Occupational Hazards
When the purge started in Hankow Borodin and his colleagues had to fly for their lives; they had a long, hard cross-country journey home by way of Outer Mongolia. In the middle thirties Borodin was editing an English language newspaper in Moscow (English was the language he always used as a medium of communication in China). Galen, a young officer who had been with him there, was, under the name of Bliicher, commanding a quarter of a million men in Russia's Far Eastern Red Army. Galen was liquidated by Stalin in (I think) about 1940; nobody knows when, let alone why, Borodin fell from grace. What a lot of wheels have come full circle in thirty years! The ardent young revolutionliry whom Borodin helped to power is today the only surviving specimen of the corrupt, reactionary warlords whom he overthrew; Borodin's persecuted disciples have become totalitarian despots; and he himself, who did more than any other Russian to further the cause of Com- munism in Asia, lies, behind barbed wire, in whatever kind of grave the authorities provide for counter-revolutionaries, deviatiionists and such-like trash.
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