Vietnam & Trotskyism

A Stalinist Massacre

Simon Pirani

Reprinted from Workers Press, 3 January 1987

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Vietminh and the French

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed the Russian Revolution itself was made on that understanding.

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

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

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

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