Before the Viet Minh unification of 1941 there was quite a bit of infighting in the Vietnamese communist movement. It seemed that everyone had their ideas of which version of communism (more often than not their own version) was best for Vietnam and the future of the movement. In 1930 a young man named Nguyen Ai Quoc was sent to Hong Kong in order to coordinate the unification of the parties into one umbrella faction. Nguyen Ai Quoc took the name Ly Thuy and traveled to Saigon in order to promote the unification. In 1939 the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed, and communism was banned in all areas of French rule. communists were forcibly exiled from Saigon, their main city of activity, and unification was almost necessary. In 1941, Ly Thuy changed his name again into what we now know him as, Ho Chi Minh, and the communist leaders of Vietnam each sacrificed a few minor points of their worldview to unite under the banner of the "League for the Independence of Vietnam", or "Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi", or "Viet Minh" for short. The Viet Minh crept back into the Vietnamese in order to begin their war against the French colonists. The Viet Minh was a different style of communist movement, it seemed to use nationalism as a front to give communism a digestible form to those in Vietnam still opposed to communism.

Not everyone in Vietnam was a communist, or supported communism after the Viet Minh unification. There were definitely people impressed into a fighting force or tortured for their beliefs. This was put to a stop by Ho Chi Minh in the 50's, but was still a reality of life for many Vietnamese citizens.

As for individual movements, the two main ones were the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) and the Vietnamese Trotskyists. It is very arguable that the ICP were more or less still in power despite the unification under the Viet Minh, as they were the vast majority in the unified movements. Even though the ICP were the most widely recognized program, the Trotskyists were the ones attacked most often. The Trostkyists and the ICP grew to be the strongest and most recognizable single movements from the whole communist section of Saigon because they were most likely the only two movements who cooperated.

The Viet Minh policy was basically the Marxist-Leninist blend that the communist portion of Vietnam still holds today, which has become almost entirely based on the words of Ho Chi Minh, called "Ho Chi Minh Thought". Lost in the whole movement is the fact that Ho was formally schooled in communism in Russia and went to school in France and worked in the U.S. To answer your first question, Ho was as close to a totalitarian dictator as you can get without actually being one. He never ruled over all of Vietnam, but it can be argued that he was totalitarian over his portion of it. There were very popular members of the movement pre-Viet Minh Unification that held almost total control such as Phan Boi Chau.

Unfortunately I can't tell you much about economic policies for the Viet Minh because during their heyday the communists rarely had control over a government in total. Their politics would look very close to what we consider basic revolutionary communism today: emphasis on the workers and the common folk, pushing for the abolishment of a class system, socialist economies, etc.

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You can find a lot more about this question through these books, this is just a very basic overview:

The Black Book of Communism (The Vietnamese section)

Sources of Vietnamese Tradition (The Ho Chi Minh writings portion)

Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919-1941