Sino-Soviet Romance: An Emotional History of Revolutionary Geopolitics

Abstract

This article argues that the relationship between the Russian and Chinese revolutions can be interpreted as a romance, to create an emotional history of elite revolutionary geopolitics. Tracing the stories of two prominent Sino-Soviet couples – President of Taiwan Jiang Jingguo and his wife Faina Vakhreva, and PRC Labor Minister Li Lisan and his wife Elizaveta Kishkina – against a larger backdrop of cultural exchange highlights continuities in a relationship most often described in terms of its ruptures. In the 1920s, when Jiang Jingguo first arrived in the Soviet Union, attitudes toward love and sex in both cultures were shifting, and the Chinese Revolution was celebrated in Moscow, rendering early Chinese experiences there romantic on several levels. The Liza-Li affair, begun in the difficult circumstances of the 1930s, highlights the ways in which the choices of one partner, personal or geopolitical, could come to constrain those of the other, through the 1950s and beyond. Such deeply felt and publicly prominent cross-cultural romances gave China’s relationship with Russia an emotional complexity and cultural depth that were lacking before the advent of twentieth century communism – and have survived its demise.