Eva Sandberg

Eva Sandberg (November 8, 1911 in Breslau - November 29, 2001 in Beijing) was a Jewish German photographer who took Soviet citizenship. In Moscow she met and married the Chinese communist poet Xiao San. In 1939, after twelve years in Moscow, Xiao was ordered to the revolutionary base at Yan'an; Sandberg was allowed to accompany him. Herbert Sandberg is her brother.

Only White Woman at Yan'an

The First (or Central) Red Army and CCP headquarters had been in northern Shaanxi for four years, having arrived there from their abandoned Jiangxi base. Xiao, a Hunanese and an old classmate of Mao's, took over the editorial department at the Reds' Lu Xun Academy of Arts. Under the exacting conditions of the Second Sino-Japanese War Sandberg here bore Xiao two sons. She was the base's only resident western female; the reporter and spy Agnes Smedley, who famously initiated the leadership's Saturday dances, was a visitor. After five years Sandberg returned to Moscow, taking Xiao's sons. The eventual Japanese surrender did not bring peace to China, of course, as the civil war then sputtered to resumption. In March 1947 the Communists evacuated Yan'an and the National Army general Hu Zongnan occupied it. Only in March 1949, with the leadership ensconced in a western suburb of Beijing, did Xiao board a train for Moscow with a delegation of writers; he was headed to Stockholm for committee work on the Geneva Conventions but very much looked forward to seeing his wife and children however briefly after four years.

Only Three Soviet Women in China

Reunited, the Xiao family returned to The PRC. The CPC-controlled government's first five-year plan brought grand-scale modernisation to the country at last, but collectivisation resulted in famine; doubts raised among the aghast planners were met with political movements called Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist, and a plan for the years 1958-62 called Great Leap Forward. In this climate even Xiao San, Mao's boyhood friend, dared write no more poetry; given his history the family could not long hope to avoid the regime's xenophobia, mounting even as Mao relinquished the State Chairmanship to Liu Shaoqi in 1959.

Eva had laid aside her Leica and begun making films of the People's Republic for use by the communist news agencies of Europe. In 1962 it emerged that her travels in this starving land where all travel was controlled by internal passports had aroused suspicion. She came under pressure—as did any Soviet wife then in China—either to take Chinese citizenship or to leave. When her friend Nadia left Zhang Bao and returned to the Soviet Union, Eva knew there were only two such women remaining : Elisabeth (Lisa) Kishkin (李莎), wife of Li Lisan, a Lubianka survivor, and Grania (格拉娘), the uneducated wife of Chen Changhao (陈昌浩), a veteran of the alternate Long March of Zhang Guotao (purged 1937).

The simple Grania was put on trial, painted as a Revisionist and Capitalist roader. Chang divorced her promptly, losing his son Victor, and was the prosecution's witness. Eva and Lisa spoke in her defense. The paranoid, Stalinistic charge of spying menaced all three women but could not be made to stick. For a few years they imagined nothing worse might come to Grania than the penury to which she as a single, visible-minority mother was reduced, and which they tried to alleviate. However, in 1966 Liu, the official State Chair was outfoxed by his resurgent predecessor, and Law gave way to Expedience. Mao's so-called Revolution in Proletarian Culture brought douzhenghui violence to bear against the Soviet wives and the men who had married them (and against tens of thousands of other designated victims within and around the Party); all were charged with—and made to confess to—the most preposterous crimes. The following year they were formally arrested; Eva and Xiao, Lisa and Li, divorced Grania and deserted Zhang Bao. Li died within days of his arrest, on June 22, 1967; the others were to spend years in a Beijing prison and years after that in enforced rustification, a sort of internal exile.

References

• Patrick Lescot: Before Mao: the Untold Story of Li Lisan and the Creation of Communist China, 1999; English translation by Steven Rendall, 2005 ISBN 0-06-008464-2.