In later years, it became a puzzle to many students of his life that a man with so much personal magnetism and subtlety of character could adopt a writing style that was so pedestrian and heavy-handed. Yet here lies a key to his personality and to his political effectiveness over the years. Unlike many other Marxist leaders, Nguyen Ai Quoc saw his audience as composed not primarily of intellectuals, but of ordinary people—workers, farmers, soldiers, and clerks. He had no desire to impress readers with his intellectual brilliance, but rather he tried to persuade them in simple but vivid terms to share his vision of the world and his views on how to achieve change. At its worst, his writing makes turgid reading for the sophisticated reader. At best, there is sometimes a raw power, particularly when he describes the horrors of the colonial system.
Le Paria soon became well known as a major voice for the oppressed in France. As Nguyen Ai Quoc himself later wrote,
We sold the newspaper to Vietnamese workers who could not read French; however, they liked to buy the paper because they knew it was anti-West and, after they purchased it, they would have French workers read it to them. Also, there were places in Paris where we could sell the paper and earn a profit. Because we were all comrades, they sold the paper for us and took no money in return so they sold quite a few papers because practically every Le Paria printed was purchased by the French Ministry of Colonies.57
Anyone caught reading the material was immediately subject to arrest. Nonetheless, Nguyen Ai Quoc attempted to sneak copies into the colonies; at first he arranged to have sailors known to be sympathetic to the revolutionary cause carry it in their luggage. When the French authorities caught on, a new method had to be found. In the end, copies were sent by inserting them in toy clocks. It was an expensive means of spreading propaganda, but it served its purpose.
Lack of funds, however, was a persistent problem. The paper received a regular subsidy from the Intercolonial Union, but it was evidently expected to be at least partially self-supporting. In general, it did not sell well. The first issue had about 300 subscribers, but later it sank to about 200, out of about 1000 copies printed for each issue. Some were sold at meetings of the union, and several hundred were sent by various means to the colonies. The remainder had to be sold in small shops. When that proved inadequate, they were given away. Still, the police were concerned about the journal, which they viewed as Communist propaganda. All known subscribers were placed on a police blacklist.58
Nguyen Ai Quoc continued to write articles for other leftist newspapers and periodicals in Paris. He also briefly turned his hand to fiction. In 1922, Khai Dinh, the Vietnamese emperor, was invited to France on a ceremonial visit in conjunction with the Exposition Coloniale that was to be held in Marseilles from April through August. There were rumors of a possible attempted assassination, and some suspected Nguyen Ai Quoc or Phan Chu Trinh of being involved in the plot. In an effort to avoid unfavorable publicity, Albert Sarraut tried to persuade Phan Chu Trinh not to express his opposition to the visit, but Trinh ignored the request and wrote a public letter to the emperor that was highly critical of his role as puppet ruler of a conquered country. Nguyen Ai Quoc also used the occasion to promote his own objectives, editing articles by others on the visit and penning his own letter, which was published in the August 9, 1922, issue of Journal du Peuple. The letter portrayed Khai Dinh as a colonial knicknack on display at an exposition, kept in a shopwindow while his people groveled in the mud. He also produced a play titled Le dragon de bambou, which ridiculed the emperor and the imperial trip to France. The play, described by contemporaries as eminently forgettable, played briefly at the Club du Faubourg. When the news reached Indochina, it served to further divide Nguyen Ai Quoc from his father. On being informed of Quoc’s comments, Sac reportedly remarked that any son who did not recognize his sovereign did not recognize his father.59
The visit of Emperor Khai Dinh did provide a final opportunity for Nguyen Ai Quoc and Phan Chu Trinh to stand on the same side of a political issue, but they could not agree on how best to liberate their homeland. In February 1922, Trinh sent an anguished letter to his young colleague while briefly visiting Marseilles. The letter did not touch on the ideological differences that had clearly emerged between the two, but focused on the question of tactics.
While defending his own approach, which concentrated on the importance of arousing the spirit and knowledge of the Vietnamese people through education, Trinh conceded that he was a conservative and a “tired horse” when compared with Quoc, a “fiery stallion.” But he argued that Quoc was wasting his time by remaining abroad and writing articles in a language that few Vietnamese understood. That, he said, was Phan Boi Chau’s error when he sought to recruit patriots for study in Japan. Quoc should go home, he advised, and appeal to the people inside the country. If so, he concluded, “I am convinced that the doctrine that you cherish so much can be diffused among our people. Even if you fail, others will take up the task.”60
Nguyen Ai Quoc was too wrapped up in his own evolving career within the French revolutionary movement to heed Trinh’s advice. Within a few years, he had emerged from obscurity to become a leading force within the radical movement in France and the most prominent member of the Vietnamese exile community. With the aid of Georges Pioch, a prominent radical intellectual connected with the Club du Faubourg, he had polished his speaking skills, and he began to take an active part in debates with prominent members of the FCP. At the Party’s first congress, held in Marseilles in late December 1921, he gave an address on the colonial question and was elected as a representative of the district of the Seine.
Shortly after Quoc arrived in Marseilles to attend the congress, two plainclothesmen tried to seize him, but he managed to elude their grasp and enter the building where the meeting was to convene. At the end of the congress he was escorted by delegates through police patrols to a secret location until he could return to Paris.
In the capital, police continued their surveillance of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s movements, and in November, probably as the result of pressure from the police, he was dismissed by his employer from his job at the photography shop adjacent to his apartment. While he was unemployed he sought other forms of work, but eventually he was able to resume his work in photography by setting up an office in his own apartment. He worked only in the morning so that he could devote himself to political activities for the remainder of the day.61
As a leading member of the FCP and its most prominent representative from the colonies, Nguyen Ai Quoc continued to be a source of considerable interest to the French security services. His daily routine was closely watched by the police, and two agents were assigned to follow him at all times. On June 22, 1922, Albert Sarraut invited him once again to the Ministry of Colonies for an interview. During the meeting the minister alternately threatened and bribed him. Sarraut opened the conversation by declaring that troublemakers connected with “Bolshevik” elements in France who were planning to cause problems in Indochina would inevitably be crushed. But, he added, he admired people like Nguyen Ai Quoc who had a firm purpose and the will to achieve it. But with willpower, he added, must come understanding. Let bygones be bygones, Sarraut concluded, “If you happen to want anything, I am always at your service. Now that we know each other, you can apply directly to me.” Nguyen Ai Quoc stood up and thanked the minister, then remarked, “The main thing in my life and what I need most of all is freedom for my compatriots. May I go now?”62
A few days later Quoc wrote a public letter to the Ministry, which was published Le Paria, L’Humanité (now the mouthpiece of the French Communist Party), and Le Peuple. Expressing his gratitude that the French authorities had provided him with his own private “aides-decamp” (obviously a reference to the police surveillance), he commented that
At a time when Parliament is trying to save money, and cut down administrative personnel; when there is a large budget deficit; when agriculture and industry lack labor; when attempts are being made to levy taxes on w
orkers’ wages; and at a time when repopulation demands the use of all productive energies; it would seem to us antipatriotic at such a time to accept personal favors which necessarily cause loss of the powers of the citizens condemned—as aides-de-camp—to idleness and the spending of money that the proletariat has sweated for.
To alleviate this problem, he added, he was giving public notice of his daily activities:
Morning: from 8 to 12 at the workshop.
Afternoon: in newspaper offices (leftist of course) or at the library.
Evening: at home or attending educational talks.
Sundays and holidays: visiting museums or other places of interest.
There you are!
Hoping that this convenient and rational method will give satisfaction to your Excellency, we beg to remain....
Nguyen Ai Quoc63
It is unlikely that Sarraut saw any humor in Nguyen Ai Quoc’s note. There is no doubt that he continued to show an interest in his whereabouts. On one occasion Sarraut sent a cable to Governor-General Maurice Long in Indochina, declaring that the government was giving consideration to a proposal to arrest Nguyen Ai Quoc and return him to his native land. Long took issue with the idea, however, arguing that it would be easier to keep track of his activities in France. When Sarraut suggested exile in one of the French spheres of influence in south China, Long replied that he would be able to influence events in Indochina from such a nearby location.64
By then harassment from the authorities was probably only a minor irritant for Nguyen Ai Quoc. What was probably more frustrating was the attitude of many of his colleagues toward the common struggle. Despite his efforts, the French left still did not seem to take colonial affairs seriously. After its well-publicized beginning, the Colonial Study Commission lapsed into virtual desuetude. Party journals rarely made references to colonial problems. Even L’Humanité, he complained, did not accord to the cause of the oppressed colonial peoples the place that it merited. Bourgeois newspapers, he wrote, give more attention to colonies, and there were many militants “who still think that a colony is nothing but a country with plenty of sand underfoot and of sun overhead, a few green coconut palms and colored folk, and that is all.”
The result of the Party’s failure to address the colonial question, Quoc lamented, was a lack of mutual understanding between the working class in France and their counterparts in the colonies. French workers regarded the native as “an inferior and negligible human being, incapable of understanding and still less of taking action.” Still, he conceded, prejudice ran in both directions. In the colonies, all Frenchmen, regardless of class, were regarded as “wicked exploiters.”65
Nguyen Ai Quoc persistently prodded his colleagues on the colonial issue. At the FCP national congress held in Paris in October 1922, he and a number of other representatives from the colonial territories submitted a resolution urging that the colonial question be given more attention within the world Communist movement. But even after the Tours conference and the departure of the moderates, a Eurocentric attitude still prevailed among the radical elements who had joined the Communist Party. Occasionally the leadership would make a few halting efforts to organize the Vietnamese working community in France (most of whom consisted of manual laborers, shiphands and stevedores, and cooks). A few Vietnamese were raised to prominent positions in the party. But little else was done.
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s frustration over this issue may have contributed to the increasing anti-French tone in his writings. On returning from Marseilles at the end of 1921, where he had seen the miserable conditions of Vietnamese dock workers, he began to sign articles with a new pseudonym, Nguyen o Phap, which means “Nguyen Who Detests the French.” On one occasion he stormed out of an angry interview with a senior Party member responsible for dealing with colonial questions. In response, the rising young French Communist Jacques Doriot quietly advised him to tone down his rhetoric.66
In March 1923, Nguyen Ai Quoc moved out of his tiny apartment on Impasse Compoint and into the headquarters of Le Paria, now located at the Intercolonial Union’s head office on the Rue du Marché des Patriarches. The move may have been motivated by convenience to his job or the need to conserve funds. The journal’s office was on the ground floor; he took a room on the floor above at a cost of one hundred francs a month. It would be his last residence in Paris.67
He was receiving help in the publication of the journal from another rising young star in the Vietnamese nationalist movement, Nguyen The Truyen. Born in 1898 near Hanoi, Truyen arrived in Paris in 1920 to study engineering. A year later he joined the FCP and began to collaborate with Quoc at the Intercolonial Union. For a while he was almost certainly Quoc’s closest colleague within the Vietnamese community.
The previous October, while attending the Party congress in Paris, Nguyen Ai Quoc had met Dmitri Manuilsky, a senior official of the Comintern in the USSR. At the congress, Manuilsky heard Quoc publicly criticize the lack of attention given to the colonial question within the Party. When, many months later, Manuilsky was ordered by the executive committee of the Comintern to prepare a report on the national and colonial questions for presentation at the Fifth Comintern Congress in the summer of 1924, he thought of the fiery young Vietnamese in Paris. Nguyen Ai Quoc was invited to Moscow at the request of Comrade Manuilsky to work for the Comintern.68
For Nguyen Ai Quoc, the invitation to Moscow was a reward for his efforts on behalf of the Party, and perhaps an opportunity to return to Asia to promote the revolutionary cause in Vietnam. But he approached the issue with his customary caution. To avoid giving away the news of his trip to the police, he announced to his friends that he was going to the South of France on a three-week vacation to rest. Then, having carefully set a regular pattern of behavior to lull his two “aides-de-camp” into relaxing their surveillance, on June 13 he left a movie house secretly by the rear door and hurried to the Gare du Nord, where he was handed his luggage by a friend and then caught a train for Berlin, posing as a wealthy Asian merchant with a cigar. He arrived in Berlin on the eighteenth, where his money disappeared quickly because of the murderous rate of inflation in postwar Germany. With the assistance of contacts from the local German Communist Party, he continued on to Hamburg. There he boarded the passenger liner Karl Liebknecht en route to Soviet Russia. He arrived in Petrograd on June 30, bearing a visa in the name of Chen Vang, a Chinese merchant.69
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s sudden departure from Paris caught the police by surprise. The men tailing him initially reported to the Ministry of Colonies that he had left his house empty-handed but did not return. They then fell for his ruse and assumed that he was on vacation in the South. Only many weeks later did they realize that he had gone to Soviet Russia. His disappearance also confused his acquaintances in Paris. He had sent a letter to friends stating that he had left France and apologizing for the fact that he had not informed his colleagues of his impending departure. He hinted that he was going under cover and that he would not return for many years. In the meantime, he promised to send letters.70
In leaving Paris for Soviet Russia, Nguyen Ai Quoc had made a final symbolic break with his friend Phan Chu Trinh’s path of reform and embraced the revolutionary cause of Vladimir Lenin. But his old mentor from the Villa des Gobelins wished him well. In a letter to a Vietnamese acquaintance in September, Trinh defended Quoc from his critics: “Although Nguyen Ai Quoc is young, and his acts are not subject to wise reflection,” he wrote, “that has no importance, because Nguyen Ai Quoc has the heart of a patriot.” Quoc had chosen the lonely and difficult path of liberating his compatriots, Trinh concluded, and all must respect his stout heart.71
III | APPRENTICE REVOLUTIONARY
In the late summer of 1923, Soviet Russia was still recovering from nearly seven years of war, revolution, and bitter civil conflict. Outside of Petrograd, Moscow, and a handful of other major cities in the European areas of Russia, the October Revolution had been, in Leon Trotsky’s memorable words, a “revolut
ion by telegraph.” In the rural villages and market towns scattered about the vast Russian empire, Lenin’s Bolsheviks—numbering only about fifty thousand at the moment of insurrection—had scant support from the millions of Russian peasants, who had little understanding of the ideas of Karl Marx and even less interest in the fate of the world revolution.
Initially, the new revolutionary leadership attempted to establish its legitimacy by announcing the inauguration of the new government in cablegrams to all administrative units. But it soon became evident that it would take more than a piece of paper to extend revolutionary power to the far reaches of the old tsarist empire. Within weeks of the storming of the Winter Palace in October 1917 (according to the Russian calendar), opposition forces began to appear: White Russian elements loyal to Tsar Nicholas II and the old monarchical system; nationalist forces among the minority ethnic groups along the fringes of the old empire, from Ukraine to Central Asia; and even foreign troops stationed in Russia to assist in the battle against Germany.
The Bolshevik government hastily mobilized manpower from among workers and poor peasants to build up the Red Army; after three years of bloody fighting it was finally able to suppress counterrevolutionary forces and establish firm control over the new Soviet state. But in the process, it had alienated key elements in Russian society, including peasants whose harvests were requisitioned by the state to feed the soldiers of the Red Army and the working population in the cities, members of non-Russian ethnic groups whose leaders were defeated and pitilessly run down by Soviet security forces, and others arrested and executed by Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s secret police, familiarly known as the Cheka (Chrezvy-chainyi Komitet, or Extraordinary Commission).
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