Kaysone Phomvihane

Who is Kaysone Phomvihane?

Kaysone Phomvihane was born in Savannakhet, southern Laos, to a Lao mother and a Vietnamese father, and studied law in Hanoi, where he came into contact with Vietnamese and Indochinese communist organizing during the late colonial period. He went on to become the founding General Secretary of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party and the principal political and military leader of the Pathet Lao insurgency through the long Laotian Civil War of the 1950s-1970s, working closely with Vietnamese communist forces. After the Pathet Lao's final victory in 1975 and the abolition of the monarchy, Kaysone became the first Prime Minister of the newly established Lao People's Democratic Republic, a post he held for over a decade, and later became President of Laos from 1991 until his death in 1992. Although Prince Souphanouvong held the more visible presidential role in the early republic, Kaysone was widely regarded as the country's most powerful actual decision-maker. In the late 1980s he oversaw Laos's cautious economic liberalization under the "New Economic Mechanism," moving the country away from strict central planning.

Sources: Grant Evans, A Short History of Laos: The Land in Between (Allen & Unwin, 2002) · MacAlister Brown and Joseph J. Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries: The Communist Movement in Laos, 1930-1985 (Hoover Institution Press, 1986) · Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos (Cambridge University Press, 1997)