The Complete Collection of Party Documents: Listening to the Party's Official Internal Voice

Author(s): Alec Holcombe

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Source: Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 225-242
Published by: University of California Press
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alec holcombe

The Complete Collection of Party Documents:

Listening to the Party’s Official Internal Voice

T he V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup [The Complete Collection of Party

Documents] (VKĐ) series is a great gift to scholars of modern Viet-
namese history. At roughly two dollars (35,000 VNĐ) a volume, a modest
fifty-dollar outlay can put at one’s fingertips hundreds of important Viet-
namese Communist Party documents written by many of the men who
designed the state that ninety million Vietnamese live under today: H7 Chí
Minh, TrM.ng Chinh, Võ Nguyên Giáp, Phfm Ven Đ7ng, Lê Ven LMKng,
Nguy#n Duy Trinh, Lê DuNn, Lê Đ+c ThC, and others. It would require
months, perhaps years, of work for a scholar to collect this enormous quan-
tity of material in Vietnam’s archives. From a research perspective, what is
most exciting about VKĐ is the great number of internal directives [chU th]],
circulars [thông tri], telegrams [IiDn], communiqués [thông cáo], political
programs [c}o’ng lQnh], and speeches [bài nói or diWn ven] contained in the
series. These previously unavailable documents might best be described as
reflecting the party’s “official internal” voice. The documents are “internal”
because the party leaders generally wrote them for mid- to upper-level appa-
ratchiks and not the wider public. This means that they are much less
shaped by propaganda imperatives than are policy statements published in
the party’s press. The documents are “official” in character because their
authors took care to analyze events, conceptualize problems, and explain

Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 5, Issue 2, pps. 225–242. ISSN 1559-372x, electronic ISSN 1559-
3738. © 2010 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all
requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of
­California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.
asp. DOI: 10.1525/vs.2010.5.2.225

225

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 226   H o l c o m b e

policies in ways that affirmed both their Marxist-Leninist ideology and their
notion of the party as the only legitimate expression of Vietnamese patriot-
ism. We cannot always assume, though, that the way in which people like
H7 Chí Minh and TrM.ng Chinh conceptualized problems to members of
the apparatus was the way in which these party leaders actually conceptual-
ized them with each other in secret meetings. The party leaders were prob-
ably more pragmatic and realistic than they sometimes appear to be in
VKĐ documents.
Though many of the documents contained in VKĐ were written for
internal party use only, the series as a whole is a particular type of party
propaganda, similar in its basic character to Vietnam’s museums, history
books, and history curriculum. The producers of VKĐ are employed by the
party, meaning that their primary task is to select those documents that gen-
erally celebrate and legitimate the party’s leadership role in Vietnam. As
thick and rich as the volumes are, the documents in them still represent only
a fraction of the total documents produced by the party leadership during
any one year. In addition to choosing which pieces appear in the collection,
the editors of VKĐ have also, from time to time, chopped from documents
certain sections that they think deviate too far from the overall propaganda
goal of the series (these excisions are usually marked with ellipses). The
opportunity to compare a few VKĐ documents with their originals in the
Vietnam National Archives III, though, has led me to believe that the editors
have rarely gone beyond chopping to actually rewrite sections of the original
pieces. In my view, the best way to approach the VKĐ series is to have a solid
understanding of what happened during a certain period and then use the
documents to explore how the party leaders discussed what happened. Jump-
ing into VKĐ completely blind about a particular topic, with no other
source of information and little experience reading documents produced by
Marxist-Leninist parties, is fraught with peril.
Because my research focuses on socialist transformation in the Demo-
cratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), I have paid particular attention to those
parts of the VKĐ series that relate to the party’s campaign of “mass mobili-
zation through rent reduction and land reform” [phát Izng qu2n chúng
gi~m tô, c~i cách ruzng I{t] implemented in northern Vietnam from 1953 to
1956. The Vietnam Worker’s Party (VWP) carried out the campaign with a

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number of short- and long-term goals in mind, the most basic of which was
to prepare the countryside for an eventual move to collectivized agriculture.
Since the late 1920s, Vietnam’s communist leaders had concluded (as Stalin
and Mao had) that this radical change would require the “overthrow” [Iánh
Iv] of those who were most invested in the old economic order—the rural
elite.1 The political power that the party stripped from these elites was to be
placed in the hands of the class that had suffered the most under the old
system and that would, as the theory went, be most receptive to radical
change—the landless poor [b2n cF nông]. To this end, from 1953 to 1956, the
party sent about 48,007 cadres into rural communities throughout the DRV
to whip up hatred [c#m thù] toward local elites (referred to as “landlords” [I]
a ch*]).2 The mass mobilization cadre’s job was to teach the poor majority
to express this hatred in Marxist-Leninist terms and channel it into the
forceful overthrow of the rural elite, whose ranks included many local party
members. As northern Vietnamese still remember vividly, this roughly
three-month process involved subjecting those accused of being landlords
to public denunciation sessions [vE I{u], trials in “special people’s courts”
[tòa án nhân dân I|c biDt], and, in thousands of cases, public execution by
firing squad. After these trials, the VWP leadership wanted cadres to win the
hearts of the countryside’s most revolutionary class, the poor landless peas-
ants, by distributing among them the convicted person’s property and
belongings .
Considering how sensitive this topic continues to be for Vietnam’s lead-
ers today, the fact that the VKĐ series provides one thousand-odd pages
of documents dealing with the mass mobilization is remarkable. Naturally,
the documents have been carefully vetted to remove any “smoking guns”
that would help historians determine how many people the party shot dur-
ing the campaign, how many others committed suicide, how many died in
makeshift prisons, how many starved to death in their homes, and so forth.
Nevertheless, the documents still have many valuable things to tell us about
the mass mobilization, putting today’s historians of the campaign in a much
stronger position than Edwin Moise was when he conducted research for
his landmark 1983 book, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam.3
Since Moise’s book continues to be the standard account of the cam-
paign, the parts of his narrative that the VKĐ series either adds to or revises

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 228   H o l c o m b e

are more noteworthy than the many parts that the series affirms. This latter
category includes such things as the general destructiveness of the mass
mobilization, its wave structure, the rushed manner in which it was imple-
mented, the issue of Chinese precedent, and so forth. It was Moise who,
working with a limited number of sources back in the late 1970s and early
1980s, did the most to bring these and other key aspects of the campaign to
our attention.

The Functioning of the Party Press

One important question related to the mass mobilization is how the DRV’s
propaganda organs (the press, the radio, and public meetings) functioned
during the campaign. Lack of access to the type of high-level party direc-
tives found in VKĐ or to people who worked for the DRV press during the
mass mobilization made it difficult for Moise to do more than speculate on
this issue. He understood that the coverage of the campaign in the party’s
main newspaper, Nhân Dân [The People] (one of his key sources), did not
reflect what was actually happening on the ground at the time.4 Similarly,
he understood that a significant discrepancy had existed between the party’s
mass mobilization policies published in the press and those followed by
cadres recruited to carry out the campaign.5 As to why this was the case,
Moise offered a few different theories. In one part of his book, he blamed
this discrepancy on incidental factors:
The Hanoi newspapers Nhan Dan and Thoi Moi are the most important
sources for a study of the DRV land reform. They were not as good as the
Chinese newspapers had been between 1950 and 1953. Vietnam was a
smaller country and had a better developed system for nonpublic commu-
nications; the leaders were not forced to describe their policies accurately
in the press in order to convey them to the people who would implement
them. Furthermore, during the land reform, neither the Party leaders nor
the people who wrote for the newspapers had a very good understanding of
what was really going on in the countryside. The best information we have
is in their retrospective analysis, written several months after the land
reform ended.6

Later in his book, Moise offered a second theory, which attributed the
discrepancy not to incidental factors but to a conscious attempt by the party
to control how its propaganda organs depicted the campaign. For example,

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when discussing why the press never released any statistics on the campaign’s
death toll, he wrote: “[O]ne possible reason for this reticence is that the Party
may have wanted to avoid provoking too many executions [from mass mobili-
zation cadres].” In other words, the party used its propaganda organs to affect
the implementation of the campaign. In a subsequent section, he pointed out
that the newspapers Nhân Dân and ThNi MRi [New Era] had stopped print-
ing articles that mentioned landlord executions after January of 1956 (about
five months before the end of the campaign). As to why this was the case,
Moise theorized that the VWP leadership might have been concerned that
the violence of the mass mobilization went against the spirit of Khrushchev’s
denunciation of Stalin at the Soviet Union’s Twentieth Congress of the Com-
munist Party (February 25, 1956). Another possible explanation, according to
Moise, was that “[t]he Party may have been failing in its efforts to persuade
the urban population that the land reform was not leading to radical excesses
and might therefore have decided to stop publicizing even occasional
excesses.”7 In other words, the party attempted to use its propaganda organs to
manipulate both domestic and foreign perceptions of the campaign.
The VKĐ series includes a number of documents that shed light on this
important issue. On the whole, they tend to support Moise’s second theory,
stressing party agency. For example, a circular [thông tri] released on June
29, 1953, titled “On the Issue of Propagandizing the Mass Mobilization,”
deals with how the initial “rent reduction” part of the mass mobilization was
to be publicized. It begins by describing the impetus for the party’s propa-
ganda strategy:

Based on the situation in a number of places, the Central Committee sees

that we have not yet propagandized and explained carefully our decrees, land
edicts, and mass mobilization orders. Even a number of leading cadres do not
yet fully understand the party and government’s policy and mass mobiliza-
tion line. Because of this, a number of spontaneous struggles have broken
out. There are places where landlords have been beaten and tortured. Even
middle peasants, poor peasants, officials, students, etc. have become targets
of struggle. In those places, there always occur incidents of landlords commit-
ting suicide. Even among rich, middle, and poor peasants there are those
who fear becoming targets of struggle and therefore commit suicide. Those
are incidents of disorderly struggle, with no strategy and no leadership. They
have neither the right intention nor the right struggle target.

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 230   H o l c o m b e

The circular then explains that, while some of these phenomena are
unavoidable and “natural” results of class struggle, an effective propaganda
campaign should reduce their incidence. In order to calm those people
who fear becoming targets of the campaign, the circular states: “We must
propagandize and explain our policy clearly to landlords and rich peasants
so they know that everybody who follows the policy has nothing to worry
about—the government and the peasants only punish those who don’t fol-
low the laws and who don’t show repentance.”
After explaining the impetus for the party’s propaganda strategy, the cir-
cular puts forward some ground rules for depicting the mass mobilization.
With respect to the “fruits” of struggle (items taken from those people
labeled as landlords), newspapers were only to mention “land, buffalos, and
rice . . . taken from reactionary and cruel landlords” and not to mention
“gold, jewels, clothing, etc.” On the key issue of how landlord executions
were to be handled, the circular instructs: “Only propagandize executions
of the most extreme arch criminals [I\i gian, I\i ác cZc Iz]. Normally, exe-
cutions should not be propagandized. Executions should be propagandized
only in newspapers or by other means such as word of mouth, etc. They
should not be announced over the radio.”
Another part of the circular warns that “the execution of cruel despotic
female landlords should not be publicized because the enemy could exploit
it to counter our propaganda.” Propagandizing executions in the press or in
meetings “should not create unnecessary alarm in society but rather court
public sympathy.” Regarding the procedure for propagandizing an execu-
tion, the circular states: “In summary, propagandizing executions must be
done carefully. Mass mobilization brigades should send documents about
big important struggles and executions to the Central Committee’s Propa-
ganda and Instruction Bureau so that it can then send the information on to
various newspapers.”8
These passages suggest that a key goal of the propaganda strategy was to
assuage people’s fears and reduce the incidence of “spontaneous struggles”
and panicked resistance. Moreover, it is clear that the party leadership saw
the press as a propaganda organ to be used in the overall implementation of
the mass mobilization, not as an institution standing outside it. Thus it does
not appear to be of great importance whether those people working for the

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newspaper Nhân Dân (one of Moise’s key sources) “had a very good under-
standing of what was really going on in the countryside” or not. Their job
was to depict the campaign in the way that the party leadership thought
would facilitate its smooth implementation—such as by promising a nerv-
ous DRV population that everyone who followed the law would have “noth-
ing to worry about.”
Had the rural elite been privy to a VWP Politburo directive released on
May 4, 1953, though, they probably would have felt that, contrary to what
they were being told by the regime’s propaganda organs, they had a great
deal to worry about. That directive stated that the VWP Politburo wanted to
see the execution of one person for every thousand people during the more
moderate rent reduction phase of the mass mobilization.9 In other words,
the party leadership had already decided roughly how many people should
be executed during rent reduction before cadres had even entered their
assigned villages, and before they had had an opportunity to determine
whether so-called landlords were law abiding and “repentant” or not.
Extrapolated for the roughly eight million people who went through rent
reduction in the DRV, the May 4, 1953, directive’s execution ratio indicates
that the VWP Politburo wanted its mass mobilization apparatus to shoot
about eight thousand people during this initial phase of the campaign.10
Because the VWP Politburo had operated on the basis of an execution
ratio for the rent reduction, the logic of which was defended in that May 4,
1953, directive, there is no reason to think that it would not have set a ratio
for the land reform phase of the campaign as well. And we may reasonably
conclude that any execution ratio for that more radical second phase of the
campaign, when the landlord class was to be “completely overthrown” [triDt
IW Iánh Iv], would have been considerably higher than one to one thou-
sand. What this execution ratio was for the ten million people who under-
went land reform, whether it changed over time and place, and how the
VWP Politburo came up with the number, remains one of the most well
kept secrets in modern Vietnamese history.
Evidence that the VWP leadership wanted to conceal the scope and
character of the mass mobilization campaign from the northern Vietnam-
ese population, the party rank and file, and foreign observers appears in a
number of different documents contained in the VKĐ series. For example,

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 232   H o l c o m b e

H7 Chí Minh, during his closing remarks at the Fifth Meeting of the Party
Central Executive Committee and the First All-Country Meeting of Party
Representatives (November 14–23, 1953), gave those representatives in
attendance the following instructions regarding the upcoming land reform
(which had been discussed during the meeting):

Now, on returning home, you may not shoot your mouths off [nói lung
tung] because this [policy] is a secret of our strategy to attack feudalism, to
carry out land reform. If all of you shoot your mouths off before we have
made preparations [s: p sHa], then the enemy and the landlords will be able
to make preparations before we do. For this reason, the Central Committee
will issue a directive explaining how the land reform should be propagan-
dized in general for all regions and how it should be propagandized specif­
ically for regions that have yet to undergo mobilization.11

Later in the speech, H7 Chí Minh stressed again the need for secrecy:

With respect to [those of you] from regions that have not yet undergone
mobilization as well as other regions, you may not shoot your mouths off.
You must keep this secret. When you, as representatives, return [to your
communities], you must report [the contents of this meeting] only to the
Regional Committee and to no one else. Afterward, it will be up to the
Regional Committee to consider carefully the issue of to whom and to what
extent the [land reform] policy will be disseminated. You are not to “blab”
[t}Lng] about either this report or the policy. Are all of you clear on this?
You absolutely must remember this.12

As H7 Chí Minh had promised, nineteen days later, on December 12,

1953, the Central Committee released a directive [chU th]] titled “On Propa-
gandizing the Land Reform Policy.” Written by TrM.ng Chinh, it contained
two main sections: the first discussed the “mission and content” of land
reform propaganda and the second dealt with the “method of implementa-
tion.” For those with the most at stake in the mass mobilization, the so-called
landlords, TrM.ng Chinh explained that propaganda should “make them see
that the land reform is just, appropriate, and legal; land worked by the peas-
ants naturally should be returned to the peasants.” To ease the minds of those
who feared becoming targets of struggle [b] I{u tF], TrM.ng Chinh instructed
people involved in propaganda work to stress that “the government differenti-
ates in its treatment of each type of landlord according to his attitude toward

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the resistance and the people—of course, landlords are not all lumped into
one category [vL I[a c~ n:m]. The purpose [of this policy] is to isolate
the traitorous, reactionary, cruel, and despotic landlords, thereby stabilizing
the morale of revolutionary and normal landlords. This should prevent the
landlord class from taking measures to resist the policy and sabotage
production.”13
In the section of the directive that described how the party leadership
wanted the land reform to be propagandized in those places about to undergo
the campaign, TrM.ng Chinh stated: “With respect to propagandizing and
studying the land reform policy in these places, there is no need to organize
study sessions as was usually done in the past. When the land reform team
[Izi công tác] enters the village to carry out land reform, it will organize ses-
sions to study the policy then.”14 Thus it appears that the key details of the
campaign were to be revealed to communities only after the land reform
team had already arrived. Here it is important to note that one of the first tasks
of a land reform team upon entering a village was to seal off the roads and
place suspected landlords under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
VKĐ documents suggest that the VWP leadership made it a policy to
conceal key details of the campaign not just from the DRV public but from
rank-and-file party members as well. A directive from Politburo member Lê
DuNn titled “On the Plan to Study the Land Reform Policy” stated that “in
order to assure the successful implementation of the land reform policy, the
Central Committee has decided that cadres from various levels need to
make a thorough [sâu rzng] study of the policy.” This study was to focus on
the “meaning” and “purpose” of the land reform as well as its “just” and
“absolute” character. However, with respect to the content of the policy, Lê
DuNn instructed that the sessions should “impart an understanding of the
main points, but not go into the details of the policy.” Likewise, he added
that “with respect to the method of implementing the policy, it is not essen-
tial to study it in too detailed a way [tU mU quá] . . .” As for those recruited to
serve as land reform cadres, Lê DuNn explained that they would be taught
the specifics of what the job entailed after they had joined a particular land
reform brigade [koàn *y]. Later, the directive instructed that provincial and
district-level party executive committees were not to organize any study
sessions for members of village-level party cells [chi bz xã] but “only to

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 234   H o l c o m b e

disseminate [the study materials] carefully.”15 When would these local-level

party members have the opportunity to study the details of the policy? Lê
DuNn explained, “[A]nywhere land reform is carried out, the land reform
team will be responsible for leading the local party cell in a careful study [of
the policies].”16
On January 10, 1955, a couple of months after the top party leadership had
officially taken over those areas of northern Vietnam that had been controlled
by the French up until the end of the war, Politburo member Nguy#n Duy
Trinh released a circular titled “On Explaining Land Reform Policies to Civil
Servants and New Personnel in Organizations and Government Offices of
Recently Liberated Cities.” According to the circular, explanations of the
land reform policy provided to these anxious urban bureaucrats were to fol-
low the basic content put forward in a speech delivered two weeks earlier by
fellow Politburo member Hoàng Qu5c Vi0t in Hà Nbi’s opera house. (The
party leadership published excerpts of this speech, delivered to industrialists,
intellectuals, and officials, in the December 28, 29, and 30, 1954 issues of
Nhân Dân.)17 As TrM.ng Chinh had instructed in his December 12, 1953,
directive, Nguy#n Duy Trinh told party members entrusted with explaining
the policy that they should state that the VWP “discriminated between differ-
ent types of landlords, between landlords and rich peasants.” On the issue of
the public struggle sessions, the circular explained: “In order to ease the fears
[of civil servants and new personnel], [party members] should speak clearly
about the reasonable and sensible character of the recent struggles against
cruel, despotic landlord ringleaders and the current policy of establishing
courts to try them.” Then Nguy#n Duy Trinh instructed:

With respect to those issues that [civil servants and new personnel] do not
need to know about or, because they still have a low political level, cannot
understand, or could misunderstand—we should not bring them up and
explain them. (For example, our party’s general policy line for the country-
side; the issue of the party reorganization; the method of mobilizing “speak
bitterness” sessions [tF khv]; etc.) Regarding those issues related specifically
to the implementation of policy for party executive committees, such as
dealing with cruel, despotic, reactionary landlord ringleaders, determining
whether punishments should be heavy or light, and our specific tactics
during the struggle with the enemy, etc.—all these things should not be
brought up and explained.18

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Eleven days later, on January 21, 1955, the party secretariat released another
directive, titled “On Studying the Land Reform Policy.” Written by Politburo
member Lê Ven LMKng, it stated: “The Central Committee sees that it needs
to organize study sessions for cadres to learn more about the land reform pol-
icy. This is to prepare them mentally for zealous participation in and leader-
ship of the campaign.” As Lê DuNn had instructed in his February 10, 1954,
directive, Lê Ven LMKng declared, “The study sessions should focus on grasp-
ing the spirit of the policy and avoid wandering into issues in too detailed a
way [Ii miên man vào các v{n IM quá chi tiCt].” Like Nguy#n Duy Trinh, Lê
Ven LMKng suggested that the study sessions look at Hoàng Qu5c Vi0t’s ear-
lier speech, published for mass consumption in Nhân Dân.
Thus it appears from these VKĐ documents that the disparity between the
depiction of mass mobilization in the DRV press and what actually happened
in northern Vietnamese villages did not stem from a lack of knowledge of the
campaign on the part of the party leadership or the press. Rather, it resulted
from a specific policy set by the DRV leadership to keep the true scope and
character of the campaign secret. This, the party leadership seems to have
hoped, would facilitate the smooth implementation of the mass mobilization
by lowering the incidence of “spontaneous struggles” and “landlord sabo-
tage.” In the party leadership’s eyes, the latter phenomenon seems to have
included such actions as unloading one’s land and belongings, fleeing, or
even, in the last resort, committing suicide. As for the discrepancy between
the published land reform policies and those actually carried out by cadres,
VKĐ documents suggest that this too may have been a deliberate policy
employed by the party leadership to keep the nature of the campaign secret.
The VWP leadership appears not to have wanted cadres to learn the specific
details of what being a mass mobilization cadre entailed until after they had
joined a rent reduction or land reform brigade—in other words, after they
were safely inside the party’s mass mobilization apparatus, cut off from family,
friends, and the wider public.

The Mass Mobilization and the Geneva Accords

As scholarship by Pierre Asselin has shown, the VKĐ series contains many
interesting documents related to the Geneva Accords signed in July of
1954.19 A number of these documents provide information on how the party

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 236   H o l c o m b e

leadership worked to mitigate the threat to the mass mobilization posed by

sections 14c and 14d of the accords. These stipulated that there be no repris-
als or discrimination against former political opponents and that a three-
hundred-day period of free movement between North and South (July 1954
to May 1955) be observed. This meant that the mass mobilization’s attack on
the landlord class violated the spirit of section 14c, which had obviously
been created to protect the entire Vietnamese population from state-spon-
sored violence coming from either Sài Gòn or Hà Nbi. Moreover, the three-
hundred-day period of free travel meant that anyone who feared becoming
a target of reprisals from either regime should have had the option of emi-
grating. To ensure compliance with these provisions, signatories to the
Geneva Accords had agreed that an International Control Commission
(ICC) comprised of Canadian, Polish, and Indian representatives would
travel freely about the country, conducting inspections. Both the regimes in
Hà Nbi and Sài Gòn were supposed to help the ICC carry out this duty. On
these issues, Moise wrote:

It is surprising that reports of the International Control Commission con-

tain so little evidence of persecution directed against important French col-
laborators. The ICC teams could move with a fair degree of freedom in
North Vietnam—more so than in the South—and they should have been
aware of any widespread violations of the accords. . . .
. . . The top party leaders decided, rather reluctantly, to comply with the
accords and allow the peasants to leave. They were under pressure from
the International Control Commission, and for as long as they retained any
hope that Vietnam might be peacefully reunified, they could not afford to
defy this pressure. But even after Hanoi had reached this decision, many
local officials refused to implement it. They continued to obstruct the
migration, whether from a reasoned belief that people wanting to leave for
the South should be delayed long enough to let them reconsider, or from
a reflexive unwillingness to cooperate in any way with people who were
flaunting counterrevolutionary sentiments by asking to leave the DRV. . . .
. . . After a few months the situation eased, and by the deadline of 18
May 1955, most of those who wanted to go South had done so.20

The VKĐ collection contains a number of orders and directives from the
party leadership that deal with the specific issues raised by Moise in the above
excerpts. With respect to the regime’s adherence to clause 14c forbidding

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 F o r u m : T h e C o m p l e t e C o l l e ct i o n o f P a r t y D o c u m e n t s    237

reprisals against political opponents, a Politburo resolution from September

7, 1954, stated the following:

The method of struggling against landlords in the mass mobilization has

changed somewhat. Now we must stress the importance of legal authority
and use judicial forms to deal with landlord resistance. With respect to sat-
isfying the basic demands of the peasants and creating political power for
the peasants in the countryside, the direct actions of peasants struggling
against landlords must be more flexible now. This is to avoid giving our
opponents a pretext for claiming that we are terrorizing those who cooper-
ated with them. At the same time, we need to avoid a situation in which
landlords who are being struggled against flee to the South in great num-
bers, hurting our efforts to unify the country.21

On the issue of the ICC’s ability to learn what was happening in the
DRV countryside, a September 26, 1954, directive from the party general
secretary’s office discussed how local party members should prepare in the
case of an ICC visit: “Frequently the Control Commission will visit loca-
tions to inspect and investigate. Aside from investigating specific issues, they
will try to find a way of figuring out all aspects of our general situation. They
could go to a place and start asking the locals questions, etc. Therefore, we
need to prepare and let those local people know how to respond cleverly to
the International Control Commission’s questions; we cannot just let them
say whatever they want.”22
Two months later, in November 1954, TrM.ng Chinh released a Polit-
buro directive titled “On Creating a Large and Powerful Movement Com-
prising All Classes of the Entire Country for the Purpose of Resisting Our
Opponent’s Blatant Violations of the Geneva Accords.” Toward the end of
that directive, TrM.ng Chinh affirmed that “[w]e have many advantages.
Because justice is on our side and because we respect the Geneva Accords,
legitimate public opinion supports us.”23
A February 16, 1955, Politburo directive (this was almost exactly three
months before the end of the three-hundred-day period) warned that there
was still a large number [sF Iông] of people preparing to go South. To help
this situation, the Politburo recommended the following course of action:

• Choose a few model places where we will organize to help people emi-
grate (after choosing the place, check it with the Central Committee).

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 238   H o l c o m b e

We should invite the International Control Commission to come and

witness what we do there. These model places must be areas where we
have a mass base so that when we organize to help people leave, only
a few people actually ask to go. This is the only way that helps our
cause. This work must be carefully planned so that it can be imple-
mented rapidly.
• We must have a plan to crush reactionaries, to increase vigilance, to
tighten our control, and to prevent the enemy from exploiting this
opportunity to speed up concentration of the masses and create more
troubles for us.24

A month later, on March 20, 1955 (two months before the end of the free
travel period), a communiqué from the VWP Central Committee to the
various interzones assessed the situation as follows:
The reactionaries in the International Control Commission group are
operating zealously. Now they have formed three more groups to inspect
coastal provinces: Thái Bình, Nam Đinh, Ninh Bình, Thanh Hóa, Ngh0
An, and Hà T3nh. The goal of the reactionaries on the International Con-
trol Commission this time is to find our weak spots, find evidence to con-
clude that we have violated the accords, and bring that before the nine
signatories. They want to delay their departure from HOi Phòng and
lengthen the period of emigration. They want to ruin the accords and
immediately organize to force [c}Xng ép] the masses to emigrate on a large
scale all at one time.25

In April of 1955, one month before the borders were to close, TrM.ng
Chinh wrote on the issue of whether those targeted as landlords would be
allowed to emigrate to the South:

With respect to landlords, generally speaking, we do not let them go and

we must create enough legal reasons for holding them in the North, espe-
cially the treacherous and cruel ones. We should wait until the mass mobi-
lization and deal with them then. If a special situation arises in which the
International Control Commission comes to inspect and there is a landlord
who asks to go, [the local authorities] must ask for orders from the provin-
cial party bureau. If this happens in a locality that is in the middle of mass
mobilization, then permission must be obtained from the [Land Reform]
Brigade Bureau. Local cadres must not cause the peasant masses to lose a
struggle target by allowing a landlord to emigrate.26

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And finally, seventeen days before the end of the free movement period,
a May 1, 1955, Central Committee communiqué warned:

Looking at the situation in Nam Đinh and a number of other provinces,

the Central Committee sees that the situation with regard to the “emigra-
tion” has become critical in a number of places:
•  The command of the party’s Provincial Committees has been loose.
•  The repression of reactionaries has been too weak.
•  A number of cadres, because they are afraid of violating the Geneva Accords,
have opened the door wide for people to leave. Localities need to fix the above
weaknesses immediately.27

These excerpts from the VKĐ series indicate that the DRV leadership
took concrete measures to thwart the ICC’s ability to find out what may
have actually happened in the countryside. They also suggest that the impe-
tus for preventing people from emigrating came primarily from the party
leadership, not local cadres (as Moise speculated). Indeed, it appears that
party leaders were frustrated with local cadres for not doing more to prevent
people from leaving. And finally, the documents raise questions about
Moise’s assessment of the way the period of emigration concluded. He ini-
tially wrote, “After a few months the situation eased, and by the deadline of
18 May 1955, most of those who wanted to go South had done so.” A few
lines later, he seemed to modify this assessment somewhat, stating that
“[t]he only large concentrations of people who wanted to go south but still
had not been able to do so were in the provinces of Ngh0 An and Thanh
Hóa, Interzone IV.” The final VKĐ document quoted above shows that the
party leadership, looking at Nam Đinh (a province north of Thanh Hóa in
Interzone III) and other provinces, still considered the emigration situation
to be “critical” only seventeen days before the end of the period of free
travel between North and South.

Conclusion
While the VKĐ series has its limitations, I hope some of the passages
quoted in this short piece show that the editors of the series have provided
plenty of intriguing material for us to consider. We should remember that
they were educated in communist Vietnam and share many of the values of
the party leaders whose documents comprise the collection. Things that

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 240   H o l c o m b e

most of us would probably want to excise from our own records (fulsome
praise of Stalin, for example), the editors of the series find perfectly accept-
able. For non-native speakers of Vietnamese, the documents in VKĐ do
present a language challenge, but in my experience, this challenge is not
nearly as forbidding as it initially appears. After grinding through one vol-
ume’s worth of documents, the second is much less difficult, and by the
third volume, one finds that the basic language of the regime has been
memorized. The same terms and arguments appear over and over again as
the party leaders turn their Marxist-Leninist lens from one problem to the
next, making the VKĐ volumes easy to read. New ideas that would require
an expansion of the regime’s vocabulary and a richer, more sophisticated
use of the Vietnamese language rarely appear in the collection.  ■

alec holcombe is a PhD student of History at the University of Califor-

nia, Berkeley. He is currently writing a dissertation on socialist transforma-
tion in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Notes
  1. “Tuyên ngôn cFa ĐOng Cbng sOn Đông DMKng” [Manifesto of the Indochi-
nese Communist Party], V#n KiDn ĐOng Toàn Tup [The Complete Collection
of Party Documents] (Hà Nbi: Chính Tri Qu5c Gia, 2001), 1:213.
  2. Nguy#n Duy Trinh, “Báo cáo b% sung cFa chính phF vj cOi cách rubng k(t
và chqnh k5n t% ch+c (báo cáo kCc trM&c khóa hCp Qu5c hbi l6n th+ 6, ngày
4/1/1957)” [Supplementary Report from the Government on the Land
Reform and [Party] Reorganization (Report Read before the Sixth Session of
the National Assembly, January 4, 1957)], Hà Nbi, Sl Th$t, February 28,
1957, 4.
  3. Edwin Moise, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam: Consolidating the
Revolution at the Village Level (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 1983).
  4. Ibid., 219.
  5. Ibid., 197–198, 213.
  6. Ibid., 182.
  7. Ibid., 222.
  8. Ban Bí thM, “Thông tri cFa Ban Bí thM, ngày 29 tháng 6 nem 1953: vj v(n kj
tuyên truyjn phát kbng qu6n chúng” [Communique from the General Secre-
tary’s Office, June 29, 1953: On the Issue of Propagandizing the Mass Mobiliza-
tion], V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 14:246–250.

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 F o r u m : T h e C o m p l e t e C o l l e ct i o n o f P a r t y D o c u m e n t s    241

  9. VWP Politburo, “Chq thi cFa Bb Chính tri vj m(y v(n kj k<c bi0t trong phát
kbng qu6n chúng, 4/5/1953” [Politburo Directive on a Few Special Issues in
Mass Mobilization, May 4, 1953], V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 14:201–206. See
the translation of this document in this issue of the Journal of Vietnamese
Studies: vol. 5, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 243–247.
10. Moise, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam, 176. He reports the number
as being “about 7,800.”
11. H7 Chí Minh, “Di#n ven b! mfc cFa ChF tich H7 Chí Minh, 23/11/1953”
[Closing Words of Chairman H7 Chí Minh, November 23, 1953], V#n KiDn
Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 14:504–511.
12. Ibid.
13. TrM.ng Chinh, “Chq thi cFa ban bí thM vj vi0c tuyên truyjn chính sách cOi
cách rubng k(t” [Directive from the General Secretary’s Office on Propagan-
dizing Land Reform Policy], V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 14:537–549
14. Ibid.
15. Lê DuNn, “Chq thi cFa ban bí thM, 10/2/1954: Vj k! hofch hCc t=p chính sách
cOi cách rubng k(t” [Directive from the Secretariat, February 10, 1954: On the
Plan to Study the Land Reform Policy], V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 15:17–20. Lê
DuNn provided no specific information on what study materials were to be dis-
seminated to local party members, writing only that “they should be provided
mainly with land reform study materials produced by the Central Committee’s
Propaganda and Training Section.”
16. Ibid.
17. Hoàng Qu5c Vi0t, “Vì sao nM&c ta phOi cOi cách rubng k(t?” [Why Must Our
Country Undergo Land Reform?], Nhân Dân [The People], no. 302–304,
December 28–30, 1954.
18. Nguy#n Duy Trinh, “Thông tri cFa ban bí thM s5 2- TT/TW, 10/1/1955: Vj vi0c
giOi thích chính sách cOi cách rubng k(t cho các công ch+c, nhân viên m&i 1
cK quan, công s1 trong các thành thi m&i giOi phóng” [Circular from the Sec-
retariat, January 10, 1955: On Explaining Land Reform Policies to Civil Serv-
ants and New Personnel in Organizations and Government Offices of
Recently Liberated Cities], V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 16:8–11.
19. Pierre Asselin, “Choosing Peace: Hanoi and the Geneva Agreement on Viet-
nam, 1954–1955,” Journal of Cold War Studies 9, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 95–126.
20. Moise, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam, 192–195.
21. VWP Politburo, “Nghi quy!t cFa bb chính tri vj tình hình m&i, nhi0m vp m&i,
và chính sách m&i cFa ĐOng” [Politburo Resolution on the New Situation, the
New Task, and the New Policies of the Party], V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 15:298.
22. TrM.ng Chinh, “Chq thi cFa ban bí thM 26/9/1954: Vj nhi0m vp cFa các c(p
ĐOng 1 các kia phMKng thubc b:c v3 tuy!n 17 k5i v&i ry ban qu5c t!” [Directive

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 242   H o l c o m b e

from the General Secretary’s Office, September 26, 1954: On the Responsibili-
ties of Local Party Levels Based North of the 17th Parallel with Respect to the
International Control Commission], V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 15:318–324.
23. TrM.ng Chinh, “Chq thi cFa Bb Chính tri 26/11/1954: Vj vi0c gây mbt phong
trào rbng l&n và mfnh m( cFa các t6ng l&p nhân dân toàn qu5c ch5ng các
hành kbng tr:ng tr/n cFa k5i phMKng vi phfm Hi0p kinh Geneva” [Politburo
Directive from November 26, 1954: On Creating a Large and Powerful Move-
ment Comprising All Classes of the Entire Country for the Purpose of Resist-
ing Our Opponent’s Blatant Violations of the Geneva Accords], V#n KiDn
Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 15:385.
24. Lê Ven LMKng, “Chq thi cFa bb chính tri s5 07-CT/TW ngày 16 tháng 2 nem
1955: ĐNy mfnh k(u tranh phá âm mMu m&i cFa kich trong vi0c dp d? và
cMg’ng ép giáo dân di cM vào Nam” [Poliburo Directive No. 7, February 16,
1955: Step Up the Struggle to Destroy the Enemy’s New Scheme to Entice and
Force Catholics to Emigrate South], V#n Ki0n Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 16:74.
25. “Trung MKng g9i các liên khu Fy, 20/3/1955” [Communique from the Central
Committee to Interzone Branches: March 20, 1955], V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup,
16:232.
26. TrM.ng Chinh, “Chq thi cFa ban bí thM s5 16-CT/TW, 21/4/1955: Teng cM.ng
chq kfo, tích clc k(u tranh âm mMu kich cMg’ng ép và dp d? giáo dân di cM”
[Strengthen Command, Zealously Struggle against the Enemy’s Scheme to
Force and Entice Catholics to Emigrate], V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 16:273.
27. “Đi0n cFa Trung MKng, 1/5/1955” [Central Committee Communique, May 1,
1955], V#n KiDn Đ~ng Toàn Tup, 16:282.

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