During the first half of the twentieth century, many young Chinese fell in love with communism, the idea of a Communist Party, and the development experience of the Soviet Union. Having been born into a generation where all that had been known was no longer true and the future of China—even the survival of the nation—seemed to be in doubt, the Russian revolution had these young people at the first hello. Then they built a movement around the ideas they had fallen in love with. The attraction of communism was that it combined European modernity and social justice; it promised to make China mighty as well as just. Moreover, they, the young Chinese, could get to be the saviors of their country through the power of their ideas.
As soon as Chinese and Russians started to interact more, it was of course not just ideas that these young people fell in love with. In this deeply researched and exquisitely written book, Elizabeth McGuire shows how people from the two countries fell in and out of love with each other from the 1920s up to the 1960s, and how their encounters, affairs, partnerships, and marriages became a substantial but often overlooked form of Sino-Soviet relations. Thousands of Chinese studied in the Soviet Union and large numbers of Soviet people served in China as engineers, military instructors, or political and administrative advisers. In spite of Communist Party and government attempts at controlling, regulating, or entirely prohibiting romantic involvements, young people did what they always do: skirting restrictions, they learn from each other and carve out space that is theirs alone, their time to love, enjoy, and sing. Even in the depths of Stalinism, it could not be otherwise.
And so began a set of associations that would change China (and to a lesser extent Russia), forever. One of the major strengths of this book is that McGuire does not ignore what goes on at other levels of interaction: ideology or state- and institution-building, for instance, even though she keeps her focus on personal relationships. Her main story is of course part of one of the biggest transformations of the twentieth century: how a China that came out of an empire ruled for centuries by Confucian principles became, in a matter of decades, a society patterned on the Soviet experience in all things from education, theater, and art, to factories, politics, and surveillance. Even today, some of China's Soviet heritage is left, and not just through the country being governed by a Communist Party. Anyone who has tried to navigate both may in the bureaucracies of China's universities feel an immediate throw-back to the USSR of the late Soviet era.
One of the main strengths of McGuire's book is that it shows the genuine enthusiasm of many Chinese for Marxism in its Soviet form. Different from most accounts, both in Chinese and other languages, that center on the duplicity of Soviet leaders with regard to China or the resentments Chinese leaders developed over perceived Russian arrogance, McGuire concentrates on how the Soviet example set young Chinese free to do what they wanted. Becoming a Marxist meant an opportunity to embrace European culture, which many educated young Chinese found irresistible, while declaring one's allegiance to one's homeland and opposition to imperialism. Never mind that this China was an ideal, far removed from the experience of the vast majority of their countrymen, or that the idealized “new China,” in its geographic form, was indistinguishable from the Qing empire they had just left behind. Or, for that matter, that the Soviet state they so admired was developing into a murderous dictatorship under Stalin's control. Even so, for millions of young Chinese, their Soviet romance elevated and liberated them at the same time.
In addition to the enthusiasts, there were of course those who had little choice in the matter. The sons and daughters of Chinese leaders were often sent to be educated in the Soviet Union, while their parents fought for the cause in China. Sometimes they are among the most tragic figures in this story. Mao Zedong's elder son Mao Anying—who was later killed fighting in the Korean War—came to the Soviet Union in 1936 with his brother Mao Anqing, after their mother had been executed and their father had abandoned them. Taking the Russian names Serezha and Kolia, the Mao brothers grew up in a special orphanage for children of foreign communists, the InterDom, and later served in the Red Army. Ironically, Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-kuo, also ended up spending many years in the USSR, after his father had sent him there before the collapse of the Communist-Guomindang alliance. Ching-kuo returned to China with his Belorussian wife, Faina Vakhreva, helped fight the communists, and later succeeded his father as president on Taiwan.
The cultural attraction of educated young Chinese to Russia and Russian culture plays an important part in the book. It is too easy to dismiss this, as some historians have done, as simply being the only thing that was on offer in terms of foreign influences in China after 1949. Russian cultural inspirations started well before then; sometimes in the form of pre-revolutionary writing and music rather than works from the Soviet-era that the communists wanted everyone to read. Compared with western imports, it was much harder for Chinese cultural commissars to condemn Lev Tolstoi or Petr Tchaikovskii as “bourgeois diversions,” simply because they were Russian. As a result, many young Chinese grew up with the great nineteenth-century Russian authors and composers as part of their cultural staple (alongside, of course, lesser Soviet works).
One of the big ironies documented in this book is that in cultural terms—as in almost everything else—the interactions between Russians and Chinese were easier and more spontaneous in the Stalin era than at any later point. One reason is of course that this was the initial stage of the infatuation. Another, however, is that at this stage, the 1920s and 30s, the instruments of party and government control were not as developed as they were to become around mid-century. When the levels of interaction between Soviets and Chinese reached their highest stage, during the 1950s Sino-Soviet alliance, communist leaders on both sides were better equipped to regiment and supervise personal contacts among people from the two countries. While proclaiming eternal friendship with one another, the leaders of the two states feared any uncontrolled links or associations at work, not to mention at play or in bedrooms.
As a work that combines political and cultural history with the history of emotions, McGuire's book may have benefitted from looking even more closely at the 1950s, when Sino-Soviet attractions developed into a state-led alliance. Not only did this lead to more surveillance and control, but eventually the falling out between the two states crushed much of what had been established at the cultural or personal level. While Chinese in the Soviet Union despaired of ever going back to China, Russians in China often fared much worse. Many of them were purged after the Sino-Soviet split and some disappeared in prisons or labor camps. Liza Kishkina, the Russian-born widow of the Chinese communist leader Li Lisan, is one of the most vivid portraits in the book. After her husband was murdered during the Cultural Revolution, Kishkina spent eight years in solitary confinement before being “rehabilitated.” Still, she remained in China after being released from prison. “After all,” she tells McGuire, “I had lived through everything with them: ‘struggle sessions,’ and prison, and exile.”
McGuire has written a beautiful, elegiac book about ideals, love, and betrayals. If there is a conclusion after reading a text like this, it must be that human happiness is so very hard to achieve in times of revolution, not least because political leaders wantonly destroy it as they build their new states. Yet joy is to be found everywhere, even under the worst of circumstances. In the book's final pages an old couple, driven apart by the horrors they have experienced, find each other again in one last dance, before the curtain falls.
