St Petersburg University has hosted ceremonial events to mark the 131^st birthday of Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese politician and the first President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Representatives of the academic and diplomatic communities, the Vietnamese community and students gathered to honour the memory of the national leader.

The event was attended by: Sergey Andryushin, Deputy Rector for International Affairs of St Petersburg University; Le Dinh Vu, Chairman of the Vietnamese Association in St Petersburg;

Alexey Rodionov, Senior Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Asian and African Studies; Major

General Evgeny Gumanenko, Vice-Rector for International Cooperation and Strategic Development of St Petersburg State Paediatric Medical University of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation and Head of the Department of General Surgery at St Petersburg University; Vladimir Kolotov, Director of the Ho Chi Minh Institute at St Petersburg University and Head of the Department of History of the Far East Countries; Chan Gui Chung, Secretary of the St Petersburg branch of the Communist Party of Vietnam; and Lê Vương Hàn, Secretary of the St Petersburg branch of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union.

Opening the ceremony, Sergey Andryushin extended greetings on behalf of Nikolay Kropachev, Rector of St Petersburg University, and the University academic community on the occasion of the birthday of the first President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

‘Ho Chi Minh is justly considered an outstanding party leader, a patriot of his country, a faithful son of his people, and an internationalist. Having visited the Soviet Union and received higher education there, Ho Chi Minh was imbued with communist ideas. All this provided a special ground for the development of relations between our countries,’ said Sergey Andryushin. He expressed his special gratitude to the Vietnamese diaspora for active participation in bilateral events.

St Petersburg University is a research and academic centre that lays a particular emphasis on the study of Vietnam. The University is the place where the Ho Chi Minh Institute was established for the first time in the world in 2010. The University is the place where a monument to Ho Chi Minh was unveiled. Such projects make it possible for us to strengthen our cooperation and friendship.

Sergey Andryushin, Deputy Rector for International Affairs

‘We are sincerely grateful to the Soviet people for their help in the liberation of Vietnam, as well as for the restoration of the country after the war. We express our deep gratitude to the administration of St Petersburg and its residents for the opportunity to perpetuate the memory of the first president of the Vietnamese people in this beautiful city,’ Le Dinh Vu, Chairman of the Vietnamese Association in St Petersburg, said in his speech.

Evgeny Gumanenko extended greetings on behalf of the Association of Russian-Vietnamese Humanitarian and Economic Cooperation. ‘Comrade Ho Chi Minh is on a par with the outstanding founders of socialism such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. But his main merit is that his scientific ideas and practical work to create a socialist state are still alive,’ added Evgeny Gumanenko.

The ceremony also included an awarding ceremony for the winners of the ‘Ho Chi Minh in My

Heart’ essay contest. In the nomination ‘Scholarly Studies’ the winner was Nem Chan Thanh

Thep, a student at the University of Tyumen. Rafik Kerimov, a student at St Petersburg University, took first place in the Literature nomination. In the Art nomination, there were two winners: teams of students from the Military Educational and Scientific Centre of the Navy ‘Naval Academy’, the town of Pushkin; and foreign students from the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia.

The event ended with the ceremony of laying flowers in front of the monument to Ho Chi Minh.