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Today we remember the day the Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh was elected President of the Republic of Vietnam, in 1945.

The revolutionary and leader of the Vietnamese struggle for national liberation, Ho Chi Minh was born in 1890. Despite attending a French colonial school as a child, Ho Chi Minh would be influenced by his father who refused to serve the French colonial government. At age 21, Ho Chi Minh left his country to become a revolutionary, traveling through Harlem, Moscow, London and Paris and getting involved in the international socialist movement. Whilst he also joined other Vietnamese compatriots who were organizing anti-colonial and pro-independence projects.

Later he lived in the Soviet Union and China for several years where he worked and studied in different governmental institutions. He also served as a senior Comintern agent around Southeast Asia for years and eventually, in the late 1930s, settled in China to work for the Communist armed forces.

Finally, in 1941, Ho Chi Minh returned to his Vietnamese homeland where he became the most prominent leader of the independence struggle, because he exercised a major role in uniting the left fractions and forging the party that would lead the liberation movement in the region. In 1945, after the success of the August Revolution, Ho was elected as the President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and proclaimed independence. As the leader of the revolutionary movement of Vietnam, Ho oversaw the famous Dien Bien Phu military win against French colonial forces, as well as much of the war against the U.S. during the Vietnam War.

By the 1960s his name was chanted by demonstrators the world over, for whom he became a symbol of the Third World’s will and ability to stand up to American imperialism. Ho Chi Minh was a staunch internationalist, who fought for nations’ auto-determination and for the liberation of proletariat around the world.

Rest in power Uncle Ho!