Growing up Sino-Soviet: Chinese Children of the Russian Revolution

Allow me to introduce to you some of the people I have met whose experiences embody and then challenge all the clichés of postwar international socialism.  They are Chinese, or half-Chinese half-Russian, and they have names like Yura Huang Jian, or Roza Yu Bin.  Some were born in China, some in the U.S.S.R., but all grew up in the Soviet Union in a very special school, called the Interdom, for the children of international communists like Mao and Tito, a school that still exists today.  Each one has a story to tell, about encountering the Russian Revolution through intimate relationships with Soviet citizens; about living inside educational and political institutions designed to structure those encounters; about making Soviet socialism part of their own internationalist and nationalist identities through minute practices like the Russian-Chinese food they prepare and grand gestures like the televised commemorative journeys they undertake; and about the hazards to mental and physical health of living between two cultures and two revolutions.

At heart these are stories about what it is like to actually live the metaphors of international socialism.  How does it feel to come of age in the postwar Soviet Union as a child of the international revolution, in a school created as a utopian vision of international brotherhood?  What happens when you journey to your “homeland” only to find that your Russification has hopelessly estranged and isolated you?  How do the authorities and institutions of international socialism encourage, structure, complicate, or attack your sense of yourself?  How do you in turn appropriate, embellish, and subvert official metaphors?  Based on archives, memoirs, and interviews, my paper will present a series of individual Sino-Soviet narratives designed to address these questions.