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

students to edit and translate it into Chinese. It was issued as a
pamphlet in Chinese only two days after Stalin's appearance. Copies
of the pamphlet were made available to all students and faculty members
of the university. Meanwhile, the Party bureau called a meeting
of all the directors of Communist Party cells in the university—all of
whom were Russians—and instructed them on ways of handling the
discussions of Stalin's speech in cell meetings. At this meeting, the
cell directors were instructed to handle their cell discussions so as to
criticize the positions of the Trotsky opposition and thus to point up
the correctness of Stalin's positions. In other words, in our cell meetings
we did not, then, discuss the Chinese revolution from the standpoint
of seeking valid answers to pressing issues. The Party bureau's
strategy was merely to support Stalin in the power struggle within the
CPSU and the Comintern. This state of affairs did not sit well with
most students at the university. It was a tragedy that the Chinese
revolution, instead of being the object of the best thinking of Party
leaders, became a mere political football which they used in contesting
one another's leadership. In such factional struggles, of course, each
contestant explores only the weak points of his opponent, which he
magnifies in an effort to discredit everything the opponent has to say;
and in the process, whatever validity there might be in the opponent's
arguments is drowned in a sea of vitriol. Not everything Trotsky had
to say was wrong, obviously. Nor was everything Stalin had to say
correct.
In the meeting of the cell to which I belonged at the university, I
was among those who expressed dissatisfaction with Stalin's discussion
of the April 12, 1927, coup; and perhaps my attitudes may serve as a
sample of student reactions. Stalin had maintained that the coup
should not be appraised as a "decline of the Chinese revolution" and
that those who so appraised it were in fact "siding with Chiang Kaishek"
and were in fact in favor of receiving Chiang back into the
Wuhan KMT. 9 I remember asking our cell director whether the
April 12 coup, if it did not represent a decline in the Chinese revolution,
represented an upsurge in the Chinese revolution. He did not
reply. So I pressed on. Stalin had said that the April 12 coup had
resulted "in a partial defeat for the workers in a number of areas. But
that is merely a partial and temporary defeat." 10 Was it the case, I
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