Shattered Families, Broken Dreams: Little-Known Episodes from the History of the Persecution of Chinese Revolutionaries in Stalin’s Gulag by Sin-Lin (review)

Lengthy stints in Soviet Russia have marked the careers of various famous Chinese political heavyweights in both the Guomindang (e.g., Chiang Ching-kuo) and especially the Chinese Communist Party or CCP (e.g., Kang Sheng). Yet many lesser-known Chinese revolutionaries and political activists also bear the stamp of a life-changing stay in the USSR. Like the author Sin-Lin (pen name of Lena Jin, b. 1937), some CCP operatives’ children were even born there and raised in Soviet orphanages while their parents either worked wherever the Party dispatched them or languished in Stalin’s gulag. Many other Chinese breathed their last in the USSR, either slowly expiring in prison camps or else abruptly shot as Trotskyite conspirators during Stalin’s murderous purges that peaked in 1938. Although Party chiefs such as Kang Sheng and Wang Ming make an appearance now and then in Shattered Families, Broken Dreams, most of the book hinges on rank-and-file Party members like her parents as well as the classmates and other peers of Sin-Lin herself. Since Sin-Lin’s native language and cultural sensibility is Russian, having spent all her pre-teen years there, she often feels like “a half Russian” with a Chinese face who must struggle to master new folkways and written Chinese after moving to “New China” to stay with her mother and stepfather in 1950 (p. 135).

The thirty chapters of part 1 of Shattered Families, Broken Dreams deal mostly with the lives of Sin-Lin herself, her Manchu mother Le Na (pseud. of Guan Shulan, 1915–1968), her father Din Ming (pseud. of Yu Zhoujun, 1914–1990), and various other relatives, friends, and associates. This is the heart of the book that practically every reader will want to peruse carefully. In contrast, the dozen chapters of part 2 contain reference material of interest mainly to specialists; they consist largely of official documents, such as arrest records and lists of various Chinese revolutionaries and activists in Stalinist Russia. These lists often include summaries of why these Chinese individuals were in Russia and what happened to them there—although such information is often unavailable, since some of them simply disappeared into the maw of Stalinist Russia. Aside from interspersed photographs throughout, the book also includes the scholarly end matter of endnotes and an index.

Both of Sin-Lin’s parents, Din Ming and Le Na, were capable students from Dongbei (Manchuria); they were radicalized into joining the CCP by Japan’s aggressive military takeover of that vast region in 1931 as “Manchukuo.” Before the two of them met, the CCP dispatched the eighteen-year-old co-ed Le Na on a clandestine mission as a secretary to cohabit in an intimate manner with a much older male stranger and CCP member named Liu Ming who was her fictitious husband; being a CCP member meant belonging to the Party body and soul and setting aside one’s own personal dignity and mores. With the Japanese police in Manchukuo closing in on her, Le Na escaped to the mountains before the local CCP leaders dispatched her to study at the Comintern’s Stalin Communist University for Toilers of the East in Moscow, where she met and eventually married her classmate Din Ming in 1935.

Wang Ming and Kang Sheng originally assured Din Ming that he and Le Na would be sent back together to Manchuria to work underground in the Anti-Japanese Resistance, but in 1938 Din Ming was suddenly taken away from the couple’s apartment by Russian security operatives and secretly thrown into Stalin’s gulag Vorkuta—without any notification to Le Na as to what had befallen him. Meanwhile...