Daria Arincheva and Alexander Pantsov have done a meticulous job documenting the attempts to train Chinese communist cadres in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s. This book will serve as an important resource for those interested in the early years of the Chinese Communist Party, the process of educating foreign cadres in the early years of the USSR, and the relations between domestic Soviet institutions and the Comintern in this regard. Arincheva and Pantsov have painstakingly traced individual biographies and pseudonyms to give readers a glimpse into the formations and early activities of crucial figures in both the CCP and the Guomindang, including Wang Ming, Li Lisan, Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, Jiang Jingguo, and numerous others. They describe in great detail the process of creating one institution after another for this purpose, providing background on logistics, personnel, and curricula. Their conclusion, however, is unambiguous: the effort as a whole was a failure. According to the authors, “The bleak reality of Soviet communist life transformed the majority of those who came to study in Moscow from romantic revolutionaries into pragmatists and careerists or evoked their complete disenchantment with Bolshevik dogmas. Romance turned into tragedy” (240).
The book begins with early Soviet attempts to provide some sort of Bolshevik education to the many Chinese who found themselves fighting for the Red Army during the Civil War. After the failure of this attempt at mass education, the book covers a series of attempts to construct institutions that would be able to turn a select group of young, presumably motivated and somewhat educated Chinese into the cadres that would bring revolution to China. Beginning with the creation of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in the early 1920s and its dedicated Chinese section, through the rise and fall of the more specialized Sun Yat-sen University of the Toilers of China, to the somewhat more successful, and elite, group trained at the International Lenin School, the book continues until the final attempts to educate young Chinese ended in 1940 after the entire project of educating foreign communists largely fell victim to the purges of the late 1930s. In all, the authors write, some 3,000 Chinese received some form of communist education in the Soviet Union during this period, of whom only about five percent would play a meaningful role in the CCP. That number was not much larger than the total who would play important roles in the GMD, an important reminder of the significant role that Soviet education played in the formation of early governing elites on Taiwan. Nevertheless, for the authors this constituted a failure, one which they attribute largely to two factors: the lack of available personnel who could speak Chinese or teach Russian, or who knew much about Chinese history, culture, and current events, and the involvement of the students in the turbulent Soviet political scene in the 1920s, which meant that students often devoted more time and energy to creating and destroying factions and unmasking supposed enemies of the revolution than they did attempting to learn even basic Marxist principles and Party history.
While the book is comprehensive in the treatment of its subject, the authors do not fulfill their promises to lay out the potential significance of this subject for the larger trajectory of the Chinese revolution, or even the process of international communist revolution as a whole. In the introduction, the authors claim that Deng Xiaoping's reforms resembled the Soviet New Economic Policy of the 1920s and could therefore be explained by the education he received at the time in Moscow, and more broadly that their study “undoubtedly has great significance not only for understanding general problems of the development of the Chinese revolutionary movement in the 1920s and 1930s, but also for comprehending the current socio-political and economic transformation of the PRC” (5). Though this is asserted again in the conclusion, nowhere in the book is there much information on what the students were actually taught about current economic policy or the relevant Marxist-Leninist doctrines. The assumption then, seems to be that a family resemblance plus proximity must be evidence of influence. It will be left to future researchers to build on this work and lay out the significance of this training for understanding the later history of the PRC.
