Establishment of a Soviet embassy in Hanoi in November
1964 afforded the North Vietnamese leadership an opportunity
to introduce Soviet authority as a counterweight to the influence
previously exercized by Peiping. Whereas previously
the Lao Dong Party had stressed the paramount importance to
North Vietnam of the Chinese revolution and '!the ideology of
Ma0 Tse-tung," the consistent pattern following the Geneva
Conference was to assign equal weight to the contributions
and experiences of the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's
Republic, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chinese
Communist Party, the Soviet and Chinese armies and the
Soviet and Chinese revolutions. Implicit in this new assessment
was the right to choose between alternative policies and
programs advocated by the two leading bloc powers. And in
fact this right was to be asserted forcefully by Ho Chi Winh
following the Soviet 20th Party Congress in early 1956. After
claiming for the first time that "our party has already achieved