As the country tried to recover from the Civil War, Lenin reluctantly recognized that Soviet Russia needed to go through its own capitalist stage before beginning the difficult transition to socialism. In 1921 he pushed through a moderate program of social and economic development known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP. The key elements in the program were the use of a combination of capitalist and socialist techniques to increase production, while at the same time promoting the concept of socialist ownership and maintaining firm Party control over the political system. Key industries and utilities and the banks remained in the hands of the state, but private enterprise operated at lower levels. The forced requisition of grain, which had caused serious unrest in rural areas, was replaced by a tax on production. The land remained in private hands.
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s first days in the new socialist paradise that he had so glowingly described in articles written in France must have been somewhat unnerving. After disembarking from the Karl hiebknecht on the dock at Petrograd, he was interrogated by a suspicious young immigration officer. Lacking official papers except for the visa in the name of the fictitious Chinese merchant, which had been approved by the Soviet consulate in Berlin, and having no personal conracts in the city, he was held in detention for several weeks “in an atmosphere of tension” until his identity was finally verified by a representative of the FCP stationed in Moscow. He was then given permission to travel and proceeded to Moscow by train late in July. After being given temporary accommodations in a hotel near the Kremlin, he was assigned to work in the Far Eastern Bureau (Byuro Dalnego Vostoka, or Dalburo for short) at Comintern headquarters, located opposite the Rumyantsev Museum (now the Lenin Library).1
The Dalburo had been created as the result of a proposal at the Comintern’s Second Congress in 1920 raised by Maring (real name Hen-drik Sneevliet), a delegate of Dutch nationality who was later to achieve prominence as an adviser to the Chinese Communist Party. A strong believer in the importance of the colonial areas to the future of the world revolution, Maring had proposed the establishment of propaganda bureaus for the Middle East and the Far East, as well as the opening of a Marxist Institute in Moscow to provide training for prospective Asian revolutionary leaders. With Lenin’s theses about to be approved, Maring’s proposal was also adopted, and the following June, at a meeting of the Comintern Executive Committee, the Dalburo was established under the direction of the Russian orientalist scholar G. Safarov.2
In the ensuing months, Comintern leaders took a number of other steps to promote the establishment of revolutionary movements in Asia and Africa. All Communist parties in Western Europe were instructed to establish colonial commissions to evaluate the situation and support the struggle of the oppressed peoples in their own colonies (thus the Colonial Study Commission had been established in France). In the meantime, plans were initiated to establish training institutes in Soviet Russia to indoctrinate radicals from Asia and Africa and prepare them to return to their own countries to carry out revolutionary operations.
By then, the Comintern had already begun to engage in some preliminary operations in East Asia. In the spring of 1920, the Comintern agent Grigory Voitinsky was sent to China to get in touch with Chinese revolutionaries. Other agents based in Vladivostok traveled to Shanghai, Saigon, and Singapore to establish contact with radical elements and assist them in conducting revolutionary operations. In November, two Russians who had just arrived in Saigon were reportedly expelled on suspicion of carrying on such activities.3
With his now characteristic flair for the dramatic, Nguyen Ai Quoc wasted no time in making his presence felt. Shortly after his arrival in Moscow, he wrote a letter to the FCP Central Committee, criticizing his colleagues for ignoring the decisions of the Fourth Comintern Congress to expand their activities on colonial issues. While conceding that the FCP had initially responded to the order of the Comintern by creating the Colonial Study Commission as well as a regular column on the colonial question in the Party journal L’Humanité, he complained that in recent months the column had been canceled and that in his absence the commission was virtually moribund. “The declarations issued at national congresses in favor of the colonial peoples have helped to consolidate their sympathy with the Party,” he pointed out, but “it is not reasonable to constantly repeat the same thing while doing nothing.” The colonial peoples, seeing much promise with a minimum of performance, would begin to ask whether the Communists were serious or just bluffing. He concluded the letter by reminding the recipient that one key condition for joining the Comintern was to carry on systematic agitation to support the liberation of colonial peoples.4
Quoc also wrote a report to the presidium of the Comintern Executive Committee, detailing his ideas on how to promote the revolutionary struggle in Indochina. As he described it, the situation was hardly promising. Tonkin and Cochin China were controlled directly by the French, while Annam, still nominally under the authority of the imperial court, was in reality under colonial domination as well. The urban proletariat represented only 2 percent of the total population and was not yet organized. There was a tiny middle class, living mainly in the large cities of Hanoi and Saigon and in provincial capitals scattered throughout the country; however, it was dominated economically by the overseas Chinese. The petty bourgeoisie, consisting of small merchants, clerks, low-level government functionaries, and artisans, were small in number and indecisive in their political views, although they did tend to support the cause of national independence. The peasants were severely oppressed and, if organized, had a high revolutionary potential. But the primary source for political activism was intellectuals and the patriotic scholar-gentry. It was they, he said, who had fomented all revolts in the past. The immediate need was therefore to establish joint action between such “national revolutionary” patriots and a Communist party.5
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s recommendations were pure Leninism, as reflected in the tatter’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions.” But given the existing state of affairs in Moscow, where attention to the colonial areas had declined substantially since the heady days of the Second Comintern Congress, it is doubtful that his ideas attracted much interest among his superiors. Still, influential Soviet officials were gradually becoming aware of the ambitious young revolutionary from Indochina and, in light of the fact that he was one of the few Asian Communists then living in Moscow, of the uses to which he could be put. During the summer of 1923 there had been a flurry of interest in Lenin’s concept of a government of workers and peasants in societies that had not yet passed through the Industrial Revolution. In Prague, populist elements had established a “Green International” in 1922 to encourage the formation of peasant parties with modern political programs, and some radical elements in eastern Europe were convinced that the Comintern must come up with a similar “international” organization to compete with the Green International for the support of peasant groups in the area. Prominent in this effort was the Polish Communist Thomas Dombal (also known as Dabal), who had been arrested by the Polish government and was sent to Moscow in the spring of 1923 in an exchange of prisoners with Soviet Russia.
Given the fact that most Bolsheviks, reflecting the views of other European Marxists from Karl Marx on down, had always suspected that peasants were “bourgeois” at heart in their commitment to the concept of private property, few Comintern officials had much interest in Dombal’s ideas, but they agreed for the time being to promote them. In preparation for holding an organizational conference, they took advantage of an international agricultural exhibition that had opened in Moscow in August, and decided to scour the meeting hall for foreigners with rural interests who could be recruited to serve as delegates to such a conference. Nguyen Ai Quoc, who was seemingly interested in everything that was going on in Moscow, had attended the exhibit when it first opened in August, and predictably he was selected as a delegate representing Indochina to the International Peasant Conference, which convened in Moscow on October 10, 192
3. He had already signaled his views on the role of the peasantry in his report to the Comintern Executive Committee, when he remarked that because they had been so badly exploited, they were “very patriotic.”6
The conference was held in the Andreyevskiy Palace, within the walls of the Kremlin, and Nguyen Ai Quoc was in the audience as one of the more than 150 delegates from forty different countries. Mikhail Kalinin, a party hack who had recently been appointed as the figurehead president of the Russian Federation, gave the opening speech, while the veteran Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev, then head of the Comintern, presented the official Party position on the role of the peasants in the world revolution.
Nguyen Ai Quoc addressed the conference on the thirteenth. The speech, given in French because his knowledge of Russian was still inadequate, made no reference to the possible adoption of a “rural strategy” in colonial areas, not to the need for a specific role for the peasantry in the revolutionary process in Asia, but simply expressed in plain and unadorned terms the difficult conditions of the rural population in many colonial Asian societies, pointing out that peasants were the worst victims of imperialist oppression in the region. The Comintern, Quoc asserted, would become a genuine Communist International only when it included representatives of the Asian peasantry as active participants.7
At the close of the conference, the organizers agreed to create a new Peasant International (in Russian, Krestyanskii Internatsional, or Krestintern for short). Its purpose was to “establish and maintain firm ties with cooperatives and economic and political organizations of the peasants of all countries,” and to “coordinate peasant organizations and the efforts of the peasants to realize the slogan for building a workers’ and peasants’ government.” An International Peasant Council was also created and Nguyen Ai Quoc was elected as one of the eleven members of its presidium. The post of general secretary of the larger body itself was given to a prominent Bolshevik bureaucrat, Alexander P. Smirnov. Dombal was named his assistant.8
In December 1923, Nguyen Ai Quoc began to take courses at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Founded on Lenin’s order in 1921 as a result of decisions taken at the Second Comintern Congress the previous year, it was originally placed under the jurisdiction of Joseph Stalin’s People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, and thus became popularly labeled abroad as the dreaded “Stalin School.” Under Stalin’s direction, it soon became the leading institute for training Asian revolutionaries invited to Soviet Russia to study, as well as cadres of non-Russian ethnic stock from the eastern regions of the old tsarist empire. A second institute, the International Lenin School, was established to provide training for advanced cadres from Western European countries.
In 1924 Nguyen Ai Quoc published a brief article in the French journal La Vie Ouvrière describing the nature of the school, and this information, in addition to material gathered by the French intelligence services at the time and recent scholarship by Russian researchers in Moscow, provides a reasonably clear picture of the school and its activities. At the time he studied there, there were more than 1000 students from sixty-two different nationalities. Most of those enrolled were from Soviet-occupied areas in Central Asia, but there were some foreigners as well, including a few Chinese and Koreans. There were apparently no students from Indochina prior to Quoc’s arrival. Nearly 900 were members of Communist parties, and about 150 were women. About half came from peasant families, while the remainder were divided between workers and “proletarian intellectuals.”
There were 150 instructors at the school, teaching a variety of courses, including the natural and social sciences, mathematics, the history of revolution and the workers’ movement, and Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Instruction was not provided through lectures, but through use of the Socratic technique, with students assigned individual topics to be prepared with the assistance of the instructor and discussed in class. Textbooks included Lenin’s The State and Revolution, Stalin’s October Revolution and the Tactics of Russian Communism, and I. M. Yaroslavskii’s Russian History: A Short Course. The school was housed in ten buildings, with the headquarters located in an old convent on Tverskaya (now Gorkii) Street, and the dormitories and cafeterias situated nearby at an old prefecture of police.9
The school was run on strict military discipline, and students not only took part in classroom studies but also received military training and were taught such useful revolutionary activities as how to instigate strikes and disseminate propaganda. Classes were initially taught in French or in their own native language, but later students were expected to be conversant in Russian (a requirement that was not always met). Lodging was free, but all students were expected to take their turn performing various administrative tasks or working in the kitchen. Party cells were established among party members to monitor their behavior and guarantee ideological orthodoxy. On arrival, each student was assigned a pseudonym, and his or her real identity was to be known only by security personnel at the school.
It was not all labor. The school year ran from September to early July, and included three weeks of vacation at Christmas and one week off in the spring. A cinema was available to the students two days each week, and two rest camps were established in the Crimea for them to engage in work-study activities during their summer vacation. Some were taught cattle breeding there, while others cultivated the hundred acres assigned to provide the food served at the camp. During their vacation, students helped local peasants bring in the harvest or took part in other community services. Still, many of the students, perhaps unaccustomed to the intense cold of Russian winters, became ill, and some were dismissed for that reason from the program. One Vietnamese student contracted tuberculosis and requested a transfer to a city in the southern part of the country.
As Nguyen Ai Quoc described it in his article, the school was an idyllic place to study. There were two libraries containing over forty-seven thousand books, and each major nationality represented at the school possessed its own section with books and periodicals in its own national language. The students were “serious and full of enthusiasm,” and “passionately longed to acquire knowledge and to study.” The staff and the instructors treated the foreign students “like brothers” and even invited them to “participate in the political life of the country.”10
Quoc was not happy with all aspects of the school. Shortly after taking part in the third anniversary celebration of the school in April 1924, he wrote a letter to Comrade Petrov, secretary of the Dalburo, complaining that there were virtually no Vietnamese in attendance and suggesting that a separate annex for Asian students should be established at the school. The Stalin School, he pointed out, was the mold that would shape the minds of the next generation of Asian revolutionaries and would become the basis on which a Communist “federation” of the East would eventually be founded.11
The Stalin School ran on two levels—a basic three-year program in Marxism-Leninism and the sciences, and a “short course” of seven months for temporary students. Nguyen Ai Quoc took the latter, presumably because he was also working at the Comintern and did not intend to remain in Moscow for an extended period of time. He also participated in a number of other organizations recently established by the Soviet state, such as the Red Labor International, the Youth International, and the Women’s International. Clearly, the Comintern leadership viewed him as their token colonial who could provide an Asian dimension to the countless front organizations being formed during those heady days. In early May 1924, he was invited to take part in the annual May Day celebrations and to speak on international worker solidarity in the festivities in Red Square. Two months later, he took part in the third congress of the Red Labor International as a representative for Indochina. He also attended an international women’s congress, where he briefly talked with Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya.12
Through these myriad activities, Nguyen Ai Quoc gradually emerged as a well-known fixture in Moscow, and became acquainted with key luminaries
of the international Communist movement, such as the veteran Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, the Finnish Communist Otto Kuusi-nen, the Bulgarian Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov, and Ernst Thàl-mann, a leading member of the German Communist Party. He also met a number of Chinese comrades studying at the school (including the future prime minister Zhou Enlai, whom he had first encountered in Paris), as well as Sun Yat-sen’s chief military adviser, Chiang Kai-shek, who visited Moscow for three months in the late summer and fall of 1923.
In general, Quoc’s acquaintances seemed to like him. Ruth Fischer, a prominent German Communist, commented that although he was not impressive on first acquaintance, he soon won the respect and affection of all by his “goodness and simplicity.” More a pragmatist than a theoretician, he appeared adept at avoiding the bitter factional disputes that were already beginning to plague the Soviet leadership and eventually led to the crippling of the Bolshevik Party (now about to be renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or CPSU) and of the Comintern itself during the next decade. The period of the NEP was a relatively brief interlude when the future must have looked bright to many Soviet citizens and foreigners alike. With the Civil War at an end, the regime had abandoned its policy of coercion and the oppression of potential rivals and began to encourage the people to take part in economic construction (“enrich yourselves” was a popular slogan of the time). Cultural life was still rich and varied, as Soviet writers, artists, and composers sought to formulate a new revolutionary medium that could accurately express the dramatic changes taking place in the country. A few years later, at Stalin’s insistence, this period suddenly came to an end.
Quoc had apparently not suffered any loss of intensity in his own revolutionary beliefs. The journalist Ossip Mandelstam, who interviewed him for the magazine Ogonyok in December 1923, noted that the slight young man, so imbued with the subtle qualities of the Confucian intellectual class, had large and penetrating dark eyes, and when he spoke of conditions in his country his whole body appeared to go into convulsion and his eyes seemed to reflect a strange fierce brilliance. In the interview, Quoc pronounced the word “civilization” with an attitude of supreme disgust, and harshly criticized the Catholic Church in Indochina for appropriating almost one fifth of the country’s arable land. According to Boris Souvarine, the French Communist who later left the revolutionary movement, Nguyen Ai Quoc had now become “an accomplished Stalinist.”13
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