In carrying out out the next stage of land reform, Party leaders had two objectives. One goal was economic in nature: to permit a more effective use of cultivated land through the transfer of “excess” land from wealthy villagers to the poor and landless peasants who made up the majority of the rural population. Following the model adopted in China a few years earlier, Party leaders hoped that land ownership would spur the peasants on to heightened efforts and an overall increase in grain production, thus laying the foundation for the building of collective farms in the near future. The second and perhaps more important objective was more political: to destroy the power of “feudal” elements at the village level (namely, the landlord class) and to create a new rural leadership composed of former peasants, who would then be grateful to the Party and loyally carry out its policies.
In emphasizing the political benefits of the land reform campaign, radicals within the Party leadership were following the dictum of Mao Zedong, who had adopted a similar program in China, remarking bluntly that “revolution is not a dinner party.” Since the 1920s, Mao had been outspoken in his willingness to raise the specter of class conflict in winning the support of exploited elements within the rural population. Although that program had been put in abeyance during the war against Japan, during the last stages of the Civil War and during the land reform campaign in the early 1950s, Maoist cadres had deliberately organized “speak bitterness” sessions to encourage poorer villagers to speak out against their former oppressors—especially all those who owed “blood debts” to the people. At drumhead tribunals in villages throughout China, thousands were convicted of such crimes and summarily executed. Militant elements inside the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) were quite willing to adopt similar measures in the DRV. As Le Duc Tho, then a leading Party cadre in the South, had remarked in 1952, “If one wishes to lead the peasants to take up arms, it is first necessary to arouse in them a hatred of the enemy,” as well as to express a concern for their practical interests.18
The campaign was launched during the summer and early fall of 1954. Placed under the direction of the veteran Party member and labor organizer Hoang Quoc Viet, the early stages of the program reportedly won approval from some segments of the local populace, especially from poor peasants who had served as soldiers or transport workers during the battle of Dien Bien Phu and had been led by Vietminh propaganda to believe that they would be rewarded with land for their efforts. There were some complaints of coercion and brutality, however. When Ho Chi Minh was informed of such cases, he criticized cadres who belittled the people and behaved arrogantly.19
Although the first wave of the new program was modest—involving only about fifty villages in Thai Nguyen province, in the northwestern corner of the Red River delta—it set off shock waves throughout the country. It was a clear signal to moderate elements that the radical strain that had appeared in the Party in the early 1950s was still alive and well, and might undermine the program of inclusion that had been promised by Ho Chi Minh in the fall of 1954.
Successive waves of land reform were launched during the winter and early spring of 1955. Although an editorial in Nhan Dan in February warned against the danger of “leftist errors,” militant cadres (many of whom were outsiders trained at land reform programs under the guidance of Chinese advisers and then sent to “work with, eat with, and live with” the peasants) incited the local populace to criticize those who had exploited them in the past. Many of those under attack were convicted of crimes against the people and were summarily executed. In some instances, villagers took advantage of the program to settle private feuds by accusing others of involvement in counterrevolutionary activities. In the process, several thousand people, many of whom had loyally supported the Vietminh movement, were accused of treason and punished. In some cases, revolutionary cadres drawn from poor peasant backgrounds attacked Vietminh veterans who had just been released from military service and their families. Even connections in high places were not always sufficient protection. In one incident, a former Vietminh official was shielded by Ho Chi Minh himself, who sent word to local administrators that the official was not to be exposed to a public tribunal. Nevertheless, the official and his family were exposed to public humiliation and persecution by their fellow villagers. The official’s niece, Duong Van Mai Elliott, relates the story:
Every time my uncle came out of his house, children would throw stones at him. Whenever anyone of any age insulted him or hit him, he had to bow his head and say, “Please, I beg you to spare me....” Landlords were made the scapegoats for the harsh life of the poor peasants. In my uncle’s village, people persecured him with zeal to show how ardently they supported land reform and to be in the good graces of the militant peasants now holding power. Others who had envied his wealth and his influence now took pleasure in humiliating him.
In the end, the former official lost his house as well as his land and was forced to settle in a hut on a nearby hillside, where he and his family scratched out their subsistence on a few acres of poor soil assigned to them by local cadres.20
Undoubtedly, some of the violence associated with the land reform campaign was a natural and spontaneous consequence of the class anger emanating from the rice fields. As such, it was a familiar, albeit tragic, by-product of revolution. But there is ample evidence that much of it was deliberately inspired by Party leaders responsible for drafting and carrying out the program. Overall direction of the campaign was given to General Secretary Truong Chinh, an open admirer of agricultural policies in China who had publicly echoed the Maoist view that land reform should take the form of a “class war.” Other leading members of the committee were, in addition to Hoang Quoc Viet, Vice Minister of Agriculture Ho Viet Thang and Le Van Luong, a militant Maoist and head of the influential Party secretariat who had been openly calling for a campaign to purge the VWP of its impure elements. Following the Chinese example, such leaders calculated that 4 to 5 percent of the local population must be declared to be class enemies, despite the fact that in many poor villages even the most well-off farmers did little better than survive.21
The violence of the campaign may have taken Ho Chi Minh by surprise, although it seems clear that he shared the militants’ view that one of the goals of the campaign was to remove hostile and counterrevolutionary elements at the village level. In remarks at a cadre conference in the town of Thai Nguyen at the end of 1954, he declared that land reform was a class struggle:
In the village, the most important task is to remake rural organizations: the administrative committee, the guerrilla militia, the associations for peasants, youth, and women.... If bad elements are retained in these organizations, it will be impossible for us to carry through the reduction in agrarian rents.... In order to carry out that operation, bad elements must receive the appropriate sanctions: Whether it is necessary to exclude, to revoke, or to retrograde, let it be done. If they can be educated, let that be done. Here is the most important task that must be accomplished in the work groups.
Nevertheless, Ho Chi Minh expressed his opposition to indiscriminate punishment: “To apply the appropriate sanction,” he directed, “it cannot be said of a group of people that they are all good or bad; to know who is good and who is bad, you must rely on the masses.” In other words, cadres must learn how to discriminate between different types of landlords. Otherwise, he said, they will gang together to oppose the peasants.
Ho was also opposed to the use of torture. Certain cadres, he charged,
are still committing the error of using torture. It is a savage method used by imperialists, capitalists and feudal elements to master the masses and the revolution. Why must we, who are in possession of a just program and a just rationale, make use of such brutal methods?22
Ho Chi Minh’s remonstrances against the use of brutal techniques—which in any case appear highly unrealistic, given the circumstances—apparently had little effect. In one case, a landowner in Thai Nguyen province who had loyally supported the revo
lutionary movement for years (and had on occasion even sheltered Truong Chinh and Hoang Quoc Viet from colonial authorities) was accused by a Chinese land reform cadre of being a cruel landlord and sentenced to death. When local villagers came to her defense, they in turn were accused of being lackeys of the enemy. After Ho Chi Minh was informed about the case, he raised the issue with Truong Chinh, and the severity of the sentence was reduced. That outcome, however, was apparently a rarity and, before the campaign’s end late in 1956, several thousand people would be executed and countless others would be harassed, persecured, and humiliated by being labeled with the indelible stigma of “class enemy” of the people. Although Ho Chi Minh may have been appalled at the indiscriminate violence that accompanied the campaign, in the view of one Vietnamese observer, he had been intimidated by Mao Zedong and was afraid to contradict Chinese officials stationed in the DRV.23
In March 1955, the Central Committee convened in Hanoi. One of the key topics for consideration was the implementation of the land reform campaign. Although Ho Chi Minh was evidently concerned at the growing level of violence in the countryside, the recent creation under U.S. sponsorship of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in Manila, as well as incidents of sabotage by guerrilla groups sponsored by the CIA, had aroused much concern in Hanoi, and many Party leaders increasingly viewed the land reform program as an essential tool in eliminating counterrevolutionary elements. Although the plenum called for a carefully controlled program to guarantee that only guilty landlords would be tried and convicted of crimes against the people, the conference declared that “rightism” (expressing the view that completion of the task of national reunification was a higher priority than beginning the process of socialist transformation) was still a greater risk than “leftism” (excessive zeal in carrying out the program). In his address at the end of the session, Ho implied his unhappiness at the decisions that had been reached, complaining that the meeting had not been sufficiently well prepared and appealing for greater efforts to achieve unity within the Party—especially within the leading echelons.24
Throughout the remainder of 1955, successive land reform campaigns were launched throughout the countryside. More than twenty thousand additional cadres were assigned to rural areas to carry out the program. By midsummer, it was clear that the Diem regime in the South had no intention of holding electoral consultations, thus undermining the argument of those who wished to delay the consolidation of Party power in the North until the process of national reunification had been completed. In August, an editorial in Nhan Dan criticized “some comrades” for expressing the view that “it would be all right to carry out land reform rather slowly, that it is necessary to concentrate all efforts on unification and that consolidation of the North is in contradiction with the struggle for unification.”25 At its eighth plenary session held in Hanoi a few days later, the Central Committee called for heightened efforts to use the land reform program as a means of rooting out spies and counterrevolutionaries.
The final wave of the campaign was inaugurated at the end of 1955, at a time when enthusiasm for bringing to completion the class war in the countryside was at a fever pitch. Ho Chi Minh was still attempting to reduce the excesses of the program. In a speech to land reform cadres in Ha Bac province on December 17, he emphasized the importance of making a careful distinction between those who were guilty and those who were innocent of counterrevolutionary activities, and he repeated his warning not to use physical abuse against those charged with crimes against the people. At a luncheon following his address, he reminded his audience that land reform, like hot soup, is best to the taste when it is drunk slowly. But in the mood of the moment, Ho’s words had little effect. A letter sent to land reform cadres by the National Peasant Liaison Committee the same month drew direct links between landlord elements at the village level and counterrevolutionary activities, while a directive from the Central Committee issued on December 14 instructed cadres to treat the land reform program as a “Dien Bien Phu against feudalism in the North.”26
By the early spring of 1956, reports of the violence of the program in rural areas had become widespread in Hanoi, where many Party and government officials came from landed families that had been attacked during the campaign. When articles critical of the program began to appear in the press, Ho Chi Minh’s erstwhile private secretary, Vu Dinh Huynh, was inspired to remonstrate with him: “The blood of our compatriots is being spilled, how can you rest easy?” Although Huynh had already provoked the suspicion of radicals for his lack of ideological militancy (Truong Chinh had dismissed him as a “running dog of the reactionaries”), Ho was sufficiently concerned about the situation to issue a new warning against the indiscriminate classification of all landlord elements as counterrevolutionary. In an April speech to cadres carrying out the program in coastal regions, he warned them not to adopt a mechanistic attitude in making judgments, pointing out that not all boat owners were dishonest and cruel. Only those guilty of tyrannical actions need to be punished. A boat, he reminded them, needs someone at the rudder as well as others manning the oars.
Ho Chi Minh had voiced such concerns before to little effect. But now, with anger rising throughout the countryside, his message was starting to find an audience. In mid-May, an article in Nhan Dan conceded that some land reform cadres had treated peasants as landlords and discriminated against the children of landlords. A few weeks later, another piece admitted that in some cases government officials had “overestimated the enemy” by assuming that a small number of cases of sabotage was representative of the general situation.27
In part, what happened to change the minds of Party leaders in Hanoi may have been the rising chorus of protest from Vietminh veterans, who, along with their families, had been victimized. But an event that took place several thousand miles away in Moscow may also have played a role. In a speech delivered at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, Party chief Nikita Khrushchev stunned his audience with his sharp criticism of the leadership style of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin. Stalin, he charged, had not only encouraged the emergence of a “cult of personality” that represented a betrayal of the Leninist principle of democratic centralism, he had also used his overwhelming power to carry out the brutal removal of loyal Bolsheviks from the Party and the government. Moreover, he had made a number of disastrous foreign policy decisions that had tragic consequences during the Second World War. Khrushchev called on the delegates at the congress to engage in the practice of “self-criticism” to ensure that such shortcomings would not be repeated.
Khrushchev’s wide-ranging denunciation of Stalin aroused a good deal of anxiety in Beijing regarding the effect that such attacks, however justified in the Soviet context, could have on the prestige of the Chinese Communist Party, on Mao Zedong’s leadership, and on the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Reaction in Hanoi, however, was muted. A Vietnamese delegation headed by Truong Chinh and Le Duc Tho had attended the congress, but press commentary in Hanoi was sparse. Nhan Dan remarked laconically on February 28, 1956, that the VWP “would further endeavor to study Marxist-Leninist theory and to apply it creatively to the concrete situation in Vietnam, to combine this theory with the practice of Vietnam’s revolution.” Once the Vietnamese delegation returned from Moscow, the VWP Politburo met to consider the results of the congress and its impact on the situation in Vietnam. On March 31, Radio Hanoi broadcast a communiqué from the Politburo that referred to the “exaltation of individualism” and “the spirit of self-criticism” and concluded that the resolutions issued at the CPSU’s Twentieth Congress would “strengthen our party in its theoretical aspects.”28
In the official view, the issue of the cult of the personality was an affair for the Soviet Union and was not relevant in the Vietnamese context, where Ho Chi Minh ruled in a collegial style. Still, there may have been satisfaction among some Party leaders that the issue had been raised, especially among those who chafed u
nder the weight of the progressive deification of Ho Chi Minh in the press. The president was now being rapidly metamorphosed into the avuncular “Uncle Ho” (Bac Ho) so familiar to the world during his final years. He was photographed greeting compatriots from every conceivable occupation and, despite his image of modesty, his picture appeared on postage stamps and even on the national currency. Truong Chinh, who may understandably have been privately jealous of Ho’s towering reputation among the populace, was reportedly elated at the antideification campaign. “Socialism,” he remarked, “can’t survive with the glorification of the individual.” The two, he pointed out, were as antithetical as fire and water: While socialism was democratic, the deification of the individual was antidemocratic.29
It probably struck many Vietnamese observers as fortuitous that Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin’s abuses had taken place at a time when decisions reached by the VWP in Hanoi were just beginning to come under serious scrutiny and debate. At an enlarged session of the VWP Central Committee held in late April, the issue of self-criticism came up for discussion, and the resolution issued at the close of the conference praised the CPSU for its courage in admitting errors, while noting that the VWP had not sufficiently engaged in examining its own practices in Vietnam. “It is through the development of criticism and self-criticism,” the resolution noted, “that we can develop internal democracy, strengthen our relations with the masses, and curb bureaucratism.” In his closing statement to the conference, Ho Chi Minh was more explicit, declaring that by engaging in self-criticism, the CPSU had displayed a degree of courage that should be imitated by all fraternal parties. The lesson was especially relevant to the VWP, he noted, because of the “feudal and colonial vestiges” that had not yet been eliminated in the country, thus enabling false and non-Communist influences to penetrate the organization. Although Ho focused his primary attention on the problems of bureaucratism and official arrogance, he admitted that a “cult of personality” existed to a certain extent in the DRV as well. While it had not yet led to any major damage, it nevertheless limited the zeal and spirit of initiative among Party members and the people as a whole. To resolve such shortcomings, he emphasized the importance of strengthening collective leadership at all echelons of the Party and government.30
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