Re-Stalinization

The party's “correction of errors” campaign, which was promised to the DRV people at the height of de-Stalinization in October of 1956, steadily lost steam in 1957 as Moscow and Beijing retreated from their more liberal policies of the previous year. The “corrections” included the rehabilitation of purged party members, the “appropriate” material compensation of “working peasants” who had had their property confiscated, and the reduction of agricultural tax levels, which had been uniformly raised during the campaign.3

The country's flagging economic situation, however, surely ruled out any sort of comprehensive policy of compensation for victims of the land reform. In January, the party leaders announced internally that “the cultivation area of rice, cotton, and other agricultural products is, in many places, less than it was in 1956.”4

Agricultural Collectivization 1958–1960

Implementing a system of collectivized agriculture in Vietnam had been a dream of Communist Party leaders since the 1930s. In those days, before these revolutionaries had seized power and carried out a war, agricultural collectivization probably appealed because it seemed morally superior and more modern than Vietnam's small-farmer system. Also, since the 1930s, collectivized agriculture had been the rural economic system of the Soviet Union, which held a mythic position in the minds of many revolutionaries.

In 1957, these original, idealistic motivations for collectivization were surely supplemented by two practical reasons that stemmed from the experiences of the past decade. First, the DRV regime's survival still depended on extracting a huge contribution from an unproductive rural economy. The difficulty of this task had tormented the party leaders throughout the war, frequently jeopardizing the military effort. The reality was that peasants would not voluntarily boost production just to serve the war effort or to build socialism. Land redistributions carried out during the years of war had done nothing to stem the decline in production. Thus, there was no practical basis on which to conclude that land reform would solve this problem.

Second, the regime still had no means of earning the quantity of money needed to achieve its ambitious economic and political goals: industrialization of the economy and military defeat of the rival regime in Saigon. Thus, the DRV was heavily dependent on Soviet-bloc aid. Because that aid could only be demanded in the name of proletarian internationalism, the DRV needed to present itself as the model student of the Soviet Union and China. This meant dutifully following in Moscow's and Beijing's footsteps. Not to undergo collectivization was to challenge the wisdom of Soviet and Chinese leaders and to question the superiority of the Soviet system.

In December 1957, the party leaders explained that “Consolidating the North and gradually constructing socialism” was one of the regime's three essential tasks. The meaning of “gradually” was not explained. At the end of 1955, the DRV leaders had invested in six “large” collective farms and ten “small” ones. These test collective farms were supposed to be carefully nurtured and generously supported so that they could succeed and generate popular excitement about collectivization. In March 1957, the party leaders held a conference devoted to assessing the results of these sixteen collective farms. In typical fashion, the leaders of the conference produced a lengthy report (forty pages), which was probably read to attendees. The report provides a window into what the party leaders had learned about collective farming in Vietnam before pushing forward aggressively with this transformation in late 1958.13

The Ministry of Agriculture had invested into these sixteen collective farms 60 percent of its development budget, a quantity that was “enough to construct two light-industry factories.” The sixteen state-run farms employed a total of 8,500 “cadres and workers.” After a year of operation, despite being generously supplied with the latest Soviet-bloc farm equipment, fourteen of the sixteen farms were operating at a loss. The two earning a profit were an orange farm and a coffee farm.

The collective-farm crop that was most likely to affect the everyday lives of Vietnamese peasants was rice. Unfortunately, despite the provision of Romanian tractors and other farm machines from the Soviet Union, debt from rice production comprised over half the total debt accumulated by the sixteen farms. According to the report, “Generally speaking, the collective farm work generated many losses for the Nation.”

The report also discussed the effect of the collective farms on both the people working in them and on the local people living in surrounding areas. “Generally speaking,” the farms had an intrigue factor. Many peasants were fascinated by the Romanian tractors and other modern farm equipment. To these local residents, working for the state farm held great appeal. As the report explained, “one easy-to-understand reason is that the collective farm is operated by the Government.” It was obvious to outsiders that, for collective farm members, their livelihood was guaranteed by the government and not dependent on what was produced in the fields. Yet the report acknowledged that “we have not yet served as a model for the people in terms of our production organization and our farming technique.” In some places, “our sloppy way of working has generated concern among our compatriots, who find our mistakes and weaknesses painful (for example, the waste of chemical fertilizer at the Thạch ngọc farm).”

From the perspective of the collective farms' productivity, there were signs of serious trouble. Though the report explained in exhaustive detail the waste that accompanied the misuse and abuse of expensive farm equipment and supplies, it still concluded that the “biggest waste is in manpower.” The report described how “serious waste and corruption” characterized the work regime of the farms:

Extremely common is wasted work, with people arriving late and leaving early. And we have used 3 million days' worth of pay on labor mobilized from people outside the collective farm. On an ordinary workday, losing only one hour of work would be unusually little. Therefore, the amount of wasted work amounts to 380,000 workdays, the equivalent of nearly 450 million Vietnamese dollars. Also, the number of non-working people in the farm is high, perhaps as much as 1,200 people during the last three months of the year. The amount of waste from this is over 100 million Vietnamese dollars during this three-month period.14

The report expressed grave concern about the extensive use of “mobilized manpower” (nhân lực huy động), which referred to non-collective-farm members who lived in the surrounding area. In parentheses next to “mobilized manpower,” the report clarified this term with the French word, “corvée,” i.e., forced labor. The extensive use of outside labor showed that the farms were not self-sufficient and were terribly inefficient, despite the DRV government's generous provision of machinery. The outside labor “did not just help the collective farm with a particular job for one day but rather did work for the farm on a daily basis.”

And finally, the report expressed concern over the way the members of the state farm were treated:

When we throw out some new work task, we do so in a great rush to open new land, to plow the earth and plant crops, but we don't think about the lives of the workers. Seize land in order to break it down—that is the initial situation in many places. Meanwhile, the workers have very little and live in cramped quarters. They work a lot and are helped little. Gradually, these workers see that we do business like the capitalists, of course not thinking about helping to improve the labor power of workers as is supposed to happen in a people's democratic regime.15

Despite these warnings about the inefficiency of collective farms, the party leaders pushed forward with collectivization. Always anxious about the degree to which Soviet and Chinese Communist policies were being imposed on the DRV people, the party leaders again attempted to frame this policy as something that the people had demanded. Thus, in December 1958, when the Politburo decided that the time to push forward with collectivization had come, the party Secretariat released a directive stating that “the masses in many places are demanding that they be organized into agricultural collectives” and that the party had to “give special attention to the consolidation and development of the collectivization movement in order to satisfy the demands of the masses . . .”16

A directive released by the party Secretariat in February of 1960, however, suggested that the collectivization movement probably was not warmly embraced in many communities:

The process of carrying out a socialist revolution and building socialism is, at the same time, a complicated, tense, and decisive process of class warfare. We want to protect our revolutionary accomplishments and guarantee the effectiveness of our socialist reform and socialist construction. Therefore, the revolutionary regime led by the working class absolutely must severely repress any action of resistance carried out by counter-revolutionary forces. That is an essential responsibility of any country's working class carrying out a revolution.17

Over the next two years (1959 and 1960), the party leaders would complete collectivization of the North. In typical fashion, the campaign required that party members write “general conclusions” about its strengths and weaknesses. Realizing that, from the perspective of agricultural productivity at least, the farms were not yet a success, the party leaders feared an honest appraisal. Thus, they released a “Draft Proposal for Guiding the Content of General Conclusions on the Movement to Mobilize Agricultural Collectivization Combined with the Completion of Democratic Reforms in Mountainous Areas.”18

What the party leaders wanted to avoid was having the policy of collectivization itself become a topic of discussion in these “general conclusions.” Therefore, while the “Draft” instructed cadres to report on the “results and remaining tasks” of the movement, the specific directions about how these were to be reported strongly suggested that the party's policies were not up for discussion. Any bad results needed to be framed as a problem with “implementation.” The Draft put forward ten different work areas to be assessed, every one of which, in one way or another, provided a ready-made scapegoat for poor results.

The first category was “policy education and ideological mobilization,” for which the party leaders wanted local cadres to “assess and review the class consciousness and socialist consciousness of cadres, Party members, and the masses.” In other words, poor collective farm results could stem from a lack of class consciousness and socialist consciousness on the part of those involved. The second category was “Agricultural Collectivization.” The VWP leaders wanted the report to discuss “strengths and weaknesses in the implementation of policies . . .” The fourth category was the “consolidation and development of base organizations and the training of backbone cadres.” The fifth category, “boosting production,” called for a discussion of the “leadership of production.” The sixth category, “Order and Security, the Repression of Reactionary Saboteurs” called for a discussion of “implementation of the Central Committee’s [above-mentioned] Directive 186-CT/CTW, of 17/2/1960.”

The end of the directive reminded party members that the General Conclusions were to focus on “a location's general leadership and command.” These were divided into two elements: (1) “understanding of the Central Committee's policies” and “how that understanding was manifest in the implementation of those policies,” and (2) “The organization of implementation.”19 The entire exercise was carefully constructed to ensure that the results of collectivization were not the measure of the policy itself.

Completing the Totalitarian State

At some point between 1958 and 1960, the party's leadership foursome of Thành, Trường Chinh, Phạm Văn Đồng, and Võ Nguyên Giáp came apart and lost their hold on power. Thành gradually retreated into semiretirement. Trường Chinh had not yet been able to recover his status after having been compelled to take most of the blame for the land reform. Phạm Văn Đồng remained prime minister, but his influence had diminished. As for Võ Nguyên Giáp, he remained secretary of defense, but his influence also declined as he increasingly came under attack from the party's new leader, Lê Duẩn. According to historian Liên-Hằng Nguyễn, Duẩn was a man of “focus, administrative skill, and iron will.” He would inherit and preserve the Hồ Chí Minh personality cult as a mobilization tool for the regime.20

Duẩn would do the same with the old Politburo's collectivization project. By the end of 1960, he had placed roughly 85 percent of the DRV's rural population into 40,422 collective farms. As the Vietnamese scholar Thái Duy explains, “in addition to the method of mobilizing through persuasion, in many places, [cadres] used coercion, forcing peasants into collective farms.” The farms were based on the principle of “collectivized means of production and labor, centralized management, and unified distribution.” They would be a defining feature of Duẩn's twenty-six-year reign.21

How did peasants gain access to the food produced by the collective farm? After the DRV state had taken its required amount, the collective farm's remaining produce was distributed to members according to the principle of “work days.” Collective farm managers calculated a “work day” by assigning “points” to the different tasks carried out on the farm. Ten points equaled a “work day.” Each task, such as plowing, planting, and harvesting the collective crop, had certain criteria for measuring its completeness. If the manager of the collective farm determined that a farm member had completed a task according to standard, the member would receive a predetermined number of points.

As in the Soviet Union and China, collective farm members were allowed to keep for themselves roughly 5 percent of their original land. This small piece could be worked privately as in the past, and its yield was nontaxable. These family plots became vital to survival as the collective farm's inefficiencies and inequities steadily reduced productivity. For example, when pulling up rice seedlings for the “family plot,” not a single stalk would be broken. When completing this task for the collective farm, such care was not necessary because work points were calculated by the pile. Whether the seedlings in that pile had been carelessly snapped in half and were thus useless was not part of the calculation.

Meanwhile, the collective farm officials held all the power in a village. They allotted themselves work points for attending meetings, studying, or visiting fields. As Thái Duy explains:

Laboring members of the collective lost the right to ownership and independence in production. Meanwhile, the power of cadres who held official positions in the collective was tremendous. They determined how many “work points” members earned and decided how each grain of rice would be divided among the community. Without the signature of a local official, regular members of the collective and their children could not enter the Party, mass organizations, schools, or educational institutions. Without the collective farm official's signature, members could not leave the village to carry out work. And this was a weakness of these farms that cadres of poor character used to pressure and exploit the people.22

During the period from 1961 to 1965, DRV collective farms opened up about 200,000 hectares of new land, but agricultural productivity fell dramatically enough to offset this expansion. The cost of production began to rise, and the effectiveness of state investments steadily declined. According to official statistics, the average amount of rice distributed each month to collective-farm families in 1961 was twenty-four kilograms. By 1964, that amount had fallen to an average of fourteen kilograms.23 Mobilization for war surely played a role.

Despite the failure of these collective farms from the perspective of productivity, the party leaders pushed forward with the system. Economics was not the only motivation. Pride was a factor. The party leaders had staked their reputations on the superiority of the socialist system. To acknowledge that the collectivized economy was a failure was to acknowledge that three decades of revolutionary belief, often expressed in a tone of shrill contempt for doubters, had been misguided. To abandon collective farms was to abandon the socialist dream.

A second factor was the desperate need for Socialist-bloc military, financial, and moral support, particularly from the Soviet Union and China. In the Soviet case, this aid could only be demanded on the grounds of proletarian internationalism. With Mao, DRV leaders could tout the benefits of a strong socialist ally on his southern border, acting as a buffer against capitalist-bloc encroachment. The DRV leaders could also offer Mao prestige by following his revolutionary blueprint, helping to bolster his claims to be the leader of the Communist bloc. For the DRV leaders, the need for Soviet and Chinese support was an enormous disincentive to deviate from a sacred Socialist-bloc policy such as economic collectivization.

A third factor was the leverage that collective farms afforded the DRV state over the North Vietnamese people. The virtual elimination of private property in the countryside weakened people's position vis-à-vis the state, making resistance to government policies more difficult. The lack of private property also raised the stakes for officials at all levels. There was no viable private economic sector to join if a person were expelled from officialdom, making the cost of losing an administrative position a steep one.

Some of the leverage that the state gained from collectivization came as an indirect byproduct of measures needed to keep the collective farms afloat. For example, the presence of free markets where agricultural goods could be exchanged at actual value would always tempt peasants and officials to bypass the state system. To ensure that the DRV state was the primary buyer and distributer of agricultural products, the regime had to eliminate existing markets and stop new ones from emerging. Small local markets for exchange, often by barter, between members of the community, were acceptable. But larger markets that could compete with the state were not. To prevent such markets from emerging, the DRV regime constructed hundreds of inspection stations along major roads. These functioned to interdict peasants attempting to transport and sell large quantities of agricultural products in another region.24

The viability of collective farms also depended on people remaining in their villages to work their local farm, especially during the key periods of sowing and harvesting. If people were able to move freely from one location to another, the labor needed for the local farm would be uncertain. Thus, local party leaders were able to use their control over the collective farm food supply (and the threat of its withdrawal) to limit people's movement.

These ways in which the DRV state intervened in people's lives to protect the socialist economy also benefited the regime's mobilization of human and material resources for war. Indeed, many of the above measures taken to ensure the survival of collective farms had already been put in place to facilitate the DRV's war effort against the French and the State of Vietnam. These include such things as the implementation of an internal passport system (hộ khẩu), attempts to prevent peasants from selling agricultural goods to buyers other than the DRV state, efforts to take inventory of the DRV food supply available for the war effort, and various campaigns to put agricultural production in the hands of local officials. The need to protect and nurture the collective economy, built primarily during a time of peace, provided a moral and ideological justification for maintaining these wartime measures of social and economic control.

One of the great strengths of DRV leaders such as Thành, Chinh, and Duẩn was realism about collectivization's appeal to peasants. In mobilizing support among Southern peasants for the war effort against the Diệm regime, Duẩn followed Thành's lead by instructing party cadres to be discreet about the socialist future. As a former party cadre in the South explained to the scholar Jeffrey Race:

In this situation, the communists are very clever. They never propagandize communism, which teaches that the land must be collectivized. If they did, how would the peasantry ever listen to them? Instead, they say: “the peasants are the main force of the revolution”; if they follow the Party, they will become masters of the countryside and owners of their land, and that scratches the peasants right where they itch. But if the Party were to say: in the future, you will be a laborer, your land will be collectivized, you will no longer own any farm animals or buildings, but will become a tenant farmer for the Party or the socialist state—if the Party were to say that, the peasants would not heed them. Thus, the peasants never think of the distant future of communism. Indeed, the Party cadres are instructed never to mention these things because, according to the teaching of Lenin, the peasant is the greatest bourgeois of all: he thinks only of himself. Say one word about collectivism, and he is already against you. This is a truth the Party has studied and learned to exploit.25

Eventually, the truth of the “distant future” was revealed in the South as it had been in the North. After the DRV's 1975 victory, would the economic policies of the victorious but poverty-stricken North be implemented in the defeated but wealthier South?

The pressures to do so were enormous. Any hesitation to implement socialist transformation in the South risked tacitly acknowledging the failure of these policies in the North and offending the Soviet Union—the party's most important ally at this time. Second, the party leaders did not yet know any other way to rule. How could the Northern collective economy survive if there were markets and private enterprises in the South? How could the party seize desperately needed Southern rice if the region's peasants were able to sell their produce in markets that actually paid for it? Thus, soon after the party's 1975 victory, Duẩn sanctioned attacks on the capitalist economy. Within a few years, the Southern economy was in shambles, suffering from the same maladies (inefficiency, corruption, waste, lack of productivity, etc.) that plagued the North.

“Đổi mới” (1986) and the Dismantling of the Totalitarian State

By the early 1980s, the effort required to preserve the socialist economy was sapping the revolutionary vigor of Vietnam's aging party leaders. As the scholar Benedict Kerkvliet shows, the will of Vietnamese peasants to push back against and undermine the party's project of collective agriculture seems to have eroded the resolve of Lê Duẩn and the Politburo.26 These leaders ruled a country beset by food crises, the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of “boat people,” rampant inflation, widespread corruption, and many other serious challenges. Calls for reform began to grow and, indeed, more as a result of lapses in revolutionary vigilance than conscious policy, the reform process had already begun.27

One cautious proponent of change was Trường Chinh. In 1981, Duẩn and Thọ had orchestrated for him to leave behind his position as National Assembly Standing Committee Chairman and assume the more influential position of National Chairman. In 1985, Duẩn's failing health forced him to withdraw from many of his leadership duties as party general secretary. The Politburo nominated the reform-minded Chinh (not Lê Đức Thọ) to serve as the de facto party leader in Duẩn's absence.

In July 1986, Duẩn died of heart disease and Chinh, now 79 years old, was officially proclaimed general secretary. It must have been an emotional moment for him, returning to the position that he had been forced to abandon in disgrace thirty years earlier. Chinh would serve as general secretary for the remainder of the year until the party's Sixth Congress (held in December 1986). At that point, Chinh, Phạm Văn Đồng, and Lê Đức Thọ retired from official politics, serving as “advisors” to a new crop of younger party leaders who would continue Chinh's reform agenda.

During his brief return as general secretary, Chinh strongly promoted the reforms that he believed vital to the health of the country and to the survival of the party's regime. Justifying these reforms, which would soon be given the general name, Đổi mới (New Change), required summarizing the negative phenomena that threatened the country. This Chinh did in several policy documents produced during the months leading up to the Sixth Party Congress. The terms that Chinh and other party leaders used frequently to describe the ills of Vietnam's government and economic system were “bureaucratic centralism” (tập trung quan liêu) and “subsidization” (bao cấp). Both terms were products of the socialist system.

“Bureaucratic centralism” referred to the concentration of all economic decision-making in the hands of central state offices. The state owned and managed all legal business enterprises in the country. In this “command economy,” a company's fundamental strategic decisions were determined by officials in high-level government offices. Thus, the on-the-scene manager of a company had little power to determine such basic things as how much raw material would be obtained for production, how many goods would be produced, the price at which goods would be sold, how many employees would be hired, and what salaries they would be paid. “Bureaucratic centralism” meant that local factory managers were not accountable for the quality of the goods that their factories produced. And the men and women in the government's high-level planning offices in Hanoi were not responsible for the decisions that they imposed on factories around the country.

Trường Chinh's second term, “subsidization,” referred to the government's policy of setting the price of consumer goods lower than the actual market price. As happened in the Soviet Union and in other socialist countries, the policy of subsidizing essential goods meant that demand far exceeded supply. Because prices were often set below the level needed to meet the costs of production, many companies operated in a constant state of insolvency. As a result, they needed to be propped up (or subsidized) by the government. A company whose existence did not depend on earning a profit had little economic incentive to operate efficiently or to produce competitive products. An important overarching goal of the “subsidy system” was the regime's management of the population's consumption habits in an environment of chronic scarcity and unyielding inflation.

As Chinh observed, “over the past five years, production has gone almost nowhere and labor productivity has declined while the cost of production has unceasingly grown—the economy and society grow more unstable by the day.”28 Indeed, inflation during 1986 grew to over 700 percent. In another speech, Chinh explained some of the broad causes of Vietnam's problems:

We have made mistakes due to “leftist infantilism,” idealism, and to the contravention of the objective laws of socio-economic development. These mistakes were manifested in the [emphasis given to] developing heavy industry on a large scale beyond our practical capacity . . . [maintaining] the bureaucratically centralized mechanism of economic management based on state subsidies with a huge superstructure which overburdens the infrastructure. As a result, we relied mostly on foreign aid for our subsistence.

Another cause of the country's problems was corruption. Chinh noted the prevalence of officials who “make shady arrangements, steal goods, form nefarious partnerships, practice bribery, and abuse socialist property.” According to Chinh, what was “even more serious” was the tendency of officials to “use their power to repress and silence whistleblowers.”29 It was the “legitimate right of citizens to voice criticisms in newspapers,” he stated, though, in an obvious qualification, remarked that this right needed to be “implemented in an orderly way.” Chinh lamented the lawlessness of society, but he avoided suggesting that the law be equally binding on party and nonparty members: “every Party member is equal before the Party's law; every citizen is equal before the law.”30

Within a narrative framework that still espoused the cause of socialism, Chinh acknowledged that the regime would now “use selected parts of the private capitalist economy.” While calling for the constant strengthening of the “collective economy,” Chinh stated that the party now “recognizes the role of petit-bourgeois production and the private capitalist economy, at a limited level for a relatively long time.” Ultimately, “bureaucratic centralism” and “subsidization” were features of a totalitarian state, which is to say a state constructed to exert the maximum possible control (total control being impossible) over a nation's economic, political, and social life. Chinh repeatedly called for the elimination of these two negative features but, to the disappointment of many Vietnamese intellectuals then and today, insisted on maintaining the party dictatorship.

After 1986, the party pushed forward with the dismantling of Vietnam's collective economy in the countryside. The boost that this provided to agricultural production was immediate and enormous. In the early 1980s, Vietnam had been forced to borrow 770,000 tons of rice and grain from the Soviet Union to feed a population teetering on the brink of famine. By the early 1990s, Vietnam's agricultural production had increased so dramatically that the country had become the world's third largest rice exporter. While not without bumps along the way, Vietnam's economic transformation since 1986 has been spectacular.

The dismantling of collective farms ultimately meant the dismantling of the party's totalitarian state and its reestablishment as a merely authoritarian one. Instead of a state focused on mobilizing its citizens for “total war,” Vietnam's state in recent decades has focused on economic development and regime preservation. In the eyes of Vietnam's party leaders, that second focus continues to require that a few features of the old totalitarian state be maintained—notably, the Hồ Chí Minh personality cult, state ownership of all public media, and tight party control over ostensibly democratic institutions.