Red at Heart

Red at Heart conjures a tale of cross-cultural romance from a topic that is normally seen in geopolitical or ideological terms—and thereby offers a new interpretation of twentieth century communism's most crucial alliance.This is the multigenerational history of people who experienced Sino-Soviet affairs most intimately: prominent Chinese revolutionaries who traveled to Russia in their youths to study, often falling in love and having children there. Their deeply personal memoirs, interviews with their children, and a vivid collection of documents from the Russian archives allow Elizabeth McGuire to reconstruct the sexually-charged, physically difficult, and politically dangerous lives of Chinese communists inthe Soviet Union. The choices they made shaped not only the lives of their children, but also the postwar alliance between the People's Republic of China and Soviet Russia. Red at Heart brings to life a cast of transnational characters—including a son of Chiang Kai-shek and a wife of Mao Zedong—who connected the two great communist revolutions in human terms. Weaving personal stories and cultural interactions into political history, McGuire movingly shows that the Sino-Soviet relationship was not a brotherhood or a friendship, but rather played out in phases like many lifelong love affairs - from first love, early betrayal, and love children; througheventual marriage with its conveniences and annoyances, guarded optimism, and official heirs; to divorce, reconciliation, and a nostalgia that lingers even today.A century after 1917, this book offers a novel story about Chinese communism, the Russian Revolution's most geopolitically significant legacy.

The deep research behind Red at Heart pays off in compelling stories and masterfully observed details., Red at Heart brings together an impressive range of sources, including Russian archival material, Chinese literary works, memoirs and oral history interviews. Written both eloquently and sensitively, with an engaging cast of characters, it appeals to a broad audience beyond those working on Chinese and Russian history... The book represents an important first step towards restoring an emotive dimension to the history of Sino-Soviet relations., Groundbreaking... Elizabeth McGuire's masterfully researched and ardently narrated epic of how Chinese revolutionaries looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration, guidance, and, in some cases, personal romance convincingly demonstrates the importance of recognizing the role that passions and affects play in world historical transformations... McGuire's book convincingly makes a case that the Sino-Soviet relationship provided the Chinese with a powerful structure of feeling through which they could grasp national modernity, personal becoming, and global infatuations all at once., McGuire's book offers a compelling portrait of what the experience of the Sino-Rusian relationship was like for those who lived it beyond the realm of high politics and ideological debate... The book is extremely well-researched, including numerous interviews with key protagonists, and it is a beautifully told and easy to digest entrée into the world of early 20th -century Communist revolution. It is ideal for those who want to get a sense of what it was like to travel across Eurasia with dreams of encountering the future and remaking one's homeland in its image., McGuire has written a beautiful, elegiac book about ideals, love, and betrayals. If there is a conclusion after reading a text like this, it must be that human happiness is so very hard to achieve in times of revolution, not least because political leaders wantonly destroy it as they build their new states. Yet joy is to be found everywhere, even under the worst of circumstances. In the book's final pages an old couple, driven apart by the horrors they have experienced, find each other again in one last dance, before the curtain falls.

Elizabeth McGuire is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, East Bay. She has studied, lived, and worked in Moscow and Beijing.