The growing influence of China in the forging of domestic policy was openly acknowledged at the congress. The future Vietnam, declared Truong Chinh, would adopt the Chinese label of a “people’s democratic dictatorship,” rather than following the Soviet-style Eastern European “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Under the Chinese model, the immediate objective was to carry out the first stage of national democratic revolution in preparation for the later socialist revolution, but there would be no extended period of transition between the two stages. Rather, the national democratic revolution, in Leninist parlance, would “grow over” into a socialist stage. To win the support of the broad mass of the population, the Vietminh Front, the broad alliance of patriotic forces formed in 1941 that was now clearly identified in the public mind with its Communist leadership, was to be renamed the National United Front for Vietnam, or Lien Viet Front.6
To fulfill its task, the ICP was also to have a new name—the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (Dang Lao dong Viet Nam, or VWP). In applying the emotive word “Vietnam” to the label of the Party, the leadership was giving explicit recognition to the crucial importance of the anti-imperialist struggle in winning the support of the general population, a view that Ho Chi Minh himself had held unswervingly since the mid-1920s. At the same time, the decision represented a tacit gesture to the rising spirit of nationalism in the neighboring associated states of Laos and Cambodia, where ICP members of Lao or Khmer extraction were growing restive under the sometimes suffocating guidance of their Vietnamese superiors and now demanded parties of their own. The Party now formally recognized that the revolutions in the three countries would proceed at different speeds, and that each would now have its own party to play the vanguard role in that process. While Vietnam was heading toward a national democratic revolution and then directly to socialism, Laos and Cambodia were moving in the direction of popular democracies; their socialist revolutions were to be delayed for several years.
The decision to divide the ICP into three separate parties did not mean, however, that Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues had lost interest in the rest of Indochina. To the contrary, although separate organizations—to be called People’s Revolutionary Parties—were now to be set up in Laos and Cambodia, plans for a close alliance among the three groups were formally initiated shortly after the adjournment of the Second Congress. According to an official Party document issued at the conference and later seized by the French, the Vietnamese had no intention of relinquishing control over the movement throughout Indochina. “The Vietnamese Party,” it declared, “reserves the right to supervise the activities of its brother parties in Cambodia and Laos.” And although in later years Vietnamese sources claimed that the concept of the Indochinese federation (which had been first broached at the 1935 Macao Congress) had been explicitly abandoned at the 1951 conference, this captured document suggests the contrary, declaring that, although there were now three separate parties, “later, if conditions permit, the three revolutionary Parties of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos will be able to unite to form a single Party: the Party of the Vietnam-Khmer-Laotian Federation.”7
The decision to maintain a close relationship among the three countries, now united in fact as associated states within the French Union, was a clear recognition that Party leaders had recognized the strategic importance of Indochina as a unified bloc. In a Vietminh training document seized by the French in 1950, the three countries were described as a single unit from a geographic, economic, political, and strategic point of view. The document stated that revolutionary movements in the three countries were directed to provide one another with mutual assistance in every field to carry on the joint struggle against the imperialist invader and in building the future “new democracies.”8
The thumbprint of Ho Chi Minh could be found on various documents approved by the congress. Ho’s colleagues deferred to his steady insistence on the need to place the anti-imperialist over the antifeudal struggle in Indochina, and they recognized the necessity of appealing to moderate elements in Vietnamese society. In emphasizing the importance of a two-stage revolution (however brief) and the need to adapt revolutionary ideology to concrete conditions in each country, they responded to the pragmatic bent that had marked his ideas since the early days of the movement.
Still, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the major influence behind the decisions reached at the Second National Congress came from Beijing. In the decision to reestablish the Communist Party as the visible “guiding force” behind the Vietnamese revolution, the Vietnamese were responding to criticism from China, as well as the Soviet Union, that their struggle had heretofore lacked a sufficient Marxist coloration. The use of the term “new democracy” was a direct imitation of one recently adopted by the Chinese themselves, while in emphasizing the “growing over” of the revolution from a first to a second stage, they were stressing concerns expressed in Moscow and Beijing that the ICP was not sufficiently orthodox in its operations.
Ho Chi Minh’s reaction to the decisions reached at the congress must have been mixed. As a longtime pragmatist, he understood the importance of placating Beijing in order to encourage Chinese assistance to the Vietnamese revolution, and few were his equal in kowtowing to Chairman Mao and his proud colleagues. Yet he must have been concerned at the danger of excessive Chinese influence and aware that some elements of the Chinese model—notably, the substantially enhanced role for the Party, the increased emphasis on ideological reeducation, and the harsh punishment meted out to those suspected of counterrevolutionary leanings—might not thrive in the tropical soil of French Indochina. His inclusionist instincts must have rebelled at the knowledge that many patriotic Vietnamese were about to be driven from the ranks of the Vietminh Front and into the hands of the enemy.
Ho’s concerns did not escape contemporary observers, and rumors circulated that although Ho Chi Minh had been confirmed as chairman of the Party, the meeting marked a major defeat for Ho and his influence within the Vietnamese revolutionary movement. According to French intelligence sources, one result of the congress had been to replace the influence of moderates like Ho Chi Minh with hard-line elements led by Truong Chinh, who had been reelected to the key post of Party general secretary, and one source in the Saigon press even reported that Ho had been executed at the order of Vo Nguyen Giap. Knowledgeable sources in Hanoi today privately concede that the congress probably represented a defeat for Ho Chi Minh and a triumph for those, like Truong Chinh, who were determined to follow Chinese advice and apply a harsher approach to the Vietnamese revolution. A new central committee of twenty-nine members (consisting for the most part of veterans who had been active in the Party since before World War II) was elected. In its turn, the Central Committee created a new executive body (called, in imitation of Soviet practice, the Politburo), composed of seven leading Party members and one alternate, that would direct the affairs of the Party and the government. The leading members of this organization—known popularly as the “four columns”—were Truong Chinh, Pham Van Dong, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Ho Chi Minh himself. In a biographical sketch published by the official Party newspaper Nhan Dan in March, Truong Chinh was described as the architect and the chief of the Vietnamese revolution, while Ho Chi Minh was its soul.9
After the failure of Giap’s Red River delta offensive, the conflict gradually settled into a war of equilibrium. By 1951, most of the Vietminh effort was taking place in the north. After the end of Nguyen Binh’s abortive offensive in the summer of 1950, Vietminh strategists placed the struggle in Cochin China on the back burner. As part of his strategy, Binh had organized vast demonstrations in Saigon to protest against the war and the social and economic difficulties that it had imposed. Popular participation in the demonstrations—known as the “red days”—had been heavy, especially on the part of workers and students who had been provoked by inflation and the introduction of military conscription, but many moderates were put off by the specter of incipient violence inspired by the demonstrations a
nd refrained from giving their support to the movement. Bao Dai’s newly appointed prime minister, Nguyen Van Tam—a former police chief known as “the Tiger of Mai Lai” because of his vigorous attempt to suppress rebel activities in the south—cracked down on the Vietminh apparatus in Saigon, and by August it had virtually ceased to exist. To run the revolutionary operation in the south, the Party set up the Central Office for South Vietnam (known in English as COSVN), and placed it directly under the VWP Central Committee.
With the Cochin China theater now essentially moribund, Giap and his associates began to put more effort into neighboring Laos and Cambodia, as well as on the mountainous northwestern part of Tonkin. Giap’s objective was to tie down French military power and force its dispersal throughout all of Indochina. That would enable the Vietminh to select points of vulnerability, where it had the capacity to engage enemy forces in open combat, and then perhaps inflict on them a humiliating defeat.
Hoa Binh presented one such opportunity. The French had become convinced that this city, on the southern fringe of the Red River delta, was a key link between Vietminh headquarters in the Viet Bac and the central and southern parts of the country, now their prime source of recruits and supplies. “Rice fields,” Ho Chi Minh remarked to his colleagues, “are battlefields.” French units occupied the city after November 1951, and with the concurrence of Chinese advisers, the Vietminh launched heavy attacks on French positions there. Intense fighting—labeled by the historian Bernard Fall as a meat grinder—followed, and the French abandoned their position in February 1952, retreating to the delta. In the meantime, de Lattre had returned to France, where he died of cancer in January. By now, the optimism that had been engendered among pro-French elements in Indochina by his early show of dynamism had dissipated. The battle of Hoa Binh was widely viewed as a major reversal for the French; the U.S. Embassy in Saigon reported that non-Communist nationalists were discouraged and increasingly convinced that the Vietminh would occupy Hanoi by the summer.
At de Lattre’s order, the French had built a string of defense posts (called blockhouses) in hopes of preventing the Vietminh from penetrating the delta, but the so-called de Lattre Line had been no more effective than its World War II equivalent in France, the Maginot Line. Vietminh forces simply bypassed the blockhouses or attacked and overran them one by one. By the end of 1952, Vietminh units were moving freely throughout the rice fields around Hanoi, and revolutionary organizations had been reestablished in half the villages of the delta. The victory at Hoa Binh opened prospects for more.
That fall, Vietminh strategists opened a new front in the far northwest. The French had held this extensive region of forbidding mountain ranges and narrow valleys since the beginning of the war. During the spring of 1952, at the suggestion of Chinese advisers, Vietminh strategists began to draw up plans for an attack on French posts in the region in preparation for a campaign in central and northern Laos. In so doing, they might succeed in diverting enemy forces to outlying areas, thus rendering them mote vulnerable to attack. In September, Ho Chi Minh left secretly for Beijing to consult with Chinese leaders about the operation. He then continued on to Moscow, where he attended the Nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Final approval of a plan to attack the French base at Nghia Lo was reached in late September. Ho returned to Vietnam in December.10
In mid-October 1952, three Vietminh divisions attacked the French base at Nghia Lo. The French units there retreated to nearby posts at Na San and Lai Chau, while abandoning their base at Son La, about forty miles west of Nghia Lo. The Vietminh occupied Son La and concentrated their further efforts at Na San, where they waged an unsuccessful assault, suffering thousands of casualties in the process. But the failure to seize Na San was only a temporary setback. Early the following spring the Vietminh regrouped and advanced across the border into northern Laos, occupying the provincial capital of Sam Neua and threatening the royal capital of Luang Prabang. Then, having forced the French to further disperse their forces, they returned to the Viet Bac.
Throughout this period, Ho Chi Minh remained invisible to the outside world, a shadowy figure who had not been seen by reliable sources from the West since the spring of 1947. Some pundits, noting that he had been in chronic ill health in Hanoi after World War II, speculated that he had died, or had even been sent into exile in China because of his resistance to the growing presence of the PLA. French intelligence sources obtained confirmation of his continued existence from a photograph in L’Humanité that was taken sometime in July 1952. Finally, Joseph Starobin of the Daily Worker met him at a secret location in the Viet Bac in March 1953 and reported the interview to the English-speaking world.11
In the liberated zone, however, Ho Chi Minh was highly visible, acting not only as a war strategist, but also as chief recruiter and cheerleader for the revolutionary cause. In February 1952, a released French POW reported that Ho was seen everywhere at the front, in the villages, in the rice fields, and at local cadre meetings. Dressed like a simple peasant, he moved tirelessly among his followers, cajoling his audiences and encouraging them to sacrifice all for the common objective. Although living conditions in the liberated zone were probably somewhat better than they had been during the final months of World War II, French bombing raids on the area were frequent and Ho continued to change his residence every three to five days to avoid detection or capture. Although he was now over sixty, Ho was still capable of walking thirty miles a day, a pack on his back, over twisting mountain trails. He arose early to do exercises. After the workday was over, he played volleyball or swam and read in the evening.12
According to scattered reports from defectors or released POWs, morale in the liberated zone was declining, and complaints about living conditions were on the rise. Vietminh leaders had been forced to reinstitute the hated corvée in areas under their control to carry out various types of public works projects, for which workers received no salary beyond a small amount of food for their subsistence. Intellectuals grew weary of the constant sessions of indoctrination and self-criticism, while high taxes, volunteer labor, and the incessant bombing raids by the French frayed nerves among the population as a whole. Nevertheless, most observers reported that the bulk of local citizens continued to support the Vietminh, if only because of its efforts to secure independence from the French.13
As the war escalated, recruitment and the supply of provisions posed increasing problems. By now, the source of manpower from urban areas had essentially dried up, as the Vietminh apparatus in the major cities had been virtually destroyed, and Party planners were forced to use more aggressive methods to obtain labor and conscriprs in the countryside. There were unconfirmed reports that some peasants had migrated to other areas to avoid such duties. Whereas in the early years of the conflict, contributions of grain from peasants had been given, in principle, on a voluntary basis, now the regime felt compelled to levy an agricultural tax of 15 percent on the annual harvest.
One of the problems encountered in soliciting aid and support from the rural population was that many peasants were indifferent to the struggle, because they could not see how it affected them. Measures had been taken in the late 1940s to reduce land rents and interest rates on loans and to redistribute the land of collaborators to the poor, but they had achieved only limited results, and many landlords felt sufficiently secure to ignore Vietminh directives or to provide support to the French, in some cases even in areas controlled by the revolution.
By the time of the Second National Party Congress in early 1951, the problem had become serious enough to require action, and the Central Committee adopted some minor corrective measures. But decisive action continued to be impeded by the existing strategy of seeking the broadest possible united front against the common imperialist enemy. Although the approach was identified primarily with Ho Chi Minh, even Truong Chinh in his report to the congress had conceded that the primary task for the moment was to defeat imperialism. Although the anti-feudal mission wa
s crucial and “must be carried out at the same time as the anti-imperialist mission,” he said, it must take place “step by step” to maintain national unity in the common struggle. As a result, the government continued to refrain from a general confiscation and redistribution of land owned by the entire landlord class. By 1952, however, influential Party leaders began to argue that more radical measures were needed to win the allegiance of rural poor.
In January 1953, new directives were announced. Relying heavily on Chinese experience at the height of the Chinese Civil War, the plan called for drastic slashes in land rents and the seizure of all farmlands in the hands of landlords not actively cooperating in the war effort. Land reform tribunals composed of radical peasants were established at the village level to undertake a survey of village landholdings for future redistribution. Public criticism sessions reminiscent of the “speak bitterness” sessions organized in China were held in liberated villages to encourage the poor to criticize the allegedly tyrannical behavior of wealthy elements in the local community. In a few cases, Vietminh activists, urged on by their Chinese advisers, reportedly carried out the immediate execution of individuals judged guilty of “crimes against the people.” As author Duong Van Mai Elliott has described the process in her gripping account of her own family’s experience during the conflict, the land reform cadres would arrest landlords who were accused of having oppressed the poor. Then:
they tried the landlords in a kangaroo court, carefully staged to make it look like it was the will of the people. About a dozen poor peasants who had suffered the most and who harbored the deepest hatred of the landlords were chosen and coached in advance to denounce them at this trial. While these peasants took turns denouncing the landlords in front of this tribunal, other poor peasants planted in the audience would shout “Down with the landlord!” to reinforce the atmosphere of hostility. If the sentence was death, the landlords would be executed on the spot. If the sentence was imprisonment, they would be led away. The property of landlords found guilty of crimes—including land, houses, draft animals, and tools—would be seized and distributed among the most needy peasants.14
Ho Chi Minh Page 62
