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THE NORTH OF VIETNAM FROM 1945 - 1976
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam also known as North Vietnam, was proclaimed by Ho Chí Minh in Hanoi on September 2, 1945 as a provisional government. It was recognized by the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union in 1950. In 1954, after the defeat of France by the Viett Minh at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and as a result of the Geneva Conference, France began negotiating with the Viet Minh and Vietnam was partitioned by the Demilitarized Zone (or DMZ at the 17th parallel). France turned over power in the northern half of Vietnam to the Viett Minh who then established the DRVN as a true government. Under the Geneva Accord national elections were supposed to be held in both parts of Vietnam in 1956, with the view of unifying the nation. For the transition North Vietnam was established as a socialist state, the first in Southeast Asia. South Vietnam was established in the southern part of the country with its capital at Saigon.
Following the partition of the country, there followed a mass exodus of North Vietnamese to the South, many of them Catholics who said that they were persecuted by official North Vietnamese policy. This amounted to one million people out of a population of 13 million. Around the same time an estimated 100,000 people fled South Vietnam for the North. The nation in its first years, with an underdeveloped industrial economy and cut off from the agricultural areas of the South, become repressive and totalitarian. Between 1953 and 1956, agrarian reforms were attempted due to Chinese pressure. In the process, tens of thousands of landowners were publicly denounced as landlords, with their land distributed to those considered loyal to the party.
The capital of northern Vietnam was Hanoi and it was led by a Communist government allied with the Soviet Union and China. During the Second Indochinese War, North Vietnam largely controlled the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam who were fighting against the government of South Vietnam, and the United States. From 1965 onwards, both China and the Soviet Union provided huge amounts of aid to North Vietnam for their war effort, in what became known in the West as the Vietnam War. North Vietnam invaded and occupied portions of neighboring Laos and Cambodia. It also supplied weapons to insurgent groups which eventually overthrew the governments of both countries.
With the fall of Saigon to North Vietnamese forces on April 30, 1975, political authority within South Vietnam was nominally assumed by the North Vietnamese controlled Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (P.R.G.). But in reality, political authority rested with the North Vietnamese Army. This government merged with North Vietnam on July 2, 1976, to form a single nation called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, commonly known as Viet Nam
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