Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). On 12 September 1930, a peasant uprising broke out in two provinces of central Vietnam, shaking French colonial rule to its foundations. Workers and peasants formed soviets, which defended themselves against the superior military power until the spring of 1931.
The devastating consequences of the global economic crisis that broke out in 1929 had also affected the colonially oppressed peoples, including Vietnam, which was linked to the French economy, in an even worse way than in the ‘mother countries’.
At that time, the annual income of the 220,000 industrial and plantation workers and the more than 9 million feudal peasants was only 6% of what French workers received. Rice consumption in South Vietnam was about 8 kilograms of paddy (4.6 kilograms of unhusked rice) per capita per month. That was 153.3 grams per person per day.
Rice was to the Vietnamese what bread and potatoes are to Europeans. The colonial power placed the burden of the crisis primarily on the working people. One third of all workers and one tenth of all employees were laid off. Wages, which were already meagre, fell by 50%, in many places by up to 80%, and those of employees by between 25 and 50%.1
The French geographer and Indochina expert Gouro noted: “Hunger and misery have forced the Tongkinese and Annamite peasants to hunt insects, which they then greedily consume. In Tongking, people catch grasshoppers, crickets and mayflies, collect caterpillars and bamboo worms, and do not shy away from eating silkworm pupae.2 Everyone knows that famine is a constant presence there.” Over one hundred thousand Vietnamese fell victim to the rampant famine.
The peasant uprising
On 12 September 1930, protests by workers and peasants in several district towns in the provinces of Nghe An and Ha Tinh in central Vietnam for higher wages, tax relief, rent reductions, the return of communal land to the peasants and the distribution of rice to the starving culminated in mass demonstrations. The colonial power deployed troops to suppress the protests and bombed the gathering places from aircraft. Over 510 demonstrators were killed, more than 300 were wounded, and thousands of houses were destroyed. The ‘hunger for rice’ now drove the farmers, who were embittered to the extreme, to armed rebellion against the colonial power and the feudal lords, as even the upper-class ‘Echo annamite’ had to admit.
The peasants stormed prisons and freed the prisoners, set fire to district and municipal administrations and other public institutions, and burned tax documents, mortgage deeds and promissory notes. Under the onslaught of the peasants, the mandarins and notables fled to the provincial capitals; the colonial-feudal power apparatus in the rural communities collapsed.
On 12 December, the French newspaper L’Opinion publique wrote: ‘In the two provinces of central Vietnam, this is no longer a simple coup or violent uprising, but a real revolution. The people there are acting so comprehensively that the two provinces have established Soviet power. It seems that our power no longer exists there.’
Although the conditions for a successful uprising were not in place, as the Communist Party, which had just been founded on 3 February, assessed,
after the uprising broke out spontaneously with mass participation, it placed itself at the head of the peasants and gave their struggle an organised and purposeful character. Under the chairmanship of Ho Chi Minh, the Central Committee met in October and decided to take over the leadership of the movement and to send Central Committee member Pho Nguyen Sac to the insurrection area. Throughout the country, the party organised a movement to support Nghe Tinh, as the two provinces were collectively called. Thousands of party members and officials, revolutionaries from all provinces of Vietnam, tried to reach Nghe Tinh to take part in the uprising. 3
The formation of Vietnamese Soviets
In Nghe Tinh, the uprising had spread in October 1930 to an area of about 12,000 km² with a population of 1.5 million. In 12 of 20 districts and 400 communes, which was about half of all communes, peasant associations founded on the initiative of the Communist Party took power by the end of 1930 and formed Vietnamese Soviets. In the remaining communes, committees of the peasant associations exercised power without constituting themselves as councils. ‘The entire area has seceded from the French protectorate,’ wrote the colonial magazine L’Asie francaise in its November 1930 issue. Following a decision by the Central Vietnam Regional Committee of the Communist Party, more than 500 workers from Vinh, the industrial centre of the insurgency, went to the rebellious communes and helped the peasants establish revolutionary organs of power.
The Soviets consisted mainly of poor peasants and day labourers. A small number of middle peasants and members of the intelligentsia were also represented. The workers of Vinh played an active role in the formation of the councils, to which many of them were elected. In terms of their political character, the councils were a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants. They laid the essential foundations for the alliance of workers and peasants in the further struggles that led to the victory of the August Revolution in 1945.
The Nghe Tinh Soviets were an eloquent example of how Ho Chi Minh gave these organs of power a specifically Vietnamese character. Although the example of the Soviet council power born in the October Revolution was taken up and politically realised in terms of content, the name ‘Xo Viet’ was chosen. ‘XO’ is translated from Vietnamese as ‘councils’. With the addition of “Viet”, the name ‘Vietnamese Councils’ was created.
The Xo Viets distributed the communal land that large landowners and feudal lords had appropriated to the peasants, restricted the large landowners’ opportunities for exploitation, distributed rice from their reserves to the starving, and initiated a series of political and socio-economic reforms.
40,000 Red Guards
Under the command of a military committee of the regional committee of the KPV, Red Guards were formed, which, according to Vietnamese estimates, numbered a total of about 30,000 fighters. The FKP newspaper ‘L’Humanité’ wrote on 7 September 1931 of 40,000 armed insurgents. After attempts to capture the provincial capitals of Nghe An and Ha Tinh and several district towns still under French control with superior forces failed in October due to insufficient weapons, the Soviets limited themselves to defence and tried to avoid open military confrontation in order to prevent unnecessary losses. Many Vietnamese in the colonial army sympathised with the insurgents and in the early stages of the uprising refused to take action against the masses, with a number of soldiers even defecting to their side.
The Red Guards formed the nucleus of the People’s Army, which was created 14 years later and ensured the victory of the August Revolution. The commanders of the Red Guards included Vietnamese who had graduated from the Red Army Military Academy in Moscow and the Huang Pu Military Academy near Canton, where Soviet military officers trained officers of the People’s Liberation Army and Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. Ho Chi Minh, who was preparing to found a communist party with Vietnamese revolutionaries in Canton, southern China, in 1925/26, had delegated them there. For over eight months, the Red Guards defended the people’s power against attacks by the colonial power, which had to reinforce its troops in Vietnam with a 100,000-strong expeditionary corps from France.
An important factor in the long duration of the Soviets’ resistance, in addition to the mass character of the revolutionary movement and the high combat strength of the Communist Party, was the skilful use of geographical conditions. As a result of the dense irrigation system of the rice fields, roads and paths throughout the plain crossed countless bridges. Many villages could only be reached via narrow paths that could only be traversed on foot or with small buffalo carts. The insurgents destroyed bridges, blocked waterways and rendered ferries unusable, so that the colonial troops were unable to deploy tanks and heavy artillery and were unable to advance into the Soviet areas for a long time. The rugged mountain regions in the northwest also provided them with a protective hinterland.
Tens of thousands of victims of colonial terror
At the end of October 1930, the colonial troops launched their campaign against the Soviet areas, which lasted until the autumn of 1931. A state of emergency and martial law were imposed on Nghe Tinh; a cordon of 122 military bases was established around the insurgency area, the strongest of which had a garrison of 400 to 500 men. The colonial soldiers acted with unprecedented cruelty. Anyone who refused to denounce members or supporters of the Soviets, publicly renounce the revolution and declare allegiance to the colonial power and the monarchy was arrested and usually executed immediately.
As reported by L’Humanité on 27 March 1931, tens of thousands of people fell victim to the reign of terror. Dozens of villages were razed to the ground and thousands of houses burned down. Nevertheless, it took more than eight months for the colonial troops to break the resistance. In individual battles, the Red Guards were often supported by thousands of peasants. In August 1931, they still controlled around 50 communities. The last battles took place in December 1931. The members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party who were staying in Saigon had already fallen into the hands of the police in April/May. The first General Secretary, Tran Phu, died in April 1931 as a result of cruel torture. Ho Chi Minh, who escaped to China, was sentenced to death in absentia in Vinh. The British police arrested him in Hong Kong but did not extradite him to Vietnam as demanded by the French Sûreté. He later managed to escape and returned to Vietnam in 1941, where he led the founding of the Viet Minh liberation front.
The struggles for Soviet power in Nghe Tinh demonstrated the revolutionary strength of the young Communist Party and its ability to lead the struggle for national and social liberation. The Vietnamese communists remained loyal to the revolutionary cause even during the period of retreat, showing an unprecedented fighting spirit and revolutionary self-sacrifice. Until the last hour of the Soviets, they stood at the forefront of the struggle with weapons in their hands. Most of them sealed their loyalty to the revolution with their deaths. Among the dead was the leader of the Soviet movement, Central Committee member Pho Nguyen Sac, who had been arrested on 3 May 1931.
The Soviets of 1930/31 proved that the working class and its Communist Party had taken the lead in the liberation struggle. This was a unique event in Southeast Asia at that time. Ho Chi Minh regarded the revolutionary mass movement and the Soviets as a prelude to the victorious August Revolution of 1945.
Sources:
* The historical significance of the Vietnamese Soviets (1930–1931) for the successful course of the Vietnamese people’s national liberation struggle under the leadership of the working-class party. Author’s dissertation for the degree of Dr. rer. pol. at the Institute for International Relations (IIB) of the GDR, Potsdam Babelsberg, 1971.
* The Soviets of Nghe Tinh, Hanoi 1960 (Vietn.),
* Tran Huy Lieu: Les Soviets du Nghe Tinh de 1930-1931, Hanoi 1960,
* Ho Chi Min: The Revolutionary Path, ‘Nhan Dan’, 3 January 1970,
* The Revolutionary Mass Movement in 1930/31 and the Soviets of Nghe Tinh, ‘Nhan Dan’, 12 September 1970,
G. Feldbauer: The National Liberation Revolution of Vietnam. On the Emergence of its Essential Conditions from 1925 to 1945, Pahl Rugenstein Nachf, Bonn 2007,
Irene and Gerhard Feldbauer: Victory in Saigon, Memories of Vietnam, Pahl Rugenstein Nachf, second edition, Bonn 2006.
1 G. Feldbauer: The socio-economic and class structure before the August Revolution in Vietnam, magazine ‘Asia – Africa – Latin America’ of the GDR, issue 5/1980.
2 In Jean Chesneaux: Geschichte Vietnams (History of Vietnam), Berlin/GDR 1963, p. 183.
3 G. Feldbauer: Die Sowjets 1930/31 in Vietnam (The Soviets in Vietnam in 1930/31). Journal for Historical Science (of the GDR), issue 11/1974.
4 The educational institution was jointly maintained by the Communist Party of China and the Guo Min Dang during the period of the united front.
