Red at Heart

Reviews / Votes

...highly readable monograph. * Laurie Manchester, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA, Canadian-American Slavic Studies * The deep research behind Red at Heart pays off in compelling stories and masterfully observed details. * Gregory Afinogenov, Times Literary Supplement * Red at Heart brings together an impressive range of sources, including Russian archival material, Chinese literary works, memoirs and oral history interviews. Written both eloquently and sensitively, with an engaging cast of characters, it appeals to a broad audience beyond those working on Chinese and Russian history... The book represents an important first step towards restoring an emotive dimension to the history of Sino-Soviet relations. * Rachel Lin, Revolutionary * Groundbreaking... Elizabeth McGuire's masterfully researched and ardently narrated epic of how Chinese revolutionaries looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration, guidance, and, in some cases, personal romance convincingly demonstrates the importance of recognizing the role that passions and affects play in world historical transformations... McGuire's book convincingly makes a case that the Sino-Soviet relationship provided the Chinese with a powerful structure of feeling through which they could grasp national modernity, personal becoming, and global infatuations all at once. * Roy Chan, China Journal * McGuire's book offers a compelling portrait of what the experience of the Sino-Rusian relationship was like for those who lived it beyond the realm of high politics and ideological debate... The book is extremely well-researched, including numerous interviews with key protagonists, and it is a beautifully told and easy to digest entree into the world of early 20th -century Communist revolution. It is ideal for those who want to get a sense of what it was like to travel across Eurasia with dreams of encountering the future and remaking one's homeland in its image. * Jeremy Friedman, The Historian * McGuire has written a beautiful, elegiac book about ideals, love, and betrayals. If there is a conclusion after reading a text like this, it must be that human happiness is so very hard to achieve in times of revolution, not least because political leaders wantonly destroy it as they build their new states. Yet joy is to be found everywhere, even under the worst of circumstances. In the book's final pages an old couple, driven apart by the horrors they have experienced, find each other again in one last dance, before the curtain falls. * Odd Arne Westad, Slavic Review * The topic is well chosen, densely researched in Chinese and Russian archives, and eminently readable... This is a valuable addition to an account of twentieth-century global revolution in one of its most consummated historical dimensions. * Rebecca E. Karl, American Historical Review * Professor McGuire possesses formidable linguistic skills in Russian and Chinese and writes in vivid prose ... Her liberal use of effective quotations from diaries, memoirs, and archives, and information gleaned from interviews with several surviving members of the cohorts she studies make this book a delight to read from beginning to end. * Steven I. Levine, Pacific Affairs * McGuire is a natural storyteller....Her point is that...there was more than one homeland in the hearts of those young Chinese revolutionaries who fell in love in and with the Soviet Union, and the children who were the product of their Sino-Soviet romance. * Sheila Fitzpatrick, New York Review of Books * An excellent popular history that brilliantly illuminates a neglected aspect of the Chinese-Russian relationship, this simultaneously chatty and moving story deserves to be known. McGuire's account will appeal to anyone interested in the emotional side of 20th-century international relations. A great read. * CHOICE * McGuire presents a richly researched set of personal stories, involving both the lovers and their children, nested within a larger political story. * Foreign Affairs * [A] breathtakingly romantic account of the experiences of Chinese revolutionaries in the USSR....The Russians who appeared in their lives were not commanders and manipulators, but friends, teachers and sometimes lovers, and these encounters ultimately gave rise to a uniquely Chinese socialist ideology. Historians of the Sino-Soviet bloc tend to focus on leaders, politics and ideology. McGuire, however, sets her sights on the personal and even the intimate connections between the Russians and Chinese....Implanting communism in China turned out to be the USSR's most geopolitically significant and lasting legacy. China was destined to continue carrying a torch for the Sino-Soviet alliance. * Charles Clover, Financial Times * Thousands of Chinese Communists went to Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s to learn from the Soviet Union. Moved by revolutionary idealism and liberationist sexual ideas, many fell in love, some with each other and others (especially the men) with Russians. These Moscow-born relationships flourished while the two countries were allied and suffered when they split. McGuire presents a richly researched set of personal stories, involving both the lovers and their children, nested within a larger political story. Today, Chinese President Xi Jinping is striving to resurrect the selfless 'party spirit' of a mythical golden age. As Xi extols the supposed virtues of that era, Chinese would do well to remember the chaotic personal lives of those who built the Chinese Communist Party in the first place. * Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs * A lively history of Chinese-Russian political and cultural symbiosis. * Kirkus Reviews * Many books have been written on the Russian and Chinese revolutions but none has come so close to those men and women who made and lived them, than Elizabeth McGuire's astonishing, beautifully written, and often moving work. Based on an extraordinary quantity of Soviet and Chinese archival sources, published and unpublished memoirs, letters, and interviews, McGuire's work brings to life the Sino-Soviet story that started from the Chinese students who left for Moscow in the early 1920s and fell in love * literally and metaphoricallywith the Soviet revolution, to the fate of their offsprings in China up to the Cultural Revolution and beyond.Thomas Lahusen, University of Toronto * Brilliantly conceived as a romance about Chinese Communists who fell in love with Soviet Russia and with Russians, Elizabeth McGuire explores the emotional, social, and cultural dimensions of the Sino-Soviet relationship through individual stories. With a novelist's flair and imagination, she offers a scrupulously researched, dazzlingly original, and utterly engaging account, written with grace and wit. * Steve Smith, All Souls College, Oxford * An engaging and innovative way of looking at Russian/Chinese contacts after the Russian Revolution up to the 1950s, this book gives new literal meaning to the concept of Sino-Soviet romance. Impressively researched as well as a good read. * Sheila Fitzpatrick, author of The Russian Revolution * A wonderfully engaging story of China's twentieth-century romance with communist Russia, built around the stories of individuals who fell in love. Based on an impressive range of sources in both Russian and Chinese, McGuire's work brings alive the relations between the Chinese and Russian revolutions and casts a new light on familiar figures from Chiang Kai-shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo who married and brought back to Taiwan a Belorussian wife, to He Zizhen Mao Zedong's wife on the Long March and a host of other characters. * Henrietta Harrison, University of Oxford * Thousands of Chinese Communists went to Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s to learn from the Soviet Union. Moved by revolutionary idealism and liberationist sexual ideas, many fell in love, some with each other and others (especially the men) with Russians. These Moscow-born relationships flourished while the two countries were allied and suffered when they split. One sojourner, Chiang Ching-kuo, married a Russian woman and later became president of Taiwan. McGuire presents a richly researched set of personal stories, involving both the lovers and their children, nested within a larger political story. Today, Chinese President Xi Jinping is striving to resurrect the selfless "party spirit" of a mythical golden age. As Xi extols the supposed virtues of that era, Chinese would do well to remember the chaotic personal lives of those who built the Chinese Communist Party in the first place. * Foreign Affairs * Engrossing book...Red at Heart offers a highly original exploration of Chinese communism, putting the experiences and emotions of the young radicals who lived and studied in revolutionary Russia at the centre of the story. In her book, the concept of a Sino-Soviet romance works at the level of metaphor, pointing to a cycle of infatuation and disillusionment that made for intense, interlocked, volatile relationships between the two communist cultures, but it also takes into account the actual love affairs that made Chinese communists so personally invested in the socialist cause, and in the unfurling revolution in Russia.A provocative and original way of thinking about the connections between revolution, romance and international relations. * Miriam Dobson, London Review of Books
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