The Kremlin’s Chinese Advance Guard

This book is a comprehensive historical study of the Bolshevik system of ideological and political indoctrination of a substantial number of Chinese revolutionaries, who studied in Comintern international institutions in Soviet Russia from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Great Terror of the late 1930s.

Including analysis of previously unknown documentary materials from the Bolshevik Party and Comintern archives, as well as memoirs of former Chinese students and prisoners of Stalin's camps, the book determines how effective the training of Chinese students in the main educational centers in Moscow was, how well it compared to the existing level of Marxist education in the USSR, and how the Stalinist regime defined the lives and fates of the Chinese revolutionaries in Soviet Russia. In raising questions about the transferability of revolutionary ideology, experience, and practice from the revolutionaries of one country to would-be revolutionaries in other countries the authors ask: can revolution be exported?

Shedding light on an under-explored aspect of the early history of the CCP and the Soviet Bolshevik Party this book will be a valuable resource to both students and scholars of Chinese and Russian history and politics.