Nghe Tinh Soviet Museum

On the morning of May 1, 1930, a red flag with a hammer and sickle flew from a lamppost at the Bến Thủy junction, in the wind off the Lam River. Below it, the road was packed with people. That flag would stay on the lamppost for eight hours.

The junction lies on the left bank of the Lam River, at the foot of Mount Quyết. It is about five kilometers southeast of central Vinh. From first light that day, about 1,200 farmers had been walking into Vinh in orderly ranks, with flags and banners. They came from the villages of Yên Dũng and Lộc Đa. Others came from Đức Thịnh and from many villages nearby. They demanded higher wages for workers, lower taxes for the people, and a working day of only eight hours. The demonstration was led directly by Lê Mao. He was the secretary of the Party's provincial committee for Vinh and Bến Thủy.

The prefect of Hưng Nguyên sent soldiers to block the marchers at the Quán Lau junction. The marchers closed up and walked on toward Bến Thủy. At the factories, soldiers stood guard with fixed bayonets to keep the workers inside. But the workers left their work anyway and poured into the street. People from the Hà Tĩnh side of the river crossed over to join them. At the front walked Trần Cảnh Bình, a member of the village self-defense guard of Lộc Đa. He waved a flag and urged everyone on.

Then the French Resident arrived with ten vehicles full of soldiers. Under French rule, a Resident was the French official who oversaw a province. The soldiers blocked the marchers right in front of the gate of the match factory. The police opened fire. Trần Cảnh Bình was shot dead, and six more people were killed after him. Eighteen people were wounded. Ninety-seven were taken away under arrest. That day became the starting point of a whole wave of struggle that later generations called Xô Viết Nghệ Tĩnh, the Nghệ Tĩnh Soviets.

In 1930, the Communist Party of Vietnam had only just been founded. Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh had a long tradition of patriotism, but they were also lands of hunger and heavy taxes. After that morning at Bến Thủy, people in the two provinces took to the streets one after another, with banners and with drums. The movement carried on into 1931. In some places, the colonial administration stopped working, and farmers set up their own committees to run their villages. These self-governing committees were called soviets, or Xô Viết in Vietnamese.

The peak came on the morning of September 12, 1930. About 8,000 farmers from three cantons marched toward Yên Xuân station. Two of the cantons were Phù Long and Thông Lạng. The third was Nam Kim. The farmers carried sticks, spears and ropes, and they raised hammer and sickle flags. Passengers on the train got off and walked with them. A woman named Nguyễn Thị Quỳnh Nga, better known as Phia, stood up and spoke to the crowd. She denounced the French colonial rulers and the court of the Nguyễn dynasty. The Nguyễn dynasty was Vietnam's last royal dynasty. Soldiers fired shots to threaten them, but the marchers held their ranks and moved on toward the seat of Hưng Nguyên prefecture. When the column reached Thái Lão, the colonial authorities sent airplanes. The planes fired on the marchers and dropped bombs on them. Two hundred and seventeen people died, and one hundred and twenty-five were wounded.

In the end, the French colonial authorities put the movement down with harsh repression, and it fell apart. But the memory of it was not lost.

On January 15, 1960, a decision was made to build a museum to keep that memory. On September 12, 1963, exactly thirty-three years after that morning at Thái Lão, the Nghệ Tĩnh Soviet Museum opened its doors for the first time. It stands on Đào Tấn Street. That is in Vinh, in Nghệ An province, and the grounds cover more than 15,000 square meters.

On February 3, 1964, President Hồ Chí Minh signed a foreword for the museum. In it, he urged the officials, Party members and people of Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh to unite and compete. He asked them to build the two provinces into model places, worthy of the homeland of the Nghệ Tĩnh Soviets.

Inside, the exhibition rooms follow one another like a stream of time. In its place of greatest honor, the first room keeps a drum that once urged the people of this region to rise up. The next room shows the faces of leaders such as Nguyễn Hằng Chí and Trần Khắc Lập. It also shows Đặng Thị Quỳnh Anh and Đặng Thúc Hứa. The room keeps traces of two earlier movements as well, Đông Du and Cần Vương. Đông Du was a movement that sent young Vietnamese to study in Japan. Cần Vương means "aid the king", and it was a movement of resistance to the French.

Room four holds a scale model of the whole struggle, with every village of Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh laid out below. Room eight has a small model of Vinh Prison. The prison once held people of the Cần Vương movement and of the Nghệ Tĩnh Soviets. The room also has a model of the old citadel of Vinh. The museum has collected and preserved more than 16,000 documents and objects.

Out on the grounds stand two memorials. The memorial house for the martyrs of the Nghệ Tĩnh Soviets has five bays under a two-tiered tiled roof. Inside, eight stone steles carry the engraved names of nearly 2,000 martyrs. Among them are people of Nghệ An and people of Hà Tĩnh.

The second is a memorial to the patriots and revolutionaries once held in Vinh Prison. It stands on part of the old prison's foundations. Work on it began on June 30, 2004. It was meant to be ready for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nghệ Tĩnh Soviets. The main monument is 9.5 meters tall, with bronze reliefs on three sides. At the back, five more reliefs tell, chapter by chapter, the story of the struggle of the people once imprisoned here.

In 2025, the museum merged with the Nghệ An Museum. The joint name is now the Museum of Nghệ An and the Nghệ Tĩnh Soviets.

On the eight stone steles, each name stands for a family and a home village. Read slowly, one by one, the names sound like a whole land answering a roll call. Down by the Lam River, at the Bến Thủy junction, the wind still blows as it did that morning, when a red flag stood on a lamppost for eight hours.