Refers to the events of 19 August 1945, when Viet Minh forces took power in Hanoi and then the rest of the country in the following weeks. The combination of the Japanese coup de force of 9 March 1945 ousting the French from Indochina and the Japanese capitulation on 15 August 1945 provided the Viet Minh with the favorable conditions needed to take power before either the French could return to reassert their colonial control or the Allies could arrive to receive the Japanese surrender. But there was another factor. On the ground, as David Marr has shown, the Viet Minh and the communist leadership behind it were able to ride a ground-swell of popular discontent to power, especially in upper Vietnam where a famine had taken around a million lives since 1944. Things were more complicated in southern Vietnam, where the communists were but one voice among several nationalist religious groups. Southern communists had yet to recover from the severe French repression of 1940 and were badly out of touch with the Indochinese Communist Party’s new leadership based in the north. On 2 September 1945, thanks to the opening created by the August uprising, Ho Chi Minh declared the creation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi. In the existing communist nationalist historiography in Vietnam, the August Revolution is an important source of legitimation, although a number of historians argue that it was more of an insurrection than a revolution. Truong Chinh used the term “revolution” for the first time in a brochure he published marking the one-year anniversary of the new Vietnamese nation-state. By referring to it as the August Revolution, the Vietnamese sought to create a place for it in the history of communist revolutions, alongside that of the October Revolution of 1917.