Ngo Van Ngô Văn Xuyết ( 1913 – 2005 ) , alias Ngô Văn , was a Vietnamese Trotskyist leader . Born in Vietnam , he joined the Trotskyist movement as a young man . After the repression of Trotskyism in Vietnam in 1945 , he moved to France , where he wrote about his experiences and recent Vietnamese history . Ngo Van left his village at the age of 14 to work in a metallurgical works in Saigon , and soon became involved in the strikes and demonstrations and strikes that erupted periodically against the French colonial power in support of freedom of assembly , of the press , of travel and of education . There was already a history peasant revolts against colonialism , which were brually repressed , by the execution of leading activists , or their deportation to the infamous penal colony of Poulo Condore . He was forced to end his formal education , but , enrolled under a false name , he read Marx in the Saigon municipal library after work . He came into contact with the Trotskyist left opposition group in Saigon opposed to the general line of the Indochinese Communist Party , emphasizing the importance of a movement based on the working class as against the nationalist oriented policy of Nguyen ai Quoc ( Ho Chi Minh ) . In Saigon , the Trotskyists and Stalinists cooperated for three years ( 1933 – 36 ) in a united front around the legal newspaper La Lutte , which was published weekly in French to get around laws banning publications in the vernacular " quoc nu " or Vietnamese . Their candidates were elected to the municipal council . But after the French government signed a pact with Stalin ’ s Soviet Union in May 1935 , the French , and soon the Indochinese , Communist Parties gave up their opposition to French militarism and colonialism . Following the October group led by Ho Huu Tuong , Ngo Van and some activists formed the League of Internationalist Communists for the Construction of the Fourth International , while other Trotskyists remained in the La Lutte alliance . Ngo Van set type for the new group ’ s clandestine literature . Ngo Van also organised amongst workforce in his factory , who met under the guise of wedding and birthday parties – as all gatherings of more than 19 were illegal – and found himself the spokesperson when a strike for better wages broke out . Militant friends were arrested one after the other . The longer Van remained at liberty , the more acutely he appreciated their courage under torture . At the age of 24 , Ngo Van was arrested in the factory storeroom , where he secretly discussed anti - colonialist campaigns with other activists and hid underground literature and revolutionary publications from abroad . Van was imprisoned in the dreaded Maison Centrale in Saigon , where he , too , was tortured . Stalinist and Trotskyist prisoners were held together : Van later recalled that relations between them were wary , but civil , to avoid provoking tension to the advantage of the common enemy . He joined in a hunger strike demanding political prisoner status equal to that in France . As a consequence , the prisoners were occasionally allowed French newspapers . This was how they learned about the Moscow Trials , in which Stalin was destroying what remained of the leadership of Lenin ’ s Bolshevik Party . The Trotskyists were ‘ overcome with a profound unease , and a thousand questions without answers kept going round in our heads ’ , Van wrote in his memoirs . In 1937 the Vietnamese Stalinists , under orders from Moscow , abruptly left the La Lutte group and denounced the Trotskyists as ‘ agents of fascism ’ . Van and his comrades were constantly being arrested , tortured , imprisoned then briefly freed once more . Once , he was sentenced to eight months ’ imprisonment simply for recommending books by Trotsky to a friend in a letter , and greeting in the street the well - known Trotskyist Ta thu Thau . Exiled to Travinh , in an island in the Mekong delta , at the end of 1940 , he found himself in the middle of a peasant uprising that had engulfed western Cochinchina . Almost 6000 were arrested , over two hundred publicly executed , and thousands killed by bombing authorised by the Vichy governor general , Decoux . At about this time , Van discovered that he was suffering from tuberculosis . The Japanese moved into south Vietnam in March 1945 and imposed a regime of martial law ; allied forces bombed Saigon . The north of the country was by this time controlled by the Vietminh , as the armed front led by the Communist Party was called . They advocated an alliance with the imperialist Allies as a road to ‘ national liberation ’ ; the Trotskyists denounced this as an illusion and called on workers and peasants to rise up against all imperialist oppressors , of whatever nationality . Van and his comrades were elated when 30 , 000 miners in the Hon gai - Cam pha region set up elected councils to run the mines , public services and transport , and organised a literacy campaign .