The most informative page in this book is the one nobody reads.
Turn to the copyright notice. It carries two dates. The Russian original is copyright "Молодая гвардия", 1983 — Molodaya Gvardiya, the Komsomol's publishing house, which ran the Soviet Union's long-running popular-biography line. The English translation is copyright Progress Publishers, 1989. What Progress issued in the fourth year of glasnost, months before the Berlin Wall came down, was a book written and cleared for the press under Yuri Andropov.
This matters because 1989 is otherwise the latest date in this series, and it invites an obvious question: did the loosening of Soviet censorship reach the export list? The answer here is that it reached the imprint page and stopped. Nothing in this text was revised for the reader of 1989. It is a 1983 book in a 1989 jacket, and reading it that way explains almost everything that follows — including, as we shall see, one passage that could not have been written in 1979 and one that could not have been written at any point before 1985.
Yevgeny Kobelev was a Soviet Vietnamologist and journalist, and he tells us in his first paragraph what he was doing there: "It so happened that I was in Vietnam as TASS correspondent when the country was fending off the U.S. aggression." He describes reaching Vinh in June 1965 under bombing, waiting for nightfall at river crossings, anti-aircraft guns so loud that his party could not hear each other speak. That is not filler. It establishes at the outset that this author had been in the country, spoke to people there, and cared about them, and the reader should hold onto that when the book's failures accumulate.
It is a popular biography, not a monograph. There is no bibliography. Across roughly 105,000 words there are about six substantive source footnotes, and every one of them is to Lenin's or Marx's Collected Works in Progress editions. The acknowledgements thank "the friends and companions of Ho Chi Minh, writers and journalists, whose remembrances, articles and stories about that great Vietnamese were utilised in writing this book" — which is an accurate description of the method. Kobelev works from Vietnamese official memoir literature, Soviet recollections, and the French colonial and left press. Where those sources are good the book is good. Where they are the Party's own version of itself, so is the book.
Stalin. He is named once as a historical actor, and it is a piece of set-dressing: in the Canton training school of the mid-1920s, "the walls were hung with portraits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Sun Yatsen, and Pham Hong Thai." Otherwise the name appears only as Stalingrad — five times, all of them about the battle, including a genuinely striking scene in which Ho, imprisoned by Chiang Kai-shek in 1943, is smuggled a newspaper reporting the German surrender and "jumped with joy." Ho spent more than six years in the Soviet Union. He was there through the first and second five-year plans, through the famine, through the Terror. The man who ran the state during those years does not appear in the account of them at all. This is not glasnost. It is the standard Brezhnev-era solution: not defence, not denunciation, simply erasure.
The Terror. This is the book's central and unforgivable silence, and it is unforgivable because Kobelev goes straight into the room where it happened.
Ho reached Moscow in 1934 and stayed until mid-1938, living at the Comintern's Eastern Secretariat, studying at the International Lenin School under the alias Linov, and leading the Vietnamese group at the Institute of National and Colonial Problems. Kobelev devotes a full chapter to it — "His Second Homeland" — and it is warm and detailed. Ho does his morning exercises with dumb-bells and a chest expander. He plays chess badly and inventively. He arbitrates squabbles among the students. He goes to newsreels of the Spanish war and sees Chapayev several times over. Of his arrival, Kobelev writes that after Hong Kong prison and the news of his executed comrades, "everything Nguyen saw in the Soviet Union was like a soothing ointment, giving him new faith, new strength and vigour."
Now set that against what was happening to the Comintern's foreign cadre in exactly those rooms in exactly those years. At the Seventh Congress in July 1935, Kobelev tells us, Ho "again met his old friends Nadezhda Krupskaya, Dmitry Manuilsky, Iosif Pyatnitsky" and got acquainted with "such distinguished personalities of the world communist movement as Georgi Dimitrov, Klement Gottwald, Bela Kun." Pyatnitsky, who effectively ran the Comintern apparatus, was arrested in 1937 and shot. Béla Kun, leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, was arrested in 1937 and shot. They are named in a 1989 book, in a friendly list, with no indication that anything ever happened to them. The Asian sections of the Comintern were gutted in these years; the Vietnamese in Moscow were a small, foreign, unprotected group, and Ho's own standing was not secure. Kobelev's chapter runs from 1934 to 1938 and contains not one arrest, not one disappearance, not one funeral.
The word "terror" and its cognates occur eleven times in this book. Every single occurrence is about French colonial repression, Chinese reaction in Canton, fascism as defined by the Seventh Congress, or the Diem police. The Soviet Union does not have a 1937 in these pages. And the chapter closes with the doctrinal payoff that the whole omission exists to protect: "Socialism was winning once and for all on one-sixth of the Earth's surface... It also proved that socialism could be built in one country, and a fairly backward one."
Trotsky. Named twice, and the second is the giveaway. Explaining Ho's thinking about negotiating with France in 1946, Kobelev reaches for Brest-Litovsk as the precedent: "All counter-revolutionary forces from the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries down to the most reactionary of reactionaries were dead set against such a treaty. And they had an ally in Trotsky and the so-called Left Communists... This provocational policy was skilfully camouflaged with ultra-left rhetoric."
This is not analysis. It is the formulation of the History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course of 1938, reproduced without adjustment fifty-one years later. It is also false in a way that requires no Trotskyist commitment to see: Trotsky headed the Soviet delegation at Brest under a policy adopted by the Central Committee, the Left Communists were a faction of Bolsheviks led by Bukharin, and describing either as allies of "the most reactionary of reactionaries" is the language of the show trials rather than of the events. Anyone wanting the documentary record can consult the Central Committee minutes for January–February 1918, which have been published in English for decades and show a real and open disagreement among Bolsheviks about a genuinely appalling choice.
The Vietnamese Trotskyists. Here the book fails its sharpest test, and it fails it twice.
In the 1930s Saigon was the one place in the world where Trotskyism was a mass force. The Struggle group — La Lutte — around Ta Thu Thau, Phan Van Hum and Tran Van Thach, together with the League of International Communists, topped the poll in Saigon municipal elections and had a serious base among the city's workers. The Communists collaborated with them in the La Lutte front until Moscow's Popular Front line made that impossible.
Kobelev records the break, and does it by quoting Ho directly. Instructing his couriers before they left Moscow in 1936, Ho lists three points, of which the second is: "The Trotskyites have betrayed their reactionary essence everywhere, and in Vietnam as well. Our Party must dissociate itself from them most resolutely. There must be no compromises."
Then, in the account of the August Revolution in Saigon in 1945, the Struggle group reappears exactly once, in a single clause, as part of the reactionary bloc: the counter-revolutionary forces, we are told, pinned their hopes on a front that included "apart from numerous pro-Japanese parties, a strong Trotskyite group that called itself The Struggle, the Kaodai sect and the Hoahao sect."
Note the amalgam — the technique is the point. Pro-Japanese parties, the Trotskyists and two armed religious sects are placed in one list so that the middle term takes its colouring from the others. And note what is not said. Ta Thu Thau is not named anywhere in this book. Neither is Phan Van Hum, nor Tran Van Thach, nor Ngo Van. What happened to them is not mentioned either: in September 1945, in the weeks Kobelev is describing, the Viet Minh security services hunted down and killed the leaders of the Vietnamese Trotskyist movement. Ta Thu Thau was seized at Quang Ngai and shot. He had spent much of the previous decade in French prisons. Kobelev's book, which is scrupulous in recording every Communist martyred by the French — Tran Phu, Le Hong Son, the schoolboy Ly Tu Trong going to the guillotine singing the Internationale, and it is right to record them — has nothing whatever to say about the revolutionaries killed by the revolution.
That silence is the finding, and it is not a small one. It is the difference between a biography and a hagiography.
The book's narrative ends at the Fourth Party Congress of December 1976, and the chronology appended as "Milestones in Ho Chi Minh's Life" stops at Ho's death in 1969. There is therefore nothing on the Chinese invasion of February 1979, nothing on the boat people, and nothing on the decade-long Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia that was still going on as Progress printed this translation. Cambodia enters the final paragraphs only as a triumph — "the victory of the people's revolution in Kampuchea which put an end to the brutal Pol Pot regime" — followed by a sentence whose subject is left unnamed: "Enemies have tried at different times to wreck the alliance, but in vain." The enemy is China, and a reader who does not already know that will not learn it here. Companion volumes in this series, particularly Kampuchea: From Tragedy to Rebirth (1979), show what the argument looked like when Moscow was willing to make it openly.
One detail crystallises the book's alignment. In 105,000 words there is exactly one cult of personality, and it is not Stalin's: writing of Ho's caution about his own image, Kobelev notes that "He condemned the ugly forms of the Mao Zedong personality cult."
A great deal, and the reader should be told so plainly.
The Paris chapters are the best in the book and remain worth having. Kobelev reconstructs Nguyen Ai Quoc's life in the 17th arrondissement — the unheated room, the brick warmed in the landlady's fire and carried upstairs wrapped in newspaper — and his political education among Marcel Cachin, Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Gaston Monmousseau and Jean Longuet. He quotes at length from Nguyen's own journalism, including a fine piece for L'Humanité contrasting l'Étoile, Batignolles and Épinette as rungs of the social ladder. He follows the argument at the Tours congress of December 1920 carefully enough to show what actually drew a colonial subject to the Third International: not doctrine but clause 8 of the twenty-one conditions, quoted here in full, obliging member parties to support liberation movements in the colonies "by deed rather than word".
The Comintern chapters are similarly useful, and on one point genuinely creditable. Kobelev reports without embarrassment that at the Fifth Congress in 1924 Nguyen Ai Quoc attacked the French Communist Party from the platform for its colonial record — that L'Humanité had cut the words "to the colonial peoples" from a Comintern address, that an FCP section in Algeria had passed a resolution against a Comintern call to the colonial peoples to rise, that the party had never adopted a document conceding the colonies' right to secede. A Soviet popular biography that lets a Vietnamese Communist indict a fraternal European party in those terms is doing something better than propaganda.
And there is one passage that could not have appeared in 1979, though not for the reasons the 1989 date suggests. Kobelev recounts that six Vietnamese served in the International Regiment formed on Dimitrov's initiative during the defence of Moscow in 1941, that their names had been lost because Comintern Vietnamese used aliases and none appeared on the regiment's roll, and that "It was not until 1985, the year of the 40th anniversary of Victory, that Soviet and Vietnamese historians and journalists finally identified five of the six Vietnamese who had taken part in the defence of Moscow." Four died at the approaches to the city. This is real archival recovery, dated after the Russian text's own 1983 copyright, which means someone updated the manuscript at least once. That makes the untouched 1934–38 chapter a choice rather than an oversight.
Finally, on Ho himself, the book is not wrong about the essentials. He was an anti-colonial revolutionary of the first rank who spent three decades in exile, in prisons and in poverty; he built a party where none existed; he led a successful war against French and then American power. Nothing in this introduction is meant to diminish that, and a reader who wants the texture of those years — Canton, Hong Kong, Siam, the cave at Pac Bo, the Chinese prisons — will find it here in quantity.
For the Vietnamese Trotskyists the essential work is by a survivor. Ngo Van, a member of the Saigon movement who lived through the events Kobelev summarises in a clause, published his history of the period in Paris in 1995 as Viêt-nam 1920–1945: révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale. Reviewing it in International Viewpoint no. 270 (October 1995), K. Govindan set out what the book restores: that the Struggle group and the League of International Communists "exercised a real influence, particularly in Cochin China", that they organised thousands of militants and, on the colonial authorities' own records, were more popular than the Communist Party among Saigon's urban workers, and that during August 1945 The Struggle was printing a daily paper in excess of fifteen thousand copies. The same page recommends Simon Pirani's Vietnam and Trotskyism (1987) and Revolutionary History vol. 3 no. 2 (Autumn 1990), which is the English-language documentary collection on the subject.
That the current was not finished is itself on the record. International Viewpoint no. 197 (December 1990) carries an interview with Ha Cuong Nghi of the Vietnamese Trotskyist group behind Cahiers Vietnamiennes, describing four days spent in Prague among Vietnamese contract workers and students in the winter after 1989, carrying a case of documents in Vietnamese that included Khrushchev's secret speech. Fifty-four years after Ho instructed his couriers that there must be no compromises, and a year after Progress Publishers printed those words in English, the argument was still being had.
Read Kobelev for Paris, for Canton, for the Comintern corridors and for a journalist's feel for the country. Read him against himself on Moscow between 1934 and 1938, and on Saigon in 1945. The book's own copyright page tells you why the second half of that instruction is necessary.