Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- "There is a legend, in our country as well as in China, on the miraculous 'Book of the Wise.' When facing great difficulties, one opens it and finds a way out. Leninism is not only a miraculous 'book of the wise,' a compass for us Vietnamese revolutionaries and people: it is also the radiant sun illuminating our path to final victory, to Socialism and Communism."
- 2. Comintern Agent
Later in 1920 Ho Chi Minh also attended the Baku Conference (First Conference of the Peoples of the Far East) on his first visit to Russia. It is also likely that he took part in the Conference of Workers of the Far East in 1922 in Moscow which was concerned with establishing communism in the Far East. He returned to France and
- "Ho Chi Minh stayed on in France until 1923, when the French Communist Party chose him as its delegate to the Congress of the Peasant International (the Krestintern) which met in Moscow that October...he did not leave the Soviet Union after the meeting, but remained there for more than a year, studying Communism, its techniques, and its organization, first-hand. He came to know many of Communism's great and near-great during this period, as before he had come to know the leaders of the Left-Wing movement in Paris."5
In 1924, Ho became a student at the Eastern Workers University and studied Marxism-Leninism and bolshevik tactics.6
In 1925, he accompanied Michael Borodin, the Comintern delegate to the Kuomintang to Canton, China, as a Chinese translator to the Soviet consulate. After a few months, Ho had organized the Association of Vietnamese Revolutionary Young Comrades.7 The Whampoa Political and Military Academy in Canton, which had attracted revolutionaries, especially Vietnamese, was the center of Ho's training program of revolution and Marxism. Ho is alleged to have displayed political ruthlessness in exposing a rival nationalist, Pham Boi Chau, a renowned Vietnamese patriot and idealist; Ho is supposed to have received 100,000 piasters from the security police for his betrayal. Ho also set up a personnel security system which reputedly impaired other Vietnamese nationalist organizations. He and his assistant, one Lam Duc Thu, required two photographs of each incoming recruit to Whampoa Academy. Upon graduation, if the student had joined Ho's Youth League, he returned to Vietnam in secrecy. If the student displayed interest in other parties, Thu sold his photograph to the French consulate, which would then have the student arrested at the border. Thus Ho strengthened his own secret cells, while weakening his nationalist opposition.8 At Whampoa in 1926 Ho wrote that "only a communist party can [ultimately] insure the well-being of Annam."9
