Note on Names

Vietnamese accents are omitted throughout this book. As in many other East Asian cultures, Vietnamese family names precede personal names. When consulting other sources, note that there are different ways of anglicizing Vietnamese place names. Yen Bai, for example, can also be found as Yen Bay, Yen bai, Yen bay, Yen-bai, Yen-bay, Yenbai and Yenbay. Note also that names of organizations are translated in a variety of ways. Thanh Nien Cach Mang Dong Chi Hoi, for example, can be found as Revolutionary Youth League, League of Young Revolutionary Comrades, Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association, Association of Revolutionary Vietnamese Youth, etc. In a few cases we have indicated common alternative versions to the ones used in this book, but it is often best to use the original Vietnamese names when searching the Web or consulting book indexes.

In order to help sort out the sometimes confusingly similar names of persons, groups and publications, brief parenthetical information is given for most entries. This information is intended only as a rough preliminary guide for readers who may be interested in following up some topic, and there are probably a few errors. In particular, the memberships and interrelations among the diverse Trotskyist groupings are not always clear. Some of the persons described simply as comrades or fellow prisoners were undoubtedly Trotskyists even if that is not specified in the book. “TR” means that a person is described as a Trotskyist but without any specific group membership being indicated. “LO” means that a person is described as belonging to a particular Left Opposition group or, more generally, simply to “the Left Opposition.” But “Left Oppositionist” was simply an early synonym for “Trotskyist”; and since many of the La Lutte members and all of the LIC members were more or less Trotskyist, many of them (along with others identified simply as “TR”) were undoubtedly also Left Oppositionists during the earlier period when that label was more frequently used. And most of the LIC members had probably previously been La Lutte participants or supporters, and some may have remained so despite their differences (see Footnote 60 on the “October group”).