Stalinists, trotskyists and revolution in Vietnam in 1945

Vietnam: the background

French imperialism had first reached Vietnam in 1867, subjugating the fiercely nationalist population twenty years later with the creation of the Indochinese Union, which remained pan of the French empire until 1941. The taking of Paris by Hitler’s armies was the signal to Japanese imperialism to invade into Indochina, and its forces remained there throughout the war. In March 1945, as the Allied victory neared, the Japanese installed a puppet emperor, Bao Dai.

Japan’s imminent demise, and the impotence of the Vietnamese bourgeois and landowning classes, caused administrative chaos and a devastating famine through the summer. The working class political parties that had gone underground or disappeared during the war re-organised.

In 1945 the Trotskyists pursued a defeatist policy against all foreign imperialisms, calling for national liberation struggle to be combined with social revolution, and basing themselves on the working class centres, particularly Saigon. The Struggle group, which had pursued the united front policy in the 1930s, re-constituted itself in May 1945, its leader Ta Thu Thau who had recently been released from the Poulo Condor island concentration camp travelling north to organise the movement there. The Internationalist Communist League led by Lu Sanh Hanh (author of Some Stages … see p61 in this pamphlet) issued a manifesto on March 24th calling for struggle against Japan to be combined with the struggle for workers’ power; members of the group led the workers of the Go Yap tram depot near Saigon, who later organised a workers’ militia which played a vital role in the August revolution.

The Stalinist strategy, on the other hand, was to wage guerrilla war against the Japanese, receiving aid first from the Chinese Kuomintang and then from the American imperialists. The Vietminh front was founded in 1941 in Kwangsi, southern China, which was then under Kuomintang control. ‘From the beginning, the Vietminh asked for aid from the Chinese Kuomintang government … The Vietminh offered its services in gathering information in Indochina and creating a local military force for joint action against the Japanese.’ (Marxism in South East Asia, ed F Trager, Stanford University, 1946).

Ho collaborated with the American imperialists from 1942 to 1945, giving tactical assistance and intelligence to General Wedemeyer, Head of Southern Command (Chungking), General Gallagher of the Special Command Section, and General William Donovan of the ass (forerunners of the CIA). (Details in Ho Chi Minh, by W Warbey, pp 78-80, and Vietnam by Stanley Karnow, pp 138-9). (Of course revolutionaries have often accepted aid from imperialist powers during war, but it must be remembered that here the policy of the Vietminh was not defeatist, but supported the ‘democratic’ imperialists of China, France and the US against the axis powers.)

The Vietminh sought to avoid confrontation with the French forces, replacing their slogan ‘drive out the Japanese and French’ with ‘drive out the Japanese fascists’. (Quotations from VCP documents, reprinted in Breaking Our Chains, Hanoi 1960, p 11).

The Vietminh, which was effectively a ‘popular front’, including the property-owning classes, had a programme of national liberation and agrarian reform, but in line with the Stalinist theory of ‘stages’, specifically excluded the establishment of workers’ power. In May 1945, as Japan collapsed, the Stalinists established a ‘liberated zone’ in the six northern provinces. The property of foreigners was taken over, but that of Vietnamese bourgeois and landowners preserved. The Stalinists’ aim was, in their own words:

‘1. To disarm the Japs before the entry of Allied forces into Indochina; ’2. To wrest the power from the hands of the enemy; ’3. To be in a position of power when receiving the Allied forces.’ (Factual Records of the Vietnam August Revolution, an official publication, quoted in Trager, p 151).

While condemning De Gaulle’s intention of re-establishing imperialist control in their propaganda, they simultaneously contacted him for negotiations. One bourgeois historian points out that the ‘Vietminh had even communicated to the French a memorandum which accepted the principle of the temporary re-establishment of French sovereignty in Vietnam.’ (Trager, p 151)

The August Revolution

A revolutionary situation erupted in Vietnam on 16 August 1945 when the Japanese surrender was announced. In the provinces of Trung Bo, Bac Bo, Sadec and Long Xuyen, resurgent peasants killed their landlords and expropriated the land.

But the centre of the revolution was Saigon. Huge demonstrations demanding national independence, and freedom from all types of oppression, took place: of 300,000 on 21 August, and one million on 25 August. The slogans of the Trotskyists for workers’ power swelled their contingents by thousands.

More than 150 popular committees were set up (this policy was actively fought for by the Trotskyists of the ICL), the first one at Ban Co on 19 August. They took administrative power in many Saigon suburbs, starting with Phu Nuan on 19 August. A conference of the committees issued a programme which insisted ‘that the national bourgeoisie will be completely incapable of playing the role of the revolutionary vanguard, and that only the popular alliance of the industrial workers and rural toilers will be able to free the nation from the domination of foreign capitalists’. (Some Stages of the Revolution in the South of Vietnam, by a Vietnamese Trotskyist from Quatriéme Internationale, Sept 1947, see pp 61-72 in this volume).

As in all revolutionary situations, no amount of organisations or publications could satisfy the masses’ thirst for political leadership. Tranh Dau, the paper of the Struggle group, became daily; the ICL at one point issued bulletins every three hours from a newly-established headquarters. Hundreds of Vanguard Youth committees were set up, some under Stalinist leadership, all of whom declared their readiness to die for national liberation. The bourgeois and petit-bourgeois parties also proliferated; according to an ICL report no less than 50 new ones sprouted up.

How the Vietminh stepped in

Who was in control of Saigon? The differences between various accounts show how volatile the situation was.

Certainly the United National Front (UNF), which had a programme for national independence and included bourgeois nationalists, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao religious sects and the Vanguard Youth, was handed power by the collapsing Bao Dai administration on 14 August, and passed it on to the Vietminh a week later.

John Spencer, a supporter of the anti-Trotskyist Banda group, has recently made the stupid allegation that ‘at least some of the Vietnamese Trotskyists took part in the formation of the UNF under Japanese auspices on August 14th, 1945’, a ‘grouping which was dearly intended as a counter-weight to the Vietminh’. (Vietnamese Trotskyism and the August Reuolution of 1945).

Spencer is obviously trying to give some ‘scholarly’ weight to the Stalinist lie, originated by Ho Chi Minh, that the Trotskyists were working for the Japanese. But at least one authoritative account says that the UNF ‘included a small Communist minority’, as well as the Trotskyists of the Struggle group. (Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development, by R Turner, p 39). The same account explains how the Vietminh leader Tran Van Giau arranged for the UNF to hand over power to him by negotiation.’*

Secondly, a report from the Struggle group to the International Secretariat of the Fourth International (The August Revolution and the Struggle Group,. in files of the ISFI, Library of International Contemporary Documentation, Nanterre University, Paris) states that they proposed to the Stalinists a united front on the policy of national independence and agrarian reform, the latter turning it down ‘because they believed that they could count on the aid and compliance of the Allies, to achieve a “democratic republic of Vietnam” through diplomatic means.’ It was after this, and after the Vietminh assumed administrative control, that they took part in meetings with the bourgeois nationalists—at which the Stalinists were also present, accusing the Trotskyists of ‘sabotage’.

A few weeks later, when British troops were welcomed into Saigon by the Vietminh, the Trotskyists certainly found themselves in a de facto alliance with the bourgeois nationalists: both advocated armed resistance to the re-imposition of imperialist control. (Spencer does not express his own opinion on the small matter of the British invasion, relying on quotations from various sources supporting the Stalinist view that opposed those who resisted the British as ‘crazy’, ‘provocateurs’ and ‘ultra-lefts’).

On 22 August, after two weeks of revolutionary turmoil, the Vietminh held a meeting with UNF representatives who agreed to hand over control of the city.

At 5am on 25 August, the day of the million-strong demonstration, the Vietminh occupied all the government buildings and formally set up a ‘Provisional Executive Committee of the Southern Vietnam Republic’.

The policies of this administration were two-fold: to maintain, if possible, the tottering Vietnamese bourgeoisie and land-owning class, and to welcome the allied troops under conditions where a deal would be negotiated with them.

Stalinist leader Tran Van Giau proclaimed that ‘democratic liberties will be secured and guaranteed by the democratic allies.’ (Quoted in Some Stages … in Quatriéme Internationale).

Another Vietminh official, Nguyen Van Tao, was more explicit: ‘All those who have instigated the peasants to seize the landowners’ property will be severely and pitilessly punished … We have not yet made the Communist Revolution, which will solve the agrarian problem. This government is only a democratic government, that is why such a task does not devolve upon it. Our government, I repeat, is a bourgeois-democratic government, even though the Communists are now in power.’ (Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development, p 43).

Historian Phillipe Devilliers recounts that Vietminh leader Duong Bach Mai spoke of ‘calming the tempestuous ardour of rank-and-file militants, in showing them that the task of the moment was not to make a proletarian revolution but to smash “colonialism” by calling on all the people to struggle against it.’ (History of Vietnam 1940-52, by P Devilliers, p 181).

Buttinger says that the Vietminh government in Saigon ‘went so far as to decree the death penalty for attacks on private property.’ (Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, J Buttinger, vol 1, p 347).

Spencer, attempting to ‘place into context’ the slaughter of the Vietnamese Trotskyists, claims they were ‘unambiguously hostile’ to the Vietminh’s ‘revolutionary administration’. In fact this administration was counter-revolutionary, i.e. determined to prevent property take-overs at all costs, even when popular committees and peasant uprisings had already implemented them on a large scale.

In the North

Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla force was able to take power in Hanoi by walking into a political vacuum which followed the Japanese surrender.

A bourgeois writer says: ‘A genuine popular revolution took place that surpassed that of the wildest calculations of the Vietminh, though they alone were prepared for the events as an organised force with a definite programme. Claiming the support of the Allied powers and pointing to their previous activity, the Vietminh won acceptance by the people, particularly in North Vietnam. The Japanese authorities looked on benignly while Vietminh partisans occupied the public buildings in Hanoi. They also turned over local stocks of arms to the Vietminh.’ (Trager, p 152).

Spencer, and other pro-Stalinists anxious to prove that the Trotskyists worked with Japan, please note.

On 22 August, Emperor Bao Dai was ready to ask the Vietminh to form a government, but instead abdicated on receipt of a telegram from the Hanoi General Association of Students, which passed a motion put by former Trotskyist Ho Huu Thuong calling on the Vietminh to form a government of national independence and oust Bao Dai. Thuong was condemned by other Trotskyists who claimed this was a capitulation to the Vietminh. The Vietminh formed a provisional government and proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam on 2 September.

There is little historical evidence concerning the Vietminh’s relationship with the workers’ movement in the north. But one report in the files of the ISFI says that after the Japanese surrender, a workers’ government was set up in the large mining town of Hon Gay. (A “Moscow Trial” in No Chi Minh’s Maquis, ISFI files in Paris). The imperialist administration was dismantled, and its officials arrested along with factory bosses, and socialist measures including equal wages and workers’ control of all industries passed.

The report states that the workers’ administration was broken up by Vietminh militia who arrived in December, after the defeat of the Saigon revolution and the internment of non-Stalinist militants in Hanoi.

From their own accounts, it is clear that the Stalinists stressed the ‘democratic’ nature of their administration (the declaration of independence was based on the American one of 1778), and concentrated on preventing clashes between workers and Kuomintang units who came into Vietnam in early September to disarm Japanese soldiers.

The Allies move into Saigon

By the beginning of September, the Saigon working class was agitated. Fearing the return of the hated French imperialists, they demanded guns. The Stalinists called on them to welcome the ‘democratic’ allies and attacked the Trotskyists in increasingly frenzied tones.

On 1 September, the Vietminh’s Nam Bo (southern Vietnam) propaganda commission sent loudspeaker cars into the streets calling on people to welcome the Allies. The response was a demonstration of 400,000 people: many were armed with bamboo spikes; the Struggle group called for an armed demonstration and weapons were carried among its 18,000-strong contingent.

As the march passed Saigon Cathedral, right-wing French colonialists opened fire on it, killing 40 and wounding 150. Armed Struggle supporters, led by veteran tram workers’ leader Le Van Long, arrested the provocateurs, planting the flag of the Fourth International on the roof from which they had fired. The assassins were handed over to the Vietminh police, who released them almost immediately. (This account taken from The August Revolution and the Struggle Group, ISFI files, Paris).

As the British invasion grew nearer, conflict sharpened between the Stalinists and all those who were ready to take up arms against the Allies. On 7 September Tran Van Giau ordered the disarming of all non-governmental organisations.

Three days later, the British troops came in, with French aircraft overhead. The Trotskyists of the ICL issued a statement denouncing Stalinist collaboration with the Allies and’ calling for armed resistance to the imperialist armies.

The Stalinists responded by arresting popular committee delegates as they met in conference on September 14th; the ICL-dominated conference, although armed, gave themselves up peacefully, perhaps underestimating the readiness of the Vietminh to carry through their bloody threats.

On 16 September the Stalinists announced their readiness to negotiate with the Allies about Vietnam, or part of it, becoming part of the French Union. But General Gracey, the British commander, was not interested. Instructions had come from the Foreign Office to tolerate no Vietnamese power: Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had concluded a secret deal with France, whereby the French would get south Vietnam back but would stay out of Syria and the Lebanon. (See Ho Chi Minh, by W Warbey, pp 47-54). It was this agreement, and not simply Gracey’s imperial arrogance, that gave impetus to the Allied occupation of Saigon and sunk the Vietminh’s hopes of doing a deal.

The British, aided by French troops and remnants of the Japanese army which came under Allied command according to the terms of Japan’s surrender, took over Saigon city centre and all administrative buildings. Encouraged by the passivity of the Vietminh, the French re-occupied the barracks of the Second Colonial Infantry, the airport, the arsenal, the port and other strategic positions.

The General Secretary of the Saigon-Cholon regional council, Trotskyist Le Van Vung, was assassinated: Phan Van Hum, another leader of the Struggle group, called for the evacuation of non-combatants from the city centre. A bitter struggle ensued between the Allies and revolutionary workers, who were joined by deserters from the Japanese army.

‘In the struggles, the workers and peasants did their duty, alongside the Trotskyist militants who proudly flew the flag of the Fourth International’, the Struggle report to the ISFI stated. ‘But those who fought these early battles fought alone. Tran Van Giau refused to replenish their provisions, or to supply arms or ammunition.

‘In the Thi Nghe sector, of 214 combatants, all Trotskyists, 210 were cut down. On the third day of the struggle, Tran Van Giau issued leaflets calling for the arrest and disarming of the Struggle fighters, who had fought without orders from his government, which had been preparing itself to welcome the “liberating Allies"!

‘In spite of their superior weaponry, there were insufficient numbers of French soldiers, and they often had to turn back before resistance detachments, whose weapons were hopelessly inferior but who had decided to die in the fight against French imperialism.’

Of course this was neither the first nor the last time that the imperialists would encounter such stubborn heroism in Vietnam. But in this case, when imperialism world-wide was threatened with revolutionary movements and was at its weakest, the Stalinists acted to ensure that a movement outside their control was physically destroyed.

John Spencer claims that the Vietminh did not contest the British order to disarm, ‘though they clearly had no intention of obeying it themselves’. The above quotation from the Struggle group answers this nonsense, which is proffered in an attempt to give the Stalinists ‘revolutionary’ credentials.

The Struggle report contains another piece of evidence to answer those who claim that the Trotskyists collaborated with the Japanese against the ‘revolutionary’ Vietminh. It states that following a meeting in which the Stalinists specifically accused the Trotskyists of ‘sabotage’, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao peasant-based religious sects (the former armed with 900 rifles and four 45mm cannons which they had received from the Japanese) offered to join the Struggle group to fight the Vietminh—but the Trotskyists rejected an alliance with such unreliable forces, not being prepared to ‘lead them to a slaughter.’

*Neither the Trotskyists nor the Stalinists signed the founding programme of the UNF, in fact.—S.P., see page 54-55.

A Stalinist Massacre

Part 4 OF Vietnam & Trotskyism

By Simon Pirani

Reprinted from Workers Press, 3 January 1987

1 OCTOBER 1945: Vietnam had been through six weeks of revolutionary convulsions, coming to a climax in the last week of September when British, French and Japanese troops occupied Saigon city centre, displacing the Vietminh administration and threatening terror against the revolutionary workers and peasants.

After repeated attempts, the Vietminh negotiated a truce with the British on 1 October, the chief result of which was that imperialist troops—British, French and Japanese—were given ‘free passage’ by the Vietminh through the defiant Saigon suburbs.

A one-week ceasefire between 3 October and 10 October was used by the imperialists to strengthen their forces. On 5 October, General Leclerc arrived at the head of a French Expeditionary Force.

As the French and Gurkhas renewed their offensive against the Trotskyists and other resistance forces, Tran Van Giau had the nerve to issue a leaflet condemning the Trotskyists as ‘French imperialist agents’.

‘The Trotskyist fighters who retreated to the west were disarmed at Cho Dem’, states the Struggle report. (The August Revolution and the Struggle Group, ISFI files, Paris).

‘The Struggle forces who went east tried to mobilise two armies, the Hoang Pho I and the Hoang Pho II, when they were surrounded at Xuan Truong by large numbers of armed Vietminh forces: Tran Van Thach, Nguyen Van So and Nguyen Van Tien were taken to Thu Dau Mot where they were given a military trial and shot on the orders of Kieu Dac Thang, a common criminal and jail bird made a General courtesy of Duong Bach Mai (the Stalinist police chief); Phan Van Chanh and Phan Van Hum took the direction of Bien Hoa, from where they hoped to reach Hue.

‘Now we have no news of these comrades … (Later reports indicate that both Van Hum and Van Chanh were killed by the Vietminh). Nguyen Thi Loi, another comrade on active service, fell at Can Giuoc (Cholon).

‘All the Trotskyists at Thu Dau Mot were exterminated. At My Tho, Tan An, Bien Hoa, Can Tho, Tay Ninh, there were mass arrests of Trotskyists.

‘Hinh Thai Thong, of Struggle, was arrested at My Tho while presiding at an interprovincial meeting of delegates from the villages and districts. Thong was disembowelled.

‘How many other comrades of the Fourth International paid with their lives for their allegiance to the cause of revolution?

‘There were those who were able to join the resistance (of the Vietnamese army) whose commanders were either with us or sympathetic.

‘For example the Third Division, commanded by Nguyen Hoa Hiep, had a large number of Trotskyists.’

The Trotskyists in other groups fought just as heroically as those of Struggle. The Go Yap tramwaymens’ militia, led by members of the ICL, made a stand against the Vietminh, Gurkhas and French troops on the Plaine des Joncs. They held out until January 1946, when their leader Tran Dinh Minh, was killed by the Vietminh.

A report in the ISFI files indicates that the LCI fighters were wiped out by the Vietminh at Kien An on 23 October 1945. (A ‘Moscow Trial’ in Ho Chi Minh’s Maquis, in the ISFI files).

The leader of the Struggle group, Ta Thu Thau, met his fate on his way back from his journey to north Vietnam. Arrested at Quang Ngai in central Vietnam by the Vietminh, he was placed in front of a People’s Tribunal.

Due no doubt to the esteem in which Thau was held as a workers’ leader, the Tribunal three times declared him not guilty of crimes against the people. Despite this the veteran revolutionary, a former teacher who had been half-paralysed during his imprisonment at Poulo Condor, was taken out and shot by the Vietminh. (Reported in Quatriéme lnternationale, August 1946).

The documented proof of the huge scale of the repression cannot be reconciled with those apologists for Stalinism who claim that Ho Chi Minh did not know about the massacre, that perhaps it was the work of some over-zealous rank-and-filers, that Tran Van Giau was afterwards disciplined by the Vietminh as a result of it, etc etc.

The reports submitted to the ISFI, particularly, confirm indisputably that the Vietminh worked consciously and deliberately, and often effectively aiding the French and British, to wipe out the Trotskyists and other resistance forces.

The Vietminh and the French

The Vietminh’s attempts at compromise with the Allies were not as strong as French imperialism’s determination to re-establish colonial power.

The more the Vietminh decimated the revolutionary forces in the resistance, the more they found themselves under attack from a ruthless enemy which gave no quarter.

Having destroyed the revolutionary leadership of the Vietnamese working class, the Vietminh turned to the bourgeois nationalists of the Vietnam Revolutionary League and the Vietnam Nationalist Party.

On October 23, 1945, the day that LCI militants were massacred at Kien An, the Ho Chi Minh government in Hanoi signed a pact with the nationalists to work jointly against the French.

The Indochinese Communist Party, at its conference on 9—11 November 1945, decided on an even more astonishing gesture to appease the anti-communist leaders of the nationalist forces: they dissolved the Communist Party, which was not to be reconstituted until 1951!

The French finally agreed to talk to Ho when they had strengthened their military grip on Vietnam.

Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu was installed as governor in Saigon, while General Leclerc sent a flotilla carrying 13,000 troops into the Gulf of Tonkin in the north.

On 6 March 1946, an agreement was signed permitting French troops on Vietnamese soil, recognising Vietnam as a free state within the French Union—and leaving the question of dividing the country (the French were in favour of this) to a future referendum.

This agreement was justified by Vietminh General Vo Nguyen Giap to a mass rally in Hanoi on the grounds that the Bolsheviks had also signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany, which enabled it to strengthen itself for future struggles.

There is a difference: the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed by revolutionaries who were working actively for the success of the German revolution, and simultaneously mobilising the Red Army and the Russian working class to fight the invading imperialist forces; the treaty with the French was signed by Stalinists who had set out with the stated intention of doing a deal with imperialism, and who, far from organising revolutionary workers to defend state property, had threatened those who took property from the bourgeoisie and landowners with death—and ruthlessly carried out that sentence against the Trotskyists.

Conclusion

Neither the Hanoi deal nor the Fontainbleau negotiations which went on from May to September 1946 could satisfy the French imperialists’ thirst for conquest.

On 24 September 1946 they bombarded Haiphong harbour, killing thousands, and plunged Vietnam into a war which ended seven years later at Dien Bien Phu, and re-started immediately with the entry of American troops who replaced the French.

The Vietminh strategy of ‘People’s War’ was not, as was claimed even by Trotskyists, an extension of the strategy of working class revolution: the long drawn out struggle was forced on the Vietnamese people because the working class revolution of August 1945 was betrayed in the most despicable and violent traditions of Stalinism.*

Apologists for Stalinism like Spencer do not even seriously consider the strategy of workers’ revolution advanced by Trotskyists: he only quotes the historian Buttinger who said the Vietminh were right to regard resisting the French in Saigon as insane.

So-called ‘Trotskyists’ like Martin McLaughlin likewise argue that the Vietnamese Trotskyists ‘committed a severe tactical error in pressing ahead with strikes and demonstrations in Saigon’ because they faced the British-French occupation force, with Chinese Kuomintang forces in the north. (Vietnam and the World Revolution, by M McLaughlin of the Workers League (US), p 17).

But if it was a ‘severe tactical error’ to oppose the re-imposition of French imperial rule in Saigon in 1945 was it not a still greater one to attempt to form a workers’ administration in Paris in 1871?

Was it not ‘insane’ for the Kronstadt sailors and workers to declare a workers’ government in May 19171 And surely a still greater ‘tactical error’ to ‘press ahead’ with the July 1917 demonstrations in Petrograd?

At all these points, when the working class entered on the scene of history in its thousands and millions—which is precisely what makes a revolutionary situation—revolutionary leaders took the working class into struggle, often convinced that it held the possibility of defeat.

Indeed the Russian Revolution itself was made on that understanding.

What should the Vietnamese revolutionaries have done when the workers formed popular committees, the peasants expropriated the land and hundreds of thousands took to the streets demanding national independence?

The Stalinists of the Vietminh tried to quell the revolutionary movement in order to do a deal with the Allied imperialists; the Trotskyists, basing themselves on the perspective of international revolution which was being confirmed by revolutionary movements worldwide at the end of the war, took the leadership of that movement and fought to the end.

Those who reject their stand reject the class struggle strategy on which the communist movement is based, worked out by Marx, Engels and Lenin and carried out in practice both in the victorious revolution of October 1917, and in the defeated revolutions class="sub” of Paris 1871, Germany 1918 … and by the Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945.

* Trotsky himself wrote, with great insight, about the possibility of confrontation between Stalinist-led peasant armies and working class revolutionaries, in a letter to his Chinese supporters in 1932.—S.P., see p 113.

The Fourth International & the Stalinist Ho Chi Minh

Concluding part of Simon Pirani’s series Reprinted from Workers Press, 24 January 1987.

‘In so far as capitalism has created a world market, a world division of labour and world productive forces, it has also prepared world economy as a whole for socialist transformation,’ wrote Leon Trotsky, attacking Stalin’s reactionary fraud of ‘socialism in one country’, in 1929.

‘Different countries will go through this process at different tempos. Backward countries may, under certain conditions, arrive at the dictatorship of the proletariat sooner than advanced countries, but they will come later than the latter to socialism.’ (The Permanent Revolution, New Park edn,p 155, see excerpt pp 105 -109 in this volume).

Fifty-seven years later, the contradiction between the struggle and sacrifice of backward countries on the one hand, and the unresolved crisis of international working class leadership and the delay of the socialist revolution world-wide on the other, remains a central feature of the class struggle.

In Vietnam, a peasant army, organised under a Communist Party imbued with reactionary Stalinist ideology, achieved a crushing victory over the mightiest imperialist power of all.

Today the state founded on that victory faces hostility from imperialism on the one side, from the reactionary Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy on another, from the crushing backwardness of its own war-weary rural economy on a third—and finally from the narrow nationalist and bureaucratic outlook of its own Stalinist rulers.

The problems faced by the Vietnamese workers—like those of workers in other countries—can only be considered as part of the problems of the world working class.

Their struggle is part of the permanent, international revolutionary process.

The only tendency which approached Vietnamese problems in this way was Trotskyism.

The Aftermath of 1945 and the War with France

It was the refusal of the Saigon workers and their Trotskyist leaders to compromise with the French-British-Vietminh carve-up of Vietnam in September 1945 that led those forces to turn on them.

The Vietminh executed Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau and hundreds of Trotskyist cadres.

Trotskyist and nationalist forces, who had resisted the French when they had re-entered Saigon, were driven into the countryside where they fought a guerrilla war against the French, British-officered Gurkhas and the Vietminh.

Ho Chi Minh, the Stalinist leader, went to Paris and negotiated with the French, signed an initial agreement which recognised the French presence in the south on 6 March 1946.

Despite being decimated by the massacre, the Saigon Trotskyists re-organised in the International Communist Group (Union des Communistes Internationalistes), and in October 1946 issued a leaflet condemning the agreement signed by Ho, which ‘offered nothing but advantages for French imperialism: the restoration of French control, economic, financial and customs, and reparations for the French’.

The leaflet called on workers to maintain their political independence from the bourgeoisie, organise trades unions and fight for workers’ liberties.’ (For a Revolutionary Trade Union Organisation, leaflet in the files of the ISFI, Paris).

In the north, where the Stalinists had set up the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), initial progress by Trotskyists of the Struggle group was cut short by ruthless persecution.

A report in the Fourth International’s journal states that at first the DRV had tolerated the thriving Trotskyist movement, which won wide support, and met particular success in organising women.

At one point DRV speakers had even attended Trotskyist meetings.

But after a particularly successful Trotskyist rally at Bach Mai, ‘having realised the popularity of working class policies, and dreading their growing influence, Ho Chi Minh gave a secret order to arrest T., the leader of the group, and other members of the Fourth International.

‘But, despite this they could not prevent the clandestine publication of The Struggle, and participation of Fourth Internationalists in the resistance. (Quatriéme Internationale, Jan-Feb 1948).

While ensuring the destruction of his Trotskyist opponents at home, Ho returned to Paris for more talks with the French, which dragged on from May to September 1946 … while French troops swarmed across Vietnam, ready to renew open hostilities against the DRV.

Ho’s policy of trying to negotiate crashed to the ground on 23 November 1946, when French ships bombarded Haiphong harbour in the north, killing thousands and signalling the start of Vietnam’s bloody seven-year war with France.

There is no record of what privations and repressions the Saigon Trotskyists faced as war engulfed the country.

But a manifesto issued by their provisional central committee stated:

‘To those who believe that the national liberation of Vietnam can be achieved by negotiations with French imperialism, with or without mediation by other imperialists, we say: we will not achieve liberation without a concerted struggle of the working people and peasants of Vietnam, together with the revolutionary proletariat of the metropolitan countries, hand in hand with the other oppressed peoples’.

The statement, dated 8 July 1947, recognised that the crisis of the colonial peoples could only be resolved with the progress of the world revolution as a whole.

It called on Vietnamese workers not to place their fate in the hands of the national bourgeoisie but to prolong their resistance struggle ‘to accentuate the over-all crisis of France.’ (Our Position, manifesto in ISFI flies).

Contact with the Chinese Section

The relentless advance of Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, and the disintegration of the Kuomintang forces in 1948-49 must have filled every worker and revolutionary in Asia with hope.

The international significance of the Chinese revolution was clear to the Vietnamese Trotskyists, who sent one of their leading members to contact the Chinese Trotskyists in February 1949, eight months before Mao’s victory.

This delegate attended a conference of the Revolutionary Communist Party of China, which not only discussed at length the Chinese political situation, but also resolved to establish, jointly with the Vietnamese comrades, a Far Eastern secretariat of the Fourth International, and to set up a joint cadre school.

But Mao Tse Tung’s victory in October 1949 heralded another chapter of Stalinist repression.

Many Chinese Trotskyists suffered, at his hands, the same deadly fate that Ho had meted out in Vietnam four years earlier.

The Chinese RCP moved its head office to Hong Kong, but the British colonial authorities were no more ‘democratic’ than the Maoists.

RCP leaders P’eng Shu-tse and Liu Chia-liang then moved to Vietnam, at the end of January 1950.

‘Hardly a few months passed however, before misfortune struck again’, wrote P’eng’s wife, Ch’en Pi-Ian. (Looking Back over my Years with P’eng Shu-tse, introduction to The Chinese Communist Party in Power, P’eng).

‘Two leading Vietnamese Trotskyists were invited to participate in a conference in the zone controlled by the Vietminh.

‘We had been assured that the conference was being organised by Trotskyist elements inside the Vietminh, among them being the Chief of Staff of the army in control of this zone.

‘The conference was scheduled to discuss the military situation and organisation problems of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement. Unfortunately, the Stalinists had prepared a trap.

‘When the conference came to an end, all the Vietnamese Trotskyists, and our comrade Liu Chia-Liang … were arrested’.

Liu, a veteran of the 1926-7 Chinese revolution, who joined the Trotskyists in 1931 and served several sentences under the Kuomintang, died shortly afterwards in the Vietminh jail.

When Ch’en and P’eng left Vietnam fearing for their own lives, their Vietnamese comrades were still imprisoned but alive. Nothing further is known of them.

Vietnam and the Split in the Fourth International

How did the Trotskyist movement internationally—itself subject to massive repression by Stalinism and fascism alike—react to the Stalinist crimes against the sections in the East?

News of the 1945 Saigon massacre reached Paris nearly a year afterwards, whereupon Trotskyists there publicised it, and publicly demanded of Ho Chi Minh—who was in Paris talking to the French government—an answer for this crime.

On the other hand, Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova (who in later years opposed the Fourth International and the defence of the USSR, condemning it as an exploitative class society), was in 1947 accusing the FI leaders of relaxing the fight against Stalinism.

In a criticism of the international leadership, written together with Benjamin Peret and Grandizo Munis, she stated that the Indochinese section had been ‘forgotten for so long’, that ‘even to demand who assassinated Ta Thu Thau has been forgotten, in order to support, without serious criticism, the Stalinist government of Ho Chi Minh, greetings from whom were so warmly hailed by The Militant and La Verite.’ (FI Internal Bulletin, 1947).

A full discussion on the Fl’s politics in 1947-8 is beyond the scope of this article.* But, in the period immediately following, there is a clearer picture.

Without doubt, the Fl leadership under Pablo, which revised Trotsky’s fundamental theses on the counter-revolutionary nature of Stalinism following the Communist Party’s coming to power in Yugoslavia and China in 1949, capitulated to Stalinism to the extent that it deliberately covered up and minimised the repression of Trotskyists.

When the Fl split in 1953, with the International Cornmittee (ICFI) forming around JP Cannon’s Open Letter in opposition to Pablo’s liquidationism, a letter from the Chinese Trotskyist P’eng to Cannon accused Pablo of trying to stifle discussion on Stalinism in the Far East Commission of the FI’s Third Congress in 1951; refusing to distribute information on the wholesale arrest and murder of Chinese Trotskyists by Mao; and concealing for four months, May to September 1953, an appeal from the Chinese Trotskyists on behalf of imprisoned comrades.

P’eng states that, with regard to Vietnam, Pablo’s entryism of a special type’, actually meant sending Trotskyists from France back to their own country, with instructions to join the Vietminh, and without a clear understanding of the extent of Stalinist repression.

‘When the Vietnamese comrades were ready to return to their country to apply the “entryist policy", and called a meeting in which I was invited to make a speech, the chairman of this meeting made a request of me not to mention before the comrades the recent persecutions experienced by the Chinese comrades.

‘I knew quite well that it was an instruction or suggestion from Pablo,’ wrote P’eng.

‘Although I observed the request of the chairman, I still warned him personally that the “ostrich policy” was the most dangerous.’ (Towards a History of the Fl, Part 3, Vol 3, p 170-1, published by the Socialist Workers Party (US), Education for Socialists series.).

The Trotskyist group referred to was built among Vietnamese workers in France during and after the war.

When it returned to Vietnam in the early 1950s, this group was split—a majority faction supporting the Pablo leadership, and a minority supporting the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI) who had opposed Pablo.

This minority voted against the resolutions of the FI Third Congress along with the PCI.

We have pointed out (see article reprinted from Workers Press of 20 December above) that while the ICFI was formed on the basis of opposing Pablo’s adaptation to Stalinism and his attempts to liquidate independent Trotskyist organisation, that in later years the Healy-Banda leadership in the IC had itself manifested liqudationism with regard to Vietnam.

But the French PCI, which founded the IC together with the SLL-WRP and the American SWP, did continue to pay attention to Vietnamese Trotskyism, running classes on its history throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.

A well-known incident in the late 1960s, while proving nothing in itself, is illustrative: members of the United Secretariat of the FI on a Vietnam solidarity march in Paris chanted ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’—and were robustly answered ‘Ta, Ta, Ta Thu Thau’ by a PCI contingent.

Revolution in Vietnam

1945 : The Saigon Commune

Who was Ngo Van

Ta Thu Thau: Vietnamese Trotskyist Leader