Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of History and Memory

1. The Black Sea Mutiny in the Late Colonial Moment

CHAPTER 1 The Black Sea Mutiny in the Late Colonial Moment LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, my story has, perhaps inevitably, no real beginning. Among various possible pathways, I have chosen one that will set out from a secret guerrilla base amid the rugged mountains of northern Viet Nam in 1947. In early November of that year, thirty or so men came together for a meeting in or near the small town of Vo Nhai, about thirty kilometers northeast of Thai Nguyen, the administrative center of Bac Thai province,1 and roughly eighty kilometers north of Ha Noi, the country ’s capital then occupied by the French, their mortal enemies. Most of the men gathering in Vo Nhai held highest or high ranks in the government and other political organs of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, which had declared its independence from French colonial rule in September 1945 following a brief, successful revolutionary upheaval. But the French had returned to reestablish their control, and after much maneuvering, war had broken out between the two sides in December 1946. Soon, the DRVN had been forced to retreat to resistance strongholds in the countryside, mostly in the mountainous terrain of northern and north-central Viet Nam, from where it conducted a guerrilla campaign. On that November day in Vo Nhai, however, the men convened not in their capacity as DRVN representatives, but as leading cadres of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), which had continued to function clandestinely since its voluntary, yet only nominal, dissolution in November 1945. We can assume that among those likely to have participated in the gathering were Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan, Truong Chinh, Pham Van Dong, Vo Nguyen Giap, Le Duc Tho, Ton Duc Thang, Pham Hung, Le Van Luong, and Hoang Van Hoan. The reason for their meeting was a commemoration, and the occasion was provided by the thirtieth anniversary of the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Before describing what transpired at the commemorative gathering 3 in Vo Nhai in November 1947, I should stress that the only information about the event was provided, during an interview with me, by Duong Van Phuc, who claimed to have been present as Ton Duc Thang’s adjutant, then in his early twenties. A few months later, he would also become Ton’s son-in-law when he married his boss’s oldest daughter, Ton Thi Hanh.2 No independent sources could be found to corroborate Duong Van Phuc’s story.3 According to Duong Van Phuc, then, it was during this meeting in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the Russian October Revolution that Le Van Luong addressed the gathered ICP leadership roughly along the following lines: There actually was in their midst one person who had personally been involved in an important event connected with the October Revolution. In 1919, comrade Ton Duc Thang had been a seaman on a warship in the Black Sea where French naval forces operated in support of counterrevolutionary White armies. At Sevastopol, Ton had taken part with French sailors in the famous and successful mutiny aimed at ending the intervention and thereby defending Soviet Russia. He even had been in contact with André Marty, the well-known navy officer who instigated the mutiny and later, after his release from prison, became a communist. Upon hearing Le Van Luong relate the story of the mutiny, everybody at the meeting—again according to Duong Van Phuc—was very proud of their comrade Ton Duc Thang. Supposedly, it was only at the Vo Nhai commemorative event that many of the ICP leaders learned about Ton’s exploits for the first time; Duong Van Phuc explained the novelty of the tale with reference to Ton’s modesty and lifelong habit of rarely talking about his past. Over time, the story of Ton Duc Thang in the Black Sea would become famous both domestically and abroad as representing one of the most heroic deeds by a Vietnamese radical activist and one of the clearest and earliest manifestations of the Vietnamese spirit of revolutionary internationalism. Indeed, in this episode we can find the first and perhaps most important instance in which Vietnamese communism imagined its ancestry through the life of Ton Duc Thang. If Duong Van Phuc is correct about the gathering in 1947, those communist leaders at Vo Nhai heard a tale that would establish the earliest and most direct link between the very core of their own political enterprise and their ultimate historical and...