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p Incredible trials befell the Soviet Republic in its early years dislocation, hunger, imperialist blockade, foreign armed intervention, and civil war make up a far from complete list. Not this, however, mipressed itself upon the memory of people who visited Soviet Russia in those unforgettable times. They told their friends and comrades about the burning crimson of the revolutionary standards adorning the streets and squares of old Moscow, and about the Iruly indomitable revolutionary enthusiasm of the workers and peasants, and about the allcoriquering faith of the Bolsheviks in final victory a faith that also inspired visiting friends from abroad.

p “None of us felt cold in the light overcoats intended for wear in Rome, Genoa or Naples. Our hearts beat faster, our cheeks burned and our eyes were alight,” wrote Giovanni Germanetto, a veteran of the Italian Communist Party and a close friend of Nguyen Ai Ojioc’s, about his first visit to Soviet Russia.

p The same feelings, only enhanced by his impetuous character and his bent for romanticism, sei/.ed Nguyen, the first Vietnamese Communist, when he disembarked in Petrograd. He inhaled the smell of the sea and factory smoke the life-giving air of the country where proletarian revolution had won.

p He had no papers on him except the entrance certificate issued in the name of Tran Vang. His purse was practically empty. All his savings had been swallowed up by the monstrous inflation in Germany, where he had had to pay thousands of marks for a newspaper. All his belongings were packed in a small suitcase.

p But these trifles had no meaning for him. He was imbued with a sense of elation and triumph over being the first Vietnamese to set foot in the country where his dreams of freedom and happiness had already come true, and where people who had been oppressed and humiliated for centuries had now become captains of their own fate. He was strong and vigorous, and only 33 years old. From this great country, the cradle of the world revolution, he would bla/e the trail to the liberation of his own land. Perhaps, too, his wish would come true and he would meet the great Lenin. It was this cherished wish that he passed on in the first few minutes of his stay on Soviet soil to the border guard examining his papers.

p “What is the purpose of your coming to Soviet Russia:’" the border guard had asked.

p “Well, first of all, I’d like to see Lenin."

61

p “When I first came to the Soviet Union,” he recollected later, "I saw the hard conditions under which the Soviet land set out on its exploit. Words fail me to describe the enormous heroism and dedication of the workers and peasants who had begun to build socialism. Yet the first several achievements of the Soviet people were already visible. And this rapid progress of the Soviet land cheered us revolutionaries and filled us with pride for the cause of the Great October Socialist Revolution."

p Many of the things Nguyen saw in Moscow differed considerably from what he had expected to sec. The French bourgeois press had gone out of its way to sling mud at the worker-peasant country. Truthful reports from Soviet Russia, on the other hand, arrived with much delay. The evidence of eyewitnesses, too, failed to keep up with the rapid course of events.

p The New Economic Policy launched by the Bolsheviks under Lenin’s guidance had begun to yield ever more visible results. The years of hunger and dislocation, the fuel crisis and the transport problem, were receding into the past. The country was entering a period of economic upswing. The countryside reported bumper harvests. The first trainloads of grain for export were converging on the Petrograd port from all parts of the country. The newspapers regularly announced price reductions for manufactured goods. In the main Moscow streets one could find advertisements saying prices for a wide variety of goods had been reduced 40 per cent. "A prize to anyone who finds any item in GUM (State Department Store) dearer than in other shops,” said one brightly coloured notice.

p Lenin ended his speech at a plenary meeting of the Moscow Soviet — the great leader’s last speech on the following optimistic and prophetic note, "NEP Russia will become socialist Russia.” And the first tokens of socialism were, indeed, surfacing, thus bearing out Lenin’s brilliant prophecy.

p The Soviet Government adopted what was in those days a big and noteworthy decision: to hold an All-Russia Agricultural Exhibition, the first in the history of the young worker-peasant state. It opened in Moscow in August 1923. "One more victory for the revolutionary proletariat,” commented Pravda.

p On a Sunday, Nguyen, along with other Comintern comrades, visited the exhibition. He reviewed all the displays in silent wonder. Admiring the smiling sunburned visages of the peasant lads who had come to Moscow from different Russian gubernias and other Soviet republics, he listened raptly to what they said about their work as they showed visitors the fruit of their labours sheafs of wheat and rye, mountains of snowwhite cotton, and beautiful handmade carpets.

p Like other Comintern people, Nguyen was put up at the Lux Hotel. 62 From there his route lay to Manege Square and Mokhovaya Street. In a building there, facing Troitsky Lane, opposite the Rumyanlsev Museum (now the Lenin Library), were the head offices of the Comintern’s Executive Committee.

p Nguyen was attached to the Eastern Department of the Comintern Executive. Accustomed to rising early, he would walk out of his hotel with the first rays of the sun and go up Tverskaya (now Corky Street) to Red Square. Looking up at the crenelated Kremlin wall and the ancient Kremlin towers, he would recall a history lesson at the National College in Hue when the French teacher told them of Emperor Napoleon standing atop the Kremlin wall and gazing with pained eyes at Moscow in flames, a Moscow his troops had entered but would never conquer.

p The first thing Nguyen did when he joined the Eastern Department was to write a letter to the Presidium of the Comintern Executive, setting forth his ideas about the liberation movement in Indochina. He pointed out that proletarians in that French colony were no more than 2 per cent of total population and had no organisation of their own. The mass of peasants, he added, was the most handicapped part of the population and therefore had a high revolutionary potential. He considered the intelligentsia a nationalist revolutionary force.

p One of the prime conditions for the liberation movement to make headway in Indochina, he wrote, was to secure joint action by Communists and revolutionary patriotic elements. Nguyen recalled Lenin’s idea that revolutionaries in the colonies should join forces with the working people of the metropolitan countries and the first socialist land, Russia. He suggested establishing reliable communications between Moscow, Indochina, and Paris. He urged the Comintern leadership to devote more attention to liberation movements in colonial countries and dependencies, including Indochina. "The oppressed peoples of the colonies,” he wrote, "have been aroused by the echo of the October Socialist Revolution, and are turning instinctively to our International, the only political party that is showing a fraternal interest in them and on which they pin all their hopes of liberation."

p From his first days in Moscow, Nguyen won a large number of friends and acquaintances, especially among Soviet people and foreigners associated with the Comintern. They spoke of him as of a charming, knowledgeable person who had a knack of winning people’s affection. No small part here was played by his being the first Communist to come from remote Vietnam.

p In those days, thai French "overseas province" was for many a land of mystery at the very end of the world if not on some other planet. True, Russians were already in the know about Vietnam. In the mid-19th 63 century, Russian writer Stanyukovich, who had visited the country repeatedly on his voyages, wrote with compassion and anger about the French conquerors’ abuses in Cochin China. And poet Cumilev extolled the exotic splendours of Vietnam in his poetry.

p The first contacts between Soviet people and the Vietnamese dated back to 1919. A Vietnamese unit, as I have said earlier, went over to the side of the revolution in the region of Odessa, the port where the French intervention troops were mainly concentrated, and later also in Vladivostok, where France landed an Indochinese rifles battalion to back up U.S. and Japanese troops. Now, finally, Moscow had a professional Vietnamese revolutionary representing the national patriotic forces of French Indochina.

p Soon after Nguyen’s arrival in Moscow, his name appeared in the columns of Pravda. Peasants from more than twenty European and Asian countries had come to see the big Agricultural Exhibition. They used the opportunity to hold an International Peasant Conference. It opened on October 10 in the Kremlin’s famous Andreyevsky Hall. That day Pravda carried the following banner headlines: "Greetings to Our New Allies!" and "Workers and Peasantsjoin Hands Against the Predaceous Alliance of Capitalists and Landowners".

p On October 12, in an item on the Agricultural Exhibition, Pravda reported that "Comrade Nguyen Ai Quoc spoke at the second sitting on behalf of the French colony of Indochina. He said Indochina peasants bore a double burden of oppression as peasants in general, and as peasants of a colonial country."

p Nguyen’s speech at the international forum brought out his profound internationalism, and his striving for unity in the fight against imperialism and colonialism. "Our International will not be a truly international organisation of the working people,” he said, "until it encompasses the peasant masses of the entire East, especially those of the colonial countries, who are subjected to the most brutal exploitation and oppression."

p After sending Lenin a message of greetings, the closing session of the Conference elected the governing bodies of a Peasant International the International Peasant Council and its Presidium. And Nguyen Ai Quoc. was elected to the Presidium from the Asian countries along with Sen Katayama, an active Comintern functionary and one of the founders of the Communist Party of Japan.

p At the end of 1923, in an interview to the popular Soviet weekly Ogonyok, Nguyen said sarcastically that the best propagators of Bolshevism in Indochina had been the French. "They began persecuting Communists in Annam, " he explained, "while there wasn’t even a hint ol any Communists. And that was the best propaganda.” The. journalist 64 described Nguyen as possessing inborn tact and refinement, as a man of an entirely new culture, "possibly, the culture of" the future".

p In Moscow, Nguyen soon developed into a capable international affairs analyst. He contributed prolific-ally to the journal Inprecor ( International Press Correspondence), among others. Hungarian Communist Cyula Alpari, who was chief editor Q^ Inprecor, considered Nguyen one of his most active non-staff contributors right up to 1939. when the journal closed down. Now and then, Nguyen also contributed to the Soviet press. Nor had he broken off contact with his friends in Paris, and kept on writing for L’Humanite, La vie ouvriere, and Le Pana.

p His subject-matter ranged far afield. He exposed the abuses of the French in Indochina and the British in China. He wrote of the growth of the labour movement in China, Japan, and Turkey, and of the condition of peasants in Asia, of racial oppression in the United States, and of the expansionist policy of the imperialist powers in Asia and the Pacific.

p While still in Paris, Nguyen was fired by the idea of writing a book about French colonialism. His Comintern comrades and friends from the Inprecor helped him with his project. The book, French Colonisation on Trial, appeared in Paris in French in 1925, when Nguyen was alreadyfar from Moscow and still farther from Paris. Included in the book were Nguyen’s articles and reports of 1920 to 1925 in left-wing French papers, Le Paria, and Inprecor.

p Some copies found their way to Vietnam, where the book instantly captured the interest of the patriotic youth. For the first time, a Vietnamese writer discussed colonialism from the Marxist-Leninist point of view, showing the irreconcilable contradictions between the French colonialists and (he people of Vietnam, the irrepressible growth of the national liberation struggle of the colonial peoples, and the inevitable collapse of colonial rule. Nguyen showed that imperialism was the common deadly enemy of all the oppressed, leading to the conclusion that struggle for the national salvation of Vietnam was part of the worldwide struggle for liberation from colonial slavery. Those of the Vietnamese partiots who read French Colonisation on Trial perceived its author as a fundamentally new type of leader an adherent of the communist doctrine and a consistent internationalist.

Speaking of Nguyen Ai Quoc’s first book and its impact on revolutionary developments in Vietnam, Vietnamese historians stress that it was "like a burst of wind that drove away the clouds which screened off the sun”. French Colonisation on Trial, they held, was "a product of the dialectical, living, and organic combination of Lenin’s ideas about the essence of imperialism and the national question with the experience of the anti-colonial national liberation movement and deep study of the experience of the October Revolution".

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p Ever since Nguyen set foot in Moscow, he kept hoping he would oneday meet Lenin. He was sure Lenin would soon get well and take part in the coming 5lh Congress of the Comintern. At the Peasant Conference in the Kremlin he applauded happily with the others when it was announced that Lenin was much better, that he was on his feet and doctors had permitted him to read the papers. But a few weeks passed, and it became clear that the improvement in Lenin’s health had been no more than temporary. On January 21 came the sad news that Lenin had died.

p Ho Chi Minh recollected, "We were having breakfast at the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel when the news of Lenin’s death reached us. No one believed it at first but when we turned and looked out we saw the flag of the Moscow Soviet flown at half mast. A great shock came to us... Lenin was dead. I had not yet been able to meet him and this is a big regret in my life."

p Nguyen was with the first group of Comintern people who came to the Hall of Columns in Trade Union House to pay tribute to the deceased leader of the world proletariat. Giovanni Gcrmanctto recollected:

p “Moscow, January 1924. The Russian winter is at its height. The temperature sinks at times to 40 degrees below /ero. A few days ago Lenin died. That morning, a quiet knocking on our door in Lux Hotel aroused me. The door opened and a frail young man entered.

p “He said he was Vietnamese and his name was Nguyen Ai Quoc. He also said he intended to go to Trade Union House and sec off Lenin...

p “I told him he was too lightly dressed for the free/ing cold outside. I said he should wait, we’d get him some warm clothing.

p “Ai Quoc sighed, and sat down to have tea with us, and finally went to his room. We thought he had taken our advice and had stayed indoors.

p “Somewhere around ten at night I heard a soft knocking on the door again. It was Comrade Ai Quoc. His face was blue, and the ears, nose and fingers on the hands were blue, too, from the fierce cold.

p “Ai Quoc said he had just seen Comrade Lenin. He was trembling from the cold as he explained that he could not wait until tomorrow to pay homage to the best friend of the colonial peoples... He finished by asking if we didn’t happen to have some hot tea?"

p Years later, in the jungles with the guerillas, resting after a long march, a comrade would ask Ho why he had black marks on the ear and toes. And he heard a tale about that sad day in 1924 when, defying the 66 Russian frost, Ho had stood nearly a whole day lightly dressed at the entrance to Trade Union House to pay tribute to the great Lenin.

p The funeral of Lenin was on January 27 on Red Square. The cold was practically unbearable. It was as though nature had frozen from despair. Bonfires had been lit at street corners all over Moscow, (inns were fired in Red Square as a tribute to Lenin. Factory and locomotive whistles resounded in mourning all over the city. Over the radio people were told to stand up, for that minute Lenin was being lowered into his grave. All trains and cars stopped in their tracks, and all factories and offices ceased work for five minutes. Then the whistles ended, and the radio announcer said, "Lenin is dead Leninism lives on!"

p That phrase resounded in Nguyen’s ears for a long time like the pounding of the unforgettable village tom-toms at home. That day, on returning from the Hall of Columns, he locked himself up in his room and wrote until late at night, seeking to express his feelings of grief on paper. He kept writing, while tears rolled down his cheeks. And here is what he wrote:

p “Lenin is dead! This news struck people like a bolt from the blue. It spread to every corner of the fertile plains of Africa and the green fields of Asia. It is true that the black or yellow people do not yet know clearly who Lenin is or where Russia is... But all of them, from the Vietnamese peasants to the hunters in the Dahomey forests, have secretly learnt that in a faraway corner of the earth there is a nation that has succeeded in overthrowing its exploiters... They have also heard that that country is Russia, that there are courageous people there, and that the most courageous of them all was Lenin...

p “Lenin is dead, so what will happen to us? Will there be other courageous and generous people like Lenin who will not spare their time and efforts in concerning themselves with our liberation?...

p “We believe that the Communist International and its branches, which include branches in colonial countries, will succeed in implementing the lessons and teachings the leader has left behind for us. To do what he advised us, is that not the best way to show our love for him?" "In his lifetime he was our father, teacher, comrade, and adviser. Now he is our guiding star that leads to social revolution. Lenin lives on in our deeds. He is immortal."

p Nguyen Ai Quoc’s piece appeared along with numerous other items sent in by foreign friends in Pravda on January 27. Later, in "Lenin and the East”, an article for the Moscow newspaper (ludok, on the second anniversary of Lenin’s death, Nguyen would give a comprehensive view of Leninism’s international relevance as a universal revolutionary doctrine. Leninism was especially invaluable and important for the colonial 67 peoples, he wrote, for through its prism they saw the contours of a radiant future, and put their trust in il.

p “Lenin opened a new, truly revolutionary era in the colonial countries" Nguyen wrote. "He was the first to understand and stress the paramount importance for the world revolution of finding the correct solution to the colonial problem... He was the first to realise that a social revolution was inconceivable without the participation of the colonial peoples. With his characteristic insight, he knew that success in the colonies depended on using to the lull the developing national liberation movement, and that by supporting this movement the world proletariat gained new powerful allies in the struggle to bring about a social revolution."

p Wanting to understand the greatness and extraordinary attractiveness of Lenin not only as revolutionary but also as fighter, leader and simply a man, Nguyen avidly read his works and the remembrances of his comrades. He questioned people who had known Lenin. And he marvelled at how much Lenin resembled the knight in shining armour whom he had created for himself in his younger years as the image to strive for. ’To his friends in Le Pana, he wrote: "II is not only his genius, but his disdain of luxury, his love of labour, the purity of his private life, his simplicity, in a word, it is the grandeur and beauty of this master, which exert an enormous influence upon the Asian peoples and irresistibly attract their hearts."

p For Nguyen Ai Quoc, the ideal he strove for was embodied in Lenin. The lofty ethical principles his father had cultivated in him from childhood, blended in the course of his revolutionary work with the standards of revolutionary morality, and, in the final analysis, yielded that precious alloy which enabled him not only politically but also morally to become the undisputed leader of the Vietnamese national liberation movement and the burgeoning proletariat, and its vanguard, the Communist Party. Subsequently, in his writings on revolutionary morality, and in talks and conversations, Nguyen Ai Quoc-Ho Chi Minh would call on the Vietnamese Communists to be like Lenin in their daily life and struggle.

p Shortly before his death, in an interview to a L’llumanile correspondent on the approaching centenary of Lenin’s birth, Ho Chi Minh said: "In the eyes of the peoples o( the Hast, Lenin was not only a leader, a commander. He irresistibly attracted our hearts. Our respect for him was close to filial piety, one of the fundamental virtues in our country. For us, the victims of ill-treatment and humiliation, Lenin was the embodiment of human fraternity."

p But, of course, what Nguyen mainly looked for in Lenin’s works was an answer to the many questions that the liberation movement posed in Indochina. I le set out to read everything 1 .emu ever wrote or said on the 68 colonial question. And in those days this was not simple. Only a lew of Lenin’s works had been translated into other languages. Nguyen spent hours in libraries and with his Russian comrades who helped him pick up the requisite literature at the Comintern Secretariat. His notebooks were full of extracts from Lenin’s works. In between, he put down the fruits of his own reflections that later became the nucleus of a new book on the Vietnamese revolution.

Gradually, the contours of the only correct road came into focus. In colonial and dependent eountries, Nguyen felt, the revolution would initially have to be mostly a peasant revolution directed against colonialists and local feudal lords. A broad and dependable national front, he held, would come about on the basis of an alliance between the vast majority of the peasants and the working class. But the peasanls in the colonies were ignorant and downtrodden. A revolutionary party was needed to organise and politically educate them. Without such a party, a Communist Party, victory could not be assured. In due course, a Leninist understanding of the specific social and political conditions in the colonies, and of the vital imperative of tackling the peasant question, enabled the Vietnamese Communists to win the support of the vast majority and carry out the victorious August 1945 revolution.

3

p In Moscow, Nguyen had an opportunity to put order into his already fairly extensive knowledge of revolutionary theory gained through his work with the French Communist Party and his study of Lenin’s works and Comintern documents. While working in the Eastern Department of the Comintern Executive, he also attended short-term courses at the Communist University of the Working People of the Kast.

p One of the; first Soviet political educational establishments, it was founded in 1921 on Lenin’s instructions. Its purpose was to train revolutionaries from the East. Most of its students came from the Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics A/erbaijari, Kirghizia, Tajikistan, Turkmcnia, and so on. But the number of revolutionaries from foreign countries, mainly countries in Asia, kept rising year after year.

p Nguyen was deeply impressed. He sent a detailed account of the marvellous educational establishment attended by more than a thousand students of dilferent nationalities to La vie ouvriere in Paris. He described the university’s nine buildings, two libraries, cinema, polyclinic, hostel, and farm, and also its holiday home in the Crimea.

p “The Russian revolution,” he wrote, "is not satisfied with making fine plalonic speeches and drafting ’humanitarian’ resolutions in favour of 69 the oppressed peoples, but it leaches them to fight... Despite its internal and exiernal difficulties, revolutionary Russia has never hesitated to come to the aid of peoples awakened by its heroic and victorious revolution. One of its important acts was the founding of the University of tinEast."

p On March 15,1924, I’lfnita, the Italian communist newspaper, printed Giovanni Germanetto’s contribution describing the Eastern University and its first Indochinese student, written in the form of a dialogue.

p “The constitution of the Bolshevik university,” Nguyen Ai Quoc told his Italian friend, "ushered in a new era in the history of the Eastern peoples. Here we learn the principles of class struggle. Here we establish contacts among ourselves and with the Western nations. Here we are given knowledge of what has to be done...

p “Many are the people who recognise our sad condition,” Nguyen went on to say. "But no one except the Russian revolutionaries arcshowing us the way to liberation. It was Lenin, our dear Lenin, who told us Eastern revolutionaries what road to opt (or. It was he who helped us make our first steps so that we should go forward hand in hand with the world proletariat."

p Germanetto asked Nguyen what he intended to do after finishing the university?

p “I’ll go back home to fight for our cause. We in Vietnam will have to fight very hard. For at the moment the only right we have is to pay taxes to ’Mother’ France and our own landowners. We are outcasts, we are classed as the ’low’, we have no right to elect or to be elected. Whereas in Russia, that barbarian country, as it is called by bourgeois democrats, we have the same rights as the Russian workers."

p He went on to say that his countrymen had suilered a lot, and would suffer still more, for those who had come to make civilised people out of them would never grant them freedom of their own free will. "But we will follow the road of the October Revolution and will make full use of its lessons,” Nguyen Ai Quoc concluded.
 

p On April 21, Nguyen was invited to tin- Eastern University’s third anniversary celebrations. Speakers recalled one of Lenin’s last articles, "Better F’ewer, But Better”, which said the October Revolution in Russia had generated a revolutionary upswing in the East, where- the majority of the population "has been drawn into the struggle lor emancipation with extraordinary rapidity"   [69•1 . They pointed out that the role of individuals was gaining ground and that the need for people who cultivated the revolutionary outlook among the masses was increasing. And it was 70 these people, they said, that the I’niversily of ihe East was training on the basis of the political and ideological experience of the proletariat in the more developed countries, notably Soviet Russia.

p Nguyen listened to the speakers and looked around him at the students. "No Vietnamese revolutionaries here,” he thought. "Yet there are so many of them, impetuous, temperamental, ready to lay down their lives for the liberation of Vietnam, who do not know what road to take, how to arouse the people, organise them, lead them into battle.” He made a mental note to see to it that Vietnamese should make their appearance among the students of the University of ihe Kast.

p On May 20, he wrote a letter to the Eastern Bureau of (he Comintern Executive, suggesting that a separate Asian group of students should be established at ihe Eastern University. "The University of the East,” hewrote, "is at present giving training to 62 Eastern nationalities. This number will increase as the action and propaganda of the International expand. The University is a mould which shapes the first propagandists for countries of the East. 11 must be the basis on which a Communist Federation of the East will be founded."

p May Day, the international day of labour solidarity, was approaching. A May Day appeal to the peasants of the world to act in solidarity with the workers issued by (he International Peasant Union was printed in Pravda on April 30. Among those, who signed it was a member of its governing body, Nguyen Ai Quoc. Thai day, Nguyen received a note from Vasil Kolarov, Comintern General Secretary, asking him to speak at a May Day meeting.

p It was dri/./.ling monotonously. But (his did not prevent Red Square from appearing in the scarlet splendour of holiday Hags and streamers. A huge poster on the wall of the History Museum, read: "Give all of yourself to the Revolution as Lenin had done."

p Like other foreign Communists in Moscow, Nguyen was in the grandstands beside the Kremlin wall. Nguyen could not hide his elation as he watched demonstrators stream past the Mausoleum. They carried posters with stirring slogans. Huge cartoons of Raymond Poincare, then the moving spirit of the bourgeoisie’s anti-Soviet crusade, floated past the grandstands. A Frenchman, most likely Gaston Monmousseau, who had come to the festivities at the head ol a French trade-union delegation, shouted, "A bas Poincare”,   [70•1  and the crowd in the square cheered loudly.

At the end of May, the Paris workers at a city-wide meeting in memory of the Communards had decided to turn over the banner of the 71 Paris Commune, a priceless relic, for safekeeping in Moscow until the proletarian revolution won in France. Fourcade, an 80-year-old veteran of the Paris Commune, carried the banner through the streets of Paris for the last time. Now, in Moscow, on Red Square, the banner was being handed over to the Moscow workers. To the tune of revolutionary marches, the banner was placed inside the Lenin Mausoleum. The French Communist Party delegation that had come to the 5th Congress of the Comintern, of which Nguyen Ai Quoc, representing Indochina, was also a member, took part in the ceremony.

4

p Never before in his life, Ho Chi Minh recalled years later, had he experienced such a sense of freedom and elation as he had in Moscow at that time. "And yet,” he used to say, "I counted the days before the Comintern Congress, because right after it I would go home and start on my revolutionary activity."

p The 5th Congress of the Comintern opened on June 17, 1924, in the Bolshoi Theatre building. It was the first such congress after Lenin’s death. Fidelity to Lenin, whichever country they belonged to, was the predominant idea expressed by most speakers at the Congress. In fact, the Congress was preceded by a memorial meeting in Red Square, where Mikhail Kalinin delivered an impassioned speech.

p “It is self-evident,” he said, "that the first word at the Congress refers to Comrade Lenin. He was the leader of the Russian revolution, the leader of Bolshevism, and also the leader of the Communist International. We accept that as natural. For what we call Leninism includes the most consistent, fullest, and most effective internationalism."

p Nguyen spoke three times at the Congress on the activity of the Comintern, on the national and colonial questions, and on the agrarian issue. He spoke impetuously, and criticised his own Party for its flaws. Pravda published his intervention on the national and colonial questions under this headline, "From Words to Deeds. Speech of Indochina Delegate Nguyen Ai Quoc".

p Ihe 5th Congress proceedings contain an interesting dialogue between Vasil Kolarov and the Indochina representative at the opening session:

p “Kolarov: The presidium has submitted a resolution in support of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples.

p “.Nguyen: Will the Congress issue any special address to the colonies?

p “Kolarov: On the agenda we have the colonial question, the question of the Eastern countries, and the colonial and semi-colonial countries. 72 Anybody who wants to speak on the subject will have an opportunity to do so.

p “Nguyen: Before voting on the address, I suggest adding the words, ’To the colonial peoples’.” This was accepted.

p Nguyen Ai Quoc had spoken from his seat, and his insistence became clear after Manuilsky delivered the report on the national and colonial questions. He criticised the French Communist Party for not conducting anti-colonial propaganda, and cited several serious facts. During the FCP Congress in Lyons in January 1924, the Comintern issued an address to the French workers and the peoples of the French colonies. The editors of L’Humanite, which published the address, had deleted the words "to the colonial peoples”. About a year before the 5th Congress, the Comintern called on the colonial peoples to rise against their oppressors. In Algeria, an FCP section passed a resolution which opposed this Comintern call. Manuilsky reported to the Congress that the French Communist Party had adopted no document proclaiming the right of colonies to secede from the metropolitan country. He also pointed out that its revolutionary propaganda and organisational work among the 300,000 colonial workers living in France and the 250,000 Blacks in the French army was far short of the mark.

p The delegate from Indochina, that is, Nguyen Ai Quoc, spoke to the same effect, and emphasised the necessity for close cooperation between the European communist parties and the mass of the working people in the colonies.

p “So long as the communist parties of France and Britain fail to conduct a vigorous colonial policy and make no contact with people in the colonies,” Nguyen said, "all their mass propaganda will be fruitless because out of step with Leninism”. According to Lenin, he continued, the revolution, if it was to win in the West, had to be closely related to the anti-imperialist movements in the colonies and semi-colonies. The national question, he pointed out, was part of the general issue of proletarian revolution and proletarian dictatorship. This, he said, was how Lenin conceived it. "As for me,” Nguyen added, "having been born in a country that is now a colony of France, and being a member of the French Communist Party, I must say with regret that my party has done very very little for the colonies."

p Nguyen set forth a number of concrete proposals which, to his mind, would enliven the work of the FCP and invigorate revolutionary propaganda in the colonies.

p “I think these proposals are sensible,” Nguyen said, "and if the Comintern and our Party approve them, I am sure that at the 6th Comintern Congress the FCP will be able to say that the united front of the peoples of the metropolitan and colonial countries has at last been shaped."

73

p Nguyen knew belter than anybody else why his Party was so passive. Many French Communists at that time fell lor Rosa Luxemburg’s idea that the political independence of the colonies would not come about until a socialist overturn in the metropolitan countries made it secure, and that, therefore, there was no special need to invigorate revolutionary work in the colonies: once the revolution in the metropolitan countries won, the proletariat would simply grant the peoples in the colonies freedom and a socialist future.

p Nguyen disagreed. And it was due to the explicative work of the Comintern and the efforts of revolutionaries from the colonies, Nguyen Ai Quoc among them, that the FCP finally shifted to a truly internationalist position. It began supporting the struggle of the colonial peoples for national liberation in every possible way, and in the 1940s and 50s opposed the French colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria.

p Nguyen Ai Quoc, who was the sole representative of far-away Indochina at the Congress, was highly popular. Communists from different continents were glad to make his acquaintance and to talk to him. One day, a Moscow painter asked him to pose for a portrait. The portrait appeared in Moscow’s Rabochaya Gazeta on July 29.

p The 5th Congress of the Comintern was followed by a succession of other important international forums all of them in Moscow, and all of them attended by the Indochina representative. When in Paris, Nguyen had joined a workers’ trade union affiliated with the United Confederation of Labour founded under communist guidance, and now, along with his old friend Monmousseau, attended the 3rd Congress of the Profintern as plenipotentiary delegate. He was also a delegate to the First Conference of the International Relief Association (for revolutionaries). A few years later, this organisation would play a decisive part in saving him from incarceration in a colonial prison. He was still young, and looked no older than a youth, which was why his appearance in the presiding party of the 4th Congress of the Communist Youth International looked quite natural. Finally, since he was still the sole representative of his downtrodden nation, of its workers, peasants, youth, women, and so on, he was also invited as an honorary guest to attend the International Women’s Congress.

p At the Women’s Congress he met Nadezhda Krupskaya, who sat a few seats away in the presidium. He spoke with that "very kind and simple woman”, as he would later describe her, during the interval. Krupskaya showed genuine interest in Nguyen’s account of events in distant Indochina. She asked how the revolutionary movement there was making out, what forces stood in the vanguard, and whether or not women took part in the revolutionary movement. She pointed out that Indochina’s revolutionaries faced incredibly difficult tasks. "What an 74 intricate knot of contradictions!" she exclaimed, and added: "I don’t think it can he unravelled without mastering communist theory and applying it correctly."

p Nguyen said that they had also come to that conclusion. He said he had first spotted this thought in Lenin’s works. Speaking at the 2nd Congress of the Communist organisations of Kastern peoples, he recalled, Lenin had said they would have to adapt themselves to the specific conditions that did not exist in the European countries and apply communist theory where the peasants comprised the vast majority with the struggle proceeding against medievalism, not against capitalism. "In my country,” Nguyen added, "there is also hrutal colonial oppression in addition to this."

“If you only knew, Comrade Krupskaya,” Nguyen exclaimed, "how Lenin is revered in the East, and notably in my country, Indochina. He is leader and guide and teacher to the European workers, but for Unpeoples of the East he is something still more.” He said that on his way to Soviet Russia he had hoped to meet Lenin, and regretted that he had not been able to. "We Vietnamese patriots,” he added, "had been in darkness and did not see how to liberate our countries. Lenin showed us the way, and we will never depart from it."

5

p Only a year had passed since Nguyen disembarked in Petrograd. It was a year so filled with events that it became a special milestone in his life of professional revolutionary. He studied Lenin’s works, was active in the Comintern, and attended the Communist University of the East. He acquainted himself with the life of the Soviet people, their revolutionary activities, and their experience of building socialism. All this rounded out his ideological and political development. He was now a convinced Communist of the Lenin school who had mastered the fundamental principles of Lenin’s doctrine, an experienced member of the worldwide league of Communists, and an acknowledged representative of revolutionary Asia who had faith in his own ability to tackle complicated tasks. He thirsted for revolutionary action which would, even if only slowly, bring closer the liberation of his people.

p Nguyen requested that the Comintern should send him to South China in order to work among Vietnamese political emigres who, as he had been informed, were gathering there then, being enticed by the Sun Yatsen government’s revolutionary programme.

p Soon, he was invited to see Manuilsky, whom the 5th Congress had elected to the Presidium of the Comintern Executive. A member of the 75 Bolshevik Parly since 1903 whom old party members knew from the underground, Manuilsky enjoyed the respect of the Cominterners.

p The two acquaintances needed no interpreter. Both spoke good French. After the defeat of the 1905 revolution in Russia, Manuilsky had emigrated to Paris, and there finished the Sorbonne law school.

p “Comrade Nguyen, I can see you’re spoiling for a fight,” Manuilsky said, smiling warmly.

p “Yes, terribly. The past congress has given all Communists an action programme. Though we in Vietnam have no communist party so far, I understand the call of the Congress for the bolshevisation of communist parties in capitalist countries that is, introduction of the ideological, organisational and tactical principles of Bolshevism is applying to us as well. We must form a Bolshevik-type party in Indochina as quickly as possible,” Nguyen replied.

p He said objective conditions were available, the Vietnamese working class was gaining strength, and many patriots had left the country, settling in the southern regions of China Canton, Shanghai, Hongkong, and Macao. He said he considered it his duty to conduct revolutionary work among them, for they would one day be the nucleus of a communist party in Indochina. Besides, he added, it will be much easier to maintain communications with Vietnam from there.

p Manuilsky said the Executive had complied with Nguyen’s request, and that he was appointed plenipotentiary of the Ear Eastern Secretariat of the Comintern Executive. Nguyen’s main job, Manuilsky added, would be to organise his fellow countrymen and set the stage for the (bunding of a communist party in Indochina. "But considering your knowledge and experience,” he said, "the Executive hopes that you will do everything you can to help revolutionaries from other Southeast Asian countries as well."

p Manuilsky said Nguyen was right to want to go to South China, where the situation was favourable at that time. The Canton government was formed early in 1923 under Dr. Sun Yatsen, leader of the Kuomintang, who was a friend of the Soviet Republic. "And, as you know,” he added, "the first Congress of the Kuomintang, held in Canton in January 1924, ended in a victory for the revolutionary wing."

p He explained that the Soviet government, acting in line with the 2nd Congress of the Comintern, supported revolutionary-democratic movements in colonial and dependent countries, and therefore also the Kuomintang. This was yielding good results. Soviet political and military advisers, he added, were doing useful work in South China. "Sun Yatsen’s political adviser, Mikhail Borodin,” Manuilsky said, "is also the Comintern representative in China.” Borodin, he said, was an old Bolshevik versed in the ways of the underground, and had attended the 76 Inaugural Congress of the Comintern. Manuilsky advised Nguyen to eontact Borodin as soon as he arrived.

In parting, Nguyen said he hoped when they met the next time, he, Nguyen, would be representing the Communist Party ol his country, Vietnam.