Nghiên cứu Hồ Chí Minh như thế nào?
Sophie Quinn-Judge
Đại học Temple, Hoa Kỳ
Hồ Chí Minh tiếp tục là chủ đề gây tranh cãi trong cộng đồng người Việt
Hồ Chí Minh là nhân vật có ảnh hưởng lớn trong lịch sử chống thực dân. Đến năm 1920, ông đã lãnh đạo một nhóm nhỏ người dân thuộc địa của Pháp sống tại Paris và là chủ biên tờ báo của họ, Le Paria. Quỹ đạo ban đầu của cuộc đời ông tương tự như những người chống thực dân khác thuộc thế hệ hậu Thế chiến thứ Nhất, những người thất vọng vì thỏa hiệp hòa bình 1919 đã lờ đi số phận của họ cũng như không hứa hẹn gì về quyền tự quyết mà Tổng thống Mỹ Wilson đề xướng.
Chính trong khoảnh khắc vỡ mộng với Tây phương mà ông Hồ nhìn về Moscow và lời hứa Quốc tế Cộng sản. Giống như những người Ấn Độ, tưởng rằng sự trung thành với mẫu quốc sẽ được tưởng thưởng khi chiến thắng, giống như người Triều Tiên và Trung Quốc, đã từng hy vọng có nhượng bộ từ Hội nghị Hòa bình Paris, ông Hồ và các đồng chí tin rằng đã đến lúc cho những chiến lược mới. Ông bị thu hút bởi ý nghĩ rằng những người cách mạng Nga sẽ thuyết phục giai cấp công nhân phương Tây chiến đấu cho quyền của người dân thuộc địa.
Với các cây bút người Việt cánh tả lẫn cánh hữu, dường như không thể có nghiên cứu nghiêm túc về Hồ Chí Minh. Giai thoại thay thế cho sự phân tích thực sự quan điểm của ông và những đóng góp về chính sách sau 1945.
Khi ông Hồ đến Moscow mùa hè 1924, cuộc sống của ông bị cuốn vào những tranh cãi, tin đồn và bí mật của phong trào cộng sản. Điều này tạo ra khó khăn lớn cho giới sử gia ngày nay viết về Hồ Chí Minh. Nhìn từ quan điểm phương Tây trong thập niên 1960, sau chuyến thăm Moscow của ông Hồ, các lựa chọn của ông thật rõ ràng và dễ đoán; chúng ta cũng cho rằng chính sách của Quốc tế Cộng sản luôn được định ra rõ ràng. Chúng ta quên mất rằng Tôn Dật Tiên đã hợp tác với cộng sản Liên Xô năm 1923 và rằng việc ông Hồ đi sang Moscow năm 1924 có thể xem là sự mở rộng tìm kiếm hợp tác của những người theo chủ nghĩa dân tộc Việt Nam muốn tìm đồng minh ở cả Nhật, Trung Quốc, Mỹ và Pháp. Bi kịch lớn của ông Hồ là ông không bao giờ tìm ra cách thoát khỏi mối quan hệ ràng buộc này.
Huyền thoại kép
Năm 1945, khi Hồ Chí Minh bộc lộ mình là Chủ tịch của nước Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa độc lập, ông trở thành đối tượng cho đủ loại người viết, phân tích gia và tuyên truyền muốn giải thích ông cho thế giới hay sắp xếp hình ảnh của ông. Mặc dù có lúc ngắn ngủi ông cố kiểm soát tiểu sử của chính mình, nhưng nó không còn là lựa chọn cho một lãnh đạo không có quyền uy tuyệt đối. Sang thập niên 1950, ban tuyên truyền của đảng cộng sản dường như đã kiểm soát hình ảnh của ông như một lãnh tụ khôn ngoan, sáng suốt, xóa đi hầu hết cuộc cãi vã và đấu tranh chính trị trong đảng từ 1945 đến thập niên 1960. Hồ Chí Minh bị mắc kẹt trong cái mà tôi gọi là “huyền thoại kép” – cả phe tả lẫn phe hữu đều dần xem ông là một lãnh tụ tuyệt đối theo kiểu Mao hay Stalin. Hoặc ông là lãnh tụ thần thánh dành cả đời cho công cuộc độc lập của Việt Nam, hoặc ông là một nhân vật cộng sản độc tài, giả vờ là cha già dân tộc trong mắt thế giới bên ngoài trong khi lãnh đạo Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa thông qua thanh trừng, một cuộc cải cách ruộng đất tàn khốc, và hủy diệt tự do trí thức. Mặc dù kể từ khi chủ nghĩa cộng sản ở Liên Xô sụp đổ, đã xuất hiện một ít tiểu sử nghiêm túc và tinh tế về Hồ Chí Minh, nhưng theo tôi, nói chung người ta vẫn không muốn rũ bỏ thứ ngôn ngữ Chiến tranh Lạnh trước đây.
Dường như một số cây bút vẫn tin rằng cách nhanh nhất để làm suy yếu chính quyền Việt Nam hiện nay là hạ bệ danh tiếng của Hồ Chí Minh. Nhưng đây là trò chơi cũ rồi – nó cũng không có ảnh hưởng với ban lãnh đạo hiện tại đang dựa vào một nền kinh tế tăng trưởng nhờ đầu tư nước ngoài và hệ thống cà rốt và cây gậy khéo léo để dân chúng vâng lời. Về mặt chính trị, chính quyền cũng không có mấy liên hệ với Hồ Chí Minh dẫu cho từ năm 1991 họ đã tôn “Tư tưởng Hồ Chí Minh” lên thành ý thức hệ quốc gia.
Với các cây bút người Việt cánh tả lẫn cánh hữu, dường như không thể có nghiên cứu nghiêm túc về Hồ Chí Minh. Giai thoại thay thế cho sự phân tích thực sự quan điểm của ông và những đóng góp về chính sách sau 1945. Ví dụ, có nhiều cách kể về thái độ của ông trước vụ xử bắn bà Nguyễn Thị Năm, một địa chủ và tham gia công tác của hội phụ nữ của Việt Minh. Nhưng còn có rất nhiều tư liệu có sẵn cần được phân tích – từ báo chí, nguồn Đông Âu và Trung Quốc, chưa kể đến ấn bản Văn kiện Đảng mới nhất. Đã có ai thực sự đối chiếu tác phẩm về Cải cách Ruộng đất của Trần Phương hay Edwin Moise, vốn đặt ra nhiều câu hỏi về những năm đó? Ai hay cái gì chịu trách nhiệm cho cuộc thanh trừng đạt cao trào vào đầu năm 1956, khi, như Moise mô tả, “các tổ chức cũ” tại làng quê, gồm cả đảng Lao động và Việt Minh, bị giải thể và các đảng viên của họ bị bắt giam?
Tác giả cho rằng Hồ Chí Minh không phải là lãnh đạo uy quyền tuyệt đối như Mao Trạch Đông
Một điều hầu như không bao giờ thấy trong các bài viết của phương Tây hay người Việt hải ngoại về Hồ Chí Minh là sự chỉ trích ông từ phía những nhân vật ngang hàng, cụ thể là các lãnh đạo cộng sản người Việt. Nhưng đây chính là một cửa sổ cần được những người viết tiểu sử nghiêm túc mở ra. Dù chúng ta đã thoáng nhìn ra sự chỉ trích này nhờ các kho lưu trữ cộng sản từng bị đóng kín, nhưng nhu cầu cần xem xét kỹ không vì thế mà giảm đi. Sự phê phán của những người cộng sản trẻ hơn, quyết liệt hơn, những người đóng vai trò lãnh đạo của phong trào mà ông sáng lập, tỏ ra trước sau như một. Từ cuối năm 1930, ông Hồ bị phê phán là mang lập trường dân tộc, tiểu tư sản, và không hiểu biết vai trò của đấu tranh giai cấp trong cách mạng.
Bị chỉ trích từ nội bộ
Ví dụ, vào tháng Tư 1931, Trần Phú viết thư cho Văn phòng Ban phương Đông ở Thượng Hải, phàn nàn rằng hội nghị hiệp nhất tháng Hai 1930 do Hồ Chí Minh tổ chức, mà đã thành lập Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam, bị lây nhiễm tư tưởng của “các tổ chức cách mạng cũ” và đưa các địa chủ nhỏ và vừa tham gia cách mạng. Trần Phú viết: “Công tác của ‘hội nghị hiệp nhất’ này mang nặng dấu ấn của thời kỳ hợp tác giữa Quốc dân đảng và Đảng Cộng sản Trung Quốc, đặc biệt là chính sách hữu khuynh của Đảng Cộng sản Trung Quốc từ 1925 đến 1927.”
Nội bộ Đảng Cộng sản trong lịch sử không đoàn kết như nhiều chuyên gia từng nghĩ
Báo cáo của Hà Huy Tập về Đại hội Đảng Cộng sản Đông Dương tháng Ba 1935 ở Macao nói rõ là ảnh hưởng của Hồ Chí Minh đối với phong trào cộng sản Đông Dương khi đó đã bị bác bỏ. “Ở Xiêm cũng như ở Đông Dương, các tổ chức cộng sản đã tiến hành cuộc đấu tranh công khai chống lại những tàn dư của tư tưởng cách mạng-dân tộc, trộn lẫn với chủ nghĩa cải lương và duy tâm của Hội Thanh Niên và đồng chí Nguyễn Ái Quốc.” Đến cuối thập niên 1940 và một lần nữa vào năm 1962-63, chúng ta cũng có bằng chứng văn bản về cáo buộc rằng Hồ Chí Minh bị đảng của mình xem là sẵn lòng thỏa hiệp với phương Tây. Ví dụ vào năm 1947, lãnh đạo đảng khi đó, Trường Chinh, viết rằng Cách mạng Tháng Tám bị tổn hại vì thái độ nương nhẹ với những kẻ thù của cách mạng.
Còn năm 1963, chúng ta có bằng chứng từ kho tư liệu ngoại giao Đông Đức cho thấy Hồ Chí Minh bị cáo buộc hai sai lầm: năm 1945, ông thỏa hiệp với Pháp khi cho phép họ quay lại Việt Nam; năm 1954, lại thỏa hiệp lần nữa, đồng ý phân cắt Việt Nam tại vĩ tuyến 17. Đảng cộng sản khi đó đang mở chiến dịch “chống Xét lại” để dẹp ý tưởng rằng độc lập dân tộc có thể đạt được bằng phương pháp hòa bình. Biến cố này khiến tạm thời làm băng giá quan hệ giữa miền Bắc với Liên Xô và Đông Âu, nơi theo sau khủng hoảng tên lửa Cuba, có mong muốn cải thiện quan hệ với Mỹ. Vào ngày Giáng sinh 1963, Hồ Chí Minh nói với đại sứ Liên Xô ở Hà Nội rằng ông sẽ rút khỏi các công việc hàng ngày.
Nhưng thay vì xem xét chính sách của Hà Nội như quyết định của một tổ chức đảng chia rẽ và hay tranh cãi, nhiều người viết về lịch sử Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa có xu hướng xem mọi bằng chứng về chính sách cực đoan và đàn áp là của Hồ Chí Minh. Nếu đọc bình luận của người Việt hải ngoại, thì xu hướng quy kết này ngày càng rõ trong mấy năm qua khi bàn về giai đoạn sau của Cải cách Ruộng đất và Chỉnh đốn Đảng.
Trong năm nay 2011, 36 năm sau ngày kết thúc chiến tranh, sẽ là điều tốt lành nếu cộng đồng người Việt trên thế giới bắt đầu nghĩ về lịch sử theo một cách khác – như một cuộc tìm kiếm sự minh bạch mà không nhất thiết bắt đầu bằng việc tìm anh hùng và kẻ ác.
Sophie Quinn-Judge là Phó Giám đốc về Triết học, Văn hóa và Xã hội Việt Nam tại Đại học Temple, Hoa Kỳ. Bản dịch tiếng Việt được đăng với sự đồng ý của tác giả, sau khi Bấm bản gốc xuất hiện lần đầu trên Bấm Global Vietnamese Diaspora, trang web tập hợp các nghiên cứu về người Việt hải ngoại.
Tác giả: Sophie Quinn-Judge
Dịch giả: Hoài An và Diên Vỹ
Hiệu đính: Hồ Gươm
Thread thảo luận: Hồ Chí Minh - Những năm tháng chưa được biết đến [1]
Tác giả: Sophie Quinn-Judge
Dịch giả: Hoài An và Diên Vỹ
Hiệu đính: Hồ Gươm
Thread thảo luận: Hồ Chí Minh - Những năm tháng chưa được biết đến [1]
Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh (Ho the Most Enlightened) (1890–1969) became a world figure after the Second World War, during Vietnam’s long struggle for independence from France. Th e first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), which declared its independence in September 1945, Ho attained his greatest renown in the 1960s, during the DRV’s war against the United States for control of southern Vietnam. Yet by the end of 1963 he had become a largely symbolic leader, whose role in day-to-day decision making had ended. In a world of Communist strong men and tyrants, Ho was an exception: his moral authority did not give him any more power than his single vote in the politburo. Th e limitations on his power have only become clear in recent years, however, as fresh archival research has revealed the extent to which his leadership was contested within his own Communist Party.
Ho’s political ideas were mainly shaped in the twenty years between 1907 and 1927, the period from his adolescent years in the Nguyen dynasty’s capital of Hue to his flight from China following Chiang Kai-shek’s coup against the Communists in the United Front. He was born as Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1892 or 1893, according to French sources, in the rugged north-central province of Nghe An. While his years as a sailor and laborer have been strongly emphasized in official biographies, Ho was in fact the son of a successful mandarin, who by 1901 had passed the second-highest examination in the realm to become a teacher of Chinese in Hue. Ho’s father did not engage openly in anticolonial activity, but the fi rst decade of the 20th century was a time of ferment in his milieu, which could not have failed to affect him and his family. The French had removed all real power from the mandarinate in 1898, and scholars such as Phan Chu Trinh, a contemporary of Ho’s father, were refusing employment in the corrupt shell of the mandarin system. These scholars started a movement to encourage Western education and indigenous manufacturing. (Young Vietnamese men, Ho Chi Minh included, had until then studied the Chinese classics alone.) Another scholar from Ho’s own district in Nghe An, Phan Boi Chau, started the Dong Du (Eastern Travel) movement in 1906, which encouraged promising young men to join him in Japan to receive a modern education and military training. In 1908 when an anti-tax campaign broke out in central Vietnam, the French blamed the modernizing scholars and arrested a number of them. French troops responded to a peaceful demonstration in Hue by shooting into the crowd. Ho Chi Minh, around fi fteen at the time, witnessed this violence, and it would mark him for many years.
Ho’s father became a district mandarin in 1909, but an accusation of violence against a prisoner in his jurisdiction, which he contested, led to his demotion. Th is change in his father’s fortune forced Ho to withdraw from the prestigious National Studies School in Hue, where he was continuing his education in French and quoc ngu, the romanized Vietnamese script. His withdrawal marked the end of his formal education, unless one counts his studies in the Comintern’s institutes in Moscow. In 1911 both he and his father made their way to Saigon, from where Ho sailed for France. In view of what we now know of Ho’s family connections to Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Boi Chau, we can surmise that Ho was being sent abroad to receive a Western education that would prepare him to play a role in Vietnam’s struggle for independence.
After working as a shipboard cook for over a year, and having failed to gain admission to a French academy that trained the sons of “high” mandarins, Ho turned up in London in 1913 or 1914, where he worked at odd jobs and studied English. He remained in London until the end of 1916, then returned to France to consult his colleagues on the future path of the independence movement. From then until the middle of 1919, when he appeared in Paris for the Peace Conference at the close of the First World War, his movements are uncertain. But there are indications in the French and Russian archives that in 1917–18 he lived in the United States, where he heard Marcus Garvey speak in Harlem and consulted Korean independence activists. When he turned up in Paris, he began circulating a petition with the “Demands of the
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Vietnamese People” for greater freedom. It was signed, “Nguyen Ai Quoc” (Nguyen the Patriot), for the Group of Vietnamese Patriots. Although Ho received help in writing this appeal from his colleague Phan Van Truong, a professional interpreter and lawyer, the idea of addressing the Peace Conference was probably his own.
Ho would be known as Nguyen Ai Quoc for the next twenty years, even though he frequently used other pseudonyms. The campaign to win concessions from the Paris Conference failed, but Ho stayed on in France to canvass support from the Socialist Party and other sympathetic organizations. When his fi rst contacts with the radicals of the Socialist Party began is uncertain, but by 1920, when a group that affi liated itself with the Third International split from the rest of the party, he joined them and thus became a founding member of the French Communist Party. By this time he had discovered Lenin’s views on imperialism, and eagerly embraced the theories of the Comintern on support to anticolonial movements. He devoted himself to political organizing from this time onward, even though he was suffering from poor health and had to earn his living. He joined the “Union Intercolonial,” composed of Africans, Caribbeans, Malagasies, and a number of his Vietnamese colleagues. This union, whose newspaper Le Paria Ho edited, became his primary political base until he departed in secret for Moscow in June 1923. His political life in Paris had become too circumscribed by police surveillance.
Ho’s arrival in Moscow is often described as the result of Dimitri Manuilski’s recruitment efforts, but this explanation probably attributes too much clarity and purpose to the Comintern’s dealings with Ho. (Although he would be attached to the Comintern until 1941, his status and official roles were often vaguely defined.) His trip to Moscow was organized by the Intercolonial Union, and it is uncertain that the Comintern had long-term plans to employ him when he arrived in 1923. He attended the first congress of the Peasant International (Krestintern) that October, and joined their presidium. After a number of months in Moscow he wrote a letter complaining that he had only expected to remain for three months, before moving on. He was eager to return to Southeast Asia to establish relations between the International and Indochina. But his return would not take place until November 1924, following his participation in the Fifth Comintern Congress, where he lobbied actively for more Comintern attention to the plight of colonized peoples. When the Comintern bureaucracy fi nally granted his
Ho Chi Minh
wish to travel to Canton, he was sent as a translator in the Russian news agency’s bureau, without any official cover.
Ho’s time in Canton was a productive and formative stage in his career. He used part of his translator’s salary to fund the training of Vietnamese émigrés in Guangzhou in Leninist concepts of revolution. He and his nucleus of like-minded Vietnamese took part in the propagandizing and peasant organizing connected with the United Front. By 1926 they were able to bring a group of young Vietnamese to China for a three-month training course, followed by a second, which produced the fi rst cell of Vietnamese Communists. They did not have their own party until 1930, so were organized into a front group known as the Thanh Nien or Youth Association. The inner core became members of the CCP. Ho was believed to have discouraged a military uprising in Vietnam in 1926, which would have coincided with the start of the Northern Campaign in China, as his network of political trainees was still too small. When in April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist coup reached Canton, Ho had to depart rapidly.
He returned via Vladivostok to Moscow, then traveled to Paris, Brussels, and on to Berlin, to wait for a new assignment and funding for his return to Asia. Th is eventually came, but with money only to enough fi nance his return travel, and he was given no clear instructions beyond the suggestion that he should use his experience in China to start forming peasant unions. Ho was not invited to attend the Sixth Comintern Congress in Moscow, so made his way back to Asia, this time Siam, in the summer of 1928. He lived among the Vietnamese in northeastern Siam until mid-1929, when he was summoned to Hong Kong by the Th anh Nien leadership, to sort out the quarrels of rival Communist groups in Vietnam. He called a quick conference in Hong Kong in February 1930 for representatives of the two factions, and was able to patch together a draft party program that was in theory acceptable to both sides. Th us February 1930 became the founding date of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
This event, which has always been presented in official histories as a triumph for Ho Chi Minh, was the beginning of a stormy year for the VCP and in fact marked the start of Ho’s first political eclipse. He was sent by the Far Eastern Bureau to Singapore to form a national CP for Malaya, then remained in Hong Kong to carry on liaison work. The members of the new party within Vietnam apparently came under the influence of the
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Ho Chi Minh
“revolutionary upsurge” then gaining ground in China, in the newly militant spirit of the Sixth Comintern Congress. Ho had no apparent directing role in the brief soviet movement, which broke out in his native region of central Vietnam in the autumn of 1930, and in fact his leadership was criticized in a party plenum that October. A new set of political theses in line with the Comintern’s new course replaced his short program, and party leadership was handed over to a Moscow trainee named Tran Phu. Ho attempted to give advice to his comrades, under siege in the spring of 1931, but was dismissed by Tran Phu as a product of the United Front in China, whose petty bourgeois influence had been harmful to the party. Th e entire Central Committee and most of the provincial leaders were arrested in the spring of 1931. Th e British police picked up Ho Chi Minh in June.
Ho narrowly escaped deportation to Vietnam from Hong Kong, and after a long appeal process was expelled from the British colony. He hid somewhere in China until he reestablished contact with the Comintern and got passage back to Russia. There is sufficient documentation in the Comintern archives to show that Ho was in eclipse during this stay in Moscow. His arrival in mid1934 did not merit a hero’s welcome; instead he was sent to study at the Lenin School for cadres, along with Li Lisan. As preparations were underway for the Seventh Comintern Congress, two letters arrived from his party denouncing Ho’s leadership as petty bourgeois and accusing him of serious lapses in security. These may have been the reason that his mandate for the Seventh Congress was revoked. He remained in Moscow afterward, and later wrote that he had been removed from any role in his party in those years. He studied at the Institute for National and Colonial Problems until the autumn of 1938, when he was fi nally given the green light to return to southern China to help build a united anti-Fascist front.
The undermining of Ho’s authority from 1931 until 1938 set a pattern for his later career. His position was strongest when united fronts were the order of the day, as in 1924–27. On his return to China he had considerable difficulty in rebuilding contact with his party. Only in May 1941 was he able to hold a meeting, the Eighth Plenum, with members of the CC from inside Vietnam. It was then that Ho convinced them to form the Viet Minh alliance with other non-Communist parties and to concentrate on national liberation before a Socialist revolution. His other great coup was to convince the OSS to train and provide small arms to his group in the Viet Bac in mid-1945. This alliance allowed the Viet Minh to enter Hanoi in late August 1945 as liberators sponsored by the United States, following the Japanese surrender.
Ho’s Declaration of Independence on September 2, 1945, did not win his new government recognition. Th e disorganization and lack of cohesion of the Viet Minh front in South Vietnam, where rival Communist groups existed, made it relatively easy for the French to regain control in Saigon. Ho exhibited his skills in diplomacy and political maneuvers, but failed to secure his new state. He broadened his government, giving posts to his Nationalist rivals, and ordered the Communist party to go underground, to reassure the international community. But the French continued to press for a return to Hanoi. Ho signed a modus vivendi with France in March 1946, which arranged for the occupying Nationalist Chinese troops to be replaced by the French. He was willing to accept a place in the French Overseas Union, so long as Vietnam controlled its own government, army, and finances. But negotiations dragged on, with the French insisting that South Vietnam was an independent state. Ho returned from an extended trip to France for the Fontainebleau negotiations empty-handed. In December the French attack on the Haiphong customs post led to all-out war, and the Viet Minh retreated from Hanoi to the maquis.
Vietnamese appeals to the United States to intervene failed; by mid-1947, as the Cold War hardened attitudes in Europe, Communist movements in Southeast Asia returned to armed struggle. Ho once again came under attack within his party for negotiating with France and “disbanding” the CP. In 1950, after the Communist Chinese victory, he followed Mao Zedong to Moscow for talks, and Mao convinced Stalin to accept Ho’s leadership of the DRV. But during Ho’s absence, a rival leader, Truong Chinh, asserted his control over the party, and when Ho returned to the maquis, he was increasingly given the role of “soul” of the Vietnamese revolution, while Truong Chinh became its “commander.” With Stalin’s consent, Chinese advisers began to play a major role in the Vietnamese party’s practice and ideology. Th e first phases of land reform got underway, and in 1952 a Party Rectification Campaign began to replace village leaders who belonged to the land-owning classes. By 1954 when the Geneva Conference brought peace to Vietnam, now divided at the 17th parallel, the political climate was quite different from that of 1945. The land reform campaign had intensified, growing more violent and often classifying middle peasants as landlords. It was probably
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Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress in Moscow that made possible criticism of the land reform from within the party and led, in October 1956, to a public apology for the campaign’s excesses.
Ho Chi Minh did not take the lead in the relaxation of ideological and cultural policies that occurred briefly in 1956. But he presided over them as acting general secretary after Truong Chinh was removed and the cadres associated with the excesses of land reform were demoted. He supported Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence at the Communist summit of 1957, and again in 1961. However, by this time it had become clear that the Diem regime in South Vietnam would not hold elections as stipulated in the Geneva Agreements, and at the Third Party Congress in 1960 the party had already decided to reunify the country by force if necessary. A new first secretary, Le Duan, who was determined to aid the southern revolution, had been confi rmed. In 1963 the Vietnamese became increasingly impatient with Khrushchev’s policies and began to support Chinese attacks on his revisionism. At the end of 1963 at the Ninth Party Plenum, a resolution was passed to make Vietnam’s foreign and internal policies follow those of China. Several memoirs maintain that Ho’s opinions were ignored at this meeting. At a Christmas meeting with the Soviet ambassador that year, Ho announced that he would be retiring from the day-to-day running of the country. The Ninth Plenum seems to have been a personal defeat for him, although he did not disagree with the policy of making reunification a priority. He probably did disapprove the unequivocal condemnation of Soviet revisionism, however.
After 1964 the frail Ho increasingly became a symbol of the David-and-Goliath struggle between the tiny DRV and the United States. He received southern fi ghters and was photographed at anti-aircraft batteries. He met foreign visitors and issued inspiring messages to his people. He undertook foreign missions to win support for the DRV. But his influence on political decisions by this stage is unclear. It was sometimes hinted that he was growing senile, but American peace envoys who met him in 1967 described him as still sharp enough to converse in English and as requesting that they send their correspondence to him directly. His trips to China for medical treatment and rest grew more frequent, however, and he in fact spent most of 1967 there. He survived long enough to witness the beginning of peace negotiations in Paris in 1968, but also observed the hardships his people were enduring because of the war. In his “Last Will and Testament,” part of which was suppressed, he requested tax relief for farmers and expressed a wish that the split in the Socialist camp be mended.
A Soviet embalming team was already in Vietnam when Ho died in September 1969. With considerable difficulty his body was preserved until it could be placed in its tomb on Ba Dinh Square in 1976. Thus Ho Chi Minh, against his will, became the cult figure of the Communist dynasty begun in 1945. Ironically, although he often was at odds with the policies of his party, he became the source of its legitimacy as the force of Communist ideology waned. His every writing and speech is combed for sources of Ho Chi Minh Thought, the closest thing that Vietnam now possesses to a guiding ideology. Some writers describe him as a prisoner of the system he created. He was in many respects a prisoner, but it is diffi cult to say that he created the system. It may be more accurate to say that he was a captive of his need for Communist support to win independence. This seriously restricted Ho’s political options throughout his career.
See also Anti-imperialism; Cold War; Comintern; Decolonization; Nationalism; Vietnam War.
FURTHER READING
Brocheux, P. Ho Chi Minh: du révolutionnaire à l’icône . Paris:
Editions Payot and Rivages, 2003. Duiker, W. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Goscha, C. E., and B. de Tréglodé. Naissance d’un Etat-Parti:
Le Vietnam depuis 1945. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2004. Lacouture, J. Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography. Paris: Editions
du Seuil, 1967. Quinn-Judge, S. Ho Chi Minh: Th e Missing Years. London:
Christopher Hurst, 2003.
SOPHIE QUINNJUDGE
389
Copyrighted Material
Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh (Ho the Most Enlightened) (1890–1969) became a world figure after the Second World War, during Vietnam’s long struggle for independence from France. Th e first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), which declared its independence in September 1945, Ho attained his greatest renown in the 1960s, during the DRV’s war against the United States for control of southern Vietnam. Yet by the end of 1963 he had become a largely symbolic leader, whose role in day-to-day decision making had ended. In a world of Communist strong men and tyrants, Ho was an exception: his moral authority did not give him any more power than his single vote in the politburo. Th e limitations on his power have only become clear in recent years, however, as fresh archival research has revealed the extent to which his leadership was contested within his own Communist Party.
Ho’s political ideas were mainly shaped in the twenty years between 1907 and 1927, the period from his adolescent years in the Nguyen dynasty’s capital of Hue to his flight from China following Chiang Kai-shek’s coup against the Communists in the United Front. He was born as Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1892 or 1893, according to French sources, in the rugged north-central province of Nghe An. While his years as a sailor and laborer have been strongly emphasized in official biographies, Ho was in fact the son of a successful mandarin, who by 1901 had passed the second-highest examination in the realm to become a teacher of Chinese in Hue. Ho’s father did not engage openly in anticolonial activity, but the fi rst decade of the 20th century was a time of ferment in his milieu, which could not have failed to affect him and his family. The French had removed all real power from the mandarinate in 1898, and scholars such as Phan Chu Trinh, a contemporary of Ho’s father, were refusing employment in the corrupt shell of the mandarin system. These scholars started a movement to encourage Western education and indigenous manufacturing. (Young Vietnamese men, Ho Chi Minh included, had until then studied the Chinese classics alone.) Another scholar from Ho’s own district in Nghe An, Phan Boi Chau, started the Dong Du (Eastern Travel) movement in 1906, which encouraged promising young men to join him in Japan to receive a modern education and military training. In 1908 when an anti-tax campaign broke out in central Vietnam, the French blamed the modernizing scholars and arrested a number of them. French troops responded to a peaceful demonstration in Hue by shooting into the crowd. Ho Chi Minh, around fi fteen at the time, witnessed this violence, and it would mark him for many years.
Ho’s father became a district mandarin in 1909, but an accusation of violence against a prisoner in his jurisdiction, which he contested, led to his demotion. Th is change in his father’s fortune forced Ho to withdraw from the prestigious National Studies School in Hue, where he was continuing his education in French and quoc ngu, the romanized Vietnamese script. His withdrawal marked the end of his formal education, unless one counts his studies in the Comintern’s institutes in Moscow. In 1911 both he and his father made their way to Saigon, from where Ho sailed for France. In view of what we now know of Ho’s family connections to Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Boi Chau, we can surmise that Ho was being sent abroad to receive a Western education that would prepare him to play a role in Vietnam’s struggle for independence.
After working as a shipboard cook for over a year, and having failed to gain admission to a French academy that trained the sons of “high” mandarins, Ho turned up in London in 1913 or 1914, where he worked at odd jobs and studied English. He remained in London until the end of 1916, then returned to France to consult his colleagues on the future path of the independence movement. From then until the middle of 1919, when he appeared in Paris for the Peace Conference at the close of the First World War, his movements are uncertain. But there are indications in the French and Russian archives that in 1917–18 he lived in the United States, where he heard Marcus Garvey speak in Harlem and consulted Korean independence activists. When he turned up in Paris, he began circulating a petition with the “Demands of the
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Vietnamese People” for greater freedom. It was signed, “Nguyen Ai Quoc” (Nguyen the Patriot), for the Group of Vietnamese Patriots. Although Ho received help in writing this appeal from his colleague Phan Van Truong, a professional interpreter and lawyer, the idea of addressing the Peace Conference was probably his own.
Ho would be known as Nguyen Ai Quoc for the next twenty years, even though he frequently used other pseudonyms. The campaign to win concessions from the Paris Conference failed, but Ho stayed on in France to canvass support from the Socialist Party and other sympathetic organizations. When his fi rst contacts with the radicals of the Socialist Party began is uncertain, but by 1920, when a group that affi liated itself with the Third International split from the rest of the party, he joined them and thus became a founding member of the French Communist Party. By this time he had discovered Lenin’s views on imperialism, and eagerly embraced the theories of the Comintern on support to anticolonial movements. He devoted himself to political organizing from this time onward, even though he was suffering from poor health and had to earn his living. He joined the “Union Intercolonial,” composed of Africans, Caribbeans, Malagasies, and a number of his Vietnamese colleagues. This union, whose newspaper Le Paria Ho edited, became his primary political base until he departed in secret for Moscow in June 1923. His political life in Paris had become too circumscribed by police surveillance.
Ho’s arrival in Moscow is often described as the result of Dimitri Manuilski’s recruitment efforts, but this explanation probably attributes too much clarity and purpose to the Comintern’s dealings with Ho. (Although he would be attached to the Comintern until 1941, his status and official roles were often vaguely defined.) His trip to Moscow was organized by the Intercolonial Union, and it is uncertain that the Comintern had long-term plans to employ him when he arrived in 1923. He attended the first congress of the Peasant International (Krestintern) that October, and joined their presidium. After a number of months in Moscow he wrote a letter complaining that he had only expected to remain for three months, before moving on. He was eager to return to Southeast Asia to establish relations between the International and Indochina. But his return would not take place until November 1924, following his participation in the Fifth Comintern Congress, where he lobbied actively for more Comintern attention to the plight of colonized peoples. When the Comintern bureaucracy fi nally granted his
Ho Chi Minh
wish to travel to Canton, he was sent as a translator in the Russian news agency’s bureau, without any official cover.
Ho’s time in Canton was a productive and formative stage in his career. He used part of his translator’s salary to fund the training of Vietnamese émigrés in Guangzhou in Leninist concepts of revolution. He and his nucleus of like-minded Vietnamese took part in the propagandizing and peasant organizing connected with the United Front. By 1926 they were able to bring a group of young Vietnamese to China for a three-month training course, followed by a second, which produced the fi rst cell of Vietnamese Communists. They did not have their own party until 1930, so were organized into a front group known as the Thanh Nien or Youth Association. The inner core became members of the CCP. Ho was believed to have discouraged a military uprising in Vietnam in 1926, which would have coincided with the start of the Northern Campaign in China, as his network of political trainees was still too small. When in April 1927 Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist coup reached Canton, Ho had to depart rapidly.
He returned via Vladivostok to Moscow, then traveled to Paris, Brussels, and on to Berlin, to wait for a new assignment and funding for his return to Asia. Th is eventually came, but with money only to enough fi nance his return travel, and he was given no clear instructions beyond the suggestion that he should use his experience in China to start forming peasant unions. Ho was not invited to attend the Sixth Comintern Congress in Moscow, so made his way back to Asia, this time Siam, in the summer of 1928. He lived among the Vietnamese in northeastern Siam until mid-1929, when he was summoned to Hong Kong by the Th anh Nien leadership, to sort out the quarrels of rival Communist groups in Vietnam. He called a quick conference in Hong Kong in February 1930 for representatives of the two factions, and was able to patch together a draft party program that was in theory acceptable to both sides. Th us February 1930 became the founding date of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
This event, which has always been presented in official histories as a triumph for Ho Chi Minh, was the beginning of a stormy year for the VCP and in fact marked the start of Ho’s first political eclipse. He was sent by the Far Eastern Bureau to Singapore to form a national CP for Malaya, then remained in Hong Kong to carry on liaison work. The members of the new party within Vietnam apparently came under the influence of the
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Ho Chi Minh
“revolutionary upsurge” then gaining ground in China, in the newly militant spirit of the Sixth Comintern Congress. Ho had no apparent directing role in the brief soviet movement, which broke out in his native region of central Vietnam in the autumn of 1930, and in fact his leadership was criticized in a party plenum that October. A new set of political theses in line with the Comintern’s new course replaced his short program, and party leadership was handed over to a Moscow trainee named Tran Phu. Ho attempted to give advice to his comrades, under siege in the spring of 1931, but was dismissed by Tran Phu as a product of the United Front in China, whose petty bourgeois influence had been harmful to the party. Th e entire Central Committee and most of the provincial leaders were arrested in the spring of 1931. Th e British police picked up Ho Chi Minh in June.
Ho narrowly escaped deportation to Vietnam from Hong Kong, and after a long appeal process was expelled from the British colony. He hid somewhere in China until he reestablished contact with the Comintern and got passage back to Russia. There is sufficient documentation in the Comintern archives to show that Ho was in eclipse during this stay in Moscow. His arrival in mid1934 did not merit a hero’s welcome; instead he was sent to study at the Lenin School for cadres, along with Li Lisan. As preparations were underway for the Seventh Comintern Congress, two letters arrived from his party denouncing Ho’s leadership as petty bourgeois and accusing him of serious lapses in security. These may have been the reason that his mandate for the Seventh Congress was revoked. He remained in Moscow afterward, and later wrote that he had been removed from any role in his party in those years. He studied at the Institute for National and Colonial Problems until the autumn of 1938, when he was fi nally given the green light to return to southern China to help build a united anti-Fascist front.
The undermining of Ho’s authority from 1931 until 1938 set a pattern for his later career. His position was strongest when united fronts were the order of the day, as in 1924–27. On his return to China he had considerable difficulty in rebuilding contact with his party. Only in May 1941 was he able to hold a meeting, the Eighth Plenum, with members of the CC from inside Vietnam. It was then that Ho convinced them to form the Viet Minh alliance with other non-Communist parties and to concentrate on national liberation before a Socialist revolution. His other great coup was to convince the OSS to train and provide small arms to his group in the Viet Bac in mid-1945. This alliance allowed the Viet Minh to enter Hanoi in late August 1945 as liberators sponsored by the United States, following the Japanese surrender.
Ho’s Declaration of Independence on September 2, 1945, did not win his new government recognition. Th e disorganization and lack of cohesion of the Viet Minh front in South Vietnam, where rival Communist groups existed, made it relatively easy for the French to regain control in Saigon. Ho exhibited his skills in diplomacy and political maneuvers, but failed to secure his new state. He broadened his government, giving posts to his Nationalist rivals, and ordered the Communist party to go underground, to reassure the international community. But the French continued to press for a return to Hanoi. Ho signed a modus vivendi with France in March 1946, which arranged for the occupying Nationalist Chinese troops to be replaced by the French. He was willing to accept a place in the French Overseas Union, so long as Vietnam controlled its own government, army, and finances. But negotiations dragged on, with the French insisting that South Vietnam was an independent state. Ho returned from an extended trip to France for the Fontainebleau negotiations empty-handed. In December the French attack on the Haiphong customs post led to all-out war, and the Viet Minh retreated from Hanoi to the maquis.
Vietnamese appeals to the United States to intervene failed; by mid-1947, as the Cold War hardened attitudes in Europe, Communist movements in Southeast Asia returned to armed struggle. Ho once again came under attack within his party for negotiating with France and “disbanding” the CP. In 1950, after the Communist Chinese victory, he followed Mao Zedong to Moscow for talks, and Mao convinced Stalin to accept Ho’s leadership of the DRV. But during Ho’s absence, a rival leader, Truong Chinh, asserted his control over the party, and when Ho returned to the maquis, he was increasingly given the role of “soul” of the Vietnamese revolution, while Truong Chinh became its “commander.” With Stalin’s consent, Chinese advisers began to play a major role in the Vietnamese party’s practice and ideology. Th e first phases of land reform got underway, and in 1952 a Party Rectification Campaign began to replace village leaders who belonged to the land-owning classes. By 1954 when the Geneva Conference brought peace to Vietnam, now divided at the 17th parallel, the political climate was quite different from that of 1945. The land reform campaign had intensified, growing more violent and often classifying middle peasants as landlords. It was probably
388
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Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress in Moscow that made possible criticism of the land reform from within the party and led, in October 1956, to a public apology for the campaign’s excesses.
Ho Chi Minh did not take the lead in the relaxation of ideological and cultural policies that occurred briefly in 1956. But he presided over them as acting general secretary after Truong Chinh was removed and the cadres associated with the excesses of land reform were demoted. He supported Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence at the Communist summit of 1957, and again in 1961. However, by this time it had become clear that the Diem regime in South Vietnam would not hold elections as stipulated in the Geneva Agreements, and at the Third Party Congress in 1960 the party had already decided to reunify the country by force if necessary. A new first secretary, Le Duan, who was determined to aid the southern revolution, had been confi rmed. In 1963 the Vietnamese became increasingly impatient with Khrushchev’s policies and began to support Chinese attacks on his revisionism. At the end of 1963 at the Ninth Party Plenum, a resolution was passed to make Vietnam’s foreign and internal policies follow those of China. Several memoirs maintain that Ho’s opinions were ignored at this meeting. At a Christmas meeting with the Soviet ambassador that year, Ho announced that he would be retiring from the day-to-day running of the country. The Ninth Plenum seems to have been a personal defeat for him, although he did not disagree with the policy of making reunification a priority. He probably did disapprove the unequivocal condemnation of Soviet revisionism, however.
After 1964 the frail Ho increasingly became a symbol of the David-and-Goliath struggle between the tiny DRV and the United States. He received southern fi ghters and was photographed at anti-aircraft batteries. He met foreign visitors and issued inspiring messages to his people. He undertook foreign missions to win support for the DRV. But his influence on political decisions by this stage is unclear. It was sometimes hinted that he was growing senile, but American peace envoys who met him in 1967 described him as still sharp enough to converse in English and as requesting that they send their correspondence to him directly. His trips to China for medical treatment and rest grew more frequent, however, and he in fact spent most of 1967 there. He survived long enough to witness the beginning of peace negotiations in Paris in 1968, but also observed the hardships his people were enduring because of the war. In his “Last Will and Testament,” part of which was suppressed, he requested tax relief for farmers and expressed a wish that the split in the Socialist camp be mended.
A Soviet embalming team was already in Vietnam when Ho died in September 1969. With considerable difficulty his body was preserved until it could be placed in its tomb on Ba Dinh Square in 1976. Thus Ho Chi Minh, against his will, became the cult figure of the Communist dynasty begun in 1945. Ironically, although he often was at odds with the policies of his party, he became the source of its legitimacy as the force of Communist ideology waned. His every writing and speech is combed for sources of Ho Chi Minh Thought, the closest thing that Vietnam now possesses to a guiding ideology. Some writers describe him as a prisoner of the system he created. He was in many respects a prisoner, but it is diffi cult to say that he created the system. It may be more accurate to say that he was a captive of his need for Communist support to win independence. This seriously restricted Ho’s political options throughout his career.
See also Anti-imperialism; Cold War; Comintern; Decolonization; Nationalism; Vietnam War.
FURTHER READING
Brocheux, P. Ho Chi Minh: du révolutionnaire à l’icône . Paris:
Editions Payot and Rivages, 2003. Duiker, W. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Goscha, C. E., and B. de Tréglodé. Naissance d’un Etat-Parti:
Le Vietnam depuis 1945. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2004. Lacouture, J. Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography. Paris: Editions
du Seuil, 1967. Quinn-Judge, S. Ho Chi Minh: Th e Missing Years. London:
Christopher Hurst, 2003.
SOPHIE QUINNJUDGE
389
Copyrighted Material
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