Kang Sheng - Kang in Moscow

Kang in Moscow

In July 1931, Wang Ming removed himself to Moscow and assumed the position of chief Chinese representative on the Comintern. Kang and his wife Cao Yi’ou followed two years later. Kang remained in Moscow for four years, acting as Wang’s deputy on the Comintern, returning to China in 1937. While in Moscow, Kang was elected a member of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party, perhaps as early as 1931 but more probably in January 1934.

As Byron and Pack put it, "Kang had no cause to regret working with Wang in Moscow. His own prestige and power grew ever greater, and his cocoon of privilege insulated him from the irritations of daily life. But being in Moscow also excluded Kang and Wang Ming from the drama that was unfolding in China at the time." That “drama” included the epic retreat of the Communists from Jiangxi Province to Yan’an, which became known to history as the Long March, and the ever-growing power within the Chinese Communist Party of Mao Zedong. As Jacques Guillermaz observed,

he Long March helped the Chinese Communist Party to achieve a greater independence of Moscow. Everything tended in the same direction – Mao Zedong’s appointment as Chairman of the Party, happening as it did in unusual conditions, practical difficulties in maintaining contact, the Comintern’s tendency to remain in the background to help the creation of popular fronts, under cover of patriotism or ant-fascism. In fact, after the Zunyi Conference, the Russians seem to have had less and less influence in the Chinese Communist Party’s internal affairs. In light of more recent history, this was perhaps one of the major consequences of the Long March.

Wang Ming’s influence over the main Communist forces was minimal after Mao Zedong’s emergence from the Zunyi Conference of January 1935 as the undisputed head of the Party. From Moscow, Wang and Kang did seek to maintain control over Communist forces in Manchuria, which were ordered by them to conserve their strength and avoid direct confrontation with the Japanese army. This directive, which Kang later denied even existed, was resisted by some Manchurian leaders and later criticized by Mao Zedong as evidence of Wang Ming having stifled Manchuria’s revolutionary potential.

Following the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Joseph Stalin commenced his great purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Following this example, and with Wang Ming’s support, Kang established in 1936 the Office for the Elimination of Counterrevolutionaries and worked closely with the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in purging perhaps hundreds of Chinese then in Moscow. As Byron and Pack put it:

Kang gained great power from the Elimination Office, which he used to silence opponents and witnesses to any embarrassing episodes in his past, especially his arrest in Shanghai. … This was not the first time the Chinese in Moscow had fallen victim to purges. Soviet authorities had made numerous arrests at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University during the late 1920s; students disappeared into the night, never to be seen again. But Kang worked his own variation: in the past, the Chinese had been purged by the Soviets; now, under Kang, they were liquidated by their fellow Chinese.

Stalin was more tolerant of the Chinese in Moscow than he was of other foreign Communists, who were purged along with their Soviet comrades. This may have been motivated by a concern about the potential threat of a Japanese invasion of the Soviet Far East. In any case, at this time Stalin began to promote the idea of a united front of the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang against the Japanese, a policy that Wang Ming and Kang quickly endorsed. In November 1937, following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the Japanese invasion of China, Stalin dispatched Wang and Kang to Yan'an on a specially provided Soviet plane.

Kang had played a wily game in the complex and murky world of Stalin’s Moscow, earning the following comment from Josip Broz Tito, who had met Kang in Moscow in 1935:

It can be said without any shadow of a doubt that at that time Kang Sheng was playing a multiple game. On the one hand he was humoring Stalin, but at the same time he was betraying his confidence. Similarly, he had made contact with the Trotskyists, and had considered joining their movement, but he had also taken steps to infiltrate and sabotage their Fourth International….

Tito made these comments to Hua Guofeng on his only visit to China, in 1977 after Kang was dead, and certainly had his own agenda in doing so, but as Faligot and Kauffer remark, “n any case, Tito certainly got the measure of Kang’s psychology: a multifaceted game of mirrors was certainly his style, even in the 1930s.”