‘When You Have Seen What I Have Seen, You Can Never Rest Peacefully’ : A Woman’s Story: From Gulag to Cultural Revolution

In 1933, Elizaveta Kishkina fell in love with the dashing Chinese revolutionary Li Lisan. From their romance sprang a tale of suffering and love that spans the gulag of Josef Stalin and the labor camps of China’s Cultural Revolution.

Purged twice in China and jailed in the Soviet Union, Li died in the custody of China’s Red Guards in 1967. Kishkina and their two daughters live on.

For her marriage with Li, Kishkina spent nine years in Chinese prisons and lost her voice because Communist authorities, who accused her of being a Soviet spy, prohibited her from speaking for nine years. Her daughters, prosecuted also for espionage, were imprisoned for two years each.

After Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, Kishkina, thinking political purges had ended, planned to live out her years in peace in Beijing. But now her adopted country is caught in another bloody campaign, this time to crush a movement for freedom. Kishkina wonders whether China will turn on her and her family again.

“Of course we are afraid for the future,” she said in the living room of her Beijing apartment. “When you have seen what I have seen, you can never rest peacefully.”

The story of this Soviet-Chinese clan covers more than seven decades. For Elizaveta Kishkina, it is a tale of dashed hopes in a glorious socialist future and of the instincts of a mother protecting her family.

“In the end,” she said as she smiled at her 15-year-old grandson, Peter, “we only have each other. The politicians come and go, but we have survived.”

For Li, it is a sad story of a revolutionary manipulated by his superiors and of love for one’s country overcoming political beliefs and fierce pride.

“He was a broken man. He had been used up by the revolution and by the leaders,” Kishkina said. “All he wanted was to live in peace, but they wouldn’t even allow him that.”

Kishkina, a 75-year-old woman who goes by her Chinese name, Lisha, lives in a three-bedroom apartment in the western section of Beijing. Comfortably furnished with a fluffy couch and a small but ornate Russian samovar, it is high-class by Chinese standards.

Lisha is a woman of sparkling gray eyes who greets guests with cookies and cakes. She speaks excellent Mandarin with a thick accent, giving her joviality an air of Russian mystery.

Lisha was born in 1914 into a Ukranian aristocratic family that had fallen on hard times. When she was 6, her father died and her mother packed up the family and moved to Moscow, where three years earlier the Bolsheviks had seized power.

As a young girl and a teen-ager, Lisha believed strongly in the revolution. In the late 1920s, when Soviet leaders issued the call to develop Siberia, Lisha was one of the first to sign up.

The bands of Soviet youth lived a hard life, fighting swarms of insects in summer and fierce snows and frosts in winter.

“In France, they say lovers can live on kisses and cool water,” Lisha said. “As revolutionaries, we lived on ideology and strong tea.”

In 1933, she returned to Moscow and enrolled at a part-time school. That year she met Li Lisan.

Li was a shell of a man. A gifted labor organizer, he had risen quickly through the ranks of the fledgling Chinese Communist Party and in 1928, with the help of Soviet agents, was appointed its head.

Li was picked because his belief that China’s revolution would begin in its cities matched those of Stalin. When it became apparent that Li was wrong and that the revolution was occurring in the countryside, under the leadership of Mao Tse-tung, Li was sacked and given refuge in Moscow.

Lisha had been hoping to continue her studies and Li gave her the encouragement she needed. The two began seeing each other and soon had a simple marriage in line with their political beliefs.

In 1936, Lisha was accepted by the Moscow Pedagogical Institute for Foreign Languages, majoring in French. But her husband’s political problems had just begun.

In the late 1930s, a Stalinist purge targeted Li and he was accused of being a “Japanese spy and a Trotskyite.” He was jailed from 1938-39.

“It never crossed my mind to leave the man,” she said. “In that way, I was very traditional. Revolutionary love to me was not free love, it was love with a higher purpose.”

The day before Lisha’s last exam in 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The couple fled Moscow and settled in a small city on the banks of the Volga River. In 1944, they had the first of their two daughters, Ina. Another one, Alla, would follow five years later.

Li began to show signs of homesickness.

“He was a proud man and the first purge had hurt him deeply,” Lisha said. “But he loved his country more than himself so he went back anyway. He threw his political beliefs away and went back to work for a new China.”

The couple set up house in Harbin, a city in northeastern China. For hundreds of years, Chinese and Russian cultures had met and melded there and Lisha felt at home.

In 1949, with the Communist victory against the Nationalist Chinese complete, the family moved to Beijing.

“Now that was a shock,” she said with a laugh. “There was nothing Russian about Beijing at all.”

Li moved through a variety of posts, settling as the nominal head of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, the state-run union. From one of Stalin’s puppets, he was transformed into one of Mao’s.

“He was happy enough just to be home,” Lisha said.

Life was difficult in the poor country in the 1950s, but the family escaped the early political campaigns. Still, the Communists’ habit of purging and jailing the best and the brightest in their country weighed heavily on Lisha.

“I remember there was one day when I just stopped caring about the big questions, about revolutions and all that,” she said. “I had seen so many lives wasted in the Soviet Union and China, I stopped asking myself why.”

In the early 1960s, the country began a reform program, led by Deng and then-head of state Liu Shao-chi. Li backed the program. But Mao, who was being eased out of power, opposed it and decided to reassert control. The result was the Cultural Revolution. Deng was purged and Liu was killed.

Arrested by Red Guards

On June 22, 1967, Red Guards, the shock troops of the political campaign, arrested Li and took him to a house outside Beijing.

Nine years later, Lisha would find out he had died three days after his arrest. Authorities said he committed suicide, but the family does not believe them.

Lisha and her daughters were also arrested. Communist authorities accused the family of heading “a great band of Soviet spies.”

Lisha spent nine years in solitary confinement, her daughters two years each.

“The worst punishment was that I couldn’t speak to anyone,” she said. “I used to recite Pushkin to myself to keep myself sane, but never too loudly. If they heard me they might have thought I was crazy and done even worse things to me.”

Daughters to Countryside

In 1969, her daughters were freed and sent to central China to work in the countryside. Lisha stayed in jail.

“All that high-level consciousness, all my Marxism and Mao Tse-tung thought couldn’t help me,” she said. “I was worried about my children.”

In 1976, Lisha was released but denied the right to see her children, still engaged in hard labor. Two years later, Deng returned to power and started a reform program designed to open China to the West. Lisha and her family were united again.

China’s relations with the Soviet Union also began to improve. A string of Soviet diplomats began appearing at Lisha’s door to pay their respects to this witness to history. In 1986, Lisha visited her homeland for the first time in 25 years. She has been back three times since.

‘Such a Big Party’

“All my relatives were there. We had such a big party,” she said. “Fifty people and we were all related.” Indeed, Alla, her daughter, met her second husband at one of the soirees in Moscow.

Through her daughters and her eldest grandson, Lisha followed closely this spring’s student movement. Although no one in her family was an active participant, she still worries for them. Ina teaches at a school in Beijing where the students were active. Peter was also deeply influenced by the movement.

“We can’t talk about what we feel about what happened,” she said. “But I can tell you that I am afraid. Afraid for all of us. Afraid for China.”

Lisha returned to the Soviet Union in early July. Perhaps, she said, she won’t be going back to China.