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Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
- agent provocateur until more was known about what he had said and done while in British custody.
- "Finally, Ho made contact and early in 1934 the Communist apparatus smuggled him back to Moscow, where he had been preceded by a fairly large group of Vietnamese trainees studying in many fields, from engineering to plain agitprop (agitation and propaganda). He naturally turned to the latter.
- "Ho first attended the Institute for National and Colonial Questions in Moscow, and then the famous 'graduate school' for senior Communist leaders, the Lenin School. Moscow, in 1935–38, also provided an education of a far different sort: the Stalin purges. It would be interesting to know what Ho's feelings were as he saw some of his best friends accused, convicted, and executed for crimes which they patently had not committed. What is remarkable is that Ho, as a well-known member of the Comintern group, was not purged right along with them, for hundreds of thousands of people of lesser distinction than he became victims of Stalin's mania."12
The record of Ho's travels in the period of 1933–1939 is otherwise obscure; the communist movement in Vietnam was led by Tran Van Giau and others during those years.
Ho emerged from his retreats in 1939, a difficult year. Ho, as a disciplined communist had to follow the Party's tactical guidance, which was intended to safeguard the Soviet Union as the base of the international movement, even when this brought him into temporary conflict with his long term goals for Vietnam. Of the period just preceding World War II, Fall has written:
- "...Ho probably was then unconditionally loyal to Stalin, and Stalin knew it. This became particularly clear when Nazism began to loom as a threat and the Communist parties decided in 1936 to apply the policy of 'popular fronts' with the Western democracies.
- "This policy was a bitter pill for the colonial Communist governments such as that of Indochina, for it meant giving up advocacy of outright independence in favor of a policy of cooperation with the French colonial regime. But Ho, returning to Communist bases in Northwest China in 1937, gritted his teeth and rammed this line down the throat of his reluctant following in its most minute vagaries, and his report on the results, addressed to the Comintent in 1939, demonstrated his success.
- "It was probably Ho's lowest point. He had to forswear publicly all he had stood for, had to cooperate with the French, the people he hated most, and had to sell out the Trotskyist
C-37
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
