Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University

On 12 March 1925, Sun Yat-sen, pioneer of the Chinese Revolution, died in , leaving and the Chinese people in turmoil. Just before dying, he signed a number of documents. The best-known were his testament, drafted by , and a letter to the Central Executive of the Soviet Socialist Republic, drafted by Eugene Chen. The letter read:

Dear Comrades,

I have firm confidence in the reliable support you have given my country to this day. In bidding you farewell, dear comrades, allow me to express the hope that the day will soon come when the will be able to greet a friend and ally in the shape of a powerful and free China, and that the two united countries will march hand in hand in the great strug- gle for the emancipation of the oppressed peoples of the world. I leave behind a Party that, as has always been my wish, will be bound with you in the historic work of the final liberation from the imperialist order of China and other exploited nations. By the will of fate, I must leave my work unfinished and hand it over to those who, remaining true to the Party’s principles and teachings, will show themselves to be my true followers.

Sun Yat-sen

This was Soviet Russia and the Chinese revolutionaries’ honeymoon period. However, the love-affair went through difficult times. In July 1912, after the 1911 Revolution, Lenin read Sun Yat-sen’s ‘On the Social Meaning of the Chinese Revolution’ and wrote ‘Democracy and Narodnism in China’, in which he expressed infinite respect for Sun and China in the wake of the Revolution:

In China, the Asiatic provisional President of the Republic is a revolu- tionary democrat, endowed with the nobility and heroism of a class that is rising, not declining, a class that does not dread the future, but believes in it and fights for it selflessly, a class that does not cling to main- tenance and restoration of the past to safeguard its privileges, but hates the past and knows how to cast off its dead and stifling decay. Does that mean, then, that the materialist West has hopelessly decayed and that light shines only from the mystic, religious East? No, quite the

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opposite. It means that the East has definitely taken the Western path, that new hundreds of millions of people will from now on share in the struggle for the ideals the West has already worked out for itself. What has decayed is the Western bourgeoisie, which is confronted by its grave- digger, the proletariat. But in Asia there is still a bourgeoisie capable of championing sincere, militant, consistent democracy, a worthy comrade of France’s great men of the Enlightenment and great leaders of the close of the eighteenth century. The chief representative, or the chief social bulwark, of this Asian bourgeoisie that is still capable of supporting a historically progressive cause, is the peasant.

Sadly, Sun Yat-sen had not experienced such support from faithful friends during his years of suffering and frustration. Having embraced the West’s civilisation and revolutionary ideals, Sun naturally turned towards the West. In 1917, however, the October Revolution was victorious in Russia. Surrounded by imperialist powers, Soviet Russia under Lenin again turned its attention to its neighbours, particularly China, the largest country in Asia. In 1920, at the Second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin put forward his ideas on the ‘national and colonial question’. He proposed an alliance between Soviet Russia and China’s revolutionaries and again wooed Sun. At this very moment, Sun Yat-sen, bogged down in the quagmire of the Chinese revolution and repeat- edly disappointed in his dealings with the Western powers, turned his atten- tion for the first time to Soviet Russia. China and the Soviet revolutionaries immediately warmed to each other. With Li Dazhao, co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party, acting as go-between, on 27 January 1923, Joffe, represent- ing the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and the Soviet Government, met Sun Yat-sen in his residence, where they issued a joint decla- ration. (Later, Joffe became an Oppositionist: he was expelled from the Party by Stalin and committed suicide.) General Borodin then went to Guangzhou, to act as Sun’s advisor. In 1924, the Guomindang underwent reorganisation, after which it adopted Sun’s Three Great Policies of ‘alliance with Soviet Russia, alli- ance with the Communists, and support for the workers and peasants’. The two parties cooperated and a vigorous revolutionary movement ensued. When the Guomindang and the Communists split and the civil war started, Chiang Kai-shek slandered the Chinese Communists as the ‘rouble party’. Actually, the Guomindang was also a ‘rouble party’, indeed much more so than the Chinese Communists. The Comintern and the Soviet Government thought that both Chinese parties opposed imperialism and warlordism and supported both with huge resources. We know from recently opened archives