Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow and the Chinese Revolution - KU ...

When famous operas were staged in Moscow theaters, we were
given tickets to attend the performances. The Student Commune had
numerous clubs, including music, volleyball, basketball, horsebackriding,
archery, swimming, photography, ice-skating, dancing, and
sightseeing. Students were free to participate in any one or all of them
with the opportunity of being instructed by experts in each field.
The university also had facilities to deal with the financial welfare
of the students and their families in China. A student whose family
was in need could apply through the university to have a certain
amount of money remitted to his family in China. This service demonstrates
the lengths to which the university went to insure the students'
welfare, since at that time foreign currency was severely limited in
Russia.
One cannot talk about student welfare at the university without
mentioning the summer-vacation system. According to the Soviet Constitution
and labor laws, all laborers who were engaged in heavy industry
or whose work was in one way or another harmful to their
health (for example, furnace workers and those in the chemical industry)
were entitled to one month of vacation annually. Those in light
industries got a two-weeks' vacation, and the intelligentsia (scientists,
professors, students, and so forth) were entitled to a two-months' vacation.
All travel costs and room and board during the vacation period
were entirely free. The students of Sun Yat-sen University were no
exception in this universal system of vacations.
During my stay of more than six years in Soviet Russia, I spent my
summer vacations in various dom outdy\ha (rest houses) in different
parts of Russia—from luxurious summer resorts on the coast of the
Black Sea to those located along the shore of the Pacific. The food in
all the rest houses was excellent. There were usually four meals a day—
breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner. It was also compulsory
for everyone to take a nap for one hour after lunch. This hour was
called meortvii chac (the dead hour). Anyone violating this regulation
three times was ordered to check out of the rest house. The doctors
inspected every dormitory after lunch to see whether there was anyone
missing from his bed.
On the day that one checked into the rest house, he was weighed
and his record was kept on file. It was considered a failure of the
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