were accorded rations of twenty-eight pounds of rice a month, ten ounces of meat and the same weight of sugar, and a pint of fish sauce. They received four yards of cloth a year, and two sets of underwear. Yet even in the darkest days, Party leaders and their families fared much better. The Northern elite enjoyed nothing like the riches that soon accrued to their Southern counterparts, but they never went hungry. In 1955, only deliveries of Burmese rice averted a famine as grave as that of a decade earlier. Hanoi’s principal sources of cash were $US200 million provided by China, and another $100 million from Russia. These sums were not gifts, however, but mere payments for commodities shipped abroad, desperately missed at home.
Credible statistics have never been published about the cruelties and executions perpetrated by North Vietnam’s rulers in the early years of revolution. Significant admissions were made in a 29 October 1956 speech by Giap, by then deputy prime minister: ‘We indiscriminately viewed all landowners as enemies, which led us to think there were enemies everywhere … In suppressing enemies we adopted strong measures … and used unauthorized methods [a communist euphemism for torture] to force confessions … The outcome was that many innocent people were denounced as reactionaries, arrested, punished, imprisoned.’ Estimates of executions range up to fifteen thousand. While Ho Chi Minh is alleged to have wrung his hands about the excesses, he never deployed his huge prestige to prevent them.
Not only were large portions of landlords’ holdings confiscated, but in many cases the new regime demanded that they should repay to their tenants money collected over years in ‘excessive’ rents. Assets and draught animals were seized at will, so that Duong Van Mai’s elderly uncle found himself attempting to till his residual patch of paddy with a plough strapped to his own shoulder. Space in another uncle’s big house was ‘reallocated’: revisiting forty years later, she found it occupied by forty people. Northerner Doan Phuong Hai’s grandmother seemed to age before his eyes as she suffered indictment as a landlord, followed by interrogation, denunciation, and property confiscation. The old woman refused her son’s offer to take her to Hanoi for medical treatment, merely coughing and wheezing to a premature grave.
The entire landlord class suffered institutionalised humiliation, designed to boost the self-regard of the peasantry as much as to abase owners of property. Even an ardent communist such as Dr Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan admitted later: ‘Many things happened that I thought didn’t make sense.’ For years she herself was denied promotion, despite her devotion to the Party: ‘everything required the right family background’. By this she meant that those of peasant origins were favoured over people such as herself, from educated and allegedly ‘privileged’ backgrounds. Dissent, diversity, freedom of information were alike abolished. North Vietnam adopted the Stalinist approach to truth, which became whatever the politburo decreed that it should be.
Truong Nhu Tang, later a secret cadre, acknowledged that many of the executed ‘enemies of the people … so-called landlords … had simply been poor peasants who happened to own slightly larger plots than their neighbours, all the holdings being minuscule to begin with’. He also notes that the Party has never expressed remorse for its 1956 campaign to suppress ‘intellectuals’: even those who escaped imprisonment were condemned to house arrest, incommunicado. In November 1956 there were violent rebellions, which two army divisions were deployed to suppress. One such episode took place in Nghe An province, which a later communist history attributed to three ‘reactionary Catholic priests’, named as Fathers Can, Don and Cat, who barricaded villages, seized weapons, captured cadres and organised demonstrations against land reform.
A communist narrative acknowledges: ‘We were obliged to use military forces … All leaders and their key lackeys were arrested.’ In addition to hundreds who died in hot blood, up to two thousand executions followed, and many more prison sentences. Between 1956 and 1959 there were further disturbances in Lai Chau province. Hanoi professed to blame these on agitation by Chinese Nationalist agents, but the revolts created ‘many difficult political situations … creating fear and worry among the population about socialism and diminishing the people’s confidence in the Party and Government’.
Lan, brother of Nguyen Thi Chinh who had fled south in 1954, was frustrated in his attempt to join the Vietminh, who instead imprisoned him for six years. Thereafter, denied a ration card, he was reduced to selling his blood to hospitals, and became a street porter. Their father’s fate was worse: even when released from imprisonment he was unable to secure a ration card or access to employment, and eventually succumbed to beggary. One night, cold and starving, he knocked at the door of an old friend and novelist named Ngoc Giao. Giao’s wife, on opening the door, took one look at the visitor and implored him to go away: her husband was himself in bad odour with the regime. But Giao came down from the roof where he had been hiding, in expectation that the night visitor was a policeman. He insisted on admitting Cuu, feeding him and allowing him a shower. They talked all night, until the writer said regretfully, ‘I’m afraid you can’t stay here.’ Before Cuu left, he said to Giao, ‘If you ever hear anything of my daughter, please tell her how much I love her.’ Then he vanished into the street. Giao and his wife thereafter provided the only assistance they dared, placing a bag of rice in the back alley early each morning. This was collected for a fortnight or so, then one night was left untaken. Cuu vanished from their lives and from that of Vietnam, dying at a time and place unknown. Chinh secured this glimpse of her father’s latter days only long after the war ended.
North Vietnam became known in Western intelligence parlance as a ‘denied area’. Yet thanks to the prestige of its leader, a figure of unimpeachable anti-imperialist credentials, embodiment of a triumphant revolutionary struggle, his country stood well in the world. Its status as a closed society invited shrugs from most Westerners, that this was merely the communist norm. A Northern intellectual suggested later that Ho’s career should be seen in three distinguishable phases – first as a simple patriot; then as a communist; finally as an apparent nationalist who was in reality pursuing the interests of the Communist International. In the view of a compatriot, he profited greatly from his cosmopolitan experience and ideological ties with China and the USSR, whereas his nationalist rivals knew little of the world outside Indochina. He conducted an extraordinarily skilful balancing act between the two great communist powers, especially after their own relationship turned glacial in the late 1950s.
Hanoi’s politburo was stunned by Nikita Khrushchev’s February 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, denouncing the cult of personality even as Vietnam’s leader was being promoted as a near-deity. Most of Ho’s senior comrades were Stalinists, who had mourned their hero’s 1953 death ‘with tears streaming down our cheeks’, in the words of a Party functionary. Now they were disgusted by Moscow’s renunciation of a military showdown with the West, in favour of a mere economic and ideological contest. The 1956 Hungarian uprising confirmed North Vietnam’s leadership in its view that any indulgence of dissent risked unleashing challenges to its authority.
A Canadian diplomat reported from Hanoi: ‘There is little point in speaking of the possibilities of an economic collapse of North Vietnam, since there is no economic structure.’ At independence, among a population of thirteen million people, there were only thirty qualified engineers and a handful of factories: the country’s rulers were too preoccupied with their domestic predicament to have any stomach for aggressive action in the South. Eighty thousand troops were demobilised and dispatched to swell the rural labour force. Both China and the Soviet Union made it plain that they opposed any armed provocation which might alarm the Americans.
Evidence remains meagre about Hanoi’s 1954–57 Party power struggles. It seems nonetheless plain that Ho Chi Minh and Giap wanted no new war: they believed they could secure a unified communist Vietnam without fighting for it. Their oft-rehearsed commitment to achieving this peacefully was – at that stage – sincere. Other rising men, however, thought differently. As they watched the evolution of Diem’s government in Saigon, they saw scant hope of securing their just inheritance of a unified Vietnam, other than through armed struggle.
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