Mikhail Borodin

Mikhail Markovich Borodin (Russian: Михаи́л Mápкoвич Бороди́н; July 9, 1884 – May 29, 1951) was the alias of Mikhail Gruzenberg, a prominent Comintern agent.

Background

Borodin was born in a Jewish family in Yanovich, located in modern Vitebsk Region, Belarus. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1903 and became an associate of Vladimir Lenin’s in their underground work. In 1905, he chose to go into exile in the United States. While there, he attended classes at Valparaiso University in Indiana, and taught English to immigrant children in Jane Addams' Chicago Hull House. After the October Revolution of 1917, he returned to his motherland, working in the foreign relations department. From 1919 to 1922, he worked in Mexico, the United States and the United Kingdom as a Comintern agent. He was jailed for six months on 29 August 1922 in Glasgow, ostensibly for breaking immigration regulations, but his political mission was known too, and discussed in court.

China

When Sun Yat-sen requested the help of the Comintern, Borodin led a contingent of Soviet advisors to Guangzhou, where Sun had established a local government. English was the common language between the two. He negotiated the First United Front between the Chinese Nationalist Party of Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese Communist Party. Under his tutelage, both parties reorganized on the Leninist principles of democratic centralism and organized training institutes for mass organizations, such as the Peasant Training Institute, where the young Mao Zedong served, and the Whampoa Military Academy, which under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek trained officers for a party controlled army. He arranged shipments of Soviet arms and shrewdly kept a balance between the middle class elements of the Nationalists and the more radical Communists.

After Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925, Borodin remained an influential advisor to the Nationalists until 1927, when he sided with the left wing Nationalist government in Wuhan led by Wang Jingwei and Eugene Chen. Stalin, under criticism from Leon Trotsky for compromising with the Chinese bourgeoisie, instructed Borodin to enforce leftist land revolution policies on the Nationalists and to mobilize an army of peasants and workers in order to seize control of the party. Chiang Kai-shek, head of the right wing of the party, purged communists in the bloody Shanghai Massacre of 1927 but allowed Borodin to "escape" by car to the Soviet Union along with Sun Yat-sen's wife and Eugene Chen's sons. "The revolution extends to the Yangzi River," Borodin told a reporter as they began their journey, and "if a diver were sent down to the bottom of this yellow stream he would rise again with an armful of shattered hopes."

Later life

After his return to the Soviet Union, Borodin worked briefly as editor of the English language Moscow News. In 1949, he was arrested in the context of antisemitic repressions and died two years later in Lefortovo prison.

Kenneth Rexroth mentions Borodin in his poem Another Early Morning Exercise, and he is one of the main characters in Les Conquérants, André Malraux's first novel (published in 1928).