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

eighty to ninety Trotskyite students. With that, the Trotskyite organization
at Sun Yat-sen University completely collapsed. Some students
announced their withdrawal from the opposition, but there was
no small number who fought to the end. Hence, the Russian GPU
stretched out its hairy paws; it arrested all those suspected of being
leaders of the opposition who had refused to confess, and put them in
prison. The fate of many of them was not known.
In this ferocious struggle against Trotskyites in Sun Yat-sen University,
I was deeply involved from start to finish. Throughout the purge,
I was a member of the bureau of the CPSU branch in the university.
Concurrently, I was the branch's secretary in charge of all translating
and interpreting from Chinese into Russian and from Russian into
Chinese at all bureau meetings. At the same time, I was deputy Party
guide (hu tang chih tao yuan) for one of the class cells in the university.
3
There were more than twenty students in my cell. With the exception
of two or three cell members who were more or less loyal to
the bureau of the Party branch, all of them were either Trotskyites or
some other kind of "anti-Party element." It was the university's worst
cell. Since "oppositionists" were in the majority, they more than once
adopted resolutions demanding that the Party branch dismiss me as
deputy guide and replace me with someone else. The bureau of the
Party branch naturally ignored these demands, while giving me pep
talks about the importance of my being a good fighter. Thus, at
every meeting I was besieged from all directions by "oppositionists."
With the stubborn determination of youth I fought off all of their
charges, and in the process they not unnaturally came to hate me.
Indeed, when the purge was reaching its climax and the oppositionists
became frantic, a plot to assassinate me was uncovered. 4
Meanwhile, as the purge progressed, the most obstreperous Chinese
Trotskyite students were arrested and held in the underground jail
in the headquarters of the GPU on Lubyanka Square in Moscow, and
it became necessary to interrogate them. GPU headquarters asked the
bureau of the Party branch at Sun Yat-sen University to assign someone
to help them with these interrogations. Unfortunately, the bureau
assigned this odious job to me. I protested the assignment to Ignatov,
177