This issue begins with an article by Tuong Vu discussing how the Vietnamese Communists pursued a radical transformation of Indochina after World War II as part of their general drive for world revolution. Far from being a strictly “nationalist” movement (as was alleged by many critics of the U.S. role in Vietnam), the Vietnamese Communists were aggressively internationalist in their orientation, often seeing themselves as the vanguard of a global Marxist-Leninist revolution. Drawing on recently declassified archival materials, Vu shows that the ideological radicalism of the Vietnamese Communists was crucial in shaping all stages of the prolonged warfare in Indochina, from the 1950s through the 1980s.
The next article, by Katya Drozdova and Joseph H. Felter, uses declassified records of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to appraise the Soviet Army's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988–1989. A significant number of analysts in both Russia and the West have...