Nguyen Ai Quoc and the historic "meeting"

In late 1923 and early 1924, Nguyen Ai Quoc traveled to the Soviet Union - the land of the great Lenin. When he arrived in the Soviet Union, he could not meet Lenin because he had passed away. The Truth newspaper on January 27, 1924 published an article by Nguyen Ai Quoc titled “Lenin and the Colonial Peoples”.

In this article, Nguyen Ai Quoc expressed his utmost respect for Lenin: “When he was alive, he was our father, teacher, comrade and advisor. Today, he is the bright star guiding us to the socialist revolution.”

Comrade Nguyen Ai Quoc (second from right) attended the international solidarity congress in the Soviet Union in 1923.

The first "meeting"

In fact, Nguyen Ai Quoc had “met” Lenin since 1920 after he read Lenin’s “First Draft of Theses on the National and Colonial Questions”. According to the book “Ho Chi Minh - Events”, after July 17, 1920, Nguyen Ai Quoc read this work published in the newspaper L'Humanité (ie Nhan Dao newspaper) published on July 16 and 17, 1920.

Later, he once recounted this important event: “Lenin's thesis made me so moved, excited, enlightened, and confident! I was so happy that I cried. Sitting alone in my room, I spoke loudly, as if speaking before a large crowd: My tortured and suffering compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation! From then on, I completely believed in Lenin, in the Third International.”

Lenin's work addressed the issues that he was eager to learn about and helped him see clearly the direction of the people of the colonies. In the article "The Path That Led Me to Leninism" (1960), he wrote: "What I wanted to know most of all - and what was not discussed at the meeting - was: Which international then defends the people of the colonies?...

Several comrades answered: “That is the Third International, not the Second International. And one comrade gave me Lenin’s Theses on the National and Colonial Questions published in the newspaper L’Humanité.” Since reading this work of Lenin, in meetings, he strongly responded to the criticisms against Lenin with the only argument and reasoning: “If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not defend the colonial peoples, what kind of revolution are you doing?”

Following Lenin's path

In December 1920, the 18th Congress of the French Socialist Party met in the city of Tours, with 370 delegates and guests attending, including 285 delegates representing 89 party chapters from all of France and French colonies. Nguyen Ai Quoc was the only native elected as a delegate to the congress.

At this congress, Nguyen Ai Quoc officially sat in the "left" faction, with Paul Vaillant-Couturier (who shortly after, together with Nguyen Ai Quoc and a number of comrades, founded the French Communist Party) on one side and comrade Marcel Cachin, a famous French political and cultural activist and later a member of the Politburo of the French Communist Party, on the other side.

Marcel Cachin was the one who introduced Nguyen Ai Quoc to the French Socialist Party. When Marcel Cachin was the Director of the Nhan Dao newspaper, he encouraged and supported Nguyen Ai Quoc to write articles for this newspaper. Nhan Dao was also a newspaper that Lenin still read with pleasure.

Comrade Nguyen Ai Quoc (third from left, seated row) with some delegates attending the 5th Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, Russia, in 1924.

At this congress, Nguyen Ai Quoc voted in favor of Lenin's Third International. After the vote, comrade Rose, the congress's shorthand recorder, asked Nguyen Ai Quoc: "Why did you vote for the Third International?"

Nguyen Ai Quoc replied: “I understand one thing clearly, the Third International pays great attention to solving the problem of colonial liberation… Freedom for my compatriots, independence for my Fatherland, that is all I want, that is all I understand.”

On December 30, 1920, Nguyen Ai Quoc and those who advocated joining the Third International announced the establishment of the French Section of the Communist International. From this moment on, Nguyen Ai Quoc became a communist and the first communist of the Vietnamese people. It was thanks to Lenin's doctrine that Nguyen Ai Quoc found the path to fight for independence for the Vietnamese people, a task that his predecessors, despite their great patriotism and courage, had not yet completed.

The book “Stories about President Ho’s life and activities” said that when he arrived in Leningrad that year, after a while, two friends, Paul Vaillant-Couturier and Marcel Cachin, came to “recognize” Nguyen Ai Quoc and took him back to Moscow. French historian Charles Fourniau commented: “Nguyen Ai Quoc made an important contribution to the formation of the tradition of anti-colonialism, a tradition that brought glory to the French Communist Party...

So, surely, the founder of the Indochinese Communist Party and leader of the Vietnamese national liberation movement must be considered one of the teachers of the French Communist Party on colonial issues".

Remember Lenin

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, when patriotic movements broke out and failed, Nguyen Tat Thanh left to find a way to save the country for the Vietnamese people. Recalling this event, he later wrote: “I want to go abroad, see France and other countries. After examining how they do it, I will return to help our people”. Since 1920, when encountering Leninism, the question of which path to save the country Vietnam should follow was answered, that was the path of the Russian October Revolution, the revolutionary path of Lenin.

Absorbing Marxism-Leninism, Nguyen Ai Quoc promoted the establishment of a working class political party, preparing the theoretical and organizational premises for the birth of the Party. In the work "The Revolutionary Path" written in 1927 to train the first class of revolutionaries in Guangzhou, China, Nguyen Ai Quoc affirmed: "In the world today, only the Russian revolution has succeeded and succeeded completely, meaning that the people enjoy true happiness, freedom and equality, not the false freedom and equality that French imperialism boasted about in Annam.

The Russian Revolution drove out the king, capitalists, and landlords, then made efforts to help workers, peasants, and oppressed people in the colonies make revolutions to overthrow all imperialism and capitalism in the world.

The Russian Revolution taught us that, if we want the revolution to succeed, we must have the people (workers and peasants) as the foundation, we must have a strong party, we must be steadfast, we must sacrifice, we must be united. In short, we must follow Leninism.

As a nation with the tradition and morality of "Remembering the person who planted the tree when eating the fruit", 31 years after Lenin's death, Lenin's Office and Residence Museum officially opened and the first foreigner to visit the Museum was the President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam - Ho Chi Minh.

On the first page of the Museum's Impressions Book, President Ho Chi Minh wrote: "Lenin, the great teacher of the proletarian revolution. He was also a man of high morality, teaching us to practice thrift, integrity, and uprightness. Lenin's spirit is eternal." June 13, 1955, Ho Chi Minh.

Vu Trung Kien

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