Red at Heart by Elizabeth McGuire

Author:Elizabeth McGuire [McGuire, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chinese teacher at the Interdom. Courtesy of her son, Han Moning, also called Monia Kibalchik.

Yet the Chinese children were not left in that relatively nurturing Interdom environment for long. Even before the upheaval of purge and war, in the mid-1930s the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party were envisioning and creating institutional settings for them with very different objectives.

A School in the Dark

On November 19, 1936, Wang Ming sent a proposal to Dmitry Manuilsky, the Russian Communist Party’s official representative to the Comintern. In addition to the top-secret sections that Eastern University was currently operating for adult revolutionaries from Manchuria and other parts of China, Wang was intent on forming another, very special section for Chinese children, ages ten to seventeen. At Eastern University, he explained, the children could learn Chinese properly and receive a solid revolutionary education. Wang made a list of children he intended to bring to the school—mostly orphans of prominent revolutionaries or children like Tuya already in Moscow with a parent. But it also included the two sons of Mao Zedong, who were en route to Moscow with Wang’s protégé Kang Sheng.22

The inclusion of the Mao brothers shows that Wang’s goals in creating the children’s section were complex. Some sources suggest that Stalin himself was directly involved in bringing Mao’s sons to Moscow, as pawns in a game to control their father. If so, Stalin was overestimating Mao’s commitment to his children; the boys had already been left behind in Shanghai after the Nationalists executed their mother, Yang Kaihui, in 1930. Mao had never made an effort to find them; his brother, Zemin, finally tracked them down in 1936. Their names in Chinese were Anying and Anqing, but in Russia they went by the pseudonyms Serezha Iun-Fu and Nikolai Iun-Shu. Like Chiang Kaishek’s son before them, the boys ended up staying in the Soviet Union for years. Later on, Anqing/Kolia would write his autobiography in Russian, describing his early life in the following way:

I, Iun-Shu Nikolai was born in 1925 near the city of Changsha. My father Mao Zedong abandoned me because of his revolutionary activities when I was around five or six years old. My mother, Yang Kaihui, the daughter of a professor, was shot by the Guomindang in the city of Changsha… . After the death of my mother my grandmother took me and my brother and placed us in some sort of children’s institution, organized by communists. After the destruction of this institution by the police, a “communist” who later turned out to be an agent of the Guomindang took me and my older brother Anying (my younger brother Anlong had died in the hospital) in. In the summer of 1936, taking advantage of the absence of our host, the communists were able to make a deal with his oldest wife, who saw us as “spongers” and who didn’t know about the money the communists sent her husband for our upbringing, and sent us to the Soviet Union.23

Written expressly for the Russian authorities and

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