Ho Chi Minh played no role in the debate, and in fact was not even present at the meeting. After his visit to Moscow for the Communist party summit, he had continued on to Beijing, where he remained “for a rest.” His long and unexplained absence fueled speculation in Hanoi that he may have been marginalized by recent events or had even died in the USSR. Some suggested that he may have deliberately stayed away in order to force his colleagues to accept his advice. As yet there is no adequate explanation for his absence from Hanoi at such a critical time. While it is possible that he had gone to China for medical treatment, it is indeed curious that he did not attend the Thirteenth Plenum, which was destined to have a momentous impact on the DRV.
Whatever the reason for his not being present, on his return to Hanoi on December 24, Ho Chi Minh appeared to approve the decision to place a new priority on building a socialist society in the North. One week after his return, he greeted the new year with a speech announcing that the period of economic reconstruction had come to an end, giving way to a new era of planned economic development. It was, he said, “a new advance in the revolutionary work of our people.” Five days later, Nhan Dan announced that there were now to be two revolutions—a socialist one in the North and a national democratic one in the South. A conference of senior cadres was convened to map out procedures for the transition to the socialist stage of the revolution. But doubts lingered. In March 1958, Truong Chinh complained that “some people” still failed to understand the importance of achieving socialism in the North as preparation for the libetation of the South. In a talk to representatives of the Fatherland Front, Chinh called for a cultural revolution to train new intellectuals to serve society in the new era. Explaining the reasoning behind the decision to launch the program, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong—who apparently was one of Truong Chinh’s allies at this juncture—declared that “a stronger North” made the Vietnamese nation stronger in the struggle for national reunification, while “the road to a stronger North is the socialist road.”62
By this time, Ho Chi Minh’s dominant role within the Party was on the decline. The process may have begun with the rise of Chinese influence over the movement in the early 1950s, and it accelerated after Geneva, when many of his colleagues grew restive at the failure to achieve the peaceful reunification of the country. With the emergence of Le Duan as the most important figure on the political scene, it was about to decrease further.
Although he may have been outmaneuvered by Truong Chinh in the policy debate at the Thirteenth Plenum, Le Duan wasted no time in putting his own stamp on the Party apparatus. During the next few months, followers of Truong Chinh and Ho Chi Minh were dismissed from influential positions and replaced by new members. As his instrument in cleansing the organization of potential opposition, Le Duan selected his old colleague Le Duc Tho. Born near Hanoi in 1911 in a scholar-gentry family, Tho (real name Phan Dinh Khai) had joined the revolutionary movement in the late 1920s, but was soon arrested and spent most of the next two decades in prison. Released in 1945, he was sent to the South and served (under the revolutionary code name “Sau”) as Le Duan’s deputy during the Franco-Vietminh conflict. Narrow-minded in outlook, devious in manner, and dour in his public image, Tho soon became known as “Sau Bua” (Sau the Hammer) for his toughness in dealing with his colleagues. Although Tho may have envied Le Duan for his more senior position within the Party, the two collaborated effectively, and when Duan was elevated to leadership, Tho joined him in Hanoi as head of the Central Committee’s Organization Department, a position that he quickly transformed into an effective apparatus to investigate and control the activities of Party members.
If Le Duc Tho had a rival in his ability to inspire fear and loathing in Hanoi, it was the Party apparatchik Tran Quoc Hoan. Born about 1910 in Quang Ngai province south of Da Nang, Hoan rose in the Party hierarchy during the Franco-Vietminh War, and was named DRV minister of public security in 1953. Secretive and resentful of his superiors, he lacked both culture and intellect, and became known as “the Vietnamese Beria” for his thoroughness and brutality in ferreting out alleged counterrevolutionaries within the ranks. Le Duc Tho was quick to see his promise as an ally and an instrument of power.
It was Tran Quoc Hoan who became the central figure in one of the most bizarre incidents in the history of the DRV. In 1955, a young woman from the border province of Cao Bang arrived in Hanoi. Winsome in appearance, Miss Xuan soon came to the attention of the aging president, who arranged to have her serve as his private nurse. Eventually she gave birth to his son, who was subsequently adopted by Ho’s private secretary, Vu Ky. One day in 1957, Miss Xuan’s body was discovered beside a road in the suburbs, the apparent victim of an automobile accident. Two female roommates in the Hanoi apartment where she had been assigned to live died under mysterious circumstances shortly after.
At first, the incident received little publicity, but several years later, the fiancé of one of the deceased young women charged in a letter to the National Assembly that Miss Xuan had been raped by Tran Quoc Hoan, and was then killed at Hoan’s order to cover up his crime. The other two women were similarly disposed of, the fiancé claimed, to prevent them from disclosing what had happened. Although the story was quicked hushed up and Hoan was never charged, reports of the incident circulated among knowledgeable Party members in Hanoi. Whether Ho Chi Minh was aware of the details of the pathetic story is unknown, and he never referred to it.63
In December 1957, the Thirteenth Plenum gave tentative approval to a plan to lay the foundation for an advance to socialism throughout the DRV. By then, the process was already under way. While most agricultural production remained in private hands (a few experimental collective farms had been created in the mid-1950s), about 40 percent of all manufacturing and retail trade and almost half of the transportation sector were under state or collective ownership. Work exchange teams—a rudimentary form of socialism based on cooperative seasonal labor, which had been adopted in China in the early 1950s—had begun to appear.64
The initial moves coincided with the inauguration of the Great Leap Forward in China, and the new Chinese program provided Vietnamese officials with an opportunity to study the consequences of a similar possible application in the DRV. China had collectivized agriculture over a three-year period beginning in 1955, but the results in terms of food production had been somewhat disappointing, and in 1958 the government suddenly encouraged the building of massive “people’s communes” throughout the countryside. These communes, of more than thirty thousand people each, included all forms of economic and administrative organization and common ownership and represented in principle the highest form of organization in the Marxist-Leninist lexicon—a stage that not even the Soviet Union had yet attempted.
At first, there were indications, including comments in the official press, that the Vietnamese would base their own program on the Chinese model. During his brief stay in Beijing in December 1957, Ho Chi Minh offered his own praise of the Great Leap Forward, writing admiringly in several articles (under the pseudonym T.L.) of the Chinese strategy of self-reliance and its policy (known as “to the village”) of encouraging urban cadres to spend part of their time engaging in manual labor with the masses. But it is likely that Ho Chi Minh was engaging in his old game of flattering potential benefactors in order to win their support, for in March 1958, he advised the Politburo to be cautious and avoid haste in collectivizing the countryside. In an article that appeared in Nhan Dan that July, he warned that the experiences of fraternal socialist countries must be studied carefully and applied not “blindly,” but in a creative manner. On the other hand, he appeared to approve of China’s “to the village” movement, suggesting in September that senior Vietnamese officials should engage in manual labor one day a week to raise their own consciousness.65
In his doubts about the relevance of the Great Leap Forward to conditions in North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh was in good company. Le Duan, who presumably viewed any radical program to change
society in the North as an obstacle to his own objectives in the South, warned against an adventurist approach. Use ripples, not waves, to bring about changes, he quoted Mao’s cautious colleague Liu Shaoqi. For his part, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong emphasized that the purpose of the three-year plan was to increase food production and raise the standard of living (rejecting, by implication, the Maoist view that its primary objective was to raise ideological consciousness in the villages), while even Truong Chinh announced that the process should be carried out “step by step.” Vietnamese leaders had learned by bitter past experience that the Chinese model could not be imported lock, stock, and barrel into the DRV.66
In November 1958, the Central Committee held its Fourteenth Plenum and formally laid down the basic path for socialist transformation, which consisted of replacing private with collective or public ownership in both urban and rural areas. The Three-Year Plan for Economic Transformation and Cultural Development (1958–1960) was approved by the National Assembly the next month. The plan called for an acceleration of both agricultural and industrial production but stressed agriculture as the key link.
To some, the adoption of a rural strategy suggested that the Party was following recent practice in China. In fact, however, Ho Chi Minh had argued for years that underdeveloped countries such as Vietnam should begin their growth process in the countryside. The central objective of the program was to strengthen the national economy—which at that time was still overwhelmingly agricultural—in order to create the foundations for a future industrial revolution. In an article in December, Ho (writing under the name Tran Luc) recommended imitation of the Chinese strategy of maintaining “very tight” Party control from the capital to local areas, but emphasized that the formation of cooperatives must be carried out with caution and on the basis of “the principle of voluntarity.” Ho Chi Minh, at least, had learned his lesson from the disaster of the land reform program.67
During most of 1958, the issue of national unification attracted little attention from Party leaders in Hanoi. Although a key reason for the neglect was the need to pay attention to domestic needs in the North, certainly another factor was the attitude of the regime’s patrons in Moscow and Beijing. Khrushchev’s views were well known. In private conversations with North Vietnamese officials, Mao Zedong had offered similar advice. The problem of a divided Vietnam could not be resolved in a brief period, but would require a protracted struggle lasting many years. “If ten years is not enough,” he warned, “it may take one hundred.”68 Although some senior leaders in Hanoi may not have agreed, they kept their own counsel.
For the time being, then, Party leaders focused on issues of domestic reconstruction, while limiting their efforts on national reunification to seeking support in the diplomatic arena for carrying out the provisions of the Geneva Accords. In February 1958 Ho Chi Minh led a North Vietnamese delegation on a tour to India and Burma, two countries with neutralist governments that had expressed some support for the DRV. The visit to New Delhi was designed in part to counterbalance India’s recent decision to grant diplomatic recognition to the Republic of Vietnam. In talks with Prime Minister Nehru, Ho successfully solicited his host’s support for the principle of Vietnamese reunification, but Nehru refused to issue a public condemnation of the RVN or of the United States for their role in frustrating the holding of nationwide elections. He received a similar response in Rangoon.69
By now, Ho Chi Minh’s role was increasingly limited to that of senior diplomat and foreign policy adviser, as well as to fulfilling his growing image as the spiritual father of all the Vietnamese people and the soul of the Vietnamese revolution. Ho played his part as the kindly Uncle Ho to perfection. He continued to shun the more ornate trappings of his presidential role. In 1958, he moved into a new small stilt house on the grounds of the presidential palace, just a few yards away from the gardener’s cottage he had occupied. Built at the Party’s order in the simple style of the houses of the mountain minorities settled in the Viet Bac, it served as his main office and residence for the remainder of his life.
Shortly after the close of the Fourteenth Plenum, Le Duan embarked on a secret inspection trip to South Vietnam to assess the situation there in preparation for a major policy review by the Central Committee. On his return in mid-January 1959, he presented a report to the Politburo, which had been called urgently into session to discuss the situation. Conditions in the South, Duan declared, were perilous. The enemy’s determination to drown the revolution in blood had placed the lives of the masses in serious danger and heightened popular hostitiry to the Saigon government.
Although the tone of Le Duan’s report was obviously colored by his polirical objectives, his description of the situation in the South was fairly accurate. When revolutionary activists launched their terrorist campaign in 1957, Ngo Dinh Diem had responded with a desperate effort to destroy the movement. To extend its control over the countryside, Saigon established a new program to fortify and defend villages from being infiltrated and controlled by Vietminh elements. Known as “agrovilles,” these new fortified hamlets were strengthened with barbed wire, mud walls, and moats to enable residents to defend their village from enemy attack. Within each agroville, villagers were organized into militia units to protect the community against infiltration from the outside, while government agents and informers sought to identify Vietminh sympathizers, some of whom had surfaced as such after the Geneva Accords.
As an internal Party document later conceded, the Saigon regime was initially quite successful in stabilizing the situation in South Vietnam and limiting the effectiveness of the revolutionary forces:
The enemy at this time had completed the establishment of his ruling machinery from top to bottom, being able to build a tight espionage network and to form popular force units in every village. He was able to control each and every family by means of the house-block system [a Saigon-run security network in which families throughout the RVN were organized into units of five and made jointly responsible for the loyalty of all of their members]. The movement’s influence was so low that even the people’s low-level struggles, such as the requests for relief or for loans to grow crops, were labeled as “Viet Cong activities,” and the participants were intimidated and terrorized. At the same time, the enemy kept on systematically building his agrovilles, concenttating people in centers and hamlets away from remote areas and to zones near commercial centers, wide roads and waterways. He carried out a tight system of oppression in the rural areas....
During this period, the people were somewhat perturbed and shaken even though they strongly hated the enemy and believed that the revolution would be victorious in spite of everything. Doubt in our struggle method and old views from the past were now revived and voiced more vigorously. People said that the struggles for “democratic and civil rights only lead to the prisons and to the tombs,” and that “such struggle will end with everyone’s death.” In many localities people requested the Party to take up arms and fight back against the enemy.70
Between 1957 and 1959, more than two thousand suspected Communists were executed, often by guillotine after being convicted by roving tribunals that circulated throughout rural regions of the RVN; thousands more who were suspected of sympathy with the revolutionary cause were arrested and placed in prison. South Vietnamese military units launched raids into Vietminh base areas in the Ca Mau Peninsula and in Zone D, where the population had long harbored sympathies with the revolutionary movement. According to sources in the DRV, Party membership in the South plummeted from over five thousand members at the beginning of 1957 to less than one third that level by the end of the year. According to Tran Van Giau, who had emerged as a prominent historian in the DRV, it was “the darkest hour” for the revolutionary cause.71
But subversive activity undertaken by Vietminh elements who had remained in South Vietnam after the Geneva conference was not the only threat to the stability of the Saigon regime, for in many respects Ngo Dinh Diem was his own wors
t enemy. At the instigation of the United States, in 1956 Diem agreed to promulgate a constitution to create an aura of legitimacy for his new government. The constitution of the RVN called for a combination of the presidential and parliamentary forms of government and included provisions to protect individual human rights. However, Diem lacked the instincts of a democratic politician. Stiff in demeanor and uncomfortable in large crowds, he found it difficult to mingle with his constituents. Distrustful of southerners, he surrounded himself with his fellow Catholics, many of whom were recent refugees from the North and shared his deep distrust of communism. Sensitive to criticism, he was quick to suppress any potential opposition to his rule. A government-sponsored political party, known as the Personalist Labor Party, was created under the leadership of his younger brother, Minister of the Interior Ngo Dinh Nhu. Opposition parties were declared illegal and critics of the regime were routinely silenced or put in prison.
Perhaps Diem’s worst failing was his inability to comprehend the needs of the peasants, who made up more than 80 percent of the population of the RVN. At U.S. urging, the Saigon regime launched a land reform program of its own to rectify the vast inequalities in the distribution of land (about 1 percent of the population owned half the cultivated acreage in the country and poor peasants often paid up to one third of their annual harvest in rent to absentee landlords). Wealthy landowners or the affluent bourgeoisie in the large cities, who could be expected to oppose a land reform program as inimical to their own interests, were among the government’s most fervent supporters. As a consequence, the land reform legislation was written with loopholes large enough to make it easy for landlords to evade its provisions, and after several years of operation, only about 10 percent of eligible tenant farmers had received any land. In many instances, families living in previously Vietminh-held areas were now forced to return land they had received during the Franco-Vietminh conflict to its previous owners, often at gunpoint. For them, as for many of their compatriots throughout the country, the Diem regime represented little improvement over the colonial era. By the end of the 1950s, much of the countryside in South Vietnam was increasingly receptive to the demand for radical change.
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