Hallmarks of President Ho Chi Minh’s journey for national salvation

President Ho Chi Minh

The first great turning point was Uncle Ho’s departure in the summer of 1911, when he was 21 years old. On June 5, 1911, he left the nation on the ship, Admiral Latouche Treville using the name Van Ba and began to earn his living by working at various jobs, together with self education and exploration of realities. He gradually took part in the struggles of workers and people in places he visited.

June 5, 1911 was an especially significant milestone, not only in the life of a person but also the history of a nation. At that time, Nguyen Tat Thanh himself neither understood that he was shouldering a great national historical task nor knew that on that day an extremely sacred mission had been assigned to him.

History affirmed that after many years, the young man had grown up from being Nguyen Tat Thanh to become known as Nguyen Ai Quoc, and from a person seeking pathways for national salvation to a person guiding the entire nation.

France was the first country that Nguyen Tat Thanh wanted to visit on his long journey. And this was also the dream of Nguyen Tat Thanh when he was young. “When I was 13 years old, it was the first time I heard, “Free France”, “equality”, and “humanity”. I really wanted to get acquainted with the French civilization and to explore what was hidden behind these words.”

Nguyen Tat Thanh wanted to explore the truths about France and its colonialism which was ruling Vietnam. This was a wise choice and a direction which was different from his predecessor revolutionaries, reflecting the unique creativity in Nguyen Tat Thanh’s thoughts and activities.

After France, Nguyen Tat Thanh continued his journey, visiting other continents in the world with keen observation, exploration and experiments. Wherever he set foot, he also witnessed the similarly miserable lives of people living in colonial countries and the barbarous crimes committed by colonialism.

Due to the exploration of French colonialism, he better understood colonialism in general and he shared his sympathy with the working class and people who were exploited and oppressed in those nations.

Following the early years of his journey, Nguyen Tat Thanh discovered the pathway for national salvation. This was the second great turning point in his life which was attached to taking leave of the UK, for France.

By the end of 1917, Nguyen Tat Thanh returned to France from the UK to become directly involved in the overseas Vietnamese and French workers’ movements. Nguyen Tat Thanh actually joined in the fight, with his involvement in the movements of organizations and broad public struggles. He participated in diversified political, socio-cultural, scientific and artistic activities and various organizations, particularly the French Socialist Party.

In June, 1919, Nguyen Ai Quoc put forward an eight-point list of demands of the Vietnamese people in front of the Versailles Conference. The demands reflected the Vietnamese people’s desire and had a strong impact on Vietnamese people in the country and abroad. A Vietnamese citizen called Nguyen Ai Quoc was courageous enough to put forward Vietnam’s political issues to the world, asking for practical and basic legitimate rights for Vietnam.

This was a new sign of the Vietnamese people’s struggles on the way to national independence and from then on Nguyen Ai Quoc really began his mission as the Vietnamese people’s pioneer soldier in the fight against French colonialism, with one French secret agent recognizing his qualities: “The slim young man full of vitality may be a person to put an end to our dominance in Indochina”.

Nguyen Ai Quoc read the first draft of theses on national and colonial issues written by V.I. Lenin in June, 1920 and published in the humanitarian newspaper, an organ of the French Socialist Party, on July 16-17, 1920. The headline of the article relating to the colonial issue immediately attracted Nguyen Ai Quoc’s attention.

In this document, V.I. Lenin clearly stated: “It is a must to distinguish between the interests of the oppressed and exploited class and oppressed people who are not entitled to enjoy the right of equality, and the nation that applies oppression and carries out exploitation to strike the trick in the bourgeois democratic manner that is covering the overwhelming majority of people on earth who are enslaved by a small minority of advanced and very rich bourgeois nations, in terms of colonies and finance”.

During the time between seeking and finding the pathway to salvage the nation, Nguyen Ai Quoc experienced almost 10 years of work, study and struggle, with extraordinary perseverance and a creative scientific spirit. Nguyen Ai Quoc came from patriotism to Leninism, the path to liberate the nation that he found was precisely the revolutionary path under Lenin’s revolutionary theory.

Thanks to Lenin’s thesis, Nguyen Ai Quoc found a basic orientation and pathway for national liberation revolutionary movement, which included Vietnam’s own revolution. That belief was an ideological foundation for Nguyen Ai Quoc to steadily follow a strict revolutionary road of Leninism and have the determination to follow Lenin’s great road.

From then on, the crisis of the revolutionary road in Vietnam’s revolutionary history was over. The Leninism that Nguyen Ai Quoc received was considered a guiding star to lead the way to the success of Vietnam’s revolution.

The third great turning point of the journey was the time when Nguyen Ai Quoc became involved in founding the French Communist Party.

When the French Socialist Party convened the 18th Congress in Tour city at the end of 1920, Nguyen Ai Quoc attended the congress as the sole official delegate of Indochina’s colonial nations and joined the majority of delegates at the conference to vote for admission to International III (Communist International) and also became involved in founding the French Communist Party. The event marked the completion of this phase of his journey to salvage the nation – the road to proletarian revolution.

Nguyen Ai Quoc became the first Vietnamese communist, marking a decisive evolution in his ideological awareness and political stance, from an advanced patriotic person to a socialist soldier. Forty years later he reviewed the event and wrote: “From the very beginning, studying the glorious revolutionary traditions and being trained in the real heroic struggle of workers and the French Communist Party, I myself have found the truth of Marxism-Leninism and turned from a progressive patriot to a socialist soldier”.

By Thuy Dung