The Communist Party prepared the movement. It founded cells, spread tracts and organized meetings. It was able to act in total liberty in the villages where no one interfered with them. Notables did not dare to act out of fear, while the mandarins didn’t pay any attention to us and the French were ignorant of what was taking place.
Asked how the demonstrations were organized, Giai said that activists beat the drum at the communal house to mobilize the local population. Those who were hesitant or resisted were intimidated with batons. In a few cases, he conceded, houses or pagodas were burned down, while some of those opposed to the demonstrations were tortured or killed, but that was not standard procedure. Assassinations of suspected Vietnamese collaborators were conducted secretly, because the Party “didn’t want to frighten the masses.”8
To many zealous young Party members at the time, Moscow’s recent prediction that Asia was on the vetge of revolt must have seemed clairvoyant. In its advice to leaders of the Revolutionary Youth League in late 1929, the Comintern had stated pointedly that the lack of an organized Communist Party should not prevent revolutionaries from giving their active support to a spontaneous uprising led by workers and peasants. Above all, Moscow reasoned, the league should not fall behind the masses in its revolutionary activism. As for the need to ascertain whether the situation favored the revolutionary forces, the Comintern could provide little assistance, beyond the suggestion that the final decision on such questions could be reached only by the leadership on the spot.
The Comintern had undoubtedly been impressed by continued unrest in China, where rebel groups under the ambitious CCP leader Mao Zedong had just taken refuge from the fury of Chiang Kai-shek’s suppressive efforrs in the mountains of Jiangxi province, southwest of Shanghai. For the newly created VCP, however, the rising crisis in Vietnam was fraught with dilemmas as well as opportunities. Despite Moscow’s gratuitous comment that it was “not necessary to wait” until a Communist Party had been completely organized before inciting a revolt, the new party was certainly ill prepared for a major confrontation with the French colonial regime. It had just survived an emotionally scarifying split within the movement, and its leaders were untried and uncertain. A formal central committee had not yet been created, and the Party’s local apparatus was just in the process of formation. Until such a committee could be formed, the existing leadership remained in Hong Kong, far removed from events inside the country. If the Party attempted to spark a revolt in the central provinces, rhere was no guarantee that the rest of the country would follow. Even if hostility and discontent among the workers and peasants could be translated into action, it was unclear whether the restless urban bourgeoisie would come to their assistance or simply watch in silence while the French restored order in rebellious areas. To a revolutionary with a sense of hisrory, conditions in Vietnam probably resembled those in the Russia of 1905 rather than 1917.
Such at any rate was the view of prudent members of the Party leadership. Even the firebrand Tran Van Cung, head of the rump group that had broken with the league to form the CPI in 1929, was cautious. According to French intelligence reports, when VNQDD leaders contacted Cung to solicit his supporr for their own planned uprising in February 1930, he had rejected their proposal on the grounds that conditions for revolution were not ripe. When some local members of Cung’s party wanted to take part in the Yen Bay insurrection, their leaders advised them against it.
Nguyen Ai Quoc almost certainly agreed. For one thing, the VNQDD lacked a disciplined party organization. For another, as he had warned Nguyen Luong Bang in Shanghai, it was important to be careful in attempting to mobilize soldiers because of their unreliability. In a comment to comrades in Siam a few weeks after the Yen Bay uprising, he remarked that he and other delegates attending the February unity conference in Hong Kong had attempted in vain to contact the VNQDD leadership to advise them against an insurrection.9
For Party operatives involved in riding the wave of anger and unrest in the central provinces, doubts and hesitancies about the immediate future were a luxury they could ill afford. Urged on by Nguyen Phong Sac, the militant activist who had now been assigned responsibility for the Party’s newly organized regional committee for Annam, cadres in the area continued to stoke the fires of revolution in the countryside.
By early September, the unrest threatened to get out of hand. Demonstrators in several districts along the Ca River northwest of Vinh, acting under instructions from the Party’s provincial committee, began to take power into their own hands, evicting the local authorities and forming village associations to establish peasant power at the local level. Such hastily organized peasant councils, known as “soviets” in the Bolshevik style and usually dominated by the poorer peasants in the village, abolished debts and tax collections, and ordered reductions in land rents and the confiscation of communal lands previously seized by landlords and “local bullies”; at the same time, village self-defense militia units were formed to maintain law and order. Meanwhile, labor strikes continued to spread in factories at Ben Thuy, while students in Vinh and at the National Academy in Hué organized student unions and voiced their support for the cause.10
In some cases, zealots took even more severe action, seizing the land of landlords and assassinating “local tyrants,” abolishing traditional village customs such as expensive funeral and wedding ceremonies, and exacting stiff punishments for “backward” habits such as gambling, stealing, and prostitution. In a few cases, they even formed voluntary “collectives” (hop tac xa) to mobilize the population to work together and share the harvest among the village’s families.
Faced with the threat of a total loss of government power throughout the central provinces, the French authorities dispatched units of the Legionnaires to bolster the imperial civil guard. On September 12, when thousands of demonstrators began to march from the village of Yen Xuyen toward the provincial capital—reportedly to seize the local office of the Bank of Indochina—imperial troops were dispatched to bar the route to Vinh, while French fighter planes bombed the column of marchers. After an all-day battle—described by acting French Governor-General René Robin as “the most critical day”—the route between Vinh and Yen Xuyen was littered with hundreds of dead and wounded Vietnamese.11
While the Party’s local organs were preoccupied with the task of how best to respond to the unrest in the Vietnamese countryside, leading elements were preparing to hold the first session of its provisional central committee in Hong Kong. The original plan drafted at the unity conference in February had called for the immediate establishment of three regional committees, in Tonkin, Annam, and Cochin China. Each committee would then select representatives for a nine-man provisional Central Committee to meet somewhere in Tonkin as soon as all delegates had been named. When Tran Phu, the bright young student from the Stalin School in Moscow, returned to Hong Kong in March, Nguyen Ai Quoc conferred with him and then sent him on to Vietnam to assist the activities of internal Party leaders.
An initial attempt to hold the meeting in April, however, proved abortive, and when it was postponed until July, the site was shifted to Hong Kong. But two of the delegates were arrested en route to the Hong Kong conference, so the date was postponed once again, until late October. To make final preparations, Tran Phu returned to Hong Kong in September to confer with Nguyen Ai Quoc and report on the situation in Indochina. Perhaps because of his familiarity with Marxist-Leninist doctrine, a consequence of his years in the USSR, Phu had been selected by the regional committee in Tonkin as a member of the provisional Central Committee, and he had been asked to write a draft political program based on the latest twists of the Comintern line, replacing the original drawn up by Nguyen Ai Quoc at the February unity meeting. Ideological differences between the two versions were destined to play a significant role in the debate that would take place at the forthcoming conference.12
Soon after Nguyen Ai Quoc and Tran Phu made a quick trip to Shanghai to report to Noulens and obtain hi
s approval for the new Party program, delegates began to arrive in Hong Kong to attend the Party’s first formal meeting since February (it would be known hereafter as the first plenary session of the Central Committee). It was probably through the reports of these delegates that Nguyen Ai Quoc received his first detailed account of the rising current of unrest inside the country. During the spring and summer, he had spent considerable time out of Hong Kong, either in Southeast Asia or in Shanghai, and had not been able to observe the situation in detail. After assimilating this information, he wrote a report to Moscow on the events taking place in Indochina. He urged the Comintern to call on all comrades to support the suppressed masses in the beleaguered districts of central Vietnam. So far, the demonstrations there had attracted little attention in the world press, although news of the unrest had reached Paris.13
But there is ample reason to believe that Nguyen Ai Quoc had serious misgivings about the recent trend toward armed violence within the movement. Although the rapidly escalating crisis in the central provinces confirmed his oft stated prediction that the rural population of Indochina was on the verge of revolt against its feudal and colonial oppressors, the Party was hardly in a good position to provide the leadership necessary to turn it into a serious threat to the colonial regime. During his years in Canton, Nguyen Ai Quoc had already witnessed at first hand the heavy price of faulty preparation. In an article titled “The Party’s Military Work among the Peasants,” which he had written while living in Berlin in 1928, he had drawn upon his experience in south China to analyze the conditions under which a successful revolution might take place in a preindustrial society like Vietnam. In that article, he had stressed the vital importance of an effective alliance between urban workers and peasants. Although he conceded that peasants could not achieve victory without proletarian leadership and the active participation of workers, he also insisted that
the victory of the proletarian revolution is impossible in rural and semirural countries if the revolutionary proletariat is not actively supported by the mass of the peasant population.... In China, in India, in Latin America, in many European countries (Balkan countries, Rumania, Poland, Italy, France, Spain, etc.) the decisive ally of the proletariat in the revolution will be the peasant population. Only if the revolutionary wave sets in motion the rural masses under the leadership of the proletariat, will the revolution be able to triumph. Hence the exceptional importance of Party agitation in the countryside.14
This, of course, was a familiar message, one that colleagues of Nguyen Ai Quoc had heard before. And it was a message that was fully in accordance with current Comintern guidelines, as Moscow had passed them on to Asian Communist parties earlier in that year. In partial response, in the summer of 1930 the CCP, under the urging of its new general secretary Li Lisan, had launched a major effort to spark combined urban and rural uprisings against government-held regions in central and southern China, seeking a victory in one or more provinces.
But Moscow’s sanction for Asian uprisings based on the formation of a worker-peasant alliance raised as many questions as it answered. Under what precise conditions would a successful rebellion of this type occur? And what policies should be adopted to maximize the chances of success? Lenin had always fended off such questions, remarking that revolution was an art, not a science. In his 1928 article cited above, Nguyen Ai Quoc agreed, quoting Lenin to the effect that armed violence in rural areas, as in urban ones, should not be unleashed “at any given moment,” but only during classical revolutionary conditions, when “the yoke of the ruling classes has become intolerable, and the village masses are in a state of revolutionary ferment and ready to fight actively against the established order.” Again taking his cue from Lenin, Quoc had pointed out that spontaneous actions by peasants were symptoms that the oppressed masses refused to continue in the old way, and that the country was about to enter “an immediately revolutionary situation.”
But even if a Communist Party should determine that classical conditions for a successful revolution existed, it must still decide what actions to take to increase the likelihood of success. In his article, Nguyen Ai Quoc conceded that “general recipes and universal formulae for organization and tactics” were inapplicable, since conditions in one country would inescapably differ from those elsewhere. Above all, it was “the duty of the proletarian party always to take account of the concrete conditions of the moment,” and to understand thoroughly the political situation and the particularities of the local population and culture, so that the proper tactics and strategy could be adopted.
One of Lenin’s prerequisites for a successful revolt was that support for an overthrow of the old order should be widespread throughout the country. But Nguyen Ai Quoc had observed from his own experience in China that a revolutionary upsurge might break out initially in one province and then spread gradually to other regions. To maximize the chances of success, he recommended a particular course of action should the first stage of a revolt break out in a province where there were a number of industrial areas surrounded by a substantial rural population. At the appropriate moment, when revolutionary conditions emerged, the peasants should organize military detachments and then join with urban workers and peasants from other areas to take part in operations around the country. The armed struggle in rural areas would thus gradually take on a mass character and pass from defensive to offensive action. Quoc conceded that in some countries, where there was an infinite diversity of geographical, economic, and political conditions, the revolutionary seizure of power would not take place in the space of a few weeks or even months, but might involve a prolonged period of revolutionary agitation throughout the country.
To Nguyen Ai Quoc’s experienced eye in Hong Kong, the situation in central Vietnam in the first nine months of 1930 undoubtedly displayed a number of the telltale signs that he had outlined in his article two years earlier. The unrest in the central provinces had already led to the emergence of an informal alliance between workers and peasants, while signs of similar activity were beginning to appear in other parts of the country. On the other hand, his optimism must have been tempered by a realistic skepticism over the prospects of success. As he had stated in many earlier articles, the level of political awareness and organization in Vietnam was much more rudimentary than in semicolonial countries like China. Vietnam was much smaller than China, and there was thus less likelihood that a victory could be sustained in one area. Moreover, the French were a more formidable adversary than the fragile warlord government in China. Finally, despite Moscow’s confidence, he must have felt that his new revolutionary party was ill prepared to take advantage of the situation.
Thus, when reports of the unrest in central Vietnam came to Nguyen Ai Quoc’s attention in the late summer of 1930, he reacted to the news with caution. In discussions with colleagues in Hong Kong just prior to the October meeting of the Central Committee, he declared that without further information on the situation he was not in a position to advise Party operatives inside Indochina on how to respond. Members of the CCP living in Hong Kong who were consulted recommended vigorous action, noting that their party had taken advantage of such opportunities in China. But Quoc was still dubious that conditions in Indochina were sufficiently ripe to move into a stage of general insurrection, even though he admitted that it might be appropriate to elect soviet organizations in rebellious villages and to redistribute farmland to local peasants. Quoc’s recommendation received a mixed reception from his colleagues, some of whom were even more cautious and doubted that conditions warranted any intervention by the Party at all.15
Whatever his inner doubts about the consequences, however, Nguyen Ai Quoc felt that the Party was both morally and politically obligated to come to the support of the rebellious forces in the central provinces. Only by demonstrating that the VCP—and the VCP alone—stood firmly on the side of the downtrodden masses in their struggle against their oppressors could the Party solidify its relationship with the Vietnamese people
and prepare the groundwork for a future revolution. If maximum publicity for the revolt could be achieved throughout the world, it would help to demonstrate the fragility of the French presence in Indochina and convince Moscow that the peoples of Indochina could make an importance contribution to the revolutionary wave in Asia.
For Nguyen Ai Quoc, then, the proper approach would be to establish a delicate balance between caution and foolhardiness, providing firm support for the rebellious elements in the central provinces, while simultaneously attempting to minimize the damage in the likelihood that the unrest would eventually be put down. Sometime in September, VCP leaders in Hong Kong sent a message to the regional committee in central Vietnam, offering this advice:
In Thanh Chuong [and] Nam Dan at this time, the executive committee [i.e., of the Nghe An provincial committee] is already advocating violence (setting up soviets, dividing land, etc.); such policies are not appropriare, because the preparation of the Party and the masses throughout the country is inadequate, and there is no armed violence. Isolated violence in many regions at this time is premature and just blind adventurism. But with things as they are, we must thus behave in such a way as to preserve the party and soviet influence so that even if they lose, the meaning of the soviets will penetrate deeply into the minds of the masses and the influence of the party and the peasant associations will still be maintained.16
When the regional committee in central Vietnam received the directive for transmittal to its provincial committee is not clear. In what may have been a response to such criticism, in early October its official journal Nguoi Lao kho (The Oppressed) published an editorial addressed to the Party’s local operatives in the region. “This,” it said, “is not the time for violence,” and those who maintained that it was were mistaken. Not only was support for the revolutionary cause not at a high level throughout the region, it pointed out, but the masses had little revolutionary experience, while the various village militia units that had been recently organized lacked both discipline and adequate weaponry. The Party would require a favorable general situation like a major war, the editorial concluded, to wage a successful revolt.17
Ho Chi Minh Page 26
