Translated from English by L. I. Golovacheva and V. Ts Golovacheva, Moscow: IV RAS; Kraft+, 2009. 320 p., ill.

The book under review is written by the famous Chinese revolutionary, Communist Party and Kuomintang party leader, journalist, high-ranking military officer and diplomat Sheng Yue (Sheng Zhongliang, 1907 - 2007). Its appearance in translation into Russian was an important event for Russian Sinology. But before touching on the specifics of the Russian-language edition, it is worth recalling that Sheng Yue's book is well known to any sinologist who studies the history of Soviet-Chinese relations, the Chinese revolution, and the activities of the Comintern in the 1920s and 1930s, as it is one of the most valuable, systematic, and reliable narratives about how the 1920s and 1930s In the 1930s, the Soviet authorities trained cadres for the Chinese Revolution.

For this purpose, in 1925, the Chinese Workers ' University (UTC) was specially created in Moscow. Sun Yat-sen, named after the leader of the Chinese Revolution, the first president of the Republic of China, founder of the National Party (Kuomintang), an active supporter of China's cooperation with the USSR in the cause of revolution and the struggle against imperialism. The university was headed by well-known Bolsheviks K. Radek, P. Myth and V. I. Weger. While studying the "science of revolution" in young Soviet Russia, students closely followed the revolutionary movement in China, participated in the party struggle, met with Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Krupskaya, Sun Yat-sen's widow, Hu Hanmin, Xiang Zhongfa, Qu Qiubo, Zhou Enlai, Zhang Guotao, Feng Yuxiang and other political leaders of the two countries. countries. A series of these famous revolutionaries seems to come to life in the pages of the book. In particular, the chapters describing Chinese students ' meetings with Stalin (p.173-182), Feng Yuxiang (p. 151-161), and Sun Yat - sen's widow (p. 162-172) are deeply impressive. Very touching are the descriptions of students ' everyday and personal lives (Chapter VI), as well as the internal structure and curriculum of the UTK (Chapter VI). IV, V). Dramatic are the chapters that tell about the "dark period" of the rule of the "Moscow Section of the CCP" (Chapter VIII), the struggle against Trotskyism (Chapter XIII), the "second line" (Chapter XV), the "Li Lisan line" (Chapter XVI), and other forms of party-factional struggle, which later turned into the tragedy of broken ties. the fate and death of many UTK students.

Although the training course at the UTK lasted only two years, the Soviet authorities created the most favorable conditions for intensive training of young Chinese revolutionaries. The quality of this training is evidenced by the fact that many university graduates later held senior positions in the party, state and military leadership of China. Among them were four General secretaries of the CPC Central Committee (Wang Ming, Qin Bangxian, Zhang Wentian, Deng Xiaoping), the President of the People's Republic of China (Yang Shangkun), the Deputy Chairman of the People's Republic of China (Wu Lanfu), the leader of the Kuomintang and the President of Taiwan Jiang Jingguo, as well as marshals (Ye Jianying), ministers and parliamentarians. The author of the book, Sheng Yue (pseudonym-F. A. Mitskevich), graduated from UTK in 1928, lived and worked in the USSR for another four years. After his return to his homeland, until his arrest by the Kuomintang secret services and his resignation from the party, he led the work of the underground Bureau of the CPC Central Committee in Shanghai.

As a contemporary, witness and direct participant of many political events in the USSR and China, Sheng Yue described them in his book, first published in 1971 in English in the United States, 40 years after the closure of the UTK. Living far from China and the USSR, away from the brutal political and ideological battles of the Cold War, the Maoist "cultural revolution" and the Soviet-Chinese conflicts, the author recreated in detail a completely reliable, though not devoid of personal preferences, picture of the events and destinies of people who happened to live, study and work in the UTK. Based on the personal memoirs of Sheng Yue and his classmates, as well as the documents available to him, this book sheds light on many little-known pages in the history of the Chinese Revolution and the early years of Soviet Russia.

In the PRC, as in the USSR, in the 1970s. the book of Sheng Yue was hidden in special storage. But already in 1980. it was released in China in a small print run for official use, translated into Chinese. In the 1980s, when the events of half a century ago became a distant and dispassionate story, Sheng Yue twice came to China with members of his family at the personal invitation of his classmate in UTK Yang Shangkun. In the 1990s and early 2000s, many other memoirs and interviews with elderly UTK graduates were published in the PRC, as well as some rare archival materials stored in the PRC concerning the studies of Chinese revolutionaries in the USSR and their subsequent fate. In 2004, Sheng Yue's book was reprinted in China for the second time, this time in a series of rare archival documents. Still under the formal heading "for official use", but already distributed through bookstores.

As for Russia, since the early 1990s, the Moscow archives of the Comintern and UTK have also been the subject of growing attention from scholars from Europe, the United States, China, and Taiwan. Separate documents and information about the tax code are also published in Russia. But, despite a number of publications by fellow Sinologists, the topic of training personnel for the Chinese revolution in the USSR is still not fully covered in the national scientific and popular literature. Sheng Yue's book itself has so far only been available in the original English version and has not found its way to the general public for a long time. Now the translation into Russian has given us this opportunity.

Reading the memoirs of Sheng Yue, we can not fail to note the solid creative contribution of translators to the study of the topic and text of the book. The scientific significance of the reviewed Russian translation lies in the fact that in addition to the author's text, which was translated into Russian for the first time, the book includes updated and expanded comments that significantly supplement and clarify many important facts and information, including those forgotten or omitted by the author or simply inaccessible to him when writing memoirs. For example, translators have restored the name of the Trotskyist student Zhao Yanqing (pseudonyms-Mamashkin, Donbasov), who committed suicide on January 28, 1930, in the midst of a fierce party purge (pp. 194-195). The identity of the senior military adviser of the Comintern in China (Manfred Stern, General Kleber, p.271), whose name is omitted by the author of the book, has also been established.

The translators also added a preface, a list of references, an index of names, and, what is especially interesting for the reader who is intrigued by the extraordinary personality of Sheng Yue, a meticulously reconstructed biography of the author. The reconstruction of Sheng Yue's biography in the period after his arrest in October 1934 and his withdrawal from the CCP in 1935 would not have been possible without the active assistance of the author's five children now living in the United States and China. An appeal to readers by one of the author's daughters, Sheng Soyalun (p. 318), can also be attributed to successful, emotionally exciting finds of translators. Finally, another merit of the translators was the selection of 64 magnificent black-and-white illustrations reproducing unique photographs and documents from the archives of the Russian State Academy of Natural History (Moscow), the State Museum of Natural History (Vladivostok), the V. K. Arsenyev Primorsky Regional Museum (Vladivostok), the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kyrgyz Republic, the Fund for Valuable Photographs of Modern History at the 2nd State Historical Archive Many illustrations from the Soviet periodicals (Ogonyok magazine) of the 1920s, including a number of photographs from the Sheng family archive and original photographs of translators, were published for the first time.

Unfortunately, the list of references does not include some interesting publications of Russian sinologists on the topic of UTK im. Sun Yat-sen. So, it does not mention the article published in 1999 by I. E. Tsiperovich, dedicated to the collection of books and brochures published on the basis of UTK's own printing house (Tsiperovich I. E. Unique collection in the library of the Institute of Oriental Studies (St. Petersburg branch) / / Materials of the scientific conference dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China. St. Petersburg, 1999, pp. 95-101). However, this particular omission only underlines the general importance of the appearance of the Russian translation of the book about UTK im. Sun Yat-sen, who, I hope, will be the new

This is not the last step towards restoring the full truth about Soviet-Chinese relations in the 20s and 30s of the 20th century.

We can only fully agree with the translators 'words that" the uniqueness and high reliability of the materials collected by Sheng Yue remain the key to the enduring significance of his book both for scientists and for all readers who want to know their past " (p. 6). The translation of Sheng Yue's book into Russian was the best tribute to the memory of the author himself, all students, teachers and employees of UTK im. Sun Yat-sen in Moscow.

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