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Chinese Trotskyists in Soviet Russia

Alexander Pantsov

From Students to Dissidents

The Chinese Trotskyists in Soviet Russia

(Part 1)

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Introduction

The disputes between Trotsky and the theoreticians of Russian national Communism which raged within the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) until the end of 1926 and covered the fundamental issues of the inner-party regime, economic construction in the USSR, and the direction of world developments, including the Chinese revolution, were largely unknown within the individual sections of the Communist International (Comintern), Not only the rank and file but also the leaders of these parties were ignorant of the positions of Trotsky and his supporters. This was the result of Stalin’s attempt to fence off the world Communist movement from the influence of his principal rival. In this, however, he was only partially successful. Despite his best efforts, both the foreign staff of the ECCI and those foreign Communists who were, for various reasons, living in the USSR were drawn into the struggle within the Bolshevik party. Above all, this meant those who had come to study in the various universities and “cadre schools” set up to train militants of the world Communist movement. Our story concerns those Chinese Communists, ECCI delegates, and students, who became involved. It was precisely within these circles that the Left Opposition in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was born.
 

Chinese Students in Soviet Russia

The Bolsheviks understood that the fate of the October revolution depended on an early victory of the world revolution. Therefore, from the very first days following their seizure of power, they offered moral and material aid to foreign revolutionary movements, helping to set up political parties, giving advice on strategy and tactics, and above all developing a system for training cadres. Aid was given on an especially large scale to the Chinese movements and many Chinese came to study in Russia, having to a greater or lesser degree thrown in their lot with the Communists.

Since, in the early years following October, it was practically impossible for Chinese revolutionaries to make the journey to Russia, the Bolsheviks concentrated their efforts politically educating those Chinese workers who, for one reason or another, found themselves on Soviet territory. According to various estimates, there were some 300,000–400,000 Chinese citizens on Soviet territory during the years 1917–20. The majority were labourers contracted to the Tsarist government during World War I. Many were ruined peasants and lumpen proletarians driven to seek work in Russia by sheer destitution. [1] During the civil war, many revolutionary-minded Chinese served in the Red Army and the Soviet authorities organized military and political training for them. For example, in August 1920, a special officer school set up by the international brigade of the 5th Army was attended by two hundred Chinese. By 1921, when the 5th Army was merged with the Eastern-Siberian military district, an international party school had been established. Teams of translators enabled lectures and political discussion groups to function. Scores of Chinese attended the agitprop courses organized by the central federation of foreign groups set up by the Central Committee of the party. [2]

In organizing these courses, the Bolsheviks believed that these Chinese revolutionaries, having witnessed and participated in fierce battles in Russia, “would act as a link between the existing movement [in Soviet Russia] and that soon to be born in China”. [3] And indeed some of this first wave of Chinese, having studied at the school of the class struggle so to speak, subsequently played prominent roles in the Chinese Nationalist and Communist movements – for example, Yang Ming-chai and Liu Ch’ang-sheng. [4]

Chinese emigrants in Russia on several occasions requested the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities (Narkomnats) to set up a central political school for them. [5] And F.I. Gapon of the Communist Party Siberian district committee drew up a detailed memorandum proposing a special school for training Marxist revolutionaries from Eastern nationalities. [6] During this early period, however, the education of Chinese students in Russia never attained a systematic or centralized character.

With the end of the civil war, however, and with national liberation movements springing up in the East, the task of organizing systematic education for revolutionaries of the East assumed a more urgent character. Young freedom-fighters would travel spontaneously to Russia seeking help and there was a need to set up a central school which could teach them Marxism-Leninism and revolutionary strategy and provide them with some military training which they could later put to use in their own countries. [7] A proposal to found such an institution was put to the Second Congress of the Comintern on June 26, 1920. The representative from the Dutch East Indies, H. Maring (alias H. Sneevliet), declared that:

”The Third International should make it possible for students from the Far East to live here for a year or so, to study courses in Communism, so that they properly understand what is taking place here and can breathe life into the theses [resolutions of the Congress], create Soviet organizations, and carry out Communist work in the colonies.

... Moscow and Petrograd are the new Meccas of the East. We here in Russia must make it possible for Eastern revolutionaries to get a theoretical education, so that the Far East becomes a living part of the Communist International. “ [8]

At the end of 1920 and the beginning of 1921, Narkomnats set about developing a programme of short-term schools capable of educating about one thousand students of various nationalities at a time including, of course, Chinese. [9] On February 3, 1921, the Politburo took a decision to organize courses for Eastern students under the direction of Narkomnats. [10] On February 10, 1921, the Central Committee decided to collect the various schools and courses together under the name of the University of the Toilers of the East. [11] A resolution concerning this was adopted by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union on April 21, 1921. [12] The institution soon became known as the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (CUTE). In 1923, it was renamed the J.V. Stalin Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Its initial aim was declared to be the political education of representatives of the working masses of the Soviet Far East – “... treaty lands, autonomous republics, autonomous areas, workers communes, and national minorities.” [13]

But from the outset, it was given the additional task of educating Eastern revolutionaries from beyond the borders of the USSR, including, of course, from China. [14]

With the foundation of CUTE in Moscow, the education of Chinese revolutionaries in the Soviet Union entered a new phase. Between 1921 and 1925, and again in the 1930s, all Chinese students were educated alongside those from other nationalities. But from 1925 to 1930, there was a university devoted exclusively to educating Chinese revolutionaries. It was founded in response to the outbreak of the national anti-imperialist revolution in China, and from 1925 to 1928 it was known as the Sun Yat.sen University of the Toilers of China (UTC). On September 17, 1928, after the defeat of the CCP and the institution of a fierce white terror in China, the university was renamed the Communist University of the Toilers of China (CUTC). [15] A short time previously, Chinese students at CUTE had been transferred there. The aim of CUTC expressed in its journal Kung-ch’an tsa-chih (Communist Journal) was to give a Marxist education to “the leaders of the mass Communist movement in China, the Bolshevik leaders of the Chinese revolution.” [16] In the summer of 1929, the Russian name for the university was again changed to the Communist University of Toiling Chinese. [17] Toward autumn of 1930 it was closed down.

Following this, the International Lenin School became the focus for the education of Chinese revolutionary youth. A special Chinese department was established within the school known as department “C”. Members of the Communist League of Chinese Youth were also educated at the Central Komsomol School. In 1934, a Chinese section was again opened at CUTE but it lasted only two years. On March 25, 1936, the overseas department of CUTE (known at this time as the cadre department) was transferred to the Institute for Scientific Research on National and Colonial Problems, which then became responsible for the education of students from abroad. The Chinese students at CUTE (143 persons) were transferred to the new institute, making up about 80 percent of its intake. In September 1938, however, the institute was dissolved by a decision of the ECCI Secretariat.

Apart from CUTE, UTC/CUTC, the International Lenin School, the Institute for Scientific Research on National and Colonial Problems, and the Central Komsomol School, there were other institutions where Chinese revolutionaries studied during the 1920s and 1930s. In December 1921, a decision of the Agitprop Department of the Russian Communist Party’s Central Committee led to the opening of a department of CUTE in Irkutsk devoted to the education of Far Eastern peoples including Chinese. [18] In June 1922, a decision of the party’s Far East Bureau established a political education department of the military-political school of the people’s revolutionary army of the Far Eastern Republic. [19] This was intended to educate Chinese partisans from Manchuria among whom Communist influence was practically non-existent. A Chinese Leninist school functioned in Vladivostok in the mid-1920s. [20] In 1932, a series of courses entitled “The Workers’ Movement” were organized on the initiative of A Lozovskii (Solomon Dridzo), the general secretary of the Red International of Trade Unions. They were intended to prepare Chinese graduates of Soviet universities for their return home. Lozovskii and others taught the young revolutionaries the art of leading strike movements among the workers, building trade unions, etc. [21] Chinese were given technical industrial training in various Soviet firms. There were many other specialist courses available to Chinese Communist cadres. [22]

The Bolsheviks gave great assistance to the Chinese Communists in the field of military training. Special departments for Chinese students were set up at the Frunze Military Academy, the Tolmachev Military-Political Academy, the Aeronautical Military-Theoretical School, the Artillery School, the Moscow Infantry School, and in military schools in Kiev and other provincial centres. From September 1927 until June 1928, CUTE ran special military-political courses. [23] Chinese commanders were also sent on the “Vystrel” (Shot) courses organized for Red Guard commanders. In an official message to the military academies, KE. Voroshilov directed that they should aim to train officers capable of commanding “large-scale military units in China”. [24] At the request of Chou En-lai, the Soviets routinely organized military training for Chinese Communists coming to Moscow on Comintern or other business. [25]

The process of selecting Chinese students for study in Russia and the composition of the student groups varied with the political situation in China and, of course, with the particular profile of the institute in question (was it a specifically Communist university or a military school, etc.). It also depended on the importance attached to the institution by the Kuomintang (KMT, Nationalist Party) or CCP leadership.

For example, the selection of students for specifically Communist institutions lay entirely with the ECCI, and the central committees of the Russian and Chinese Communist parties. For the general political schools and, during the period of the CCP-MKT united front ( 1924–27), for military academies, the selections were made jointly by the central executive committees of the USSR and the KMT, with the participation of the CCP Central Committee. After the break-up of the united front, responsibility for choosing students for military schools fell to the Chinese delegation at the ECCI. Naturally, a great deal of the practical work of selection was carried out in China itself, by Soviet and Comintern workers.

In 1920, the ECCI representative G.N. Voitinsky, together with his assistants M.F. Kuznetsova and Yang Ming-chai, organized the so-called School of Foreign Languages in Shanghai. [26] This was in reality intended for socialist-minded youth who wanted to study in Moscow. The secretary of the Shanghai Union of Socialist Youth, Yu Hsiu-sung, also played an active part in setting up the school, of which he became the technical director. The students for the most part (several groups of ten to twenty students passed through the school) studied the Russian language, which was taught by Yang Ming-chai. Once a week a member of the Shanghai Communist circle, Ch’en Wang’tao, who was also the first Chinese translator of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, gave a lecture on Marxism. [27] lt is likely that other members of the Shanghai Communist organization gave lectures, though given the low level of development of Chinese Marxist thought at the time, it is unlikely that the students came away with any clear picture of socialism. In the spring of 1921 (apparently in April or May), the first fourteen graduates of the school were sent to Soviet Russia, on the recommendation of the Shanghai Communist circle and Yang Ming-chai. Among them were some who later became prominent figures in the CCP-Liu Shao-ch’i, Jen Pi-shih, P’eng Shu-chih, Lo I-nung and Hsaio Ching-kuang. [28] According to Pao Hui-seng, one of the first supporters of Communism in China, a special commission for education was set up in Shanghai in early 1921 by himself and Yang Ming-chai. Its function was to choose worthy representatives of Chinese socialist youth to be sent to study in Moscow. [29] Some reports suggest that Tung Pi-wu also took part in the work of the commission. [30]

The high level of activity of the School of Foreign Languages and the commission for education is explained by the fact that among Chinese youth at this time there was an enormous interest in events in Russia and especially in the Russian Communist Party. Many young Chinese were desperately searching for a way out of their country’s acute crisis. One of the results of this was a transformation, in the early 1920s, of the “diligent work, economical study” (ch’in-kung chien-hsüeh) movement. [31] There was a gradual waning of interest in studying in Western Europe whose place began to be occupied by Russia in the minds of young Chinese. In August 1920, Mao Tse-tung, Fang Wei-hsia, and Ho Shu-heng set up the “Society for the Study of Russia”, based in Changsha, which aimed to “agitate for diligent work and economical study in Russia”, so that people could study the situation in the country. [32] According to Hsiao Ching-kuang, the Society had links with the School of Foreign Languages in Shanghai and its members were sent to study in the Soviet Union via the School. [33]

The first large intake of Chinese students, including Liu Shao-ch’i and Hsiao Ching-kuang, were enrolled at CUTE on August 1, 1921. [34] A total of twenty-six Chinese were issued with student cards on that day, having arrived in Moscow on the recommendation of various Communist circles. Prior to this, only two Chinese had enrolled at the school, arriving on July 9 and 23 respectively. [35] By the second half of 1921 there were thirty-five or thirty-six Chinese students at CUTE; by 1924, fifty-one; and in mid-April 1925 there were 112. [36]

As revolutionaries and conspirators, the majority (and after December 1922, all) were given pseudonyms by which they were known in all official documents. P’eng Shu-chih was known as Ivan Petrov, Jen Pi-shih as Brinskii, Lo I-nung as Bukharov, and Liu Po-chien, who later rose to prominence in the CCP, as Sherstinskii. [37] The students represented a significant percentage of CCP and Socialist Youth members. In April 1924, about 9 percent of the CCP membership were in Russia. [38] The majority came from non-proletarian backgrounds. In China, as in other countries, the intelligentsia predominated in the early stages of the Communist movement. [39]

Following the formation of the national united front by the CCP and KMT, the basis on which students were selected for study in the USSR changed. After the foundation of the Sun Yat-sen University of the Toilers of China (October 7, 1925), a central selection committee was set up in Canton (Guangzhou) on the proposal of M.M. Borodin, adviser to the KMT’s Central Executive Committee. A number of prominent leaders of the Nationalist party and government took part, including T’an Yen-k’ai, Ku Ying-fen, and Wang Ching-wei. Borodin acted as adviser. Selection boards sat in several large cities, including Shanghai, Peking (Beijing), and Tientsin (Tianjin). In Shanghai, Yang Ming-chai and Chou Ta-wen were in charge. [40] All the students had to sit arduous three-part examinations. Finally, a contingent of 310 students was selected, including 180 from Canton, 100 from Shanghai, Peking, and Tientsin, and 10 each from the military schools in Hunan and Yunnan, and the Whampoa Academy. An extra 30 were added to the group without having to sit the exams, on account of their close family relations with important KMT officials.

Although the rules of the new university laid down that the number of CCP and KMT students should be roughly equal [41], both parties did their best to obstruct members of the other party from getting to Moscow. For example, 90 percent of those chosen in Canton, where the right was strong, were KMT members. On the other hand, the majority of students from Shanghai, Peking, and Tientsin were members of either the CCP or its youth wing. [42] Taking the group as a whole, the number of Communists was greater. Among those who had arrived in Moscow by December 1925, 188 (68 percent) were Communists. [43]

The whole process of getting the group to Moscow took several months. [44] The first group of 119 people received their student cards on November 23, 1925 [45], while others had to wait for a passage from Canton where they were taught Russian by Soviet advisers to the KMT. [46]

Chinese émigrés could also be selected for study in Moscow and this was left in the hands of the particular party they were attached to. Some, of course, simply turned up in Russia on their own initiative. The first group to arrive, from France, were members of the CCP or its youth organization and enrolled at CUTE in April 1923. Among them were Wang J o-fei, Kao Feng, Hsiung Hsiung, Cheng Ch’ao-lin, Ch’en Ch’iao-nien, Ch’en Yen-nien, and Chao Shih-yen, all of whom were active members of the CCP’s European Department (which had been set up in 1922 in Paris). [47] In mid-November of the same year, another group of twenty arrived at CUTE from France. Among them was Yin K’uan, one of the future leaders of the Trotskyist movement in China. [48] In October 1924, another group from France enrolled at CUTE, including Nieh Jung-chen who was later to play a prominent role in the CCP. [49] In January 1926, ten Chinese, mainly KMT members, arrived from Germany to enrol at UTC, followed in autumn of the same year by ten CCP members from Belgium and France. [50] Chinese students also arrived from the Philippines and the United States and a number enrolled who had previously been resident in Soviet Russia.

At the end of the first academic year at UTC, the selection process had to be repeated and the Organization Bureau of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee appointed S.A Dalin, one of the staff at the university, to take charge of the matter. [51] Thanks to his efforts, the links between UTC and China were maintained throughout the revolutionary period of 1926–27. During these years, groups from central and south China continued to arrive in Moscow, mainly enrolling at UTC, but also at CUTE and various military academies. In August 1926 and at the start of 1927 commanders and political commissars from the People’s Army of Feng Yu-hsiang arrived at Sun Yat-sen University and in the winter of 1926 a large party arrived from north China. [52] By July 1927, around the time of Wang Ching-wei’s coup in Wuhan, there were 562 students at the university. [53] Their social backgrounds reflected the makeup of the national united front in China, in that they included members of the bourgeoisie and land.owning class as well as workers and peasants.

On September 13, 1927, the KMT’s Central Executive Committee formally broke relations with the Sun Yat-sen University of the Toilers of China, deciding to “send no more students to this university.” [54] But even before this, the KMT had forbidden its members to remain at UTC and on August 5, 239 students quit the university and returned to China. [55] With the withdrawal of the KMT, the selection of students was left in the hands of the Communists. UTC was reorganized into a Communist institution and in March 1928 its rector, Pavel A. Mif, presented a document to the Chinese commission of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee recommending a maximum of 20 percent non-communist members of the student body. He also proposed that no less than half of the students should be industrial workers. As regards émigrés, only those with a solid record in the CCP or its youth wing should be accepted and, above all, no one who had spent more than five years abroad should be considered. [56] At the beginning of August 1927 there were 320 students at UTC. [57] Some of them returned to China, having finished their courses. Others were kept on as translators, instructors, or researchers and still others went on to study in military academies around the Soviet Union.

In autumn 1927 a group of prominent CCP members arrived at the university. Some of them, including Wu Yu-chang and Lin Po-ch’u, had held posts in the KMT government in Wuhan until the July coup d’etat. At the beginning of 1928 a large group of working class and peasant youth, veterans of the Nanchang uprising and the “autumn harvest” uprisings of 1927, arrived in Moscow. They were accompanied by many trade unionists and activists from the women’s movement. Most of these people were members of the CCP or its youth wing. A number of delegates to the CCP’s Sixth Congress, which was held near Moscow in August 1928, were sent to study at UTC at the conclusion of the congress. Among them was the fifty-two-year-old founder-member of the CCP, Ho Shu-heng. At this time, the university, now renamed the Communist University of the Toilers of China (CUTC), numbered around 600 students, including 137 who had been transferred from the Chinese Department of CUTE. [58]

As a whole, looking at the period of the 1920s and 1930s, we can say that a significant proportion of the Chinese revolutionary movement (both the CCP and the KMT) received a political education in the USSR. A whole network of higher educational establishments were created for this purpose. About 1,600 Chinese studied at UTC/CUTC [59] and no less than 500 at CUTE. A large number of officers both from the Chinese Communist Red Army and the KMT-controlled National Revolutionary Army studied at Soviet military schools. From various sources we can conclude that of the 118 top leaders of the CCP (we are talking here of the period from the 1920s to the 1940s) who studied abroad, 80 (70 percent) studied in Russia. [60] More than half of these (47) became members or alternate members of the Central Committee and 15 became members of the Politburo. Apart from those we have already referred to, there were such prominent figures as Wang Chia-hsiang (studied at UTC/CUTC), Kuan Hsiang-ying (studied at CUTE), Teng Hsiao-p’ing (on enrolment at CUTE on January 17, 1926 he was given the pseudonym Krezov; after twelve days, he was transferred to UTC where he studied until January 12, 1927 under the name of lvan Sergeevich Dozorov), Li Fu-ch’un (student at CUTE), Hsiang Ching-yu, Ts’ai Ch’ang (CUTE), Tso Ch’uan, Chang Wen-t’ien (UTC/CUTC), Chu Te (CUTE), Ch’in Pang-hsien (UTC/ CUTC), Ch’en Po-ta (alias Ch’en Shang-yu, UTC/CUTC), Ch’en Ch’ang-hao (UTC/CUTC), Ch’en Shao-yu (alias Wang Ming, UTC/CUTC), Yang Shang-k’un (UTC/CUTC), and others. Four of the five members of the executive committee of the united Trotskyist organization founded in May 1931 had studied in Moscow. These were Ch’en 1-mou, Cheng Ch’ao-lin, Wang Wen-yüan (alias Wang Fan-hsi, CUTE, later CUTC), and Sung Feng-ch’un (UTC/CUTC).

The majority of these people came to study in the Soviet Union at a comparatively early age-on average about twenty to twenty-one years. As a rule they had little practical experience of revolutionary work and their understanding of Bolshevik theory was still more limited.

Liu Shao-ch’i, for example, before arriving in Soviet Russia, “understood only that socialism was a good thing. I had heard of Marx and Lenin, about the October revolution and the Bolshevik party. However, at that time I did not have a clear idea of socialism and how it could be brought about.” [61] The theoretical level of the majority of Chinese left-wing democrats at the time of their arrival in the USSR can be gauged by the admission of Sheng Yueh that he and the overwhelming majority of his colleagues before arriving to study in the USSR had only a weak acquaintance with traditional Chinese philosophy and knew virtually nothing of Western, bourgeois philosophy. [62] Judging from reports on the newly arrived students held in the archives of CUTE and UTC/CUTC, at best they could be expected to have read the Manifesto of the Communist Party or Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii’s ABC of Communism. [63] Of course, a student might write down that he had read such and such a work without really understanding its contents. According to Wang Fan-hsi, he and his comrades “in fact did not understand what Communism really was” even after reading the few Marxist books available in China in the mid–1920s. They desperately sought reading material and, still more, teachers who could educate them. [64]

The task facing the authorities of the Soviet international schools, therefore, was to devise a special teaching programme suitable for students of whom the majority carried with them the baggage of patriarchal and national traditions, had a very feeble grounding in Marxism, and did not even have a grasp of the basic social, political, and economic concepts of the modem world. Of course, the levels of education of the students varied widely. Workers and peasants who had not even attended elementary school would study at CUTE and UTC/CUTC alongside graduates of Chinese universities such as Peking University, the Peking National University of Law and Political Science, the Sun Yat-sen University of Canton, and Shanghai University, or foreign universities like Gotebourg, the Lyons Franco-Chinese Institute [65], and the University of Labour at Charleroi [66], Belgium. However, even the most educated had little knowledge of Marxist theory.

The students at both CUTE and UTC/CUTC were divided into study groups according to their level of education. In the Chinese section at CUTE (at first known as department A, later as department C), they were split into seven groups with about half a dozen students in each. By contrast, the eleven groups at UTC each had between thirty and forty members. [67] The make-up of the groups was determined by party allegiance and age as well as educational attainment. An example of such a group which existed in 1926–27 at UTC was the so-called Theoretical Class consisting of leading CCP and KMT members. The secretary of its party cell was Teng Hsiao-p’ing. [68] In 1928, a Special Class was set up for CCP members over thirty years of age. There were fifteen members, including Tung Pi-wu (pseud. Slukhov) [69], Yeh Chien-ying, Lin Po-ch’u, Hsu T’e-li, Wu Yu-chang, Fang Wei-hsia, Ho Shu-heng, and Chao Ju-chih. [70]

The universities had special access departments (similar to those run for workers) which ran foundation courses for those students with little formal education. There were also, on the other hand, advanced study groups, whose members were proficient in Russian and worked as lecturers and translators. These advanced students were also expected to prepare course summaries and translate any necessary special material into Chinese. The student-translators could be attached to a particular study group or to the faculty as a whole. At CUTE in 1921 there were two student-translators, Li Tsung-wu (alias Li Chung-wu) and Ch’u Ch’iu-pai. The latter worked as an assistant in the social studies department. [71] By September 1927 there were twenty Chinese graduates of UTC in the general lecturers’ group at the university, All had received the permission of the CCP Central Committee to remain in Moscow. Among them was Wang Chia-hsiang, Tung l-hsiang, Pu Shih-ch’i, Huang Li, Shen Tse-min, Chang Wen-t’ien, Ch’en Shao-yu, Ch’en Yuan-tao, and Lu Yuan, this last a leader of the Chinese Left Opposition. [72]

The revolutionary movement needed highly trained cadres and the course of study was extremely arduous. At CUTE to begin with, the course lasted seven months. In 1922 it was extended to three years and in 1927, to four. The length of time students spent on military training also increased, to between six and nine months at CUTE and two years at UTC. It was planned to run a three-year military course at CUTC. [73] The best teachers in Moscow were attracted to work at CUTE and UTC/CUTC. These included the distinguished Sinologists M.G. Andreev, G.N. Voitinskii, M. Volin (alias S.M. Belenkii), A.A. Ivanov (A. Ivin), E.S. Iolk, V.S. Kolokolov, V.N. Kuchumov (who from mid–1927 to May 1928 was pro-rector of UTC), L.I. Madiar (sometime director of the economics faculty at UTC), I.M. Oshanin, and E.D. Polivanov (director of the native languages department at CUTE). Karl B. Radek also lectured at UTC, where he was rector from 1925 until April 6, 1927. B.Z. Shumyatsky was rector of CUTE from 1926 to 1929 and taught a course on the history of revolutionary movements in the East. Others included Pavel A Mif (pro-rector, then, from 1927 to 1929, rector of UTC), V.J. Veger (rector of CUTC, 1929–30), A. Aizenshtat (lecturer in political economy at UTC/CUTC), A.I. Skorplilev (director of the faculty of the history of class struggle at CUTC), and V.I. Gorev (military director of CUTE, expert on the Chinese army and the Chinese language). Many other historians, economists, philosophers, and graduates of the Institute of Red Professors and the J.M. Sverdlov Communist University taught at CUTE and UTC/CUTC. In 1922–23 at CUTE there was a teaching body of 165 lecturers; in 1925–26 there were 146. [74]

In 1926–27 there were 62 teachers at UTC and in 1930 there were 70. [75] The teaching department at UTC/CUTC had responsibility for the organization of courses. It prepared teaching materials, hired staff, and organized staff conferences on educational problems concerning the performance of the students, and on the development of more effective teaching methods. [76]

Many leaders of the Communist Party, the Comintern, and the International of Professional Unions (Profintern), including Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Krupskaya, Lozovskii, Manuilskii, Pick, and Katayama, attended as visiting lecturers. The students were also able to meet with leaders of the CCP such as Chou En-lai, Teng Chung-hsia, Chang Kuo-t’ao, and Ch’u Ch’iu-pai, on their visits to Moscow.

The course work was extremely intensive. At CUTE in 1923 students had to study the Russian language, political economy, historical materialism, history of class struggle, history of the working class movement, history of the Russian Communist Party, as well as a number of natural sciences. [77] The first-year students at UTC studied the Russian language, the history of the development of social forms [78], history of the Chinese revolutionary movement, history of the revolutionary movement in the West, general Western history, history of the Soviet Communist Party, economic geography, political economy, party-building, military affairs, and one other subject which went wider the name “Gazette”. [79] In the general lecture group at UTC, only four subjects were studied – political economy, general history of the West, historical materialism, and the theory and practice of proletarian revolution. [80] In the foundation (access) courses, they studied the Russian language, history, geography, arithmetic, and social science. [81]

The most intensive and effective were the Russian language courses. The principal aim was to permit the students to read social and political texts and to carry on discussions on these themes, which naturally were of most relevance to young revolutionaries. Social science courses were, of course, influenced by ideological and political developments within the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern. Before 1924 and Trotsky’s defeat following his first clash with the Stalinist bureaucracy, students were taught according to the Trotskyist-Leninist theory of world development. But as Stalin’s role in the Bolshevik party grew in importance and the struggle against Trotsky and later, the joint Left Opposition, intensified, the spirit of the ideology taught in these schools underwent a fundamental change. This process was under way from the time of the very foundation of UTC, despite the fact that oppositionists held many leading positions in the university and the rector, Karl Radek, was one of Trotsky’s closest co-.thinkers. According to the prevailing norms of party discipline, Radek and his colleagues were obliged to publicly defend the party line as defined by congresses, plenums, and other leading bodies controlled by the Stalinists. They had certain room for manoeuvre and attempted to outline their own views in their lectures and seminars [82], but only within definite limits, bearing in mind that they were under constant surveillance by Stalin’s supporters on the staff at UTC, headed by the pro-rector Mif. At the end of 1926 the Chinese students themselves were drawn into the inner-party struggle by order of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee [83] and many of them subsequently saw it as their duty in the fight against the Opposition to inform on their teachers to the university party committee. [84]

(To be continued)

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Footnotes

1. See Novy Mir (New World), 1959, no. 4:115; M.A. Persits, Eastern Internationalists in Russia and Some Questions of the National Liberation Movement (1918–July 1920), in Komintern i Vostok (The Comintern and the East), ed. R.A. Uliyanovsky (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1969), 55–56; N.A. Popov, The Participation of Chinese Internationalists in Defence Units of the Soviet Republic in the Period of the Civil War (1918–1920), Voprosy Istorii (Problems of History), 1957, no. 10:110; V.M. Ustinov, Chinese Communist Organizations in Soviet Russia (1918–1922), in Kitaiskie Dobrovol’tsi v Bayakh za Sovetskuyu Vlast’ 1918–1922 (Chinese volunteers in the struggle for Soviet power 1918–22), ed. M. Liu (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1961), 39.

2. See Popov, Participation of Chinese Internationalists, 120; also his Chinese Proletarians in the Civil War in Russia, in Liu, Kitaiskie Dobrovol’tsi, 35; and Ustinov, Chinese Communist Organizations, 44.

3. Pravda, June 30, 1920.

4. Yang Ming-chai (1882–1938) arrived in Russia before the overthrow of Tsarism; after the October victory, he became a member of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) [RKP(b)]; in 1920 he was assigned to the Vladivostok Department of the Far East Bureau of the RKP(b) and accompanied a group of Comintern officials sent to China to establish links with the Chinese revolutionary movement. Until the summer of 1927 he worked and studied in Moscow, then occupied a leading position in the Peiping-Tientsin regional organization of the CCP. At the beginning of the 1930s he was deputy editor of the Khabarovsk regional newspaper Rabochii Put’ (Workers’ Road). Yang was arrested in 1938 by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and shot soon afterwards, accused of being a member of the so-called counter.revolutionary bloc of rightists and Trotskyists. He was later rehabilitated.

Liu Ch’ang-sheng (1904–67) arrived in Russia in 1922 and worked as a docker in Vladivostok. He was a member of the Russian Communist Party from 1923 and of the CCP from 1928. He was an alternate member of the Seventh CCP Central Committee (CCPCC) and a full member of the Eighth CCPCC. From 1953 to 1957 Liu was vice chairman of the Chinese trade union organization. He was killed by Red Guards on January 20, 1967.

5. Zhizn’ Natsional’nostei (Life of Nationalities), May 28, 1921.

6. See Persits, Eastern Internationalists in Russia, 65; K.V. Shevelev, Episodes from the History of the Formation of the Communist Party of China; Problemy Dal’nego Vostoka (Far Eastern Affairs), 1980, no. 4:145.

7. At this time, Chinese were still being trained as party and Soviet cadres with a view to working among the Chinese population within Russia. In October 1929 a party school accommodating 125 students opened in Vladivostok and an International Pedagogical Institute (also in Vladivostok) opened in 1931. The latter comprised a Chinese and a Korean department. See Russian Centre for the Preservation of the Records of Modern History [hereafter Russian Centre] 530/1/57; Vestnik Dal’nevostochnogo Otdekniya AN SSSR (Bulletin of the Far East Department of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), 1932, nos. 1–2:34.

8. Kongress Kommunisticheskogo lnternatsionala: Stenograficheskii Otchet (Stenographical record of the Second Congress of the Communist International) (Moscow: The Comintern Press, 1921), 165–66.

9. Zhizn’ Natsional’nostei, January 13, 1921.

10. Pod Znamenem Ilyicha (Under the Banner of Ilyich), May 8, 1926. According to a number of sources, the decision to open a school for party and Soviet workers drawn from the toilers of Eastern borderlands was taken by the RKP(b) Central Committee in January 1921. See Zhizn’ Natsional’nostei, January 26, 1921.

11. Pod Znamenem Ilyicha, May 8, 1926. On April 18, 1924, with the abolition of Narkomnats, CUTE was placed under the direction of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. From 1929 to 1937 (when it was restructured), it was managed by the Scientific Research Association for the Study of National and Colonial Problems. In 1937–38, it was under the control of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. It was closed down in 1938.

12. Zhizn’ Natsional’nostei, May 15, 1921; Sobranie Uzakonenii i Rasporyazhenii Rabochego i Krest’yanskogo Pravitel’stva (The Statutes and Orders of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government) (Moscow), 1921, no. 36:194; Pod Znamenem Ilyicha, May 8, 1926.

13. Zhizn’ Natsional’nostei, May 14, 1921.

14. Ibid., May 22, 1921; Pod Znamenem Ilyicha, May 8, 1926. It should be noted that when CUTE was opened, there were already a number of general educational establishments giving training in Marxism-Leninism to members of the national liberation and Communist movements of the Near and Middle East. For example, there was a Socialist Academy of the East (see Kommunist [Baku], October 15, 1920). In mid-January 1921, the first students graduated from the “shock” courses in Soviet activity and propaganda in the East (see Zhizn’ Natsional’noetei, March 17, 1921). But CUTE was the first school dedicated to the systematic education of revolutionaries from the major countries of the East, including China.

15. This decision was taken by the Organization Bureau of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee (see Russian Centre 530/1/27). The internal reorganization of UTC into a Communist institution (by re-working the study programme, altering the basis for the selection of students, and reinforcing party-political work) dragged on until the start of the 1929–30 academic year. See G.V. Efimov, Episodes in the History of the Communist University of the Toilers of China, Problemy Dal’nego Vostoka, 1977, no. 2:173.

16. Kung-ch’an tsa-chih (Communist Journal), 1929, no. 1:5.

17. The Chinese name of the university changed only once-in 1928. Until autumn 1928, it was known as “Sun Chung-shan ta-hsueh” or “Sun Wen tah sueh” or “Sun 1-hsien ta-hsueh” (Sun Yat-sen University). Then it became “Chung-kuo lao-tung kung-ch’an-chu-i ta-hsueh” (Communist University of the Toilers of China).

18. See N.N. Timofeeva, The Communist University of the Toilers of the East (CUTE) (1921–25) [hereafter cited as CUTE, 1921–25], Narody Azii i Afriki (The Peoples of Asia and Africa), 1976, no. 2:52.

19. See Persits, Eastern Internationalists in Russia, 89.

20. See N.N. Timofeeva, The Communist University of the Toilers of the East (CUTE) (1926–38), [hereafter cited as CUTE, 1926–38], Narody Azii i Afriki, 1979, no. 5:40.

21. Sheng Yueh, Sun Yat-sen University and the Chinese Revolution: A Personal Account (New York: Paragon, 1971), 66.

22. A.M. Grigoriev, Revolyutsionnoe Dvizhenie v Kitae 1927–1931: Problemy Strategii i Taktiki (The revolutionary movement in China 1927–31: Problems of strategy and tactics) (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1980), 271.

23. See Russian Centre 532/1/41.

24. Cited in R.A. Mirovitskaya, The Soviet Union and the CCP at the End of the 1920s and the Start of the 1930s, in Opyt i Uroki Istorii KPK: K 60-ktiyu Obrazovaniya Partii (Experience and lessons from the sixty-year-long formation of the CCP), ed. M.L. Titarenko (Moscow: Institut Dal’nego Vostoka Press, 1981), 202.

25. Ibid.

26. See Ch’i-wu Lao-jen (Pao Hui-seng), Before and After the Formation of the Communist Party of China, Rabochiy Klass i Sovremenny Mir (The Working Class and Contemporary World), 1971, no. 2:120; People’s Daily (Peking), August 14, 1983; Hsiao Ching-kuang, Before and After Studies in the Soviet Union, Ke-ming shih tzu-liao (Materials on the History of Revolution) (Peking), 1981, no. 3:6; Donald Klein and Anne B. Clark, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Communism; 1921–1965, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1:241, 2:982.

27. See Hsiao, Before and After Studies in the Soviet Union, 6.

28. Ibid.

29. See Ch’i-wu Lao-jen, Before and After the Formation, 121.

30. Klein and Clark, Biographical Dictionary, 2:983.

31. Another important factor influencing the change of character of this movement was the post-war economic decline in the West and a corresponding sharp fall in the demand for Chinese workers. For more details on the “diligent work, economical study” movement in Western Europe, see E. Yu. Staburova, Anarkhizm v Kitae 1900–1921 (Anarchism in China 1900–1921) (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1983), 106–14; Liu Fa ch’in-kung chien-hsüeh yün-tung (The “diligent work, economical study” movement in France), 2 vols. (Shanghai: Shang-hai jen-min ch’u-pan-she, 1986).

32. See Wu-ssu shih-ch’i te she-t’uan (Societies of the May Fourth Period) (Peking: Sheng-huo, tu-shu, hsin-chih san-lien shu-tien, 1979), 67.

33. See Hsiao, Before and After Studies in the Soviet Union, 6.

34. The remaining graduates of the school’s first intake (among them P’eng Shu-chih) arrived in Moscow in the second half of September.

35. See Russian Centre 532/1/393/69-72.

36. See Chiang K’ang-hu, Hsin E yu-chi (A journey to the new Russia) (Shanghai: Shang-wu yin-shu-kuan, 1923), 35; Russian Centre 532/1/393/22–29, 61–64.

37. See Russian Centre 495/225/730; 532/1/393/5, 17; Cheng Ch’ao-lin hui-i-lu (Memoirs of Cheng Ch’ao-lin) (Hong Kong: 1982), 59.

38. Pod Znamenem llyicha, April 26, 1924.

39. “Comparative predominance of the intelligentsia at the start of the movement was observed everywhere,” wrote Lenin. See V.I. Lenin, How V. Zasulich Fights Liquidationism, in Collected Works 24:22.

40. Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 16.

41. See Russian Centre 530/2/35.

42. Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 16.

43. Calculated according to Russian Centre 530/1/3; 530/1/42/79.

44. Our best information is that the last group of this intake (seventy-five persons) arrived at UTC on September 22, 1926. See Russian Centre 530/1/42.

45. Russian Centre 530/1/42/68.

46. See Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 21–22.

47. See Russian Centre 495/225/874; 532/1/393/5, 10, 15, 21, 30; Cheng Ch’ao-lin hui-i-lu, 54–55, 62.

48. See Russian Centre 532/1/393/14, 18, 70.

49. Ibid., 43.

50. Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 102; Chiang Tse-min, Days of Diligent Work and Economical Study in France and Belgium, Ke-ming shih tzu-liao, 1981, no. 3:84.

51. See Russian Centre 530/1/9/11; S.A. Dalin, Kitaiskie Memuary 1921–1927 (Chinese memoirs 1921–27) (Moscow: Nauka Press, 1975), 176.

52. Russian Centre 530/1/42; Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 30, 137–38, 147.

53. Calculated according to Russian Centre 530/1/42.

54. Ibid., 530/1/16.

55. Calculated according to Russian Centre 530/1/42/79–61. About fifty KMT members remained at UTC, many of whom expressed a desire to join the Komsomol or Communist Party. See ibid. 530/2/26.

56. See also Russian Centre 530/1/33.

57. Calculated according to Russian Centre 530/1/42/79–61.

58. See ibid. 532/1/69/4–9; Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 42.

59. Calculated from Russian Centre 530/1/75.

60. Calculated from Klein and Clark, Biographical Dictionary 2:1056–57.

61. Liu Shao-ch’i, Speech at a Meeting Held in the Moscow Palace of Sports (December 7, 1960), Pravda, December 8, 1960.

62. Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 63.

63. The name of the second author of The ABC of Communism, it is true, was never mentioned. See, for example, Russian Centre 495/225/401, 1100, 1629 and other sources.

64. Wang Fan-hsi, Shuang-shan hui-i-lu (Memoirs of Shuang-shan) (Hong Kong: Chou Publisher, 1977), 34.

65. This institute was founded in autumn 1921 by Chinese anarchists as part of the programme of “diligent work, economical study” in France. For more details, see Staburova, Anarkhizm v Kitae, 111–12. More than one hundred Chinese studied there.

66. The University of Labour at Charleroi was formed by Belgian socialists for the children of Belgian workers. However, the administration opened its doors to young Chinese also, giving them free accommodation and setting up special courses for them. For details, see Chiang, Days of Diligent Work and Economical Study in France and Belgium, 74–84. Among others, Nieh Jung-chen and Liu Po-chien followed training courses here.

67. Pod Znamenem Ilyicha, April 26, 1924; Efimov, Episodes in the History of the Communist University of the Toilers of China, 172.

68. Russian Centre 495/225/1629; Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 69.

69. According to other reports, Sleptsov (Russian Centre 495/225/31).

70. Russian Centre 530/1/40, 75; 530/1/76/2, 7, 9, 20, 27; Yang Tzu-lieh, Chang Kuo-t’ao fu-jen hui-i-lu (Memoirs of Madame Chang Kuo-t’ao) (Hong Kong: Tzu-lien ch’u-pan-she, 1970), 216.

71. Both Ch’u Ch’iu-pai and Li Tsung-wu arrived in Moscow in January 1921 as correspondents of the Peking newspaper Ch’en Pao (Morning Post). See Hsiao, Before and After Studies in the Soviet Union, 11; Chiang, Hsin E yu-chi, 35; and Klein and Clark, Biographical Dictionary 1:241.

72. See Russian Centre 530/1/16.

73. Ibid., 532/1/37/5; Timofeeva, CUTE, 1921–25, 50; Pod Znamenem Ilyicha, May 8, 1926; Wang, Shuang-ehan hui-i-lu, 53; Ch’ien-chin pao (Forward) (Moscow), December 18, 1925; Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 61.

74. See Timofeeva, CUTE, 1921–25, 50, and CUTE, 1926–38, 34.

75. Russian Centre 530/1/16, 68.

76. See Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 49–50.

77. See Cheng Ch’ao-lin hui-i-lu, 63.

78. This discipline was an introduction to the social sciences, history, political economy, and philosophy for those students with only a slight acquaintance with Marxism. See Dalin, Kitaiskie Memuary, 176.

79. See Russian Centre 530/1/16. According to Sheng Yueh, the UTC students also studied one Western language, English, German, or French. See Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 61.

80. See Russian Centre 530/1/16.

81. See Sheng, Sun Yat-sen University, 75.

82. This was extremely characteristic of Radek who, until 1927, taught a general course on the history of the revolutionary movement in China. We have the testimony of several persons that he was deeply revered and loved by the majority of students. See, in particular, Russian Centre 530/2/29, 32.

83. For details, see Meng Ch’ing-shu, Vospominaniya o Wang Mine (Memories of Wang Ming) (Manuscript in Russian) (Moscow: n.d.), 66–67.

84. See Russian Centre 530/2/29.

 
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