Eva Sandberg - Only Three Soviet Women in China

Only Three Soviet Women in China

Reunited, the Xiao family returned to The PRC. The CPC-controlled government's first five-year plan brought grand-scale modernisation to the country at last, but collectivisation resulted in famine; doubts raised among the aghast planners were met with political movements called Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist, and a plan for the years 1958-62 called Great Leap Forward. In this climate even Xiao San, Mao's boyhood friend, dared write no more poetry; given his history the family could not long hope to avoid the regime's xenophobia, mounting even as Mao relinquished the State Chairmanship to Liu Shaoqi in 1959.

Eva had laid aside her Leica and begun making films of the People's Republic for use by the communist news agencies of Europe. In 1962 it emerged that her travels in this starving land where all travel was controlled by internal passports had aroused suspicion. She came under pressure—as did any Soviet wife then in China—either to take Chinese citizenship or to leave. When her friend Nadia left Zhang Bao and returned to the Soviet Union, Eva knew there were only two such women remaining : Elisabeth (Lisa) Kishkin, wife of Li Lisan, a Lubianka survivor, and Grania, the uneducated wife of Chang Zhenhao, a veteran of the alternate Long March of Zhang Guotao (purged 1937).

The simple Grania was put on trial, painted as a Revisionist and Capitalist roader. Chang divorced her promptly, losing his son Victor, and was the prosecution's witness. Eva and Lisa spoke in her defense. The paranoid, Stalinistic charge of spying menaced all three women but could not be made to stick. For a few years they imagined nothing worse might come to Grania than the penury to which she as a single, visible-minority mother was reduced, and which they tried to alleviate. However in 1966 Liu, the official State Chair was outfoxed by his resurgent predecessor, and Law gave way to Expedience. Mao's so-called Revolution in Proletarian Culture brought douzhenghui violence to bear against the Soviet wives and the men who had married them (and against tens of thousands of other designated victims within and around the Party); all were charged with—and made to confess to—the most preposterous crimes. The following year they were formally arrested; Eva and Xiao, Lisa and Li, divorced Grania and deserted Zhang Bao. Li died within days of his arrest, on June 22, 1967; the others were to spend years in a Beijing prison and years after that in enforced rustification, a sort of internal exile.