20. Phan Boi Chau’s letter to Nguyen Ai Quoc is reported in Annex 6, note by Noel, no. 144, in SPCE, Carton 365, CAOM. On February 3, 1925, Quoc reported to the Comintern on a meeting with a veteran patriot, but did not mention the individual’s name or the date of the meeting. Phan Boi Chau’s account is in Phan Boi Chau nien bieu, pp. 201–2. The problem is complicated by the fact that many Vietnamese used the lunar calendar at that time. See Note by Noel, no. 158, May 24, 1925, in SPCE, Carton 365, CAOM, and Pinot’s letter to Noel, January 23, 1925, in SPCE, Carton 364, CAOM.
21. For Nguyen Ai Quoc’s report to the Comintern itemizing these plans, see his letter dated February 19, 1925, in the Revolutionary Museum.
22. It has long been suspected that Lam Duc Thu was a French agent, but until recently, proof has been lacking. Now Thu’s identity as the “Pinot” in Sûreté files is convincingly established in materials contained in the French archives at CAOM. French official efforts to identity Ly Thuy are recorded in a series of cables between Canton, Hanoi, and Paris during the first six months of 1925 and contained in SPCE, Carton 364, CAOM. The Sûreté was appatently able to prevent Nguyen Ai Quoc from discovering that he had been identified. The snapshot is still in the French archives.
23. The proclamation is contained in “Proclamation de la Ligue des Peuples Opprimés à l’occasion de sa formation,” Envoi no. 190, July 18, 1925, in dossier labeled “1950”, in SPCE, Carton 366, ibid. For a detailed analysis of the various names for the Revolutionary Youth League, see Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism, 1925–1945 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 63–64. As Khanh pointed out, there were a number of variations in the title of the organization, even within the movement. For convenience I have chosen to stick with the customary title.
24. Komsomolskaya Pravda, May 1, 1969. A copy is located in the Indochina Archives at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas.
25. This letter, addressed to Petrov and dated May 21, 1924, is located in the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi and in the Comintern archives in Moscow. Also see Kobelev, p. 70.
26. Throughout the report, the author uses the term “Annam” as opposed to Vietnam or Indochina. A copy is located in Alain Ruscio, ed., Ho Chi Minh: Textes, 1914–1969 (Paris: L’Harmattam, n.d.), pp. 76–78. I agree with Ruscio that from the context, Nguyen Ai Quoc was probably the author of this report. Not only was he the only Comintern official in Moscow knowledgeable about conditions in Indochina, but a number of remarks in the report relating to the need to end the Eurocentric attitude in the FCP and within the Comintern itself, as well as suggestions for future initiatives, appear to match his own ideas on the subject. Researchers in Hanoi agree—the report is included in Toan Tap, II, vol. 2, pp. 464–69.
27. See Ruscio, Textes, p. 76.
28. The text of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s letter, written in early April, is contained in SPCE, Carton 364, CAOM. For another discussion, see Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 172–75. The French were apparently quite anxious to obtain a copy of the tract, which they thought Huyen might have written in cooperation with Phan Boi Chau. Their agent Pinot (Lam Duc Thu) explained that he had not been able to distract Quoc long enough to steal it, and his camera broke. See Note by Noel, no. 153, May 22, 1925, in SPCE, Carton 365, CAOM.
29. For Phan Boi Chau’s complaint that Nguyen Ai Quoc was ignoring him, see Annex 196, July 24, 1925, in SPCE, Carton 365, CAOM. Some sources claim that the funds for Chau’s trip were provided by the Revolutionary Youth League. Chau’s letters to Quoc and Ho Tung Mao are conrained in Annexes 6 and 7 to Note by Noel, no. 144, in ibid. In the letter to Quoc, Chau reminisced about reciting drunken verses to the younger man two decades earlier and said that even then he knew Quoc would be a savant. For the exchange between Phan Boi Chau and Nguyen Ai Quoc, also see HZYZ, p. 24.
30. Suspicions by league members that the guilty party was Nguyen Thuong Huyen are contained in Envoi no. 210, September 6, 1925, in SPCE, Carton 365, CAOM. For Phan Boi Chau’s own conclusions on the matter, see Phan Boi Chau Nien biev, pp. 202–3. Lam Duc Thu was charged with responsibility for the act in an article by Dao Trinh Nhat in the October 30, 1948, issue of the Vietnamese-language journal Cai Tao. The author cited the remarks of Phan Boi Chau’s old associate Prince Cuong De, who in his own memoirs claimed that in later years Lam Duc Thu had often bragged that he had initiated the plot on the grounds that Chau’s arrest would make good propaganda for the revolution. This is probably the key source for the suspicion that he was the responsible party. See Cuoc doi cach mang Cuong De [The revolutionary life of Cuong De] (Saigon: Nam Viet, 1957), pp. 120–21. At least one member of the league agreed—see “Déclarations de Le Quang Dat et Ly Phuong Duc,” in Saigon report, July 28, 1931, in SPCE, Carton 367, CAOM. Also see Joseph Buttinger, Viet-Nam: A Dragon Embattled (New York: Praeger, 1967), vol. 1, p. 80. For the assertion that the decision was Nguyen Ai Quoc’s, see Huy Phong and Yen Auh, Nhan Dien Ho Chi Minh [Exploring the Ho myth] (San Jose, Calif: Van Nghe, 1988), pp. 32–37. For Hanoi’s rebuttal, see Vietnamese historian Chuong Thau’s “Phan Boi Chau qua mot so sach bao mien nam hien nay” [Phan Boi Chau in a recent book published in South Vietnam], in NCLS, no. 67 (October 1964).
31. A message from the Sûreté Générale in Hanoi to the French concession in Shanghai, dated September 26, 1931, refers to the fact that the latter had introduced an informer into Ho Hoc Lam’s household in Hangzhou prior to Phan Boi Chau’s arrest—see SPCE, Carton 369, CAOM.
32. In his report to the Comintern in March 1930 (cited in note 11, above), Quoc conceded that Chau’s arrest had spurred the growth of the nationalist movement in Indochina—see Van kien Dang Toan Tap, vol. 2, p. 33. Also see Nguyen Ai Quoc o Quang Chau, pp. 66–67.
33. The informer was Lam Duc Thu. See Report of Agent Pinot, April 12, 1926, annex to Note by Noel, no. 300 of May 8, 1926, in SPCE, Carton 368, CAOM, cited in Larcher, “La voie étroite,” p. 413.
34. Nguyen Ai Quoc may have also feared that such actions would only result in putting French authorities on guard against league activities in Canton. See Note 273, “Renseignements de l’informateur habituel à Canton,” April 22, 1926, in dossier labeled “Nguyen Ai Quoc 1926–1927,” in SPCE, Carton 368, CAOM.
35. HZYZ, pp. 24–27. Interview with Le Xien Heng, director of the Canton Revolutionary Museum. Also see Thep Moi, “Uncle Ho in Canton,” Vietnam Courier, no. 48 (May 1976), p. 29. Sometimes the neighboring building was used as well. There is some confusion in the evidence on the date when the institute was moved to Wen Ming Street, since memoirs by or interrogations of ex-students are not consistent. For sources, see the interrogation of Le Hong Son, October 24, 1932, in SPCE, Carton 367, CAOM, and Le Manh Trinh’s recollections, “Dans le Kouang Toung et au Siam,” in Souvenirs sur Ho Chi Minh, p. 99. When classes became too large, they were moved to a CCP-owned building nearby—see ZYG, p. 11.
36. Thep Moi, “Uncle Ho,” p. 26.
37. Ibid, p. 28.
38. Hoang Zheng says in HZYZ, p. 25, that the institute had three terms, each lasting three to four months. The first class opened with ten students in early 1926, and classes continued until the spring of 1927. By the third term, there were over fifty students enrolled. For statistics on enrollment, see Nguyen Ai Quoc o Quang Chau, pp. 56–59. Nguyen Ai Quoc wrote a letter to the Comintern seeking permission to send students to Moscow (dated January 5, 1925; see BNTS, vol. 1, p. 250).
39. Nguyen Ai Quoc o Quang Chau, p. 86; Vu Tho, “Qua trinh thanh lap dang vo san o Viet Nam da duoc dien ra nhu the nao?” [How did the process of forming the proletarian party in Vietnam take place?], in NCLS, no. 71 (February 1965), p. 18, citing Hong The Cong, Essai d’histoire du mouvement communiste en Indochine. Also see Tran Huy Lieu, Tai lieu tham khao, vol. 4, pp. 132–33. Each branch was composed of cells consisting of five members.
40. Nguyen Ai Quoc, “Indochine,” in Ho Chi Minh: Ecrits (Hanoi: Foreign Lang
uages Press, 1977), p. 14. The article originally appeared in Cahiers du Communisme, no. 15 (May 1921).
41. Huynh Kim Khanh corrected earlier misconceptions about the journal Thanh Nien. See his Vietnamese Communism, p. 67.
42. Nguyen Ai Quoc o Quang Chau, p. 102. Copies of almost all issues of Thanh Nien are available in SLOTFOM, Series V, Carton 16, CAOM.
43. The pamphlet was printed in linotype by the Propaganda Bureau of the Association of Oppressed Peoples of Asia. According to the memoirs of some party veterans who had attended the school, it was a compilation of the lectures that Nguyen Ai Quoc presented to students during the training program. Many of the ideas bore a sttong resemblance to those published in the journal Thanh Nien, but in a more coherent form. A complete version is available in Toan Tap II, vol. 2, pp. 177–254. The spelling of “kach menh” in the Vietnamese title conforms to contemporary usage in Quoc’s home province of Nghe An.
44. Ibid., p. 186. It is interesting to note that the tetm Quoc uses for “global unity”—thien ha da dong—is taken from the Chinese tian xia da tong, the traditional Confucian term for a final era of eternal peace and unity. The author was obviously assuming that his audience would be familiar with the concept.
45. For example, in his 1924 report on conditions in Indochina written in Moscow, Nguyen Ai Quoc had assumed that when Vietnam launched its own armed revolt against the French, that uprising would take place simultaneously with a proletarian revolution in France and would be supported by Soviet economic and military assistance, while a Soviet flotilla would sit offshore to prevent assistance to the French by any foreign power. See Ruscio, Textes, pp. 73–74. While describing the process in The Revolutionary Path, Quoc may have been hoping that an uptising in Indochina would be supported by Chinese Nationalist troops crossing the border from south China—see the dossier labeled “Nguyen Ai Quoc 1926–1927,” in SPCE, Carton 368, CAOM. It is noteworthy that he always viewed the liberation of his country in conjunction with events abroad.
46. Toan Tap II, vol. 2, p. 187.
47. Ibid., pp. 197, 203.
48. Ibid., pp. 178–79.
49. This perhaps is one reason that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) did not publish the pamphlet during his lifetime, and that only excerpts appeared in scattered works written by historians in Hanoi. The complete version was not republished until 1981 in Toan Tap I; in a December 3, 1990, interview the chief editor of the collection, Nguyen Thanh, told me that some factual errors had been corrected in the text. Thanh remarked that Ho Chi Minh did not originally want the pamphlet to be published in the DRV. See Vu Tho, “From ‘The Revolutionary Path’ to the ‘Political Program’ of the Indochinese Communist Party,” in NCLS, no. 72 (March 1965).
50. Cited in Georges Garros, Forceries humaines (Paris: André Delpeuch, 1926), p. 241.
51. Ruscio, Textes, p. 71.
52. See Report by Noel, annex no. 228, November 28, 1925, in SPCE, Carton 365, CAOM. In a report to the Comintern on December 19, 1924, Nguyen Ai Quoc remarked that whether the Constitutionalist Party could be “used” depended upon “the attitude of the French government and our cleverness”—see Toan Tap II, vol. 2, p. 14.
53. Comintern archives in Moscow, Carton 495, series 154, file 555, cited in Sophie Quinn-Judge, “Ho Chi Minh: New Perspectives from the Comintern Files,” The Vietnam Forum, no. 14 (1994), p. 65. The quote from the Second Congress is from “The Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions,” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1950).
54. A flagrant example of this tactic is located in “Déclarations dernières de Nguyen Dinh Tu—dit provisoirement Phan Van Cam, dit Van Cam dit Nguyen Van Cam—sur sa vie depuis juin 1925 jusqu’à son arrestation en date du 5 août 1929 à Ha Tînh,” an intelligence report in Dossier 2690, Carton 335, CAOM. It is not clear, however, whether such tactics in luring new candidates into the Revolutionary Youth League took place while Nguyen Ai Quoc was in Canton, or after his departure. For his report on the Constitutionalists, see BNTS, vol. 1, p. 242; a full copy is located in the Revolutionary Museum in Hanoi.
55. In his courses at the institute, Quoc regularly criticized Nguyen Hai Than’s Vietnamese Nationalist Party, comparing it with the Second International in Europe. See Tran Van Giau, Giai cap cong nhan Viet Nam [The Vietnamese working class], vol. 1 (Hanoi: Su That, 1957), p. 392.
56. BNTS, vol. 1, pp. 260, 265; King C. Chen, Vietnam and China, 1938–1954 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 22; Hong Ha, V Strane Sovetov, p. 109; Nguyen Ai Quoc o Quang Chau, pp. 127–29, 155. Peng Pai died in the service of the revolution in 1929.
57. See HZYZ, p. 33, and Nguyen Ai Quoc o Quang Chau, p. 145. Quoc spoke in French under the name Wang Hai-jen. A Vietnamese translation is available in Toan Tap II, vol. 2, pp. 213–17.
58. The source of much of this information was the French agent Lam Due Thu himself. See the Hanoi report, October 28, 1931, in SPCE, Carton 367, CAOM, and “La conversation entre Pinot et Noel,” July 4, 1926, in dossier labeled “Nguyen Ai Quoc 1926–1927,” in SPCE, Carton 368, CAOM. See also “Lam Duc à M. D.,” January 29, 1927, in dossier labeled “Nguyen Ai Quoc 1926–1927,” in ibid. For Tuyet Minh’s physical characteristics, see the interrogation of Lesquiendieu [Le Quang Dat], October 28, 1931, in SPCE, Carton 367, CAOM. For the rumor that Quoc had a daughter from this marriage, see Nguyen Khac Huyen, Vision Accomplished (New York: Collier, 1971), p. 8.
59. ZYG, p. 11; Dang Ho, Bac Ho, p. 75; T. Lan, Vua di duong, vua ke chuyen [Walking and talking] (Hanoi: Su that, 1976), p. 32; interrogation of Truong Van Lenh, February 7, 1932, in SPCE, Carton 367, CAOM.
60. See Envoi 354, January 1, 1927, and Noel reports of April 10, 1926, December 27, 1926, and June 1, 1927 in SPCE, Carton 368, CAOM. The French became aware of the feud through Lam Duc Thu. The latter and Nguyen Hai Than themselves eventually had a falling our. See “Lettres de Pinot,” April 8 and 14, 1927, in the dossier labeled “Nguyen Ai Quoc, 1926–1927,” in ibid.
61. See Pinot’s agent report dated May 7–9, 1928, in SPCE, Carton 365, CAOM.
V | The Magic Sword
1. Several sources have asserted that he took a different route, joining a group of Soviet refugees traveling from Shanghai directly across China through the Gobi Desert, following the route taken earlier by Mikhail Botodin and his party. See Kobelev, pp. 90–91; ZYG, p. 11; Dang Hoa, Bac Ho: Nhung nam thang o nuoc ngoai (Uncle Ho: The months and years abroad) (Hanoi: Thong tin, 1990), p. 75. There is some plausibility to this assumption, since “Pinot” reported to his control “Noel” that he had received letters from Nguyen Ai Quoc mailed from Hankou in June 1927. But Quoc’s own letter to the Dalburo, written after his arrival in Moscow, makes it clear that he went through Vladivostok. Perhaps he wrote the message to Thu to throw possible pursuers off the scent. The letter to the Dalburo is contained in the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi. Also see a Vietnamese translation in Toan Tap II, vol. 2, pp. 241–244.
2. He argued that “other comrades” could replace him in Shanghai, but not in Siam. Letter to the Dalburo, in BNTS, I, 285–86.
3. For Quoc’s request that the Stalin school set up a Vietnamese section, see Toan Tap II, vol. 2, pp. 255–56. Also consult Hong Ha, Ho Ski Min v Strane Sovetov [Ho Chi Minh in the land of the Soviets] (Moscow 1986), pp. 115–18. For information on Tran Phu, see Ton Quang Duyet, “Mot vai y kien bo sung ve lich su hai dong chi Tran Phu va Nguyen Thi Minh Khai” [Some opinions on the history of comrades Tran Phu and Nguyen Thi Minh Khai], in NCLS, no. 139 (July–August 1971). Other Vietnamese students at the Stalin School were Nguyen The Rue, Ngo Duc Tri, Bui Cong Trung, and Bui Lam. Quoc’s colleague Le Hong Phong was temporarily enrolled in an aviation school in Leningrad. See BNTS, vol. 1, pp. 284–87.
4. The letter is available in a Vietnamese version in Toan Tap II, vol 2., pp. 167–68. For a contemporary Comintern report on revolutionary tasks in Indochina, see “Directives pour le travail en Indochine,” in the Russian C
enter for the Preservation and Study of Contemporary Historical Documents], Moscow, Carton 495, Series 154, file 556.
5. The conference had been convened to oppose the rise in international tensions and the growing danger of a new world war. See “His Many Names and Travels, Vietnam Courier (May 1981), p. 9. Also see Charles Fenn, Ho Chi Minh: A Historical Introduction (New York: Scribner, 1973), p. 51; BNTS, vol. 1, p. 290; Avec l’Oncle Ho, p. 61; Charles Fourniau and Léo Figuères, eds., Ho Chi Minh: Notre Camarade (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1970). P. 43, and Hong Ha, V Strane Sovetov, pp. 124–25.
6. The letters are contained in a Vietnamese version in Toan Tap II, vol 2., p. 265 and BNTS, vol. 1, pp. 292–94.
7. BNTS, vol. 1, p. 296. In another letter sent at the same time, he told a friend: “You can understand how I am in my spiritual and material state. There is much work to do but I can do nothing, I have nothing to eat, and no money. Today is April 12, can I expect to hear in twenty-four hours?” Ibid., p. 297.
8. According to a letter dated April 28, 1928, the costs were to be borne by the Dalburo. See BNTS, vol. 1, p. 300. Funds for the Comintern and all its subordinate organizations were provided by the Soviet state. For his letter to the Dalburo, see ibid., p. 302.
9. T. Lan, Vua di duong, vua ke chuyen [Walking and talking] (Hanoi: Su that, 1976), pp. 35–36. A contact with the Italian Communist Party had suggested taking a French ship to Siam, but Quoc rejected the idea as too risky—see Hong Ha, V Strane Sovetov, pp. 127–28.
10. Le Manh Trinh, “Dans le Kouang Toung et au Siam,” in Souvenirs, p. 102.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 104; Thep Moi, “Uncle Ho in Canton,” Vietnam Courier, no. 48 (May 1976), p. 24.
13. Nash Prezident Ho Shi Minh [Our President Ho Chi Minh] (Hanoi: Foreign Language Press, 1967), p. 142.
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