Tran Dan was soon under attack from the left, not only for his outspoken demand for an end to ideological controls over creative artists in the DRV, but also for allegedly leading a “bourgeois lifestyle.” Expelled from the VWP, he was later incarcerated in the military prison at the Citadel in Hanoi. “I see nothing but rain,” he remarked in sorrow, “falling on the red flag.”40 But the ferment caused by his letter, combined with the brutality of the land reform campaign and the literary “thaw” brought about in the USSR as a result of the impact of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech in February 1956, emboldened other intellectuals; and in the spring of that year a new literary journal called Giai Pham began to publish pieces that were at least implicitly critical of government policies. Despite official expressions of disapproval, additional issues of the journal appeared during the summer, encouraging the appearance of a second periodical, Nhan Van, in September. The editor of the new publication was the noted Vietnamese intellectual Phan Khoi, a participant in Phan Chu Trinh’s reformist movement at the beginning of the century. By now, Vietnamese intellectuals had been encouraged by the appearance of the Hundred Flowers campaign in China, an officially sponsored but short-lived movement to encourage public criticism of the shortcomings of the CCP and the government. One article penned by the poet Hoang Cam lamented the official abuse meted out to Tran Dan and defended him from his critics. Other articles in the two journals described the sufferings of families whose members had been imprisoned during the land reform campaign, and the problem of bureaucratism.
Chastened by the uproar caused by the excesses of the land reform campaign and the calls for self-criticism emanating from Moscow and Beijing, ideological purists in the Party took no immediate action to suppress such criticism. In fact, the Tenth Plenum in September 1956 issued a communiqué calling for the extension of democratic freedoms, while in December a presidential decree guaranteed a limited freedom of the press. Truong Chinh appealed for the creation of a new Vietnamese culture which would be national in form and socialist in content. What he meant by that was uncertain. When one intellectual complained to Truong Chinh about the lack of freedom to speak out, Chinh replied in surprise, “but you have plenty of freedom to criticize imperialism!”
But the demonstrations at Quynh Luu aroused anxiety among Party leaders in Hanoi, and before the end of the year Nhan Van and Giai Pham were forced to close their doors. The official newspaper Nhan Dan called for strict Party control over intellectuals, and many were compelled to attend courses on Marxism-Leninism. The elderly Phan Khoi was expelled from the writer’s association and eventually arrested. He died in prison before standing trial. Tran Dan resigned from the Party, but declared himself faithful to its utopian ideals, “a Communist without a party.”41
It is not easy to discern to what degree Ho Chi Minh should bear responsibility for the persecution associated with the suppression of intellectual dissent and the land reform campaign. Apologists point out that Ho was not directly implicated in carrying out either program, and that he persistently urged senior colleagues and cadres alike to make a careful distinction between misguided elements who could be redirected onto the proper path and truly counterrevolutionary elements who had to be surgically removed like a cancer from the body politic of Vietnamese society. But critics retort that even if Ho did not wield the knife, he had nonetheless set the stage for those who did. It is significant that even after he was informed about excesses in the two campaigns, he made little effort to use his immense prestige to mitigate their effects.
While Ho demonstrated no personal predilection for the use of brutality against his adversaries or rivals, he was willing (in the pattern of ideologues throughout the ages) to condone such actions by his subordinates in the larger interests of the cause. Where he was personally acquainted with the victims—and Ho Chi Minh knew a number of the intellectuals who were attacked during the campaign—he sometimes intervened on their behalf, but often without effect. A family member of one intellectual who fell victim to the campaign informed me privately that Ho had attempted to alleviate his treatment in prison. Perhaps the most that can be said is that Ho Chi Minh had become a prisoner of his own creation, a fly in amber, unable in his state of declining influence to escape the inexorable logic of a system that sacrificed the fate of individuals to the “higher morality” of the master plan.42
While much of the attention accorded in Hanoi to the CPSU Twentieth Congress in early 1956 had been focused on Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech, an equally significant product of the congress was Moscow’s decision to pursue a policy of peaceful coexistence with the West. In justifying the new program, Khrushchev argued that the only alternative was a nuclear conflict, which could bring about the death of millions on both sides of the ideological divide.
For Hanoi, Moscow’s adoption of the strategy of peaceful coexistence had disquieting implications, for it suggested that the Soviet Union might not look with favor on a possible resumption of revolutionary struggle to bring about the reunification of the two Vietnams. For the moment, the new approach did not run counter to policies adopted by the Party leadership in Hanoi, since in August 1955 the VWP Central Committee had reaffirmed its wish to seek reunification by peaceful means; and in early 1956, the DRV indicated its approval of a Chinese proposal to reconvene the Geneva conference to discuss the enforcement of the Geneva Accords. Still, the issue obviously remained under debate among senior leaders of the Party, and sometime during the late winter of 1956, a delegation led by Army Chief of Staff Van Tien Dung traveled secretly to the South to consult with ranking members of the local Vietminh apparatus. The chairman of the Party’s Regional Committee for the South (the Party’s leading organ in the South after the Central Office for South Vietnam, COSVN, was disbanded following the Geneva Accords) was Le Duan, the Party veteran who had directed operations there since the dismissal of Nguyen Binh in 1951. The stated objective of Dung’s trip was to set up new revolutionary base areas and to consider the possible need for reinforcements, as well as to facilitate a formal alliance with dissident elements of the two religious sects.
The son of a carpenter in Quang Tri province, a rural area just north of the old imperial capital of Hué, Le Duan lacked the educational background and elite family credentials of many of the founding members of the Party, several of whom, like Ho Chi Minh himself, had come from the scholar-gentry class. Yet, although slight in physique and plainspoken and rustic in manner, Le Duan did not lack self-confidence, and he was viewed as an effective organizer and a vocal advocate for the interests of the movement in the South. On the other hand, some of his colleagues apparently found him to be arrogant and unwilling to consider ideas other than his own.43
Having served (with the code name of “Ba”) as a senior representative of the Central Committee in the southern provinces since shortly after the end of the Pacific War, Le Duan was an appropriate choice for the assignment of commanding the movement in South Vietnam. He was totally devoted to the task of bringing about national reunification, but he was also a pragmatist, and in meetings of the Regional Committee he argued tirelessly for the adoption of a realistic strategy that took into account conditions not only in the South but also on the international scene. On the one hand, he sought to rein in the firebrands who wanted to return immediately to the strategy used against the French, arguing that the Party’s armed forces were simply not yet up to the task. On the other hand, he was skeptical of a peaceful solution, feeling that some form of violence would ultimately be needed. Political activities in the South, he stated, “will sometimes have to be backed up with military action in order to show the strength of the forces which won at Dien Bien Phu.”44 In March 1956, Duan presented Van Tien Dung and his team with a plan to launch military preparations for a possible return to a policy of armed struggle. After their visitors left, Duan’s Regional Committee for the South approved a limited increase in the Party’s local military forces, including the formation of twenty main-force battal
ions and the mobilization of guerrilla squads in villages sympathetic to the revolution.
Le Duan’s proposal to adopt a more aggressive approach in the South arrived in Hanoi at a time when Party leaders were actively discussing Moscow’s new line of peaceful coexistence. In early April 1956, Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikoyan arrived in Hanoi to explain to Vietnamese comrades Moscow’s view of the world situation. It was the first visit of a senior Soviet Party figure to the DRV, a gesture that was undoubtedly highly welcome to his hosts. Two weeks after his departure, the VWP Central Committee announced its formal approval of the resolutions of the CPSU Twentieth Congress at its Ninth Plenum. But Truong Chinh, who was still general secretary at the time, admitted that not all of his colleagues agreed with that view. “There are some people,” he remarked, “who do not yet believe in the correctness of this political program and in the policy of peaceful reunification of the country, holding that these are illusory and reformist.”45
Whether Truong Chinh was referring to Le Duan, the Party’s chief representative in the South, is not known. In any event, such reservations were apparently held, among others, by Ho Chi Minh himself. Although he had publicly urged his colleagues to give the peace process a chance, he had never disguised his belief that the national issue must take precedence over other concerns, and he was not prepared to rule out a return to violence if it should prove necessary to bring about reunification. At a speech given on April 24, 1956, the final day of the Ninth Plenum, Ho declared that the Vietnamese people understood the “great significance” of the decisions reached in Moscow, and the growing strength of the powerful forces of world peace; however, he then qualified that statement by adding: “While recognizing that war may be averted, we must be vigilant to detect the warmongers’ schemes; for as long as imperialism exists, the danger of war exists.” Although in some cases the road to socialism may be a peaceful one, he poinred out,
we should clearly recognize this fact: In those countries where the machinery of state, the armed forces, and the security police of the bourgeois class are still strong, the proletarian class must prepare for armed struggle. Therefore, while recognizing the possibility of reunifying the country by peaceful means, the Vietnamese people should not forget that their principal enemies are the American imperialists and their agents who still occupy half the country and are feverishly preparing for war. So, while we should firmly hold aloft the banner of peace, we must at the same time enhance our vigilance.46
Ho Chi Minh’s views were incorporated into the resolution approved at the close of the conference, which stated that while some nations were capable of advancing to socialism by peaceful means, in some cases a fierce struggle might be unavoidable, so the working class must prepare for either contingency. Moscow was thus put on notice that although its ally was not yet prepared to confront Khrushchev directly on the issue of peaceful coexistence, it was willing, if necessary, to define its own strategy to bring to a successful resolution the struggle for national liberation and unification in Vietnam.
By approving the declaration of the CPSU Twentieth Congress on the new policy of peaceful coexistence, the Ninth Plenum rejected Le Duan’s proposal to take the first steps toward adopting a more military strategy in the South. By so doing, however, it did not bring to an end the debate within the DRV over the proper path to follow in the South. A long editorial that appeared in Nhan Dan in mid-July noted that many people still harbored “complex ideas and illusions” about the question. Some, it said, had been “simple in their thoughts” and were sure elections would be held. Now they were disillusioned and pessimistic. Others were “reluctant to carry on a long and hard struggle” and continued to hope that unity could be achieved peacefully.
Among those who were undoubtedly the most upset were the southern cadres who had been shipped to the North after the Geneva conference to receive training and indoctrination in Marxist ideology and revolutionary tactics. In a bid to ease their discomfort, Ho Chi Minh tried to reassure them, via a public letter in June, by explaining the official policy of seeking reunification by peaceful means. The struggle, he warned, would be difficult and protracted, and could not succeed until the North had first been strengthened to serve as a powerful and reliable base of operations. The political struggle is just, he said, and would certainly be victorious. But “to build a good house, we must build a strong foundation.” Ho’s comments about the need for domestic construction must have resonated with many of his readers. That spring, North Vietnam was suffering from a severe food shortage, as well as a continuing lack of skilled personnel to help build the economy. Agreements were signed with China to provide technological assistance in building up a light industrial base in the DRV, but in the meantime, the people must be fed. In the words of a Vietnamese poet who had just visited rural provinces in the Red River delta:
I have passed through
Many villages of Kien-An and Hong-Quang
Where the sea broke in and left its salt over wide plains
Where, for two successive seasons, no grain of rice has grown
And human excrement is red with peels of sweet potatoes.
I have met
Countless emaciated children
Of five or six years old
Eating less rice than bran.47
Party leaders had consulted with key members of the southern leadership on the issue of reunification just prior to the Ninth Plenum, and the southerners may have been chided by Truong Chinh for their impatience. But doubts about a peaceful solution to the problem certainly persisted in Hanoi as well. After holding a meeting on the subject in June 1956, the Politburo issued a resolution titled “The Situation and Missions of the Revolution in the South,” This document noted that since South Vietnam had become a virtual colony of the United States, it was necessary to consider the adoption of a policy of armed struggle for self-defense. Still, the Politburo concluded that for the time being it was important to stay with the strategy of political struggle. In a letter to the Vietnamese people in July, Ho Chi Minh said that the DRV would continue the effort to pursue national unification by peaceful means through the mechanism of the Geneva Accords.48
As a member of the Politburo, Le Duan probably attended the June meeting. If so, he would have been instructed to carry Hanoi’s views back to his colleagues in South Vietnam. Sometime that summer, he wrote a short pamphlet called The Path of Revolution in the South to present his own ideas on the subject. On the surface, his recommendations appeared to coincide with those of the advocates of a peaceful policy within the VWP Central Committee and the Politburo. At its present stage, the author declared, the Vietnamese revolution faced two major tasks, building socialism in the North and liberating the South. The existing policy of peaceful political struggle in the South conformed to existing realities, in light of the current weakness of the Party apparatus in South Vietnam, and it was also in line with decisions reached at the Twentieth Congress in Moscow and the prevailing situation around the world.
However, Le Duan’s apparent emphasis on the need for a political approach was somewhat deceptive, for the central thrust of his argument focused on the need for a more vigorous approach to the revolution in the South. Although not formally deviating from the existing policy, he pointed out that there was a significant difference between a policy of reformism based on “legal and constitutional struggle” and one of political struggle adopted by a revolutionary movement that “takes the revolutionary political forces of the masses as its foundation.” As the vanguard of the revolution, he argued, the Party must be ready to lead the masses (here he used the example of the August Revolution of 1945) to seize power. Otherwise, a favorable opportunity to overthrow the reactionary regime in Saigon might be wasted.
To Le Duan, the glaring lesson offered by the August Revolution was that it was necessary to prepare for a general uprising by building up the political and military strength of the revolutionary forces. Regrettably, Duan concluded, many cadres respo
nsible for guiding the movement “had not yet firmly understood the strength of the revolutionary masses” and thus failed to lead them.49
At the beginning of 1956, China and the Soviet Union had appeared to be in agreement on the need for a period of international peace and stability as a backdrop for their efforts to engage in domestic construction. In February, both Moscow and Beijing had urged Hanoi to accept their proposal to reconvene the Geneva conference as a tactic to rescue the faltering peace process in Indochina. That overture proved abortive, because Great Britain, the co-chair with the USSR, was unwilling to reconvene the conference in light of Saigon’s declaration that it was not a party to the agreement and would not be held accountable for its provisions. Moscow, which had essentially assigned responsibility for the Indochinese imbroglio to the Chinese, took no action. Beijing, still preoccupied with its own internal problems, followed suit.
By the autumn of 1956, however, differences between Beijing and Moscow had begun to appear over other issues. Chinese leaders were concerned at the implications of the recent Soviet intervention in Eastern Europe, where Soviet leaders had taken firm action to prevent social unrest in Poland and Hungary; this contradicted the Chinese view that differences among socialist nations should be dealt with by consultations based on the principle of equality and noninterference. In Beijing’s view, the uprisings against Communist rule in Eastern Europe were a direct outgrowth of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech, which had undermined the prestige of the Communist Party as the vanguard of the socialist revolution.
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