Romance and revolution in two countries

ON the eve of President Mikhail Gorbachev's visit to Beijing during the turbulent summer of 1989, a journalist at Agence France-Presse set off to file a brief background story about a marriage between a Russian girl and a Chinese revolutionary. Patrick Lescot returned from the interview with pages of notes. His original 500-word despatch has now given birth to a 500-page book which is one of the most remarkable accounts of love and revolution in the 20th century. L'Empire Rouge Moscou-Pekin 1919-1989 (The Red Empire, Moscow-Peking) tells the astonishing story of two Chinese revolutionaries, Li Lisan and Zhang Bao, who married Russian girls in Moscow only to be incarcerated by Josef Stalin during purges there. Li, who led the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s, was a rare survivor among the Chinese members of the Communist Internationale. He was eventually allowed to return to China where he became a minister in Mao Zedong's government. Zhang, however, spent 18 years in labour camps, but he too was eventually allowed to return to China with Nadia Roudenkou, who had waited for him. When Mao and Nikita Khrushchev fell out after 1959, the Chinese Communist Party demanded they divorce their wives. Roudenkou returned to Moscow with their son Valery. Li refused to divorce. Instead his wife, Lisa Kichkine, was allowed to stay if she became a Chinese citizen. A few years later, both became victims of the Cultural Revolution. Kichkine was taken from her husband shortly before his death and spent eight years in solitary confinement. Zhang was also arrested and spent many more years in labour camps, becoming uniquely able to compare the gulags of Stalin and Mao. Finally, in the most remarkable twist, his son Valery married the second daughter of Li, Alla, and both still live in Beijing as does her mother, Lisa. The book, which appeared in France in September, is much more than the story of these two families. Their destinies are picked out against an epic canvas of the 20th century and history of the communist revolution. It takes the reader from Li's days as a student-worker at a factory in France and Zhang's student days at Madison University in Wisconsin, to Li's role as the fiery orator who mobilised mass strikes and rebellions across the mainland in the 1920s. It chronicles Zhang's escapades with the FBI in the service of the American Communist Party and their friendship as revolutionaries in Stalin's Moscow. Both men avidly read and wrote poetry and Zhang ended his days as vice-president of the All China Association of Poets. Lescot's research took him to the US where he was able to track down a daughter born to Zhang after he left for the Soviet Union, and to Moscow where he was able to examine the KGB archives and open the files of both men. The book reveals much about the history of the Chinese Communist Party before Mao took control and his followers rewrote history to put him in the leading role. For the first time, too, it tells the story of what happened to the Chinese victims of Stalin's purges. Like many other Communist revolutionaries, Li was born in Hunan and was among those, like Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai, sent to France to help with the labour shortages there. In France he joined the communist movement and was expelled for leading protests in Lyon. By 1923, he was organising the first successful miners' strikes in Anyuan, and two years later leading a wave of workers' protests after demonstrators were shot dead by police in the British concession. After Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek massacred the communists in Shanghai in 1927, Li played a leading role in founding the Red Army and leading it in an attack on Nanchang, the first city captured by the communists. The next year he travelled to Moscow for the first time where he was made de facto head of the party and then returned. Acting on Moscow's orders, he launched a national insurrection as the underground party emerged into the open and tried to take control of the main cities. For unknown reasons, part of the Red Army in Hunan Province, where it was led by Mao and Zhu De, disobeyed orders and did not attack Changsha. Instead Mao retreated to the mountains. The national uprising failed and Li was blamed and recalled to Moscow where Wang Ming was appointed in his place. At this point, Li disappeared from view. Lescot reveals that he spent the next seven years in Moscow living at the Hotel Lux working for the Comintern. This was the headquarters for world revolution where the exiled heads of many national communist parties lived together. At the Lenin Institute, groups of Chinese revolutionaries were trained and for each class, Li was brought out to make self-criticisms of the errors of his 'putschism'. With Zhang, Li edited the propaganda journal Save the Motherland until February 1938 when they were arrested by the secret police. Night after night, the inhabitants of the Hotel Lux lay awake in their beds listening to the ghastly routine. Along the long and silent corridors, they would hear the steps of three People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) men and wait expectantly until the footsteps stopped outside a door. There would follow three knocks and the command 'Arrest order' and the sound of voices. Some cried out: 'I am innocent', but most left in silence taking a suitcase that had already been prepared and lay under the bed. Li was arrested and on the night of February 23, 1938 and marched through the snow to the Lubyianka, the headquarters of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. Three days later it was Zhang's turn. Lescot claims all the Chinese Communist Party members living in the Soviet Union who were arrested were named by Kang Sheng and Wang Ming. A list was handed over in 1937 before they fled to Yunan when Moscow re-established ties with Mao. In prison Li's interrogators tried to make him confess that he was the leader of a conspiracy to assassinate Stalin, a Trotskyite and a Japanese spy. In another cell, Zhang passed out when his interrogators put a revolver against his skull and pulled the trigger. On another occasion, he was forced to recite Pushkin to the amusement of his torturers. Two years later, Li was released - he was still a member of the Chinese party's central committee - but Zhang was sentenced to eight years' hard labour and sent to Siberia. He would not be released for 18 years and only after Stalin's death. His extraordinary odyssey through the camps is described in detail, while his later years in China undergoing 'reform through labour' merit only a few lines. Lescot notes however that only in China were the prisoners forced to spend hours in political struggle meetings after 12 or 13 hours of labour. He also stresses that in the Soviet Union there was some legal process - including a trial - but not in China. Li's family have never been able to find out how he died or who was responsible. He was locked in a room of an apartment in Sanlihe, a district in Beijing, guarded by two senior officials. He was then found dead at his desk and reported to have committed suicide, ashamed of his crimes. His family found the story unbelievable. The death certificate recorded a different name and a man who was eight centimetres shorter. The men responsible, although their names are known, could not be traced. L'Empire Rouge Moscou-Pekin 1919-1989, Patrick Lescot, Editions Belfond