1

Vietnam: Workers Revolution and National Independence

Al Richardson (ed.), Vietnam: Workers Revolution and National Independence
(Revolutionary History, Vol. 3, No. 2, Autumn 1990).
Contents
Editorial
Simon Pirani: The Fourth International in Vietnam
Daniel Hemery: La Lutte and the Vietnamese Trotskyists
Ngo Van Xuyet: On Vietnam
Ngo Van Xuyet: Ta Thu Thau Vietnamese Trotskyist Leader
A Letter to Trotsky (from leaders of La Lutte)
Comrade P: My First Steps Towards the Permanent Revolution
Ngo Van Xuyet: A Moscow Trial in Ho Chi Minhs Guerilla Movement
ICL (Vietnamese Section of the FI): Our Position, 8 July 47
Lu Sanh Hanh: Some Stages in the Revolution in the South of Vietnam

The Fourth International in Vietnam: Why Study It, and What to Read
Simon Pirani
A good overall introduction to the history of the movement is the Spartacist pamphlet
Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam, New York 1978, which collects articles from
Workers Vanguard. Upon this is based Stig Erikssons Stalinismo y trotskismo en Viet-nam,
no.15 in the Cuadernos rojas series, published in Stockholm for the Spanish Trotskyists.
A number of other general accounts exist, both original and secondary, of varying value. Of
the first hand sources, pride of place go to that by An Indo-Chinese Comrade appearing in
Quatrime Internationale (new series, nos.22/23/24, September/October/November
1945, pp15-17) which was translated in Fourth International (SWP, USA), Volume 7 no.1,
January 1946, pp.16-17, and to the full length discussion by Anh Van (Hoang Don Tri) and
Jacqueline Roussel (Marguerite Bonnet), Mouvements nationaux et Lutte de Classes au
Vietnam, Paris 1947, which was translated into English by Simon Pirani and published as
National Movements and Class Struggle in Vietnam, London 1987. Richard Stephensons
Vietnam: Stalinism v. Revolutionary Socialism (Socialist Charter, 1972), which was drawn
upon by Gerry Downing, Vietnam and Trotskyism (Workers Press, 7 June 1986), is based
largely upon Anh Van and Roussel, along with Ngo Van Xuyets description of the Saigon
events of 1945, and is therefore largely outmoded.
Of other secondary sources, Milton Sacks essay, Marxism in Viet Nam, contributed to
Marxism in Southeast Asia (Stanford UP, 1960, pp.02-58) is a good general survey, as is
Bob Potters Vietnam: Whose Victory? (Solidarity Pamphlet no.43). The description From
the Vietminh to the Vietcong (Class Struggle/Lutte de Classe, new series no.14, April 1968,
pp.7-16), whilst valuable in its day, is probably too general to be of much assistance now.
The discussion of the history of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement among the
Trotskyist organisations has been wide and illuminating. Apart from the references given
in our prefaces to Ngo Van Xuyets Life of Ta Thu Thau and A Moscow Trial in Ho Chi
Minhs Guerilla Movement below, the following should not escape the attention of the
serious reader: George Johnson and Fred Feldman, On the Nature of the Vietnamese
Communist Party (International Socialist Review, Volume 34 no.7, July/August 1973, pp.49, 63-90) and Vietnam, Stalinism and the Postwar Socialist Revolutions (International
Socialist Review, Volume 35 no.4, April 1974, pp.26-61); Henry Platsky, The History of
Vietnamese Trotskyism: What it Means (Class Struggle (USA), July 1973) and The
Vietnamese Revolution and Pabloism (Class Struggle, August 1974), and Vietnam: Ten
Years On and Trotskyism and Stalinism (Socialist Organiser, no.232, 12 June 1985). Apart
from Al Richardson, More on the Vietnamese Trotskyists (Workers Press, 21 June 1986)

and Simon Pirani, Campaign for Vietnamese Trotskyists (Workers Press, 25 February 1989:
for the text of the actual appeal, cf. the issue of 11 March) all the documents pertaining to
the recent discussion of the history of the Vietnamese Trotskyists are to be found in
Vietnam and Trotskyism, Australia 1987, along with much other crucial material including
all Trotskys essays on the subject.
An interesting by-product of the betrayal of the Vietnamese uprising by the French
Communist Party through its deputies in the chamber was the recruitment of practically
the whole of the Vietnamese working class community in France to the Trotskyist
movement, in which the leading part was played by Anh Van (Hoang Don Tri). This is dealt
with in Benjamin Stora, Les travailleurs indochinois en France pendant la seconde guerre
mondiale (Les Cahiers du CERMTRI, no.28, April 1983) and Anh Van, Les travailleurs
vietnamiens en France, 1939-1950 (Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.40, December 1989, pp5-19).
*****************
The history of the Fourth International in Vietnam has a direct bearing on many important
disputes which persist among tendencies claiming to be Trotskyist.
Has history rendered the building of the Fourth International superfluous, or does it have
to be rebuilt? Are there countries where it has become unnecessary, because the Stalinist
party has proved able to give the revolutionary leadership to which the Trotskyists aspire?
Was its foundation in 1938 divorced from the real movement of the working class, and
thus an empty gesture, as Isaac Deutscher and many other after him believed?
Vietnamese history is important to these disputes for two reasons. Firstly, because
between 1947 and 1975 the nationalist movement there dominated politically by the
Stalinists waged war against, and inflicted crushing defeats on, French and then US
imperialism. This gave sustenance to those Trotskyists who claimed that Stalinism, far
from being a counter-revolutionary agency of imperialism within the workers movement
as Trotsky stated, had given birth to tendencies which had found a way to become
revolutionary in spite of being Stalinist. The Stalinists had de facto taken the helm; the
Trotskyists had, it appeared, been found wanting.
Secondly, the Vietnamese Trotskyists had led decisive sections of the working class in the
1930s, but no longer did by the time of the French and American wars and this simply
confirmed, to those who wanted to believe it, that they were marginalised by history.
This false view rested on ignorance, or distortion, of the history of the revolutionary
situation which arose in Vietnam in 1945. When Japans wartime administration collapsed,
workers under the Fourth Internationals leadership vied for power in Saigon with the

Stalinist provisional government headed by Tran Van Giu, which, in line with Stalins
post-war agreement with the Allies, wanted to return the south of the country to French
imperialist control.
During this little-known revolution, soviet-type councils of workers and peasants, and (on
a small scale) workers military organisations took shape in Asia for the first time since the
Canton commune was crushed by the Guomindang in 1927. In Canton, Stalinism betrayed
the revolutionary workers; in Saigon, it connived with imperialism to ensure a bloody
defeat and pursued their Trotskyist vanguard into the countryside, where they were
invariably killed if caught. The foremost victim was the Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau,
biographical material about whom appears for the first time in English in this issue of
Revolutionary History.
The Stalinists have tried to bury the truth about this revolution and nearly got away with
it because Trotskyists, bending under Stalinist pressure, concealed it from themselves.
(For example, the two single-volume histories of the Fourth International in English, The
Fourth International by Pierre Frank, London 1973, and The Death Agony of the Fourth
International by Workers Power/Irish Workers Group, have between them not one single
word to say on the Vietnamese experience!)
Without understanding the 1945 revolution, the working class will never understand what
happened in Vietnam, or what the records of Stalinism and Trotskyism really were.
Is it not exaggerating to say that the history of the 1945 revolution was concealed? Look at
it from the viewpoint of the thousands of Europeans who joined the various organisations
claiming to be Trotskyist during Vietnams war against the USA, in the 1960s and 1970s.
How would they have come to learn about the 1945 revolution, or indeed about the fact
that there was such a thing as Vietnamese Trotskyism at all?
They would have searched the various journals and newspapers of their organisations in
vain. They might have picked up a copy of the libertarian Marxist journal
Solidarity(Volume 5 no.5, 1968) which contained the article The Saigon Insurrection by
Ngo Van Xuyet, translated from the duplicated sheet Information-Correspondance
Ouvrires. (This eye-witness account is part of a longer, unpublished work, Sur le Vietnam
[On Vietnam], from which we publish extracts below.)
Other pamphlets published at that time were in similarly tiny numbers. From authors
claiming adherence to Trotskyism came, in English: Vietnam: Stalinism vs. Revolutionary
Socialism by Richard Stephenson (a Chartist International Publication, 1972); Trotskyism
and Stalinism in Vietnam by Stig Eriksson, Vietnam: What About the Workers (Workers
Voice, Volume 2 no.7); Vietnam: An Unfavourable Terrain for the Guerilla Fight of the Far

Left Against the French Communist Party and From the Vietminh to the Vietcong in Class
Struggle, new series no 14, April 1968, pp1-16.
Little
The large organisations claiming to be Trotskyist had little to say on the issue of the
Vietnamese movement.
The French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI), led by Pierre Lambert, ran
educational classes on the Vietnamese movement's history. When supporters of the
United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) raised, on anti-Vietnam war marches
in Paris, the shout Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, OCI members answered Ta, Ta, Ta Thu Thau;
but the OCI never published anything about the Vietnamese Trotskyists. Neither did the
Socialist Labour League until 1975, and then only in order to denigrate them.
In 1973 Pierre Rousset, a leading member of the USFI, published Le parti communiste
vietnamien, Franois Maspero, Paris, 1973. (I believe only one chapter was translated into
English: this appears in the anthology The Stalinist Legacy, 1976, edited by Tariq Ali.) This
book set out to show how the Vietnamese Stalinist party had, under the pressure of
events, become revolutionary, and followed the path of Permanent Revolution sketched
out by Trotsky.
It sparked off a controversy in the USFIs English-language journal, International Socialist
Review (July-August 1973, April 1974, February 1975). Against Roussets contention that
the Stalinists had become a revolutionary leadership, George Johnson and Fred Feldman
of the Socialist Workers Party (US) laid out detailed evidence from the Vietnamese
Stalinists history.
One aspect of this argument, concerning the assassination of the Vietnamese Trotskyists
in 1945, is particularly interesting. Ho had told the French historian Daniel Guerin in 1946
that Ta Thu Than was killed because he didnt follow the line I laid down (Aux services
des colonises by Daniel Guerin, Editions Minuit, p22). Rousset quoted Guerin but
maintained that while Ho and the Stalinist leaders bore clear political responsibility for
the Trotskyists murder, it was difficult to establish who was immediately responsible;
here the Stalinist partys position was ambiguous. Feldman and Johnson pointed out
that there was no ambiguity, and that Rousset had pretended it merely to perpetuate
the illusion of the Stalinists revolutionary potential.
The two Americans also pointed out that the most important job for Trotskyist students of
Vietnamese history is the one Rousset didnt do: a re-examination of the 1945 events and
the Trotskyists struggle at that time for leadership against the Stalinists. A start could be

made with contemporary material published by the Fourth International (with caution as
to its accuracy on some factual points). This consists of: the most comprehensive account,
Quelques tapes de la Revolution au Nam-B du Vietnam (Some Stages in the revolution in
Nam-B, Vietnam) by Lu Sanh Hanh (Quatrime Internationale, September 1947); Qui a
tue Ta Thu Thau? (Who killed Ta Thu Tha?) by Rodolphe Prager, (La Verit, 19 July 1946);
Indochina Assassinat de Ta Thu Thau (Indochina: The Killing of Ta Thu Than), Quatrime
Internationale, August-September 1946; and Nouvelle etape de la contra-revolution et de
loffensive imperialiste en Indochine (The New Stage of the Counter-revolution and
Imperialist Offensive in Indochina) by the Central Committee of the Vietnamese
International Communist Group in France, Quatrime Internationale, early 1947. There is
a reference to the Vietnam experience in The Fl in Danger by Benjamin Peret, Grandizo
Munis and Natalia Trotsky (Revolutionary Communist Party, Internal Bulletin, 27 June
1947). (There were further articles in Quatrime Internationale about the French invasion
of Indochina, English-language translations of which appeared in Fourth International of
January 1946 and April 1947, but these mention the Fourth Internationals own section in
Vietnam only in passing.)
The American Socialist Appeal, Volume 3 no.58, 11 August 1939, published the letter from
Phan Van Hum, Tran Van Thach and Ta Thu Than to L.D. Trotsky, informing him of their
brilliant victory over the Stalinists in the Saigon colonial council elections in March of
that year (which we reproduce below).
Source
In their polemic with Rousset, Feldman and Johnson suggested he could do a real
service to Marxism, and to scholarship in general, by investigating the key 1945 events
further. They suggested interviewing Vietnamese and Chinese Trotskyist exiles in Paris:
there is no evidence that Rousset did this. Another vital source of information, which the
two Americans did not know about, is the International Secretariat of the Fourth
Internationals (ISFI) file of correspondence from Vietnam for 1945-55 which as a leading
USFI member Rousset could surely have checked. Some doubt is cast on his honesty (let
alone his Trotskyist credentials) by his failure to refer to it.
The file, now held in the Bibliothque Internationale de Documentation Contemporaire
(BIDC) at Nanterre University, is the most important primary source on the Trotskyists
part in the 1945 revolution. It includes reports on the 1945 events from the two Trotskyist
groups in Vietnam: Dans le Sud du Vietnam: La Revolution d Aut 1945 et la Groupe de
La Lutte (In South Vietnam: The August Revolution and the Struggle group); and the less
informative La Lutte de la Ligue Communiste Internationaliste du Vietnam (The struggle
of the Internationalist Communist League of Vetnam). There are reports from individual

Trotskyists, principally the two published here in Revolutionary History for the first time:
Un proces de Moscou dans le maquis de Ho Chi Minh (A Moscow Trial in Ho Chi Minhs
Maquis) by N Van, and the unsigned essay Mes premiers pas vers la Revolution
Permanente (My first steps towards the permanent revolution). The file also includes
letters, theses and proclamations by the Vietnamese Trotskyists; its most recent items are
a 15-page letter from Saigon dated May 1955 and some programmatic theses drafted in
the same year. The ISFI file of correspondence from China should also be consulted, as it
contains a two-page report, dated August 1951, on the fate of Liu Chia-Liang, a Chinese
Trotskyist who was killed by the Stalinists while working in Vietnam.
This material could form the basis for a serious study of the Trotskyists record in the 1945
revolution, which would be of great benefit to the movement.
No such study was carried out in the Fourth International in the years following 1945. In
fact the attention paid to the Vietnamese section was, to put it mildly, scant. Mention is
made of it in The Chinese Experience with Pabloite Revisionism and Bureaucratism by Peng
Shuzi, in Towards a History of the Fourth International, Part 3, Volume 3, pp.170-71,
Education for Socialists Series of the American SWP; and Looking Back Over My Years With
Peng Shu-tse by Chen Pilan (Introduction to The Chinese CP in Power by Peng, Monad,
New York 1980). Unpublished, but in a private collection, is a Resolution sur le Travail
Indochinois de la Commission Coloniale (Resolution on the Indochinese Work of the
Colonial Commission) from the late 1940s.
Now for the material on the Vietnamese Trotskyists published recently (since the mid1970s) by organisations and authors claiming to be Trotskyist.
First, there are writings which repeat the Stalinists misrepresentations and distortions
about the Vietnamese Trotskyists. To the forefront here are Stalinism and the Liberation
of Vietnam by Stephen Johns, in Fourth International, Autumn 1975 and Winter 1975 (he
says the Trotskyists had never been able to build a base amongst the peasantry and
totally underestimated the rle of the revolutionary guerilla war); and Vietnam and the
World Revolution by Martin McLaughlin (Labor Publications, Detroit 1985). In terms of
historical research, these items are almost worthless; however, they throw light on their
authors politics.
Secondly, there are various attempts to add to research on the Vietnamese Trotskyists
history, and comment on it: principally, Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam, a Spartacist
pamphlet (1975); and Vietnam and Trotskyism (a Communist League of Australia
pamphlet, 1987) which republished a series of articles by myself from Workers Press
(December 1986-January 1987). This latter pamphlet also included the first English

publication of the above-mentioned report Some Stages in the Revolution in Nam-b,

Vietnam, and the Declaration of the Indochinese Oppositionists (1930), which was the
basis of an important discussion between the Vietnamese section and L.D. Trotsky.
The duplicated sheet The Vietnamese Trotskyists and the August Revolution of 1945, by
John Spencer, is written from an anti-Trotskyist viewpoint, but refers to the conflicts
among Trotskyists over the Vietnam issue.
Important material on Vietnamese Trotskyist history can be found in Chroniques
Vietnamiennes, the French-language journal of the Groupe Trotskyste Vietnamien
(Vietnamese members of the USFI). Chroniques no.1 (November 1986) contained three
letters to Ho Chi Minh, dated to 1939, which effectively ended the argument about his
attitude to the slaughter of the Trotskyists. He encouraged it.
Despite these efforts, a properly researched history of the 1945 revolution, and the
Trotskyists part in it, has still to be written.
The Trotskyist activity in Vietnam before the Second World War is much better
documented. Apart from many references in works mentioned above, there is in English,
firstly, National Movements and Class Struggle in Vietnam, by Anh Van and Jacqueline
Roussel, New Park, 1988, a historical/ analytical pamphlet, first published by the Fourth
International in French in 1947.
References by L.D. Trotsky to his Vietnamese comrades are as follows: On the Declaration
of the Indochinese Oppositionists (Writings of Leon Trotsky 1930-31, Pathfinder, pp.2933); in India Faced with Imperialist War: An Open Letter to the Workers of India of 25 July
1939 (the English translation appears in Trotskys Writings on Britain, New Park, 1974,
Volume 3, pp.188-195), and in The Kremlin in World Politics (Writings of Leon Trotsky
1938-39, Pathfinder, p.368); in Trotskyism and the PSOP, (Leon Trotsky on France,
p.241).
In French there is the recent Cahiers Lon Trotsky, no 40, Revolutionnaires dIndochine,
the principal item in which is Le mouvement IV Internationale en Indochine 1930-39 (The
Fourth Internationalist Movement in Indochina 1930-39) by N. Van. A second article by N.
Van, Le Mouvement IV Internationale en Indochine 1940-45, is due for publication in the
Cahiers this year. Most works by non-Trotskyist authors are listed separately below, but a
special mention is needed for Rvolutionnaries Vietnamiens et Pouvoir Colonial en
Indochine (Vietnamese Revolutionaries and Colonial Power in Indochina), by Daniel
Hmery, Maspero, 1975, an exhaustive 500-page study of the relations of Stalinists,
Trotskyists and nationalists in Saigon 1932-37. The Centre dEtudes et de Recherches sur
les Mouvements Trotskyste et Mvolutionnaires Internationaux (Centre for Study and

Research on international Trotskyist and revolutionary movements) in Paris has an

incomplete but useful file of Vietnamese Trotskyist publications from the 1930s, including
Le Militant, La Lutte and Thang Muoi (The Spark); also an unpublished typescript on
Vietnam, Le Communisme de 1920 a 1935.
In Italian there is I Giornale La Lutte e i Trotskysti di Saigon 1934-39 by Stelio Marchese in
Storia a Politica, Volume 16 no.4, 1977.
In addition to these, there are Vietnamese Trotskyist pamphlets which have not yet been
translated into a European language or even, as far as I know, become available in any
European library. These include Tu de nhat den de to quoc te (From the First to the
Fourth International) by Ta Thu Thau, Van hoa tho xa, Collection Hieu biet moi (New
Knowledge), Saigon 1937; and Ta Thu Thau: Tu quoc gia den quoc te (Ta Thu Thau: From
nationalism to internationalism), by Nguyen Van Dinh, Sang, Saigon 1938.
An important aspect of the Fourth Internationals history concerns the struggles of
Vietnamese workers in France, both during the Second World War when they were
confined to labour camps, and after the war. Their leaders and organisers were
Trotskyists. This is dealt with fully in Les travailleurs indochinois en France pendant la
seconde guerre mondiale (Indochinese workers in France during the Second World War),
by Benjamin Stora, Cahiers du CERMTRI, no.28, April 1983. There are also references to it
in Chroniques Vietnamiennes, no.4, and I understand one of the comrades involved has
written a lengthy unpublished memoir in Vietnamese. Also unpublished is a Bref
Historique de Group Bolshevik-Leniniste Indochinoise, a copy of which is in the Centro
Studi Pietro Tresso in Foligno, Italy.
Now to material by bourgeois and non-Trotskyist writers on Vietnamese history. Those
which include the most detail about the Trotskyists are: Marxism in Vietnam by I. Milton
Sacks, part of Marxism in Southeast Asia: A Study of Four Countries, edited by Frank N.
Trager, Stanford University Press, 1960; Vietnamese Communism 1925-45 by Huynh Kim
Khanh, Cornell University Press. The Section d'Outre-Mer des Archives Nationales
(Overseas Section of the National Archives) in Paris, where vast quantities of reports on
the revolutionary movement by the French colonial administration of the 1930s are
stored, is an essential source for more detailed research.
On the 1945 revolution, The Failure of the Independent Political Movement in Vietnam
1946-46 by K. Colton, an unpublished thesis in the library of the School of Oriental and
African Studies in London, is exceptionally useful. Also interesting is Political Alignments
of Vietnamese Nationalists, US State Department Division of Research for the Far East,
Office of Intelligence Research Report No 3708, 1 October 1949.

10

There is, of course, material in Vietnamese (see for example the bibliography of Huynh
Kim Khanhs Vietnamese Communism). Obvious priorities for translation are Nha Cach
Mang Ta Thu Thau 1906-1945 by Ba Phuong Lan, Khai Tri, Saigon 1973 (a biography of Ta
Thu Thau); Ta Thu Thau by Huan Phong, articles in Hoa Dong nos.44-52, Saigon 1965-66;
and Ngoi to kham Ion (In Central Prison) by Phan Van Hum (one of the Trotskyist leaders),
Saigon 1957.
Other works with more than a passing mention of the Trotskyists are: History of
Vietnamese Communism 1925-76 by Douglas Pike; Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, two
volumes, by Joseph Buttinger, London, 1967; The Struggle for Indochina 1940-55 by Ellen
Hammer, Stanford University Press, 1955. In French, there are the Histoire du Vietnam de
1940 1952 by Phillippe Devillers; Ho Chi Minh: a political biography by Jean Lacouture
(Allen Lane, London 1968); and La Liberation: Les Revolutionnaries pendant la Second
Guerre Mondiale 1944-47 (The Liberation: Revolutionaries During the Second World
War 1944-47) by Yvan Craipeau.
I have found no references to the Trotskyists in the Vietnamese Stalinists official
European-language versions of their own history. The origins of their lying slanders that
the Trotskyists were Japanese agents are the above mentioned letters from Ho Chi
Minh. This was subsequently repeated in the Vietnamese-language Party Writings,
Volume 2 (1930-45), Central Commission for the Study of Party History, Hanoi, 1977, and
most recently in the Observations on the steps of the Partys struggle against the counterrevolutionary Trotskyist bands by The Tap, in Tap Chi Cong San (Communist Review),
No.2, February 1983, which comrades of the Chroniques Vietnamiennes group have
usefully taken the trouble to translate into French. Whether new material will be
uncovered, as a result of the appeal launched by those comrades for the Stalinists
archives on the 1930s to be opened, or the winds of glasnost blowing across from
Moscow, we dont yet know.
Building the Fourth International is as practical a matter in post-1975 Vietnam as
anywhere else in the world. It does have a little history of its own, which, although strictly
outside the scope of this article, could be touched on. See especially Chroniques
Vietnamiennes, its predecessor Nghien Cuu, the letter from the Bolshevik-Leninist Group
of Vietnam to the USFI of 5 February 1947 (published in the above-mentioned pamphlet,
Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam by the Spartacist League), and also a series of
articles in Workers Press, 3, 17 and 24 February 1990. A polemic in the Summer 1980
special edition of the USFIs Inprecor, entitled Dbat Sur La Situation En Indochine,
touched on some political and theoretical issues of vital importance arising from the
Vietnamese invasion of Pol Pots Cambodia.

11

La Lutte and the Vietnamese Trotskyists

Daniel Hemery
The following extracts have been translated by Ted Crawford from Daniel Hemerys book,
Revolutionnaires Vietnamiens et pouvoir colonial en Indochine, which is published by F.
Maspero (1 Place Paul Painlev, Paris 5) in 1975. We are greatly indebted to both author
and publisher for permission to reproduce them in English garb here.
Daniel Hemery is a member of the Ligue Communiste Internationalists, the French section
of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International. The research on which his book is
based formed part of the doctorate he submitted to the University of Paris in 1973. He
lectures at the Universite Jussieur, and has also written an account of the thought of Ta
Thu Thau before he became a Trotskyist, Ta Thu Thau: Litineraire politique dun
revolutionnaire vietnamien, in Pierre Brocheux (ed.), Histoire de lAsie du sud-est, Lille,
pp.193-222. The snippets that we produce here reflect only a fragment of the massive
research of Comrade Hemerys 526 page book, and hopefully will tempt confident French
readers to study the rest.
As is our custom, the notes have been renumbered, though it should be possible to find
them very easily in the original from the page references which we give. Unless otherwise
stated, the notes are the authors own, but we have cut out or reduced some notes that do
not deal with the Trotskyist theme that is our concern here.
*******************
1. An ambiguous approach to national reality? [1]
It is surprising that the writings of the group attach little importance to this issue [the
national question - Eds.]. The evocations of national history, which one can read in 192527 from the pen of Tran Van Thach or of Ta Thu Thau, cease. The key words of the
national question, fatherland or independence, are hardly used. La Lutte always writes
in the language of class struggle, it hardly borrows from that vocabulary, however rich it is
in French, and only once mentions the word Vietnam. Furthermore, when this lack of
interest ceased, it was tempted to give way to iconoclasm. Did they not write in April 1935
that for a long time in this country patriotic sentiments have not had any sort of echo?
However, the readers were not deceived, and some of them questioned this. A retired
teacher, interviewed by a reporter of the journal on the question of the language of
education, confessed his astonishment:

12

I know that you are not nationalists at La Lutte, but all the same I swear to you that above
all I love my country, our country. You seem, all of you, to ignore the fact that we are a
conquered people.
In 1934-35 Vietnamese Marxism seemed to put itself at the opposite extreme to
patriotism. Can we see here the existence of a Vietnamese version of Luxemburgism, or
even a national nihilism? The reader of the journal must look carefully at these
impressions. One could talk of the national issue being half-hidden, rather than there
being an absolute silence on this question. The nationalist demand is actually put forward
in La Lutte, but in counterpoint, at once as an implicit element of the general theme of the
journal and the group, and as a minor motif in its explicit discourse. It can come up swiftly
in different random contexts when national oppression is shown. Thus, of a Vietnamese
journalist, victim of a beating up, La Lutte justified its protests in these terms: The group
around La Lutte is one of the many efforts which our people make to gain respect. The
national theme pushes out things not found in the international rubric in the form of a
constant reminds: of the right of colonised peoples to independence. It also takes a
cultural or educational detour. One of the slogans of the journal is for the adoption of
Vietnamese (but it is still called Annamite) as the official language in the colonial
legislatures, and as the language of education.
The national language is expressed in La Lutte [2], but its occurrence is weak. In the 21
months up to June 1936, it only produced about 20 articles on this. [3] Statements on the
national theme can be classified in general into two categories. The first is set around the
criticism of the patriotism of the bourgeoisie, and seeks to show the role which it plays in
the alienation of the working classes. Even in an oppressed country, the La Lutte people
thought that the patriotism of the ruling class was an instrument of oppression. This did
not mean, however, an absolute condemnation of patriotism, because its positive value
was affirmed in the statements of the second category. La Lutte thus made a distinction
between two historical varieties of patriotism, one being the alienating patriotism of the
bourgeoisie, the other being in the interests of the majority of the nation, the patriotism
of the working class and its allies. These statements forcefully claimed an identity
between the national cause and the interests of the working class. But several of them ...
gave them less importance and showed the necessity of an intransigent class struggle. For
the group this was certainly the principal weapon of national liberation. To emphasise all
the more the importance of this dialectic of class and nation, La Lutte even bent the
Stalinist definition of the second of these two themes. We know, it said in April 1935,
that a nation is not necessarily a community of race, language or religion. To have a joint
future it must be an economic unity.

13

2. International links [4]

Through Gerard Rosenthal [5] La Lutte corresponded with the International Secretariat of
the Trotskyist movement, and at the beginning of 1936 received the publications of the
different national Trotskyist groups Belgian, Chinese and Australian as well as the
French paper of the Spanish POUM. But the references in the journal to Trotskyism
remained very discreet for a long time, the first only appearing in March 1936 with some
extracts from Rvolution, the paper of the French Revolutionary Young Socialists (JSR).
Eventually, the political contacts of the group spread to the whole political spectrum of
the French left, the pacifist movements, and above all, the Comit d'amnistie aux
Indochinois, and the Ligue Anti-Imperialiste [6], movements which were promoted by
Francis Jourdain, the most active Paris correspondent of La Lutte, as well as, through the
intervention of Daniel Guerin, the Colonial Committee of the SFIO. Guerin became one of
Ta Thu Thaus correspondents at the end of 1936, and the spokesman of the group in the
SFIO.
The intensity of these contacts was uneven. Contacts with the Comit damnistie were
particularly active, and were founded on mutual confidence. Contacts with the Fourth
International, which had not yet been formally established, were very loose. This was for
reasons which were not only due to the needs of the United Front. The international
contacts of Vietnamese Trotskyism were for a long time of a purely ideological nature, and
it always kept total liberty of action. There were a number of reasons for that the
weakness of the Fourth International and the Eurocentric nature of its preoccupations,
together with its lack of knowledge, hardly allowed it to intervene in the tactical choices to
be made in Indochina. Its leaders seem to have been somewhat reserved with regard to
political practice in Indochina, but they had confidence in the Vietnamese Trotskyists and
supported them. [7] We must doubtless return to the analysis developed by Trotsky in
order to explain the independence of his Vietnamese supporters. Like the majority of the
inspirers of contemporary Communism, he never truly suspected the future importance of
the revolutionary movements then developing in the great French colonies of North Africa
and Indochina, to which his writings only made rare allusions. He had, however, with
remarkable perspicacity, criticised in 1930 the reluctance of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in
France to take sides on the national question. The later short texts where he dealt with
Indochina, all dated in 1939, were in return almost entirely devoted to very specific rather
than general questions. [8] The necessity of maintaining the struggle against French
imperialism and, above all, of breaking from the policy of weakening the anti-imperialist
movement that was then being promoted by the Comintern as far as the Communist
parties in the French and British colonies were concerned, was certainly affirmed, but
without going deeply into the analysis of the actual developments taking place in

14

Indochina. Above all, he had for a long time thought that the historically decisive battles
would take place in the industrialised countries, the Soviet Union, China and India. [9]
3. Keeping an eye on peasant life [10]
Apart from the personal links of its editors with the countryside, La Lutte possessed its
own circle of correspondents, who were often village school teachers, sometimes freed
political prisoners sent back to their villages who could not start secret activity again
because they were watched, or young people, the educated unemployed, of whom an
official report in 1936 deplored that they were not assimilable by the established order of
the village:
True pariahs, they could not be classified amongst the dan, and they were rejected by
native society which despised them, and which they in turn despised.
In addition, La Lutte could count upon the hidden support of the underground militants of
the Communist Party.
This peasant implantation of a workers organisation was not peculiar to the La Lutte
group, but was an historic characteristic of Vietnamese Communism. From this period it
had a different sociological profile compared to the great Communist parties of the
interwar period, the French or German for example. This spread of workers ideas in
peasant or semi-peasant circles certainly echoes the Chinese experience, and even calls to
mind the influence of Socialism or Anarchism amongst the workers in semi-rural industry,
which played a key role in the nineteenth century in the workers revolutions and in the
birth of trade unionism in Europe. [11] And as far as La Lutte is concerned, we must
appreciate with more precision the true influence of the legal movement in the rural
milieu. It would not perhaps be too much of an exaggeration to say that because of its
more obvious urban character, it was able to build an underground Communist
organisation.
Its influence was weak amongst the peasantry of Transbassac, but pretty solidly
established in the provinces of central Cochin China, that semi-circle which went around
the Jonc plain and its moonscape countryside. It was there that La Lutte people found
both an audience and information about the countryside.
4. Two electoral campaigns [12]
From February to May 1935, Cochin China saw a continuous electoral campaign. The La
Lutte people came near to success in the first round, and carried it off easily in the second.

15

La Luttes campaign for the colonial elections on 3 and 17 March had only propagandist
aims. The group had hardly any serious hope of success, and only put up six candidates,
three Communists and three Trotskyists, in the Eastern and Central Provinces. [13] It was,
however, not completely absent elsewhere. At Vinhlong, in the third constituency, the
advocate Duong Van Giao, a friend of Ta Thu Thau and the groups lawyer, was elected
deputy in the central provinces, thanks to the support of the Cao-daists, and another
independent candidate Phan Khac Giang, in the fifth constituency (Cantho), affirmed his
sympathies for La Lutte. Even if the constitutionalists were re-elected nearly everywhere,
the elections still represented quite a success for legal Communism. [14] In contrast to the
dull campaign of the rural gentry, the La Lutte people had shown unequalled cohesion and
vigour, and imposed a quite different kind of electoral competition.
As can be read in the confidential report on the election, the Trotskyist leader Ta Thu Thau
once again showed himself to be the real head of the revolutionary organisations. After
getting to know thoroughly the electoral legislation, they mobilised all the resources of
the legal party and its sympathisers, and made contact with clandestine organisations.
After carefully explaining their manner of working on the edge of legality without ever
openly breaking the law, they gave everybody different tasks. Some had to make
collections among workers who were not electors, collecting the sinews of war, whilst
others had the jobs of editing papers and leaflets, propaganda and information. [15]
The group was refused the right to organise meetings, but knew how to get its
programme known amongst the middle bourgeoisie and the small peasants of the centre
and the East. In each county town La Lutte had its propagandists, who went by bicycle
through the countryside carrying posters, personally visiting each elector, distributing
thousands of leaflets, and organising meetings and local support groups. [16] The three
principal slogans of the candidates, the Three Whales of the revolutionary movement,
were first the Amnesty [17], secondly, raising wages, dividing up the great estates, and
freedom for the trade union movement, and thirdly, the installation of peoples power.
They had a real impact. For the first time in Indochina an election took place with a radical
challenge to the established political order, and on the claim to a parliament elected by
universal suffrage. La Lutte had put the problems of ordinary people at the centre of its
campaign, and supported a detailed programme of immediate demands. [18] It opposed
to the friendly relations of the constitutionalist politics with the French administration a
quite different conception of parliamentary activity, and tore to pieces the image of the
Colonial Council, saying:
Can it be said that the Colonial Council represents the people, as it has no power? Even if
it did have any of the powers of any European parliament, it would be powerless without

16

a movement organised by the people. We must send to the Colonial Council

representatives who can talk loudly to the whole people from the parliamentary tribune
and who will help to organise the conquest of People's Power. [19]
They vigorously fought the constitutionalists, all of whom sparred with the La Lutte
people, which earned them a stern call to order from the authorities. The elections of
March 1935 marked the end of part of the electoral base of the constitutionalists, in
particular the young people of the towns:
The constitutionalists, taking note of their political work, only pull behind them their
personal friends or very respectable electors. They have become leaders, destroyed by
their own success, whose supporters, over time, have left them, without yet being
replaced by new elements. [20]
The divorce between the conservatism of the supporters of Bui Quang Chieu and the
quickening rhythm of change in the country had become irreversible.
The municipal elections in Saigon of 6 and 12 May accelerated the process. The tactics and
general campaign themes of the group were unchanged. La Lutte raised the question of
the chaos of the colonial city, the growing imbalance between the general underprovision
of the urban area and the growth of its working class population, the absence of any
cheap housing policy, and the misery of the inhabitants of the shanty towns. The
government noticed the reception by the urban masses of this new political language.
For the first time, they wrote in a report, they were spoken to in a language made for
them. [21]
5. La Luttes first balance sheet [22]
After 21 months of existence, La Lutte appeared as a vigorous political movement which
had gone beyond the stage of a simple propaganda group. The confidential reports then
used expressions about it which reflected this growth: legal Communist party or, legal
movement. Their tone was alarmist. All emphasised the dominant influence on the
audience that the group was in the process of acquiring in the political life of the South.
What, then, was La Luttes character? Numerically it was growing. However, one must not
see it as a political organism of the European type, highly organised and openly displaying
its forces. La Lutte can hardly be understood with the help of todays categories of French
political sociology. The party, which was actually part of the legal movement, was limited
to a strict minimum elected representatives and journalists but many militants worked
secretly under its direction; plenty of more or less anonymous friends and sympathisers,
workers, clerks, school students, village school masters, and smallholders, brought it

17

decentralised and benevolent assistance. On the other hand, it offered a welcoming

organisation to ex-political prisoners who were too carefully watched when they returned
from France or the Soviet Union to be able to take part in underground organisations.
They carried on three activities: the correspondence and collection of information, the
circulation of the journal and giving an oral translation of it, and propaganda activity
during elections or strikes.
This loose and open structure represented the beginning of the semilegal movements
which developed in Indochina during the period of the Popular Front, and the future of
which the group foresaw. [23] It permitted great flexibility and popular initiative, which
compensated for the weakness of the official group. La Lutte functioned as a
semimovement deprived of an internal organisation. After it came out of its initial
isolation, the circulation of the journal grew a little. Its sale was more than 1,500 copies at
the start of the autumn of 1935, a number only appreciated by noting the tiny public
Indochinese press. In reality, such a small circulation represented several thousand
readers and listeners, and an indeterminate number of ordinary sympathisers. The
cohesion of the group was its strength. Differences were sorted out by discussion. [24]
Thus, as a reader wrote, after the electoral success of 1935, the political tendencies of
the workers movement came together. [25]
La Lutte had a strong attraction in urban society. It re-established the bases for
continuous Communist activity in Saigon. What were they? Above all, they were the
working class and youth. The group had succeeded in attracting the attention of the
workers and the coolies who were crushed by the crisis and by the cumulative effects of
capitalist and pre-capitalist methods of exploitation. It was a real part of the workers
movement at the moment that it was retaking the offensive. The administration saw in its
militants the recognised advisors of the needy class. [26] Its working class activity was
spread further in May 1936 with the creation of study circles of workers [27], of which the
first, for the workers in the Arsenal, met on 16 June at Nguyen Van Nguyens house. It is
true that they had to stop the meetings in July, as its members feared they would be
sacked. On the other hand, La Lutte had published a series of pamphlets called The Social
Library in Quoc Ngu, of which the first, edited by Nguyen Van Tao, was sold out in a few
days. [28]
The fusion between the intellectuals and the advanced elements of the proletariat was
well on its way. La Lutte was equally at work among the youth in the schools. The group,
which knew how to run its political work through the network of precapitalist socioeconomic structures (the market, the shed at the crossroads, the artisans workshop) was
now present inside the national cultural system, notably within the private schools. [29]

18

The Trotskyists of La Lutte taught in these places, and had great authority there, above all,
Ta Thu Thau, a well-known lecturer by whom young people and their parents wanted to
be taught. [30] On several occasions the paper had defended the pupils. [31] It was
circulated in the vocational schools, at the industrial and the mechanic schools, and at the
Lycee Petrus Ky where Nguyen Van Nguyen led a Marxist study circle in April 1936. In the
course of the following years a great number of these students would come to strengthen
the legal organisations.
Legal and illegal operations constituted two dialectical aspects related to the same
political phenomenon that is to say, the rooting of Communism inside the body of
Vietnam society. The clandestine activists helped the legal ones [32], and these prolonged
and amplified the partial battles which the former organised, such as those of the tobacco
growers. La Lutte was also a political substitute. Whatever its vitality, the Indochinese
Communist Party was convalescent, having to use most of its resources to regroup, and
was not without the inherent sectarian tendencies of a period of defeat or isolation. La
Lutte gave to the party the continuity of Communist action, and despite certain extremist
statements, had shown sufficient flexibility to pull moderate and patriotic opinion towards
the Communists.
At the same time, the Communist movement had undergone another mutation. Until
then, its mass basis had been above all in the countryside, the towns being the
strongholds of the colonial system. After 1932 the legal movement enabled it to transfer
Communisms centre of gravity to urban surroundings, and to rebalance the relationship
between urban and peasant struggles. Urban action allowed the revolutionaries to spread
modern forms of political combat through the countryside, apd to give them inspiration
and continuity. In the pre-war period, and with the birth of the crisis of colonialism, the
urban centre had for a time acquired the key role; a new dialectic of town and country
which would have its full effect in the revolution of August 1945, which was simultaneous
in both the city and the villages. It was only 1946, with a new historical structure that of
the long war which reversed the balance between the town and the countryside.
These transformations favoured the reorganisation of clandestine Communist
organisations after the repressions of April-May 1935 in the South and Annam, and of
August-September 1935 in the North. It was precisely in Cochin China that their
reconstruction had been most rapid. From July clandestine propaganda was renewed in
Saigon, Giandinh, Rachgia, Baclieu and Travinh, and in at least eight provinces by July
1936. [33] Underground Communism was weak, but its ability to resist outweighed the
efforts of the police to root it out, and gave alarm to the highest levels in Hanoi. On their
side, the Trotskyists had been able to rebuild an embryonic clandestine organisation, the

19

League of International Communists (LCI) founded in July 1935. [34] They criticised the
strategy of Popular Fronts, and demanded the formation of a mass workers party and an
anti-imperialist front uniting the different tendencies of the workers movement. At the
time of the arrest of their most active leaders [35], most notably Luu Sanh Hanh, Ho Huu
Tuong and Ngo Van Xuyet, they had recruited militants in about 40 workplaces.
6. The anti-imperialist United Front [36]
There was hardly any lasting consensus between the Vietnamese Trotskyists and
Communists on the question of political strategy. In Saigon the Trotskyists were inspired
by the conclusions of the manifesto Whither France?, which Trotsky had published in
October. The last lap of the race between Fascism and the workers revolution had
started: no third way was possible but only short detours, which led to one or the other. In
the end a recourse to violence was inevitable.
In June the Vietnamese Trotskyists made a similar analysis of the Indochinese situation in
their illegal papers and then, only a little later, in their legal journal Le Militant, the first
four numbers of which were issued between 1 and 21 September 1936.
The economic recovery and the French crisis could only lead to another mass movement
in Vietnam, which, supported by the offensive of the French working class, would shake
the colonial system. They envisaged the appearance of a revolutionary situation in
Indochina and prepared for it. The illegal review Thuong Truc Cach Mang (Permanent
Revolution) of the Lien Doan Cong San Quoc Te had put forward the idea of creating
action committees in the spring of 1936, which had already been advocated by Trotsky in
November 1935. [37] The Trotskyist underground militants thought that in Indochina
these peoples committees would allow an offensive mass movement to be formed, and
so they started to set them up. There was perfect synchronisation of analysis between
them and their western comrades. Whilst the Parisian proletariat was occupying the
factories, Trotsky ended his article of 9 June with the words the French revolution has
begun; in Saigon, even as the arrest of their people was taking place on the 11th, the
illegal Trotskyists circulated an appeal to go forward:
Comrades, several hundreds of thousands of French workers of the metropolis have struck
and occupied the factories. Let us follow them, let us rise up in the factories and
plantations in each province and village. Let the workers and peasants elect delegates to
form action committees. Follow the workers of France! Down with the imperialist
Indochinese government! Long live the independence of Indochina! Seize the lands of the
landlords! Long live French and Indochinese Communism! [38]

20

The Trotskyist analysis thus included a revolutionary outcome for all the developments of
June 1936. The logic of the crisis in the metropolis would set a date for the liberation of
the Indochinese peoples. The French revolution would open the way to the Indochinese
revolution [39], and they must aim for the conquest of power, and never lose sight of
internationalism. Now was not the time to have confidence in the government of Leon
Blum, indeed one had constantly to distrust it. In the same way the Trotskyists reaffirmed
the double necessity of making practical agreements with the Vietnamese big bourgeoisie,
and of maintaining the class struggle, so they thought of the United Front as a tactic of
simultaneous alliance and struggle. [40] Anything was possible in France and Spain, and all
this would happen in Indochina ... [41]
7. The Action Committees [42]
The dialectic of the illegal and the legal the coordination of open activity and the
activity of our party according to a document of the PCI had meant a rapid growth in
the movement of the provisional Action Committees. The La Lutte group did almost all the
work at the centre. They printed innumerable leaflets on behalf of the Action Committees,
and in their own name, notably the manifesto Dong Duong Dai Hoi (Indochinese Congress)
[43], and their militants knew how to use the most varied forms of oral propaganda (for
example, they got theatre groups to put in passages in their plays which mentioned the
aims of the Congress), they organised many meetings in the provinces, and started up
some of the Committees in the Saigon-Cholon area. [44]
La Lutte also published the pamphlet Cach Lam Viec Cua Banh Hanh Dong (Method of
Work of an Action Committee), an interesting guide to the recently formed Action
Committees [45], by the Trotskyist militant Dao Hung Long, just released from prison, and
a member of the committee for the convening of an Indochinese Congress. In order not to
have to ask for legal authorisation, these Committees could never have more than 19
members. This obligation made discussions and decentralised political initiative easier,
and in this Ta Thu Thau saw some of the conditions for success. He foresaw getting
thousands of such Committees established. They did not have formal constitutions, and
legally had to be temporary, but were, nonetheless, destined to become permanent
organisations of the masses. The pamphlet recommended limiting the numbers of
organisers to five, and reserving the other places to representatives of the masses.
The spread of the Committees had to obey the rule of fission. When a Committee reached
20 members it had to split.
Each Committee had great liberty of action. According to the pamphlet which perhaps
put forward a Trotskyist vision of the movement there would be no leaders or central
committee [46], whilst conferences of the Committees would enable coordination and

21

political debate to take place; it recommended having a Committee in each village. Each of
these organisations elected a Secretariat which met at least once a week, organised the
expression of popular demands, edited a discussion bulletin, drew up lists of resolutions,
and arranged to elect the conference delegates. La Lutte would manage external affairs
both with the French left of the metropolis and Saigon [47], and with the Vietnamese
press in the rest of Indochina. It brought valuable help to the foundation in Hanoi of the
legal Communist group Travail in September 1936, which resulted in a northerly extension
of La Luttes formula (but with different politics) and of the Congress movement. [48]
The secret organisations played an equal if not more important role. From outside they
exercised a critical check on the actions of the group, a double entry check since there
were two political lines in the Congress. Le Militant, the legal paper of the Trotskyists,
warned against holding any illusions in the southern bourgeoisie. [49] The Trotskyists, still
just starting their clandestine organisation, actively pushed for the preparation of an
Indochinese Congress, and the formation of Action Committees [50], in which they saw
the embryonic structures for a situation of dual power.
In the weeks following La Luttes call, the clandestine Communist organisations set
themselves the task of multiplying the Action Committees in the immediate future. [51]
The Bureau Abroad [Communist Headquarters Eds.] followed the development of the
campaign and the action of La Lutte with attention. Its resolution of 3 October [52]
commented favourably on this, but criticised what the Bureau considered as clumsiness:
the article of Nguyen An Ninh which denqunced the manoeuvres of the President of the
Chamber of the Representatives of Tonkin, and the caustic remarks of La Lutte about the
bourgeoisie. [53] But beyond this critical comment on the movement, the ICP, by far the
biggest revolutionary party, favoured the spread of Action Committees with all its forces,
the great majority of such owing their existence to it.
In short, the ex-political prisoners who started to return to their villages really made up
the backbone of numerous Committees. Because of the surveillance to which they were
subject, they were all struck off to run the Committees which, let us repeat, were legal.
The police made a partial list of the very numerous ex-political prisoners among the
activists at the end of September 1936. In the village of An Truong (Travinh), the old
centre of the peasant movement of the South and an area of harsh repression after the
great demonstration of 1 August 1931, the Action Committee was founded after the
return of a group of freed prisoners who by then had a relationship with La Lutte. Ta Thu
Thau was seen there on several occasions at the beginning of 1937. [54] Another police
source reckoned that 25 per cent of all the members of the Committees were exprisoners. [55]

22

8. Repression [56]
The colonial government, already certain of the home governments support, immediately
struck at the vital centres of the Congress movement. On 21 September the headquarters
of La Lutte and the homes of Ta Thu Thau and Nguyen An Ninh were seized and searched.
Both were imprisoned. On 3 October it was the turn of Nguyen Van Tao. Three days later
their demand to be freed on bail was rejected.
The relationship between the Communists and the Trotskyists came under pressure
following the appearance in Le Militant of harsh criticisms of Soviet foreign policy and the
French Popular Front, and became more bitter in October. On 8 October the Trotskyist
weekly made public its decision to suspend publication in order not to handicap that of La
Lutte. [57] The Central Committee of the ICP added to its circular of 3 November this
conciliatory preface:
If the Trotskyists sincerely enter the Popular Front, we will welcome them with pleasure,
but we will always be careful, because we only believe in peoples' deeds, and not their
words. [58]
At the time of this step backward, La Lutte appeared more than ever irreplaceable, even
in a milieu strongly aligned with the Communist movement. It is remarkable enough that
it also had good relationships with the Cao-daists. The government accused the sect of
Pham Cong Tac of providing campaign funds to the group [59], a fact which evidently is
unproven, but it is symptomatic that Ta Thu Than, Nguyen An Ninh and Nguyen Van Tao
had, at the invitation of Ho Phap, joined in the mourning ceremonies for Le Van Trung at
Tay Ninh on 26 November. [60]
The arrest of the militants of La Lutte, and the hunger strike that they undertook for 11
days from 24 October, caused huge indignation in Vietnamese opinion, both in Saigon and
the countryside. In the villages close to Saigon, the merchants and the hackney cab drivers
[61] struck on 5 November. In Saigon demonstrations were under way, and the popularity
of La Lutte had never been so great. [62] The isolation of the French authorities was at its
height.
The movement for the calling of the Indochinese Congress was effectively opposed by the
neo-colonial policy of the Popular Front. However, Marius Moutet was far from having
approved the repressive operations of the colonial government, whom he accused in a
long letter of 24 November of having taken unnecessary risks in keeping in prison three
politically important individuals [63], and of having exaggerated the danger. Pushed by
the minister, the colonial government went into reverse and relaxed its grip. It then
allowed the publication at Hue of the Nhanh Lua (The Rice Seed) of Nguyen Khoa Van on

23

24 October, whilst on 5 November Nguyen An Ninh, Nguyen Van Tao and Ta Thu Thau
were freed. [64] The case against La Lutte was also dropped on the orders of the minister.
[65] As all three left the main prison, the first great wave of strikes in Vietnamese history
had already started.
9. The strikes [66]
The setting at liberty of the three leaders of La Lutte on 5 November opened the second
phase of the Popular Front period in Indochina. It marked a pause in the political struggle
continuing since August between the national movement and the neo-colonial policy of
the Popular Front. This respite itself reflected the extension of the struggle to the terrain
of class conflict. From the end of October 1936 to the end of August 1937, Vietnam was
shaken by an unprecedented wave of strikes without an equivalent in any other French
colony. The Minister of Colonies had been forced to drop the case against La Lutte
precisely because he feared that the political crisis would develop into a social explosion.
In the same way the strikes imposed pressure on the legal revolutionary movement. The
tasks of the hour became to aid the strikers and to organise solidarity around them. From
this came the two key tasks which appeared imminent at the end of the summer the
legalisation of the Congress campaign and the proclamation of political democracy.
In the course of the strikes it was clear that the influence of Trotskyism and Communism
among the working class was progressing with giant steps. The strike offensive itself
consisted of a great spontaneous impulse. Often the initiative came from the depths of
the proletariat, and resulted from collective consciousness, but this spontaneity had
joined up with the activity of organisations, and it would have been vain to oppose them.
The double structure of the Communist movement, including Trotskyism, had played a
profound role, and had given coherence to the push of the working class. Even if
documentation is almost totally lacking, one cannot doubt that long before October 1936
the secret trade union nuclei reconstituted by the ICP since 1934 had taken over a large
number of strikes, such as that of the sawmen. The November 1936 issue of Giai Phong,
the underground paper of the Interior Committee of the ICP, gave credit to Communist
militants for the leadership of strikes in the distilleries, the clothing industry, the sawmills,
potteries and soapworks, but recognised that: Although the mass movement is boiling
up, many strikes and working class struggles have escaped the control of the Communist
Party. [67]
In other cases it was Trotskyist militants who had organised the strikes. [68] From the
evidence, all the underground organisations, whatever their tendency, had abandoned
slow recruitment in favour of joining the workers spirited offensive.

24

The activity of La Lutte was only a little more understood. Official documents blamed it,
with malicious exaggeration, for being responsible for most of the strikes in Saigon. The
political report of December 1936 thus conjured up:
... the double game of La Lutte, the double texture of its work: on the one hand carrying
on outside activities on behalf of certain trades and substituting itself for the CGT, which
does not exist here, justified by the need to modernise workplace legislation, and the
necessity for applying this to the working population in Cochin China, which is backward
on a world scale, and on the other hand carrying on secret underground work and
profound anti-French opposition. [69]
In the end, one of the results of the strike movement was the formation of important
underground unions, of which the police took notice at the end of December 1936. The
Communists had created the Tong Cong Hoi (General Workers Union), and were
represented in at least 11 important enterprises, notably the Arsenal, the FACI and Shell
[70], and had published at the end of January the first number of Hop Nhut (The Union).
By 1 March 1937 they numbered 800 members in Saigon and 700 others in several
sympathising groups. [71] In addition the underground Trotskyist militants were in the
process of getting an important audience in the Saigon working class. They were active in
the factories, notably the Arsenal where they were more influential than the
Communists [72] on the railways, in the water and electric companies, and had formed
another embryonic general union, the Lien Hiep Uy Tho Thuyen (The General Workers
Federation) which, after November 1936, regularly published the monthly Lien Hiep (The
Union), a union propaganda organ. [73]
10. The break [74]
The split in La Lutte in June 1937 had led within two months to the ruin of the political
project that was conceived the year before by the Vietnamese Communists and
Trotskyists. The event is not a superficial one in Vietnamese political history. In a sense it
opened the way to the ideological reorientation of Communism, which culminated in the
foundation of the Vietminh, and through this established new roots in the national
revolutionary tradition. Crucially, however, this split brought into play the principle factors
which affected the general evolution of the revolutionary parties: the changes in the
dynamism of the mass movements on the basis of doctrinal choice, the personality of
human beings, and the impact of the policy of the colonial government and of the
Comintern on the course of the national movement, etc. It is still necessary to add that,
like all splits during the Stalinist epoch, it harboured no fewer emotional repercussions
than reasoned elements. Their combination would result in the widening of the split into
an irreconcilable conflict, culminating in its tragic end in 1945.

25

Underground Trotskyism did not have the same strength. In Vietnam, as in many other
countries, it seems, moreover, to have always kept a group structure without ever truly
acquiring that of a solidly organised and geographically spread party. [75] Ta Thu Thau was
above all an orator, perhaps by personal temperament and certainly as a result of his ro1e
in legal political life. Nevertheless, since the scuttling of Militant in October 1936, the
illegal Trotskyist group of Ho Huu Tuong, because of the difference in its experience in
1931-32, had succeeded in providing a complete system of both legal and underground
publications, and it was in the process of becoming a force to be reckoned with. [76] It
published its constitution in the May 1937 issue of its paper, Tien Quan (The Vanguard).
The Trotskyists had won young followers in the Saigon factories in which they had done
their best to build trade union committees. These, the embryos of a working class trades
unionism, absorbed most of their efforts, apart from propagandist action in SaigonCholon, as well as in some central provinces like Mytho and Travinh [77], and some help
they gave to the Action Committees.
In the spring of 1937 their members had set up a trade union federation of Nam Ky (Lien
Uy Tho Thuyen), whose rules were published and adopted on 1 May. [78] It had active
organisers in at least 39 workplaces in Saigon and Cholon: the Arsenal, where they were
particularly influential, the French Est-Asiatique, the FACI, the railways, rubber
manufacture, the tramways company, Indochina distilleries at Binh Tay, the water and
electricity company, Franco Asiatique oil, the rice mills at Hiep Xuong, Duc Hiep, Extreme
Orient and Hang Thai at Cholon, among the dockers, the labourers in the ricemills, and
among the workers in the potteries and the sugar mills of the provinces Cholon, Giadinh
and Thudaumot. [79]
Fairly numerous documents show that the Trotskyist worker militants and their
sympathisers played a leading part in the organisation of strikes in 1936-37 in the South.
In the absence of sufficiently conclusive pieces of evidence it is difficult to be more
positive, but it is probable that their role was considerable in the great strikes from May to
July 1937. [80] The Vietnamese Trotskyist movement the expression already
corresponds to reality had from the beginning a successful implantation in the Saigon
region, whose importance moreover can be measured by the frequent warnings against
Trotskyism in the underground Communist press.
This double development had significant consequences. The underground groups now had
the necessary resources to keep the autonomous legal organisations alive, but the latter
had to show themselves to be more willing to conform to the orientation of the
underground groups. The relative independence from which La Lutte had benefited could
only be put into question in the long term.

26

The aborting of the Indochinese Congress and the disappointments caused by the
Indochinese policy of the Leon Blum government had brought into question the
unconditional acceptance of the Trotskyist and Communist lines. Since the reappearance
of Militant, the legal Trotskyist weekly, on 23 March 1937, the publications of the
Indochinese Communist Party denounced the campaign conducted by the Trotskyists
against the Popular Front, and in parallel, against the Moscow Trials. At the centre of this
polemic there was the attitude to be adopted vis-a-vis the Popular Front. Thus the 15 May
1937 issue of the Trotskyist paper Tien Quan:
The supporters of the Third International persist in supporting the Popular Front, alleging
that it is not responsible for the actions of the Popular Front government and the
government of Indochina. The reality is that without the support of the Popular Front,
there would not be a Popular Front government, and that, without the confidence
accorded by it to Brevie, and without the confidence given in his turn to the local
administrative heads and so on, there would not be the repression from which the
Indochinese are suffering. [81]
This analysis of the real relations between the different levels of the pyramid of colonial
power undoubtedly rings true. For the Trotskyists, imperialism under a Popular Front
government was still imperialism. There were thus no new variables to be introduced into
the tactics of the revolutionary movement. After 1936, just as before it, these consisted in
preparing the working class and the peasantry through the daily experience of class
struggle and anti-imperialist conflicts for the distant future perspective of a revolution
with a proletarian direction and content. All the same, it remained for Vietnam to resolve
the near-Sisyphean tasks which were posed at the same historical moment, and presented
to all the sections of the international Trotskyist movement, that is the construction of
workers' parties, at once both revolutionary and connected to the masses.
Daniel Hmery
Notes
1. From pp.105-7.
2. Let us above all recall that the group included men who were radical patriots such as
Nguyen An Ninh, Tran Van Thach and Le Van Thu. There is nothing to suggest that they felt
uneasy with the Trotskyist or Communist critique of nationalism, and everything to
suggest that their sympathy for the two varieties of Communism took root in their
patriotism.

27

3. Significant of this reserve is the restrictive title of the most important of these articles,
Let us Talk about National Aspirations.
4. From pp.140-1.
5. He participated in the first activities of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in Paris (he was
arrested in the course of the demonstration outside the Elysee), and he was active in the
Comit damnistie aux Indochinois.
6. The League Against Imperialism came out of the Liga Gegen Koloniale Unterdrckung
(which emerged in Berlin in 1925), and was founded at the Brussels Congress (10-15
February 1927). Ta Thu Than spoke at the Second Congress (Frankfurt 20-30 July 1929),
and Tran Van Thach wrote in the first number of its bulletin in 1928. In 1934 it had a
Vietnamese section in Paris with a paper Phan De (The Anti-Imperialist). Its French
section disappeared in 1936.
7. According to Pierre Naville, La Lutte appeared too populist and they had reservations
about the alliance with the Communists.
8. Or at least those that have been published.
9. Naville recalls that the correspondence which he had with Trotsky defended the
opposite idea, according to which the major crises of French capitalism would be found on
its colonial periphery. Trotsky did not allow himself to be convinced.
10. From pp.199-200.
11. We should recall the Jura Federation in the First International.
12. From pp.253-56.
13. The administration did not allow Nguyen Van Tao, Tran Van Thach, Nguyen Van
Nguyen and Ho Hun Tuong to stand, as they were not old enough, but they stood for the
principles of La Lutte.
14. The following were elected: Tran Van Kha, Vo Ha Tri, Tran Van Sang (first
constituency); Nguyen Phan Long, Huynh Van Chin and Nguyen Dang Lien (second); Bui
Quang Chien, Thuong Cong Thuan at Gocong, Bentre, Travinh and Vinhlong; Le Quang
Liem, Nguyen Tan Duoc (fourth, Rachgia, Longxuyen, Chaudoc Hatien and Sadoc); Huynh
Ngoc Nhuan, Tran Trinh Huy, Truong Dai Luong (fifth, Cantho, Soctrang, Baclieu); Duong
Van Giao (in the third) and Pham Van Tiec (in the fourth) seem to have been the only
independents elected.

28

15. Report of Governor Pages, 11 March 1935.

16. In Cai B the electoral address of La Lutte was written by hand and taken to the
electors homes by schoolboys. On 1 March the police seized 8,000 leaflets in Vietnamese
at the printshop, but La Lutte was able to produce several dozens of thousands of leaflets.
17. A demand personified by the candidature at Giandinh of Nguyen Van Nguyen, who
had just been released from the Poulo-Condore.
18. Let us just cite the matter that interested the peasantry the remission of rents and
debts until the end of the crisis, the division of the cong dien and the cong tho among the
agricultural workers, the distribution to the poor of 300,000 hectares of abandoned rice
land and the stocks of rice belonging to the dien chu, the abolition of the poll tax, and the
exemption from the land tax for those with less than five hectares.
19. La Lutte, 19 February 1935.
20. Police report of 15 May 1935.
21. Report on the Saigon electoral college sent by Pages, 9 July 1935.
22. From pp.263, 270-1.
23. According to the police archives of June 1936, Ta Thu Thau had the perspective of
gathering together a large legally recognised Communist Party, and would have proposed
to the constitutionalists the calling of a conference of their party, which would have
created a useful precedent. At the very most this is only a hypothesis.
24. The only conflict appeared after 21 months. Tran Van Thach was opposed to the idea
of negotiating with the other Vietnamese and French councillors for the election of Ta Thu
Thau to the post of first assistant, and the appointment of Nguyen Van Tao and Tran Van
Thach as delegates to the Administrative Council. The La Lutte people had spoiled their
ballots at the time of the Mayors election, and Tran Van Thach had been publicly
reprimanded.
25. La Lutte, 25 June 1935.
26. Police archives, November 1935. Mixing closely in the life of the workers, denouncing
all the abuses of which the humble are victims, leading strike movements, the young men
of La Lutte have become the idols of the Annamite population. (LOeuvre Indochinoise,
Hanoi, 9 December 1935)

29

27. Ta Thu Thau had great hopes for this sort of propaganda. He thought it would be a
step in reaching out to all classes of the Annamite people. (Police archives, March 1937)
28. Le front populaire et les aspirations des masses Indochinoises, published 8 July 1936.
Other titles were Le Fascisme et la guerre civil en Espagne (Fascism and the Spanish Civil
War) and Etude sommaire de la lutte des classes (A Short Study of Class Struggle) which
appeared in 1937.
29. Founded in great number after the First World War, often at the initiative of the
constitutionalists, who had at that time perhaps seen in them a way of establishing a
centre of cultural resistance.
30. Phan Van Hum taught Vietnamese language and literature at the Lyceum P. Downer,
from which he was sacked in 1935 after a strike by lecturers. Ta Thu Thau taught French,
ethics and history in the Institute of Huynh Khuong Ninh, Chau Thanh and at Nguyen
Trong Hy school in Giadinh. Anh Van, who was his pupil, has a moving portrait of his old
teacher. The police accused Ta Thu Thau of having led the pupils of Chan Thanh on a
hunger strike at the end of 1934 (Police report, fourth quarter 1934) but this hardly agrees
with the recollections of Anh Van (Hoang Don Tri).
31. In particular against the tyrannical principal of the Mechanics School. See the letter
from the pupils in La Lutte, 10 January 1935.
32. Then the police arrested at Song Phuoc (Mytho), two militants who had escaped from
Paulo-Condore who were persuading a farmer to vote for La Luttes candidate. (Political
report of December 1935) According to the police reports of December 1935, the
leadership of the ICP in the South still hesitated in February 1935 whether to support the
La Lutte lists, but the Bureau in exile gave Tran Van Giau the task of organising the illegal
organisations participation in La Luttes campaign.
33. At this date (June-July 1936) the police reckoned the effective members of the
Indochinese Communist Party in the South to number 70, and the unions of peasants and
workers to be 7,000. (Note on the ICP and unions much abbreviated Eds.)
34. By Luu Sanh Hanh, released from prison at Cap St Jacques and a journalist on Duoc
Nha Nam. The chief members of the group were the white collar worker Ngo Van Xuyet,
the students Trinh Van Lau and Ngo Chinh Phen, the returnee from France, Nguyen Van
Nam, the printer Ky and the coolie Don. With the help of Ho Hun Tuong from October the
Ligue published the review Cach Mang Truong Truc (Permanent Revolution) and the
paper Tien Dao (Vanguard).

30

35. The Arsenal, the tramways, the petrol stores at Nha Be, the aerodrome at Cat Lay, etc.
Their trial took place on 31 August 1936. (Seven were found guilty and sent to prison from
six to 18 months).
36. From pp.285-7.
37. We have not been able to find this document, and we have relied on the recollections
of Ho Hun Tuong and Ngo Van Xuyet.
38. He saw in this a way of breaking what he called the anti-revolutionary resistance of
the party and trade union apparatus and of preparing to arm the workers, anti-Fascist
self-defence and the general strike. The idea of elected Action Committees had also been
put forward by Dimitrov in his report to the Seventh Congress, but was then abandoned
by the Communist International. At any rate, Action Committees were created by the
Vietnamese Communists for some years. Thus, at the beginning of 1936, the Provisional
Committee of Nam Ky recommended the formation of Action Committees in each village
against the tax system.
39. From Depeche d Indochine, 15 June 1936.
40. And vice-versa, we are tempted to say. But no text or document justifies this
supposition.
41. Cf. the article A Tous in Le Militant, 8 September 1936.
42. From pp.314-318.
43. At least that of the La Lutte action committee which had, according to the police, put
out at least 20,000 leaflets, and which was the active antenna of the Organising
Committee of the Congress.
44. Nguyen Van So was a member with Dao Hung Long of the provisional Action
Committee of the neighbourhoods of Cho Dui, Cau Ong Lien, Cau Mui, Cau Kho and
Choquan. Ganofsky and several other supporters of La Lutte belonged to that of the outer
suburb of Dakao. Tran Van Thach, Ho Huu Tuong, Ninh and Hum led the Action Committee
of La Lutte, Nguyen Thi Luu that of the women of Saigon, Le Van Thu Ca, that at Choquan,
Truong Thi Sau, wife of Nguyen An Ninh, that of the village of My Hoa, and Duong Thi Lai,
wife of Phan Van Hum, the Action Committee of An Thanh (Thudaumot) etc. The La Lutte
group controls to our knowledge about 200 Action Committees in the Saigon-Cholon
region and its outskirts. (All from police archives)
45. Abbreviated translation in the police archives.

31

46. Only this would avoid the dissolution into the party of the Committees which were
more rigidly structured.
47. Cf. the friendly exchange in Agir, 3 August 1936, between Ta Thu Thau and C. Metter,
who attacks the La Lutte people for allying with the Vietnamese bourgeoisie (the
marriage of the carp and the rabbit). Ta Thu Thau replied to him that the progressive
elements of the bourgeoisie, like the working class, wanted democratic liberty, and that
the Organising Committee had made provision for the French left equal to the other
ethnic minorities, and invited him to take part in the La Lutte Action Committee. Cf. La
Lutte, 2 and 9 September 1936.
48. According to Ho Huu Tuong, during the summer of 1936, the legal Communist activists
of Tran Huy Lieu sent Dang Thai Mai and Vo Nguyen Giap (released from prison 18
November 1931) to Saigon to consider with the La Lutte people the creation of a legal
paper in the North. Dang Thai Mai was stopped at the frontier, but Vo Nguyen Giap was
able to get to Saigon. He met Ta Thu Thau, Nguyen Van Tao, Ho Huu Tuong, etc. Hanoi
being under direct French rule, it was possible to publish a French paper there. The La
Lutte people would have passed on the name of the experienced Trotskyist militant,
Huynh Van Phuong, who finished his law studies in Hanoi in 1935, and two other
Trotskyist sympathisers, Tran Kim Bang and Le Cu. If the participation of the two latter in
editing Le Travail is uncertain, that of Huynh Van Phuong did take place. So the Travail
group had a few Trotskyists and a majority of Communists and their sympathisers,
including Giap, and without counting the clandestine editors: it was in regular
correspondence with La Lutte. Le Travail came out from 1 November 1936 to 16 April
1937. Tran Van Thach wrote several articles for it. From the summer of 1937 until 1945
there was a tiny Trotskyist group in the North.
49. Cf. for example Bilans et perspectives, 15 September 1936. The paper, edited by Ho
Huu Tuong, contains Trotskys main articles written at the time.
50. Among the Action Committees led by Trotskyists which the police mention are those
of the Saigon pupils led by the young Nguyen Van Cu, that of Giarai (Baclieu), organised by
Nguyen Van Dinh, who had returned from France, the provincial Action Committee of
Camau with Tran Hai Thoai, the provincial Action Committee of Cantho in which Tran Van
Hoa (alias Tu Thai Mau) was active, and that of Thoi Thanh (O Mon, Cantho province) with
Tran Van Mao.
51. Cf. the leaflet Tuyen Ngon (Manifesto), spread massively through the South.
52. Doi voi phai phu hao (With Regard to the Bourgeoisie), op. cit.

32

53. To which articles did this allude? However, let us quote Ta Thu Thaus sarcasm to
Nguyen Phan Long on 7 November, who had demanded stopping all propaganda relating
to class struggle, for we work in a spirit of concord. The reply of Than was that is a little
inexact, for we organise numerous public meetings all the same to accustom the masses
to this revelation. (Police note of 3 October 1936)
54. Police sources.
55. Note on revolutionary propaganda in Indochina, April 1937. Police sources.
56. From pp.326, 327, 331.
57. La Lutte, 1 October 1936.
58. With Regard to the Bourgeoisie, op. cit.
59. Political report of December 1936 by Pages.
60. In the Chomoi region the Action Committees contained quite a number of Caodaists,
La Lutte, 25 March 1937.
61. Note by translator: I have translated cochers de boites dallumettesas hackney cab
drivers, since a coach which is a box of matches seems to be that.
62. Ta Thu Than, Nguyen An Ninh and Nguyen Van Tao have become legendary heroes
for their hunger strike which they undertook during their incarceration wrote the police
(December 1936). When they came out, the Vietnamese journalists organised a party in
their honour and declared them to be inspirers of Vietnam.
63. If things had gone wrong you would have had to account for the situation in which
you had put the government, he wrote about the hunger strike of the La Lutte leaders.
64. They stopped their hunger strike at the demand of Duong Bach Mai (cf. his telegram of
3 November 1936. Good policy. Suspend the hunger strike.) in order not to upset his
mission.
65. Cable of 21 November 1936.
66. From pp.333-5, 367.
67. Giai Phong, 7 November 1936.

33

68. According to the underground fellow-travelling paper Tan Cong (The Offensive), 1
February 1937 (in police archives), the workers list of demands in COFAT had been drawn
up by the Trotskyists.
69. Report sent by Pages.
70. Police archives January 1937. Other enterprises concerned were the Garage Scama,
the Ardin printworks, Le Bucheron (timber), Garages Chamer, the Port of Commerce
shipping, Stacindo (piping and building materials manufacturers) and the Orsini Shipping
Co.
71. Police report derived from ICP documents.
72. A note by the police states (even if this is doubtful), that the underground Trotskyist
group, the Lien doan Cong San Quo to Chu Nghia (League of Communist Internationalists)
had become numerically the rival of the underground Communist party.
73. Police files February and March 1937.
74. From pp.395, 398-400.
75. A hypothesis which a study of Vietnamese Trotskyism at its height between 1937 and
1939 would be able to verify.
76. Tap Chi Noi Bo (Workers' Fight), no.1, 1 December 1936, Lien Hiep (Workers Union),
no.2, 4 December 1936. On 1 February Tho Thuyen Tranh Dau was replaced by Tien Quan
(The Vanguard) which appeared regularly until the autumn of 1937. Furthermore, Ho Huu
Tuong ran the publishing firm Quang Min (The Light) and edited Le Militant (no.5, 23
March 1937) of which the managing editor was the French returnee Nguyen Van Cu.
77. At Nam Ky in the North, Trotskyism was still organised in illegal conditions.
78. Police files.
79. They were discovered during a police raid on an underground meeting in the village of
Binh Hoa Xa (Giadinh). Forty-three delegates from workplaces were arrested. (Police files)
80. See Appendix 24 in the original.
81. In July 1937 the police reckoned that there was increasingly a larger working class
element in the Trotskyist party than in the Dong During Cong San Dang, which cannot be
proved on the evidence available. But a more detailed analysis of these sources, which is
not part of this work, would throw a general light on the broad evaluation of the national
movement.

34

On Vietnam
Ngo Van Xuyet
The text below is extracted from Sur le Vietnam, a series of articles published in
Informations et Correspondences ouvrires from the end of 1967 and the beginning of
1968, at the height of the movement against the Vietnam war in Europe and North
America. Whilst this description as a whole has not hitherto appeared in English, the final
chapter, The Saigon Insurrection of 23 September 1945, was the only account of the
events available in Britain for many years, having been first translated by Chris Pallis and
printed in Solidarity, Volume 5 no.5, 27 October 1968, pp.3-6, 16. It was subsequently
reproduced in the United States as a leaflet by the Spartacist West group of the movement
now known as the ICL, and later by S Pirani (ed.), Vietnam and Trotskyism, Australia 1987,
pp.56-60.
This account was largely written from memory, without the advantage of an extensive
documentation to hand. Comrade Vans more extensive treatment of the same period is to
be found in Le Mouvement IV Internationale en Indochine, 1930-39 in the Cahiers Leon
Trotsky, no.40, December 1989, pp.21-60.
The author, Ngo Van Xuyet, was a member of the League of Internationalist Communists
for the Fourth International, formed in Saigon in 1935; like Ta Thu Thaus organisation this
group supported the Fourth International, but did not participate in the La Lutte front,
concentrating instead on the publication of the journal Le Militant. He was jailed for a year
in 1936, continued political activity on his release, participated in the 1945 Saigon
insurrection, and has lived in exile in France since 1947.
**********************
1. The La Lutte Group and the Workers and Peasants Movement (1933-37)
South Vietnam in the thirties: we have seen how the world economic crisis reverberated
in Vietnam in essentially peasant revolts and in the awakening of the working class
movement momentarily decapitated by the repression at the beginning of the thirties.
Some Vietnamese students who had been trained in France organised themselves into the
two main tendencies that divided the Third International: Stalinism and Trotskyism. Some
of them had been expelled from France after their demonstrations against the sentences
following the Yen-bay rebellion in 1930. [1] Moscow trained some of the militants who
were assigned to reconstruct the Communist Party in illegality; the kernel of this new
illegal party fell under the blows of police repression in 1935, and when one of its leaders,

35

Tran Van Giau, now in Ho Chi Minhs information services, was before the court in Saigon
being questioned about his occupation, he declared that he was a professional
revolutionary. Along with his companions he joined those who had been sentenced in
1933 in the hard-labour camp of Poulo-Condore. Also born in clandestinity round about
1932 were the small Trotskyist groups under the leadership of some of those expelled
from France. Bulletins run off with gelatine disseminated in secret the theoretical
discussions of the Vo-san (Proletarian) group of Ta Thu Thau and the Thang-muoi
(October) group of Ho Huu Tuong and others amongst some of the awakened city
workers. The second of these groups charged the first with a conciliatory tendency
towards the Stalinists. Inspired by the Permanent Revolution, these disciples of Trotsky
advocated a dictatorship of the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry in order to
accomplish this permanent revolution, the foremost tasks of which would be national
liberation through anti-imperialist struggle and agrarian reform through the abolition of
private ownership and the division of the land amongst the peasants, whereas the
Stalinists were planning on a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry
that would realise the same objectives. The secret political influence of the Trotskyists was
essentially urban; the Stalinists rooted themselves in the countryside on account of the
origins of their movement, where they propagated the notion that the Trotskyists were
the enemy of the peasantry.
But very soon the three Trotskyist groups the third being the Ta doi lap tong tho
(Publications of the Left Opposition) were broken up; in August 1932 the police
arrested 41 militants and sympathisers in Saigon and in the provinces. The first trial of the
Trotskyists took place in Saigon on 1 May 1933, and 16 out of the 21 accused were
condemned to between three months and five years imprisonment.
At the time of the Saigon municipal elections in 1933 both Stalinists and Trotskyists
attempted to carry out joint legal action by putting together a single electoral list, the
workers list (so lao-dong). In order to stand in elections you had to be either a proprietor
or, at least, pay business tax, so the Trotskyist teacher Ta Thu Thau became a carpet seller
in Lagrandire Street, whereas the Stalinist journalist Nguyen Van Tao became a
lemonade seller in the Old Market. Electoral meetings began to be held in the Thanhxuong, a small local theatre. Coolies, commercial employees, Saigon workers and young
people were for the first time openly exhorted to struggle for the eight hour day, for trade
union rights and for the right to strike by the candidates to the municipal council who
were seeking the votes of the citizens in order to represent them. The success of these
meetings alarmed the police, who closed the Thanh-xuong theatre along with the theatres
in the suburbs (Khanh-hoi and Tan-dinh), but meetings rendered impossible by this police
intervention were transformed into street demonstrations. The bourgeois electoral list of

36

the Constitutionalist Party was defeated, and the workers list gained a majority of those
seats upon the municipal council that were set aside for the Vietnamese. It was at the
time of this legal agitation that La Lutte first appeared, a weekly newspaper in French of
the United Front between the Saigon Stalinists and Trotskyists (you should bear in mind
that no paper in the native language was allowed to appear without the prior
authorisation of the colonial administration, so La Lutte could only cater for a thin layer of
the urban population, that which could read French; even then it was often the victim of
seizures and searches, but in the Vietnamese language it would not even have been
allowed to appear). A French journalist, old Ganofsky, who lived in poverty on the margins
of colonial circles, gave his name as manager of La Lutte. This free spirit was afterwards
interfered with on several occasions and he paid the consequences of his disinterested act
right up to his death.
This local United Front that was dictated by the necessities of the struggle against strong
colonial oppression soon became disrupted by the evolution of the politics of the Russian
Communist Party, and consequently the politics of the French party. The France-Soviet
Pact of May 1935 converted France into an ally of Russia, and the French Communist Party
now had the duty of defending French democracy against Fascism. The Stalinist group
dutifully dispensed with its usual jargon of French Imperialism, no longer talked about
national independence, and imparted a purely reformist direction to its slogans. Deep
differences arose within La Lutte, but the Ta Thu Thau group still did not break its formal
unity with the Stalinists. The wave of strikes that was followed by the factory occupations
and the formation of the Popular Front in France in June 1936 had an immediate echo in
the peninsula of Indochina, where the reformist current grew stronger. A Popular Front
known under the name of the Indo Chinese Congress Movement (Phong-tiao-Dongduong-Dai-hoi) was formed on the initiative of the La Lutte group with the bourgeois
Constitutionalist Party, in order to draw up demands relating to the political, economic
and social reforms that were to be presented to the Popular Front government of the
metropolitan country. At the end of 1935 a small secret Trotskyist group was set up, the
Internationalist Communist League, which launched the slogan of action committees
amongst the workers and peasants by means of a leaflet in the Vietnamese language, but
its militants were immediately thrown into prison. The Stalinists urged respect for the law
to the peasants who had begun to agitate in a violent manner against direct and indirect
taxes and for a reduction in ground rent.
The first trial of the Fourth International, the trial of the Internationalist Communist
League, opened in Saigon on 31 August 1936. Following a plea submitted by their lawyers
with regard to the tortures and maltreatment they had undergone at the hands of the
police, a complaint that raised an echo in the Depche dIndochine and La Lutte, Lu Sanh

37

Hanh and seven of his comrades were sentenced to light prison sentences of between six
and 18 months. [2]
The ferment among the workers manifested itself in partial strikes that culminated in the
general strike of 1937 that included workers in the arsenal at Saigon, of the Trans-Indo
Chinese Railway (Saigon-Hanoi), the Tonkin miners and the coolies of the rubber
plantations, the mass of the proletariat, in other words. They were demanding an eight
hour day, trade union rights, the right to strike and convene, a free press, etc. It was
during this struggle that the workers, assisted by the militants, organised their strike and
support committees and their contacts throughout the country. There was something
spontaneous in this wave of demands and chain explosions, and in the limited
understanding of the workers and peasants. They were fed on the illusion of the
possibilities of freedom and social reform offered by the Popular Front of the
metropolitan country. Agitation and propaganda and the legal and underground activities
of the organised political groupings, whose members could be counted on the fingers, are
not enough to explain this vast movement.
It was then that Brvi, who had been appointed governor of the colony by the Popular
Front government, resorted to repression. Not only was the skeleton of working class
trade unions formed during the General Strike banned, and its militants sent to prison
(October 1937), but even the Movement of the Indochinese Congress was itself dissolved.
Trotskyist and Stalinist papers that had sometimes been able to appear in the Vietnamese
language were banned once more, and the labour legislation remained a dead letter. It
now became difficult for the Stalinists to continue their defence of the Popular Front,
which had in no way changed fundamentally Frances imperialist colonial policy.
The Moscow Trials were now at their zenith, and the French Communist Party sent the MP
Honel to give the local Stalinists the order to break with the Trotskyists. Abandoning La
Lutte to the Trotskyists, the Stalinists employed the same venomous methods against
them as those of their masters in the Kremlin. In their new paper Le Peuple (later Danchung) they were to represent their erstwhile comrades as spies for the Mikado and
provocateurs. The period of methodical murders will be described when we come to the
1945-46 period. The utter and immediate obedience of the Stalinist group to the orders of
Moscow can only be explained by their blind fanaticism. Young men, driven by an ideal,
were transformed overnight into wolves, howling to the death with the other wolves
against their brothers in the fight, with whom they had still been elbow to elbow only the
day before, in struggle as well as in prison. Regimentation had corrupted them, along with
the Vietnamese workers and peasants movement, which was thus sacrificed from birth
to Russian foreign policy. As we were later to see, the exploited were to forge new chains

38

for themselves under the leadership of these professional revolutionaries, when they
thought that they were struggling for their emancipation those of the industrial world,
where production is not a requirement of true and vital human needs, but those of state
capitalism as the revolutionary vanguard inevitably turned into a bureaucracy possessing
the state.
Obviously, French imperialism breathed freely and easily during this period of relative
support by the Stalinists for the integrity of the empire. The calm was broken by the
Hitler-Stalin Pact of 23 August 1939, followed by the declaration of war on 3 September.
The decree of 26 September, which dissolved all organisations relating to the Third
International, was the prelude to the mass arrests of militants of all tendencies, Stalinists,
Trotskyists, nationalists and the leaders of the magico-religious sects in October 1939, and
then were to close upon them the sinister doors of the prisons and the camps for the
special training of workers, the death camps that were established in unhealthy regions,
in which few survived. In a declaration of November 1939 in conformity with Stalin's
foreign policy the Indochinese Communist party at one and the same time denounced the
imperialist war of France against Germany as well as the Japanese plans for aggression
against Russia. This sudden shift translated itself in 1940 into a concealed peasant
insurrection fomented by the Indochinese Communist Party in Cochin China, which was
drowned in blood.
2. The Sects and the Vietminh
[We omit here the section dealing with the expression of peasant discontent through
sectarian Buddhist consciousness, and extract merely what deals with the movements
during the Second World War.]
The young Marxists carried their dream of transforming the imperialist war into a civil
war into the prisons, but the words pronounced at Zimmerwald coming from far-off
Europe, and their illustration in the Russian events of 1917, were nonetheless to continue
to sound in their hearts. A Communist Party song composed about 1935 that called for
civil war remained deep in their hearts: We will take the opportunity of the war between
the imperialisms and when Soviet Russia shall be attacked, we will engage in civil war
(Thua luc de-quoc tranh-chien, voi luc danh So-viet lam noi-chien mau). It was upon
propaganda in favour of this same idea in an illegal Trotskyist duplicated sheet, the
Vanguard (Tien-dao) that the Prosecutor attached to the Saigon court had supported his
indictment at the time of the trial of the Internationalist Communist League in September
1936.

39

Pre-emptive arrests did not prevent the peasants of Cochin China from rising in December
1940, and in the same year an upsurge broke out at Bacson in Tonkin. Repression caused
thousands of deaths, and courts martial sent those who were captured to death and to
the prisons. The prisons were so full that a certain number of prisoners were locked up in
barges berthed near Saigon, where they perished like flies.
[Here we omit more material upon the beliefs and history of the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao.]
It should be remembered that after the French defeat in Europe the Japanese occupied
Indochina, and in agreement with Vichy preserved the French administrative and
repressive apparatus, together with a new colonial governor henceforth at their service.
The policy of the Japanese attempted to eliminate the Stalinist tendency and to search for
a compromise of collaborating with the nationalist tendencies and the sects; in 1942 the
mad bonze who had been exiled in Laos was liberated by them, and when on 9 March
1945 the Japanese brought the French colonial administration to an end, they armed the
devotees of these two sects, hoping to be able to use them as military auxiliaries in the
event of an American landing.
Let us return to the Stalinists and to their activities up to their seizure of power in 1945. In
May 1941 Ho Chi Minh, who was living in Kwangsi in China, convened a conference that
brought together Vietnamese elements of all origins and formed along with them an
organisation under the unassuming title of Viet Minh (an abbreviation of Viet-nam dot-lap
dong minh, The League for the Independence of Vietnam), whose effective leadership
belonged to his own followers.
The Chinese generals of the Guomindang now convened a second conference of the
Vietnamese political refugees in China at Lieou-tcheou on 4 October 1942, with the
intention of brushing aside the Communist tendency and of setting up the Dong-minh hoi,
the Association for National Liberation, presided over by Nguyen Hai Tha, an old proChinese emigr. Ho Chi Minh was imprisoned for 18 months. However, at the conference
of March 1944 at Lieou-tcheou, in the course of which a programme for a provisional
republican government of Vietnam was elaborated, the Vietminh was represented, and
had a portfolio. This programme consisted of two points: the liquidation of the
domination of the French and Japanese, and independence for Vietnam with the
assistance of the Guomindang; but whereas the nationalists of this government remained
in China, where they waited for the intervention of the Guomindang to assure them of
power in Vietnam, the Ho Chi Minh group, under the banner of the Vietminh, came back
into Tonkin and established itself in the region of Thai-nguyen. When the Japanese coup
of 9 March 1945 put an end to French rule in Indochina, the Vietminh found itself
practically master of the highlands. Orientating himself towards the Allies (Russia,

40

Nationalist China, Great Britain and the United States), Ho Chi Minh organised a few
skirmishes against the Japanese, made contact with the Americans at Kun-ming, and from
them obtained weapons with which to struggle on the side of the Allies. After the
surrender of the Japanese on 15 August 1945, the Ho Chi Minh group (the Vietminh) was
already an organised military force, however hastily armed and numerically weak.
3. August 1945, The Coming of Ho Chi Minh
Here we shall examine the situation that permitted the seizure of power by Ho Chi Minh
and his Vietminh followers in August 1945.
The first cannon shots in Europe that began the continuation of politics in the blood of
the slaves opened up for Japanese imperialism, which had been engaged upon a full-scale
war of conquest in China since 1937, a perspective of realising the Greater Asia Plan of
Tojo for the ousting of the old Western masters from South-East Asia. When the French
refused to allow their troops to penetrate into Tonkin in 1940, the Japanese went over to
the attack at Lan-son and Dongdang in the evening of 22 September, and on the 24th
landed at Haiphong after having bombarded the port. So began the Japanese occupation
of Indochina; it maintained the administrative apparatus of French colonialism with a
Vichy admiral in charge who largely collaborated with the Japanese general staff. The
systematic plunder of the produce of the country for the needs of war plunged the
population into increasing misery; more than ever the peasant masses lived in destitution.
American bombing, typhoons and exceptional cold all added up to disaster, culminating in
the great famine of March to May 1945, with about a million deaths in the north,
including deaths in the streets of Hanoi.
In the south of the country the religious sects that had been persecuted by the French
cherished a hope in Japan. The Cao-daists, whose Pope Pham Cong Tac was living in exile
at Nossi-lava (Madagascar), were counting on the return of Prince Cuong-de, who was a
refugee in Japan, and the devotees of the Mad bonze, the Hoa-Hao, had obtained from
the Japanese the return of their master Huynh Phu So, who had been exiled to Laos by the
French. From 1943 onwards some pro-Japanese nationalist groups were formed, and their
members were utilised in the Japanese propaganda and police services.
Round about 1943 in the mountain region of Tuyen-quang near the Chinese frontier in the
north, Ho Chi Minh organised his guerilla centre and made contact with the Americans to
ask them for weapons, whilst proclaiming himself to be on the side of the democratic
Allies against Japanese Fascism; his peoples army was officially inaugurated in the
resistance starting from 22 December 1944.

41

Faced with the American offensive in the Pacific and the threat of ruin for the BerlinTokyo-Rome Axis, the Japanese put an end to the authority of the French over the whole
peninsula by a coup starting from 9 March 1945. The French troops were disarmed and
confined to their barracks, and the commanders were either imprisoned or put to death;
the population was concentrated and strictly controlled. The Japanese effected a
proclamation of independence by the Emperor Bao Dai and by means of Tran Trong Kim
created a national government at Hu on 2 March. The leaden cover that had weighed
down upon the country was now split. The popular masses felt relieved, since of the two
brigands who had been plundering them, one had fallen under the blows of the other, and
they were filled with a feeling of satisfaction over the one that was impotent, along with
the illusion that with national independence something positive was going to be done
about their condition. The arrogant policemen of the French regime were no longer in the
streets of Saigon questioning workers and clerks returning from work in order to verify
their personal identity cards (giay thne than). No longer were French colons to be heard
threatening to kick the backsides of rickshaw boys who were claiming what was owed
them. The members of the pro-Japanese nationalist groups received key posts in the
administration. The youth of country, town and village was paramilitarily organised to
serve as an auxiliary force for the Japanese army in the event of an American landing; this
movement was known under the name of the Youth Vanguard (Thank-nien tied-phong).
The Cao-daists formed their own armed groups, whereas the Hoa-Hao were forging sharpedged weapons whilst waiting upon events, in other words, the opportunity for seizing
power. The militants of the Stalinist group who had escaped the repression or who had
been freed from the concentration camps after 9 March were working mobilised after a
fashion for the national government and the peasants, and were operating
underground within the Youth Vanguard. All this political ferment in the South during the
five months that preceded the defeat of the Japanese was escaping from their control,
whereas in the regions of Upper Tonkin the zone of the armed groups of Ho Chi Minh was
spreading; they, also, were waiting upon events.
The bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed by the surrender of Japan on 15 August
1945 marked another bloody era for this corner of Asia, intended by the imperialist
powers (the Potsdam agreement between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt) to be occupied
to the north of the seventeenth parallel by Chinese troops and to the south of it by British
troops. This new partition of the world wiped French imperialism from the map of
Indochina, and through the mediation of Chiang Kai-Sheks Chinese the Americans were
counting on including Northern Vietnam within their sphere of influence in South East
Asia.

42

Faced with the political gap created by the Japanese surrender, and preceding the Chinese
troops who were bringing with them the pro-Chinese nationalists of the Dong-minh-hoi
and the Viet-nam quoc dan-dang, Ho Chi Minh brought together his supporters in the
village of Tantrao (province of Thai-nguyen) and created a Committee for the National
Liberation of Vietnam (Uy-ban giai-phong dan-toc Viet-nam), the majority of which was
composed of about 10 former members of the Communist Party. In this way he broke
with the government in exile in China, and therefore with the pro-Chinese nationalists.
After some spectacular demonstrations organised by his emissaries in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh
made his entrance there at the head of his peoples army around 18 August. Without
further ado the representative of Bao Dais pro-Japanese government in Hanoi, Phan Ke
Toai, withdrew. Thus the de facto power of the Vietminh was set up with the indifference
of the Japanese, who had received instructions from the Allies to maintain order until the
arrival of the Chinese troops. It should also be said that the Japanese released some 400
political prisoners who had been incarcerated in the Shell buildings who were claimed by
the Vietminh, and that they allowed them to get hold of weapons. At the same time the
peoples committees took control of the administration in the provinces, and the
Mandarins disappeared or submitted. A provisional Vietminh government was formed in
Hanoi on 25 August, presided over by Ho Chi Minh; in Hue, after the resignation of the
Tran Trong Kim government, Bao Dai also abdicated, and was designated as a supreme
counsellor by Ho Chi Minh.
Frozen
What happened in the South of the country after 15 August? The same absence of power
as in the North made itself felt in Saigon; the Japanese troops seemed to be frozen into
immobility whilst awaiting the arrival of the British, whereas ever since 9 March the
disarmed French had been waiting for their liberation and their return to power. The
supporters of Ho Chi Minh (some emissaries who had come from Tonkin had joined the
Stalinist group of Cochin China) went around in cars provided with loudspeakers calling
out defend the Vietminh (ung-ho Viet minh), the Vietminh being a name hitherto
unknown around Saigon having all the attraction of a mystery, and then they distributed
leaflets claiming themselves to be on the side of the Russian, Chinese, British and United
States Allies for independence. The United National Front which in a few days had
collected together the Party for the Independence of Vietnam (Viet-nam quoc gia doc lap
dang), the Vanguard Youth, the Group of the Intellectuals, the Federation of Civil Servants
and the Tinh do cu Buddhist sect along with the Hoa Hao and the Cao Dai, appealed to the
population to demonstrate for independence in the presence of an uncertain and
threatening situation. On 21 August 1945, for the first time in the political life of the
country, from the morning onwards, veritable masses of people assembled like ants and

43

filled the Norodom Boulevard, then the Botanical Gardens near the governors palace, and
then crossed the major arteries in order chanting slogans: Down with French
imperialism! (Da dao de quoc phap), Long live the Independence of Vietnam!
(Vietnam hoan toan doc lap', whilst the flags and banners floating above this moving
army indicated the presence of the Vanguard Youth, who had been a pro-Japanese
organisation only yesterday, peasants led by Stalinist militants who had come from the
environs of Saigon, workers of Saigon-Cholon, Cao-daists, Buddhists of various sects
grouped around their bonzes, the Hoa Hao, and the militants of the Trotskyist La Lutte
and Internationalist Communist League groups. The latter, under the flag of the Fourth
International, raised the slogans of the land and ricefields to the peasants, the factories
and enterprises for the workers!. Some demonstrators were armed with sharpened
bamboo poles. Banners were seen with the unusual inscriptions such as Murder Assault
Groups (Ban am sat xung phong) raised by bare-chested and tatooed men, who were
carrying sharpened weapons and old rifles. The Vietnamese police at the service of the
occupation no longer knew from where to take its orders: it remained passive in the
presence of the procession crossing the city on strike, and the crowd only disappeared in
the afternoon. This demonstration, which owed its initiation to the Vietminh, was the
classic tactic preparatory to the seizure of power it represented the seal of general
approval. But in fact everybody went down into the street with different aspirations. The
only common but overwhelming sentiment was never to see the French back in power,
long live the end of the colonial regime!
This first awakening of these masses, who had been forever in chains . and gags,
emanated an electric tension amid an unusual calm, the brooding calm that preceeds a
storm. All constraint was broken, and everybody seemed to live a moment of total liberty,
where the absence of the state and the bankruptcy of the police allowed everyone to
prepare himself in his own way for the eventuality of a terrible conflict. What darkness
upon the horizon of a fundamental change! Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had decided
our fate at Yalta and Potsdam. We were now to be cast body and soul into a future
without a tomorrow. Faced with the perspective of the imminent arrival of the British
troops, and faced with the threat of the return of the old colonial regime (Colonel Cdile,
the special envoy of the New France, was already in the Governor-Generals palace in
Saigon), everybody decided to look for and obtain weapons; everyone lived in the same
explosive atmosphere.
Events were about to unfold in these crucial moments of general crisis with the speed of
lightning. The nationalist groups and sects that had been pro-Japanese remained armed,
but incapable of taking the initiative: their time was finished with the fall of Japan. The
Vietminh, politically reinforced by the coming of Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi, and having already

44

taken control of the movement of the Youth Vanguard, whose leaders has joined it, also
having been strengthened by the monster demonstration of 25 August, in which it saw the
approval of the masses for its policy of collaboration with the Allies for national
independence, was about to impose its rule.
Range
In fact, a proclamation signed by the Southern Provisional Executive Committee (Uy-ban
hanh chanh lam-thoi Nambo) soon appeared on the walls of the city. The Committee
appealed to the population to range itself behind it with a view to obtaining the
independence of the country by negotiation with the Allies, and promised the formation
of a democratic parliamentary republic. At the same time as this poster announced the
taking of power by the Vietminh, a list of the members of the Provisional Government,
presided over by the Stalinist Tran Van Giau, was put up in front of the Saigon town hall,
fastened to an imposing column covered with red cloth; another Stalinist, Nguyen Van
Tao, who had been a Saigon municipal councillor, was assigned to the Ministry of the
Interior, and in order to give their committee the appearance of a national union that
would be acceptable to the Allies in an eventual negotiation, the Stalinists secured the
governmental collaboration of a doctor, some non-Stalinist intellectuals, and even a
landowner. This Nam-bo committee sat in the town hall, guarded by militiamen in white
uniforms. The police and cops had joined them, and the commissariats were controlled by
Tran Van Giaus comrades; the pirates of Le Van Vien, called the Bay Vien, had been
enlisted as policemen and as agents for the future Stalinist assassinations (they had been
well known under the French under the label of the bands of Binh xuyen, the name of a
hamlet situated between Saigon and Cholon).
The activity of the Nam-bo Committee extended out towards the provinces, where they
set up their own provisional committees that took control of the peoples committees that
had spontaneously arisen in the villages and of the old Vanguard Youth. The arrival of the
Allied Commission was announced for the beginning of September. In the streets of
Saigon floated immense banners bearing inscriptions of greeting in English, Russian,
Chinese and Vietnamese: Welcome to the Allied Forces! Some demonstrative actions
marked the intentions of the Nam-bo Committee to have done with French colonialism:
the Saigon streets changed their names. The Rue Catinat, the luxurious artery of the city,
famous for its police offices, jails and torture chambers, was baptised The Street of the
Paris Commune, and the Norodom Boulevard was called The Boulevard of the Republic
... The statues of the heroes of the conquest (the Bishop of Adran holding the young
prince Canh by the hand in front of the cathedral, Admiral Rigault de Genouilly at the side

45

of the Saigon river, and Bonnard in front of the Municipal Theatre) and other monuments
of the colonial era were destroyed.
On the morning of 2 September a large official procession was organised by the Nam-bo
Committee. The newly armed militia opened the march in uniform. In the afternoon some
shots were fired in the cathedral square, no-one knows from where, provoking a general
outburst; the demonstrators flung themselves upon the French houses, and the
demonstration ended late at night with dead and wounded on both sides.
Soon the Gurkhas of the Twentieth Indian Division arrived by plane under the command of
the British general Gracey. From the moment of his arrival Gracey had leaflets spread all
over the city by Japanese fighter planes proclaiming that he had charged the Japanese
with the maintenance of public order, and that he forbade the population to keep any
weapons under threat of severe punishment. An immense poster repeating this
proclamation was stuck on the city walls. The haughty tone of this Allied military
representative was the equivalent of a formal notice, addressed not only to the armed
groups of the religious sects who had held onto quantities of Japanese weapons, but also
to the Nam-b Committee, whose armed militia was more or less held responsible for the
disorders of 2 September. Gracey installed his headquarters in the small palace of the
governor of Cochin China. A feverish activity agitated the groups and sects. The Hoa Hao
assumed the name of the Social Democratic Party (Dang dan-xa), and it seems that they,
along with the Cao-daists, were invited to a few subordinate ministerial posts of social
affairs by the Vietminh. The Trotskyists of the La Lutte group pronounced in favour of
support to the Stalinist Vietminh in this phase of the struggle for national independence
and for the formation of a democratic republic, but declared that they reserved the right
to criticise; another Trotskyist tendency denounced as an illusion fostered among the
masses the possibility of obtaining national independence by negotiation with the
imperialist brigands whose alliance was being solicited by the Vietminh. Advocating the
arming of the people (which was against the intentions of the Nam-bo Committee to
control all the armed groupings) and the preparation of an armed insurrection and against
the return of the old regime, they organised some tens of workers and clerks in a People's
Revolutionary Committee (uyban nhan-dan cach-mang) in the Tandinh suburb of Saigon,
and a similar people's committee was formed at Bien-hoa, some 30 kilometres from
Saigon. But the activity of such committees, in a duality with the de facto power of the
Stalinists, was a stain that could spread, and the arrest and incarceration of their members
by the police put a stop to it. We should note that the militants of Tan-dinh allowed
themselves to be disarmed without protest, for they feared that if they fired upon the
police they would only foster the accusations of provocation that had been launched
against them by those in charge in the town hall, and they would be misunderstood by the

46

masses. The leaders of the sects who were also the victims of police searches
disappeared, along with their armed groups. The repression of the Vietminh was already
aiming at controlling all its opponents.
The Nam-bo Committee, to whom Gracey had accorded some polite acknowledgements
without giving them formal recognition, still operated in the town hall; on the other hand
Cdile, who was feverishly plotting with the British to re-establish colonial order, had
also entered into a dialogue of the deaf with this same Committee. The leaflets of the
Committee of 17 September called for a general strike against the French, but always in
the hope of a possible negotiation with the British, and recommended calm to the
population. Three days afterwards, on the 20th, the Vietnamese press was banned by the
British, and the proclamations of the Committee were torn down and removed from the
walls of the city. On the 22nd the British were controlling the prison, and were rearming
some 1,500 French soldiers who had been shut up by the Japanese in the barracks of the
second Indo Chinese Regiment. Finally, during the night of 22-23 September, the French,
assisted by the Gurkhas, reoccupied the police stations, the political police headquarters,
the Tax Office and the Post Office. The Vietminh Committee left the town hall and
withdrew into the neighbourhood of Cholon; that same night the Saigon insurrection
broke out.
4. The Saigon Insurrection
One of the main concerns of the Vietminh Committee was to ensure its recognition by
the British authorities as a de facto government. To this end the committee did everything
it could to show its strength and demonstrate its ability to maintain order.
Through its press it ordered the dissolution of all the partisan groups that had played an
active role in the struggle against Japanese imperialism.
All weapons were to be handed over to the Vietminhs own police force. The Vietminhs
militia, known as the Republican Guard (Cong hoa-ve-binh) and their police thus had a
legal monopoly in the carrying of weapons.
The groups aimed at by this decision were not only certain religious sects (the Cao Dai and
the Hoa Hao) but also the workers committees, several of which were armed.
Also aimed at were the Vanguard Youth Organisation and a number of self-defence
groups, many based on factories or plantations. These stood on a very radical social
programme but were not prepared to accept complete control by the Vietminh.

47

The Trotskyists of the Spark group (Tia Sang), anticipating an imminent and inevitable
confrontation with the military forces of Britain and France, started to distribute leaflets
calling for the formation of Popular Action Committees (tochuc-uy-ban hanh-dong) and
for arming of the people.
They advocated the creation of a popular assembly, to be the organ of struggle for
national independence.
Workers of the big Tramway Depot of Go Vap (about eight kilometres from Saigon),
helped by Tia Sang militants, organised a workers militia. The militia issued an appeal to
the workers of the Saigon-Cholon area to arm themselves and to prepare for the
inevitable struggle against the forces of British and French imperialism. By now General
Gracey had prolaimed martial law.
Before it abandoned the centre of Saigon, the Vietminh Committee plastered the walls
with posters, inviting the population to disperse into the countryside, to avoid
confrontation, and to remain calm, because the Committee hopes to open
negotiations.
A sense of insecurity hovered over the town, which slowly drained itself of parts of its
Vietnamese population.
During the night of 22-23 September 1945 French troops, supported by Gurkhas
commanded by British officers, reoccupied various police stations, the Post Office, the
Central Bank and the Town Hall. They met no immediate resistance. The news spread like
a trail of gunpowder and triggered off a veritable insurrection in the working class districts
of the town. Explosions were heard in widely separate areas. The movement had broken
without anyone giving any kind of directive.
The Vietminh had certainly not called for insurrection. Their one preoccupation was law
and order and their own accession to power following negotiations.
In all the outlying suburbs trees were cut down, cars and lorries turned over, and primitive
furniture piled up in the streets. Elementary barricades were set up to prevent the
passage of French and Gurkha patrols, and the taking up of strategic positions by the
imperialist forces. The centre of the town rapidly fell under the control of the French and
Japanese troops, supported by Gurkhas. But the poorer suburbs of Khanh Hoi, Cau Kho,
Ban Co, Phu Nhuan, Tan Dinh and Thi Nghe were firmly in the hands of the rebels.
Erupted

48

The rebels themselves were not a homogenous lot. Among them were members of the
Popular Committees, of the Vanguard Youth, Cao-daists, and even off the line groups of
Stalinist Republican Guards.
In areas where the popular forces were in control Frenchmen were shot: the cruellest
functionaries of the old regime, the hated policemen, known by the population to have
participated in torture, were sought out, killed and thrown in the canals. Racialism, fed by
80 years of imperialist domination, and by the contempt of the white man for the yellow
man, left its imprint on the violence of the masses, which erupted at moments like these.
The massacre of a hundred French civilians in the Heraud Estate, at Tan Dinh, was a
painful reminder of this fact. The threats of certain French colons to skin the Annamites
alive to make leather sandals rebounded back against all whites.
The occupation forces feverishly searched the whole centre of town. This did not prevent
the insurgents from setting fire to various important buildings, such as the Manufactured
Rubber Company, and to warehouses.
During the night of 23-24 September, guerillas attacked the port without respite. The
following day revolutionary groups openly paraded in the Rue de Verdun and marched up
the Boulevard de la Somme, converging on the Market Place, which they later burnt
down.
In Saigon there was neither water nor electricity. Supplies were breaking down. Each day
the French sought to extend the area under their control, while various armed groups
organised themselves as guerillas in the periphery of the city.
The Vietminh Committee produced a leaflet: The French ... seem to take pleasure in
murdering our people. There is only one answer: a food blockade. While seeking to
starve out the French (a futile hope, as the British ships controlled the access to the
harbour) the Vietminh clung to its hope of starting negotiations with the British.
Talks with Gracey did at last start ... and a truce was announced on 1 October. On 5
October General Leclerc, head of the French Expeditionary Force, arrived. His mission was
to restore order and to build a strong Indochina within the French Union. He landed
his troops. The commandos of the battleship Triomphant paraded down the Rue Catinat.
The hated Tricolour again fluttered from various windows.
The negotiations between the Vietminh and the British continued. The only result was
that British and Japanese troops were allowed free and unmolested passage through
zones occupied by the insurgents. The Vietminh Committee, continuing its policy of
appeasement towards the imperialist Allies, had consciously taken this decision.

49

The Gurkhas and the Japanese moved out further detachments occupying strategic points
on the periphery of Saigon. On 12 October French troops, supported by Gurkhas, launched
a general attack towards the north-east. The miserable peasant huts burnt from Thi Nghe
to Tan Binh. The encirclement of the town by the rebels was gradually broken, in
desperate fighting. The leader of the Bay Vien group of guerillas refused to undertake
underhand police work against other tendencies not affiliated to the Vietminh. He
proclaimed his independence in relation to the latter. His was not the only armed band to
refuse the authority of the Stalinists. The biggest of such dissident groups was known as
the Third Division, de-tam-su-doan. It was led by an erstwhile nationalist, who had for a
while placed his faith in Japan.
A few hundred armed men organised sustained resistance to the French, in the Plaine des
Joncs, but they surrendered a few months later, and the group disbanded.
The Vietminh would not tolerate any tendency that dared formulate the least criticism of
it. It dealt with such tendencies by physically liquidating them. The militants of the
Trotskyist group La Lutte were the first victims of the Stalinist terror, despite their
proclamations of critical support to the Vietminh government.
Gathered in a temple in the Thu Due area, and while preparing the armed struggle against
the French on the Gia Dinh front, they were surrounded one morning by the Vietminh,
arrested and interned shortly afterwards at Ben Sue in the province of Thu Dau Mot.
There they were all shot together with some 30 other prisoners at the approach of the
French troops.
Among those murdered was Tran Van Thach, one-time municipal councillor for Saigon,
elected in 1933 on a Stalinist-Trotskyist list, and a few months earlier released from the
penal settlement at Poulo Condore.
Ta Thu Thau, also released from Poulo Condore, had gone to Tonkin Province to help
organise assistance to the famine-stricken areas. He was murdered by supporters of Ho
Chi Minh, on his way back, in central Annam.
In this atmosphere of Vietminh terror, the workers militia of the Go Vap tramway depot,
some 60 strong, participated in the insurrection, on its own initiative. The 400 workers
and employees of the Tramway Company were well-known for their militancy and
independent frame of mind.
Under French imperialist rule there had been no trade union rights. After 9 March 1945,
when the Japanese had replaced the French at the head of this particular enterprise, the

50

workers had immediately constituted their own workers committee and put forward a
series of demands.
Japanese soldiery, led by Colonel Kirino, had come to threaten them, but confronted by
their militant and united stand, had eventually been obliged to grant them a wage
increase and even to recognise 11 delegates elected by the 11 categories of workers:
electricians, carpenters, metal workers, etc.
In August 1945, when foreign technicians had momentarily abandoned the enterprise, the
depot had been taken over and managed by the workers themselves, until the time of the
insurrection.
All those insurgents who did not rally immediately to the Vietminh flags were denounced
by the Vietminh as traitors. Workers who didnt identify with the patriotic cause were
called saboteurs and reactionaries.
The southern CGT was presided over by the arch-Stalinist Hoang Don Van. Its function was
to control the workers of the Saigon-Cholon area, by nominating their representatives
for them, from above.
In this atmosphere of violent ideological totalitarianism, the workers of the Go Vap
tramway depot, although affiliated to the southern CGT, refused the label of Cong-nhan
cuu-quoc (Worker Saviours of the Fatherland). They insisted on remaining a proletarian
militia, and rejected the Vietminh flag (yellow star on red background), saying they would
continue their fight under the red flag, the flag of their own class emancipation.
The tramway men then organised themselves into combat groups of 11 men under
elected leaders and under the overall command of Tran Dinh Minh, a young Trotskyist
from the north who had published a social novel in Hanoi, under the pseudonym of
Nguyen Hai Au, and who had come south to participate in the struggle.
At this stage the local Stalinists, under the command of Nguyen Dinh Thau, seemed far
more concerned at arresting and shooting their left critics and in fact all whom they saw
as potential rivals for the leadership of the movement than at prosecuting the struggle
against the French. Terrorist acts became the rule. They left a deep imprint on the statein-embryo which the maquis was soon to become. The emergence of the Vietminh as the
dominant force, in the years to come, was only possible after a lot of working class and
peasant blood had been shed.

51

Refusing to accept the authority of Nguyen Dinh Thau, the tramwaymens militia sought to
regroup in the Plaine des Joncs, towards which it had opened a way, fighting meanwhile
against the Gurkhas and the French at Loc Giang, Thot Not and My Hanh.
In the Plaine des Joncs the tramwaymen established contact with the poor peasants. And
it was here that, in a fight against the imperialist forces, Tran Dinh Minh was killed, on 13
January 1946. Some 20 other tramway workers had already lost their lives in the course of
battles waged on the way.
The intolerance of the Vietminh in relation to all independent tendencies, the accusations
of treachery combined with threats of murder and the numerical weakness of the
tramwaymens militia eventually forced its members to disperse. Three of them, Le Ngoc,
Ky and Huong, a young worker of 14, were stabbed to death by Vietminh bands.
The Saigon explosion reverberated into the countryside and into the more distant
provinces. The peasants seized the local officials who had most distinguished themselves
by their cruelty or their extortions, and many were put to death. But in the countryside, as
in the towns, the pretext of popular anger against the exploiters was everywhere used by
the Vietminh to settle accounts with political dissenters.
Ngo Van Xuyet
Notes
1. For the Yen Bay incident, cf nl1, see below Ngo Van Xuyets account of Ta Thu Thau.
2. Apart from Lucien, the writer, Ngo Van Xuyet, was also jailed at this time.

52

Ta Thu Thau: Vietnamese Trotskyist Leader

Ngo Van Xuyet
The credit for the first attempt in Britain to confront the Vietnamese Stalinists with the
question of the murder of Ta Thu Thau goes to Chris Harman of the International Socialists
(now the Socialist Workers Party), who broached the subject in his speech at a Ho Chi Minh
Memorial Meeting, which was organised by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and held in
London on 13 September 1969. This resulted in the representative of the Stalinist regime
walking off the stage in protest, and considerable pandemonium in the hall.
An eye-witness account of this meeting appears in David Widgery, The Left in Britain
1956-68, Harmondsworth 1976, pp 412-5. An account by the IS appeared in Socialist
Worker (18 September 1969), and one hostile to the IS was in Black Dwarf (1 October
1969). Harmans article, Ho He Gave the Third World Hope, which made much the
same points as his speech, appeared in Socialist Worker (11 September 1969). A letter
from Peter Sedgwick defending Harmans position appeared in Black Dwarf (26 November
1969), with an editorial reply signed by Tariq Ali, Anthony Barnett, Fred Halliday, Adrian
Mitchell and Sheila Rowbotham, saying that Sedgwick ... knows little about Vietnam.
(The IS had previously published material on Ta Thu Thau in an article by Jim Scott, Ta Thu
Thau A Great Vietnamese Socialist, Labour Worker (7 September 1966).)
Some sections of the Trotskyist movement showed a distinct lack of principle on this issue.
The International Marxist Group affirmed that all talk of Ho Chi Minhs murder squads is
an over-simplified distortion of an extremely complex situation (Ta Thu Thau: Vietnamese
Revolutionary, Red Mole, 15 September 1970), and Stephen Johns tried to exonerate the
regime from responsibility by claiming that he had been assassinated by a Vietminh
cadre (Stalinism and the Liberation of Vietnam, Fourth International (WRP), Volume 9
no.3, Autumn 1975, p.119).
Ho Chi Minhs responsibility is established in the three letters and three interviews printed
in Ho Chi Minh et les Trotskystes, Chroniques Vietnamiennes, no.1, November 1986,
pp.13-18, from which come the pieces translated by Richard Moore in Political Terror in
Vietnam, Socialist Organiser, no.295, 4 December 1986, and by Simon Pirani in Vietnam
and Trotskyism, Australia 1987, pp.123-8. Tran Van Giaus personal responsibility was
raised with him when on a visit to France last year (Peter Salmon, Killer Confronted,
Workers Press, 24 February 1990). Other accounts by the Groupe Trotskyste Vietnamien in
France occur in Justice for Ta Thu Thau, Socialist Organiser, no.359, 9 June 1988 and Ta
Thu Thau, Vietnamese Trotskyist, Socialist Organiser, no.360, 16 June 1988.

53

The following summary was written for us by the veteran Vietnamese revolutionary Ngo
Van Xuyet, who now lives in Paris, and was translated for this magazine by Simon Pirani,
and our thanks are surely due to both, as it consists of the fullest treatment of the life of
this heroic figure that has yet appeared in English.
**********************
Ta Thu Thau was born on 6 May 1906 at Tan Binh (Longxuyn, south Vietnam), the fourth
child of a large and very poor family: his father was a carpenter. In 1925 he began work as
a teacher in Saigon. [1] At the age of 20, along with most of the educated youth, Ta Thu
Thau in an experience he later called the folly of his youth joined the nationalist
group Young Annam, which was soon dissolved by the French colonial government. [2] On
24 March 1926 Ta Thu Thau took part in a mass demonstration to mark the return from
France of the constitutional-nationalist leader Bui Quang Chiu, and on 4 April 1926 in the
demonstration marking the funeral of the veteran nationalist Phan Chau Trinh. [3] On 21
March that year he had taken part in a meeting in the Rue Lanzarotte, Saigon, organised
by Nguyen An Ninh, for democratic liberties, and against the exploitation of Annamites,
both natives from Annam and those from Tonkin. He wrote for the Annam newspaper of
the nationalist lawyer Phan Van Truong. [4]
Ta Thu Thau arrived in France in September 1927 and enrolled at the Science faculty of
the University of Paris. He joined the Dang Viet Nam Dc Lap (Annamite Independence
Party PAI), and after its founder Nguyen The Truyen returned to Vietnam in 1928, took
responsibility for its work. [5] The anti-colonialist monthly Resurrection, which began in
December the same year, but was shortlived, was published by Ta Thu Thau in
collaboration with Huynh Van Phuong. [6]
In January 1929, Pierre Taittingers Jeunesse Patriotes (Young Patriots) [7] clashed with
Annamites under the PAIs influence. Ta Thu Thau attacked LHumanit, the French
Communist Partys newspaper, for the bad faith of its account, and the French
Communist Party (PCF) for its failure to intervene on behalf of the Annamites arrested at
this meeting, and wrote about the retribution to be exacted from the PCFs Colonial
Commission for its counter-revolutionary factional work within the PAI. The Annamite
group of the PCFs Colonial section, led by Nguyen Van Tao [8], hoped through this work
to transform the PAI members into automatons for carrying out their edicts, as he
wrote. A leaflet written by Ta Thu Thau concluded: From our unspeakable slavery, we cry
out to all the oppressed of the colonies: unite against European imperialism, white or red,
if you want a part of this world for yourselves. In March 1929 Ta Thu Thau tried in vain to
defend the PAI from its legal dissolution by the Seine district court.

54

From 20 to 30 July 1929 Ta Thu Thau participated in the Second Congress of the AntiImperialist League at Frankfurt. [9] In left-wing Paris circles, he met Felicien Challaye,
Francis Jourdain and Daniel Gurin. [10] He abandoned the nationalist beliefs of his early
years and entered the Trotskyist Left Opposition. He was 23 years old.
Following the insurrection at Yn Bay, on the night of 9-10 February 1930, inspired by the
Viet Nam Quc Dn Dang (the Annamite Kuomintang) [11], Ta Thu Thau set out his
political perspective in relation to the Indochinese revolution in La Verit, organ of the
Left Opposition in Paris (April/May/June 1930).
The artificially-created indigenous bourgeoisie is not capable of making any revolution ...
the indigenous bourgeois bloc, incapable of an independent existence, has welded itself
firmly to the French bourgeoisie which holds on tight to it, and uses it to break up the
revolutionary struggle in the name of Annamite nationalism.
The badly-organised rising at Yn Bay ... without liaison between its organisation and the
civilian population ... was launched on a confused ideological foundation ... a Sun-Yat-senist synthesis of democracy, nationalism and socialism [12] ... a kind of nationalist
mysticism.
This policy obscured the concrete class relationships, and the real, organic liaison between
the indigenous bourgeoisie and French imperialism ... Those who speak of immediate and
integral independence have nothing more than a mechanical and formalistic conception of
the struggle. Not one of them can doubt that, behind these impressive words, there is a
people within which operate perpetual molecular changes of the social classes, which are
all the more imperceptible because they are veiled by the appearance of the conflict
between races, which in many peoples eyes is real and eternal ... Neither terrorism nor
Gandhism will resolve the colonial problem ... A revolution based on the organisation of
the proletarian and peasant masses is the only one capable of liberating the colonies ...
The question of independence must be bound up with that of the proletarian socialist
revolution.
Ta Thu Thau here criticised the Third International and the PCF for their negligence in
training Marxist cadres, and for their empirical approach to the so-called continuous
revolutionary situation in Indochina; he denounced the false policy of the International,
the adventurist policy of the Third Period, as a result of which proletarian revolutionaries
had capitulated to the nationalist parties ... and the Chinese revolution had been led to
the graveyard.
Sentences

55

On 22 May 1930 the Annamite students in Paris demonstrated in the Champs dElyses
against more than 50 death sentences passed against participants in the Yn Bay uprising;
Ta Thu Thau was arrested, and on 30 May deported from France back to Vietnam with 18
of his compatriots.
When the clandestine Trotskyist Ta doi lp (Left Opposition) was formed in Saigon near
the end of 1931, Ta Thu Thau was one of its founders. But the group soon split into three
factions: Ta Thu Thau organised the Dng duong cng san (Indochinese Communism)
group, which from 1 May 1932 published a duplicated news-sheet, V San (Proletarian).
Huynh Van Phuong and Phan Van Chanh, who were also among those deported from
France, published communist propaganda journals under the title Ta doi lp tung tho (Left
Opposition Publications). Another deportee from France, Ho Huu Tuong, together with
other opponents of the Indochinese Communist Party, formed the Thang muoi (October)
group. [13]
These clandestine groups were soon hit by severe repression. Forty-one people were
arrested in Saigon and in the Baclieu, Baria, Giadinh and Soctrang provinces. Arrested on 8
August 1932, Ta Thu Thau was freed with a warning on 21 January 1933; but 15 activists
were sentenced to between four months and five years imprisonment at a trial of 21
Trotskyists on 1 May 1933.
At the Saigon municipal elections on 30 April and 7 May 1933, Ta Thu Thau carried out
legal agitation with the Stalinist Communist Nguyen Van Tao, the nationalists Nguyen An
Ninh, Tran Van Thach, Le Van Thu, Trinh Hung Ngau and others. [14] This group
constituted a workers list (so lao dong) for the elections, an unusual event for Indochina.
A French-language newspaper, La Lutte (The Struggle), was published to support the
campaign (Annamite-language newspapers were subject to censorship); the first issue was
dated 24 April 1933 and the paper disappeared the day after the election. To a stupefied
reaction from colonialist society, two candidates from the workers list were elected onto
the municipal council.
On 15 November of the same year, following an initiative from a study circle of former
students in France, Ta Thu Thau gave a lecture on the dialectic, to a large audience of
students and workers gathered at a cooperative college.
In 1934, from the United Front of Trotskyists, Stalinists and nationalists for the defence
of the working class, the La Lutte group was formally constituted; the Trotskyists
withheld their critique of the USSR and Stalinism, the Stalinists their criticism of
Trotskyism, and the La Lutte newspaper reappeared on 4 October 1934.

56

Their election to office annulled [15], the groups members presented themselves anew
for the municipal election of May 1935. Ta Thu Thau was among those elected. Sought by
the authorities for subversive press activity, he was given a two year suspended prison
sentence on 27 June 1935, a punishment confirmed by the appeal court on 10 September
1935. On 26 December 1935 Ta Thu Thau along with three other elected representatives
of La Lutte was arrested for making a speech in support of striking tilbury-drivers; they
were released the next day. At the trial of the La Lutte newspaper on 18 March 1936, Ta
Thu Thau was fined 500 francs in the Saigon court.
The coming to power of the Popular Front government in France in June 1936 [16]
triggered off a vast popular movement which swept Indochina: strikes in the rubber
plantations, in the Arsenal, on the railways ... and peasant demonstrations. At a meeting
on 13 August 1936, principally of militants from the La Lutte group and leaders of the
constitutional-nationalist party, plans were sketched out for the Indochinese Congress
movement. A committee was formed to prepare a charter of democratic demands for
presentation to the Popular Front government. The Congress movement was banned on
19 September 1936, and Ta Thu Thau, who had taken part in its commission for legislation
for the workers, was jailed along with Nguyen Van Tao and Nguyen An Ninh. They were all
released after 11 days hunger strike, on 5 November.
In 1937 industrial strikes and peasant demonstrations exploded again. Ta Thu Thau found
himself back in prison from 18 May to 7 June, and was then condemned by the Saigon
court on 9 July to two years in prison, a sentence against which he appealed. It was at this
time that the PCF ordered the Stalinists to break with the Trotskyists (cf the letter from
Gitton, 19 May 1937). [17] A general strike of railwaymen landed Ta Thu Thau back in
prison on 23 July 1937. After a hunger strike of 12 days, he was brought back it front of
the Saigon court on 17 September on a stretcher. He was semi-paralysed. Condemned on
11 November to a further two-year sentence to run concurrently, he was released
conditionally three months before the end of the sentence, on 14 February 1939, on the
eve of the Annamite new year.
Working with his Trotskyist comrades Ta Thu Thau continued publication of the
newspaper Tranh dau (formerly La Lutte which appeared in the Annamite language from
October 1938), supporting the Fourth International. In the papers pages he waged a
campaign for the Colonial Council elections of 16 and 30 April 1939 [18],. where he was
elected with his two comrades Tran Van Thach and Phan Var Hum[19] Their programme
included opposition to a national loan of 33 million piastres being raised from the people
for the defence of Indochina and this conflicted with the position of the Indochinese
Communist Party, which was aligned with that of the PCF, that France had to get her

57

security forces into a state of battle-readiness, as a consequence of the Laval-Stalin pact of

May 1935. On 1 October 1939 Phan Van Hum was condemned to five years in prison for
this anti-militarist propaganda.
Ta Thu Thau was authorised to leave Saigon on 21 August 1939 to go to Siam. He intended
to seek medical treatment there. But the war broke out, and he was arrested and taken
back to Saigon on 11 October 1939. The newspaper Tranh dau was among those affected
by a banning order on 26 September 1939, and Ta Thu Thaus group was among those
communistic groups and associations affected by a dissolution order (decreed in
October, 1939). Condemned in the Saigon court on 16 April 1940 to five years
imprisonment a 10-year banning order and 10 years loss of civil rights, Ta Thu Thau was
deported to the Poulo Condore island concentration camp in October 1940.
Coup
After his return from the camp at the end of 1944, Ta Thu Thau worked to build the
Socialist Workers Party (Dan xa hoi tho thuyen). The Japanese coup put an end to French
colonial power on March 1945, and replaced it with the government of Bao Dai and Tran
Tron Kim. [20] By the middle of 1945, Ta Thi Thau had made his way to Tonkin, and made
contact with Trotskyist militants in the Dan phuong region including Luon Due Thiep,
Khuong Huu An and others who were publishing the newspaper Chieu dau (Combat) as
the organ of the Socialist Workers Party of north Vietnam.
Ta Thu Thau participated in clandestine workers and peasants meetings in the mining
areas of Nam dinh, Haiphong and Hai duong. After the fall of Japan and the coming to
power of Ho Chi Minh in August 1945 [21], Ta Thu Thau hoped to get back to south
Vietnam, but was arrested by the Vietminh at Quang ngai and assassinated in September
1945. [22]
Mourn
On the subject of Ta Thu Thaus death, here are the words of Ho Chi Minh in 1946, as told
by Daniel Guerin: He was a great patriot and we mourn him ... but all those who do not
follow the line we have laid down will be broken.
In the month following the Saigon insurrection of 23 September 1945, Ta Thu Thaus
closest comrades led the Tranh dau group into battle against the Franco-British force
which aimed to reconquer Vietnam, an engagement in which some 200 Tranh dau men
lost their lives; like Ta Thu Thau, the Tranh dau leaders were assassinated by Ho Chi
Minhs partisans.

58

We must recall that in 1939, echoing the Moscow Trials, Ho Chi Minh wrote three letters
to his beloved comrades describing the Trotskyists as notorious spies and traitors, in
the service of international, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and German fascism. To
exterminate them was the implicit, but very clear, conclusion from this.
As a person, Ta Thu Thau was likeable and had great self-possession. Answering a
summons by governor Pages [23] in April 1937, he declared: A revolutionary I am, and a
revolutionary I will remain as long as there is blood in my veins.
Ngo Van Xuyet
Notes
1. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the National Liberation Fronts 1975 victory.
2. France sent military missions to Vietnam from 1848 (central and south Vietnam then
constituting the nation of Annam, north Vietnam being known as Tonkin). Vietnam and
Cambodia were under complete French control by the 1860s, and this was extended to all
Indochina with the conquest of Laos in 1893. The national independence movement took
the form of bourgeois conspiracies in the early years of the twentieth century; in the early
1920s it emerged as a mass movement. A Constitutionalist Party was formed in 1923;
revolutionary nationalist organisations also proliferated, of which Young Annam (Viet Nam
Thanh Nien Dang) was one.
3. Bui Quang Chieu founded the bourgeois Constitutionalist Party which aroused mass
sentiment against the feudal class and colonialists in the 1920s, using occasions such as
Phan Chau Trinhs funeral for this purpose. As workers' movements emerged, starting
with the abortive uprisings of 1930, the Constitutionalists became extremely hostile to
them and drew closer to the colonialist government and police.
Phan Chau Trinh was a mandarin at the Hue court, who quit his post in disgust at the
courts corruption in 1905, and joined nationalist veteran Phan Boi Chau in exile in Hong
Kong. Returning to Vietnam in 1906, he was accused of inspiring a peasant uprising in
1908 and was jailed far three years. After being freed he continued political activity.
4. Nguyen An Ninh studied law in Paris, where he joined the nationalist movement. He
returned to Vietnam in 1923 and founded the nationalist newspaper La Cloche Fele,
which among other things published the Communist Manifesto in Vietnam for the first
time; in the 1930s he played a leading role in the Indochinese Congress movement, and in
La Lutte. The Rue Lanzarotte meeting, attended by 3,000 people, was the first-ever public

59

political rally in Saigon. La Cloche Fele was followed by Annam in May 1926. Its editor,
Phan Van Truong, had joined the nationalist movement as a student in France in 1912.
5. Nguyen The Truyen also joined the nationalist movement while studying in France, and
in 1922-23 formed LUnion Intercoloniale to unite anti-imperialists from throughout the
French empire. He returned to Vietnam in 1928. Back in France in 1936-37, he attempted
to establish a union of oppressed nationalities together with the Algerian Messali Hadj.
6. Huynh Van Phuong came from a rich Mytho family; in 1927 he went to study law in
Paris, where he joined the Trotskyist Left Opposition. Deported to Vietnam together with
Ta Thu Thau in 1930, he edited the Left Oppositions journal in Saigon, and was active in
the La Lutte group. He was assassinated by the Stalinists in 1945.
7. Pierre Taittingers Jeunesses Patriotes were French fascists, inspired by Mussolini, who
emerged as a force after the 1924 election of a Radical-Socialist coalition. These were
lumpen thugs, dressed in blue raincoats and berets for their public provocations,
downmarket in comparison to the Croix de Feu (predominantly ex-servicemen) and
Charles Maurras Action Directe which headed the attempted fascist coup of February
1934.
8. Nguyen Van Tao joined the French Communist Party while studying in Paris, and
became a full-timer in 1927; he was deported to Vietnam in 1931, where he played a
leading part in the Stalinist organisation.
9. The Anti-Imperialist League, founded under the influence of the Stalinist Comintern
leaders in 1927 at Brussels, brought together pacifists and other petty-bourgeois lefts. The
Frankfurt congress, which Ta Thu Thau attended, brought its short life to an end.
10. Felicien Challaye, Francis Jourdain and historian and writer Daniel Guerin were French
anti-colonialists, inspirers of numerous actions supporting colonial liberation, and
founders in 1933 of an Amnesty Committee for Vietnamese political prisoners.
11. The Yen Bay insurrection began as a mutiny by Annamite troops stationed on the
Chinese frontier; they massacred their officers and controlled the garrison for a night, but
other garrisons either failed to rise or were defeated. The village of Co Am rose a few days
later, and was suppressed by pitiless aerial bombardment. The severity of French
repression following the rising finished the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dong as a political force.
12. Sun Yat Sen was founder of the Chinese bourgeois nationalist Guomindang; his
philosophy combined anti-imperialist nationalism, democracy and utopian Socialist ideas.

60

13. Phanh Van Chanh joined the Left Opposition in Paris in 1929, and was deported along
with Ta Thu Thau in 1930. He worked as a teacher, and was an editor of the Left
Opposition's Saigon journal. Deported to Poulo Condore 1940-43; he was assassinated by
the Stalinists in October 1945 at Ben Sue, Thu Dau Mot. For Huynh Van Phuong see note
6.
Ho Huu Tuong began his political life as a nationalist, and joined the Trotskyist movement
while studying in France, at Aixen-Provence and Lyons; he returned to Saigon in 1931. The
October group, which later became the League of Internationalist Communists, supported
the Fourth International and published Le Militant; it would not join the La Lutte front
because this would have meant withholding public criticism of the Stalinists; its members
played a leading role in forming soviet-type workers councils in the 1945 revolution. Ho
Huu Tuong also participated in 1945, although he had renounced Trotskyism during the
war.
14. Tran Van Thach, a nationalist, studied in Paris and was deported to Vietnam with Ta
Thu Thau in 1930. He worked as a teacher and, following the struggle within La Lutte,
became a Trotskyist in 1937. He was elected to the Saigon Colonial Council in 1939,
imprisoned at Poulo Condore from 1940 to 1944, and assassinated by the Stalinists at Thu
Dau Mot in 1945. Le Van Thu, another of the Paris deportees, remained a nationalist but
played an active part in La Lutte and the workers movement. Trinh Hung Ngau, who had
worked with Ta Thu Thau on the Annam newspaper, was a nationalist with Anarchist
leanings.
15. The elections of La Lutte councillors were annulled on spurious grounds, such as the
non-payment of taxes.
16. The elections of April-May 1936 in France gave a large majority to the Popular Front of
the Communist Party, Socialists, Radicals and others. A government headed by Leon Blum
of the Socialist Party took office on 2 June amidst a wave of strikes and factory
occupations. The Stalinists supported this government, although they did not take part in
it, thus ensuring that power remained with the bourgeoisie.
17. At this time the Trotskyists advocated intensified strike struggles against French
imperialism; the Stalinists wanted an abatement of strikes on the grounds that the
working class should not damage the French Popular Front government, a diplomatic ally
of the USSR. The letter from French CP leader Marcel Gitton to the Indochinese CP stated
we consider it impossible to continue the collaboration of the party with the Trotskyists
... and instructed it to cease. After the Stalinists split from La Lutte, the letter was
published in it (29 August 1937).

61

18. Colonial Councils were administrative bodies with limited powers; there was a small
property qualification for franchise.
19. Phan Van Hum was a teacher of law, literature and philosophy. He began political
activity as a nationalist, but joined the Trotskyist movement in France in the early 1930s.
Returning to Saigon in July 1933, he took part in La Lutte, was deported to Poulo Condore
during the war, and was assassinated by the Stalinists in October 1945 in Bien Hoa. For
Tran Van Thach see note 13. Their joint letter to Trotsky appears below.
20. Bao Dai, last emperor of Vietnam, succeeded his father in 1925 at the age of 12, but
did not take the throne until 1932. He collaborated with the French, and when the
Japanese coup took place agreed to work with them; he abdicated in 1945, joined the
Vietminh briefly, went into exile, and returned as a French puppet again from 1949 to
1955. Tran Trong Kim, a mild-mannered academic, was his Prime Minister in 1945.
21. Japan surrendered to the imperialist Allies on 14 August 1945, after the atom bombing
of Hiroshima: this provoked a revolutionary situation in Vietnam. In the north the
Vietminh marched from their jungle bases into Hanoi and declared a Democratic
Republic on 2 September. According to Stalins agreement with the Allies, the south was
to be placed under French control again, and while the southern Vietminh tried to prepare
for this, it was resisted by the nationalists, and by the Trotskyists who called for the
workers councils which had sprung up to take power. The Stalinists arrested delegates to
a congress of workers councils and managed to establish a provisional government
despite the unpopularity of their line; they stood by as the French reinvaded in October,
concentrating their fire on the Trotskyists, all of whose leaders were killed.
22. According to a report published in the journal Quatrime Internationale in 1947, Ta
Thu Thau was tried by a Vietminh peoples tribunal after his arrest. Due to his great
prestige in the workers movement, this tribunal could not be persuaded to find him guilty
of anything; then he was shot anyway.
23. Pierre Pages was French colonial governor of Indochina throughout the 1930s.
This essay is based upon the following sources: Archives nationales (Paris) F7-13406,
13408, 13409, 13410, 13167, 13170, Archives Outre-mer D2514; La Depeche dIndochine,
Saigon, various issues 1933-40; Nguyen Van Dinh, Ta thu thau, to qudc gia toi quoc te (Ta
Thu Thau, from Nationalism to Internationalism), Saigon 1938; Phuong Lan, Nha each
mang Ta thu Thau (The revolutionary Ta Thu Thau), Saigon 1974; D. Hemery, Du
patriotisme au marxism: limmigration vietnamienne en France 1926 a 1930 (From
patriotism to Marxism: the Vietnamese emigration in France 1926-30), in Le Mouvement
social, no.90, Paris 1975; D. Hemery, Revolutionnaires vietnamiens et pouvoir colonial en

62

Indochine (Vietnamese revolutionaries and colonial power in Indochina), Paris 1975; D.

Hemery, Ta Thu Thau: litineraire politique dun rvolutionnaire vietnamien pendant les
annees 1930 (Ta Thu Thau: the political path of a Vietnamese revolutionary through the
1930s) in Histoire de lAsie du Sud-Est. The translation and the notes are the work of
Simon Pirani, to whom, along with the author, our thanks are due.

63

A Letter to Trotsky
Phan Van Hum, Tran Van Thach, Ta Thu Thau and the group La Lutte
18 May 1939
The following letter of greeting was sent to Trotsky after the victory of the three
Trotskyists in the elections to the Saigon colonial council, and appeared in the Socialist
Appeal (USA), Volume 3 No.58, 11 August 1939.
Trotsky was much encouraged by this, and quoted from the issue of La Lutte that
announced this in The Kremlin in World Politics, 1 July 1939 (Writings of Leon Trotsky
1938-39, New York, 1974, p.368) and India Faced with Imperialist War, 25 July 1939
(Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939-40, New York, 1973, pp.33-4). These texts can otherwise
be found conveniently collected in S. Pirani (ed.), Vietnam and Trotskyism, Australia 1987,
pp. 110-3.
Dear Comrade Trotsky,
You must be acquainted with the results of the colonial elections of last 30 April in Cochin
China. Despite the shameful coalition of the bourgeois of all types and the Stalinists, we
have won a shining victory ...
We went to battle, the flag of the Fourth International widely unfurled. Our victory is one
of all the Fourth over the bourgeoisie, naturally, but above all, over their SocialDemocratic and Stalinist agents. We have faith in the final victory of the Fourth
International.
This faith you have imparted to us. Today, more than ever, we understand the importance
not only of the programme of the Fourth International, but also of your struggle of 192528 against the theory and practice of Socialism in One Country, of your struggle against
the Peasants International, the Anti-Imperialist League and other show committees,
Amsterdam-Pleyel and others.
In these days of hope engendered by our recent victory, we think of you, of the moral and
physical sufferings that you and your comrade have endured. We want to say to you that
even in this remote corner of the Far East, in this backward country, you have friends who
agree with you, comrades who struggle for that to which you have devoted your life, for
socialism, for communism!
Our affectionate Bolshevik-Leninist salutations.
Phan Van Hum, Tran Van Thach, Ta Thu Thau and the group La Lutte (18 May 1939)

64

Trotskyist Fighters in the Forefront of the Struggle to Free Indochina

The following is a quotation from a Vietnamese paper, Cam Tu (Volunteers for Death)
which first appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and was reproduced in turn in the
American Militant, Volume 4 no.48, 1 December 1945. The Chicago Tribune described this
paper as Trotskyist, and it certainly reflects Trotskyist views as against the policy of the
Vietminh at the time.
This is the hour when every Annamite must participate in our resistance. Our guerillas
must have the greatest mobility, must profit from the slightest relaxation of the enemys
vigilance, and continue attacking him.
Death volunteers must destroy roads and bridges, and set fire to factories. On occasions
the entire population must go into action and refuse cooperation with the enemy, not sell
him food, preventing him from organising his exploitation of our people. In the long run
the action will destroy the enemy. All property of the French colonials must be destroyed.

Four point guide

(The same issue was reported to contain a four-point guide for the Annamese guerillas:)
The first duty of our compatriots is to win the sympathy of the people; the second, avoid
any attitude that might destroy sympathy; third, no troops are entitled to requisition food
or goods; fourth, guerillas surrender all moneys they have collected for the resistance
funds.
(Whether or not Cam Tu is actually a Trotskyist newspaper cannot as yet be verified.)

65

My First Steps Towards the Permanent Revolution

The following account was written by Comrade P, who was then a militant of the La Lutte
group, but who has had no contacts with the Trotskyist movement since the 1940s and
now lives in France. Its translation we owe to Comrade Simon Pirani, and the text was
given to us for reproduction here by Comrade Ngo Van Xuyet.
It expresses the view of the La Lutte group (as opposed to the ICL to which belonged
Lucien (Lu Sanh Han) and Ngo Van, and whose basic document is reproduced in Our
Position below). The La Lutte group, seeing no other possible policy due to the relationship
of forces, gave critical support to the Vietminh Nam-bo Committee (cf. Paolo Conlon, Yet
More on the Vietnamese Trotskyists, in Workers Press, 21 March 1987, answered by
Simon Pirani, Looking at History with Blinkers On, Workers Press, 25 April 1987). It did not
actually join the Vietminh government, as is so often stated, but it did agree to sit upon a
commission set up to negotiate with the Allies when they landed in Saigon, which in the
event never met. It was, so Comrade Ngo Van commented, perhaps a bit like the
behaviour of Stalin and Kamenev in February 1917 (Conversation with Al Richardson, 1
June 1990).
The La Lutte group criticised the ICL as being sectarian (cf. Trotskyism in Vietnam in
International Communist, no.7, March 1978, pp.49-51), and when the latter appeared on
the great Saigon demonstration (cf. the account of Comrade Ngo Van Xuyet, above) the La
Lutte group denounced it as follows:
The La Lutte group, which has joined the Vietminh front, has made known that in the
course of the demonstration of 25 August, a group of persons marching under the banner
of the world revolution [a red flag bearing a globe crossed by a lightning flash] had sown
confusion by its slogans. They declared that they had no links with these people. (Journal
de Saigon, no.17017, 28 August 1945). The La Lutte group, which later named itself the
Socialist Workers Party, was much more numerous than the ICL. Differences widened in the
exile in France, where the ICL adopted a state capitalist analysis of the Soviet Union. The
exiles in France belonged to both tendencies, but were not divided into two organisations
over basic questions as they had been in Vietnam.
*****************
I was then 17 years old. Japanese imperialism had undergone a defeat, and the French
were despoiled, under guard and concentrated) in various large towns. The old political
leaders were returning from deportation and the extermination camps. Saigon, my

66

birthplace, was able to breathe its first breaths of freedom normally for the first time.
Such was the political situation in Saigon on the day I joined the Trotskyist La Lutte group.
After an absence of eight years, La Lutte, the organ for the defence of the working class,
made its reappearance before the Saigon public. In a few days the number of papers
brought out climbed to dizzy heights. Three editions a day were not enough for the
workers and the Saigon public. [1] The Stalinist organisations, on the one hand
preoccupied with the question of taking power, and having on the other already been
defeated by the Trotskyists at the time of the election campaigns of 1936-37, no longer
had the time to carry out work among the factory workers and toilers in the towns. Since
the first days of political agitation it seemed to me that the October Group wished to carry
out extensive work among the workers, and it succeeded overwhelmingly. This work,
however, was unfortunately only carried out on the basis of revolutionary instinct; its
leading cadre, moreover, severely affected by imperialist repression as well as by the
treachery or defection of a certain leading member [2] was unable to regain its sense of
direction. It then abandoned this work to resort to an adventurist policy of dual power
with the Stalinists.
As for the La Lutte group, its leadership was re-established and the same personnel were
once again reunited. [3]
In the midst and at the height of the struggle one fact has tormented me for a good
number of years: our leader Ta Thu Thau left us in order to return to the north of Vietnam.
The entire defeat was partly the result of his departure from the field of battle. Officially,
as far as we rank and file militants were concerned, Ta Thu Thau had left on a mission to
the north. However, according to his second in command, he intended to get to
Chungking (via Yunnan). [4]
In accordance with the unanimous political orientation at that time, march separately,
strike together, the remaining Central Committee carried on its work of agitation and
propaganda, whilst placing itself under the control of the Vietminh front when it came to
action. In addition, the Central Committee obtained permission from the Stalinists to set
up a workers militia of self-defence (with the proviso that the military command was put
under government control). The government, moreover, already under the direction of
the Vietminh Front, took charge of material aid, arms and ammunition. Nothing could get
through without the permission of the Stalinists. So carried away by their enthusiasm, and
by the favourable political situation at the time, our comrades had forgotten all distrust of
the Stalinists. From then on our comrades slowed down the work of setting up soviets in
the city, of turning the factories into fortresses, and of preparing for a civil war. The
militants of the October Group only weakly criticised the La Lutte group. The final days of

67

the existence of the Vietminh Front in Saigon were painful. Everybody, on our side as well
as the entire population, felt that something dire was threatening us and lying in wait for
us. It was too late for we Trotskyists to do anything in the city of Saigon, no matter what.
23 September 1945. A violent seizure of power by French imperialism, assisted actively by
the British army and passively by the Japanese military police. The Vietnamese
government immediately gave the order to evacuate Saigon and await further
instructions: Let us keep calm.
The Central Committee of La Lutte was completely dispersed for several days. Then, in the
middle of the night, I was awoken by a comrade who passed on to me instructions
appointing me as an aide to a member of the Central Committee [5], along with an order
to meet him 150 kilometres south-west of Saigon and conduct him safe and sound to our
headquarters, situated 20 kilometres to the north of Saigon. What joy! I can still
remember how, half an hour after this news, having kissed my mother goodbye and
leaving her in the care of my sister, I left on my bike at one in the morning and pedalled
without stopping to carry out my mission. Three days later we were at headquarters.
The General Staff of the La Lutte group existed for about 12 days. It must be realised that
we were far from really being that. All this existed in name only. The abrupt dispersal of
our comrades led us, in fact, to total disaster: we only had 30 soldiers to the right and left
of us, along with different organisations in a state of dissolution. As far as the city workers
were concerned, they had either obeyed the evacuation order or were following the
regular regiments of the government.
Among the Central Committee members present at headquarters were:
1. Tran Van Thach, a lawyer and former editor of the paper La Lutte.
2. Phan Van Hum, author and philosopher.
3. Phan Van Chanh, a university lecturer.
4. Ung Hoa, the groups General Secretary.
5. Nguyen Thi Loi, a schoolteacher.
6. Nguyen Van So. [6]
7. Le Van Thu, a journalist.
These were seven out of the 11 members of the Central Committee of La Lutte. We were
very well placed from the point of view of military strategy. We enjoyed sympathy and

68

deep respect as regards the civilian population. They looked upon us as serious people
and as revolutionaries who were willing to sacrifice themselves to build something better.
[7]
In the remaining paragraphs I shall go over the entire meticulous preparations of the
Stalinists for the extermination of the Trotskyists. As I see it, it was a conscious
undertaking on the part of the Stalinists. For two weeks before the date of 23 September
everywhere in every village on the official notice boards could be found articles drawing
the attention of the public to the secret preparations of a certain organisation to
sabotage the peace and the independence of the country. This was a blow aimed at the
Trotskyists. So our comrades could easily determine the atmosphere among the public
that surrounded us at that time.
I have forgotten to tell you until now that Saigon under the Vietminh government had four
military districts: the first was controlled by the Stalinists and the other three by
nationalist forces and by forces close to the Trotskyists.
Here is a diagram that will enable you to follow the tactics of the Stalinists in action. Zone
1 was under Stalinist control and was mainly peasant. Zone 2 was half peasant and half
working class, and was under the control of the second and third divisions of the
Vietnamese army. The majority of the staff in command of the second zone were
Trotskyists (former members of the La Lutte group). In addition, a number of principled
agreements had been reached between Vu Tranh Anh, the commander of the second
division, a former officer in the Japanese army, and the leaders of the La Lutte group.
One further point: the headquarters of the La Lutte group had been set up on the border
of the non-Stalinist and Stalinist zones. Zones 3 and 4 had no military divisions, but the
apparatus of the GPU was in Zone 3. The administrator of Zone 4 was a neutral
intellectual. Every approach to and negotiation with the Vietminh took place through his
mediation.
My stay at headquarters was for me an unforgettable and historic memory. United in a
common cause, we, who previously had belonged to different social layers, helped each
other hand by hand through the fire of our enemies. Day and night, in sun and rain,
through vicious jungles and vast rubber plantations, we soldiers of the proletarian general
staff tirelessly carried out military manoeuvres by the techniques of guerilla warfare. We
were under the command of a former NCO in the French army. We had hardly anything in
the way of weapons. Some reliable comrades were assigned the tasks of buying or
acquiring arms by our own means on the one hand, or on the other of negotiating with
the Vietminh government.

69

While I am on this subject, as a soldier I did not know anything of the various negotiations
between our General Staff and the Vietminh leaders. Nevertheless, on several occasions
our comrade Phan Van Chanh was summoned by the Stalinist representatives. And on one
occasion, four days before the arrest of our comrades, a Stalinist military and political
commission came right into our headquarters, whether to negotiate or to look us over, I
dont know which. As for the surrounding civilian population, they were very impressed by
our ideals and actions. Every day they brought us firewood, rice and various foodstuffs
free of charge.
Three days before our headquarters was disbanded, we received a number of items of
disturbing news:
1. A French cruiser, the Richelieu, had disembarked Leclercs troops onto our territory.
2. The second division of the Vietnamese army, on which we had placed all our hopes, had
suffered reverses and had had to withdraw. At the front the Allied airborne troops and
those of Leclerc (the armoured division in particular) were on the rampage; in the rear, in
Zones 3 and 4, the soldiers of the second division had been discharged by the Stalinist
forces, who had incited the entire population against this division a division commanded
by a traitor.
3. Our comrade Phan Van Chanh, ask to go with the Vietnamese police, gave himself up
and was arrested on the spot. We have had no news of him since then. As far as he is
concerned, even his wife who was arrested at the same time and was afterwards released,
has not been able find out whether her husband is still alive.
From then onwards we witnessed the complete dispersal and disappearance of our
comrades. Our General Staff sent Nguyen Thi Loi on a mission in Zone 1 and then he
disappeared.
Our General Staff (I do not know whether it was an order on behalf of the Vietminh
government or by its own decision) informed and advised us to get ready to leave for the
front in the course of the week. Each of us had to leave our dirty linen in the care of a
reliable comrade and we were able to obtain 24 hour leave. As I was still a soldier, I was
much intrigued by all of this; it meant leaving the front under arms.
One day before the entire headquarters was arrested, more and more alarming decisions
permitted us to foresee certain disaster. And on the basis of all this, I insist that our
leaders knew and were aware of the crime that the Stalinists had in store for them.

70

Comrade Phan Van Hum left the headquarters to go 20 kilometres to the north east to
prepare a camp, so that oor soldiers could find refuge there after the final battle. He left,
and then disappeared.
On the final night comrade Tran Van Thach was the only Central Committee member to
remain at the headquarters. We soldiers received the order to form a double guard and
search everybody who passed in front of our headquarters.
At 5.30a.m. 10 gardes mobiles arrived, under the command of the Stalinist police
commissioner of the district, to take away comrade Train Van Thach, to search the entire
building and to collect everything together.
Then, for the first time in my life, I heard at first hand the slanders and actions of the
Stalinists (both at the same time). Brandishing his revolver, the commissioner gave we
soldiers a long lecture.
As for comrade Nguyen Van So, he too was arrested a few days later in equally stormy
circumstances (according to accounts on the spot). Then he disappeared.
Of the seven comrades present at the headquarters, five have been murdered, and only
two were able to escape.
One of them, Ung Hoa, has, I think, allied with Bao Dai during recent times, since he is
related to the royal family.
As for the last of them, Le Van Thu, he still remains in Saigon, sending money to La Verit
from time to time.
Forget!
Do not forget!
Only conscience knows it
And future deeds will respond to it!
Comrade P

Notes
The notes are those of the author unless otherwise stated.

71

1. It should be noted that the circulation did not exceed 15,000. Nonetheless, this was a
considerable figure for a non-industrial city of 250,000 inhabitants.
2. Ho Huu Tuong (1910-1980) was arrested at the beginning of the war in 1939 and
condemned to four years in prison on 16 April 1940. In 1944 he declared that he had
abandoned Marxism and went over to Buddhism, and he later became a professor at the
Buddhist University in Saigon. He was released, but placed under house arrest. According
to his autobiography, 41 nam Lam Bao (41 Years in Journalism), p.130, the emancipation
of humanity by the proletariat is the greatest myth of the nineteenth century, and the
revolutionary potential of the proletariat in Europe and North America the greatest myth
of the twentieth.
He became a nationalist, and as advisor to Bay Vien, the chief of the Binh Xuyen pirates in
rebellion against the Diem government, was arrested and on 28 September 1957 was
condemned to death and sent to Poulo Condore concentration camp. When Diem fell
from power he was released, and in 1970 campaigned for non-alignment and a third
force, for which he was then deported again by the Thieu government. After the southern
regime fell he was arrested by the Stalinists and then interned in a. re-education camp,
and died on the day of his release, 26 June 1980. [Information given to us by Comrade Ngo
Van Xuyet]
3. If the La Lutte group allowed some important political issues to bypass it, that was the
result of the weakness of our movement on the international level at that time, of the lack
of contact between the various sections and particularly of contact with the International
Secretariat. Our comrades were unable to keep up with international movements during
their five years of deportation.
4. Two years afterwards, once I was able to survey the events as a whole, I came to the
conclusion that at that time Ta Thu Thau was all too aware that the Central Committee of
the Communist Party in the north and that in the south were not acting in concert with
each other. The operations conducted by Tran don Giau in Cochin China from the start
were not dictated by Ho Chi Minh. It was through wanting to meet Ho Chi Minh, in other
words the entire action committee, that Ta Thu Thau exposed himself to risk in this way.
5. He was engaged in carrying on a campaign for the formation of a trade union among
schoolteachers.
6. I do not know exactly what his profession was. He was a former student at the ecole
normale superieur. He did not live at the headquarters, but about 10 kilometres from
there.

72

7. That was a mistake on the part of our leadership. The population accused us of nothing.
It could, however, clearly see the formation of a state within a state. On 22 September
1945, one day before the decision to evacuate the city, on the orders of the Stalinist
leader Tran Van Giau, the government decreed the disarming of all military divisions, and
the issue of a warrant in particular for the arrest of Vu Tran Anh on a charge of embezzling
funds. Now it seems to me that he insinuated himself into the ranks of the Japanese army
in order to get out of the country, since he had relinquished his command to his aide-decamp.

73

A Moscow Trial in Ho Chi Minhs Guerilla Movement

Ngo Van Xuyet
What appears here is an account by the veteran Vietnamese Trotskyist Ngo Van Xuyet, to
whom, along with our translator, Simon Pirani, our thanks are due. It should establish once
and for all that the Vietnamese Communist Party is an organisation of the purest Stalinist
type, and becoming as it did a military apparatus supporting itself on the peasantry, could
not do otherwise in a real revolutionary situation than attack the working class movement
and its authentic representatives, as Trotsky foresaw so long ago in the case of its sister
party, that in China (Peasant War in China and the Proletariat, 22 September 1932, Leon
Trotsky on China, New York 1976, pp.529-30). Readers who are interested in this
phenomenon should consult our remarks in the introduction to the article in Revolutionary
History, Volume 2, no.4, Spring 1990, p22.
The contrary view, that the Vietnamese Communist Party was a real revolutionary working
class organisation, is to be found argued by Michael Lowy in The Politics of Combined and
Uneven Development, London 1981, pp.130-41, and by Pierre Rousset in The Vietnamese
Revolution and the Ro1e of the Party, International Socialist Review (SWP, USA), Volume
25 no.4, April 1974, pp.4-25 and in Le parti communiste vietnamien, Paris 1975. The
cruder versions of this belief occur in John Spencers Vietnamese Trotskyism and the
August Revolution of 1945 (Communist Forum, n.d.), Stephen Johns Stalinism and the
Liberation of Vietnam, (Fourth International (WRP), Volume 9 no.3, Autumn 1975, part 1 ,
pp.1114-128) and Martin McLaughlins Vietnam and the World Revolution, Detroit 1985,
the last two, which repeat the old Stalinist canard that the Trotskyists underestimate the
role of the peasantry.
****************
The coming to power of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam in 1945 was favoured by the special
conjuncture of circumstances in which the country found itself: the absence of the French
imperialist state apparatus, disrupted by the Japanese army since 9 March 1945, and the
surrender of Japan itself on 15 August 1945. Arriving at the head of his guerilla bands from
the highlands of Tonkin, Ho Chi Minh took power in Hanoi. He was able to impose himself
upon the insurgent masses not only by his reactionary nationalist demagogy but also
above all by force of arms and through the murders carried out by his GPU, the Ty CongAu.
Whilst the former mandarins, bourgeois, landlords, peasants and workers were being
invited to participate in the Stalinist Vietminh front, Ho Chi Minh was asking the emperor

74

Bao Dai to abdicate in favour of the republic and to agree to become Supreme
Counsellor/Advisor to the democratic government. At the same time his assassination
committees were arranging for the thorough disappearance of the printer Luong Doc Thi,
the leader of the Thanh Nien Thothuyen Xahoi (Socialist Worker Youth), Nguyen Te My
and many other internationalist militants, including Tiep, Luong, Vinh, and Sam, who
suffered the same fate. Nguyen Te My had been organiser of the Viet Da Tuyen
(Independent Peoples Front) in the Haiphong area. The teacher Tran Tien Chinh was
arrested and died from the effects of torture in [illegible] prison at [illegible].
Just as Ho Chi Minh was occupying Hanoi, the miners of Hoa-gay in Camphu district (a
conurbation with a population of 300,000) rose in revolt, set up workers committees, and
on that basis established a truly proletarian government. The workers took over the
mines, tramways, railways and telegraph system, arrested the bosses and the police, and
destroyed the local apparatus of the old imperialist state. The Japanese troops, who had
surrendered, remained indifferent to the situation. All the means of production were
placed under the direct control of a management committee elected by the workers
themselves and completely controlled by them. The principle of equal pay for all levels of
manual and intellectual work was put into effect. Public order was maintained by armed
workers. During the three months of its existence (from the end of August until December
1945) this first proletarian government made mining production work normally, secured
the economic life of the region, conducted an intensive struggle against illiteracy and
brought in sickness benefit.
But isolated by circumstances, the movement was unable to spread and rouse the other
working class centres in the country.
After having established himself in Hanoi and having murdered the proletarian revolution
in that city, Ho Chi Minh sent for his armed gangs from the Delta under the leadership of
Nguyen Binh (the future Commander-in-Chief of the guerillas of Cochin China) to surround
the insurgent mining district and force the workers government installed there to dissolve
itself. The workers militia had only a few rifles and sharpedged weapons, so a
compromise was reached: Nguyen Binhs troops entered the district promising to respect
the status quo. Thereupon, by means of underhand police intrigues, the militants S, Lam,
Bien, Hien, Le and others, who had been elected by the workers, were ousted from their
positions, placed under arrest and taken to Haiphong, where several of them had to be
released in face of the anger of the miners. But in the end the entire region was occupied
and subjected to the military and police control of the Ho Chi Minh government.
On 14 September 1945 in Cochin China (South Vietnam), this same Vietminh government
arrested the Popular Revolutionary Committee at 9 rue Duclos that had been set up on

75

the initiative of the International Communist League (LCI). This embryonic soviet had
placed its stamp upon the region of Saigon-Cholon, Gia-dinh and Bien-Hoa. Bombarded by
the general staff of General Graceys British troops of occupation, as well as the Stalinist
Tran Van Giau clique who led the Vietminh government, it had advanced the slogans of
arming the people, expropriating the landlords and handi over the land to the peasants,
and for workers occupation of the factories. The Stalinist Minister of the Interior, Nguy
Van Tao, sent soldiers to bring to their senses with bursts of machine gun fire the peasants
of Go-den, as well as the peasants of the Plain of Reeds, who had themselves expropriated
the landlords.
Whilst Ho Chi Minh and his follow were advertising themselves as supporters of the
democratic (Russo-Anglo-American imperialist) Allies against Japanese Fascism, and
whilst the Popular Revolutionary Committees were calling the masses to armed
insurrection against all the imperialisms (democratic or Fascist), Tran Van Giau sent his
police (those same cops who only yesterday had still been in the service first of French
and then of Japanese imperialism) to dissolve the Committee, and its militants were sent
the Central Prison in Saigon to be shot. When the British troops, whom the Vietminh
government had but recently welcomed with a Hurrah to the Allied Forces, helped the
French to reoccupy Saigon, Tran Van Giau and his gang fled to Cho-dem, leaving the
revolutionaries locked up in the hands of the French police and the (British) intelligence
service, whilst the popular insurrection, against the wishes of those in flight, erupted
against the Franco-British troops on the night of 23 September.
The Vietminh GPU continued to hunt down the revolutionaries on its blacklist even whilst
in flight. The leading members of the Socialist Workers Party of Vietnam (whose leader Ta
Thu Thau had been murdered on Ho Chi Minhs personal orders in September 1945) Tran
Van Thach, Nguyen Van So, Nguyen Van Tien and many other workers were murdered at
Kien-an (Thu-dau-mot) on 23 October 1945; Phan Van Hum and Phan Van Chanh
disappeared somewhere in the areas controlled by the guerillas in the north of Cochin
China; Nguyen Thi Loi, a member of the same party, was murdered at Binh Dang (Cholon)
in October 1945; Le Ngoc and Nguyen Van Ky, members of the LCI, were tortured to death
by the GPU of the Vietminh in the Hoc-mn region at the beginning of 1946.
This marked the end of the period of simple murders and of the execution of traitors,
and was the beginning of the period of the Moscow Trials.
Having already escaped from Ho Chi Minhs GPU in 1945, Nguyen Van Linh, known as
Rene, and Truong Khanh Hinh, two revolutionary workers from Saigon, fell into a trap laid
by the Vietminh in May 1950. [1] Nguyen Van Linh had taken part in the European
workers movement since 1930 as an activist among the circles of the Left Opposition in

76

France. Having returned to Indochina at the beginning of the war, he had been a member
of the LCI from the time of the Saigon Uprising of September 1945. He had been one of
the organisers of the Go-Vap Tramway Workers militia (whose leader, Tran Dinh Minh,
known as Nguyen Hai Au, had died in battle with the French troops on the Cao-Lanh
Front). Arrested by the GPU of the Vietminh in 1946, he had escaped from Soc-Trang and
returned to Saigon. Last year, having been invited by the guerillas of Bien Hoa to discuss a
proposal for a so-called United Front, Nguyen Van Linh and two other comrades were
treacherously arrested. When his wife went to search for him, she too was detained by
the GPU. They bound her feet and suspended her from the rafters. Then they made cuts
on her limbs with a pen-knife into which they put oil-soaked wicks of cotton, which they
set alight to force her to counter-sign a statement allegedly signed by her husband.
According to this statement, Nguyen Van Linh had confessed to having been an agent of
the French Deuxieme Bureau, and to having received 31,000 piastres from Bazin, the
Security Commissioner, for use against the resistance movement. His wife, who was
being held separately, saw him and hardly recognised him; he was a mere human bundle
of rags. There is no need to dwell on the fate that awaits him if he has not been shot
already. The two other comrades have already been killed.
Nguyen Van Linhs wife escaped from her torturers in the middle of a battle between
them and the French troops.
Ho Chi Minh and his GPU are marching in step with the Bao Dai regime and the French
expeditionary corps as far as methods of torture and murder are concerned.
The only victims are the oppressed and exploited masses and those who constitute their
revolutionary vanguard. Whilst the American imperialist bloc, hand in hand with Mao
Zedong, puts Korea to fire and sword and makes intensive preparations for the
destruction of mankind with its atom and hydrogen bombs, Russian imperialism, by
means of its hired assassins in every corner of the globe in China, in Central Europe, and
in the guerilla areas of South East Asia proceeds with the methods of the Inquisition,
besides which all the Torquemadas of the Middle Ages pale into insignificance, to the total
annihilation of what yet remains of those elements that are faithful to the world
proletarian revolution, the movement for the liberation of mankind. The case of Vietnam
shows that the Stalinists of the Asian guerillas are the equals of their masters in Moscow
when it comes to monstrous crimes against the revolutionary proletariat.
Ngo Van Xuyet
Notes

77

1. According to Chen Pi-Lan, Looking Back over My Years with Peng Shu-tse in Peng Shutse (ed.), The Chinese Communist Party in Power, New York 1980, pp.42-3, Rene and Liu,
the two leading Trotskyists, had organised a conference in a zone controlled by the
Vietminh army, the chief of staff of which in that area was a Trotskyist. But this was a trap
prepared by the Stalinists, and they were all arrested along with the Chinese Trotskyist Lu
Chia-Ling, who was on his way to Europe with Peng Shuzi and his wife, and so died in
prison in Vietnam.

78

Theses adopted by the Provisional Central Committee of the International

Communist League, Vietnamese Section of the Fourth International, 8 July 1947
The position of the ICL on the events of 1945-47 is much better known than that of La
Lutte, its Trotskyist rival. Apart from the accounts by Comrade Ngo Van Xuyet above, we
have the description below written by Lucien who was a comrade who had escaped to
France in 1947, where he worked among Vietnamese factory workers, returning to Saigon
in 1954. He died of tuberculosis in 1982. It is thus impossible to accept the remark of
Stephen Johns (in Stalinism and the Liberation of Vietnam, Fourth International (WRP),
Volume 9 no.3, Autumn 1975, part 1, p.119) that no Vietnamese Trotskyist has ever
written an account of the Saigon events.
Of secondary sources, John Sharpes description in Stalinism and Trotskyism in Vietnam
(Spartacist, New York, 1978), an informative treatment that originally appeared as a series
of articles in Workers Vanguard in 1973, also sympathises with the ICLs views, as does
that of Stig Eriksson.
The ICL criticised the support accorded to the Vietminh by the La Lutte group, and had a
separate list. They considered that the formation of military forces was most important,
advocating the arming of the people against the reorganised French and the British
imperialist army of occupation. They founded a workers militia, and attempted to create a
system of dual power to oppose both the Allies, setting up peoples committees of workers
and peasants, among whom they had some 30 militants. They favoured the expansion of
the revolution by the abolition of private property, of land to the peasants and the
factories to the workers. In 1945 they had as yet no differences with the La Lutte group
over the class characterisation of the Soviet state, such as appear in our document here.
Trotsky quotes the La Lutte groups description of October, the ICLs predecessor, as
centrist in Trotskyism and the PSOP, 15 July 1939, Leon Trotsky on France, New York
1979, p.241.
This programme comes from the archives of the United Secretariat of the Fourth
International (where it bears the number Don no 69546, FOD Rs 445), to whom our
thanks are due, and here appears for the first time in English.
*******************
1. August 1945, sounding the knell of Japanese domination, marked the birth of the
Vietnamese Revolution.
It was born in the gap created by the disarray of the ruling Japanese military authorities
and the inability of the Allies to cause relief troops to come to the spot. The causes that

79

gave birth to it are classic: the centuries-old slavery to which the Vietnamese people had
been subjected by French imperialism, the misery and countless sufferings engendered by
the last war to end wars (two million dead during the 1945 famine in Tonkin), the growth
in the political understanding of the masses, the knowledge they had of the inferiority of
French imperialism caused by the military disasters it experienced when confronted with
German imperialism, to the yellow Japanese imperialism, and to the sensible
organisation of the Vietminh.
II. The Vietnamese revolution could be claimed to encompass all classes and social layers,
and all the political economic, religious, social, philosophical and cultural organisations of
the Vietnamese, people. Saigon and Hanoi have witnessed enormous demonstrations of
more than a million, recalling the great revolutionary days in Paris, where all the banners
were mixed together. Even if the worker and peasant population is very much the basis
and inexhaustible reserve of the Vietnamese resistance, many of the bourgeoisie and
landowners, up to and including the Emperor Bao Dai (citizen Vinh Thuy today) and a very
great number of intellectuals have carried on a great struggle,.
The Vietnamese Revolution is truly national and popular.
It has inaugurated the Vietnamese democratic republic with its own government, its own
national assembly, its army and its finances.
III. (A) Dominated, however, as it is by the policy of a bloc of classes of the Indochinese
Communist Party, the strongest and best organised of all the parties that make up the
Vietminh, the policy of the Vietnamese republican government defends primarily the class
interests of the bourgeoisie and the landowners. The defence of private property
(including the property of French imperialism), the defence of national integrity, a
bourgeois parliament, finances and customs of an equally bourgeois type, together with
an army, police and bureaucracy intended to guarantee private property are all crowned
with a policy of building an independent economy obviously a bourgeois one away
from the grip of the world imperialist economy.
As for the layers of the petty bourgeoisie, the republic will reserve a host of careers for
them, in parliament, in the administration, in the police, in the army, in commerce, in
agriculture, in diplomacy, etc.
With regard to the mass of the poor peasantry, the Ta-dien, nothing, or practically
nothing. Obviously the Dia to (tenant farming system) will be reformed, but private landed
property remains sacred and inalienable.

80

As for the still weak working class, it was only granted a slight amount of labour
legislation.
However, since the Vietnamese bourgeoisie has turned out to be congenitally impotent,
an impotence from which the French imperialism of the great industrial combines, trading
companies and large plantations of the Bank of IndoChina never allowed it to break free,
just as in another way the interests of the native gentry are intimately linked with and
subordinated to the interests of French imperialism, this bourgeois policy of the
Vietnamese republic has been shown to be unworkable.
Economic, and consequently political, independence is no more than a hollow dream.
Agrarian revolution would have been considered a crime. Thus neither of the two great
tasks of the democratic revolution came to be resolved; the dream of the Stalinist
strategists has evaporated, largely because of themselves.
Even more so, they have sabotaged both the one and the other.
(B) In fact, confronted by imperialism, they merely practised the grovelling policy of
cowardly pacifists. At the news of the defeat of the, Japanese, having straightaway seized
power by a bold coup detat in Tonkin, they posed as democrats, boasting of their struggle
on the side of the democratic Allies against Japanese militarism. They naively thought that
the Sino-English imperialists whom they had received with open arms were going to grant
them the independence promised by the Atlantic Charter. Their illusions were soon
dispelled when General Gracey opened the gates of Nam-bo (in Cochin China) to the first
troops of the puffed-up Leclerc, who in the meantime had been armed by Great Britain at
a cost of three billion francs for the conquest of both Vietnam and Indochina.
Stirred
Then the people, whom up till then the Stalinist leaders of the Vietminh had accustomed
to bleat out the slogan Hurrah Allied Forces, who had been partly stirred up by
revolutionary groupings, either extremist nationalists or International Communists, as if
by instinct came to their senses and armed themselves spontaneously, some with
sharpened bamboo sticks, some with hatchets, with machettes, with knives, and some
with weapons that had been stolen or seized from Japanese soldiers, and organised
themselves rapidly into popular militias and revolutionary peoples committees. The
peasants began to take over the land and the workers the factories, mainly belonging to
the French.

81

All these revolutionary measures were forbidden by the governmental committee of Nambo of Tran Van Giau, Nguyen Van Tao and Duong Bach Mai, all three of them ministers and
leaders of the Indochinese Communist Party.
Arming the people! What a Trotskyist provocation to the Allies! It was up to the popular
militias to surrender all their weapons, including the sharpened bamboo sticks, to the
governmental committee who would hand them back to the Japanese, since they had to
render account for them to the British, who had entrusted them with the maintenance of
law and order. Revolutionary Committees! Yet another Trotskyist provocation! Only
administrative committees are necessary. Land to the peasants! Factories to the workers!
Yet more Trotskyist provocations!
Thus the Stalinist leaders had opposed all the popular initiatives that would have
guaranteed national liberation and the agrarian revolution.
Their enemies are the defenders of the working people and of the armed revolutionary
people, they are the supporters of the Fourth International, they are those who, at least
during the first period of the resistance, the Stalinist leaders imprisoned, assassinated and
offered as victims on the altar of the democratic Allies as represented by Gracey, for
defending the poor peasants. It is thus understandable why numerous militants of the
Fourth International as well as of the Hoa Hao were exterminated physically, and why it
was necessary for the Stalinists to secure the liquidation of the Fourth International, for
this was a sine qua non condition of their maintaining power and of their flirtation with
imperialism.
(C) In spite of this attitude, or because of it, they were driven from the capital by the first
French troops. Their friend Gracey lifted not a little finger to defend them, just as he had
never even allowed them to see him via the back stairs. They gave up Saigon without firing
a single bullet and left the people to itself, to the fury of the enemy ... but also to its
revolutionary militants.
Finding cadres within its own ranks, the people, angered by the flight of the Stalinist
government, organised the resistance everywhere. It has lit up the bloody road of armed
insurrection by a flame never to be forgotten that will yet astonish the world.
(D) Having recovered from their fright, our Stalinist ministers, trained as they were in the
school of the Guomindang, then tried to regain the leadership of the movement of the
insurrection, not without effecting the assassination of authentic revolutionary militants.
But as always, they went from surrender to surrender.

82

First there was the suspension of hostilities in Nam-bofor the parleys with General Gracey
that allowed the French reinforcements to arrive. Then there was the agreement of 6
March, which in exchange for the formal recognition of the Vietnamese Republic opened
the gates of Tonkin to the troops of Leclerc, and finally the modus vivendi, a booby trap
that in spite of the warnings of the revolutionary opposition allowed the MoutetDArgenlieu-Leclerc trio to finalise its plans for the reconquest of Tonkin and Annam. The
entire Stalinist policy has betrayed the cause of the bourgeois democratic revolution, and
has continually played the game of imperialism.
IV. Resistance, effective, violent and burning, is still continuing at present by the most
sophisticated methods of the guerilla. The enemy, however, has reoccupied almost all the
vital and strategic centres. It is, nonetheless, exhausted even by that. The permanent
internal crisis in France (finance, food, supplies, interminable strikes, the threat of civil
war), the financial incapacity of French imperialism to send and maintain an expeditionary
force of between 250,000 and 500,000 men that would be necessary for the complete
reconquest of Vietnam, and the revolts of other French colonies should and could have
induced them to bargain with the Ho Chi Minh government. But there we are; he is of the
Moscow obedience, and clerico-republican French reaction, following its yankee
orchestral conductor, did not want any of it. For Vietnamese territory is coveted by SinoAmerican expansionism. Besides, it is likely to serve as a base for the future war to end
wars.
Whilst one faction of the bourgeoisie went back to its old master, another faction for
fear of seeing itself ruined by an interminable policy of scorched earth (houses and
factories burnt down, rice fields abandoned, trade ruined and communications cut),
fearing the measures of War Communism (confiscation of the harvest, of property and of
requisitions of all kinds) this faction of Nguyen Hai Than, of Nguyen Tuong Tam and
Nguyen Van Sam has turned towards the ex-emperor Bao Dai to mediate with the
Americans in exchange for a consideration.
These latter have systematically organised themselves, made a stand and regained their
courage against the Stalinist policy of the Vietminh under the name of the National United
Front.
Making themselves the echo of a more gigantic struggle, that of the USA-USSR, these two
fronts have entered into open conflict, saturating Western Cochin China in blood. And so
the Vietnamese drama continues, without any foreseeable way out for the moment.
What does, however, remain certain is that the Vietnamese working people and peasants,
who did not struggle only in the end to remain inside the imperialist French Union, to

83

allow itself to be still exploited and plundered, or to serve Sino-American interests, has
shown itself to be satisfied neither by the Ho Chi Minh setup, nor by the set-up of Than
Tam Sam (Nguyen Hai Than, Nguyen Tuong Tam and Nguyen Van Sam).
The Viet Hong organisation in Tonkin is already being talked about as being the
revolutionary wing of the resistance. Groups for resistance to the end are being born
practically everywhere.
Satisfy
In any case, negotiations could yet take place. Governmental combinations could halt the
hostilities momentarily, though this does not appear probable.
But since nothing will be done to satisfy the deep aspirations of the people, at present
organised and armed, the struggle will continue.
V. What has been the policy followed up till now by the working class political and trade
union organisations of the metropolitan country as regards the Vietnamese revolution?
The Stalinist Party, wishing to see the tricolour of France floating over all its overseas
territories, has betrayed the Leninist policy of the right of peoples to self-determination
up to and including the right of separation from the metropolitan country. They have
shown themselves to be accessories in this by their collaboration with the Bidault-Moutet
and Ramadier-Moutet governments. Abstention during the vote for military credits for
Indochina does not excuse the betrayal of its war minister. The support it has given to the
Ho Chi Minh government has only been token. Will not, moreover, the prolongation of the
war in Vietnam for certain aggravate the present crisis threatening the French finances
(over 100 million per day is being gobbled up by the expedition to Vietnam), finally
involving French imperialism with another Syria-Lebanon, at least? Its policy has in the end
imprisoned Vietnam inside the French Union for the glory of a strong and happy France,
the France of Leclerc, of the Bank of IndoChina, of the rubber planters, of water, of
electricity, etc., etc. ... obviously.
French imperial grandeur in danger could not find better defenders. Besides, isnt the
Stalinist policy of class collaboration and Millerandism a permanent betrayal of the
Socialist proletariat and the oppressed people?
The Socialist Party, which has again become the leading governmental party 10 years after
the Popular Front, has yet again revealed its thoroughly social-imperialist nature. Even the
most experienced pen pushers of Le Populaire (of Paris) could not disagree with the fact
that Bidault, Leclerc, DArgenlieu, Moutet and its own Ramadier well and truly make up

84

one and the same admirably balanced team. The truth is that the Socialist Party,
characteristic as it is of the Fourth Republic, is parliamentarism, and is only there to make
the Vietnamese pill palatable to the working people of France. History will one day tell us
the amounts on the cheques that Moutet and Ramadier and sons have handled from
Ganny, the planters and other sharks during their stay in Saigon. We must assign
responsibility properly. But between them and us it is a question of war.
The Pivert-Rous tendency, the left wing of the Socialist Party, has indeed protested against
the opportunism of their comrade ministers. But it only aimed at being able to replace
them in order to realise a better policy of understanding imperialist interests. Isnt
Dechezelles joining ranks with the Stalinists in recommending the inclusion of Vietnam
within the French imperialist union, for an agreement with the Ho Chi Minh government,
may we add? What else could this French Union be under the Fourth Republic, for
ourselves and the working class, in the absence of a Socialist proletarian revolution, if not
a union of exploiters and exploited, dominated by imperialism, naturally?
As for the CGT, its leadership, under the orders of the Socialist Party and the Communist
Party, has also failed in its duty of revolutionary support for colonial peoples in their
struggle for liberation. Moreover, can we expect anything better from the bonzes,
Jouhaux-Racamond-Frachon?
Faced with the Vietnamese revolution, all the great working class organisations of France
have either howled with the wolf or have shown themselves t be its accomplices.
The group of La Revue Internationaliste, pitifully, has only the attitude of a student
amateur.
Only the Parti Communiste Internationaliste has adopted a correct attitude of
unconditional revolutionary support. But, in its organ at least, it does not seem to have
sketched out perspectives for the future.
VI. As far as we Internationalist Communists are concerned, we lay claim to the best
traditions of Bolshevism on the national question: forever making the principles of the
permanent revolution our own, we think that the resolution of the national-democratic
tasks in Vietnam which are pressing down more sharply than ever can only be
accomplished by the resolution of the revolutionary Socialist tasks. In other words, if for
example we remain within the limits of the French empire, the true national liberation of
Vietnam, as well as the agrarian revolution, can only be accomplished borne on the wings
of the proletarian Socialist revolution in France (or in another advanced country), which
will sweep along in its wake of Socialist liberation all the oppressed peoples in order to

85

transform their national democratic revolution into a Socialist revolution, with the aim of
building a Union of French Soviet Socialist Republics.
We therefore oppose to the imperialist slogans of the French Union that of the Union of
French Socialist Republics.
If, therefore, the Vietnamese revolution is stagnating, for the time being, it is due to the
lack of a revolutionary Socialist upsurge in the advanced countries.
To those who believe that the national liberation of Vietnam can be obtained by
negotiations with French imperialism, with or without the mediation of other
imperialisms, we say; we will only obtain this liberation by a concerted struggle of the
Vietnamese worker and peasant population with the revolutionary proletariat of the
metropolitan country, hand in hand with the other oppressed peoples.
To this end, given that French imperialism can only emerge from the present crisis by
trampling upon the oppressed peoples of Africa and Asia, and by the installation of a
military or a Fascist dictatorship, being faced with the tragic dilemma of Socialist
revolution or military-Fascist reaction, our duty is not to hold back the Vietnamese
resistance for whatever independence to the advantage of the national bourgeoisie and of
imperialism, but to prolong it, to accentuate the general crisis of France, to help the
revolts of the Madagascans and the Moroccans, and whilst waiting for the French
revolutionary upsurge, to prepare for the transformation of the present revolution into a
Socialist revolution. Outside of this way, there is no solution.
International Communist League (Vietnamese Section)
Theses adopted by the Provisional Central Committee, 8 July 1947

86

Some Stages of the Revolution in the South of Vietnam

The following is a translation of an article, Quelques etapes de la revolution au Nam-Bo du
Vietnam, which appeared in Quatrime International, September/October 1947, of which
a version appeared in instalments in the Militant (USA), 18 and 23 February and 1, 8 and
15 March 1948. A full translation subsequently appeared in Workers Press, 10 and 17
January 1987, and was reprinted in Vietnam and Trotskyism, a Communist League
pamphlet, Australia 1987, pp.61-72. As this book is now out of print, it is this version that is
reproduced below.
The author, writing under the thinly disguised pseudonym of Lucien, was one of the
leading members of the International Communist League, and had been one of the
militants of the pre-war October group who had been arrested and tried, as recounted in
Ngo Van Xuyet's outline above.
*********************
The War and the Revolutionary Crisis
At 9am on 16 August 1945, news of the final defeat of Japanese imperialism was
announced throughout the countries of Indochina. The following day, the Japanese
general staff announced that it was handing over civil administration to the indigenous
peoples.
According to the terms of the statement, Japanese imperialism surrendered all power to
the legal governments of the various countries that constituted Indochina: Vietnam,
Cambodia and Laos. These peoples, the statement added, were from now on
independent, with the right to self-determination.
Several hours after this news had broken throughout Vietnam, from the north to the
south, from town to country, from factory to street, from one family to another, a social
storm arose with the power to overturn everything and smash anything.
Men and women of all ages, regardless of their political persuasion, poured into the
streets in surging waves, shouting cries of hatred mingled with joy; together they swore to
fight to the last drop of their blood for the complete liberation of their country.
On 19 August, the workers of the Ban Co district of Saigon were the first to move into
action and set up the first popular committee in the south. Some went out into the streets

87

with army rifles they had stolen from the Japanese and hidden away for months. Others
carried pistols of various and dubious origins.
Those who had no firearms carried daggers or bamboo pikes. With their blue caps with
red stars on their heads, and their weapons on their shoulders, they formed armed
detachments, marching together through the streets, in groups of 50, 100 or 200.
They paraded in military formation, singing the revolutionary anthem, then shouting with
a voice that pierced the sky: Rather death than slavery! Defend the peoples power!
On the morning of 20 August, throughout the Saigon-Cholon region, hundreds of
Vanguard Youth Committees declared before their flag their willingness to die for
freedom. Phu Nhuan district, the largest working class district in the city, elected its
popular committee, proclaimed the complete abolition of the former regime, and
proclaimed that from then on, 10 a.m. on 20 August 1945, only this Committee would be
considered the legal power in the district.
During the following days, mass organisations of many social and political tendencies
mushroomed, and it was impossible to keep track of their numerical strength and the
extent of their activities.
From 19 August onwards, the word went around the capital that there were peasant
uprisings in the provinces. Armed demonstrations and terrorist acts struck mortal terror
into the bourgeoisie and the feudalists.
On 19 August, the peasants of Sadec province ransacked about 10 magnificent villas
belonging to their landlords. At the same time they burned down a large number of
granaries full of rice.
Many dignitaries and officials were arrested by the peasants, and a number of them were
shot on the spot. While members of the rural police were drowned by the revolutionary
masses, former officials of the French and Japanese governments, who had all been
declared enemies of the people, saw all their possessions go up in flames. In the course of
a few days in Long Xuyen, an entirely rural province, 200 dignitaries and rural policemen
were stabbed to death.
From the middle of August, the revolutionary peasants in central Vietnam began to drive
out the royalist-imperialist mandarins, and seized control of the organs of local
government by armed force. During the same period, well-equipped armed detachments
of peasants launched surprise attacks on Japanese military posts, capturing arms and
ammunition.

88

From the second week of August onwards, the landowners of north Vietnam suffered the
same fate as their brothers in the south. In a number of villages, granaries, villas and land
were confiscated arbitrarily for the benefit of the Popular Committees.
Big landowners and former officials were brought before popular tribunals, where they
were tried publicly by the villagers. Several hundred former faithful servants of France and
the Japanese general staff were beheaded in a few days.
The Reactionary Parties and the UNF
Faced with the revolutionary situation that was in full upsurge throughout the country,
the leaders of the bourgeois and feudalist parties known as Cao-daists and Hoa Hao-ists or
Nationalists were unable to find any force either on the right or on the left that could save
their country, as they saw it, from the sword of the threatening revolution.
On 18 August, these groups of political nonentities called a joint meeting, at which they
decided unanimously to set up a political front that then became known as the United
National Front.
The day after reaching this political agreement, this bourgeois-feudalist bloc issued a joint
declaration calling on the people to take part in a demonstration organised under the
leadership of this Front, at Gam on 21 August in Saigons Norodom Square, to celebrate
national independence. Who were these political parties?
The Cao-dai party: in reality this was only a semi-political religious organisation, based on
a motley collection of mystical ideas. Essentially its purpose was to assist the French
government in slaughtering the revolutionary peasants who followed the Communist
movement in Cochin-China in the period of 1930 to 1941.
But when French imperialism signed its military and economic capitulation to Japanese
militarism in 1941, the Cao-dai party turned its back on its former French patron in order
to play the role of political double agent for the Japanese general staff.
However, with the coup of 9 March 1945, by which Japanese militarism ousted the French
colonial government, this partys position changed completely. Whilst its leaders preached
loyalty to the emperor of Japan, its followers rose in revolt throughout the country,
trampling God and landed property underfoot.
The second religious sect, the Hoa Hao party, which brought together more than a million
poor and middle peasants, played a no less important role in support of the Japanese
army. Hoa Hao-ism differed from Cao-daism in that it sought to unite politically urban
workers and rural proletarians, but on the basis of a total rejection of the class struggle.

89

What the former and the latter parties have in common is that they are both instruments
in the service of foreign imperialism, and are both violently opposed to social revolution.
The National Independence Party, the acknowledged instrument of the national
bourgeoisie, was essentially composed of petit-bourgeois intellectuals (academics,
engineers, journalists, lawyers and former French government officials) and was totally
devoid of theoretical and political principles. In reality, it was no more than a group of
socially degenerate careerists and speculators.
During the years of revolutionary upsurge, the leaders of this party did nothing to conceal
their reactionary attitude, and always placed themselves in the camp of the imperialist
bourgeoisie. Today these petit-bourgeois take advantage of the absence of workers
parties in the political arena, and impose their bogus patriotic sentiments to confuse the
revolutionary masses.
The Party of the Fourth International and the Events of 21 August 1945
From 1939 to 1944 no revolutionary communist voice was to be heard among the masses.
Hundreds of militants of the two parties (the La Lutte group and the LCI) fighting under
the banner of the Fourth International, had been deported, exiled or jailed, and quite a
few had disappeared into prisons and concentration camps.
But towards the end of 1944 the Trotskyist movement became active again. At first the
LCI, reconstituted in Saigon in August 1944, brought together only a few tens of members,
among them five founding members of the Trotskyist movement who had each
experienced at least 12 years of revolutionary struggle. To this number were added a few
experienced comrades sent by the section in the north.
After the Japanese coup of 9 March 1945, the LCI lost no time in issuing a manifesto
calling on the revolutionary masses of Saigon to prepare politically for a revolution in the
very near future:
The imminent defeat of Japanese imperialism will launch the Indochinese people on to the
road of national liberation. The bourgeois and feudalists, who today are the cowardly
servants of the Japanese general staff, will likewise serve the Allied imperialist states.
The petit-bourgeois nationalists with their adventurism will also be incapable of leading
the people to revolutionary victory. Only the working class, fighting independently under
the flag of the Fourth International, will be able to accomplish the task of leading the
revolution.

90

The Stalinists of the Third International have already abandoned the working class in order
to rally wretchedly to the democratic imperialists. They have betrayed the peasants and
no longer mention the agrarian question. If today they march with the foreign capitalists,
then in the coming period they will assist the indigenous exploiting classes to crush the
revolutionary people.
Workers and Peasants! Gather under the banner of the party of the Fourth International!
(Manifesto of 24 March 1945)
At Gam on 21 August more than 300,000 men and women, grouped in columns, thronged
Saigons Norodom Boulevard. Banners and placards blossomed above this human sea.
The Cao-daist and Hoa Hao-ist peasants formed a column 10,000 strong, with the
monarchist banner at its head. In opposition to the reactionary nationalist parties, the LCI
boldly unfurled its huge flag of the Fourth International, three metres long and two
metres wide.
Carried by the worker C, an old Bolshevik-Leninist, the flag was a proud beacon of
revolutionary strength, and attracted the lively attention of hundreds of thousands of
slaves, who had been duped for many years by the exploiters of their country.
Revolutionary slogans were inscribed in huge letters on a series of huge placards and
banners that waved above our heads: Down with imperialism! Long Live the World
Revolution! Long Live the Workers and Peasants Front! Popular Committees everywhere!
For a People Assembly! For the arming of the people! Nationalise the factories under
workers control! For a workers and peasants government!
Thousands of workers who had been leaderless, dispersed and demoralised during the
war years, had never lost their memory of the revolutionary movement. From the first
moment when the flag of the Fourth International and the slogans of the revolutionary
proletariat appeared, they spontaneously recovered their political consciousness and felt
their revolutionary faith reviving.
They embraced each other for joy in the midst of the crowd, and they competed for the
right to carry this placard or that flag. Workers arrived in waves, greeting each other with
the clenched fist salute, and declared themselves ready to fight with their vanguard party.
Within a few hours, the workers who gathered under the leadership of a few tens of
Trotskyists numbered more than 30,000.
Terrified by the violence of the revolutionary masses, the bourgeois could only grit their
teeth: they were politically paralysed, and obliged to leave the field clear for the activities

91

of the Trotskyists. While the masses marched through the streets, the militants of the LCI
tirelessly put forward their policies at open air meetings.
For their part, the peasants, marching separately behind reactionary leaders, listened
attentively to our speeches on the national and peasant problems.
Disregarding the political discipline imposed by their parties, they enthusiastically
applauded every time the flag of the Fourth International was carried past. Inspired by the
Trotskyist slogans, workers and peasants looked to each other as friends.

Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History

The Evolution of the Balance of Political Forces after 21 August
After the military defeat of Japanese imperialism the bourgeois and feudalist parties had
fallen into hopeless disarray, and had no idea how to put an end to the anarchist terror.
These political nonentities had tried to deceive the masses once again with the setting up
of the United National Front, but when they had taken stock of the situation they felt
more isolated than ever.
Within a few days there emerged, in addition to these nationalist parties, about 50 other
separate petit-bourgeois political groupings, each with its own headquarters and military
leaders. The bourgeois and petit-bourgeois disagreed and were divided amongst
themselves to the extent that the political unity of the ruling classes crumbled
irretrievably. From only a few members at the beginning of 1945, the LCI saw its forces
increase by the end of the August of the same year to 200, each of whom played a definite
part in the revolutionary mass organisations. After the success of 21 August, the
Trotskyists greatly increased their political influence, and formed, in relation to the
bourgeois parties, an important political force that, at the time, was a formidable
revolutionary pole of attraction.
On 23 August the LCI unfurled its huge red flag outside its headquarters, thus legitimising
its political power in the face of reaction. The LCI had its own printing shops and press,
and every three hours its political directives were sent among the people in the form of
communiqus.
In addition to its political preparations, the LCI were actively engaged in the formation of
military cadres, which was considered to be the burning question of the hour in relation to
the arming of the people and the carrying out of the historical tasks of the party in the
approaching decisive period.

92

The Vietminh Coup dtat and the Stalinist Reaction

During the war, the Indochinese Stalinists had become docile servants of the Allied
imperialists. On 23 August, the leader of the southern Vietnamese Stalinists, Tran Van
Giau, notorious above all for his anti-Trotskyism, admitted cynically in the proclamation of
the Vietminh front of which he was General Secretary: For five years we have fought at
the side of the democratic Allies ...
In fact, after the defeat of Japanese imperialism, the Vietminh (the Stalinist party in
disguise) put themselves forward to the bourgeois nationalist parties as an authority
sanctioned by the Allied imperialists.
For their part, however, the revolutionary masses saw in the Stalinist party a force capable
of leading them on the road of anti-imperialist revolution. Under these historical
conditions, the Stalinist party rose spontaneously above the social conflict and thus
established a bonapartist dictatorship.
At a meeting of the United National Front on the evening of 22 August, Tran Van Giau,
with the support of the former head of the Japanese police, Huynh Van Phuong, ordered
the leaders of the self-styled pro-Japanese parties to relinquish completely their official
positions in the administration, which were to devolve upon the Vietminh, the official
representatives of the Allies. Your role is now finished, concluded Tran Van Giau, hand
over to us!
The leaders of the pro-Japanese parties bowed their heads in submission and affirmed
their loyalty to the Vietminh front. A day later, the UNF issued a statement proclaiming its
own dissolution and the adherence of all the nationalist parties to the Vietminh front.
On 25 August at Sam all governmental posts were occupied by the leaders of the Vietminh
front without the knowledge of the people. The transfer of power was carried out quietly,
behind the backs of the whole population.
The Vietminh took power with the ruling classes and the whole of the state apparatus
behind it. Nevertheless, 24 hours after the accession to power of the Vietminh, Tran Van
Giau cynically proclaimed that the revolution carried out by his party was truly
democratic and that there had been no spilling of blood (sic).
This was nothing but a lie: this was not a revolution at all, just a coup dtat carried out
with the support of all the exploiting classes and behind the backs of the revolutionary
masses.
The Events of 25 August

93

The LCI had marched with the masses on the demonstration of 21 August organised by the
bourgeois National Front. It was impossible for the LCI not to take part in the
demonstration of 25 August, even though it had been organised by the Vietminh who,
from the moment they came to power, sought to gauge the depth of the likely political
and moral reaction of the revolutionary masses.
All social classes participated in this huge demonstration. The number of demonstrators,
who arrived from every corner of western Nam Bo, amounted to more than a million.
Compared with the first demonstration, the political complexion of the second was
expressed with much greater clarity and in much greater depth.
There must have been as many as 30 political organisations of various tendencies that
turned up in full strength. Of these the Stalinist Vietminh and the Communists of the
Fourth International were the most significant.
The class struggle had reached such a pitch that even the police, the loyal instrument of
the bourgeois state, had split into two opposing political camps. The first, led by the two
former chiefs of the Japanese police, Huynh Van Phuong and Ho Vinh Ky, marched under
the banner of the Fourth International; they called themselves assault police. The
second, more numerous camp, influenced by the Stalinists, gathered under the banner of
the Vietminh.
The number of workers marching with the LCI was reduced to 2000 on this occasion, as
opposed to 30 000 on the 21st. This was not accidental, as this time most workers felt
obliged to march with their trade unions.
In spite of its numerical weakness, the LCI still remained a political force to be reckoned
with on the demonstration. On the strength of its clear and truly revolutionary slogans it
attracted to its ranks all the best elements of the working class. Hundreds and thousands
of workers and peasants constantly and loudly applauded the slogans Land to the
peasants! Factories to the workers!
Faced with the stand taken by the LCI militants, the Stalinist leaders could only grit their
teeth, and had no idea of what to do in the face of the increasing excitement of the
revolutionary masses.}
The Stalinist Counter-revolution
Faithful to its revolutionary programme, the LCI remained politically independent of the
Vietminh front, whilst constantly insisting on the necessity of pursuing the tactic a tactic of
the anti-imperialist United Front, in accordance with which the LCI marched separately

94

from, but fought together with, all popular organisations against foreign imperialism. The
LCI never stopped explaining in its leaflets and its press that the Vietminh was a form of
bourgeois coalition in which the Stalinists played a key political role
Whereas the Stalinists originally maintained in their propaganda that the democratic
republic had already been established, we, the Internationalist Communists, told the
masses that the revolution had not yet been made.
While the Stalinists shouted: All power to the Vietminh!, we replied: All power to the
popular committees! Two days after his coup dtat, the Stalinist Minister of the Interior,
Nguyen Van Tao, threatened the Trotskyists in the following terms:
Those who incite the peasants to seize landed property will be severely and mercilessly
punished. We have not yet made the Communist revolution that will solve the agrarian
problem. This government is only a democratic government. Therefore it is not up to it to
carry out such a task. Our government, I repeat, is a bourgeois democratic government,
even though the Communists are the ones actually in power.
The day after this leader of Vietnamese Stalinism had made this statement, the entire
Stalinist press viciously attacked the Trotskyists, accusing them of trying to stir up trouble
and provoke social unrest.
Day in and day out, Dr Phan Ng, Thach, a faithful lieutenant of Tran Van Giau, and a whole
band of bureaucrat lackeys of the Stalinist government, constantly insisted to the people,
through the press and radio, that the national independence of Vietnam was only a
matter of diplomatic negotiations with the Commission of the imperialist Allies.
Those, said Tran Van Giau on September, who incite the people to take up arms will be
regarded as saboteurs and provocateurs, as enemies of national independence. Our
democratic freedom will be granted and guaranteed by the democratic Allies.
The Events of 2 September
At noon on 1 September, the Nam B0 government propaganda commission drove around
Saigon-Cholon calling on the population to take part in the ceremony in honour of the
Allied Commission that was to arrive in Saigon on the evening of 2 September.
The members of the propaganda commission insisted again that the countrys
independence depended entirely on the will of the Allied Commission, which therefore
meant, claimed the government, that the population had to observe perfect law and
order. The people took the government at its word.

95

At 4 p.m. the following day, more than 400,000 people, men and women, young and old,
marched peacefully past Saigon Cathedral in massed columns, armed with bamboo pikes
and waving placards and banners above their heads. Suddenly, from high up on the
church, a burst machine gun and pistol fire was shot into the peaceful and defenceless
crowd. About 40 marchers were killed and about 150 were wounded.
Loud cries went up: The French are shooting! Maddened with fury, the demonstrators
forced the church door, climbed to the roof and searched every nook and cranny that
might hide their criminal enemies.}
Facing the Common Enemy
The events of the evening of 2 September produced an unheard-of turmoil in the hearts of
the people in Saigon. It had been proved that the government was incapable of defending
the country, and even more so of leading it to real independence.
From then on it was rumoured around the city that French imperialism would probably be
helped by the Allied forces to reconquer its colony soon, and slaughter the revolutionary
people. It was a matter of life and death.
On 4 September the LCI Central Committee made an urgent appeal to the people for the
revolutionary defence of national independence. In particular, it said, in the following
clear Bolshevik terms:
We, the international communists, have no illusions at all that the Vietminh government,
with its policy of class collaboration, will be capable of fighting the imperialist invasion in
the days to come. Nevertheless, if the government declares itself prepared to defend
national independence and to safeguard the peoples liberties, we shall not hesitate to
assist and to support it with all physical means in the revolutionary struggle.
But to this end, we are entitled repeat again that we shall strictly maintain the complete
independence of our party in relation to the government and to all other parties, for it is
on this political independence that the whole existence of a party calling itself BolshevikLenin depends.
(LCI statement of 4 September).
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line: Revolutionary History
The Popular Committees and the Massacre of the Trotskyist Militants

96

In the south of Vietnam (Nam Bo) more than 150 Popular Committees were set up in
three weeks under the influence of the LCI. One hundred of those in Saigon-Cholon were
mainly working class.
A provisional Central Committee, the highest body of the Popular Committees, consisting
at first of nine members and later of 15, had been formed after 21 August, and its
independent headquarters were guarded by armed workers. That was where popular
delegates of various political tendencies came to discuss and study the problems of the
revolution.
On 26 August the delegates of the people of Saigon-Cholon, gathered together in general
assembly, decided on their common programme which can be summed up as follows:
1. Recognising that the Indochinese revolution is an anti-imperialist revolution, we insist
that the national bourgeoisie will be completely incapable of playing the role of
revolutionary vanguard, and that only the popular alliance of industrial workers and rural
toilers will be able to free the nation from. the domination of foreign capitalists.
2. The Popular Committees are the most concrete expression of the alliance of the
revolutionary classes. They therefore proclaim the necessity for bringing together the
proletariat and the peasantry under the leadership of the Popular Committees.
3. In relation to the bourgeois government and all political parties, the Popular
Committees will maintain complete political independence.
4. The Popular Committees recognise only the Central Committee, elected on the principle
of democratic centralism, their highest body.
5. The Popular Committees recognise that they alone are the real basis of the power of
the revolutionary people. Th, highest authority will be the national assembly of delegates
from all Popular Committees, which will take place in Saigon in the near future.
6. The Popular Committees insist the necessity for creating a single revolutionary front
against imperialism, by categorically denounce all acts, from whatever quarter, that seek
to sabotage the freedom of action of the working class and the popular masses.
(Resolution of the assembly of the popular delegates of the district [place name illegible in
original]
Conferences were organised regularly at the headquarters of the Popular Committees at
which participants were able to express their political position with the greatest of
freedom.

97

The LCI led the revolutionary masses through the Popular Committees. It was due to these
that it succeeded to a large extent in politicising the most advanced layers of the
revolutionary masses.
For the first time in the history of the Indochinese revolution the LCI, in spite of its
numerical weakness, carried out a great historical task, namely, the setting up of Popular
Committees, or Soviets.
The defeat of Trotskyism in Indochina by the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy
will never wipe out the correctness of putting Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution
into practice in Indochina.
Once the question of armed struggle against the imperialist invasion had been posed at
the beginning of September, the Popular Committees played an extremely important role
in making the political and material preparations. Hundreds of committee members came
to the Central Committee with many valuable proposals, about which the bourgeois
governmental and military leaders hardly ever found out anything.
The workers of the Ban Co district and of Phu Nhuan proposed at the conference of 4
September to expropriate all imperialist enterprises and turn them into war factories.
Others suggested that we should turn the Bank of Indochina building into a fortress that
would be very resistant to bombardment by enemy ships in the ports. Many very
important revolutionary proposals were put forward and studied.
The Popular Committee movement posed an increasing threat to the Stalinist
government, which was also the target of constant criticism from the bourgeois parties
who accused it of impotence in internal affairs, that is, in repressing the revolutionary
masses.
On 6 September the government launched a vicious attack on the Trotskyists, accusing
them of being responsible for unrest and provocations. The entire Stalinist press went into
action against the Trotskyists in an attempt to divert the people from the imminent
danger of imperialist invasion.
On 7 September Tran Van Giau gave the order to disarm all non-governmental
organisations. The decree stated: Those who call the people to arms and above all to
fight against the imperialist Allies will be considered provocateurs and saboteurs.
On 10 September British troops disembarked at Saigon, while successive waves of French
aircraft flew over the city. Faced with the approaching danger, the LCI put all its efforts

98

into preparing the masses for taking up the imminent armed struggle, in spite of all the
slanders and threats from the Stalinist government.
On 12 September, the Popular Committees and the LCI issued a joint statement openly
denouncing the political treachery of the Stalinist government in its capitulation in the
face of the threat from the British general staff. The turmoil of the masses grew every day.
At 4.30 p.m. on 14 September the Stalinist chief of police, Duong Bach Mai, sent an armed
detachment to surround the headquarters of the Popular Committees when the assembly
was in full session.
We conducted ourselves as true revolutionary militants. We allowed ourselves to be
arrested without violent resistance to the police, even though we outnumbered them and
were all well armed. They took away our machine guns and pistols, and ransacked our
headquarters, smashing furniture, tearing up our flags, stealing the typewriters and
burning all our papers.
This was a defeat for Trotskyism in a two-fold sense: physical extermination of the
vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat, and the handing over of the people of
Indochina to democratic imperialism.
Having carried out this operation, Tran Van Giau, with the agreement of the government
in the north, ordered the systematic killing of all Trotskyist elements in the country. Tran
Van Thach, Ta Thu Thau, Phan Van Hum and dozens of other revolutionary militants were
murdered in circumstances that, to this day, have not been property established.
The two former chiefs of the Japanese police, the accomplices of Tran Van Giau in the
carrying out of the Vietminh coup dtat, were also killed, having been accused of
Trotskyism.
For sympathising with Trotskyism, the woman doctor Ho Vinh Ky, a former member of the
government, was shot together with the leaders of the La Lutte group by one of Tran Van
Giaus agents. Our three most dedicated comrades, Le Ngoc, a member of the Central
Committee, Nguyen Van Ky, an engineering worker and trade union leader, and Nguyen
Huong, a young Trotskyist and fighter in the workers militia, were murdered by a Stalinist
police chief in July 1946.
Lu Sanh Hanh