“Consistent with basic principles of Leninist political organization, communist cells in prison were integrated into networks that were vertically ordered and functionally specialized:
Currently [in late 1934], each dormitory on Poulo Condore possesses at least one cell composed of four members. Each member assumes one of four positions: secretary, chief of propaganda, chief of self-defense, and chief of control. Through their secretaries, each cell maintains relations with a central bureau led by distinguished political prisoners who are currently being held in special quarters.
The cell network in Hanoi Central Prison exhibited analogous characteristics:
The most dangerous and intelligent revolutionaries are detained at Hanoi Central Prison. They have succeeded in forming a secret organization, which comprises several departments, each serving a distinct function. One organizes propaganda, another maintains lines of communication between different categories of prisoners and with the exterior, another looks after the prisoners’ immediate needs, still another plans actions against the administration.
Vietnamese historical accounts based on internal Party documents confirm the elaborate picture of communist cell networks described in colonial intelligence reporting. According to the Institute of Party History, the communist network formed in Hanoi Central Prison in 1932 had over twenty members, divided into four cells.
The first was responsible for propaganda and training, the second managed relations with common criminals, and the third dealt with the prison staff and provided general leadership. A special three-man cell published two clandestine newspapers (The Proletarian and The Prisoner) and hand-copied and circulated dozens of political tracts. Official communist histories describe equally intricate cell networks in the penitentiaries at Son La and Buon Ma Thuot.
Another characteristically Leninist feature of communist cells in prison was their tendency to operate behind ostensibly apolitical mass organizations known as prisoners’ associations (lao tu hoi or tu nhan hoi). In Duong Kach Menh, Ho Chi Minh devoted considerable attention to the form and functions of mass organizations and provided detailed instructions for setting them up. As in society at large, mass organizations in prison were intended to penetrate into and control non-communist segments of the population. According to the inaugural charter of a prisoners’ association founded in Hanoi Central Prison, membership was available to all inmates “regardless of nationality, class, sex, sentence, or party affiliation.”
Indeed, the charter drew special attention to the organization’s ideological neutrality:
The tu nhan hoi is a society of prisoners and not a revolutionary party. Its purpose is to group together all prisoners to help them better resist disease, oppression, and abuse by the administration. It is also concerned with the intellectual and moral enlightenment of its members.
Prisoners’ associations were, in fact, little more than communist front organizations. In 1933, colonial officials observed that “communist propaganda spreads more actively than ever under the auspices of so-called prisoners’ associations.” Party historians confirm that prisoners’ associations were set up and controlled by communist cells. As the official history of the Buon Ma Thuot Penitentiary explains:
The Prisoners’ Association, the first mass organization in Buon Ma Thuot, was secretly established by communist prisoners.
Like communist cell networks, prisoners’ associations were broken down into an array of functional bodies. The prisoners’ association of Son La, for example, was divided into ten “boards” (ban), responsible for internal discipline, external discipline, propaganda and publications, education and training, medicine, economics, culture, foreign relations, commemorations, and mobilization. In Hanoi Central Prison, the prisoners’ association set up a communist youth league, a women’s union, a Red Cross brigade, a relief board, a foreign relations committee, a culture and literature council, and even a laundry committee.
Although imprisonment was intended to sever inmates from the outside world, the administrative reach of communist cells in prison frequently expanded beyond the walls of the institution and penetrated into the wider community. “The Hanoi tu nhan hoi does not limit its activities to the Central Prison,” The Les Associations anti-françaises et la propagande communiste en Indochine security [AAPCI] bulletin concluded gloomily in 1934
but by the constant circulation of prisoners, it has succeeded in expanding its influence throughout the provincial prisons of Tonkin, where it has organized secondary sections.
As early as 1931, evidence emerged that prisoner organizations regularly corresponded with cells on the outside. “Liaison between Saigon Central Prison’s tu nhan hoi and the ICP’s executive committee for Cochin China is perpetual,” AAPCI reported, “and is assured by the constant flow of prisoners entering and leaving the prison.”
While it might be assumed that prison-based cells received guidance and support from party organs on the outside, advice and assistance could also flow in the opposite direction. Messages sent by jailed communists to comrades in the wider community and intercepted by prison authorities contain direct orders about revolutionary strategy and tactics. In a letter intercepted from the Haiphong Civil Prison in 1933, jailed party members tersely instructed the provincial Party committee to “recruit more poor peasants and workers” and avoid alliances with “rich cultivators or notables.”
Based on other confiscated letters, AAPCI concluded that a communist cell in the Quang Ngai Provincial Prison had assumed responsibility for all political work in the province. The report concluded:
We see here, the provincial committee of Quang Ngai, created by inmates, functioning in the interior of the prison and, from there, directing propaganda for the entire province.
Communist cells formed in the provincial prisons of Son La and Quang Nam represented the Party’s earliest efforts at political organization in those provinces as well.
In his prison memoir “I Must Live To Fight,” the ICP member Nguyen Tao confirms that communist cells in prison assumed a leading role in the Party apparatus during the early 1930s. Tao’s account opens in 1933, when he and several comrades escaped from Hanoi Central Prison and joined up with a local party cell in Nam Dinh. Although he had been confined for over a year, Tao apprised the Nam Dinh cadres of the movement’s recent progress:
The very night of our arrival, we held a meeting with five activists from neighboring hamlets. Transported with the delight of finding ourselves among friends, Dam and I spoke tirelessly until dawn. We talked about the world situation and the danger of war, the home situation and the forthcoming task of the revolution. Our friends’ eagerness, it must be recalled, incited us to speak at length: deprived of news for a long time and cut off from the rest of the organization, they wanted to know everything and asked us question after question.
It is instructive that Tao, a recently escaped convict, describes his hosts and not himself as “deprived of news for a long time” and “cut off from the rest of the organization.” Also striking is the breath of information available to the fugitives—from changes in local revolutionary strategy to developments on the global geopolitical scene. Rather than marginalizing them, imprisonment seems to have thrust Tao and his fellow escapees into the very vortex of the revolutionary movement.”
- Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. pp. 211-215.
