Only one of his acquaintances at the time expressed a low opinion of Quoc. The prominent Indian Communist M. N. Roy, who later served as a Comintern representative in China and (in the view of many observers) whose incompetence was a major factor in the defeat of the Chinese Communists at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, felt that the young Vietnamese was unimpressive in mind as well as in body and was a poor student to boot. Ironically, Quoc was one of the few in Moscow who shared Roy’s thesis that the Asian revolution was the necessary first step in the overthrow of world capitalism.14
Nguyen Ai Quoc also had the time to do a considerable amount of writing, contributing regularly to French leftist journals and also to the Soviet press, publishing a number of articles in Inprecor (International Press Correspondence, the official mouthpiece of the Comintern). The topics of his articles were varied, but always had a revolutionary slant. He wrote about imperialist oppression in China, of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, of the idyllic life of the population in the Soviet Union, and of course about the colonial exploitation of the native peoples of Asia and Africa. In collaboration with Chinese students at the Stalin School, he edited the short pamphlet Kitai i kitaikaya molodezh (China and Chinese Youth), published in 1925 in Chinese and French as well as in Russian. He also reportedly wrote a history of Indochina under French rule, which remained unpublished in the Comintern archives.15
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s major writing project during his stay in Moscow, however, was Le procès de la colonisation française (translated into English as “French Colonialism on Trial”). Presumably based on articles that he had written while living in Paris as well as on his manuscript entitled Les opprimés, which had disappeared prior to publication in 1920, the book was completed in Moscow and published in Paris by the Librairie du Travail in 1926, long after he had left France for Moscow. It is a rambling indictment of colonial conditions throughout the world, ending with a spirited appeal to the youth of Indochina to rise up against their exploiters. Much of the material in the book relates to Indochina, but there are several references to the African colonies. Although it is probably the best known of all Ho Chi Minh’s writings, it is so poorly organized and badly written that one biographer has speculated that it may have been written by another Vietnamese and then printed under his name. But in its tone and style, it is too similar to other writings of Ho Chi Minh for most scholars to doubt that it is essentially his work. The most that can be said about it is that it shows evidence of having been written in haste.16
In all of his public utterances, Nguyen Ai Quoc still seemed to be a true believer. His writings on the Soviet Union are uniformly full of praise, and his admiration for Lenin seemed boundless. He had apparently been very disappointed at being unable to meet the Bolshevik leader before his death. When he was asked the purpose of his visit on his arrival in Petrograd in July 1923, Quoc had replied that he wished to meet Lenin and was disheartened to hear that the Soviet leader was ill. The following January, he learned to his great sorrow that Lenin had died. As an Italian acquaintance, Giovanni Germanetto, recounted the story:
Moscow, January 1924. The Russian winter is at its height. The temperature sinks at times to 40 degrees below zero. A few days ago Lenin died. That morning, a quiet knocking on our door in Lux Hotel aroused me. The door opened and a frail young man entered.
He said he was Vietnamese and his name was Nguyen Ai Quoc. He also said he intended to go to Trade Union House and see off Lenin....
I told him he was too lightly dressed for the freezing cold outside. I said he should wait, we’d get him some warm clothing.
Ai Quoc sighed, and sat down to have tea with us, and finally went to his room. We thought he had taken our advice and had stayed indoors.
Somewhere around ten at night I heard a soft knocking on the door again. It was Comrade Ai Quoc. His face was blue, and the ears, nose, and fingers on the hands were blue, too, from the fierce cold.
Ai Quoc said he had just seen Comrade Lenin. He was trembling from the cold as he explained that he could not wait until tomorrow to pay homage to the best friend of the colonial peoples.... He finished by asking if we didn’t happen to have some hot tea.
According to Ho’s Soviet biographer, Yevgeny Kobelev, after returning from Lenin’s funeral Nguyen Ai Quoc locked himself in his room and wrote an essay expressing his grief at the death of the generous Bolshevik leader who had spared his time and effort to concern himself with the liberation of the colonial peoples. “In his life,” he concluded, “he was our father, teacher, comrade, and adviser. Now he is our guiding star that leads to social revolution. Lenin lives on in our deeds. He is immortal.”17
Only in bits and pieces do we find suggestions that not everything enthralled him. On moving to the Lux Hotel in early December 1923, he had been assigned to a small room occupied by four or five fellow students that evidently displeased him. The following March he wrote a letter complaining about the conditions—by day he was kept awake by the noise, and by night by insects, which kept him from sleeping—and he declared that he was withholding his rent of five rubles a month as a form of protest. He was eventually resettled in another room.18
On a more important note, Nguyen Ai Quoc was not always pleased with strategy decisions. For months he had been bombarding his acquaintances on the issue of colonialism. In February 1924, he wrote to a friend at Comintern headquarters (possibly Dmitri Manuilsky) to thank him for raising the colonial issue at the FCP conference in Lyons. On the same day, he wrote Comintern General Secretary Grigory Zinoviev asking for an interview to discuss the colonial problem. Receiving no answer, he wrote a second letter complaining that he had received no answer to his request for an interview. There is no indication that Zinoviev answered his request.19
What he wanted to discuss with Zinoviev is not known for certain, but in an article published in the April issue of Inprecor titled “Indochina and the Pacific,” Quoc had declared that although at first sight the Asian question was of no concern to European workers, in fact the problem of Indochina and Asia had importance for workers in all countries. Colonial exploitation of the region, he said, served not only to enrich capitalists and unscrupulous politicians, but also risked bringing about the outbreak of a new imperialist war. Such actions represented a threat to workers in Indochina and Asia, and also to the international proletariat as well.20
In referring to the relationship between conditions in Europe and Asia, Nguyen Ai Quoc—deliberately or not—was stepping into a minefield that had already aroused angry debates in Comintern meetings since the Second Congress in 1920. Spokesmen for the peoples of the colonial East such as M. N. Roy had argued incessantly that a resolution of the “Eastern question” was essential for the ultimate fate of the world revolution, but many European Communists retorted that the revolution in Asia could not be unleashed until Communist parties had already come to power in European countries.
At first, advocates of an Asian-based strategy had the benefit of friends in high places—including Lenin and even Joseph Stalin—who were apparently sympathetic to their views. But by 1924 Lenin was dead and Stalin had become preoccupied with the inner-party struggle for primacy in Moscow. Zinoviev, the current head of the Comintern, appeared bored by the issue. The Dutch Communist Maring had left the Comintern and even Manuilsky, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s original sponsor, was a Ukrainian who had little knowledge of Asia and concentrated his activities on conditions in the Balkans.
There was also little interest in the role of the peasantry. After a strong start, the Krestintern had fallen into distepute and was not taken seriously among the worker-oriented party bureaucrats, or apparatchiks, in Moscow. Even Nikolai Bukharin, one of the more enlightened of Bolshevik leaders, laughingly referred to Thomas Dombal as a “peasant visionary.” Nguyen Ai Quoc tried to keep the issue alive, speaking on the issue of the peasantry at a meeting of the Krestintern in June 1924, but he had little response. In a remark to a friend, he laughingly referred to
himself as a “voice crying in the wilderness.”21
The Fifth Congress of the Comintern, held in the early summer of 1924, provided Nguyen Ai Quoc with a rare opportunity to air his views within the larger body of the organization. The congress, in fact, may have been the initial reason for his original summons to Moscow, since Dmitri Manuilsky had seen him as a possible source of information in connection with his own forthcoming speech on the colonial question at the conference. Since there was no Communist Party in Indochina, Quoc attended the conference as a member of the FCP delegation.22
The Fifth Congress opened on June 17 and held its sessions in the Bolshoi Theater in downtown Moscow.23 Over five hundred delegates representing nearly fifty countries attended. The Comintern leadership was becoming increasingly sensitive to charges of neglect from Asian comrades and decided to devote a special session to the colonial question and issues connected with the non-Russian nationalities, in addition to appointing a committee to deal with the issue. But the congress was taking place at the height of the first power struggle between Stalin and his rival Leon Trotsky, and leading members of the CPSU were so preoccupied with the struggle inside the Kremlin that they gave little attention to the Eastern question. In his opening speech, General Secretary Zinoviev, soon to be one of Stalin’s new challengers for Party leadership, mentioned the national and colonial issue only in passing, while Manuilsky’s address on the national and colonial question focused primarily on the countries in eastern Europe. Perhaps at the urging of Nguyen Ai Quoc—who had probably been harassing him to raise the issue—he did criticize the FCP for its inadequate attention to the colonial question.
Right from the start, Nguyen Ai Quoc made his presence known. In the opening session, when the delegate Vasili Kolarov was reading the text of a draft resolution that would be prepared for publication after adjournment, Quoc rose to ask whether the congress would address a special appeal to the colonial peoples. Kolarov testily replied that the colonial question was already on the agenda, and thus could be raised by any delegate at the conference. But Nguyen Ai Quoc pursued the issue and asked that any address contain the words “to the colonial peoples.” The proposal was accepted by the delegates.
On June 23, Nguyen Ai Quoc took the floor. “I am here,” he told the delegates,
in order to continuously remind the International of the existence of the colonies and to point out that the revolution faces a colonial danger as well as a great future in the colonies. It seems to me that the comrades do not entirely comprehend the fact that the fate of the world proletariat, and especially the fate of the proletarian class in aggressive countries that have invaded colonies, is closely tied to the fate of the oppressed peoples of the colonies. Since this is the case I will take every opportunity that presents itself or, if necessary, create opportunities to point out to you the importance of the colonial question....
You must excuse my frankness, but I cannot help but observe that the speeches by comrades from the mother countries give me the impression that they wish to kill a snake by stepping on its tail. You all know that today the poison and life energy of the capitalist snake is concentrated more in the colonies than in the mother countries. The colonies supply the raw materials for industry. The colonies supply soldiers for the armies. In the future, the colonies will be bastions of the counterrevolution. Yet in your discussions of the revolution you neglect to talk about the colonies. If one wants to break an egg or a stone, one will be careful to find an instrument whose strength corresponds to the object one wishes to break. Why is it that where the revolution is concerned you do not wish to make your strength, your propaganda, equal to the enemy whom you wish to fight and defeat? Why do you neglect the colonies, while capitalism uses them to support itself, defend itself, and fight you?24
On July I Quoc took the floor once again to underscore Dmitri Manuilsky’s initial criticism of European Communist parties for their failure to address the colonial issue. In a lengthy report he singled out not only the French but also the British and Dutch parties for their inadequate efforts to conduct a vigorous colonial policy and establish contacts with revolutionary elements in colonial societies. Pointing to the fact that Party journals in France had missed many opportunities to bring the issue to the attention of their readers, he called for a number of specific measures to improve their performance. As in his speech at the peasant conference, he refrained from asserting a central role for the countryside in the coming revolution, but he did make an effort to show that the peasantry would play an active role:
In all the French colonies, famine is on the increase and so is the people’s hatred. The native peasants are ripe for insurrection. In many colonies, they have risen many times but their uprisings have all been drowned in blood. If at present the peasants still have a passive attitude, the reason is that they still lack organization and leaders. The Communist International must help them to revolution and liberation.25
With his performance at the Fifth Comintern Congress, Nguyen Ai Quoc had brought himself to the attention of the leaders of the world Communist movement. The Soviet painter N. I. Kropchenko asked him to pose for a portrait, which appeared in the journal Rabochaya Gazeta (Workers’ Gazette) at the end of July, while Pravda reported his comments under the provocative title, “From Words to Deeds, the Speech of Indochina Delegate Nguyen Ai Quoc.” For the moment, Quoc was still following official policy, but it would not be long before his emphasis on the importance of the peasantry to the revolution in Asia would be considered heretical and would be severely punished in Moscow.26
As it turned out, the congress made no major changes in Comintern policy, but it did show a heightened awareness of the colonial problem. The leadership appeared conscious of the need to increase propaganda and recruitment in colonial areas and set up a commission on international propaganda. Nguyen Ai Quoc was named one of its founding members. The congress, however, did not include any special declaration on the colonial issue in its final resolution—a deficiency that would be remedied at the next congress four years later. But the Comintern did issue a broad appeal to “the slaves of the colonies,” as Nguyen Ai Quoc had proposed at the opening session.27
Whether or not in response to Nguyen Ai Quoc’s criticism, the Comintern leadership also turned its attention to bringing more Asian revolutionaries to study in the USSR. In the years following the congress, increased numbers of Asians—including more than one hundred Vietnamese—would be sent to Moscow or Leningrad (as the city of Petrograd was named after Lenin’s death) for training and evenrual return to their homeland for revolutionary work. The first group of three Vietnamese apparently arrived from France in mid-1925.
The central apparatus for the Soviet program to train Asian revolutionaries continued to be the Stalin School. For its part, the FCP was instructed to remedy its own shortcomings. The Colonial Study Commission was reorganized as the Colonial Commission, with Jacques Doriot at its head. In early 1925 the Party established its own clandestine colonial school near the Porte de Clignancourt in the northern suburbs of Paris to train revolutionaries from the colonies in preparation for eventual schooling in the Soviet Union. In the first class, one of the eight students was Vietnamese. Over the next several years, groups of five to ten Vietnamese arrived in Moscow each year. The majority came from France, but a few traveled directly from Indochina.
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s attendance at the Fifth Comintern Congress symbolized the end of his apprenticeship as a revolutionary and the beginning of his emergence as an Asian leader of international standing in the world communist movement. He was now the recognized spokesman for the Eastern question and for increased attention to the problems of the peasantry. As gratifying as that may have been to his ego and to his desire to orient the Comintern toward assigning greater attention to the colonial question, he now felt that he had accomplished his task in Moscow and was ready to return to Asia to launch the process of building a revolutionary movement in Indochina.
Nguyen Ai Quoc
had originally gone to Moscow under the impression that he would remain only briefly before returning to his homeland. In a letter to the Comintern Executive Committee written in April 1924, he had lamented that neither the Comintern not the FCP knew very much about the situation in the French colonies. It was vital, he maintained, to establish contact with such areas, and he recommended himself to undertake the task of serving as a liaison. The letter is sufficiently revealing about his intentions to quote at length:
It was decided on my arrival in Moscow that after three months’ stay here, I would leave for China to establish contact with my country. I am now in my ninth month here, and my sixth month of waiting, and yet the question of my departure has not yet been decided.
I don’t feel that it is necessary to speak to you of revolutionary or nationalist movements old or new; of the existence or nonexistence of workers’ organizations, or of the activities of secret societies and other groups, because I have no intention here of submitting a thesis; but I would like to point out the necessity for us to study the situation in a careful manner, and if nothing exists, to CREATE SOMETHING.
My trip would thus serve as a voyage of investigation and study. I must attempt a) to establish contacts between Indochina and the Comintern, b) to study the political, economic and social situation in that colony, c) to establish contact with organizations that are already in existence there, and d) to try to organize a base for information and propaganda.
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