In line with the stated goals of the Revolutionary Youth League, Thanh Nien placed primary emphasis on the issue of national independence. But some articles did refer in general terms to the global problem posed by imperialism and capitalism, suggesting obliquely that only communism could bring about liberation and social happiness. In an early issue, Nguyen Ai Quoc made the point that revolution was the only cure for his country’s malaise: “Revolution is the change from bad to good; it is the entirety of all the acts by which an oppressed people becomes strong. The history of all societies has taught us that it was always by revolution that it was possible to give a better form to government, education, industry, organization of the society, etc.” Only in an issue printed in the early summer of 1926 did the journal begin to speak openly of communism as a solution to the problems afflicting the peoples of Indochina.42
For students attending the training program, he undertook a more serious work. At that time, there was virtually nothing on Marxism-Leninism in the Vietnamese language; despite Nguyen Ai Quoc’s frequent pleas for assistance, he received very little propaganda material from Moscow. To remedy that deficiency, he wrote a basic text to be used in a course at the institute dealing with the fundamental tasks of the Vietnamese revolution. This short pamphlet, titled The Revolutionary Path (Duong Kach Menh in Vietnamese), provided an introduction to Marxism-Leninism and explained its relevance to Vietnam. Although most copies were used by his students in Canton, a few were eventually sent to Vietnam to be distributed with Thanh Nien.43
In the pamphlet, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s message was tantalizingly simple. Given the lack of sophistication of his students and their unfamil-iarity with Western terminology (the Vietnamese kach menh was only introduced in the early twentieth century and was the Vietnamese equivalent of the Chinese word for “revolution” ge ming, which literally means “to change the mandate”), it is not surprising that he began with a brief definition of revolution. Revolution, he stated, is to destroy the old and build the new, or to destroy the bad and construct the good.
The author then launched into a brief explanation of the typology of revolution. There were, he noted, three types of revolution in the world:
1. Capitalist, such as the uprisings in France, Japan, and the United States
2. Nationalist, as in nineteenth-century Italy and the 1911 revolution in China
3. Class, represented by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia
All such revolutions, he continued, will eventually take place in two separate stages, with a first or “nationalist” stage and a second stage of “world revolution,” when workers and peasants throughout the globe unite to overthrow the capitalist order and bring about happiness and unity to the people of all nations.44
The idea of a two-stage revolution, of course, is pure Lenin, but Nguyen Ai Quoc added some nuances of his own. First, although he was careful to declare that the nationalist stage of the world revolution would be followed by a socialist stage to bring about social happiness and global unity, Quoc was not specific about when that second stage would take place, and indeed implied that in Vietnam it would not take place until the entire world was ready to move from nationalism into a final stage of internationalism. This presumably reflected his belief at the time that the second stage would not take place in Vietnam until the majority of countries in the world had already passed through their own socialist revolutions. In his own formulation of the two-stage concept, Lenin had assumed that the first stage would relatively quickly “grow over” into the second one, as it had in Soviet Russia.45
Second, as we have already seen, Nguyen Ai Quoc ascribed somewhat more value than Lenin to the issue of national independence in the revolutionary process, presenting it in this instance as the desired consequence of the collaboration among many classes within Vietnamese society. He predicted that similar struggles for national liberation would eventually break out elsewhere in Asia. Which classes of people would lead the revolutionary surge in Vietnam? That, of course, was one of the key issues in the debate over strategy in the Comintern. Lenin had based his strategy on the concept of the four-class alliance, with its core the close link between workers and peasants. In The Revolutionary Path, Nguyen Ai Quoc singled out the latter (those who work hard and do not receive the fruits of their labor) as the prime enemy of the capitalists (who do not work yet receive all the benefits). But he appropriated Lenin’s idea of a multiclass united front of progressive classes to bring about the first stage of the revolution. Included in this alliance could be students, petty merchants, and even small landlords. Such groups, however, would not be reliable allies of the workers and peasants in carrying out the second stage of the revolution, because they would oppose the socialist stage. As he wrote in The Revolutionary Path, the workers and peasants are the leading force of the revolution:
This is because, first, the workers and farmers are more heavily oppressed; secondly, the workers and peasants are united and therefore possess the greatest strength; and thirdly, they are already poor; if defeated, they would only lose their miserable life; if they win, they would have the whole world. That is why the workers and farmers are the roots of the revolution, while the students, small merchants, and landowners, though oppressed, do not suffer as much as the workers and farmers, and that is why these three classes are only the revolutionary friends of the workers and farmers.46
Finally, although Nguyen Ai Quoc followed Lenin’s lead in stressing the need for proletarian leadership, particularly during the second stage of class revolution, underlying the entire pamphlet is the implied message that the rural classes were a crucial element in the revolutionary partnership. This, of course, was a position that he had voiced with limited success in Moscow. He argued that the lack of a close alliance between town and country had doomed the revolutionary cause both during the Paris Commune of 1870–1871 and the 1905 revolution in Russia. Only when the two classes united, as had taken place during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, could a revolution succeed. This, he maintained, was especially true in a country like Vietnam, where 90 percent of the population lived on the land and were grindingly poor. Like the proletariat in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s peasants had nothing to lose but their chains. All they required, as he had pointed out in articles written in France, was leadership and organization.47
Nguyen Ai Quoc conceded that victory would not be easily achieved, because it would be difficult to change a thousand-year-old society into a new one. The most important thing was to have a revolutionary party that could mobilize and organize the oppressed masses within the country and maintain contact with its counterparts all over the world. As a boat cannot advance without a good oarsman, he wrote, the revolution could not succeed without a solid party. A handful of rebels, he continued, can achieve little simply by assassinating a few government officials. Such actions lead only to more repression, not to liberation. The key to a solid party lay in its doctrine. A party should have an ideology that can be understood and followed by all party members. A party without ideology is like a man without intelligence, or a boat without a compass.
In the opening section of The Revolutionary Path, the author lists several characteristics that defined “the behavior of the revolutionary.” It is interesting to compare this list with the famous “catechism of a revolutionary” written by the nineteenth-century Russian terrorist Sergey Nechayev. Nechayev emphasized the role of the revolutionary as the blind instrument of the revolutionary cause. He must be ruthless, even Machiavellian, in the promotion of his goal. He must show absolute obedience to his party, and be prepared to abandon all ties with friends and family. He must also be prepared to sacrifice generally recognized standards of morality, to lie and to cheat in the interests of the revolution. While many of Nechayev’s excesses were condemned by others in the Russian radical movement, the catechism as a whole was much admired by Lenin, and became the bible of his Bolsheviks.
There were a number of similarities between
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s ethical rules of conduct and those of Lenin, as influenced by Nechayev. Both stressed the obligation of the party member to be courageous, bold, and persevering, and to subordinate his own needs to the requirements of the revolutionary cause. The main difference lay in the spirit behind these two sets of revolutionary standards. Where Lenin assumed that contemporary standards of morality had little relevance to the revolutionary code of conduct, and indeed that on some occasions there were irreducible contradictions between the two, the ethical core in Nguyen Ai Quoc’s list of behavioral norms was strongly reminiscent of traditional Confucian morality: be thrifty, be friendly but impartial, resolutely correct errors, be prudent, respect learning, study and observe, avoid arrogance and conceit, and be generous. Indeed, except for references to the party, Quoc’s revolutionary commandments could easily be accepted as behavioral norms in any devout Confucian home.48
It might be said, of course, that Nguyen Ai Quoc’s list of revolutionary ethics was simply a means of dressing new concepts in familiar clothing; it is not unlikely that the thought crossed his mind. After all, it was obvious that the bulk of the early recruits to his cause came from scholar-gentry families. Although most had rejected traditional Confucian ideology, they were still influenced subliminally by many of its core values, and Quoc always sought to tailor his message to the proclivities of his audience. Still, the standards of personal conduct that were taught at the institute became a crucial aspect of his legacy to the Vietnamese Communist movement and should not be dismissed as window dressing. To many of his colleagues, it was Quoc’s personal demeanor, his image of goodness and simplicity, his unfailing optimism, his seriousness and devotion to the cause, that were best remembered after his death. Nguyen Ai Quoc’s revolutionary ethics became the hallmark of his influence on his party and, for many, served as a distinguishing characteristic of Vietnamese communism.
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s message possessed a deep inner logic for Vietnam. By itself, the country seemed powerless to achieve its own liberation. Even the intrepid nationalist Phan Boi Chau had gone abroad, at first to Japan and then to China, for assistance. It was reassuring to read in The Revolutionary Path that the Vietnamese people would have help from the revolutionary masses throughout the world as they struggled to achieve their own liberation. It was deeply satisfying, as well, to be told that the West, too, still had to undergo a period of social turmoil.
The pamphlet’s criticisms of previous nationalist movements were particularly meaningful to young Vietnamese patriots. The weakness of nationalist organizations was only too clear; all had been notoriously deficient in ideology, with most identifying simply with the general cause of modernization and national independence. Few had attempted to go into specifics on the projected nature of a future independent Vietnam. Unlike the case in other societies in the region, the Vietnamese nationalist movement could not rally around the symbols of a common religious faith. Buddhism, which denied the essential reality of the material world and preached a philosophy of denial, had little relevance as an agent for change. Confucianism, although deeply entrenched as a set of social and political maxims among the Vietnamese elite, had been widely discredited as a result of the pusillanimous surrender of the imperial court to the French invaders. As a result, most non-Communist nationalist organizations tended to be defined by regional identity, by tactics, or by personality. The actions of their members, while sometimes courageous, often seemed meaningless gestures of hatred against an all-powerful enemy who could scatter the rebel forces with a slap of the hand.
The Revolutionary Path was Nguyen Ai Quoc’s first major effort to introduce Marxist-Leninist doctrine to his countrymen. As an ideological statement, it has little to offer a serious student of modern Vietnam or an historian of the world Communist movement. As Quoc once admitted to a colleague, the description of Marxist-Leninist doctrine and practice in the pamphlet was primitive and in some cases confusing. The unsophisticated presentation and the ideological ambiguities in Quoc’s treatment of the two-stage concept and the four-class alliance have led some to question his understanding of Marxist-Leninist doctrine or, alternatively, his commitment to its precepts. Because he was not precise in describing the “leading role” to be played by the working class (a key tenet of Leninism) in the Vietnamese révolution, some observers have interpreted the pamphlet as an early example of “peasant communism,” an unorthodox approach to Marxist-Leninist revolutionary strategy later to be attributed to Mao Zedong.
It would be a mistake, however, to attempt to read too much into Quoc’s views as expressed in this book. He was attempting to popularize Marxist ideas in a society that was predominantly rural and lacking in political sophistication. It is probable that Nguyen Ai Quoc—along the lines of his now familiar conviction that in propaganda, simpler is better—was making a deliberate effort to create a popular or “vulgar” Marxism that could be understood by the Vietnamese people in the context of their own circumstances. Although it is hardly a testament to the sophistication of his comprehension of Marxist theory, as an attempt to introduce Marxist-Leninist doctrine to the beginner it was an effective instrument.49
During his years in Moscow, Quoc had already demonstrated his conviction that the peasants in Vietnam, as in all of Africa and Asia, were the primary victim of Western colonialism and, as such, were destined to be closely allied with the working class. In the pamphlet he stated that support of the peasants would be a crucial prerequisite for victory. He probably justified his views as an orthodox interpretation of Leninism, even though the official line in Moscow had since departed from this view. In any case, Quoc obviously had relatively little interest in theoretical questions; his remarks in The Revolutionary Path may have simply been intended as an elaboration of comments he had made in Moscow a few years previously.
Still, in stressing the role of peasants, Nguyen Ai Quoc was taking a major step within the Vietnamese resistance movement. Other national leaders and groups had given only lip service to the role of the rural masses in the Vietnamese struggle for liberation, Phan Boi Chau had voiced his desire for peasant support, but Chau’s appeal was generalized, and he had taken no concrete steps to put it into practice. In voicing his determination to focus attention on the rural masses, Quoc was attempting to alert his compatriots, as well as fellow revolutionaries throughout the colonial world, to the importance of the countryside in the coming revolution in Asia.
Within a few months of his arrival in Canton, Nguyen Ai Quoc had recruited a handful of young radicals who would provide the future leadership for a new and vigorous movement of national resistance. From his vantage point in south China, the situation must have looked hopeful. Beginning in 1925, the long simmering discontent of the Vietnamese people against their colonial rulers suddenly broke into open protest. Sparked by the arrest and trial of Phan Boi Chau and the funeral of Phan Chu Trinh, which followed a few months later, anti-French sentiment rapidly rose to a level that had not been seen since prior to the outbreak of World War I.
In these conditions, several embryonic political parties, such as the Youth Party in Cochin China, began to emerge. In Annam and Tonkin, a Tan Viet (“New Vietnamese”) Revolutionary Party was formed by former members of Phan Boi Chau’s organization, in cooperation with a handful of patriotic young students in Hanoi. The Tan Viet party included within its ranks members possessing a wide spectrum of tactical orientations and ideological convictions—from reformists to advocates of violent revolution, from advocates of the Western model to evolutionary Marxists and followers of the Leninist road. The one common denominator was resistance to French rule and dedication to the cause of national independence.
In the meantime, Nguyen An Ninh, the young journalist who had angered Lieutenant Governor Maurice Cognacq with his provocative attitude, continued to stir up the populace with his fiery speeches and articles. He lectured his audience on one occasion that they were responsible for their own sufferings, because “you have not been able to impose you
r ideas, you have not dictated to the government your will.” Describing the collaboration that Albert Sarraut had once offered to the Vietnamese as similar to the relationship between a buffalo and its master, he warned:
Do not place too much hope in the socialist governor-general [i.e., Alexandre Varenne] that has been sent you; he has come to cheat you, he has much to say, but he will give you nothing. There is no collaboration possible between French and Annamites. The French have nothing more to do here. Let them give us back the land of out ancestors, let them give us the floor and let us control ourselves.
Our country has given birth to innumerable heroes, of men who knew how to die for their land! Our race is not yet extinguished!50
Ninh’s speech aroused memories of Phan Boi Chau, who had lambasted the French from his exile in Japan. The French believed they had to react. On March 24, 1926, just as the funeral cortege prepared to transport Phan Chu Trinh’s body to its final resting place, Nguyen An Ninh was placed under arrest.
That same afternoon, the French ocean liner Amboise docked in Saigon. Among its passengers was Bui Quang Chieu, the Constitutionalist Party leader whom Nguyen Ai Quoc had met on the Amiral Latoucbe-Tréville nearly fifteen years previously. Like Nguyen An Ninh, Chieu had been disappointed at the failure of Governor-General Alexandre Varenne to live up to his extravagant promises, and in early 1926 he had traveled to Paris to appeal for political and economic reforms. In talks with officials there, he warned that if the situation in Indochina did not improve, the French would be evicted in fifteen years. Chieu also held talks with radical nationalists in the Vietnamese exile community centered around Nguyen The Truyen, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s successor at the Intercolonial Union, but in the end he refused to cooperate with him. The experience apparently unnerved him; when he returned to Saigon he appeared suddenly reluctant to heed the demands of street crowds to increase pressure on the colonial government, and his speech on arrival consisted of an appeal for Franco-Vietnamese harmony. With Nguyen An Ninh in jail and Bui Quang Chieu unwilling to carry the torch, the urban unrest in Cochin China quickly died down, leading one young patriot to cry in despair, “Have we all forgotten Phan Chu Trinh?”
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