To what degree the new “spirit of self-criticism” affected the debate over the land reform campaign is not clear. It seems likely that Ho Chi Minh’s comments were intended to be received in such a light by the delegates, and by his colleagues within the Politburo. Indeed, there may have been some sense of irony in his concessions about the danger of the cult of the individual at the conference, since he must have felt that his own influence over the implementation of the program had been all too limited. In any event, Khrushchev’s speech provided him with a tool to urge his colleagues to reevaluate their own decisions and make the necessary changes in the land reform program.
Whatever the impact of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech in Vietnam, during the next few months there was a serious reevaluation of the land reform program. Immediately following the close of the conference, cadre meetings were scheduled to discuss the decisions reached by the Central Committee. Oblique comments in the official press intimated that errors had been committed in implementing the program, and a number of those previously arrested for allegedly counterrevolutionary activities were released. An article in mid-May 1956 praised the overall results of the land reform campaign, but concluded with an admonition to all those involved to correct deficiencies in the program. In a letter of July 1, 1956, to a conference of cadres evaluating the latest wave of land reform, Ho Chi Minh described the program as a success in that “in the main” it had eliminated the landlord class at the village level, but he added that a number of serious errors had been committed that significantly limited its accomplishments. Many of those responsible for the tenor of the campaign, however, were still reluctant to admit the scope of the problem. In an article published in July, Le Van Luong conceded that errors had been committed in implementing the program, but insisted that action had been necessary because the local administrative organs in many newly liberated rural areas had been taken over entirely by counterrevolutionary elements.31
The tide, however, was now running strongly against Luong and his allies. In a report to rural cadres on the results of the land reform program on August 17, Ho Chi Minh declared that “some cadres do not yet grasp our policy and correctly cultivate the mass line. [This is] because the central leadership of the Party and the government have had significant shortcomings … therefore, land reform has suffered from numerous deficiences and errors in the task of bringing about unity in rural areas.” He then promised that those who had wrongly suffered as the result of those errors would be released from prison or reinstated in their previous positions.32
The issue was the main topic for discussion at the Tenth Plenum of the Central Committee, which convened in September 1956. By now, proponents of the radical approach could no longer defend their positions, and the debate at the meeting must have been tempestuous. The communiqué issued after the close of the plenum was uncharacteristically blunt in its analysis of the problem and in assigning responsibility for the actions:
Mistakes and shortcomings have been committed during the past period. In agrarian reform and the readjustment of organizations, grave mistakes have been committed. The 10th plenum of the Central Committee of the [Vietnamese] Workers’ Party has analyzed the results of land reform and the readjustment of organizations and carried out a stern examination of the mistakes committed in these two tasks. It has found the causes of these mistakes and has adopted measures for correcting them.
For the first time, the Party sought to identify the source of the problem. Difficulties, the communiqué said, were caused by “leftist deviations”:
The 10th plenum of the Central Committee of the [Vietnamese] Workers’ Party “recognizes that these mistakes are due to shortcomings in leadership.” That is why the Central Committee of the Party bears responsibility for these mistakes. Those Central Committee members directly responsible for the mistakes committed in the guidance of the execution of the Party’s policies have made a self-criticism of their mistakes and shortcomings before the Central Committee. The latter has taken appropriate disciplinary measures against these members.33
At the close of the conference, the Central Committee took the unprecedented step of relieving several leading members of the Party and the government of their positions. Among them were the four principals of the land reform committee: Truong Chinh was dismissed as general secretary of the VWP; Ho Viet Thang was dropped from the Central Committee; Le Van Luong was stripped of his influential positions in the Politburo and the Central Committee Secretariat; Hoang Quoc Viet was dropped from the Politburo. During the next few days, a series of decrees issued by the Council of Ministers directed that those people’s tribunals that had been established at the village level to ferret out class enemies should be abolished, while agrarian reform committees that had previously been created at the central and regional levels were reduced in function to advisory bodies without executive powers. To undo the harm that had already been committed, those who had been unjustly imprisoned were to receive amnesties, and the improper seizure of private and church-held land was to be corrected.34
The dismissal of Truong Chinh, an almost unprecedented step for a party that had always sought to avoid the brutal factional struggles so characteristic of its fraternal parties in China and the USSR, forced his colleagues into a hurried decision to find a replacement. The natural successor would appear to have been General Vo Nguyen Giap. Ranked third in the hierarchy after Ho and Truong Chinh, Giap enjoyed high esteem among the people as hero of the battle of Dien Bien Phu. He and the army had avoided being tarnished by the failures of the land reform campaign. But Giap’s very popularity may have worked against him among jealous colleagues. Moreover, there was a tradition within the leadership to avoid combining Party authority with military command. As a result, Giap was passed over, and Ho Chi Minh agreed temporarily to occupy the position.
Ho Chi Minh had not been directly involved in planning or implementing the land reform campaign and could thus play a key role in assessing the damage and assigning responsibility. But his prestige as an all-knowing and all-caring leader had been severely damaged in the campaign; many of his colleagues privately felt that, although he had criticized the excesses at the local level, he was not guilt-free, since he had approved of the program at its inception and defended its achievements “in the main” even after it became clear that serious errors had occurred. In private meetings with other Party leaders, Ho engaged in some self-criticism of his own, acknowledging that “because I lacked a spirit of democracy, I didn’t listen and didn’t see, so we must now promote democracy. I accept responsibility in this time of trial. All the top leadership [Truong uong] must listen, observe, think, and act accordingly. This grievous lesson must be a motivation for us.”35
The fallout from the land reform campaign was a major setback for Truong Chinh. A distant and somewhat severe figure, respected but not loved by his colleagues and intimates, Chinh suffered less from a predilection for brutality than from a lack of warmth and humanity, and he undoubtedly believed that in carrying out the program at the suggestion of Chinese advisers he was acting properly according to the dictates of ideology. While he was certainly humiliated by the demotion, he was too proud to display his feelings in public, and reportedly never mentioned the issue to his colleagues. When occasion demanded, however, he was prepared to defend his decisions. A few weeks after the close of the Tenth Plenum, Truong Chinh argued that although some cadres had been guilty of committing grave errors during the campaign, land reform was “a revolution” and added that “a peaceful land reform equal to an exercise in offering up land is an illusion.”36
The Party’s attempt at a mea culpa came too late to prevent the outbreak of the first serious public protest against government policy since the end of the Franco-Vietminh War. To make it more embarrassing, the incident took place in a rural area not far from Ho Chi Minh’s birthplace in Nghe An province, along the central coast. Quynh Luu district was distinctive in that the majority of the inhabitants were Catholics. Many
inhabitants of Quynh Luu were highly patriotic and had supported the Vietminh against the French, but mistrust was prevalent on both sides. Vietminh cadres suspected that a significant number of local Catholics were loyal to the French or to Bao Dai, and hostile to the revolution. Catholics in turn were angered by periodic evidence of official hostility to them simply because of their faith.
Relations between the government and the Catholic community had been uneasy throughout the DRV since the end of the Pacific War. After the cease-fire in July 1954, nearly 600,000 Catholics fled to the South. Nevertheless, nearly 900,000 Catholics remained in North Vietnam after the Geneva Accords, and the DRV tried to reassure them that they would not be ill treated. A new liaison committee of patriotic and peaceful Catholics was created as a front group for the regime, and President Ho Chi Minh frequently spoke before Catholic audiences about his government’s commitment to religious freedom. New bishops were nominated to replace those who had left for the South, seminaries to train Catholic priests were created in late 1954, and in June 1955 a government decree guaranteed religious freedom and recognized the authority of the Vatican in internal church affairs, although it forbade Catholics to disseminate propaganda against government policies.
With the inauguration of the land reform campaign, however, relations rapidly deteriorated, as militant cadres often displayed hostility to Catholics, many of whom were rounded up as suspected counterrevolutionaries. In some cases, there may have been grounds to question their commitment to the revolution, since many Catholics were among the more affluent members of the rural community and therefore opposed land reform. The Church itself, which held about 1.3 percent of the cultivated land in the country, was openly hostile to the government.
Problems in Quynh Luu district began to appear in 1955, when villagers protested that they had been prevented by government officials from emigrating to the South. During the summer of 1956, the land reform campaign swept through the area, and the resentment engendered by government abuses in carrying out the program was exacerbated by the complaint of religious discrimination. Party cadres frequently denounced local Catholic leaders as reactionaries and saboteurs. When an International Control Commission inspection team arrived in the area, tensions flared and a number of violent clashes between government security forces and villagers seeking to meet the inspectors broke out. On November 9, a group of villagers presented petitions to ICC members who were traveling through the district in a jeep. When a local police unit tried to disperse the crowd, violence broke out. On the thirteenth, several thousand people, armed with tools and rudimentary weapons, marched on the district capital of Quynh Luu. Their path was blocked by regular troops; a clash resulted, and several demonstrators were killed. The next day, an entire army division was sent to occupy the area and arrest the ringleaders who had provoked the disturbance. After an inspection team from Hanoi arrived to evaluate the situation, a number of persons who had been arrested during the land reform campaign were released, and their property was returned. But it was clear that the inner-Party debate over how to carry out the program had not been entirely resolved. Truong Chinh, who had retained chairmanship of the land reform committee, warned in his report on the incident that some “dangerous individuals” had been released without justification and that it was necessary to take care that “landlord elements” did not reemerge as influential forces at the village level.
Although the incident at Quynh Luu was unique in the sense that it involved sensitive relations between the regime and Catholics, it was a clear sign that the land reform program had seriously undermined the confidence of the population in the North in the character of the Party leadership, and undoubtedly strained the bonds of unity and collective leadership within the leading councils of the Party. When, in late October, hostile crowds composed primarily of family members of those who had suffered from the campaign gathered in front of Central Committee headquarters near Ba Dinh Square to complain that their demands for redress had not been addressed, General Vo Nguyen Giap agreed to address the public at a nearby sports stadium, where he admitted that mistakes had been made during the campaign. The Party leadership, he conceded, had overestimated the number of landlords in the country and had mechanistically regarded all members of that class as enemies of the people. It therefore failed to distinguish between friends and enemies and slighted the crucial importance of broadening the national united front for the period ahead. The Party, he added, also violated its policy of respecting religious freedom in carrying out land reform in areas inhabited by many Catholics and failed to recognize the revolutionary services of many demobilized soldiers and war veterans.
Ho Chi Minh, who for months had argued in meetings of senior leaders against the excesses of the campaign, kept a low public profile on the issue until February 1957, when at a session of the DRV National Assembly he, too, affirmed that “serious mistakes” had been been committed while carrying out the campaign. But once more he defended the program as a whole as fundamentally correct in its goal of removing the power of feudalist elements at the village level and liberating poor peasants from their cycle of poverty. Observers recall that he wept as he alluded to the sufferings that occurred during the campaign.37
In some respects, the land reform program could be viewed as a success by the regime. More than two million acres (800,000 hectares) of land were distributed to over two million farm families, a total of well over half the total number of agricultural workers in the DRV. The historic domination by the landed gentry at the village level was broken and a new leadership composed of poor and middle-level peasants emerged. But the tactics that had been applied left a bitter legacy. Although the actual number of people executed during the campaign is highly controversial, even sympathetic observers concede that a minimum of 3,000 to 5,000 may have died in the process, usually by firing squads immediately following conviction by a local tribunal. There are other estimates that 12,000 to 15,000 people were unjustly executed on false charges of sabotage or otherwise supporting counterrevolutionary activities. Countless others suffered in various ways because of their relationship to the victims. The consequences were a disaster for Party organizations at the local level. A study in the early 1980s showed that in some areas, 30 percent of the Communist cells had been disbanded as a result of losses of personnel to anger generated by the campaign. In seventy-six communes in Bac Ninh province, only twenty-one cell secretaries remained in place at the end of the final wave of the campaign.38
The social turmoil aroused by the land reform campaign was not limited to the countryside. It also exacerbated the Party’s relations with urban intellectuals, who had been among the most fervent supporters of the Vietminh Front during the early stages of the resistance. Many were highly patriotic and had responded enthusiastically to the Vietminh program, which combined the issue of national independence with moderate reform measures.
However, the Party’s prestige among intellectuals was sorely tested when, beginning in 1951, the Chinese-inspired internal rectification campaign compelled them to engage in often painful bouts of self-criticism as they attempted to reconcile their patriotic instincts with the rigid requirements of the Maoist revolutionary ethic. Some responded by leaving the movement; others attempted to disguise their discomfort by adopting the rationalization that Party discipline and the sacrifice of personal goals were necessary during a time of struggle for national survival. As the writer and intellectual Phan Khoi remarked, the sweetness of patriotism, like sugar in coffee, offset the bitter taste of Party leadership and salvaged the dignity of the intellectuals.39
This dilemma was harder to evade after the Geneva conference, which, by temporarily shelving the issue of national independence, placed the Party’s domestic agenda on center stage. The story of a young writer named Tran Dan illustrates the fix many intellectuals found themselves in. A veteran of Dien Bien Phu, Dan had just written a novel in the accustomed socialist realist style about his experiences on the battlefield, and shor
tly after the cease-fire, he was sent to China to seek professional assistance in writing a screenplay for a film based on his novel. While there, he met the writer Hu Feng, a vocal advocate of greater freedom for writers and artists in the new China. On his return to the DRV, Tran Dan revised his novel to tone down the obligatory references to heroism and self-sacrifice in the ranks that the first draft had contained and fashioned a more honest three-dimensional portrait of soldiers faced with the horrors of war. During the winter of 1954–55, with the collaboration of several like-minded colleagues within the army’s propaganda section, he drew up a letter titled “propositions for a cultural politics” that he intended to submit to the Party Central Committee. The point of the project was to request greater freedoms for creative intellectuals to express the truth about the recent war as they saw it.
At first, there was apparently some support from senior military officers for the proposal, but eventually ideological militants got wind of the letter and brought about its official rejection. A leading spokesman for maintaining ideological purity was the poet To Huu, the Party veteran whose revolutionary poems had attained great popularity during the Franco-Vietminh conflict and who now served as the Party’s cultural and intellectual watchdog. A leading advocate of “art for life’s sake,” he had made a major speech in September 1949 in the Viet Bac on how to eliminate the vestiges of reactionary feudalist and capitalist influence on the emerging revolutionary culture in Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh Page 68
