Standing Among Peers: Ho Chi Minh’s Cult in Comparison to the Cults of Mao and Other Communist Leaders

Speaker: Dr Olga Dror

Talk Outline

The cults of personality of communist leaders have been an important part of forming and maintaining socialist regimes. To ensure loyalty to the Party, to the government, and to the revolutionary cause that they promulgated, communist leaders inculcated a spirit of obedience to state authority by instituting a process of indoctrination and socialization that started among children from a very young age and that nurtured a worldview that would continue throughout their lives to perpetuate the legacy of the Party.

Using Ho Chi Minh’s cult as the focus of her presentation, Olga Dror will compare and contrast it with the cults of Mao Zedong and other communist leaders. She will focus on the peculiarities of Ho Chi Minh’s cult that allows it to stand out among the cults of his peer-leaders. Olga Dror will analyse the methods of establishing and developing his cult and the historical circumstances that allowed this cult to exist largely unchallenged for seventy-five years.

Dr Olga Dror

Educated in Russia, Israel, and the United States, Olga Dror is currently an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University. She has authored, translated, and co-edited five books and numerous articles. The focus of her research ranges from Vietnamese and Chinese theistic religions and European missionaries in Asia in early modern times to the study of the civilian experience during the Tet Offensive in Hue, to North and South Vietnamese youth during the Second Indochina War to political religions.

Her most recent monograph Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965-1975 was published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press. Her articles have appeared in the leading journals of several fields Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Journal of Social History, Journal of Cold War Studies. Among her awards are a National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a Dan David International Fellowship. She is currently working on a monograph titled Ho Chi Minh’s Cult in Vietnamese Statehood, where, among other things, she focuses on the examination of Ho Chi Minh’s cult in comparison to the cults of Mao and other communist leaders.