A few weeks later, Tap returned to the attack, remarking that several delegates at the Macao congress held Quoc at least partly responsible for the arrest of more than one hundred members of the ICP and the league, since Quoc had known that his colleague Lam Duc Thu was a spy, but had continued to use him. Quoc, he charged, had also carelessly asked each student at the training institute in Canton to provide him with a photograph, as well as the names and addresses of relatives. That material had later fallen into the hands of the French; Nguyen Ai Quoc, he charged, “could never disavow his responsibility” for such actions. To the degree that Quoc’s ideas became clear to Party members and the masses, Tap concluded, such ideas would be criticized ever more severely.37
Nguyen Ai Quoc probably read such reports after their arrival in Moscow. What he thought about Tap’s criticisms of his own actions is not known, but his general attitude is indicated in a letter that he wrote in January 1935 to someone in the Dalburo, complaining that the theoretical knowledge of students from Southeast Asia who had been studying in Moscow was quite low. Many did not understand the bourgeois democratic revolution, or why the land revolution and the cause of anti-imperialism were linked together. Although Quoc admitted that such shortcomings had been true within the ICP in 1930 and 1931, the problem had recently become more serious because of the youth and lack of experience of many Party members. Whether or not he was taking a passing swipe at young colleagues such as Ha Huy Tap or the now deceased Tran Phu is unclear. In any event, he suggested that a brochure be drawn up to enlighten them on ideological matters.38
On July 25, 1935, the Seventh Congress of the Communist International opened in the cavernous House of Trade Unions in Moscow. On the walls were gigantic portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, as well as red banners with gold Cyrillic letters proclaiming the forthcoming victory of the proletarian revolution. The purge trial of Bolshevik leaders Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, past head of the Comintern, was under way as the congress convened. Both would later be executed. Because of tensions surrounding the trial, delegates to the congress were all housed together in the Lux Hotel, and were not permitted to enter the Kremlin.
Three ICP delegates attended the congress: Le Hong Phong (known variously at the congress as Litvinov, Hai An, Chajan, or Chayan), Nguyen Thi Minh Khai (Van, or Phan Lan), and Hoang Van Non. Two additional delegates had been sent from Vietnam after the departure of these three, but they failed to arrive. Comintern headquarters had decided that each Vietnamese delegate would address the congress. In her speech, Nguyen Thi Minh Khai referred to the exploitation of women that was taking place in colonial areas throughout Asia and emphasized the importance of women in the future revolution in the region; Hoang Van Non spoke on mass struggle. As chairman of the delegation, Le Hong Phong presented a major address on the past shortcomings of the ICP and its current tasks. Among those errors was the fact that many Party members continued to express “putschist” and sectarian ideas inherited from earlier “national revolutionary” parties such as the VNQDD, as well as from previous Communist groups (presumably Tran Van Cung’s first incarnation of the Indochinese Communist Party), and did not link the Party directly to the masses.39
While none of the speakers from Vietnam appeared to reflect the fact, the primary purpose of the Seventh Comintern Congress was to adopt a new strategy for Communist parties around the world, an approach that would be more in tune with the ideas that Quoc had espoused during the life of the Revolutionary Youth League than with those expressed by the Sixth Congress in 1928. The main reason for the policy shift was the growing danger represented by the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany. When Hitler was first named chancellor in January 1933, Stalin was convinced that he represented an extremist wing of the capitalist class in Germany and thus reflected the final virulent stage of global imperialism; his ascendancy, Stalin believed, would thus lead rapidly to the transfer of power to the German Communist Party. By 1935, however, Stalin had been disabused of such illusions, and he now viewed Nazi Germany as a mortal threat to the survival of the USSR.
Reflecting the importance of the new menace from the west, as well as the growing danger posed by the emergence of a militantly anti-Communist government in Japan, in 1935 the Kremlin decided to repudiate the ultraleftist line that had been approved at the Sixth Congress in 1928 and adopt a new strategy designed to create a united front of antifascist forces from around the world. At the Seventh Congress, the new line was carefully orchestrated by the latest general secretary of the organization, the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov. The previous strategy, which had called for proletarian revolutions and the creation of “soviet governments” in the colonies, was discarded; the new task was to mobilize a broad alliance of progressive and democratic forces around the world to oppose the growing danger of malignant fascism. Communist parties were instructed to join with progressive government or nationalist parties in broad anti-imperialist fronts against the common danger from Nazi Germany and Japan.
Viewed from that perspective, Le Hong Phong’s criticism of putschism and adventurism, characteristics that could be ascribed to the current leftist leadership of the ICP, had thus been carefully orchestrared by Moscow to send a clear message to Phong’s colleagues in Macao. At the close of the final session of the congress, the ICP was admitted to full membership in the Communist International, while Phong himself was elected a member of the presidium of the organization.
Nguyen Ai Quoc had attended the congress as an observer from the secretariat of the Dalburo, under the name of Linov. He evidently did not address the congress, but was probably active behind the scenes talking to delegates, and he took part in a banquet sponsored by Maurice Thorez, a leading figure in the French Communist Party, to celebrate the formal admission of the ICP to the Comintern. The shift in global strategy announced at the congress was undoubtedly gratifying to Quoc, and a much needed confirmation of the correctness of the broad united front approach that he had earlier adopted with the Revolutionary Youth League in Canton. His role as observer at the congress was not necessarily inconsistent with his continuing responsibility as the Comintern’s senior spokesman for Southeast Asian affairs. Still, it must have been galling to sit on the sidelines while one of his protégés emerged in the limelight as the leader of the ICP in the new era.40
To make matters worse, Nguyen Ai Quoc’s intimate relationship with his young colleague Nguyen Thi Minh Khai had apparently come to an end. Letters and confidential reports from the ICP leadership in Macao to the Dalburo in the months leading up to the congress had mentioned that “Quoc’s wife” (la femme de Quoc) would be among the delegates attending the meeting, thus implying that the two had been married prior to their arrest in Hong Kong in 1931. Perhaps, as the Soviet writer Yevgeny Kobelev has speculated, she fell in love with the handsome Le Hong Phong on the journey. Perhaps, too, Quoc and Minh Khai had drifted apart during their four years of separation after her arrest in Hong Kong in the spring of 1931. Other sources suggest that after his own arrival in Moscow, Nguyen Ai Quoc had been assigned a “temporary wife” by Comintern headquarters; it was also rumored that he had fathered a daughter by a lady friend in the USSR.
Whatever the truth of the matter, shortly after the adjournment of the Seventh Congress, Le Hong Phong and Nguyen Thi Minh Khai were formally married at a district registrar’s office in Moscow. After the wedding, Phong left for China to report on the meeting to the Party leadership. Minh Khai remained in Moscow for several months, finally departing for France en route to Hong Kong with her colleague Hoang Van Non in the summer of 1936. To delude suspicious French agents, the two posed as a wealthy Chinese couple on a vacation. From Hong Kong she sailed on to Shanghai to join Le Hong Phong, and eventually returned with him to Saigon, where she became a member of the Party’s regional committee for Cochin China. In so doing, she and her husband came a step closer to their future fate as two of the primary martyrs of the Vietnamese revolu
tion.41
The relationship between Nguyen Ai Quoc and Nguyen Thi Minh Khai is one of the most puzzling in his life. In later years he never mentioned the issue to his colleagues, and official sources in Hanoi vigorously deny that a marriage between the two had ever taken place. Yet internal documents provide fairly strong evidence to the contrary, although it is possible that the two had never undergone a legal marriage ceremony and simply passed off their relationship to colleagues as man and wife. Whether the combination of losing his Party leadership role and his wife to Le Hong Phong was “doubly humiliating,” as one observer suggests, is another matter. In his long career Quoc had already demonstrated a predilection for casual affairs so long as they did not interfere with his political objectives, and he may have seen the relationship as a temporary one from the start.
Prior to their departure for China, Minh Khai and Hoang Van Non met with Nguyen Ai Quoc to take a message back to Le Hong Phong in Shanghai. By that time, the decisions reached at the Seventh Comintern Congress had already begun to bear fruit, as a new Popular Front government had been formed in Paris in July 1936 under the Socialist Party Prime Minister, Léon Blum. Although the FCP was not formally a part of the governing coalition, it supported the new government, which promised to oppose fascism, to support the USSR, and to end laws in France limiting free speech and association. It also called for the formation of a commission of inquiry to look into conditions in the colonies and suggest reforms. Conditions in Indochina offered a promising opportunity for the revival of the ICP. According to his Soviet biographer, Quoc gave his ICP colleagues some concrete advice:
The Popular Front victory in France is a rare chance, and we must not fail to use it. The main thing now is to secure complete unity inside the party, especially between its homeside and overseas units. On reaching Saigon, please tell Le Hong Phong the following three things:
One. The Popular Front victory in France is sure to bring about positive changes in the situation in Indochina. For this reason the overseas Central Committee should go home at once and assume the guidance of the patriotic movement. It should leave no more than a token group of comrades abroad to maintain contact with the outside world.
Two. The Trotskyites have betrayed their reactionary essence everywhere, and in Vietnam as well. Our Party must dissociate itself from them most resolutely. There must be no compromises.
Three. Every effort must be made to form an antifascist and antiwar democratic front. It must embrace all patriotic forces, all those who want to fight for the country’s salvation. But never forget when striking up alliances that the vital interests of the Party and the working class come first.42
In stressing the importance of the broad united front strategy, which had been enunciated at the Seventh Comintern Congress, Nguyen Ai Quoc was unquestionably expressing his own convictions; in warning his colleagues of the need to maintain strict Party control over the revolutionary movement he was following the practices that he had adopted during the life of the league; but in singling out the Trotskyites as renegades who had betrayed the interests of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, he was probably deferring to the wishes of the Comintern, and specifically of Joseph Stalin himself, who for several years had waged a bitter battle against the influence of Trotsky and his followers within the international Communist movement. Although Quoc undoubtedly agreed with Stalin that Trotsky’s emphasis on an “uninterrupted revolution” led by proletarian elements alone against hostile forces throughout the world was unrealistic, he must have felt that, on balance, Trotsky’s followers in Indochina had more in common with the ICP than with their adversaries. Had it been left to him, Nguyen Ai Quoc would probably have sought to co-opt Vietnamese Trotskyites into accepting ICP leadership.
While his colleagues returned to Asia, Nguyen Ai Quoc remained in Moscow. But he was obviously restless for action. In an interview in September 1935, he told the Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg that he had only one wish, and that was to return as soon as possible to his fatherland. For a while, the situation was promising. He asked for permission to teturn shortly after the close of the Seventh Congress, but the request was denied on the grounds that the situation in Indochina was too complicated. In the summer of 1936 he submitted a second request to be permitted to return via Berlin and France. If the plan went awry, he promised to go to Shanghai to establish contact with the Comintern office there, and then seek a route home. The Comintern’s personnel office invited him to fill out a travel form, but eventually the plan was canceled because of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, an event that had repercussions in France.
While waiting for an answer to his request, in the fall of 1936 Nguyen Ai Quoc enrolled in a course at the Institute for the Study of the National and Colonial Questions (the former Stalin School); he thereupon moved from his lodgings at the Lenin University to a small single room on Bolshaya Bronnaya. His study program included courses in philosophy, history, and the Russian language. But he was also given a work assignment by the Indochinese office of the Dalburo to study peasant conditions and produce Vietnamese translations of Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s Leftism: An Infantile Disorder. Perhaps that is why he was one of two students who did not sign up for a summer trip planned by the school. During the academic year 1937–1938, he enrolled in additional courses at the institute while also working at the Dalburo. With the help of instructors at the institute, he also prepared research materials for writing a work to be titled “The Land Revolution in Southeast Asia.”43
After two decades of revolutionary work, Nguyen Ai Quoc chafed at his current situation. For an activist with little interest in theory, months spent on translating the works of Communist luminaries or attending classes dealing with abstract ideological matters must have been a trying experience. In June 1938, nearly three years after the close of the Seventh Congress, he wrote a colleague at the Comintern in desperation. It had been seven years since he was arrested, and the beginning of the eighth year of his inactivity. Quoc asked for help in changing his sad situation. “Send me somewhere, or keep me here. Do of me what you consider useful. But I beg you not to leave me too long without activity and aside and outside the Party.” To make his case, he asked for an interview with a responsible Comintern official. With help from a sympathetic Vera Vasilieva, his request was finally granted, and he was instructed to return to China by rail through Central Asia. On September 29, 1938, he resigned from the school. The following day, the personnel office at the institute recorded the fact that student number 19, named Lin, was now released.44
Why had Nguyen Ai Quoc finally been released from his purgatory in Moscow after so many years of inactivity? Without the opening of additional archives in Russia this must remain a subject for speculation, for information on his life in Moscow during the mid-1930s is pitifully sparse. Perhaps he had been under observation because of lingering rumors that he might have agreed to become a British agent as the price for release from prison in Hong Kong. It is also not unlikely that Quoc had been in disfavor with Stalin for his unorthodox approach to sacred doctrine. If so, the evolution of the world situation and the new Comintern strategy now rendered the veteran revolutionary potentially more useful in carrying out Soviet policies in East Asia. Although his specific instructions are unknown, it seems probable that he was expected to provide Moscow with information on the rapidly changing situation in China. Under intense pressure from the military forces of Chiang Kaishek, in October 1934 the CCP had abandoned its base south of the Yangtze River, beginning its Long March to Yan’an in north China. Nguyen Ai Quoc may have viewed his new duty of reporting to Moscow on the activities of his Chinese comrades as an important assignment, but it must have appeared secondary to the task of assisting his own compatriots in carrying out the next stage of the Vietnamese revolution.
VIII | A CAVE AT PAC BO
The China to which Nguyen Ai Quoc was returning in the fall of 1938 was a far different place than the country he had left nearly five years before, fo
r it was now a country at war. The conflict had originated with the Mukden Incident in 1931, when militant elements within the Japanese army suddenly occupied Manchuria and created the puppet state of Manchukuo. During the next few years, Japanese troops began to expand steadily southward, bringing substantial parts of China’s northeastern provinces around the old imperial capital of Beijing under Japanese military administration. Initially, Chiang Kai-shek had resisted appeals from his compatriots to abandon military operations to eradicare Communist-controlled areas south of the Yangtze River—operations that had led in late 1934 to the forced exodus of Communist forces on their famous Long March to their new base area at Yan’an, in north China—and then seek to create a national consensus to resist Japanese aggression. But in early 1937, after a bizarre kidnapping of the Nationalist leader by his own military officers while he was on a visit to Xian, Chiang was prevailed upon to sign a second united front with the CCP and turn national attention to the menace from Japan. A few months later, open warfare broke out after an armed clash at the Marco Polo Bridge south of Beijing.
Although the Japanese threat placed the Chinese people in extreme peril, it represented a window of opportunity for Nguyen Ai Quoc. In the first place, the establishment of the second united front between the Nationalist government and the Communists could provide him with increased freedom of movement as he sought to restore contacts with Vietnamese revolutionaries operating in south China, Secondly, it raised the specter of a general war in Asia, which could rapidly expand into Southeast Asia and bring an end to half a century of French rule in Indochina.
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