Le Duan, who had become Ho Chi Minh's second in command in early 1958,expressed the party's new "hard" line toward South Vietnam. Reputedly the leader of a "Southern" faction
who had been in charge of party operations in the South from 1947 to 1956, this previously obscure revolutionary figure criticized Khrushchev's doctrine of "peaceful transition to socialism" in early 1958 in a series of speeches and articles directed ostensibly at the Tito-brand of "revisionism." Deny- ing the applicability of this doctrine to Vietnam, Le Duan underlined the. "arduous and complicated" nature of the strug- gle in South Vietnam and invoked the authority of Lenin to emphasize that "both peaceful and non-peacef u l forms of strug- gle" were essential to the success of any revolutionary un-
dertaking. Developments throughout the remainder of 1958 in- dicated a Viet Minh decision to intensify sharply the political struggle in preparation for a new phase of armed struggle in South Vietnam the following year.