Vietnam's Revolutionary Trajectory

This article examines Vietnam’s revolutionary trajectory as an attempt to follow Lenin’s concept of the ‘transitional period’ to achieve a distinctive vision of the ‘end of history.’ Drawing on case studies of Phạm Tuân’s 1980 space mission and Trần Đức Thiệp’s 1992 nuclear accident, I analyze how Vietnam’s revolutionary ambitions produced unexpected apocalyptic risks. For Vietnamese thinkers and politicians, the apocalyptic threat was twofold: dependence on foreign powers at the superstructural level and technological backwardness at the infrastructural level. Yet, paradoxically, it was their commitment to avoiding these threats that created genuine apocalyptic risks through teleological thinking and ideological dogmatism. As they simultaneously attempted to maintain a communist political superstructure while accelerating technological development, a dangerous disconnect emerged between advanced theoretical knowledge and underdeveloped material infrastructure. This contradiction was vividly demonstrated in both Vietnam’s celebrated space achievement and its lesser-known nuclear accident. Rather than treating Vietnamese revolutionary thought as derivative of European Marxism, I illuminate how revolutionaries transformed abstract ideology into lived experience, creating distinctive forms of temporal consciousness that evolved from dogmatic teleology toward a more nuanced engagement with historical contingency as Vietnam navigated between ideological aspirations and material realities.