Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018. viii, 462 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$34.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-064055-2.
Lenin wanted the vanguard of communism to comprise professional revolutionaries single-mindedly devoted to the proletarian cause like celibate monks and nuns to the Catholic Church. Few such cold-blooded operatives answered the call. Whatever their nationality, most were flesh-and-blood human beings with all the passions, predilections, and peccadilloes of the species. Historian Elizabeth McGuire’s engaging first book explores the human dimensions of the intersection between the twentieth-century Russian and Chinese revolutions. She employs as master metaphor the concept of international revolutionary romance between real people rather than the abstract ideas that began with Lenin’s October 1917 coup d’état in Petrograd. The romance flared on and off for decades, in Moscow, Beijing, and many other Russian and Chinese venues, until the last of the two or three generations effected passed from the scene. Pushing the metaphor of romance perhaps farther than is warranted, Red at Heart is organized into five sections: First Encounters, School Crushes, Love Affairs, Families, and Last Kisses, roughly paralleling the decades from the 1920s through the 1960s. The book focuses on a rather small cast of mostly well-known figures, including Qu Qiubai, Li Lisan, Emi Siao, Jiang Jingguo (Chiang Kaishek’s son), He Zizhen (Mao Zedong’s third wife), and many lesser-known men and women whose stories appear in this rather loosely-stitched narrative that, to employ a non-romantic metaphor, more closely resembles a patchwork quilt than a snug garment.
Professor McGuire possesses formidable linguistic skills in Russian and Chinese and writes in vivid prose, with descriptions such as “the dirty imperial miscegenation that was Harbin” (44). Her liberal use of effective quotations from diaries, memoirs, and archives, and information gleaned from interviews with several surviving members of the cohorts she studies make this book a delight to read from beginning to end. The extensive bibliography demonstrates immersion in the secondary literature, but missing from it is Daria A. Spichak’s Kitaiskii avangard Kremlia (Moscow, 2012). Unfortunately, McGuire relies on Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s deservedly criticized biography of Mao Zedong, Mao: The Unknown Story, rather than Alexander V. Pantsov’s authoritative Mao: The Real Story which, in full disclosure, this reviewer translated and edited.
It is only when one ponders the question of what all the stories taken together actually tell us about the intersection between Chinese revolutionaries and the Russian revolution that the shortcomings of this book come into view. Yes, a certain number of radical young Chinese became enamoured of Russian culture, entranced by the ignis fatuus of Bolshevism, and attracted to complaisant Russian women in the period before Bolshevism turned Puritanical. So what? The main weakness of the book is that the author fails to adequately connect the stories of the individuals on whom she focuses to the larger context of evolving Sino-Soviet relations. This is not social history, but rather a pastiche of stories—some quite interesting, others quite banal— that fails to present a nexus between political thought and emotion. McGuire’s characters are emotional creatures rather than politically-motivated individuals with emotions. Adding an emotional, romantic dimension to the history of Sino-Soviet relations is a laudable and necessary project, but if, as in this book, it is basically divorced from politics, from ideology, from political action, the effort is wasted. Apart from curiosity value, how do the private lives and emotions of these very select characters relate to issues of importance? Some passages in the book provide fascinating information about the quotidian lives of Chinese students in the Soviet Union in different decades and chilling vignettes of horrors of the Cultural Revolution, but too much of it reads like People magazine, gossip column trivia, revolutionary soap opera. In writing about Mao’s third wife—wounded, abandoned, and exiled to Moscow after Jiang Qing caught the Chairman’s eye—McGuire refers to “the legend of He Zizhen [that] became a part of the Sino-Soviet romance” (206) as if fact, fiction, rumours, and gossip have equal weight in the historical record. It seems not to have occurred to the author that the personal traumas in the lives of many of her subjects derived not just from their own personal failings—many were irresponsible parents who, while dedicated to creating the future utopia, treated their own children like trash—but also from the pressure cooker of revolutionary totalitarian societies, Stalinist and Maoist, with their warped values, political witch hunts, concentration camps, mass executions, political campaigns, famines, etc. The high politics of Stalinism and Maoism emitted a poisonous paranoia that seeped into the personal lives of many mixed Chinese-Russian couples. Except for the chapter on the Cultural Revolution, there is almost no mention of this context. In the last chapter titled “Nostalgia,” writer and former PRC Minister of Culture Wang Meng travels to post-Soviet Russia in 2004, and fails to satisfy his longing for the supposed “golden age of romance” of the early 1950s, a period in which, we should remember, the Soviet Union experienced the final spasms of Stalinism, and China the imposition of Mao’s lethal party dictatorship.
McGuire concludes her book by telling us the fate of each of her main characters, somewhat in the vein of how Ivan Turgenev ended Fathers and Sons. In fact, one wonders whether this history, both fascinating and flawed, absorbing and banal, would have succeeded better as a panoramic novel on the scale of the major works of Tolstoy who, as McGuire informs us, was the most popular and influential of the classic Russian writers to impact the minds of the young Chinese revolutionaries attracted to the romance of the Russian revolution.
Steven I. Levine
University of Montana, Missoula, USA