The article is devoted to the life and work of the greatest historian of modern Vietnam Tran Van Diau (1911-2010). He has written many-volume works: the first textbooks in Vietnamese on historical and dialectical materialism, on the modern and contemporary history of Vietnam, monographs on the history of the formation and development of the working class of Vietnam, the liberation war in South Vietnam, and the history of social thought of the Vietnamese people. Thanks to these works and the pedagogical activity of Chan Van Zau, the current group of social scientists of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was formed. The first third of Tran Van Diau's life was devoted to the struggle in the ranks of the Communist Party for the liberation of the Vietnamese people from national and social oppression. During the August Revolution of 1945, he became the head of the new authorities in Vietnam's largest city, Saigon.

Keywords: Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, communist movement, Trotskyism, social sciences.

I wanted to write about Chang Wan Zyau for a long time. The man who led the revolutionary takeover of Vietnam's largest city, Saigon, in 1945 and wrote several hundred thousand pages of his homeland's history cannot help but attract attention. And he was attractive: a rare researcher of the modern and contemporary history of Vietnam, including in our country, did not refer to his works; in any of the books on the history of the struggle of the Vietnamese people for national liberation, you can find his name. But to make an essay, to write objectively about the life and work of a classic with whom I personally communicated and under whose charm I unwittingly fell, is quite difficult. Moreover, as an author, Chang Wan Jiau has repeatedly surprised not only with his fecundity, but also with the frequent change of topics, objects of research, which means that new stories could be expected until the last day of his life.

Chang Wan Jiau died on December 16, 2010, a few months short of his centenary. The farewell to the deceased was very solemn. The funeral ceremony was attended by the then President of Vietnam Nguyen Minh Chiet. General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) Nong Duc Manh and Chairman of the National Assembly of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) Nguyen Phu Trong sent condolences, and wreaths were laid on behalf of Tran Van Diau's coffin. Saying goodbye to the national hero, the Vietnamese recalled that he was awarded the titles of People's Teacher (very respected in Vietnam) and Hero of Labor, awarded the Orders of Ho Chi Minh and Independence, the medal "80 years of the CPV", one of the first to receive the Ho Chi Minh State Prize. At the end of 2012, one of the streets in Ho Chi Minh City was named after Chan Van Zau.

Chang Wan Zyau's long life and creative career cannot be called smooth and calm. Despite the fact that his very name means "rich", the future revolutionary did not become a darling of fate, he survived both prisons, privations, and material disorder. What was the richness of the century he lived, so it was in the bright events, events, etc.

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in his scientific heritage and in the whole galaxy of students who are now the flower of the social sciences of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Tran Van Zau was born on September 6, 1911, in what is now Longan Province in Cochin Hin, as the southernmost part of Vietnam was then known. The future communist did not like to focus on his social background, but some facts of his biography indicate that he comes from a fairly wealthy family: it is difficult to imagine the son of a commoner as a student of the prestigious lyceum "Chasselu-Loba" in the colonial capital - Saigon. In one of his biographies, Zyau himself calls this educational institution "a school for the children of the rich" [Giao su nhà giao..., 1996, tr. 20]. In the Vietnamese version of Wikipedia, it is reported that Tran Van Giau was born into the family of a wealthy landowner [TranVan Giau, http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/...].

After two years of studying at the lyceum, Zyau, who was then 17 years old, received a bachelor's degree and decided to go to France (which would not have been possible for a poor person), formally to continue his education. He wanted to get a good training in law and philology, so that when he returned to his homeland, he could start a law firm and publish a newspaper, thus protecting the rights of his compatriots [Giao su nhà giao..., 1996, tr. 20]. Such aspirations were widespread among young Vietnamese people in the early twentieth century.1
The patriotic impulse of the young Chan Van Zau was also predetermined by family traditions: his grandfathers and uncles resisted the invasion of French colonialists with weapons in their hands, and two older brothers were members of the "Society of Heaven and Earth" - an anti-French organization with a mystical ideology, whose members in 1913 tried to raise an armed rebellion in Saigon.

In 1928, Chan Van Zau arrived in France and entered the University of Toulouse, a city where the influence of the French Communist Party (PCF) was quite strong. The young Vietnamese quickly became close to the Communists, and in May 1929 joined the PCF2 and began to carry out certain party assignments, in particular translating articles for the Communist Party's propaganda leaflet Ko Do from French into Vietnamese ("Red Banner"), which was distributed to Vietnamese soldiers stationed in France after the First World War.

Most likely, Chang Wan Zau's joining the communist movement was not motivated by a desire to protect the poor and achieve social justice, but by hatred of the colonialists. Like other Asians and Africans who found themselves in Europe in those years, he was bribed by the Third International's policy of supporting liberation movements in the colonies. Ho Chi Minh followed a similar path to communism, writing: "At first it was my patriotism, and not yet communism, that led me to Lenin and the Communist International. Only gradually, in the course of the struggle, studying Marxist-Leninist theory and participating in practical work, did I come to understand that only socialism, only communism, can free both the oppressed peoples and the working people of the whole world from slavery" [Ho Chi Minh City, 1971, p.265].

The passion for political struggle has made adjustments to the life plans of Chang Wan Zau. In June 1930, he was sent back to his homeland for participating in a Paris demonstration, during which a large group of Vietnamese demanded that the French president pardon the participants of the Yen Bai uprising, another armed action in Vietnam against the colonialists. According to Chang Wan Zyau himself,

1 The future first president of independent Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, did the same in 1911, leaving the port of Saigon on a French ship and going to Europe "to look for a way to save the motherland," as many of his biographers noted. However, Ho Chi Minh, who came from a poor family, was able to go abroad only after getting a job on a ship as an assistant cook.

2 This was a fairly common practice at the time: Ho Chi Minh was also a member of the PCF when he lived in France.

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he returned home with a heavy heart, afraid that appearing in his native home without a diploma, even without money and things, would be negatively perceived by his parents, and the bride's parents would refuse to marry their daughter. But everything turned out fine, and Chang Wan Zau himself attributed this to the patriotic feelings of the older generation, which, apparently, approved of the young man's revolutionary activities.

Shortly after the forced return to Saigon, a wedding ceremony was held; in the same year, 1930, another important event took place: Chang Wan Zau joined the newly formed Communist Party of Indochina (CPIK). His party workload at that time was connected with propaganda work: in the underground organization of young communists, he was engaged in explaining the content of the" Manifesto of the Communist Party " by Karl Marx and Fr. Engels and other classical works of Marxism. But less than a year later, the party cell sent him to Moscow to study at the Communist University of the Workers of the East (KUTV). Like many other Vietnamese revolutionaries, Tran Van Zau traveled to Russia through France.

Studying in Kutva and staying in Soviet Russia (1931-1933) became an important stage in Chan Van Zau's life. It was then that the foundation of his knowledge as a Marxist historian was laid. In Moscow, Siau wrote and published three short books in Vietnamese: Organizational Principles of the Communist Party, Red Ngean, and the Bourgeois-Democratic Revolution3. Chan Van Zau's thesis was titled "The Agrarian Question in Indochina".

Often, especially at meetings with Soviet/Russian interlocutors, he recalled the Moscow period of his life. Moreover, he talked not only about those outstanding revolutionaries from different countries with whom he had to communicate in Moscow through the Comintern-Pyatnitsky 4, Manuilsky 5, Maurice Thorez 6, Andre Marty 7, but also about more prosaic things - festive demonstrations of Muscovites on Red Square, delicious cutlets in some dining room on the street. Tverskoy, that they paid him 2 rubles for a page of translation from French to Vietnamese and paid an additional 1 ruble for typewriting. He spent the money he received with pleasure on shish kebab and red wine. At that time, Tran Van Zau's comrades in the Vietnamese KUTVa group were the future general secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Indochina, Le Hong Fong and Ha Hui Tan.

At the beginning of 1933, through France and Singapore, Siau secretly returned to his homeland, found comrades in the old party cell, and joined the revolutionary work, the main content of which was the propaganda of Bolshevik ideas and the political training of party comrades. While doing this, he proved himself in all its glory, but in a specific situation-in prison. Before the outbreak of World War II, Chang Wan Zau was arrested three times.

In conclusion, the young communist gave lectures on revolutionary theory and practice. According to his own statement, the knowledge gained in Kutva, the experience of translating works of classics of Marxism-Leninism into Vietnamese, and a good memory helped him in this. He freely recited fragments from Marx's works by heart,

3 A. A. Sokolov cites other titles of three works by Chan Van Zau prepared in KUTVa [Sokolov, 1998, p. 151]. Most likely, this is due to the fact that Tran Van Zau himself and other Vietnamese authors cite the titles of these books from memory, without having them at hand. The specific content of these works is unknown.

4 Iosif Aronovich Pyatnitsky (1882-1938) - Soviet party and state figure, since 1921 he worked in the Executive Committee of the Comintern

5 Dmitry Zakharovich Manuilsky (1883-1959) - Soviet party and statesman, in 1928-1943 - Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Comintern.

6 Thorez Maurice (1900-1964) - General Secretary of the French Communist Party from 1930 to 1964.

7 Marty Lndrs (1886-1956) - French communist, from 1931 to 1944 was in responsible positions in the Executive Committee of the Comintern.

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Engels, Lenin. For explanations, the cement floor of the casemates was used as a blackboard, and instead of chalk, pieces of lime from the walls were used. Her cellmates called her " the best Marxist teacher." "I wouldn't have dared to say that about myself, but I felt a sense of pride when I heard it," recalled a prison lecturer [Giao su nhà giao..., 1996, tr. 24]. Among the imprisoned students, there were many who were to take on leading roles in the party and state leadership of independent Vietnam in the future. Among them is Le Duc Tho, a member of the Politburo and secretary of the Central Committee of the party, who went down in history thanks to his negotiations with Henry Kissinger, which resulted in an agreement on the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in 1973.

Despite the harsh prison conditions, Chang Wan Jiau found work opportunities. Following the example of the Russian Bolsheviks, he believed that time in prison should be used for self-improvement and education of comrades. Jiau began to learn the classical Chinese script Wenyan, transferring his lectures to paper. He wrote with rice broth and fixed it with a solution of iodine. Thus, according to him, he prepared about twenty pamphlets with a volume of 20-25 pages each. Neither Zyau nor his biographers say anything specific about their subject matter and content. It is believed that most of these works were discovered and destroyed by French jailers.

The finest hour of the revolutionary Tran Van Diau struck in the days of the August revolution of 1945, which brought independence to Vietnam. As early as September 1943, he was elected secretary of the Communist Party Committee of Cochin Hin, i.e., headed the CPIK cells in Saigon and the surrounding provinces of South Vietnam. Tran Van Diau's position was complicated not only by the responsibility that fell on him as a party leader: the main problem was the situation with the communist movement in South Vietnam. After the suppression of the "Namki Uprising" in 1940, when thousands of communists were executed and imprisoned by the colonial authorities (among the dead were Chiang Van Zau's KUTWu comrades Le Hong Fong and Ha Hui Tap), the once strong, militant Communist organization was drained of blood.

The CPIK leadership center moved from Saigon to the North, where a new leadership team was formed in the mountains on the border with China, led by Ho Chi Minh and Truong Tin (the latter served as General Secretary of the CPIK Central Committee from May 1941). The Southern Party Committee under the leadership of Chang Wan Jiau had rather weak ties with this center. In addition, some of the southern Communists created their own organization, which was called the "Liberation Party Committee", actually not recognizing the leadership of Chiang Van Zau and bypassing it by maintaining ties with the northern Central Committee. But by the end of 1944, most of the Osvobozhdeniye Communists had been arrested, and those who remained at large had joined the NWF faction, which by then had established contacts with the Central Committee.

The tactical success of the party committee headed by Zyau can be considered the establishment of close ties with the Vanguard Youth movement, which was led by the famous Saigon doctor and rich landowner Pham Ngoc Thanh. He used the forms of Boy Scout organization permitted by the Japanese occupiers for patriotic education and military training of young people. This mass movement - with more than 1 million members in 21 provinces of South Vietnam-came under Communist control [8] and was instrumental in the victory of the Saigon Revolution.

When the Japanese government announced its recognition of the Potsdam Accords on August 10, 1945, the Indochinese population realized that the Japanese would lay down their arms any day and be replaced by allies in the anti-fascist coalition. At the moment

8 One of the participants in the revolutionary events of August 1945 in Saigon, Huynh Van Thysng, claims that the Vanguard of Youth was created on the initiative of Chan Van Zau [ 1996, tr. 34], who in his memoirs indicated that in 1944 he accepted Pham Ngoc That into the Communist Party [ 2012].

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after a political powerlessness, the Vietnamese Communists had a chance to take power in their own hands and declare the country's independence. At the meetings of the Cochin Party committee, plans to seize power in Saigon were discussed. At first, it was proposed to do this on August 16-17. But then it was decided to wait until the Communists seized power in Hanoi. On the morning of August 20, Chang Wan Zau received a telegram announcing the victory of Ho Chi Minh's supporters there. A day later, the Vanguard Youth movement officially announced its affiliation with the Viet Minh Front. On August 22, the transfer of power to the communists in the county centers of Cochin China began, and on August 25 in Saigon, at a mass rally (one million participants), local communists announced their support for the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Ho Chi Minh and the formation of the Provisional Administrative Committee of Cochin China of 10 people, six of whom represented the CPC. The committee was headed by Chan Van Zau.

Tran Van Zau spoke at that rally and called Vietnam an independent state, in which a democratic regime began to be established. As for the Nambo Provisional Administrative Committee (Vietnamese for Cochin Hin), the speaker explained that it was supposed to administer South Vietnam on behalf of the Viet Minh until the National Assembly, the Parliament of the Republic, was elected [Mùa thu roi, 1995, tr. 503].

On the historic day of September 2, 1945, when Ho Chi Minh read out the Declaration of Independence in Hanoi, the second speech of Chan Van Zau took place. Since the quality of the radio broadcast of the speech of the first President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) was unsatisfactory, Saigonians simply did not hear it, and Tran Van Zau took the trouble to present the main ideas of the speech. Chief among them were: the revolution won, Vietnam became independent. He also called on the masses to rally around Ho Chi Minh's government.

It was not easy to take advantage of the victory of the August Revolution. While the people who supported her rallied on the streets of Saigon and other cities, British troops were moving from India and Burma to Cochin China, which were supposed to disarm the Japanese. On September 6, they entered Saigon. Even earlier, on August 23, 1945, a small detachment of French paratroopers landed in one of the rural areas, sent by Sh. De Gaulle. On August 29, French Government Envoy Jean Cedille met with representatives of the Nambo Provisional Administrative Committee, including Tran Van Diau, and stated that he did not recognize either Vietnam's independence or its unity (the French continued to consider South Vietnam as a separate administrative unit of Cochin Hin).

On September 13, the British seized the administrative committee building in Saigon and hung the French tricolor on it. On September 21, British General Douglas Gracie ordered a curfew in Saigon and demanded that the Vietnamese armed forces hand over their weapons. The Vietnamese refused. And on the night of September 22-23, the British helped the French restore their power in the city and occupy all the administrative buildings.

Chang Wan Zau responded by issuing a proclamation in which he called on his compatriots to rise up in a merciless fight against the colonialists. In fact, the Communists in the South have adopted a " scorched-earth tactic." They called on their compatriots not to work for the French and not to serve in their army, not to sell food to the colonialists. "If you meet a Frenchman, kill him!" the proclamation called. Chang Wan Zaw wished that "Saigon, occupied by the French, would become a city without electricity, without water, without markets, without shops" [ Nam, vol. 7, 2008, tr. 27-28].

However, this did not save the Communists from a temporary defeat. They were forced to leave Saigon. In one of the articles of the 1990s, Chang Wan Zyau somewhat picturesquely describes his parting with the city: "As I was leaving, I stopped at the bridge over the Sai River-

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Gon Yi looked at the burning city. Tears flowed down my cheeks and I thought about how I would get back " [Giao su nhà giao..., 1996, tr. 413].

The return came after 30 long years. In the meantime, he was eager to continue fighting. But the leaders of the Communist Party of China have formed their own views on Chang Wan Chiau and the revolution in the South. At the end of 1945, the political and military apparatus of the resistance forces was reorganized, the former Cochin Party committee was dissolved, and the new one was headed by Le Duan, the future General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam, at the end of October 1945. There was no place for Chan Van Thang in the new party committee [Pham Van Thang, 2007, tr. 112].

He briefly moved to Hanoi, and in January 1946, at the general elections, he was elected to the National Assembly of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and given the task away from the capital - to raise compatriots living in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand to fight the colonizers. It seemed to Chan Van Zyaw that Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Ziap saw him as an element of "rear support" for the national liberation movement in the south of the Indochina Peninsula (Giao su nhà giao..., 1996, tr. 413). He was also trusted with several diplomatic missions: in November 1945 he met with Burmese resistance leader Aung San, in August 1946 in Bangkok he held talks with a representative of the French government, whose name is unknown to us, and in April 1947 he participated in the Conference of Asian States in New Delhi. But in this area, his efforts were not marked by any notable achievements.

How to explain the failures of Chang Wan Zau's political activities? In addition to the factor of military superiority of the troops occupying Cochinchina, it can be noted that the British retained the functions of police supervision for the Japanese. By the end of September 1945, the revolutionary authorities in Saigon were confronted by more than 10,000 British, French and Japanese troops [Hoi va dáp..., 2008, tr. 21]. Chang Wan Zau's Bolshevism, lack of flexibility, and inability to compromise may have played a role. He fell out with all the political groups that collaborated with him in the Provisional Administrative Committee. One of the most dramatic episodes of this internal quarrel appears to have been a break with the Trotskyists, who initially joined the administrative committee but were soon repressed by the Communists.

The brutal treatment of the French population, which is fully reflected in the above-mentioned proclamation by Chang Wan-siau, contrasts with Ho Chi Minh's letter to the Southerners of September 26, 1945, which calls for resistance to the colonialists, but at the same time gives instructions concerning the French: "I would like to remind our compatriots in South Vietnam that we must not only protect the French prisoners carefully, but also treat them with generosity, so that the whole world and above all the French people know that we only seek independence and freedom, and do not fight because of personal hostility and hatred. hatred of the French" [Ho Chi Minh, 1971, p. 56]. Ho Chi Minh was certainly a master of the art of compromise, which explains his success in preserving the gains of the revolution in the North, where the presence of the Chancayshists and the French created just as difficult a situation as in the South.

The revolutionary Tran Van Diau was often accused of being too tough, for which he was even branded a "Stalinist" in Western literature [Bolt, 2012], although in the pages of a well-known book by French researcher Philippe Devillers, he appears to be a softer politician than other Vietnamese nationalists [Devillers, 1952, pp. 154-156, 197].

During one of my meetings with Chang Wan Chiau in the late 1990s, he was asked about his attitude to Stalin's repressions (after all, he lived in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s). He said, " We didn't know anything about it." Obviously, for Chang Wan-chiau, Stalin was not subject to criticism.

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As for Trotskyism, in one of his articles of the 1970s, Zau tried to explain the hostility-his own and his colleagues ' - to this trend (whose apologists, by the way, actively opposed the practice of colonialism). The essence of his reasoning is that by supporting Stalin in his struggle against Trotsky, the Vietnamese communists took the side of the Soviet Union and Leninism, since it was Stalin who at that time defended Lenin's ideas in the world communist movement. According to Tran Van Chiau, this was the right choice made by Ho Chi Minh and other leaders of the CPIK, since it was he, and not Trotskyism, who led to the victory of the Vietnamese revolution [Giao su nhà giao..., 1996, tr. 336-337].

Chang Wan Zau's departure from politics and his turn to scientific and pedagogical activities took place gradually. In 1949, his revolutionary work outside Vietnam ended, and he moved to the North of the country, to areas controlled by the government of Ho Chi Minh. First, he was appointed Director General of the information agency, and in 1951 - on the direct instructions of the General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, Truong Tinh-was sent to work in the Political Administration of the Vietnamese People's Army (VNA). At the same time, Chang Wan Zau began to give lectures on philosophy and history in educational institutions established in the liberated areas. "I turned from a political worker into a real university teacher," he noted, recalling 1951 [ibid., p. 26].

Chang Wan Zau's transfer to the field of education and science may have been the result of the CPC's "streamline work style"campaign. In the early 1950s, the Party Central Committee's organizing department opened a personal case against Chang Van Zau; he was also suspected of being involved in the arrest in 1935 of a French communist who served as a liaison between the PCF and Indochina revolutionaries, and of having been involved in the 1941 arrest of a French communist. Chang Wan Chiau escaped from prison with the help of the colonial authorities. In 1952, he was summoned for questioning in Tangchao, where the CPC Central Committee was located [Hoy ku Tran Van Giau, 2012, tr. 172]. These charges were dropped in the 1980s.

Chang Wan Zyau's research and teaching activities were more successful. Together with such famous Vietnamese social scientists as literary scholar Dang Thai Mai and historian Dao Zui Anh, he became the founder of the Hanoi Pedagogical Institute (HPI). At first, these were preparatory courses for higher education in Thanh Hoa Province, which quickly transformed into a university that became an institute after the liberation of Hanoi from the French in 1954. Chang Wan Zau worked as dean of the Faculty of History and Philology and gave lectures on modern and contemporary history. At the same time, his regular work on historical works began.

The first works (with the exception of those prepared in Kutva, which were mentioned above) were written in Thanh Hoa, although they were published in a typographic way only in 1955-1957. A set of three books with a total volume of about a thousand pages was to become the basis for forming the Marxist worldview of future Vietnamese social scientists. The books were called: "Worldview", "Dialectics", "Historical Materialism". The author relied on the knowledge gained during his studies in Moscow, so he did not consider it an independent creation, recognizing the shortcomings and noting their popular nature [Giao su nhà giáo..., 1996, tr. 412-413].

Perhaps, in this case, Chang Wan Zyau showed excessive modesty. In fact, it was in these books that the main propositions of Marxist-Leninist philosophy contained in the works of individual authors (including Stalin's "Marxism and Questions of Linguistics" and "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR") were presented in an accessible language for the first time in Vietnamese. In his book "Historical Materialism", their presentation was accompanied by examples from the history of Vietnam. It also contained quite a lot of criticism of the anti-Marxist views that were widespread in historical science at that time, and made comments about those Vietnamese scientists,

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who held idealistic views. Among their misconceptions, Chang Wan Zau noted the exaggeration of the role of the individual in history, the desire to explain certain events by the personal qualities of managers.

As another kind of idealism, Zyau considered the explanation of the history of the state by the peculiarities of national psychology and the perception of inter-racial struggle as "the driving force of historical changes in the world." From this perspective, he believed, Vietnam's past can be seen as a combination of two components: the struggle against aggressors and conquests. "This theory is a kind of narrow nationalism, which ultimately benefits the exploiting rulers, since it completely ignores the class struggle, other important, even the most important aspects of history (for example, economic construction, cultural creativity, etc.)," Tran Van Giau wrote [Tran Van Giau, 1955, tr. 31-32]. Indeed, until the 1980s, Vietnamese researchers focused primarily on the history of their country's response to external aggression; works on economic history or cultural history, for example, remained in the minority.

Chang Van Zau's first major work, the three - volume book Against the Invaders (1955), can be attributed, however, only formally, to the same direction, which he himself called "idealistic". In fact, it is an essay on the history of Vietnam during the French colonial expansion (1858-1898), with an analysis of the internal and external attitudes of the last Nguyen imperial dynasty (1802-1945) and a description of the history of France in the XIX century, important for understanding the zigzags of the colonial policy of Paris. The main attention was paid to specific events of the anti-colonial struggle. The author's conclusion about the changes in Vietnam in the last decades of the XIX century deserves attention. In the political sphere: the country has turned from an independent country into a colony, from a single country into a divided one; in the economic sphere, capitalist relations have emerged; in the social sphere, the formation of new social strata and classes (the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie of the city, etc.) has begun; in the cultural sphere, the monopoly of Confucian ideology has disappeared, and Latinized writing has become widespread "quoc ngy" [Tran Van Giàu, 1955, tr. 317-325].

Tran Van Giau's work "The Crisis of Nguyen Feudalism before 1858" (Tran Van Giau, 1958) was used as a textbook on the history of Vietnam in the first half of the 19th century. As the title suggests, the author considered the crisis, which manifested itself in the decline of trade, industry and backwardness of agriculture, to be the main characteristic feature of that period. Tran Van Zau placed the responsibility for it on the Nguyen emperors.

But the real general course on the history of the country should be considered the work "History of Vietnam (from 1897 to 1914)", written in collaboration with other teachers of the Hanoi Pedagogical Institute - Dinh Xuan Lam and Nguyen Van Shu [Tran Van Giàu et al., 1957]. Together with them in 1960-1961. Tran Van Zau has published three volumes of The New History of Vietnam. Then they were added to "The History of primitive communism in Vietnam" and " The History of Vietnamese feudalism." Together, they compiled an eight-volume publication that was used to train many future Vietnamese social scientists. Chan Van Zau, who was already working at the History Department of Hanoi State University, headed this team of authors, wrote the preface to almost every volume and sections on modern history.

At the same time, he prepared a work that became a "new word" in the field of studying national history from the point of view of problems and ideas. It was a multi-volume study of the formation of the Vietnamese working class before 1945 [Tran Van Giàu, 1961; Tran Van Giàu, 1962-1963]. The methodology used reflected the author's commitment to Marxist sociology. When considering the genesis of the proletariat, Chang Wang Zau used the concepts of "class in itself"and" class for itself". The stage of transformation of the Vietnamese working class into an independent political force ("class for itself")

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It covers the period from 1919 to 1930. It must be said that no one else in the 1950s and 1960s in Vietnam was ready for such a deep study of social phenomena.

Chang Wan Jiau was proud of his work and considered himself a pioneer. His work on the proletariat influenced Soviet Vietnamese studies. Published in 1967, S. A. Mkhitaryan's book "The Working Class and the National Liberation Movement in Vietnam (1885-1930)" testifies to the author's familiarity with the works of the Vietnamese historian [Mkhitaryan, 1967].

The period of the late 1950s and early 1960s became special in the life and work of Chan Van Zau due to his contacts with the USSR. At that time, he was fulfilling an important assignment - he served as General Secretary of the Vietnam-Soviet Friendship Society. In the jubilee year 1957, several of his works devoted to the Great October Socialist Revolution were published, including the book "From the October Revolution to the August Revolution" [Tran Van Giau, 1957], in which he pointed out their similar features. In 1962, Chan Van Zau, along with a group of other social scientists from the DRW, visited the Soviet Union. During his stay in Moscow, he visited the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Tran Van Zau finished his work on the Vietnamese history textbook and the multi-volume work on the working class in 1963, and in August 1964, the Tonkin incident plunged North Vietnam into the flames of the Second Indochina War. A patriot and communist, Tran Van Zau could not stand aside from what was happening and devoted himself to a new work-the multi-volume work "South Vietnam defends the Bronze Fortress""9 with a total volume of 2.5 thousand pages. He especially singled out this work among his works, considering it a personal contribution to the struggle of his compatriots in the South, in which he himself wanted to participate, but the party leadership twice refused him this request. Then he decided to "equate a pen with a bayonet" and began to write about the history of the struggle of the Vietnamese people for the liberation of the South from the neo-colonialists. The author called his book "a new type of weather record" [Giào su nhà giáo..., 1996, tr. 414]. In fact, the organization of the text was not a chronicle, but a typical monograph based on the extensive use of the South Vietnamese and Western press; the researcher showed the deep processes that took place in South Vietnamese society.

However, the work cannot be evaluated highly enough, as much was left out or not agreed upon. It was affected by the fact that it was created in a wartime environment. Thus, it barely mentioned the connection of the southern revolutionary movement with Hanoi. Nothing was said about the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the 15th plenum (1959) of the Central Committee of the Workers ' Party of Vietnam (PTV), which decided to create a guerrilla movement in the South: until the end of 1975, information about this was strictly secret. The conclusion made by another author, who wrote in 1976 that the South Vietnamese Liberation Army was actually part of the Vietnamese People's Army, and the People's Revolutionary Party was part of the PTV [Bùi Dinh Thanh, 1976, tr. 6], Tran Van Zau could not afford at the time of writing the book. It turned out the opposite: the main idea of his work is that in the South, the revolutionary forces of the local population, closely united in a single patriotic front, fought and won. Today, this approach makes us treat the monograph "South Vietnam defends the Bronze Fortress" as a work far from indisputable.

With the end of the war and the reunification of Vietnam, Tran Van Zau had the opportunity to return to his native land - to the South, and this was not only in his interests. After the unification of the country in 1975, many scientists left the research centers of Hanoi for Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon became known in July 1976, where they had to conduct research.

9 The definition of " bronze fortress "(analogous to the Russian" steel bastion") was taken from President Ho Chi Minh's New Year's message to the Vietnamese people. There were the lines "The North competes in creation, the South defends the bronze fortress" [Tran Van Giau, 1964, T. 1, tr. 5].

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fight for a new worldview, create scientific and educational institutions based on Marxist methodology.

Before leaving, together with other employees of the Institute of History, where he worked at the time, Siau prepared a politically important book, "Vietnam is one, the Vietnamese people are one" [Nuoc Viêt Nam là mot..., 1976], designed to counter the sentiments of those Vietnamese public figures who, after the overthrow of the pro-American Saigon regime, were hatching the idea of separate existence of the North and South of the country. Interestingly, neither the book's output nor the text indicated the authors of the sections. Meanwhile, all biographers of Chan Van Zau consider it one of the works of the master. Most likely, he acted as the head of the author's team and executive editor, and also prepared several chapters [Giao su nhà giao.., 1996, tr. 49].

In the liberated city of Ho Chi Minh City, Siau became an employee of the Institute of Social Sciences and chairman of the city's Society of Historians. A new stage in his life and work began, which was primarily marked by an in-depth study of the history of social thought in Vietnam. Thus, Tran Van Zau completed another major work "The development of ideology in Vietnam from the 19th century to the August Revolution", in which he not only introduced many names and facts into scientific circulation for the first time, but also used a systematic approach in his research.

Chang Wan Zyau's new work consisted of three books( volumes), the title of each of which indicated in advance the conclusions that the author intended to draw. The first volume was entitled "The Feudal worldview and its collapse in the light of the problems of history", the second - "The Bourgeois worldview and its impotence in solving the problems of history", the third - "The Victory of Marxism-Leninism and the ideas of Ho Chi Minh". The first volume dealt with the peculiarities of the ideology of the Nguyen dynasty, so the focus was on Confucianism, although Buddhism, Taoism and other religious teachings were also critically analyzed. The second book covered the ideological superstructure of Vietnamese society at the beginning of the 20th century, a period of active search for a doctrine that could contribute to the liberation of the nation and its development. As the titles of the first two books make clear, neither traditional religions nor bourgeois-democratic ideas were able to protect Indochina from the colonial yoke. "The salvation of the nation" was due to the Communists, armed with "the teachings of Marx-Lenin and the ideas of Ho Chi Minh" - this is the main line of the third volume, published almost 20 years later than the previous two.

An interesting detail is that Tran Van Giau writes in the preface to the third volume that initially the title did not contain the words "Ho Chi Minh's ideas", since the living leader of the Vietnamese revolution would not allow this, requiring his subordinates to "carefully study and correctly apply Marxism-Leninism" [Tran Van Giau, 1993, t. 3, tr. 6]. Today, "Ho Chi Minh's ideas" are reflected in party documents, including the CPV Charter. One might wonder: was the change in the title of the third volume a consequence of subordination to party discipline or the result of Chang Wan Zau's research activities? The author himself tries to prove the latter on the pages of the book.

Ho Chi Minh's ideas as a politician and thinker in the 1980s and 1990s attracted more and more attention from Chang Wan Zau. He became one of the leading experts in the new social discipline of Ho Chi Minh City studies, which gained its right to exist after the seventh Congress of the CPV (June 1991). At that time, Ho Chi Minh's ideas, along with Marxism-Leninism, became the ideological basis of the party, gaining special significance in the 1990s. The series of" Ho Chi Minh City studies "monographs was opened by Tran Van Giau's" Shaping the Foundations of Ho Chi Minh's Ideas "(1997), published by the Hanoi Political Literature Publishing House in 1997. It shows the process of forming the views of the first Vietnamese leader under the influence of family and friends.-

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and then during their stay in Western Europe and in Soviet Russia. The articles written by Chang Wan Chiau about Ho Chi Minh could have been compiled into a separate book.

Ho Chi Minh's ideas were also discussed in another book by Tran Van Zau, " Traditional Spiritual Values of the Vietnamese Nation." A separate chapter of the book was devoted to the revolutionary leader, and he was called "the embodiment of the spiritual values of the Vietnamese nation and all mankind" [Tran Van Giàu, 1980, tr. 316]. However, the author decided to present this topic not so much in his own words, but through quotations from the works of the leaders of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Le Zuan, Pham Van Dong, Truong Tin), prominent figures of the international communist movement, and from the foreign press. Tran Van Zau himself highlighted the following spiritual values inherent in the Vietnamese nation: patriotism, perseverance in work, heroism, optimism, humanity, duty.

Chang Van Zau's colleagues noted another of his works prepared in the last period of his life: "Addresses of cultural objects in Ho Chi Minh City". This is a four-volume local history publication that includes essays on the city's history, culture, and ethnography. Only one chapter in this edition is written by Chan Van Zaw, which deals with Saigon during the French and pro-American rule, i.e. from 1863 to 1975. However, the role of Chan Van Zaw in the preparation of this work is immeasurably greater. First, he was one of the two editors of this book. Secondly, he certainly influenced the authors. This can be demonstrated in one example.

The early history section of the city was written by Wo Shi Khai. He clearly sought to prove that before the arrival of the Vietnamese, these lands were free, not subject to the rulers of the neighboring Khmer state [Dia chi van hoa ... 1987, T. 1, tr. 211]. In this connection, I recall my first meeting with Chang Wan Chiau in March 1978 in Ho Chi Minh City. It was a time of fierce confrontation between Vietnam and Pol Pot Kampuchea, whose rulers laid territorial claims to the south of Vietnam, including Ho Chi Minh City. At a meeting with foreign social scientists, Tran Van Zau could not help but touch on this problem and tried to convince us that before the Vietnamese, "only elephants lived in these places." At the same time, it is no secret (this is also reported in Vietnamese magazines) that there were two Cambodian settlements on the site of Saigon before the arrival of the Vietnamese [Tran Thi Bich Ngoc, 1999, tr. 4]. Thus, the NWF continued to defend its homeland.

In the 2000s, no new works were published from the pen of Chan Van Zau, but this is excusable for a person who has crossed the 90-year mark. However, its role in Vietnam's history remains prominent. In 2002, with the proceeds from the sale of a house in a prestigious area of Ho Chi Minh City, he established the award in his name. Since that time, researchers from Nambo and South Chungbo (i.e., the areas that were under the control of the Saigon government in 1955-1975) have been able to apply annually for two "Chang Wan Zaw Awards" for "groundbreaking work": one in the field of civil history, the other in the history of public thought. In 2006, he donated more than 2 thousand books to the library of the Local History Museum of his native province of Longan.

After Chang's death, his memoirs appeared on the Internet, dedicated to the years 1940-1945 - a period that the author considered the most intense and informative in his long life. He began writing these memoirs in 1970, and finished them in 1995, and passed them on to his native Longan Province so that future generations would know that "this man always tried to do his duty and live with dignity." Chang Wan Chiau did not lie: all his life he was striving to fulfill his duty. But as a scientist, he had to serve the truth, and as a communist, it was his duty to obey party discipline and the instructions of his elected leaders. Performing these two tasks simultaneously is a very difficult mission for any person living on Earth. And the example of the life and work of Chan Van Zau shows this.

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Mkhitaryan S. A. The working class and the National liberation movement in Vietnam (1885-1930). Moscow: IVL, 1967.

Sokolov A. A. Comintern and Vietnam. Moscow: IV RAS Publ., 1998.

Ho Chi Minh City. Works (1920-1969). Hanoi: Foreign Language Literature Publishing House, 1971.

Bolt E. Who is Tran Van Giau // https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/-cbolt/history 398/whoistranvangiau.html. Accessed: 20.06.2012.

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