The Father of All Things

by Tom Bissell

  Around this time Vladimir Lenin ordered the French Communist Party to join the international organization of parties known as the Comintern. The FCP's radicals agreed, but its moderates did not. Ho Chi Minh sided with the radicals, even though he still knew so little about formal Communism at this point that he was heard to ask what Marxism meant. Ho's writings soon darkened considerably, and his letters to Vietnam became so revolutionary in tone that the colonial French authorities were soon monitoring their recipients. Yet, as a historian writes, “one can only be amazed at how little [Ho's writings] offer: most of them are polemic tirades about some obscure French official in some remote province who beat up his houseboy, raped the kitchen-maid's daughter, and closed the village school.”

  In 1923, one year before his idol Lenin's death, Ho made his first trip, by invitation, into the Soviet Union. How was Ho Chi Minh greeted in the young socialist Utopia? He was arrested. Eventually Ho became a well-known foreign Communist in Moscow and grew close to the prominent Soviets Nikolai Bukharin and Grigory Zinoviev. Photos of Ho at this time reveal a young, tie-wearing man of Mormon intensity. Ho's first break came as Mikhail Borodin's translator in Canton, China, though he understood his real job to be setting the stage for Communist revolution in Vietnam. China at the time was home to several anticolo-nial movements of ethnic Vietnamese, few of them Communist but many violently opposed to the French. As often as possible, Ho Chi Minh infiltrated such groups and Marxified them from within. In 1930, working closely with Soviet agents, he founded the Vietnamese Communist Party, later the Indochinese Communist Party, later the Vietnam Workers’ Party, and later yet again the Vietnamese Communist Party. In 1931, British authorities collared Ho in Hong Kong during a regional crackdown on radicalism, the first of his several arrests. A British official judged Ho to be “one of the worst agitators in the region” and went on to say that

  one's sporting instincts of course are in favor of letting the man go to Russia instead of in effect handing him over to his [French] enemies, but I think that this is a case for suppressing those instincts. Revolutionary crime in Annam is a really low-down dirty business, including every kind of murder, even burning public officers alive and torturing them to death. For much of this crime Nguyen is personally responsible, and it is not in his favour that he has directed the affairs from afar instead of having the guts to go and take a hand in things himself.

  But Ho was released, possibly because he agreed to inform on his colleagues to British intelligence, possibly because it was decided he was ineligible for extradition to French-controlled territory. By 1934, Ho Chi Minh was back in Moscow. This was a bad time to be in Moscow. Joseph Stalin's Great Terror—a scourge so fanatically thorough that even President Mikhail Kalinin's wife was arrested—was transforming from a storm into a whirlwind. Ho's old comrades Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Borodin were all purged and executed. According to Duiker, there is some evidence that Ho himself was investigated during the Great Terror, which if true means that Ho Chi Minh is one of the only human beings known to have emerged from the other side of Stalinist justice. By 1938, Ho was begging the regime that killed his friends “not to leave me too long without activity and aside and outside the Party.” He was finally given a job lecturing on Vietnamese history at a Soviet institute. In other words, Ho Chi Minh walked into an evil insane asylum and made it out alive, apparently unshaken, and seeking the encouragement of mass murderers. Indeed, a file has a Soviet handler speaking of “special plans” for her Indochinese comrade.

  Was he, then, a Stalinist? If so, Stalin is not believed to have been fond of Ho, nor Ho of Stalin. (Ho's relationship with China's Mao Zedong, despite Ho's early fervor in translating Mao's work into Vietnamese, was similarly tenebrous. Ho is said to have privately and caustically referred to Mao as the “Celestial Emperor,” and Mao's regard for the Vietnamese in general was negligible.) It took Stalin five revealingly long years to recognize Ho Chi Minh's regime once it declared its independence, and Stalin treated Ho so poorly during his first state visit to Moscow (a highlight: “Oh, you Orientals—you have such rich imaginations”) that Nikita Khrushchev later described Stalin's behavior as “disgusting.” All of which would appear to argue against Ho's Stalinist credentials. Unfortunately for Ho's admirers, his Stalinist proclivities became discernible during North Vietnam's August Revolution in 1945, the purges of North Vietnam's government soon thereafter, and the infamous land reform campaigns of the mid-1950s.

  Ho's behavior following the August Revolution is most easily defended. During World War II, Vietnam had been controlled by the Nazi collaborators of Vichy France and then by the Empire of lapan. With a small amount of covert U.S. assistance, Ho and the Viet Minh waged guerrilla war against the lapanese. (Another of Ho's duties was rescuing American pilots shot down over the South China Sea. Virtually none of the U.S. agents or soldiers Ho worked with or rescued was later contacted by the U.S. government for their insights into Ho's motivations.) The orphaned colonial nation of Vietnam emerged from the chaos of World War II with no clear master and in the midst of a lapanese-caused famine that would kill one to two million Vietnamese. In August 1945, Ho Chi Minh filled the power vacuum by walking into Hanoi's Ba Dinh Square and taking his perch on the balcony of the French municipal theater building. Before 400,000 people, Ho proclaimed the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam—” probably the swiftest and most bloodless Communist takeover on record,” according to the historian Bernard Fall. It was the first time Ho, who was now fifty-five, had ever been in Hanoi and one of the first times he publicly used the name Ho Chi Minh. Ho could not use the name Nguyen Ai Quoc, as Quoc was a known Soviet agent, and Ho was aware that the Party did not yet have the support of the masses. For similar reasons Ho had formally dissolved the Indochinese Communist Party to create the illusion that a nationalist rather than a Communist party was coming to power. As Ho was founding his nation on purely nationalist pretenses that even Duiker admits were false, the forces of Free France rushed en masse into the similar vacuum left in Saigon to the south.

  France's ultimate refusal to recognize the legitimacy of Ho's Hanoi-based government created numerous problems. While Ho attempted for appearance's sake to cobble together a representative government, some of Ho's colleagues within the Viet Minh were less solicitous and began murdering those who opposed them; there are references at this time to “Ho and his gang of cutthroats.” Nevertheless, given his precarious situation, it is hard to imagine that Ho was giving overmuch thought to which class enemies should be shot. One of the non-Communist nationalists assassinated by the Viet Minh was Ngo Dinh Khoi, the older brother of South Vietnam's future president Ngo Dinh Diem. Khoi's crime was having collaborated with the Japanese against the Viet Minh, and his son was killed alongside him. In Stanley Karnow's telling, Diem was brought before Ho six months after his brother's death. When Diem accused Ho of having murdered Khoi, Ho said, “I knew nothing of it. I had nothing to do with your brother's death.” To his face Diem called Ho “a criminal who has burned and destroyed the country.” Ho Chi Minh, far from being a merciless Stalinist, offered Diem a job. When the offer was refused, he let Diem go.

  The purges of Ho's representative government in the years leading up to the First Indochina War are less easily defended. The first results of Ho's August Revolution were not promising: a nation split in two, standing foreign armies all over the country, an unstoppable famine devastating the population, and no diplomatic recognition. The Japanese, despite their surrender to the United States, were taking their time in leaving Vietnam. To Ho's horror, the war's victorious Allied powers gave the (not yet Communist) Chinese the duty of occupying the northern half of Vietnam while the Japanese withdrew, and the British were charged with overseeing the Japanese withdrawal from Vietnam's southern half. Skirmishing among these forces, the Viet Minh, and various other indigenous Vietnamese political groups (one a scurvy gang of river pirates) inevitably broke out. All the while, the French were attempting to once again don
the colonial mantle, forcing Ho to negotiate with the French while attempting to placate the Chinese while attempting to earn the amity of the British while attempting to downplay his own Communism with his friends in the United States while attempting to keep open channels with a now extremely distrustful Stalin—to little avail, forcing Ho to conclude, famously, that Vietnam stood “quite alone.” Not even Ho's old allies in the French Communist Party (who were far more Stalinist than Ho) would help him, as they did not wish to harm their chances in the imminent national election by appearing to support colonial independence, an unadmired position among the average French. “We cannot trust Ho,” said the chief of France's Communist Party. “He is a Trotskyite at heart.”

  In 1945, Ho found himself at the helm of Vietnam during its pivotal point in history—and his fledgling showpiece government was falling apart. North Vietnamese Communist ideologues such as Truong Chinh were arguing that not enough blood had been spilled, non-Communist nationalists were complaining of being bullied, Trotskyist factions hostile to Ho were gaining in strength, the French were unyielding…. “Independence is the thing,” runs one of Ho Chi Minh's more amoral maxims. “What follows will follow.”

  While Ho was in France in late 1945, attempting to prevent war and rid Vietnam of all occupying forces, his friend and colleague General Vo Nguyen Giap began to annihilate all who might oppose the Communist line within the ranks of Hanoi's government and beyond. Thousands were executed, imprisoned, or forced into exile. Whether Ho gave the actual order for this purge is doubtful, but the purge would have needed his consent. That Ho made sure he was out of the country suggests some awareness on his part of the deed's blackness, especially after he had urged against similar measures in the past. (While in France, Ho ran into David Ben-Gurion, the future first president of Israel. Ho liked Ben-Gurion so much that he offered Hanoi for the Israelis’ use as a government-in-exile home base.) In March 1946, Ho, wishing above all else to avoid war, returned to Vietnam and argued for his political life in favor of allowing the French a temporary reentry into Vietnam. While the purge had presumably rid his government of those who would have opposed this strategy most strongly, many of Ho's closest allies, even General Giap, were alarmed by Ho's concession. “Can't you understand what would happen if the Chinese stayed?” Ho asked them. “You are forgetting our past history. Whenever the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French, on the other hand, can stay only a short time. Eventually, they will have to leave.” To the Vietnamese people themselves, Ho said, “I swear I have not betrayed you.”

  The French did leave, ultimately, though at dreadful cost, after the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. At roughly the same time, the Chinese, whose Communist Party had come to power in 1949, flooded into Vietnam to help along little brother's revolution. The arrival of Chinese Communists in North Vietnam would create a lasting split within Ho's party, due in large part to the disaster of North Vietnam's various land reform campaigns, which had begun in 1953.

  What was land reform? Land reform—the product of men inclined to think in terms of the “middle peasantry”—was supposed to rid Vietnam of its putatively wealthy landowners and turn their holdings over to the people. Some type of land reform was badly needed in North Vietnam, as a tiny percentage of its people, many of them Catholic, owned a huge portion of its land. “Landlords” had been despised in Vietnam long before the social abacus of Communism slid them over into a distinct class. The North's Communist Chinese advisers were adamant about implementing land reform. Ho Chi Minh resisted, saying he was “in no hurry” to redistribute land. But the reform went ahead anyway. The first step was something called “thought reform,” wherein the peasants were taught why the landlords deserved what they had coming to them. Communist cadres worked Vietnamese peasants into furies against the landlords, who owed them, they were told, “blood debts.” The second step was confronting the landlords.

  Land reform initially involved a few dozen villages; it then spun out of control. The peasants quickly ran out of landlords and turned on the next richest class, and the next, then one another; mock trials and bloody executions speedily became land reform's major distinctions. This was all likely by design. The North Vietnamese Maoist Truong Chinh believed fervently in the historical necessity of class war. (One Vietnamese joke has it that Truong Chinh understood only one part of Ho Chi Minh's most famous dictum, “There is nothing more precious than freedom and independence.” The part Chinh understood was “There is nothing.”) Ho rejected class war, mindful of the fact that even the wealthiest farmers barely made a living. Still, Chinh argued that at least 5 percent of the population had to be eliminated. Apparently he did not care which 5 percent: a landowner who had once sheltered Chinh was sentenced to death, and Chinh did nothing to interfere. Duiker writes, “Although Ho Chi Minh may have been appalled at the indiscriminate violence that accompanied the campaign, in the view of one Vietnamese observer, he had been intimidated by Mao Zedong and was afraid to contradict Chinese officials.” Indeed, already China's “advisers” in Vietnam had liquidated several Vietnamese Communists for complaining about excessive Chinese influence.

  By 1956, thousands of people had been executed during North Vietnam's experiment with land reform. How many thousands? Duiker calls this magic number “highly controversial,” adding that even “sympathetic observers” concede that at least 3,000 people were killed. Others put the number at 15,000 or 30,000. CIA propaganda of the time claimed it was 50,000, and Michael Lind says it could be as high as 100,000. What finally soured the Party on the campaigns was sobering reports that many honored Viet Minh veterans were being denounced and killed.

  It has been written that Ho Chi Minh's famous post-land reform apology to the Vietnamese people was “a remarkable achievement,” that the “equivalent in the West would be for a president or prime minister to confess that he committed treason against the nation.” While this view seems overly marvelous, it is true that Ho Chi Minh's was the first unambiguous apology—and remains one of the only—made by any Communist leader to his people. Ho claimed, in part, that the land reform abuses had occurred “because I lacked a spirit of democracy, I didn't listen and didn't see.” General Giap also apologized and admitted that the Communists had “executed too many honest people…. [Sjeeing enemies everywhere, we resorted to terror.” Real action was taken by Ho, from removing the vicious revolutionary Hoang Quoc Viet from the Politburo to the spontaneous release of 12,000 prisoners to Truong Chinh's dismissal as general secretary (though Chinh would years later avenge himself). Unfortunately, the apology did not mark the end of the killing. In Ho Chi Minh's home province of Nghe An an antigovernment protest erupted, the first in North Vietnam since the end of the First Indochina War. The unrest came from a Catholic region that had traditionally supported the Viet Minh and was purged anyway. This brief resistance was crushed.

  The final disaster of land reform was the resulting abandonment of the Party by most of North Vietnam's intellectuals, who until the debacle had been ideologically moderating influences. As a result, Ho Chi Minh, a man capable of great mercilessness (in 1958 he urged that “rightist” writers in North Vietnam be destroyed and once spoke of “hatred” as being his most powerful weapon), would serve as the Party's main ideological ballast until his death in 1969.

  Was Ho Chi Minh a Stalinist, then? Almost everyone who met Ho, with the exception of Joseph Stalin and the Indian Communist Man-abendra Nath Roy, found him a man of genuine warmth. Many Chinese diplomats living in Hanoi wished that the gentle, learned Ho were their leader instead of the dour, crude Mao. The stories of Ho's personal kindness (such as when, in the middle of the jungle, in the middle of a war zone, he found champagne for some OSS officers) are more numerous than those of his occasional political brutality. He was also largely unmoved by strict ideology: “No peasant will understand this,” he once said when handed an impenetrably Leninist broadside. Tellingly, the most militant of Vietnam's Communists—men brutal enough to have pu
rged the author of North Vietnam's national anthem—came largely to ignore Ho, and Ho came to distrust them, particularly Le Duan. By the end of his life Ho had little political power; he was, as he put it, a “flag” for Vietnam.

  Ho once maintained that after his service to the Soviet Union in the 1930s (which, it is quite possible, did disillusion him), he was no longer committed to the cause of world Communism. Long after lying about it would have served any purpose, many of Ho's comrades spoke of his lasting disappointment at falling out of the United States’ favor, and until the United States dispatched its advisers to South Vietnam, anti-American sentiment was virtually unknown among North Vietnam's Communists, much unlike their fellows in China and the USSR. Meanwhile, freedom lovers in the U.S. government delayed the publication of a memoir by Archimedes Patti, one of Ho's OSS handlers, until the 1980s, for the high crime of containing a positive portrait of Ho Chi Minh.

  Perhaps simple nuance is what the life of Ho Chi Minh rather fruitlessly argued for. For instance, the basic Communist is a rank-and-fileist who may or may not be violent but is unlikely to see much broad success due to incurable mental rigidity. The Commuleftist is sympathetic to Communist causes but not doctrinaire, operates mostly under nonviolent banners, almost always lives in a democracy, and can be highly principled. The Communationalist believes in the sometimes violent liberation of oppressed people under a Communist pretext, despite being unmindful of or ill educated about the particulars of Communism. The Commufascist may or may not believe in doctrinaire Communism and is distinguished primarily by an absolute willingness to engage in (or assist those engaging in) all manner of violence in order to retain power.

  Holders of such disparate philosophies are often unified by opposition rather than finding one another naturally, which can be discerned by how poorly Communist countries have generally gotten along. (In many cases not even republics within the Soviet Union had good relations with one another.) Ho Chi Minh had the ill luck to be a moderately reasonable Communationalist at a time when the vanguards and moneylenders of Communism were monstrous Commufascists. The tragedy comes when one attempts to reckon how the story could have gone any other way. The leap of American imagination needed to come to Ho Chi Minh's aid was almost certainly too far. If, however, Americans could remember a war that had allied them with the Commufascist Stalin, they could surely imagine stranger bedfellows than a Communationalist such as Ho Chi Minh.