Sino-Soviet Romance: An Emotional History of Revolutionary Geopolitics

In the fall of 1932, the future president of Taiwan, Jiang Jingguo, found himself in a little Russian village in Riazan, an unlikely but enthusiastic participant in the Soviet Union’s brutal collectivization campaign. Later he reminisced with obvious nostalgia about learning to plough. ‘The hardest part was turning at corners, at first I wasn’t used to it and in the place where I turned the corner I left a small empty space.’ ¹ Jiang, the son of Chiang Kaishek, had first come to the Soviet Union to study in 1925, when Chinese nationalists and communists were cooperating and heavily reliant on Soviet assistance. When Chiang turned against his communist allies, his son remained in the Soviet Union. He flirted with Trotskyism, studied at the International Lenin School, spent time in the aforementioned village during collectivization, and eventually ended up at the Uralmash industrial complex. There, he fell in love with a Belorussian worker named Faina, who decades later became the first lady of Taiwan.

Around the time that Jiang was learning to plough, the daughter of a Saratov nobleman, Liza Kishkina, was making the acquaintance of a mysterious Chinese man whose quiet presence at her friends’ dinner parties masked a passionate nature. Liza was a typesetter and had spent time in Khabarovsk working for the Soviet Far Eastern Press, where she fell in with a mixed Russian-Chinese crowd. The quiet man turned out to be the famous labor agitator and one-time Communist Party General Secretary Li Lisan, in Moscow to do penance for a series of failed uprisings. Liza married Li and returned with him to China, where she became Russian tutor to Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, and eventually a teacher to hundreds of young Chinese.

The history of ‘Sino-Soviet relations’ is most often told in the form of sharply periodized analyses of geopolitical or ideological cooperation and conflict, in which the most common human protagonists are leaders and the most relevant metaphor is brotherhood. It is also a tale of profound rupture, bound and defined not just by the rise and fall of dictators, but even by the appearance and disappearance of states. ² There are other ways of seeing the relationship; demographers preoccupied by Sino-Russian population trends in the Far East look at human interactions in the aggregate, for example, while literary scholars, fascinated by cross-cultural influences, trace textual relationships that predated communism and continue today. ³ And a handful of historians have produced meticulous accounts that blend the cultural and the geopolitical in thoughtful ways. ⁴

Yet Sino-Soviet history also contains a rich cast of supporting characters like Jiang Jingguo and Liza Kishkina, whose biographies offer a means of integrating individual experience and emotion into existing historiography. High-profile Sino-Soviet romances such as theirs are significant not because they were common; elite cross-cultural relationships were by definition rare and very different from Chinese-Russian marriages in the borderlands of the Soviet Far East. Rather, their importance derives precisely from their singular visibility among political and cultural elites in both places. They were symbolic, not representative.

Unfolding over the course of decades amid high-level Sino-Soviet geopolitics, such romances reverberated with shifts in those politics, and yet also transcended them. In the experiences and memories of these couples, love and revolution blended in deeply personal ways, always affected by radical political ruptures, yet ultimately telling a tale of continuity. Whereas historians have noted the ebb and flow of popular enthusiasm for the Sino-Soviet alliance, these individual romances reveal something very different: an emotional history of revolutionary geopolitics.

In turn, that emotional history suggests a way of re-imagining the relationship between the Russian and Chinese revolutions as a whole. It connects the Russian experiences of young Chinese communists of the 1920s, when both places were undergoing ‘love revolutions’ and cross-cultural, trans-revolutionary passions ran high, to the much more constrained experiences of a second generation of Chinese in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. The very same Chinese who had been in their 20s in the 1920s and had experienced all the elation and heartbreak of those years were in their 50s in the 1950s. They sought to protect and control their children – both biological and national – from such vicissitudes. Friendship and brotherhood, the dominant public metaphors promoted by national-level leaders and mass Sino-Soviet friendship associations, were less risky and messy, even metaphorically, than romance.

The stories of couples like Liza and Li are an alternate prism through which to view the Sino-Soviet relationship. From the perspective of the people most intimately tied to it, it was a life-long romance, in which the mistaken perceptions and early betrayals of first love gave way to the obligations of middle age, and each party was increasingly constrained by the choices of the other – such that even divorce could not untangle them, and the only reasonable stance is nostalgia. ⁵

Jiang Jingguo journeyed to Moscow just at the beginning of the Sino-Soviet romance, a moment of naive infatuation not only felt by young Chinese students in Moscow, but also permeating popular perceptions in both places and evident in hopeful, high-level geopolitical maneuvering.

The very first Chinese eyewitness reporter in red Moscow, a Russian language student named Qu Qiubai, arrived in 1921. Since the late nineteenth century, young Chinese interested in reforming or overturning the existing order looked to Japan, the USA, or Europe for precedents. But the failure of the Versailles Treaty to give Japanese concessions back to China led to a major uprising in 1919 and real disillusionment with the western democracies. ⁶ This was the context for initial Chinese interest in the Russian Revolution.

Whereas most archival histories of early Sino-Soviet relations focus on the recruiting and translation efforts of Communist International operatives in Beijing and Shanghai, Chinese cultural histories also describe a process of exposure to the longer history of the Russian revolutionary movement via nineteenth century fiction – and then by the romanticized dispatches of Qu Qiubai. ⁷ Qu was a poetic, neurotic young man, who met Tolstoy’s granddaughter Sofia, imagined a romance with her for the benefit of his readers back in China, and penned a wildly popular travelogue called History of the Heart in the Red Capital. ⁸ Tolstoy was well-known in China due to the popularity of Russian anarchism – via Japanese translations – since the late nineteenth century. ⁹ Qu eventually joined the Chinese Communist Party, and even served as its General Secretary for a short period of time in the late 1920s.

The very first group of young Chinese attracted by Qu’s reports and recruited by the Comintern to study in its brand-new University for the Toilers of the East included luminaries like Liu Shaoqi, and subsequent classes were populated by future leaders from Deng Xiaoping to Red Army Commander Zhu De. ¹⁰

The location of the university, on Tverskaia Street not far from the Kremlin, made the school itself an ongoing show, put on for Muscovites close to the center of Soviet power. Students participated in international revolutionary meetings in Moscow and were involved in actual performances as well, some staged by the famous director Meyerhold himself. ¹¹ Taken in groups to ‘tour’ various Russian sights, they had the sense that it was they who were on display. ¹² All of this suggested that the Bolsheviks liked to show off the international appeal of their revolution, as personified by token groups of exotic foreign radicals.

Perhaps no Chinese student was as symbolically important as Jiang Jingguo, whose presence in Moscow represented the potential to unite China’s disparate revolutionary strands into a single movement under Soviet direction. Throughout the 1920s, the Soviet Union had been feverishly promoting a Chinese revolution that had as much to do with idiosyncratic Marxist-Leninist interpretations as with the situation in China. Following the Marxist notion that a bourgeois revolution had to precede a communist one, the Comintern advocated a so-called United Front between the relatively organized and well-funded Nationalists and the tiny Chinese Communist Party.

Hopes ran high for the United Front, and revisionist historians have uncovered a Chiang Kaishek who was in fact enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution in the early 1920s. He read widely, including books on Marxism and histories of the French and Russian revolutions, concluding in 1923 that while the two were quite similar, ‘the Russians rectified the errors made by the French, which was most valuable.’ ¹³ Chiang sought and received serious military assistance from the Soviet Union, including funding and personnel for a military school in Guangdong. Chiang also sent his son, Jingguo, to Moscow to study, as a gesture of his commitment. For their part, the Bolsheviks opened a new school – Sun Yatsen University – just for Chinese revolutionaries, nationalist and communist alike. ¹⁴

Jiang was just 15 when he arrived in Moscow, yet he embraced the Bolshevik project, as he came to understand it, with surprising zeal, in the 12 formative years he would spend in Soviet Russia.

At first, Jiang’s experience was relatively sheltered, limited to school activities at Sun Yatsen University. Located across from the Christ the Savior church, near the Kremlin, the school was so well-funded that it served five meals a day. Jiang remembered rising early with the Kremlin bells for morning exercises in the church courtyard, learning in class about labor specialization in prehistoric times, and working on the school newspaper late into the night. ¹⁵

Jiang also had a girlfriend, the pretty daughter of a left-leaning warlord, whom he never mentioned in his memoirs, but whose flirty letters to him are preserved in the Comintern archives. Romances among Chinese students and between Chinese and Soviet citizens were common; Chinese were in the throes of what historians now call a ‘love revolution,’ in which they rejected arranged marriages and looked to European fiction for alternative romantic visions. ¹⁶ Even before they departed for Moscow, many young Chinese radicals had most likely read various works of nineteenth century Russian fiction – the very first issue of China’s most famous radical journal New Youth included Turgenev’s First Love – in translation. ¹⁷ Meanwhile, Soviet youth were in a period of radical experimentation of their own, conflating sex and politics in new ways. ¹⁸ This was a moment of cross-cultural confluence that gave emotional resonance to the experiences of young Chinese communists in Moscow.

At Sun Yatsen University, rector Karl Radek – himself in the throes of an extramarital affair – set aside what one student remembered as a ‘special boudoir’ for the Chinese. ¹⁹ The students read Sorrows of Young Werther along with their Pravda, and engaged in endless debates about the role of love and sex in the life of a communist. ²⁰ ‘Werther’s ‘worry’ bore the evil influence of feudalism!’ wrote one Chinese student in a school newspaper. ‘If Lotte and Werther didn’t harbor illusions of monogamy, and her husband didn’t have some petty jealous feelings, then why would Werther resort to killing himself!’ ²¹ ‘Comrade Jingguo! Why is it,’ Jiang’s girlfriend teased him in a letter, ‘that meeting you has had such a big influence on me? Such a hardworking person as you with such a fun-loving person like me is really no good, huh?’ ²² The rate of abortion among Chinese students in Moscow was so high that Lenin’s widow Krupskaia was called in to talk with them. Instead of repeatedly aborting, she said, Chinese women should give birth to their babies and leave them in Russian children’s homes. Jiang’s girlfriend concluded (tongue in cheek) that having babies was ‘also making little revolutionaries.’ ²³

When Jiang’s father began his ‘Northern Expedition’ in 1926, marching his troops north from Guangdong, ousting regional warlords, and allowing Communists to foment social revolution in territories he took, he briefly captured the Soviet popular imagination as well. Chinese students in Moscow at the time recall that girls would surround them in movie theaters, occasionally directly offering themselves up as wives. ²⁴ The vibe around China was captured by the poet Mayakovsky, who wrote several poems about China, including one that some have claimed was based on a real experience he’d had: asked to recite his best poem in an apartment in Yaroslavl in March 1927, he ‘bawled out/abandoning my poetic tone/louder/than the trumpets of Jericho/Comrades!/ with the workers/and the troops of Canton/they are taking Shanghai!’ ²⁵ Such enthusiasm was tame compared to the all-out rapture that would later accompany the Spanish Civil War, but it was a real high point for the Chinese who experienced it. ²⁶

All of this – the public acclaim, the cosseted lifestyle – that had structured Jiang Jingguo’s early Soviet experience – came crashing down in 1927. While the Soviet Union was celebrating what it assumed was the success of the Chinese revolution as the Comintern had imagined it, Chiang Kaishek was becoming very uncomfortable with the agitation the communists were doing under his auspices. By 1927 he felt powerful enough to openly discard the Soviet program, which, after all, called for an eventual communist revolution to replace his so-called bourgeois-nationalist regime. On April 12, Chiang ordered the massacre of hundreds of his erstwhile communist allies, touching off a large-scale suppression campaign that lasted for years.

News of Chiang Kaishek’s coup reached Moscow the day it happened. Chinese University students rushed to the school assembly hall, where many, including several children of Nationalist Party officials, denounced Chiang. But 17-year-old Jiang came to the platform and spoke with great emotion, outperforming them all. ‘I speak here not as the son of Chiang Kaishek, but as the son of the Chinese Komsomol.’ When he was done, the hall broke out in deafening applause. ²⁷

Subsequently, Jiang made an official statement that was distributed by the Soviet news agency TASS. ‘Chiang Kaishek was my father and a friend of the revolution. He has gone over to the counterrevolutionary camp. Now he is my enemy.’ Historians have speculated about the authenticity of this statement, but the Taiwanese historian who has analyzed most carefully sources related to Jiang believes that, whether or not he personally wrote the TASS statement, it accurately reflected his emotional state. Jiang, she argues convincingly, felt personally betrayed by his father. ²⁸

Moscow public opinion shifted drastically: in 1927 girls stopped surrounding Chinese students; instead, people threw tomatoes at them. ²⁹ And Chiang’s dramatic move electrified Soviet domestic politics. As Stalin pushed for Trotsky’s final defeat, Trotsky seized upon Chiang’s coup as evidence that Stalin was unfit to lead the world revolution. Meanwhile Stalin advocated continued uprisings, hoping for a victory, yet pushing the Chinese Communist movement to the brink of extinction. ³⁰

Perhaps the most serious defeat came in December 1927. On the insistence of the Comintern, a small contingent of poorly armed communists attempted to take over Guangdong. On 11 December 1927 they seized the post and telegraph, police stations, and army barracks in the city, much as the Bolsheviks had done in Petrograd in 1917. But of course Guangzhou in 1927 was not Petrograd in 1917. Anti-communist forces reacted quickly, shooting not only workers and communists but also Russian consular officials who had allowed the consulate to be used as headquarters for the uprising. ³¹

The Comintern decided to call the Guangzhou incident the ‘Canton Commune,’ likening it to the doomed Paris Commune of 1871, which was part of the Soviet genealogy of revolution (to this day some provincial towns have a ‘Paris Commune Street’) – a tragic, noble, but ultimately misguided case of radical martyrdom. Placing the failed Guangzhou uprising in the French context took the emphasis off botched Soviet efforts to direct China’s revolution and played instead upon a vague sense of universal and perhaps inevitable moments in revolutionary development.

There was just one problem. While the French revolutionaries were dead and therefore had no say, the Chinese ones were very much alive. Trotsky’s criticisms of Stalin’s China policy resonated deeply with many Chinese, especially the several thousand students in Moscow who were most attuned to the relationship between Soviet domestic politics and Comintern policy in China. Ironically, included in the ranks of disillusioned Chinese sympathetic to Trotsky was, for a time, Jiang Jingguo. ³²

In the aftermath of his father’s coup, Soviet authorities swooped 17-year-old Jiang out of the increasingly chaotic and politically suspect Sun Yatsen University and sent him, along with a small contingent of his classmates, to Tolmachev Military Academy in Leningrad. There Jiang was pressured to give up any remaining politically questionable behaviors or relationships, including to the warlord’s daughter. ‘There are so many good women in the world, you don’t need to keep filthy her in your mind,’ wrote a well-meaning friend. When his stint at Tolmachev was over, Jiang was neither allowed to join the Soviet Red Army nor to go back to China. Instead, like other high-ranking Chinese, he spent his time on tourist jaunts, in Black Sea resorts and hospitals (he was actually sick for a time), and at the International Lenin School.

If Jiang was now something of a hostage, nothing about his actions suggested that he was passive or bored. He kept himself busy, earnestly integrating into Soviet life, according to both the memoirs that he wrote upon his return to China and Russian archival records – an individual biography at odds with the larger picture of Sino-Soviet relations in the early to mid-1930s, which are generally seen as a period when the paths of the two revolutions diverged. The Nationalists under Jiang’s father conducted a massive campaign of ‘white terror’ in China against Communists, who were forced out of the major cities and eventually onto the Long March, where they fell out of communication with Moscow for a time. Yet Jiang’s story – along with those of many other Chinese who remained in the Soviet Union in the 1930s – shows how personal ties and cross-cultural knowledge can deepen even in periods of state-to-state distance, ready to enrich and inform future periods of engagement.

By 1931, Jiang was working at the Moscow factory Dinamo and living in a dorm near the Moscow Lenin School. ‘Every day I wait for a tram,’ he remembered,

But when it comes it’s full, I can’t get on. It’s so cold I can’t move my hands. After another five minutes another number 16 car comes and even though it’s too full I still have to get on otherwise I’ll be late for work. The people who open the doors say, ‘The bus isn’t made out of rubber!’ But I still go all out to push on. Inside it’s so crowded you can’t move. ³³

Jiang also waited in bread lines, discussed the first five-year plan and socialist competition in a factory meeting, and got a voucher permitting him to buy shoes, which he then had to give up even though his old shoes were worn out, because he didn’t have the money to use the voucher. ³⁴

In this 1931 collage, we see Jiang leaving the culturally mediated Lenin School dorm and getting on a crowded tram – making a physical and psychological journey each day pressed up against the so-called Soviet masses on all sides. He traveled from an international environment that was saturated with geopolitical debates and high-level Chinese party politics, to a Soviet space where politics and even geopolitics were also important, but defined very differently and articulated in Russian by ordinary Soviet people.

Jiang – like many Chinese who remained in the Soviet Union in the 1930s – found himself embroiled in the ongoing Soviet drama in ever more unlikely ways. ³⁵ In what had to be one of the most peculiar events in the entire history of personal relations between the Russian and Chinese revolutions, Jiang was sent to help collectivize a Russian village, Bol’shoe Zhokovo. In his memoirs Jiang recalled,

When I first got here because I was a foreigner nobody would give me a bed. So the first night I slept in the garage of a church … The second day I went to the village square early. The villagers said a lot of things to make fun of me. But I still said to them very politely, ‘Good morning!’ Later an old villager said to me ‘You should work the fields with us!’ I said, ‘OK!’ So I did the winter ploughing with them. At first I thought ploughing was a really difficult thing, but later it didn't seem so hard … On this day I didn't return to eat any lunch, ploughed all the way until night, my body felt awful. When I returned to the church garage I felt ill. I ate a little something, and fell asleep. I slept half the night and then I heard somebody call me, ‘Friend, this is no place to sleep! Come to my hut to sleep!’ This was a little old village woman, called Sofia, she was 68 years old. ³⁶

Isolated from his Chinese friends and in only occasional contact with higher authorities in Moscow, in a purely Russian-language environment, surrounded by hostile peasants, Jiang’s story is of a quintessential Soviet experience: achieving personal and social integration through collectivization, described as the back-breaking process of transforming the most basic methods of everyday interaction and organization. For Jiang, the transformation included a physical change: he learned to plough. And finally, it involved a cultural transformation, from son of a Chinese national leader to surrogate grandson of a Russian peasant babushka.

Just like the Soviet citizens amongst whom he lived, Jiang’s experience with collectivization was a prelude for industrialization. In 1933, Jiang went to work at the great industrial complex Uralmash, where he remained until his departure from the Soviet Union in 1937. His memoir describes the process by which he became Kolia-kitaets, or Kolia the Chinese, accepted as a regular functioning member at a Soviet flagship factory, contributing to the production of the precast fortifications for the Moscow metro. He recalled worrying over lack of spare parts; watching the oil for machines turning to ice; seeing a Ukrainian dance group in the factory club. ³⁷

At Uralmash, Jiang also began courting a Belarussian worker named Faina Vakhreva. Jiang said little about her in his memoirs, noting only that she ‘understood my situation best and was always there to sympathize and help me whenever I had difficulties.’ ³⁸ Faina was the daughter of two workers and a member of the Party. For the son of Chiang Kaishek, operating in a Soviet environment where working class origins were everything, it was ‘marrying up.’ In 1934 the two honeymooned on the Black Sea. A photo captured Faina in a dark and white striped swimsuit, sitting in the waves with her legs curled under her, her right hand on her hip, left arm stretched out holding Kolia’s hand, Kolia beaming and hunched over in the water. ³⁹ OPEN IN VIEWER

Kolia would surely have suffered during Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937, along with many other foreign communists. He had been accepted into the Soviet Communist Party in 1936, but shortly after lost his job at the Uralmash newspaper and faced expulsion from the Party over alleged Trotskyism. ⁴⁰ However, because he also happened to be Jiang Jingguo, when the Chinese Communists and Nationalists rejoined in a United Front against Japan in 1937, Kolia-kitaets was able to leave the Soviet Union at the exact moment when, without his other identity, he might have perished. When Jiang returned home, he brought Faina and their toddler son with him.

Jiang also attempted to bring his Soviet experience to bear in China. In 1938, he was given a position in internal security in Nanchang, which gave him an insider’s view of his father’s regime. Perhaps because of his Soviet education he didn’t think twice about the necessity of the secret police, but took exception to Nationalist ties to organized crime. ⁴¹ By 1939, Jiang found a position that allowed him to marry his leftist inclinations to his father’s political agenda. Seeing how the Communists were attracting educated young people from the cities to Yanan, Jiang created a rival territory – Gannan – in southern Jiangxi province not under Japanese control. Jiang brought local bandits to heel; outlawed opium, gambling, prostitution, and expensive weddings even for prominent businessmen; reduced land rents; opened a cadres school to train promising young people, a ‘New Man School’ to re-educate resisters, and numerous primary schools in clan temples; strengthened the secret police; opened soup kitchens; fielded citizen complaints in person; spread propaganda about his ‘Gannan model’ far and wide; and just generally did everything his Soviet education had taught him about state formation. ⁴²

Despite pressure from conservative Nationalists, Jiang kept up open support for the Soviet Union – useful to his father, who was relying on Soviet military assistance even after the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with Japan. Jiang traveled to Moscow – without Faina – in the summer of 1945, to negotiate a Friendship Treaty with Stalin. The Treaty, signed in August, promised mutual support against Japan and non-intervention in domestic affairs. ⁴³ With this agreement, Moscow ensured that no matter which side won the Chinese Civil War, the Soviet Union would see a return on decades of investment in Chinese politics.

Meanwhile, Jiang and Faina were married in a traditional Chinese wedding, and Faina gradually began learning the Ningpo dialect spoken all around her. This Sino-Soviet family grew and thrived, despite Jiang’s occasional infidelities, and the geopolitical shifts that would eventually render a Russian First Lady of Taiwan inconvenient.

Faina never granted a serious interview and she did not leave any sort of public memoir, but the memoir of another woman, Liza Kishkina, offers a glimpse of the Russian side of the marriages spawned by the Sino-Soviet relationship, as well as a self-reflective account of the mature stages of romance both geopolitical and personal.

Liza Kishkina had been born to a large noble family in 1914, such that her earliest childhood memories were of her family estate, with its large halls and rambling gardens, in the moments before the cataclysm of 1917. Her father committed suicide in 1918 and her mother brought her to Moscow, where she worked hard to overcome her origins and fit into the new Soviet ethos. After her middle school graduation in 1928, she entered a program that trained proofreaders for the State Publishing House, Gosizdat. Yet she was unable to achieve her real dream, which was to join the Komsomol. And so she applied to go to the Far East, where the salaries were higher and the doors to the Komsomol open. ⁴⁴

In Khabarovsk Liza met a number of Chinese men who had gentry origins and seemed sophisticated to her. She remembers writing to her mother about her new friends.

Aunt Shurochka said that the Chinese are a hideous people (which by the way is now considered chauvinism) but it’s the opposite, they’re lovely! Of course I’m not talking about street traders, I’m talking about the ones who work with us as editors of the Chinese literature section. They are so very refined, they’ve graduated from universities, sometimes more than one … We have such a good time with them, they come over all the time, and we go swimming and play volleyball and they are teaching us to play tennis. It’s a wonderful game! ⁴⁵

Liza also followed the development of the Chinese revolution in the news. She had first seen a photo of her future husband in the pages of Ogonek, a weekly illustrated magazine, in 1925. ⁴⁶ In this widely reproduced picture, a young Li Lisan – wearing simple worker’s clothing, with a wild shock of hair that stood up as if electrified and a face darkened with suntan, shouts into a crowd with a passion that seems audible from the page even today. In Khabarovsk, Liza came across a brochure about Li, ‘Against Li Lisan-ism,’ in which he was scapegoated for failed uprisings in the aftermath of the 1927 debacle. ⁴⁷

When Liza met the real Li at a friend’s dinner party, he was introduced with a pseudonym, Li Min, and she didn’t make the connection between the unassuming man before her and the larger-than-life figure she had read about until later on. Li courted Liza with perfume, chocolates, boat rides, and theater tickets. ‘Gradually my interest in him grew,’ she remembers. ‘It seemed he had come from another world, full of revolutionary romance in contrast to my monotonous days.’ He told her about his studies in France, the strikes he had organized in 1921 in the Anyuan coal mines, and how, after the May 30^th Movement of 1925, he had narrowly escaped the police, running across rooftops.

To me it seemed like a high risk adventure, just like in the movies … These stories placed a romantic halo around Li Min, and I looked to him with ever more respect and sympathy. The aura of this person enveloped me and held me. Unnoticed, all on its own, a special feeling was born, which, probably, is what people call love. ⁴⁸

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Liza, Li, and their daughter Inna, 1946, before Li’s return to China.

Liza and Li married in 1936, enjoying a Sochi honeymoon and a brief period of happiness before Li was arrested in February 1938. Numerous Chinese were caught up in the Soviet terror, which was carried out by Wang Ming, Kang Sheng, and other high-ranking Chinese communists in Moscow. ⁴⁹ Though some friends and family advised Liza to forget him, she waited, sending him the 50 rubles a month the Taganka prison allowed. Li was released in November 1939 and allowed back to his old job at the Foreign Languages Publishing House. The two were evacuated to the town of Engels during the war, where Liza gave birth to a daughter, Inna. ⁵⁰

On New Year’s Eve, 1945, Li came home with big news: he was being reinstated to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and would return to China to help lead the Party’s campaign against the Nationalists in the crucial Northeast. Li was able to send for Liza and Inna, who arrived in Harbin in 1946. Nearly 60 years later she attempted to explain her confusion:

At present the word ‘adaptation’ is in fashion – in my time there was no such concept. We lived, locked in our own borders, thinking once and for always according to an established canon and sincerely supposing that the entire world was organized exactly as it was for us. Therefore when I went to China, in essence I knew nothing about this country, the Chinese, and their daily life. The world was turned upside down.’ ⁵¹

But Li worked hard to help her adapt, hiring a Russian nanny and even bringing Liza’s own mother to live with them in Beijing, once the Communist victory in the Civil War was assured. The two set up a home that included not only two daughters but two grandmothers – Li brought his own mother to live with them as well – and featured family dinners where Russian and Chinese languages, foods, and manners mingled in a display of Sino-Soviet domesticity. ⁵²

The victory of the Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War, the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, and the conclusion of a new Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Aid in 1950 together constitute a major turning point in the state-to-state Sino-Soviet relationship. China was suddenly ‘New China,’ and the alliance of the 1950s is generally treated as a departure for a new historical period.

And yet, from the perspective of the human beings with the deepest personal investment in the relationship – first generation Chinese revolutionaries now in their 50s who had spent time in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s – the 1950s were the belated realization of a youthful dream, the maturation of a relationship rife with heartbreak and betrayal. The high-profile Beijing household of Li Lisan and Liza Kishkina symbolized a best-case scenario of sorts, the possibility that, after periods of suffering and separation, the partners could be reunited in a comfortable domesticity.

Now as much as ever, metaphors of socialist fraternity or friendship fell short of useful or accurate description of the continuing experiences of the many top-level Chinese Communists who had some sort of biographical investment in the Soviet Union. Of the 14 Chinese who served on the Politburo between 1945 and 1969, for example, nine had spent time studying or working in Moscow, and seven still had biological or adopted children in Russia. Some of these children had been deliberately selected for a high-profile home for children of international revolutionaries outside Moscow, where they were raised along with children of leading communists from all over the world. ⁵³ Only two Politburo members in these years had no Russian association. ⁵⁴ The new PRC embassy in Moscow was headed up by a man who had had a Russian wife and child during his student years in Moscow; one of the first things he did upon his return was to look for them. ⁵⁵ Even Mao himself had had, at various points, two sons, a daughter, a brother, and a wife (who had been committed to a Soviet psychiatric hospital in the 1940s) in the Soviet Union. ⁵⁶ For these leaders and many other senior Chinese communists with personal ties to Soviet Russia, the metaphors they publicly promoted of brotherhood and friendship left out the mixed and sometimes bitter memories – as well as the love, the sex, and the Russian-speaking children.

Perhaps mindful of the complications and heartbreak caused by their own Russian love affairs, the Chinese leadership expressly forbade romance for students departing for the Soviet Union in the 1950s. ⁵⁷ Such rules were common in the Eastern Bloc, but in reality, Eastern Europeans in the Soviet Union more easily circumvented them. When Sino-Soviet relationships were discovered, they were broken up by the Chinese authorities, even when the KGB had no objections. ⁵⁸ This prohibition extended also to Soviet experts in China. ⁵⁹ Thus the ‘Sino-Soviet Friendship’ of the 1950s was not only a nation-to-nation metaphor; it was also an explicit rule governing individual cross-cultural relationships. Chinese students in Moscow in the 1950s remember feeling great pressure both to refrain from romantic relationships and to enact ‘friendship’ with their Soviet classmates. ⁶⁰

The public pageantry of ‘Sino-Soviet Friendship’ sublimated the difficulties of the pre-1949 relationship – nobody seemed to remember 1927 at all – even as it leaned heavily upon personnel and expertise that had accumulated over the course of decades. Once again China sent thousands of students to the Soviet Union – an exchange directed by a three-person committee of high-ranking Communists who themselves had studied in Moscow in the 1920s. ⁶¹ The Soviet Union sent thousands of technical experts to China to help build factories and dams. ⁶² Cultural exchange grew rapidly, promoted by a Friendship Society heavily reliant on people with prior Soviet experience and ties. ⁶³ China broadcast a daily news report in Russian to the Soviet Union; both sides published ‘friendship’ journals; Chinese translators who had quietly been working in the 1930s and 1940s were tapped for a massive campaign to translate Russian literature that dwarfed the efforts of previous decades. ⁶⁴ All of the large-scale, well-publicized, official exchange had an effect on popular sentiment in both places. In China particularly, young people became once again infatuated with all things Russian. ⁶⁵

Liza Kishkina herself was in great demand, her career rising on a tidal wave of enthusiasm for Russian language instruction. The wife of a trusted friend of Mao’s from Hunan, she was tapped to teach Jiang Qing Russian. She then secured a job at the elite Beijing School for Russian Language Specialists. This was an internal party organization to train translators for top cadres and was not open to the public. The head of the school was Shi Zhe, who had spent many years in the Soviet Union, himself had a Russian wife, and was to serve as Mao’s translator during his first visit in Moscow. The deputy head of the school was an old friend of Liza’s from Vladivostok in the 1930s, whose wife was Liuba Pozdneev, the daughter of the founder of the very first Beijing Russian Language School at the turn of the century. ⁶⁶ Beyond Beijing, Russian language schools were springing up in party, government, and military units all over the place; by 1956 China had ‘produced’ nearly 2000 Russian language teachers. ⁶⁷

If all of this cross-cultural contact and technical cooperation suggested partners finally settling down officially to co-create a Eurasian revolution, the period of earnest work toward an apparently shared objective was brief. It was cut short as so many marriages are by irreconcilable differences – between a reformist Soviet Union and a radically revolutionary People’s Republic. Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech set off a downward spiral in Sino-Soviet relations both personal and political. ⁶⁸

Liza Kishkina paints a nuanced portrait of Sino-Soviet tensions in her own household beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As she understood it, in the aftermath of Peng Dehuai’s critique of the Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1959, there was a general perception that Peng had been in separate communication with Khrushchev, and suspicion of ties with foreigners increased. ⁶⁹ At the time, all she knew was that her husband was pulling away from her, but later she discovered that Mao’s crony Kang Sheng had pressured Li to have Liza change her citizenship from Soviet to Chinese. According to her, Li responded to Kang:

I thought about it, and is this politically necessary? If she were really politically unreliable, then changing to Chinese citizenship wouldn’t change anything. But I can vouch for the fact that there is nothing wrong with her politically. On the other hand, she’s really tied to her people. She’s Russian, she grew up in Moscow, her national habits are second nature … asking her to break with her country and change her citizenship to China, she will never agree to it. If I try to make her, there will be a terrible argument, which might even lead to divorce. ⁷⁰

Li also wrote to a close friend, Foreign Minister Chen Yi, and for the time being it worked. But when another Sino-Russian couple came under political pressure and the Chinese husband denounced Liza as a Russian spy in 1961, Li was called repeatedly to the Central Committee. There Li Fuchun (whose daughter had been raised in the Soviet Union and married a Russian), Kang Sheng (who had personally brought Mao’s sons to Russia and whose niece had had a Russian boyfriend in Kiev), and Zhou Enlai (whose adopted daughter had Moscow theater training and ran a children’s theater popular with Soviet people in Beijing) tried to convince Li to divorce Liza. During this time Li explained nothing to Liza, but she fretted about the growing distance between them.

The general situation had an impact on my relationship with my husband. He retreated into himself, didn’t have much to do with me, and I felt as if a wall of estrangement was growing between us. In my heart I was confused and worried. Once he even moved to live in the Higher party school near the Summer Gardens. His old friend, the director of the school, gave him a small apartment there. It was in winter 1961–1962. He didn’t give a reason and I didn’t ask though it was painful for me. I told myself he just wanted to be alone for a while. Maybe there was too much ‘foreign influence’ in his family, which had become more and more reprehensible? But there wasn’t anything I could do about that – it’s not so easy to change habits you’ve had since childhood. ⁷¹

In fact, Li’s absence from home coincided with a critical moment of tension inside the Chinese Communist Party. In January 1962, the party held a broad meeting where Liu Shaoqi, a friend of Li Lisan’s since their days together in Anyuan in the 1920s, gave a crucial speech. Liu ever so cautiously reopened the question of blame for the famine that accompanied the Great Leap Forward, and Mao offered what was generally perceived as an apology. Ultimately, the conference resulted in a relaxation of economic policy and a surge in Liu Shaoqi’s status. ⁷² This relieved some pressure on Li, who returned home, albeit with a new demand. Li explained the Central Committee had wanted him to divorce her, but finally decided the marriage could stand if Liza changed her citizenship. She did. In this atmosphere of geopolitical tension, any decision either spouse in a Sino-Russian marriage made would profoundly impact the other. ⁷³

The same was true for the state-to-state relationship. Paradoxically, the Sino-Soviet split showed just how powerful each side had become in defining and constraining the possibilities for the other. The split and subsequent Cultural Revolution not only provoked a barrage of anti-Maoist propaganda in the Soviet Union, they also forced the Soviet Union into a process of self-reflection. The problem was not that international communism or even Sino-Soviet friendship was a sham, but rather the reverse. So interrelated had the socialist revolutions become that any change one made could force revisions in others – even Albania, when it decided to side with China, could give the Soviet Union pause. ⁷⁴

What is most remarkable about the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the Soviet context was that it reverberated deeply not only with Soviet Party leaders and dissidents but also in the popular imagination. ‘How can we tell that the earth is round?’ asked an anonymous jokester. ‘Because,’ the answer came, ‘all the trash that we send west comes back to us from the east.’ ‘When will Mao Zedong’s cult of personality end? When they lay him in the Mao Zo Leum.’ And another: ‘Who are the Chinese? Russians, squinting and yellowed (okosevshie i pozheltevshie) from an excess of Marxism.’ ⁷⁵ These jokes suggest a visceral sense inside the Soviet Union that the Chinese revolution had followed along the lines of the Russian one, and that what comes around goes around. Even as the Chinese attacked the Soviet Union, in reality, these jokes suggested, what was happening in China was eerily similar to the Soviet Union’s own past.

People like Liza and Li, who personally experienced the most radical phases of both revolutions, saw the similarities as well, but lacked the luxury of irony. Like other Sino-Soviet families in Beijing, their world was torn literally apart. As Liza remembered it,

One night for some reason I came home at eleven. The evening was already stifling, it was the hot and dusty month of May. I came through the gate into the yard and stopped short: our house was brightly lit, all the lights were on. What on earth? Why this illumination? In the yard, next to our outdoor terrace, was a minivan, with people bustling around it. I went up and saw that one of them was holding an old doll that one of our friends a long time ago brought my daughters as a gift from abroad. The doll’s linen hair was disheveled, its face was smeared, but the blue eyes were still opening and closing along with the movements of the Red Guard. Angrily shaking the doll he turned to the wife of our gatekeeper … ‘So this is the kind of stuff these bourgeois kids play with!’ ⁷⁶

Finally Liza was called to the Foreign Languages Institute and told to prepare a confession. She came home in a state of helpless fury. ‘If all this were happening in the Soviet Union,’ she said to Li, ‘we’d have been arrested long ago.’ Li gave her a long searching look and said nothing. ⁷⁷ Red Guards repeatedly ransacked their home, paraded them as Russian spies in struggle sessions, and tried to turn their daughters against them. In 1967, Liza was arrested and sent to Qincheng prison; Li was killed under circumstances that remain unclear even today. ⁷⁸

Ultimately, as the disaster in China unfolded, some back in Russia even began to think about how the Chinese revolution could change the ending of the Soviet story. As border tensions increased with a China that now had nuclear capability, Soviet people began to perceive a real threat. It was the famous dissident Andrei Amalrik who articulated the most thorough vision of how a Chinese attack could cause the demise of the Soviet Union. Writing in the aftermath of a Chinese-Soviet border scuffle at Damanskii Island in the Ussuri River, Amalrik argued that a war with China over territories in the Russian Far East would cause the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet military was overextended, so Germany would seize its chance to reunite and nationalist tendencies would lead to the formation of new states from Soviet republics. Amalrik predicted the war with China would begin between 1975 and 1980. Hence the title of his landmark essay, ‘Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?’ ⁷⁹ Amalrik’s predictions were remarkably prescient – except his tenuous and perhaps expedient claim that China would be the catalyst.

And yet, that China would play this role in his prognostications shows the grip the Chinese revolution had on Soviet imaginations, as well as a clear sense of just how deeply interrelated ‘Soviet’ and ‘international’ socialism had become in the decades since 1917. On some level, the failure of Soviet Russia’s most critical alliance was the beginning of the end of global communism.

But for all that, the Sino-Soviet split was not exactly the end of the Sino-Soviet romance – personal or geopolitical. Liza Kishkina, for example, sustained herself through a decade in solitary confinement by envisioning Li and her daughters, and dreaming of grandchildren … a dream that at least partly came true.

Upon her release to provincial exile, Liza’s daughter Inna sent her toddler grandson Pavlik to live with her. Slowly she revived, chatting with the locals, taking Pavlik to outdoor movies, and feeding him eggs from a chicken she adopted to amuse him. Like Jiang Jingguo learning to plough while shipwrecked in a Russian village by geopolitical cataclysms, Liza Kishkina’s cross-cultural knowledge deepened to a sort of graceful wisdom in rural exile. ‘I had somehow grown into Chinese life,’ she reflected, ‘and people, even the most orthodox elderly veterans, recognized me as their own. After all I had lived through everything with them: “struggle sessions,” and prison, and exile. And I was rewarded with human trust.’ ⁸⁰ Eventually, she returned to her old job at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, was officially rehabilitated, and went on to serve in the ceremonial Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress. She and other surviving members of high-profile Sino-Soviet families were routinely honored at Friendship Society events.

Though the renewed pageantry of what one journalist has called the Russian-Chinese ‘bromance,’ enacted by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, may strike some as disingenuous, both sides are reaching out to touch a very real piece of the past – a time when geopolitical and ideological alliance was backed by sustained cross-cultural contact and personal intimacy on elite levels. ⁸¹

In retrospect, it seems that one of the most crucial and lasting legacies of the Bolshevik Revolution was a fundamental reorientation, by which two countries with mutually incomprehensible cultures and geopolitically clashing agendas became deeply, and irrevocably, related.