Agrarian Reforms

Agrarian Reforms

by Van Nguyen



      The Background

      The Russian Experience--Collectivization

 Liberation in the economy brought about a turnabout in the Soviet Union. By 1927, both industrial and agricultural productions were nearly back to pre-war levels. The regime in these years was undergoing great uncertainty of its leadership. This already had been apparent before Lenin died in 1924, but the removal of a man whose acknowledged ascendancy had kept forces within it in balance opened a period of evolution and debate in the Bolshevik leadership. It was not about the centralized autocratic nature of the regime which had emerged from the 1917 revolution, for one of the protagonists considered that political liberalization was conceivable or that the use of secret police and the party’s dictatorship could be suspended within a world of hostile capitalist states. But they could disagree about economic policy and tactics and personal rivalry sometimes gave extra edge to this.

 Broadly speaking, two viewpoints emerged. One emphasized that the revolution depended on the good will of the mass of Russians, the peasants, they had first been allowed to take the land authorized by attempts to feed the cities at their expense, then recon ciliated again by the liberalization of the economy and what was known as “NEP,” the New Economic Policy which Lenin had approved as an expedient. Under it, the peasants had been able to make profits for themselves and had begun to grow more food and sell it to the cities. The other viewpoint showed the same facts in a longer prospective. To conciliate the peasants who would slow down industrialization, which Russia needed to survive in a hostile world, the party’s proper course, which argued against those who took this view, promoted the theory that somewhat relies upon the revolutionary militants of the cities and to exploit the still-non Bolshevized peasants in their interest while pressing on with industrialization and the production of revolution abroad.

The Communist under Trotsky took this view. What happened was roughly that Trotsky was shouldered aside, but his view prevailed. From the intricate politics of the party there emerged eventually the ascendancy of a number of its bureaucracy, Joseph Stalin, a man far less attractive intellectually than either Lenin or Trotsky, equally ruthless, and of greater historical importance,  Gradually arming himself with a power which he used against former colleagues and Bolsheviks as willingly as against his enemies, he carried out the real Russian revolution to which the Bolshevik seizure of power had paved the way and created the a new elite on which a new Russia was to be based. For him, industrialization was paramount. The road to it  lay through finding a way for forcing the peasant to pay for it by supplying the grain he would rather have  eaten if not offered a good profit. Two five-year plans’ carried out industrialization program from 1926 onwards, and their roots lay in the collectivization of agriculture. The Party now, for the first time, conquered the countryside. In a new civil war, millions of peasants were killed on transported communes, and grain levies brought back famine. But the towns were fed, through the police apparatus kept consumption down to the minimum. There was a fall in real wages. By 1937, 80 per cent of Russian industrial output came from the plant built since 1928. Russia was again a great power and the effects of this alone would assure Stalin a place in history.

The price in suffering was enormous. The enforcement of collectivization was only made possible by brutality on a scale far greater than anything else under the tsars and it made Russia a totalitarian state far more effective than the autocracy had been. Stalin, though himself a Georgian, looks a Russian figure, a despot whose ruthlessness of power is anticipated by an Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. He was also a somewhat paradoxical claimant to Marxist orthodoxy, which taught that the economic structure of society determined politics. Stalin precisely invented this; he demonstrated if the will to use political power there, the economic structure could be revolutionized by force (J. M. Roberts, History of the World. Oxford University Press. New York, pp. 226-27).   

    

Agrarian Reforms in Vietnam

 As soon as the Communist Party of Indochina was founded (1930), it proclaimed its fundamental tasks as to abolish feudalism and French imperialism and to gain full independence. In support of theses, the Party carried out such slogans as “to requisition all lands belonging to foreign and local landowners and to the Church and to give them to middle and poor peasants. Campaigns for land reforms were practically carried out in the early years of the 1950’s, not only expropriating the lands and properties of the exploiting classes but also annihilating traditional religious beliefs, abolishing old values, and establishing a new social order instituted on codes of behavior determined through systems of party cells and its affiliated organizations throughout the county. In 1939, The Communist Party of Indochina, in seeking support from national parties and soothing all social layers in the country, encouraged the confiscation of the possessions of the French imperialists and Vietnamese traitors, the reduction of rents and rates of interest, and the redistribution of communal lands to the peasants (Tran Phuong, The Land Reform 19651965:187-168).

       Agrarian Reforms in North Vietnam

General Le Thiet Hung of the People’s Army reported in the magazine Cuu Chien Binh (Veteran Fighters) in September 1991 that it was Ho Chi Minh who initiated and executed the campaigns for crimes revelations and denunciations of landlords in the beginning of kind reforms of 1953-56. He applied all the experiences he had learned from Stalin during his stay in the Soviet Union and the maneuvers for crimes revelations and denunciations from Mao in Hunan during the years 1924-1927 when he served as a secret agent for China. The consequences were disastrous. In the provinces in the Red River Delta, the masses revolted against the local administrations. In the Center, the Party leadership had to rely on the army to quench the uprising of the peasantry. During November 1956, the Party press conceded that a popular uprising took place in the Quynh Luu Distract, Nghe An Province. Approximately 20,000 peasants armed with only coarse farm implement and staffs fought against the 315 Division. Western observers claimed that about 1,000 peasants were killed or wounded between November 10 and 20, 1956. Seven thousand people were arrested and deported. Before that, on November 1, 1956, the government announced the release of 12,000 people from prison and labor camps. It is generally believed that between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed, and 50,000 to 100,000 were deported and imprisoned.

.The government nationalized all agricultural land and vested ownership rights in the land taken from “reactionary “landlords in agricultural communes, which, in principle, it could relocate land for families who needed most. This appeared to be a sensible marriage Communist orthodoxy with colonial traditions. However, doing the land reform campaign 1953-1956, a separate organization was established to appropriate and redistribute the land of the “landlords” and “rich peasants” categories of population whose definition, to a considerable extent, dependent on the whims and wishes of local party officials. This campaign caused major problems in rural areas and was not successful in effacing inequalities in access to land and other assets in rural areas. What the agrarian reforms failed to accomplish was to satisfy the need for land. It was only able to give 1.5 million landless and poor peasant’s family’s slightly more than one acre each. These gifts were not enough to turn the poor peasants into enthusiastic supporters of the regime. On the contrary, the injustices and atrocities produced widespread resentment, unrest, and eventually rebellion (Joseph Buttinger. The Smaller Dragon, 1968:428).

By sheer energy, persistence, and ruthlessness, the Labor Party, by successive programs of agrarian reforms, was successful in eliminating the land-owing peasantry, establishing government control the agricultural sector of the country.  However, Fforde noted that “the land reform was modified in “the early 1960’s to one which sought to establish cooperatives that would, in turn, incorporate it into full scale agricultural collectives. At the same time, the government was implementing neo-Stalinist development policy at the macroeconomic level. Emphasizing the rapid development of heavy industry, and, of course, waging an increasingly costly war the American-backed government in the South. Only massive aid from CMEA countries allowed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to continue these policies, to the point where their armies could invade the South and inflict a humiliating defeat on the American and South Vietnamese armies. By any objective standard, the economy of North Vietnam in 1975 was at a very low level of economic development (Adam Fforde. The Agrarian Question of North Vietnam.  1989:14)    

      Agrarian Reforms in South Vietnam

After the "liberation" of the South, when the wounds if the war were yet to heal, along  with political discrimination and hatred, repression, and  corrupt practices  emerged en masse and spread everywhere. Common personnel of the old regime were brought to stand trial in sessions of meeting in local street wards or village hamlets for avowals of crimes. Suspected reactionaries were subject to interrogation, arrest, and reeducation. Households of the petty bourgeoisie and family members of officers and officials of the old regime were forced or encouraged to leave the city and returned to their home villages. Thousands of people were still seeking means to leave the country, by boat across the sea or on foot to the neighboring countries. Executions of the personnel of the Republic of Vietnam were extending to the villages of the south most of South Vietnam, Ben Tre, Moc Hoa, Chuong Thien, Bac Lieu, Ca Mau, and  Rach Gia. For months, fear of a bloodbath like the sickle of Damocles hanged overhead these “blood debtors of the people.”

Agrarian reforms in the South were carried out without “splitting and sky-rocketing campaigns’ as they had been in the early years of the 1960’s in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Reminiscences of the days of revelations of crimes and scenes of reactionaries being brought to stand trials before the People’s Court, nevertheless, resurged in the minds of the refugees from the North in 1954. Still, the population in the South well obsessed with the bloodiest Tet massacre merciless in the spring of 1968, rockets shelling into schools, markets, and hospitals in Cai Lay, Dinh Thong, Saigon, Binh Long, Quang Tri, Ban Me Thuot, and so on following the cease-fire 1973. The land repartitions in the rural areas proceeded peacefully in silence while campaigns for expropriating the bourgeoisie’s properties in the cities. Was in full swing in the cities, thousands of workers found no jobs, and hundreds of thousands of city-dwellers were resettled in the new economic z ones for socialist productions.

Unlike the campaigns for land reforms in the North, the peasantry under the People’s Democracy in the South played no role in this agricultural economic transition. The land distributions  were solely vested in the authority in politics and party cadres of South Vietnam origin who freshly returned to their homes and authorities from the North who had little and no knowledge about the economy of the South, and even worse, the opportunities called as “the revolutionaries of April 30(1975). Land redistribution was preceded on the whims and wishers of these “mandarin of the Revolution.” Lands expropriated with redemptions under the Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu Thieu governments were, again, expropriated and distributed to the peasants. Lands and properties belonging to the “puppet” exploiting class or “counterrevolutionaries were divided among authorities, the local cadres, households of war martyrs of war heroes, and those who achieve great deeds or contribute to the service of the “Revolution.” In the Cu Chi, Thai My, Dong Thap (Plain of Rush), and the plains of Bassac River, the same lands distributed to the peasants during the Vietnam War by the Privy Government of South Vietnam were, again, distributed to them!