Mikhail Borodin

Early Life: Bolshevik and Comintern Agent

Mikhail Borodin, born Mikhail Markovich Gruzenberg into a Jewish family in the Russian Empire in 1884, is described by the Encyclopaedia Judaica as born in Yanowitski, Belorussia, and by John K. Fairbank as a Russian Jew from Riga. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he joined the Bund in 1901 and left it for the Bolsheviks two years later. Fairbank writes that he was among the first Bolsheviks to follow Lenin and met Stalin at the Bolshevik conference in Finland in 1905.

Arrested by the tsarist police and deported in 1906, he went via England to the United States, attended Valparaiso University in Indiana and then taught English to immigrants in Chicago, where he ran his own night school. He returned to Russia in July 1918 and after the founding of the Comintern in 1919 became one of its top agents, carrying funds to Germany, Switzerland and Holland and helping to found the Mexican Communist Party; in early 1922 he was arrested in Britain and, after six months in jail, deported to Moscow. Fairbank argues that his American years made him “an Americanized Russian, which made all the difference when he got to China and dealt with Americanized Chinese.”

Arrival in China and the Reorganisation of the Kuomintang

In 1923 Borodin came to China as the Soviet politburo’s special adviser to Sun Yat-sen, arriving in Canton in early October. According to Wang Feng, writing in Phoenix Weekly, Sun and Soong Ching-ling warmly received the fluent English-speaking Bolshevik, and since they could talk in English they soon became close friends. Fairbank writes that when warlord forces threatened Canton in mid-November that year, Borodin rounded up some 500 volunteers who principally checked the advance, after which he had the inside track with Sun.

Wang Feng writes that on 15 October 1923 Borodin put forward five proposals for reorganising the Kuomintang, including revising the party programme, drafting a constitution, building local organisations and convening a national congress to elect a new central executive committee, all of which Sun adopted. The First National Congress of January 1924 reorganised the party on Leninist lines, admitted Communists as individual members and decided to establish the Whampoa Military Academy, whose founding was discussed at Borodin’s residence by him, Chiang Kai-shek, He Yingqin and others. Fairbank says that Borodin drafted the Kuomintang’s constitution and “really put the Kuomintang (KMT) in business”; Wang Feng writes that with his help the Kuomintang gradually became a party with Leninist characteristics.

After Sun Yat-sen’s Death

Fairbank notes that Borodin’s key ally in Canton was Liao Zhongkai, leader of the Kuomintang left. After Sun’s death and Liao’s assassination in 1925, Borodin was in a tougher position and worked mainly through Wang Jingwei, who had inherited the leadership of the left. When Chiang Kai-shek moved against Soviet influence in his coup of 20 March 1926 (the Zhongshan Gunboat Incident), Borodin was in North China; after returning to Canton at the end of April he helped send off the Northern Expedition, but in Fairbank’s view his influence in Chinese politics was by then already declining.

The Wuhan Period and Departure from China

After the Northern Expedition reached the Yangtze, the Kuomintang left set up a government in Wuhan, and Borodin moved there. According to research by Lu Yi of the Central Party School, published in the journal CCP History Studies, the two plans for an eastern expedition against Chiang Kai-shek drawn up before the April 12 Incident were both Borodin’s; after Chiang began his purge, Borodin briefly pressed for an eastern expedition, but then, judging the Wuhan troops unreliable and pinning his hopes on joining forces with Feng Yuxiang, switched to advocating a northern campaign. Borodin later acknowledged that hesitation over breaking with Chiang had delayed a decisive blow against him, with negative consequences.

By the summer of 1927 the Wuhan government was also turning against the Communists. Wang Feng writes that after consulting Soong Ching-ling and T. V. Soong, Borodin took Soong Ching-ling’s advice to return to the Soviet Union overland through the north-west. According to a report of 17 August 1927 by the American chargé d’affaires Ferdinand Mayer, the American consular officer at Hankow, Mr. Lockhart, reported Borodin’s “apparently definitive departure for Russia, after a number of false starts, on July 27th, by special train on the Peking-Hankow railway,” taking three passenger cars with him and followed the next day by five trucks, as he planned to travel overland through Shaanxi and Mongolia.

Later Life and Death

Back in the Soviet Union, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, he became deputy commissar for labour, and after 1932 worked mostly as a journalist, serving as deputy director of the TASS news agency, editor-in-chief of the Soviet Information Bureau and editor of Moscow News. He fell victim to Stalin’s purges, though accounts differ in detail: Fairbank writes that he was arrested in 1949, survived two years in a labour camp near Yakutsk and died in 1951, while the Encyclopaedia Judaica states that he was condemned to death in 1951. Both give 1951 as the year of his death, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica adds that he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

Assessments of Borodin’s role vary widely. Fairbank argues that Soviet sources make him stand too tall: as a foreign adviser he could never be a principal figure in the Nationalist movement, and what he offered had to reach the scene through Chinese protagonists — “He was a short-term catalyst who helped others to achieve power, after which he became utterly expendable.” Soong Mei-ling, in an essay, likened him to Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust.