OTR Politics - December, 2004

In Ho Chi Minh we have a man playful enough to have sent messages to his staff members in the form of paper airplanes, and ruthless enough to have said of his purged friend Ta Thu Thao, “All those who do not follow the line that I have set out will be smashed.” In the view of Ho’s longtime comrade Pham Van Dong, “Ho Chi Minh is high but not far; new but not strange; great but does not make up greatness. . . . Seeing him for the first time, one has a feeling that one knew him long ago.” One American agent of the pre-CIA Office of Strategic Services (OSS) remembered Ho this way: “If I had to pick out the one quality about that little old man sitting on his hill in the jungle, it was his gentleness.” The French diplomat Jean Sainteny, who unsuccessfully negotiated with Ho to prevent the outbreak of the First Indochina War, claimed his Vietnamese counterpart was a man “of the highest caliber . . . [with] his intelligence, his vast culture and total unselfishness.” A description of Ho Chi Minh from a French intelligence dossier: “Fearless, sly, clever, deceptive, ruthless--and deadly.”

Many have claimed that one cannot understand the Vietnamese revolution without understanding its architect--an argument made both by those who praise the Vietnamese revolution and damn it to hell. Ho Chi Minh: Che Guevara with an epicanthic fold? Who else has been compared to Lenin and Gandhi? Probably the most rhapsodic mainstream Western appraisal of Ho remains David Halberstam’s 1971 biography: “In his lifetime Ho had not only liberated his own country and changed the course of colonial rule in both Africa and Asia, he had done something even more remarkable; he had touched the culture and soul of his enemy.” The least favorable recent look at Ho (which angrily cites the above passage) comes in Michael Lind’s fiercely argued, fascinatingly stupid 1999 polemic Vietnam: The Necessary War, in which Ho Chi Minh is “Stalin’s Vietnamese disciple.” One suspects this needs to be stated because if Ho Chi Minh is not Stalin’s Vietnamese disciple, then Lind’s bizarre thesis that the Vietnam War was necessary begins to bobble atop its already quivery legs.

Ho Chi Minh (Chinese for “he who brings enlightenment”) was the final identity of a complicated man. Like the wispy beard he would make famous, the name was initially taken up as a disguise. He was born Nguyen Sinh Cung, renamed by his parents Nguyen Tat Thanh, left Saigon on a steamship in 1911 as Ba, made his revolutionary name abroad as Nguyen Ai Quoc, attacked the French in pamphlets as Nguyen o Phap, traveled to the USSR as Chen Vang, served as a Soviet translator as Ly Thuy, wrote articles for the Soviet press as Nilovsky, infiltrated rival Vietnamese revolutionary groups as Wang Shan-yi, traveled in Siam as Father Chin, worked in Hong Kong as L. M. Vuong, was arrested in Hong Kong as T. V. Wong, was interrogated in Hong Kong as Song Man Cho, served China’s People’s Liberation Army as Major Hu Guang, wrote inflammatory anti-French articles as P. C. Line, chaired the Vietnam National Liberation Committee as Hoang Quojun, picked up in a Chinese prison the name Hu Lao Bo, worked as a U.S. agent in World War Two under the code name Lucius, attacked the United States in Vietnamese magazines as C. D., and finally wrote biographies of himself as Tran Dan Tien. There are more aliases--Ding, for instance--but one gets the idea. In a file somewhere there is an old visa request for one Ho Ting-ching, whom the U.S. Office of War Information wanted to send to San Francisco to broadcast pro-American propaganda in Vietnamese during the early 1940s. Just as Fidel Castro failed his tryout for the Washington Senators, this idea was rejected. Ho Ting-ching, or Ho Chi Minh, had a different appointment with fate.

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Ho Chi Minh was born in a three-room hut to a nationalist low-level imperial bureaucrat father and a literate storytelling mother in the central province of Nghe An. According to Ho’s biographer William J. Duiker, Nghe An’s people are “known as the most obdurate and rebellious of Vietnamese,” and, in time, they would rebel against even Ho Chi Minh. Educated in French schools in Vinh (a city whose population U.S. bombing would decades later literally reduce to zero) and Hue, Ho’s first political activity came when he offered his translation services to a crowd of peasants seeking redress from the French authorities. In return the young man received several wallops from an intemperate French policeman’s baton. Ho got off easy: within hours the French opened fire into the crowd. The next day at Ho’s school French officials turned up looking for a “tall dark student” who had been involved in the demonstration. Ho was expelled that day, wandered the countryside for months, earned money by teaching Chinese and martial arts, and ultimately hopped a steamship out of Saigon and traveled around the world, seven languages of which he would eventually master. Whether he was in Africa, the Americas, Asia, or Europe, Ho Chi Minh noticed black and brown and yellow men laboring beneath European whips, fomenting in him the realization that Vietnam was merely one seed in a planetary garden of human exploitation. (He also claimed, somewhat dubiously, to have seen a KKK lynching in the American South.)

But was he a Stalinist? By the time Ho was thirty he was living in Paris and had become a founding member of the French Communist Party, the only group that took his critiques of colonialism seriously. As World War One ended, Ho wrote his first, fairly moderate tract, “Demands of the Annamite People” (“Annam” being the French protectorate that today corresponds to the central third of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam), and attempted to bring it before President Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. Despite what one writer has heartbreakingly described as Ho’s “spiffy suit” (it was a rental), Ho failed to catch Wilson’s eye. Ho published “Demands” in several Socialist magazines under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc, or Nguyen Who Loves His Nation. The French police figured out that Nguyen Ai Quoc was actually Nguyen Tat Thanh, the expelled radical from Hue who had disappeared several years ago, and began to track him. (Ho sometimes left notes for his pursuers cheekily outlining his day’s itinerary.) 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 knew so little about Communism 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.

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. But Ho “gradually emerged as a well-known fixture in Moscow,” in Duiker’s words, and grew close to 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 as setting the stage for Communist revolution in Vietnam. China at the time was home to several anti-colonial movements of ethnic Vietnamese, few of them Communist but many violently opposed to the French. 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 (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 “one of the worst agitators in the region” and went on, fascinatingly, 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. A bad time to be in Moscow. Arguably the worst time to be anywhere. Stalin’s Great Terror--a scourge so fanatically thorough that the USSR would see its own President Kalinin’s wife 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 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.” 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.

However, 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 Vietnamese in general was negligible.) One famous anecdote has Stalin on the rhetorically losing end of a challenge to Ho on the devoutness of Ho’s Communism. 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 his admirers, however, the man’s proclivities toward Stalinism are further 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.

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His role following the August Revolution is most easily defended. During World War II Vietnam had been variously controlled by the Nazi collaborators of Vichy France and then by the Empire of Japan. With a small amount of covert U.S. assistance Ho and the Viet Minh waged guerilla war against the Japanese. The orphaned colonial nation emerged from the chaos of World War Two with no clear master and in the midst of a Japanese-caused famine that would kill a million Vietnamese. (The Viet Minh often distributed rice liberated from Japanese granaries to the starving.) In August of 1945 Ho Chi Minh filled the power vacuum by walking into Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square and proclaiming the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It was the first time Ho had ever been in Hanoi and one of the first times he publicly used the name Ho Chi Minh. Nguyen Ai Quoc was a known Soviet agent and Ho was aware that the Party did not yet have the support of the masses. (For similar tactical reasons Ho formally dissolved the Indochinese Communist Party.) As Ho was founding his nation on pretenses 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 (which, unlike the formless south, had in the Viet Minh an actual army at its service) 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. Duiker: “Despite Ho’s effort to avoid offending moderates, however, the government was not always able to control radical elements at the local level who wanted to settle personal scores or engage in class warfare.”

This is sympatheticese, and 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 as 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 Ho and the Viet Minh. 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 it was turned down, he let Diem go.

The purges of Ho’s representative government in the years leading up to the First Indochina War are less easily evaded. The “immediate results” of Ho’s August Revolution, in Duiker’s analysis, 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 in Duiker’s words leaving Vietnam “with an alarming lack of urgency.” 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 between 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 U.S. 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 would help him: they did not wish to harm the FCP’s chances in an imminent national election by appearing to support colonial independence, an unadmired position at the time.

Even many of Ho’s allies regarded his attempts to play every side as shameless. Such ideological amnesia had earned him not a few enemies in the past. An Indochinese Communist Party editorial had once cited the “erroneous instructions” of the overly nationalist Nguyen Ai Quoc, who funnily enough “did not understand the directives of the Communist International.” 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, Trotskyite 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.”

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While Ho was in France in late 1945, attempting to prevent war and rid Vietnam of all occupying forces, Ho’s 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. One suspects, too, that Ho felt he had little choice, having urged against similar measures in the past. At any rate, in March 1946, Ho 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 most strongly opposed this strategy, even many of Ho’s closest allies were alarmed. “Can’t you understand what would happen if the Chinese stayed?” Duiker quotes Ho as saying. “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.”

The French did leave, eventually, though at dreadful cost, after the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. At roughly the same time, however, the Chinese, now helpful Communist brethren--China’s Community 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, not the least due to the disaster of North Vietnam’s various land-reform campaigns that began in 1953.

What was land reform? Land reform was the product of men inclined to think in terms of the “middle peasantry.” Some type of land reform was indeed badly needed in North Vietnam, as a tiny percentage of its people owned a huge portion of its land. “Landlords” were also despised long before the social abacus of Communism slid them over into a distinct class. On its face, land reform was to redistribute land in a more equitable way among the peasants of North Vietnam. The North’s Communist Chinese advisers were adamant about implementing land reform. For his part, Ho Chi Minh resisted, saying he was “in no hurry” to redistribute land, according to Duiker. But land reform went ahead. The first step was something called “thought reform.” The second step was confronting the landlords. Communist cadres worked Vietnamese peasants into berserker rages against the landlords, who owed them, they were told, “blood debts.” As Duiker tells it, land reform initially involved “only about fifty villages” and then caromed out of control. The peasants quickly ran out of landlords and turned on the next richest class, and the next, then each other; 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, “Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence.” The part Chinh understood was “Nothing.”) Ho rejected class war, mindful of the fact that, as Duiker puts it, “most well-off farmers did little better than survive.” Still, Chinh argued that at least five percent of the population had to be eliminated. Apparently he did not care which five percent: a landowner who had once sheltered Chinh was sentenced to death, and Chinh did nothing to interfere. Duiker: “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, China’s “advisors” in Vietnam had liquidated several Vietnamese Communists for complaining about excessive Chinese influence.) By 1956, thousands had been executed during North Vietnam’s experiment with land reform. How many thousand? Duiker calls this magic number “highly controversial,” adding that even “sympathetic observers” concede 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. But what finally soured the Party on the campaigns was not the number of bodies but rather 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 occurred “because I lacked a spirit of democracy, I didn’t listen and didn’t see.” Additionally, real action was taken within the Party, from the vicious revolutionary Hoang Quoc Viet’s removal from the Politburo to the spontaneous release of 12,000 prisoners to Truong Chinh’s dismissal as General Secretary (though Chinh would ascend again in the 1960s and dearly avenge himself). Michael Lind notes that during the Party’s subsequent “Rectification of Errors” campaign, Ho said publicly, “One cannot waken the dead,” which Lind dismisses as a “callous observation.” In fact, the evidence suggests that Ho meant this with regret and humility.

Unfortunately, the unpleasantness was not over. In Ho Chi Minh’s home province of Nghe An there erupted North Vietnam’s first antigovernment protest since the end of First Indochina War. The unrest came from a Catholic region that had traditionally supported the Viet Minh and was purged anyway--a betrayal the official apologies were not enough to soothe. This brief resistance was crushed. The final disaster of land reform was the subsequent 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 ruthlessness (in 1958 he urged that “rightist” writers in North Vietnam be destroyed), would serve as the Party’s main ideological ballast until his death in 1969.

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Was Ho Chi Minh a Stalinist, then? That depends if it matters that almost everyone who met Ho, with the exception of Joseph Stalin and the Indian Communist M. N. Roy, found him a man of genuine warmth. It depends if it matters that the stories of his 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. It depends if it matters that he was largely unmoved by strict ideology (“No peasant will understand this,” he once said when handed an impenetrably Leninist broadside). It finally depends if it matters that the most militant members of his Party--a Party brutal enough to have purged the man who wrote North Vietnam’s national anthem--came largely to ignore him.

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 indebted to the cause of world Communism. This is from a report written by the American Archimedes Patti, one of Ho’s OSS handlers: “Conceding that many Americans viewed him as a ‘Moscow puppet,’ Ho denied that he was a Communist in the American sense. Having repaid his debt to the Soviet Union with fifteen years of Party work, he now considered himself a free agent. In recent months, he pointed out, the DRV had received more support from the United States than from the USSR. Why should it be indebted to Moscow?” Many of Ho’s detractors regard this as shameless opportunism, but surely one can be opportunistic and sincere. Long after lying about it would have served any purpose, many of Ho’s comrades spoke of his lasting disappointment at falling out of U.S. 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 Patti’s memoir until the 1980s for the high crime of containing a positive portrait of Ho Chi Minh, and for decades hid from the American public the eleven letters and telegrams Ho Chi Minh had written President Truman, one of which offered to make Vietnam a protectorate of the United States “for an undetermined period” and another of which offered up Vietnam as “a fertile field for American capital and enterprise” in exchange for aid against the French.

U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson argued in 1949 that it did not matter whether Ho was a Communist or a nationalist. In colonial societies, Acheson said, all Communists were nationalists. As a devoted Soviet puppet, he argued, Ho Chi Minh was “the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina.” Hindsight--and it is largely hindsight--has made Acheson’s argument seem preposterously shortsighted. 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 success due to incurable mental rigidity. The Commuleftist is sympathetic to Communist causes but not doctrinaire, mostly operates under nonviolent banners, almost always lives in a democracy, and can be highly principled. The Communationalist believes in the sometimes necessarily 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 primarily distinguished 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.) Ho Chi Minh had the ill luck to be a moderately reasonable Communationalist at a time when the 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 imagination needed, in order to come to Ho Chi Minh’s aid against a nation the U.S. had just fought a world war to help free, was almost certainly too great. But neglecting to come to Ho’s aid and driving him back toward the Soviet bear hug were two very different things. If the United States could remember a war that allied it to the Commufascist Stalin it could surely imagine stranger bedfellows than a Communationalist such as Ho Chi Minh.

Perhaps this is too easily letting Ho off the moral hook. Here is story Duiker has pulled from one of Ho’s two self-penned biographies:

One day, a Chinese nurse who was assigned to care for Uncle [Ho’s name for himself] asked him secretly: “Uncle, what is communism?” . . . The nurse knew that Communists were not smugglers, thieves, or murderers, so she couldn’t understand why Communists were arrested.

“To put it simply,” Uncle replied, “Communists hope to make it so that Chinese nurses will not have to take orders from their British superiors.” The nurse looked at Uncle with wide eyes and replied, “Really?”

No doubt Ho believed this, and perhaps as time went on the self-slavery of Communism remained less odious than any kind of foreign domination. Lind’s view that Communism was itself a foreign ideology is too facile an observation, and it avoids pondering why every other political vision available to Ho had the associative venom of a wicked colonial legacy flowing through it. (André Malraux: “It is difficult to conceive of a courageous Annamite being other than a revolutionary.”) During the Vietnam War, the New York Times interviewed some young South Vietnamese about why Communism appealed to them. One responded that he took “note of the fact that on this side we have half a million foreign troops while on the other side there are none.” When one takes into consideration the universal appeal of self-determination, the lengths foreigners were willing to go to apparently prevent it in the case of Vietnam, and the liberating promises (however qualified) of Communism, Ho Chi Minh was a Stalinist, certainly--perhaps the only Stalinist who can be forgiven it.

Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea, a travel narrative; God Lives in St. Petersburg, a short-story collection; and the co-author (with Jeff Alexander) of Speak, Commentary, a volume of fake DVD commentaries. This piece is drawn from his current project, a travel book about a trip he took to Vietnam with his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War.