Little Known Episodes from the History of the Persecution of Chinese Revolutionaries in Stalin's Gulag
Translated from the Russian and with an Introduction by Steven I. Levine
"A compelling, fast-paced, historically enlightening autobiography of a Chinese woman raised in Stalinist Russia along with the children of many Red elite Chinese families which vividly reveals how the cruelties of Stalinism in and out of China made humane relations virtually impossible both at the most intimate level of personal relations and at the highest levels of political power. Important. Illuminating. And a great read."
—Edward Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Madison
"In the spirit of writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sin-Lin opens a new and almost unknown world for American readers. This harrowing tale of personal trauma and spiritual enlightenment, told with searing honesty and admirable dignity, exposes the endemic cruelty of Stalin's and Mao's Communist regimes and restores its Chinese victims to their rightful place in history."
—Alexander V. Pantsov, Capital University
"Ultimately a story of broken homes, broken promises, broken dreams, and broken lives, [Sin-Lin's] intense account offers fresh insight into the fate of Chinese revolutionaries repressed in Stalin's Gulag and into the insanity of the Great Cultural Revolution."
Donald J. Raleigh, Jay Richard Judson Distinguished Professor
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Children are a nuisance to revolutionaries. Why change diapers when you can change the world? Sin-Lin, the author of this extraordinarily powerful and multi-layered memoir, was born in Moscow in 1937 to Chinese Communist revolutionary parents. She was brought up as a Russian girl in a Soviet orphanage. During the Great Terror her father was arrested on false espionage charges and languished in Stalin's gulag for seventeen years before returning to China in 1955 with a new wife.
Meanwhile, Sin-Lin's mother, unaware of her husband's fate, was sent back to China, remarried, and became a member of the Communist elite
Meanwhile, Sin Lin's mother, unaware of her husband's fate, was sent back to China, remarried, and became a member of the Communist elite. Sin-Lin slowly and painfully discovered the convoluted truths of her parents tangled lives after she herself returned to China in 1950. Whiplashed between her cynical father and her privileged mother, Sin Lin suffered repeated psychological traumas as she tried to make a life of her own. Sin-Lin's painfully honest memoir recounts in vivid detail her bitter experiences in Mao's China where she was victimized by the endless campaigns of political persecution. Her father's first-person gulag recollections, enfolded within her own memoir, opens up the hitherto closed world of the hundreds of Chinese Communist revolutionaries who were among Stalin's countless victims.
Sin-Lin's painfully honest memoir recounts in vivid detail her bitter experiences in Mao's China where she was victimized by the endless campaigns of political persecution. Her father's first-person gulag recollections, enfolded within her own memoir, opens up the hitherto closed world of the hundreds of Chinese Communist revolutionaries who were among Stalin's countless victims.
Part 2 provides remarkable documentary underpinning to the often improbable-seeming events related in Part 1. In each chapter, the author has selected and arranged documents that detail the fate of hundreds of Chinese Commuists in Stalin's Gulag. Sin-Lin expertly weaves together the information from her father with other information and documents unearthed by the author. She found the documents in, principally, archives in Moscow, Moscow's "Memorial" research center, a few Chinese publications, and some Chinese memoirs that are as yet unpublished because of censorship.
ISBN 978-1-937385-18-7 pbk $35
ISBN 978-1-937385-19-4 cloth $75
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