This article describes the history of the Communist Party of Vietnam (from 1930 to 1976 known as the Indochinese Communist Party and then the Workers’ Party of Vietnam) from its origins in the 1920s through to the consolidation of its position as the ruling party of a united Socialist Republic Vietnam after 1976.
Thanh Niên The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) originated in 1925. In the spring of that year the young man born Nguyễn Sinh Cung—under the pseudonym Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Nguyen the Patriot) but best known as Hồ Chí Minh (Ho the Enlightened One)—established the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League (Vietnamese: Việt Nam Thanh Niên Kách Mệnh Hội—commonly: "Thanh Niên") a Communist political organization. Hồ Chí Minh had previously helped found the French Communist Party and had emerged as a leading anti-colonial advocate in the Communist International (Comintern).
Thanh Nien sought to employ patriotism to end the colonial occupation of the country by France as well as traditional Confucianism. The group sought political and social objectives—both national independence and redistribution of land to working peasants.
The establishment of Thanh Niên was preceded by the arrival of Comintern functionary Hồ Chí Minh in Canton, China from Moscow in December 1924. Hồ was ostensibly sent to China to work as a secretary and interpreter to Mikhail Borodin, but he actually set to work almost immediately attempting to transform the existing Vietnamese patriotic movement towards revolutionary ends. Hồ managed to convert a small group of émigré intellectuals called Tâm Tâm xã (Heart-to-Heart Association) to revolutionary socialism and Thanh Niên was born.
The headquarters of the organization in Canton directed the underground revolutionary movement in Vietnam, making all important decisions.
Thanh Nien was designed to prepare for an armed struggle against the French colonial occupation. Hồ Chí Minh and his associates envisioned three phases. In the first phase, an external center was to be established as a training center, source of unified political propaganda and headquarters for strategic decision-making and the maintenance of organizational and ideological discipline. Secret revolutionary groups called "cells" were to be trained in Canton and returned to Vietnam to operate.
In the second phase, activity would become "semi-secret", in which Thanh Niên cadres would initiate political and economic activities, including strike action, boycotts and protests, which might include political violence as a means of mobilizing the masses. A third, insurrection phase, would follow to overthrow the established political regime by force of arms, establishing a new revolutionary government.
Thanh Niên was conceived of as a relatively open mass organization, with the most trusted members part of a directing center called the Communist Youth Corps (CYC). At the time of Thanh Nien's dissolution in 1929, the CYC is believed to have consisted of 24 members. In addition to Thanh Nien, this small inner circle directed two other mass organizations, Nong Hoi ("Peasants' Association") and Cong Hoi ("Workers' Association").
The CYC and Thanh Niên published pamphlets and newspapers, including a guidebook of revolutionary theory and practical techniques called The Road to Revolution, as well as four newspapers—Thanh Niên ("Youth") from June 1925 to May 1930; Bao cong nong ("Worker-Peasant") from December 1926 to early 1928; Linh kach menh ("Revolutionary Soldier") from early 1927 to early 1928; and Viet Nam tien phong ("Vanguard of Vietnam") in 1927.
Factional split of 1929
In 1928 Thanh Niên was forced into hiding by the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT). The center had to be moved repeatedly to avoid repression—first to Wu-Chou and then to Hong Kong. Hồ Chí Minh departed Canton in May 1927 and was incommunicado with the Vietnamese movement. The lack of contacts with a unified headquarters catalyzed an organizational split, with movement radicals beginning to take instructions from the Comintern via the Communist Party of France and others following a different path.
In September 1928 the radical Bac Ky Regional Committee of Thanh Niên held a conference at which it affirmed the Comintern's new Third Period analysis, positing a revolutionary upsurge around the world. Noting the growth of the organization among intellectuals in urban centers, the conference determined to send its largely petty bourgeois membership into the countryside and to urban factories in an attempt to bring communist ideas to the poor peasantry and the numerically tiny working class. In a letter to the Comintern, Thanh Niên estimated that approximately 90 percent of its membership consisted of intellectuals; a full-scale offensive to win mass support was desired.
The Central Committee of Thanh Niên called a National Congress of the organization, slated to begin on May Day of 1929. This gathering, held 1–9 May 1929 and attended by 17 delegates from each of the three main administrative districts of Vietnam, plus Hong Kong and Siam, would prove the occasion for a split between those who placed primary emphasis on the so-called "national question" (independence from colonialism) and those who sought social revolution. Hồ Chí Minh was not in attendance, still missing from the scene. The conclave was chaired by Nguyen Cong Vien, making use of the pseudonym Lam Duc Thu, who summarily ruled the question of formation of a proper Communist party out of order, prompting a walkout of three members of the northern delegation, leaving only an informer working on behalf of the French secret police at the session as the Tonkin representative.
The walkouts were sharply critical of those who refused to split, charging the remaining Thanh Niên leaders as "false revolutionaries" and "petit-bourgeois intellectuals" who were attempting to build bridges with the "anti-revolutionary and anti-worker" Kuomintang. On 17 June more than 20 delegates from cells throughout the Tonkin region held a conference in Hanoi, where they declared the dissolution of Thanh Niên and the establishment of a new organization called the Communist Party of Indochina (ICP).
The new Northern party published pamphlets detailing its rules based upon the Comintern's "Model Statutes for a Communist Party" as well as the International program approved by the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928. Three periodicals were launched—the newspaper Cờ đỏ ("Red Flag"), the theoretical journal Búa liềm ("Hammer and Sickle") and the trade union publication Công hoi đỏ ("Red Trade Union").
The other faction, based in the central and southern administrative districts of the country, named itself the Communist Party of Annam in the fall. The two organizations spent the rest of 1929 engaged in a polemical battle in an attempt to gain hegemony over the movement.
A third Vietnamese communist party emerged around this time, unconnected with Thanh Niên, called the League of Indochinese Communists (Vietnamese: Đông Dương Cộng sản Liên Đoàn). This group had its roots in another national liberation group which had existed as a rival to Thanh Niên.
Indo-Chinese Communist Party Comintern critique The two warring offspring of Thanh Niên joined with individual members of a third Marxist group founded by Phan Bội Châu at a "Unification Conference" held in Hong Kong from 3–7 February 1930. Hồ Chí Minh became active again and was responsible for brokering the peace, as well as writing the initial manifesto and statement of tactics of the group. The new party was named the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV), but did not long retain this title.
The Hong Kong conference (held in Kowloon City) elected a nine-member Provisional Central Committee consisting of three members from Tonkin in the North, two from the central region of Annam, two from the southern district Cochinchina and two from the émigré Vietnamese community in China."Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Movement," asianartmall.com/ The latter group had previously been organized within the South Seas Communist Party.
The Comintern was sharply critical of the way in which the organization was unified, decrying the Vietnamese's party's failure to eliminate so-called "heterogeneous elements". The organization's declared emphasis upon national liberation under the slogan "An Independent Viet Nam" was criticized as a manifestation of nationalism, while the party's emphasis on its role in the international communist movement was deemed insufficient. A new conference was demanded, labeled the "First Plenum of the Central Committee." The session was held in Hong Kong in October 1930 and renamed the organization the Indochinese Communist Party (Vietnamese: Đông Dương Cộng sản Đảng) (ICP) to mark Comintern's imposed changes.
At the time it formally came into being, the ICP could claim to be a vanguard of only a small working class – a mere 221,000 people in a country of 17 million. Even of this minority, most were far removed from modern industry, with one-third of these employed in various capacities on rubber plantations and the like. The working class in the North was semi-peasant in nature, leaving work in the mines and factories for the Tết festival that marked the start of the new year, often not returning. Working conditions were poor and labor turnover high.
During its first five years ICP membership reached about 1500, plus a large additional contingent of sympathizers. Despite the group's small size, it exerted influence in a turbulent Vietnamese social climate. Back-to-back bad harvests in 1929 and 1930 combined with an onerous debt burden served to radicalize many peasants. In the industrial city of Vinh, May Day demonstrations were organized by ICP activists, which gained critical mass when families of semi-peasant workers joined demonstrations as a means of venting their dissatisfaction.
Suppression and restoration As three May Day marches grew into mass rallies, French colonial authorities moved to squelch what they perceived to be dangerous peasant revolts. Government forces fired upon the assembled crowd, killing dozens of participants and inflaming the population. In response local councils sprung up in various villages in an effort to govern themselves as the revolt spread. Repression began in the fall, with some 1,300 eventually killed by the French and many times more imprisoned or deported. General Secretary Trần Phú and many leaders of the Central Committee were arrested and killed. While the ICP was effectively wiped out in the region, popular memory lived on. Lê Hồng Phong was assigned from the Comintern to restore the movement.
The First National Party Congress was held in secret in Macau in 1935. At the same time, a Comintern Congress in Moscow adopted a policy towards a popular front against Fascism and directed Communist movements around the world to collaborate with anti-fascist forces regardless of their orientation towards socialism. This required the ICP to regard all nationalist parties in Indochina as potential allies. Hà Huy Tập was appointed General Secretary (instead of Lê Hồng Phong).
Left Opposition and the Popular Front