New Books In World Affairs

If Sino-Russian relations today sometimes seem bluntly pragmatic, things were not always so, and as imperial dynasties in both countries crumbled one hundred years ago many interactions between these two Eurasian land empires had a decidedly romantic hue. As Elizabeth McGuire relates in the rich, persuasive and utterly engrossing Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2017), more than one generation of young Chinese people was swept up by the romance of the new socialist order taking shape after Russia’s October Revolution. The personal encounters this political event brought about, and the Chinese revolutionaries’ experiences as translators of languages and revolutions, and as lovers of Russian culture, politics and people, had profound consequences which endure to this day. Drawing on memoirs and archives in Chinese, Russian and European languages, and an effortless marshaling of the deeper social histories from which these emerged, McGuire o