9. For information on the Stalin School, see series III, Carton 44, SLOTFOM, CAOM. Also see Sokolov (p. 29), Komintern, pp. 15–20, 48–50. Some Vietnamese researchers believe that he did not enter the school until the summer of 1924. According to Sokolov (p. 29), there are no documents in the Russian archives to confirm his presence at the school. In an interview with an Italian newspaper in March 1924, Nguyen Ai Quoc claimed to be a student at the school—see Toan Tap II, vol. 1, p. 480.
10. Nguyen Ai Quoc, “The USSR and the Colonial Peoples,” cited in Fall, On Revolution, p. 45. The article was originally printed in Inprecor, no. 46, 1924. Nguyen Ai Quoc also commented on the school in an interview with the Italian Communist Giovanni Germanetto. For the interview, see below, note 17, and Toan Tap I, vol. 1, pp. 194–98. Also see Sokolov, Komintern, pp. 32–40.
11. Cited in Kobelev, p. 70; Hong Ha, V Strane Sovetov, p. 66; also see BNTS, vol, 1, pp. 219–20, The letter to Petrov was dated May 20, 1924. Copies are in the Comintern files and the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi.
12. BNTS, vol. 1, pp. 227–28. At the labor meeting he commented on the lack of a working class in Indochina and proposed efforts by the FCP to assist the workers in the colony to struggle against imperialism. For the invitation to take part in May Day festivities, see ibid., pp. 216–17. The meeting with Nadezhda Krupskaya is described in Kobelev, pp. 73–74. For information on the school curriculum, see Sokolov, Komintern, pp. 14, 42–43. Sokolov declares that the long program consisted of three to four years, with the short program lasting one or one and one half years. According to him, it is possible that Quoc did not attend the school as a full-time student, but simply audited classes in his spate time (p. 31).
13. Botis Souvarine, “De Nguyen Ai Quac en Ho Chi Minh,” Est et Ouest, Match 1–15, 1976, p. 99. Interview with Ossip Mandelstam, in Ruscio, Textes, pp. 54–57. In this interview, Nguyen Ai Quoc commented that he had left Indochina at age nineteen, leading the editor to suggest that this indicated he was born in 1892, rather than the official date of 1890. It should be kept in mind, however, that on many occasions, even in official biographical statements in Moscow, he gave a variety of different birth dates. In this interview, he stated that he came from a privileged Confucian family, a long distance from the poor peasant background he always claimed when talking to the authorities in France. He also talked of the young Vietnamese monarch Duy Tan, who had been deposed for his patriotic leanings by the French, and declared that such progressive leaders could sometimes play a positive force in liberating their countries. It is a curious statement. See Georges Boudarel, “Ho Chi Minh,” in Georges S. Fischer, ed., Hommes d’état d’Asie et leur politique (Université René Descartes, 1980), p. 120.
14. Roy had vigorously argued for the correctness of his approach at the Second Comintern Congress and on several subsequent occasions. Quoc did disagree with him on the uses of bourgeois nationalist parties to the revolutionary process. While Roy argued that they would eventually betray the proletariat, Quoc felt that they could be effectively utilized in the common struggle, and had already so argued in his letter to the Comintern Executive Committee.
15. The pamphlet on Chinese youth was recently located by Vietnamese researchers in the Soviet archives. Other articles written in Moscow are printed in Toan Tap and various other collections of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s writings. The manuscript on the history of Indochina is reprinted in Toan Tap II, vol. 1, pp. 345–422. For a discussion of his works on China, see Sokolov, Komintern, pp. 30–31.
16. In his biography of Ho Chi Minh, Jean Lacouture speculates that Quoc’s friend Nguyen The Truyen may have written it, but in a letter to a friend at the time, Quoc expressed relief that the project was finally out of the way. For the English-language version, see Fall, On Revolution, pp. 73–128.
17. Cited in Kobelev, pp. 65–66. Germanetto’s story also appears in Dang Hoa Bac Ho, p. 51. The funeral ceremony at Red Square left him with black marks on his ears and toes for the remainder of his life. Kobelev states that henceforth Nguyen Ai Quoc set out to read everything that the Soviet leader had ever written, and that his notebooks were packed with extracts from Lenin’s works. The essay he wrote was printed in the Soviet newspaper Pravda on January 27, 1924.
18. The letter is available in Toan Tap II, vol. 1, p. 248, and the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi.
19. For these letters, see BNTS, vol. 1, pp. 212–13, and Toan Tap II, vol. 1, pp. 241–42. In the first letter he explained that he had not been able to come to work at Comintern headquarters since the funeral of Lenin because of frostbite on his fingers.
20. For an English-language version of the article, see Fall, On Revolution, pp. 40–43. It is also in Toan Tap I, vol. 1, pp. 241–48.
21. The speech is available in a Russian version in the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi. For the comment, see A. Neuberg, ed., Armed Insurrection (London: NLB, 1970), p. 22.
22. Hong Ha, V Strane Sovetov, p. 74. According to BNTS, vol. 1, p. 222, he attended as an observer.
23. According to BNTS, vol. 1, pp. 222–23, the congress was held in the Andreyevskiy Palace in the Kremlin. Researchers in Hanoi may have mistaken the Fifth Congress for the founding meeting of the Peasant International.
24. Quoted in Helmut Grubet, ed., Soviet Russia Masters the Comintern (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1974), pp. 308–9; also see Toan Tap II, vol. 1, pp. 272–75.
25. For an English-language version of the speech, see Fall, On Revolution, pp. 63–72. A Vietnamese version is in Toan Tap I, vol. 1, pp. 215–31. The latter half of the address was apparently given on July 3—see Toan Tap II, vol. 1, pp. 276–89.
26. Hong Ha, V Strane Sovetov, p. 74; Kobelev, pp. 71–73.
27. Quoc translated the appeal into Vietnamese. Xenia J. Eudin and Robert C. North, Soviet Russia and the East, 1920–1927 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 341. Circular dated November 18, 1924, series III, Carton 103, SLOTFOM, CAOM. A later report (dated February 28, 1925) declared that in July 1924, fifteen hundred tracts written in quoc ngu and published by the Executive Committee of the Comintern in Moscow appeared in Indochina.
28. Nguyen Ai Quoc had been telling his friends that he hoped to return to Asia as soon as the Fifth Comintern Congress came to a conclusion. This letter, dated April 11, 1924, is located in the Comintern archives. The capitalization is in the original text. See Toan Tap II, vol, 1, pp. 251–52.
29. Hong Ha, V Strane Sovetov, pp. 77–78.
30. Ibid., pp. 81–82. The Far Eastern Secretariat had been established in Irkutsk in 1920. It is quite possible that this conversation is apocryphal, although the meeting may have taken place. In Hong Ha’s account, Manuilsky suggested that Quoc meet with Borodin before his departure for China. Borodin, however, was already in Canton.
31. Both the letter to Voitinsky and the report of September 25, 1924, are located in the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi. According to one source, Quoc’s trip to China might have been delayed for health reasons. On September 5, he had been ordered to spend a few days at a sanatorium in the Crimea for treatment of tuberculosis. This may have been a ruse to disguise his movements. See Hong Ha, V Strane Sovetov, pp. 83–84.
32. Letter to Treint, September 19, 1924, in Toan Tap II, vol. 1, p. 305; also see BNTS, vol. 1, pp. 231–34.
33. Report of Agent Désiré, April 10, 1925, in dossier labeled “1925,” in SPCE, Carton 365, CAOM; BNTS, vol. 1, pp. 237–38; Hong Ha, V Strane Sovetov, p. 85.
34. Hong Ha, V Strane Sovetov, p. 85.
IV | Sons of the Dragon
1. Some CCP members argued that the Kuomintang tepresented the bourgeois class in China and would eventually betray the revolution. Maring, who had recently created a similar “bloc within” among anticolonial groups in the Dutch East Indies, countered that Sun’s Party consisted of a “four-class alliance” between the nationalist bourgeoisie (a Marxist term for the mote prosperous members of the urban middle class), the petty bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the peasants. Such a def
inition opened the way for efforts by the CCP to strengthen revolutionary elements in the Kuomintang and move it to the left. See James Pinckney Harrison, The Long March to Power: A History of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1972 (New York: Praeger, 1972), pp. 49–51.
2. Information on Chau’s later career can be found in David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885–1925 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1971), and William J. Duiker, The Rise of Nationalism in Vietnam, 1900–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976). Sun’s promise to provide assistance is contained in S. L. Tikhvinskii, Sun Yat-sen: Vneshnepoliticheskie vozzreniya i praktika [Sun Yat-sen: Foreign policy views and practice) (Moscow: International Relations, 1964), p. 101.
3. By one Vietnamese estimate, less than 10 percent of Chau’s followers were peasants, in a land overwhelmingly rural. See Chuong Thau, “Moi quan he giua Ton Trong-son va Phan Boi Chau” [Relations between Sun Yat-sen and Phan Boi Chau], in NCLS, no. 88 (October 1966), p. 23.
4. See Paul Monet, Français et Annamites: Entre deux feux (Paris: Rieder, 1928), p. 40.
5. Quoted in Louis Roubaud, Vietnam: La tragédie indochinoise (Paris: Librairie Valois, 1931), p. 261.
6. Of the 40,000 Europeans living in Indochina in the 1920s, about half were dependents. One quarter were in the armed forces, and the remainder were government officials, professional people, or members of the mercantile class. See David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981), p. 24. Poincaré’s comment is in Roubaud, Vietnam, p. 268.
7. For a reference to the early years of Chieu’s party, see Megan Cook, The Constitutionalist Party in Cochinchina: The Years of Decline, 1930–1942 (Clayton, Australia: Monash University Papers on Southeast Asia, 1977), chapter 1.
8. Léon Werth, Cochinchine (Paris: Rieder, 1926), pp. 160–61.
9. Hong Ha, Ho Shi Min v Strane Sovetov [Ho Chi Minh in the Land of the Soviets] (Moscow: n.p., 1986), p. 89; HZY, p. 18. On disembarking in Canton, Nguyen Ai Quoc immediately wrote three letters to Moscow announcing his arrival. In a message to an unnamed acquaintance, he said that he was now living in a house with Borodin and two or three Chinese comrades. In a letter to Dombal, now general secretary of the Peasant International, he asked that the news of his departure be withheld from his colleagues, since he was in China illegally. He added a few remarks about the state of revolutionary work among the peasantry in south China, many of whom, he said, had already been organized by the Communists. He asked that propaganda materials be sent to Canton to enable him to intensify efforts to mobilize them for the revolutionary cause. In the third letter, to the editor of Rabotnitsa, he volunteered to continue writing articles for that journal, but asked that they be published as “letters from China” under a woman’s name. That, he said, would facilitate his effort to keep his identity and his location a secret. For copies of the three letters, all of which were recently discovered in the Comintern archives, see BNTS, vol. 1, pp. 237–39, and Toan Tap II, vol. 2, pp. 2–7. Kobelev, p. 86, states without attribution that Nguyen Ai Quoc got the job with the Comintern by applying to a want ad in a local newspaper. Given their acquaintance in Moscow and his comment in the letters cited above that he had immediately moved in with Borodin, it seems much more likely that Quoc had gone direcrly to Comintern headquarters on his arrival.
10. The Indian Communist M. N. Roy had argued against Lenin’s policy of seeking limited cooperation with bourgeois nationalist groups in the colonial and semicolonial areas, arguing that such parties would inevitably betray the revolution in the end. But Manuilsky had defended the tactic, arguing that since there were no revolutionaries in many of these countries, there was no choice. A compromise was reached, which authorized Communist support and cooperation with “national revolutionary” elements. In practice, the terms “bourgeois nationalist” and “national revolutionary” were often used interchangeably during these years. See Charles B. McLane, Soviet Strategies in Southeast Asia (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 36–40. Manuilsky’s comment to Nguyen Ai Quoc is reported in Xenia J. Eudin and Robert C. North, Soviet Russia and the East, 1920–1927 (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 326–28. For Nguyen Ai Quoc’s proposals to seek to establish cooperative relations with other anticolontal groups, see Toan Tap II, vol. 1, pp. 203–4, 251–52.
11. Both quotes are from Tran Van Giau, “The first influences of the Russian October revolution on Vietnamese politics,” Hoc Tap (August 1957), pp. 51, 64. In a report to Moscow on March 5, 1930, Nguyen Ai Quoc said much the same thing—see his “Bao cao gai Quoc Te ve Phong trao Cach Mang o An-nam” [A report to the Comintern on the revolutionary movement in Annam], in Van Kien Dang Toan Tap [Complete Party Documents], vol. 2 (Hanoi: Chinh tri Quoc gia, 1997), p. 32.
12. Ho Chi Minh, “Some considerations on the colonial question, in L’Humanité, May 25, 1922. This article is teptinted in Bernard B. Fall, ed., Ho Chi Minh on Revolution: Selected Writings, 1920–1966 (New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. 8–10.
13. Accounts of their trips to China and their reasons for doing so can be found in police interrogations contained in the French archives. For example, see the interrogation of Le Hong Son, October 24, 1932, in SPCE, Carton 367, CAOM. In 1922, Le Hong Son had reportedly assassinated Phan Ba Ngoc, a son of the famous Can Vuong rebel Phan Dinh Phung, for urging Phan Boi Chau to follow a course of reconciliation with the French—see Agathe Larcher, “La voie étroite des réformes coloniales et la collaboration franco-annamite (1917–1928),” in Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer vol. 82, no. 309 (December 1995) (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1995), p. 411. For the accounts of Truong Van Lenh and Le Quang Dat, see the interrogations dated February 3, 1932, and November 6, 1931, in SPCE, Carton 367, CAOM.
14. Dang Hoa, Bac Ho: Nhung nam thang o nuoc ngoai [Uncle Ho: The months and years abroad] (Hanoi: Thong tin, 1990), p. 64; HZYZ, p. 23. The name of the organization was reportedly adapted from the phrase “tam tam tu’ong ai” (hearts beating in mutual love)—see Tran Van Giau, Giai cap cong nhan Viet Nam [The Vietnamese working class], vol. 2 (Hanoi: Su That, 1961), pp. 367–68, According to the French historian Geotges Boudarel, leading members of the Tam Tarn Xa were influenced by the ideas of Liu Shifu and other anarchist Chinese intellectuals after their arrival in south China—see Boudarel, “L’extrême gauche asiatique et le mouvement national vietnamien (1905–1925),” in Pierre Brocheux, ed., Histoire de l’Asie du Sud-est: Révoltes, réformes, révolutions (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1981), p. 190.
15. The news account is from the South China Morning Post, cited in Boudarel, “L’Extrême gauche asiatique,” p. 185. For biographical information on Pham Hong Thai, see To Nguyet Dinh, Pham Hong Thai: (Saigon: Song Mai, 1957), and Tran Huy Lieu, Tai lieu tham khao lick su cach mang can dai Viet Nam [Historical research materials concerning the revolution in modern Vietnam], 12 vols. (Hanoi: n.p., 1958), vol. 4. On the initial choice of Le Hong Son as assassin, see To Nguyet Dinh, Pham Hong Thai, pp. 64–65, and the interrogation of Le Hong Son, October 24, 1932, in SPCE, Carton 367, CAOM.
16. For Le Quang Dar’s suspicions, see his interrogation of November 6, 1935, in SPCE, Carton 367, CAOM. According to To Nguyet Dinh, Pham Hong Thai, Thu had indeed informed the French about the plot, and had also informed them of the whereabouts of other members of the organization who, for the moment, were able to avoid French arrest. Dinh also claims that Le Hong Son did suspect Thu and attempted unsuccessfully to assassinate him—however, this seems unlikely, since Thu remained his colleague for the next several years (see pp. 118–19). For such suspicions, see Nguyen Ai Quoc o Quang Cbau [Nguyen Ai Quoc in Canton] (Hanoi: NXB Chinh tri Quoc gia, 1998), p. 53.
17. In taking credit for the attempt, Chau was at least partly correct, for the Tam Tarn Xa had maintained loose ties with his own organization, but he was apparently not directly involved. For references and a comment on Chau’s Truyen Pham Hong
Thai [The story of Pham Hong Thai], see Duiker, Rise of Nationalism, pp. 83–84. Chau declared that Thai had been motivated to carry our the plot after a conversation with Nguyen Ai Quoc, but that seems obviously fabricated, since the latter did not arrive in Canton until several months after Thai’s death.
18. The original February 19 report, written in French, is in the Revolutionary Museum in Hanoi. The letter dated December 18, 1924, is in the Ho Chi Minh Museum in the same city. Vietnamese translations are available in Toan Tap II, vol. 2, pp. 7–9 and Toan Tap I, vol. 1, pp. 314–16, respectively. References to the Indochinese Nationalist Party are in his “Gui doan chu tich Quoc te Cong san” [Report to the chairman of the Comintern], dated January 1, 1925, in Toan Tap II, vol. 2, pp. 5–6, and “Van de Dong Duong” [The problem of Indochina], n.d., in Toan Tap II, vol. 2, pp. 16–17. Nguyen Ai Quoc may have temporarily decided to use the name in deference to Phan Boi Chau’s recently created Vietnamese Nationalist Party.
Precisely how Quoc came in contact with members of the Tam Tam Xa is not clear. By the time he arrived, two of them were studying at the Whampoa Academy, and he might have learned of their names through colleagues at Comintern headquarters. Le Hong Son later told French interrogarors, however, that he had been introduced to Nguyen Ai Quoc by Lam Duc Thu. See his interrogation in SPCE, Carton 365, CAOM. Thu confirmed that supposirion-see Letter of Pinot to Noel, January 23, 1925, in ibid.
19. Phan Boi Chau nien bieu [A chronological biography of Phan Boi Chau] (Hanoi: Van su dia, 1955), p. 189; Huong Pho, “Gop phan danh gia tu tuong cua Phan Boi Chau” [A contribution to an analysis of the thought of Phan Boi Chau], in NCLS, no. 94 (September 1967), p. 24. Also see Anatoly A. Sokolov, Komintern i V’ietnam (Moscow: Iv Ran, 1998), pp. 22–26. Chau once confided to a friend that he was “too old” to understand many of the new doctrines.
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