At the end of 1931, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s appeal finally came before the Privy Council in London. His case was advocated by D. N. Pritt of the law firm Light and Fulton, while the government of Hong Kong was represented by the prominent Labour Party politician Stafford Cripps. According to Quoc’s attorney, Cripps soon realized what a bad showing the case would make for the Hong Kong government and approached Pritt with the proposal that the matter be resolved by allowing Nguyen Ai Quoc to leave the colony “under his own steam.” But the legal adviser at the Colonial Office privately accused Cripps of refusing to argue the case because he sympathized with the politics of the defendant. Some writers have even speculated that Nguyen Ai Quoc was released after giving his assent to becoming a British agent.
Nguyen Ai Quoc’s attorney agreed to accept the offer of a compromise. The British government agreed to pay for the costs of his appeal to the Privy Council and to assist him in going where he wished. Nguyen Ai Quoc had already expressed his willingness to accept this solution, so an arrangement was reached between the two sides on the morning of the hearing, June 27, 1932; the matter was thus never argued in open court.13
Although he was now eligible for release from police custody, Nguyen Ai Quoc continued to be nervous about the possibility that the French authorities would try to seize him en route to London. Since Soviet ships did not call at Hong Kong, Loseby asked the government to arrange temporary asylum for him in Great Britain, and British officials in Hong Kong initially informed him that there would be no objection to such an arrangement. Problems immediately arose, however, when his travel plans were broached with British authorities. Nguyen Ai Quoc was worried that if he took passage on a ship that passed through the Suez Canal, French agents might seize him at Port Said in Egypt; he requested permission to travel to Europe via Australia and South Africa. Neither country, however, was willing to accept him. Nor, as it turned out, was Great Britain. Officials in Hong Kong had initially informed Loseby that there would be no objection to making temporary asylum in Great Britain en route to the USSR. That later turned out to be an error. The British government had originally indicated that he would not be welcome in England, but the word “not” had been inadvertently deleted from the message.14
Forced to abandon his plans to go to England, Nguyen Ai Quoc turned his attention to finding other means of reaching Moscow. He decided to go to Singapore and board a Soviet ship sailing from there to Vladivostok. By now, however, the authorities had become exasperated at the delay in getting rid of their troublesome guest—the negotiations on his passage and future whereabouts had lasted several weeks, with one British official remarking to a Sûreté official, “Nobody wants him”—and on the evening of December 28, 1932, he was removed from the hospital and set free on the street with instructions to be out of the colony within twenty-one days.
After staying briefly with the Losebys, Nguyen Ai Quoc (posing as a traditional Confucian scholar with a newly grown wispy beard) took up lodging at the Chinese YMCA in Kowloon. In an effort to minimize the danger of French surveillance, the Losebys put out the word that Nguyen Ai Quoc had died of tuberculosis in the hospital. The Comintern had already done its part; The Daily Worker, published in London, announced his death in prison in its August 11, 1932, issue. With the assistance of Mrs. Loseby, Quoc found passage on a ship to Singapore.
But problems continued to dog him. On his arrival in Singapore on January 6, 1933, he was immediately seized by immigration officials and sent back to Hong Kong on the S.S. Ho Sang. Disembarking at Hong Kong, he was recognized and detained on the grounds that he had arrived without proper papers. The authorities decided to ignore his technical breach of the departure order, however, and—despite the protests of local police officials—set him free again on January 22, with orders to be out of the colony within three days. The Losebys arranged a clandestine residence for him, this time in the New Territories, while seeking an alternative route out of the colony. They found passage for him, accompanied by an interpreter, on a Chinese ship scheduled to leave for Xiamen on the twenty-fifth. To avoid the prying eyes of the French security services, Quoc was escorted after dark to the docks by plainclothesmen. From there a motor launch hired by the government took him out to Lei Yue Mun Strait, just outside the harbor, where the ship was waiting for him.15
On arrival in Xiamen (a foreign concession port in Fujian province then widely known to foreigners as Amoy) the next morning, Nguyen Ai Quoc and his interpreter disembarked and checked into a YMCA in the Chinese section of town. After passing the Têt holidays with friends, he spent several weeks of restless inactivity. After obtaining funds from a wealthy local Chinese who was an acquaintance of Loseby, he was finally able to travel by ship to Shanghai. That great commercial and industrial metropolis, once the scene of a powerful left-wing labor movement, had been cleansed of radicals in Chiang Kai-shek’s “Shanghai massacre” in April 1927; the few remaining members of the CCP who resided in the city were in hiding from Chiang’s security forces. To avoid security officials in the French concession, Quoc stayed at a sumptuous hotel while posing as a wealthy businessman. To preserve his meager funds, he ate alone and washed his clothing in his hotel room. Quoc was well advised to be careful, for Sûreté officials had dismissed reports of his demise and were now hearing rumors that he was in south China, Indochina, or Siam. On the chance that he was in Shanghai, French concession police there had intensified their efforts to locate him and offered a substantial reward for his arrest.16
With the local CCP headquarters driven under cover, Nguyen Ai Quoc found it difficult to make contacts with Chinese comrades who might fund his future travel, but by good fortune he discovered that Paul Vaillant-Couturier, his close colleague and patron from the early days of the French Communist Party, was in Shanghai as a member of a visiting delegation of antiwar representatives of the French National Assembly. Quoc had learned previously from friends in the CCP that, in extremis, he could get in touch with them by contacting Sun Yat-sen’s widow, Soong Qingling. Since her husband’s death, Madame Soong, who now lived in a large villa on Rue Molière in the French concession of the city, had covertly developed a close relationship with the CCP.
Lacking an alternative, Nguyen Ai Quoc decided to make use of this connection. Renting a taxi, he ordered the driver to drive to Rue Molière, where he surreptitiously placed an unsigned letter in her mailbox. As he recounted it later, the strategem almost resulted in disaster:
On his way back to the taxi, [Quoc] saw that the French police had blocked the streets in the neighborhood and were interrogating all the pedestrians. The taxi driver appeared hesitant. Uncle cried, “Let’s go!” Fortunately, because the taxicab was a luxurious model, it was not stopped by the police for inspection. Once more, a narrow escape!
The ruse worked, and he was able to establish contact with Vaillant-Couturier, who arranged to meet him in a city park. After recovering from his surprise in learning that, contrary to news reports, his old friend was still alive, Vaillant-Couturier put Quoc in touch with underground representatives of the CCP, who were in turn able to arrange passage on a Soviet steamship bound for Vladivostok. Since the French police were watching the docks closely, Quoc boarded the ship dressed as a prosperous Chinese businessman.’17
After traveling by train across the frozen tundra of Siberia from Vladivostok, Nguyen Ai Quoc arrived in Moscow sometime in the spring of 1934. A five-year plan to develop the Soviet economy had been approved at a Party congress in 1928, as well as a program of collectivization and socialist industrialization to be carried out throughout the country. To short-time visitors and citizens who did not venture outside of Moscow, Leningrad, or other large cities, the situation ptobably appeared much improved over what it had been during the previous decade. Visiting journalists filed glowing reports; the dramatist George Bernard Shaw, for example, described it as a “great social experiment” after a trip to the USSR in the mid-1930s. Nguyen Ai Quoc appeared to agree, declaring in his reminiscences tha
t under the socialist system, the USSR was making the transition from a backward agricultural society into an advanced industrial powerhouse.18
For millions of Soviet citizens, however, the reality was far different. In his determination to collectivize agriculture, in the early 1930s Stalin had ordered the destruction of the private farm economy. Rich peasants, known in Russian as kulaks (or “fists,” for their grasping ways), were to be “liquidated as a class.” Those who resisted collectivization were killed or shipped to Siberia. Thousands more were forced to work in slave labor gangs to carry out massive civil engineering projects such as the Karelian Canal, which connected the Gulf of Finland to the White Sea and finally opened for shipping in 1933. Although there were more goods on the shelves of state stores in urban areas, the authorities had requisitioned grain from the peasants to feed the cities or to export abroad to pay for machinery; as a result, a crisis developed in the countryside. Famine began in the Ukraine in 1932; over the next two years, 5 to 7 million people died of hunger.
By the mid-1930s, resistance to Stalin’s draconian efforts to transform Mother Russia into a socialist economic powerhouse had become widespread within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself. At the Seventeenth Congress of the CPSU in 1934, a movement to replace Stalin with the popular Leningrad Party chief Sergey Kirov rapidly gained momentum. But Stalin had already consolidated his power over the Party apparatus and moved with force against his rivals, whom he suspected of plotting against his leadership. Leon Trotsky had already been forced into exile; other key leaders, such as Lev Kamenev and the onetime Comintern head Grigory Zinoviev, were being isolated. In December, Kirov was assassinated at Stalin’s order, and massive purge trials began to deplete the corps of old Bolsheviks who had joined with Vladimir Lenin to wage the 1917 Revolution. In 1935, more than 100,000 suspected “enemies of the state” were arrested in Leningrad alone.
On the surface, the tension within the Party did not seem to affect Nguyen Ai Quoc personally. On arrival in Moscow, he had received a hero’s welcome at the secretariat of the Dalburo, now under the directorship of the Finnish Communist Otto Kuusinen. Vietnamese students at the Stalin School (now renamed the Institute for the Study of the National and Colonial Questions) had received reports of Quoc’s death “from advanced tuberculosis” and had already organized a funeral ceremony for both him and for Tran Phu, the ICP general secretary who had died in a French prison in the fall of 1931.
Nguyen Ai Quoc was immediately placed in charge of the 144 Vietnamese students now studying at the institute, with an office on the fourth floor of a house on Moskovskii Boulevard. There he attended lectures, wrote articles, and oversaw the students. As one of the students, Nguyen Khanh Toan, recalled:
He maintained an extremely close contact with the Vietnamese group. Normally, he came during the evening to recount his experiences in putting an emphasis on revolutionary morality and, in particular, on solidarity. Some of the youngest members, out of pique or arrogance, used to squabble over minor issues. It was Uncle Ho who arbitrated such conflicts. He sought to inculcate in everyone a few essential principles: to combat pride, egoism and egocentrism, indiscipline, anarchism, and to reinforce unity and the need to place the interests of the revolution above all else. He often advised us: “If you are incapable of maintaining solidarity in this little group, how will you able to ralk of unifying the masses to combat the colonialists and save the nation after you return to your country?”19
Living within the cocoon represented by the school, Quoc may have been unaware of the tragic conditions faced by millions of Soviet citizens living in the countryside. Students at the institute were still being treated much better than the remainder of the population. They received free clothing and shoes, lived in relatively spacious quarters in their dormitories, and were well fed at the school cafeteria. They received free medical care, free vacations in the Crimea, and 140 rubles per month to handle other expenses.
Still, Nguyen Ai Quoc badly needed a rest. Acquaintances at the institute later recalled that on his arrival in Moscow, he appeared to be haggard and sick, perhaps a continuing legacy of his months in prison in Hong Kong. In September 1934, he traveled to the Crimea, where he enrolled for medical treatment in a sanatorium. After remaining there for several weeks, he returned to Moscow and entered Lenin University, a school for advanced party cadres of fraternal Communist parties. There were two different programs at the school, one for three years and the other for six months. He enrolled in the latter course under the name of Lin (in Russian, Linov). For the next several months he attended lectures, taught courses on morality, and wrote articles, while continuing to arbitrate the problems of his fellow Vietnamese at the various institutes or at the Dalburo.
Little is known about his personal life during these first months in Moscow. He was initially placed in a residence hall with a group of Chinese cadres, but after he complained that he was having difficulty in understanding them, he was eventually shifted to a dormitory for French speakers. Although still frail and sickly in appearance, he led an active social life, attending art exhibits and literary programs and taking part in periodic visits to local sites of interest, including a collective farm in Ryazan. According to his Soviet biographer, he performed exercises every day to strengthen his frail physique and had a dumbbell and a chest expander in his room.20
It used to be thought that Nguyen Ai Quoc managed successfully to avoid the turbulent impact of the Stalinist purge trials that rocked the country during the mid-1930s. According to the French writer Jean Lacouture, Nguyen Ai Quoc was “remote from the quarrels and purges rending the Soviet Communist Party and the International.” Other early biographers concur.21
Recently, however, reports have surfaced that Nguyen Ai Quoc did come under suspicion during this period and may even have been brought to trial. Sources in Moscow state privately that sometime during his stay in the USSR in the mid-1930s, he was investigated by a tribunal composed of his old acquaintance and sponsor Dmitri Manuilsky, the Machiavellian CCP militant Kang Sheng, and the Comintern administrator Vera Vasilieva. What he might have been charged with is unclear, although it was undoubtedly well-known that he held ideas counter to the general line espoused at the Sixth Comintern Congress of 1928. That in itself was probably sufficient to place him under suspicion by Stalin. The fact that he was a close colleague of Mikhail Borodin, himself a victim of the purge trials, may also have been held against him. Finally, it may also have been that his unexpected release from prison in Hong Kong in December 1932 had aroused suspicions in Moscow that he might have made a deal with the police to obtain his freedom.22
In any event, perhaps as the result of support from Manuilsky and Vasilieva, he was apparently cleared of any charges. Vasilieva, who had long served as a liaison between Vietnamese students in Moscow and the Comintern apparatus, came staunchly to his defense, arguing that he was guilty only of inexperience. Perhaps that explains her enigmatic comment, in an undated letter to ICP leaders in south China while he was in Moscow, that “as far as Quoc is concerned, we feel that in the coming two years he must apply himself seriously to his studies and will not be able to handle anything else. After he finishes his studies, we have special plans to use him.”23
While Nguyen Ai Quoc was in Moscow, those of his colleagues who were still at large were striving to restore the Party apparatus inside Indochina. The Comintern Executive Committee had recognized the new ICP as a member in good standing in April 1931, the same month that the Party’s senior leadership had been seized by the French in Cochin China. For the next several months, the Party apparatus was in a state of total disarray. To relieve the problem, Comintern officials in Moscow instructed fraternal Communist parties to do what they could to publicize what had come to be known as the Nghe-Tinh revolt. Workers in all countries were called upon to demonstrate in favor of their oppressed comrades in Indochina. More concretely, over thirty Vietnamese students currently enrolled in various training programs in Moscow wer
e instructed to return by various routes to Indochina in order to provide the foundation for a new Party central committee. Most (twenty-two out of thirty-five, states one source) were arrested en route or deserted to the French. Among those who arrived safely was Le Hong Phong, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s protégé from the Tam Tam Xa, who had studied at an aviation school in Leningrad and then transferred to the Stalin School in 1929. Phong left the USSR in the summer of 1931; after stopovers in Berlin and Paris, he finally arrived in Longzhou, a border town in Guangxi province in south China, in April 1932. With two other colleagues from the Stalin School in Moscow, Ha Huy Tap and Phung Chi Kien, he eventually moved to nearby Nanning and in the summer of 1933 the three set up a new Overseas Executive Committee (Ban chi huy hai ngoai). According to Comintern directives, the new organization was to serve as a temporary liaison bureau between the Dalburo in Moscow and the Party apparatus inside the country.24
Ho Chi Minh Page 30
