Memoirs To the blessed memory of my teachers and colleagues who were at the origins of Russian Vietnamese studies ... There were six of us - the first students in Russian and Soviet Oriental studies who were enrolled in the Department of Oriental Studies of the History Department of Moscow State University, majoring in" History of Vietnam " and studying the exotic language of this distant and essentially unknown country in the USSR in the 50s. In the archive of the Faculty of History, probably, a document is dormant in which it is written who and when proposed to fill up the Department of History of Eastern countries with the Vietnamese direction and start training specialists in this profile practically from zero. Why and for what purpose? In fact, we got the answer to this question five years later, when the time came for the assignment to work. And in September 1950, everything was still ahead of us, and the future was not even in the vaguest outline. Most likely, the leadership of the faculty, or maybe someone higher up, decided to "keep up with life": The Democratic Republic of Vietnam was just recognized in the early 1950s, and science must keep up with the impatient times! It immediately became clear, among other things, that this "direction" was organized on a live thread, and only by the end of our training did something similar to a classic country studies course develop. So we ended up being somewhat of a guinea pig, but it was even interesting and not offensive at all. Why the history department? After all, there were Oriental studies departments in both the economic and philological faculties of the university. In addition, in Moscow at that time there was still an Institute of Oriental Studies in Sokolniki, and MGIMO also trained specialists with knowledge of Oriental languages. Probably, there were some considerations of their own on this score. Why Vietnam? After all, in Southeast Asia, not only Vietnamese fought for freedom. Indonesia and Burma gai ... Read more