Shattered Families, Broken Dreams: Little Known Episodes from the History of the Persecution of Chinese Revolutionaries in Stalin's Gulag

Children are a nuisance to revolutionaries. Why change diapers when you can change the world? Sin-Lin, the author of this extraordinarily powerful and multi-layered memoir, was born in Moscow in 1937 to Chinese Communist revolutionary parents. She was brought up as a Russian girl in a Soviet orphanage. During the Great Terror her father was arrested on false espionage charges and languished in Stalin's gulag for seventeen years before returning to China in 1955 with a new wife. Meanwhile, Sin-Lin s mother, unaware of her husband s fate, was sent back to China, remarried, and became a member of the Communist elite Sin-Lin s painfully honest memoir recounts in vivid detail her bitter experiences in Mao's China where she was victimized by the endless campaigns of political persecution. Her father's first-person gulag recollections, enfolded within her own memoir, opens up the hitherto closed world of the hundreds of Chinese Communist revolutionaries who were among Stalin's countless victims. Part 2 provides remarkable documentary underpinning to the often improbable-seeming events related in Part 1. In each chapter, the author has selected and arranged documents that detail the fate of hundreds of Chinese Commuists in Stalin s Gulag. Sin-Lin expertly weaves together the information from her father with other information and documents unearthed by the author. She found the documents in, principally, archives in Moscow, Moscow s Memorial research center, a few Chinese publications, and some Chinese memoirs that are as yet unpublished because of censorship.