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

tionary Movements. The reason for this emphasis on history is quite
clear. To the Marxists, traditional history, as a product of bourgeois
historiography, is unorganized chaos, showing little awareness of order
or of the objective laws that govern the historical development of
human societies.
The five history courses at the university were newly developed.
The History of the Evolution of Social Formations was concerned with
the processes and various stages of social evolution. This course was one
of the most colorful and interesting at the university, and I was very
much involved in it, for I was the senior assistant instructor in this
course and did most of the interpreting for it, both from Russian to
Chinese and from Chinese to Russian.
The History of the Chinese Revolutionary Movement was taught
by Karl Radek, the first rector of the university. This course included
discussions of Chinese history in general; the emphasis, however, was
understandably on modern revolutionary movements. Radek's views
were strikingly similar to the views of the Chinese Communist historian
Fan Wen-Ian, and it is not impossible that the latter's were
borrowed from Radek. Fan contends that the whole history of China
is a history of agrarian revolutions. 2 The two courses on the History
of the Russian Revolution and the History of Western Revolutionary
Movements, as can be noted from their titles, also focused upon revolutionary
movements. The instructor of History of Eastern Revolutionary
Movements was also a celebrity, and his course, like Radek's, was
taught in the auditorium. Unfortunately, I am not absolutely sure of
his name. However, it was probably B. F. Shumiantsky, known also
as Andrei Chervonnyi, an expert on Oriental affairs and, at that time,
rector of KUTV in Moscow.
The above is a summary of the history curriculum in Sun Yat-sen
University. The courses had one guiding principle—to inculcate in
the student the principle of "historical materialism," and "the concept
of world revolution." To achieve this end, I am sure that the university
administration must have worked zealously.
3. Philosophy. Our philosophical education was supplied by a
unique course entitled Materialism. The purpose of the course was to
provide the student with a new world-view, and with a new methodology—dialectics.
This course consisted of dialectical materialism and
62