Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3
NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011
TOP SECRET – Sensitive
Yen Bay, and spread throughout Tonkin. The French reaction was quick, efficient and severe. Nguyen Thai Hoc was captured and executed, along with hundreds of lesser Nationalists; others fled to China. By 1932, Nationalist Party remnants within Vietnam had been hounded into activity, and the Party thereafter centered on the exile community in China. By 1940, in a series of factional struggles, three main branches evolved: a pro-Japanese faction called the Great Vietnam Democratic Party (Dai Viet Dan Chinh); a faction re-established in Vietnam called the Great Vietnam Nationalist Party (Dai Viet Quoc Dan Dang); and a Kunming faction under Vu Khong Kanh bearing the original VNQDD name. The latter group survived the war, and became important in its aftermath.
- (3) The Primacy of the Indochinese Communist Party
The disunity, vulnerability, and meanderings of the Nationalist Party — notwithstanding its relative effectiveness compared with most other parties — stands in contrast with the solidarity and resiliency of the lndochinese Communist Party (ICP). The main unifying factor of the communist movement was Ho Chi Minh, and the coterie of dedicated revolutionaries, most of whom he personally recruited, trained, and led. But important as was such leadership, doctrine and discipline also figured in communist success. Ho (then known as Nguyen Ai Quoc) participated in the founding of the French Communist Party, and after training in Moscow, formed the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth League in Canton, primarily nationalist in announced aims (Figure 2).5 In its journal in 1926, however, Ho wrote that: "Only a communist party can insure the well-being of Annam," and he apparently began about that time training cadres for covert operations. By 1929, some 250 Vietnamese had been trained in Canton, and at least 200 had returned to Indochina to undertake organizational work; as of that year, some 1000 reported communists and collaborators indicated that 10% were in Cochinchina, some 20% in Annam, and the remainder in Tonkin.6 In 1929 communists sought fusion with the New Vietnam Revolutionary Party, and attacked the Nationalist Party (VNQDD) as a "bourgeois party." That same year, a faction of the Revolutionary Youth League formed an Indochinese Communist Party (Dong Duong Cong San Dang), the first to bear the title. In 1930 the Revolutionary Youth League, some members of the socialist Nguyen An Ninh Association, and the exiled Annam Communist Party joined with the latter faction into first the Vietnam Communist Party, and then — per Comintern wishes to broaden the party to embrace Laos and Cambodia — a reorganized Indochinese Communist Party, which was recognized by the Comintern.
In the Nationalist-precipitated violence of 1930, about 1000 ICP members led 100,000 peasants in strikes, demonstrations, and open insurrection. In Ho's home province of Nghe An, peasant soviets were set up, landlords were killed, and large estates broken up — methods so violent, so tainted with pillage and murder, that the Comintern objected that they were not in consonance with "organized violence" of Marxist doctrine.7 Again, however, French counteraction was swift and telling. French police destroyed overt apparatus of the ICP in Vietnam during 1930 and 1931, and
