Free The gates of November by Chaim Potok

events that had brought the Bolsheviks to power in Russia. In Britain—labor unrest and a weak government. In France, Italy, Hungary—demonstrations, strikes. In America—near national hysteria over the Reds; strikes in major industries; even the police force of Boston out on strike. All over the world—new Communist parties of greater or lesser strength, splitting away from or capturing existing Socialist parties. Western intellectuals and liberals thrilled to the vision of power—armies, police, hosts of bureaucrats—in the hands of Russian intellectuals, and were enchanted by the prospect of a new social order and the destruction of the abhorrent bourgeois class. The Communists in America, Britain, Sweden, Australia remained small splinter organizations, but in France, Italy, Germany they became major parties. Nearly everywhere in the world, it seemed, Communists craved to join the Comintern, accept subservience to Lenin, participate in the coming world revolution.
    But during the years that immediately followed the Third International, not a single trade union in the Western world fell to the Communists. The Communist putsch in Germany was smashed by the German government. The war with Poland ended soon after the close of the Second Congress with an astounding defeat suffered by the Red Army and with a treaty, signed in March 1921, that cost the Bolsheviks much coveted territory. Inside Russia there was domestic unrest: peasant uprisings, a stunning mutiny at the naval base in Kronstadt by sailors once fiercely loyal to the Bolsheviks, continuing economic collapse, agrarian failure, starvation. The labor strikes in Europe and America were broken or settled. The dream of world revolution, the very essence and postulate of Communism, had to be rethought. Lenin now needed to concern himself with the consolidation of socialism in his own country.
    The Far East, though, appeared for a while a rich field for Bolshevik harvesting. Applying pure ideology to practical necessity in a region virtually empty of industrial workers or Communists, Lenin, during the Second Congress, had urged the formation of temporary working alliances of Communist parties and their erstwhile enemies, bourgeois national liberation movements. And evaluating the Politburo’s Far East strategy, he remarked, “The road to Paris lies through Peking.”
    Gregory Voitinsky had earlier entered China in the spring of 1920, about two months before the convening of the Second Congress. Together with a Chinese named Yang Wing-chai, he traveled first to Peking and then to Shanghai, looking for Communists, and found a tiny leftist enclave in each city. He then returned to Russia.
    In July 1921 thirteen young Chinese men, meeting first in a girls’ school in the French Concession in Shanghai and then on an excursion boat—secret police had been spotted near the school—founded the Communist Party of China. One of those present was a twenty-seven-year-old named Mao Tse-tung.
    Later that year the Comintern sent Voitinsky back into China. His task: to establish contact with the new Chinese Communist Party and open communications between Lenin and Sun Yat-sen, the president of China, who had headed the revolutionary movement that, in February 1912, had brought about the abdication of the last Manchu emperor. Earlier in 1921, as director of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist People’s Party, Sun had organized a revolt against the government in Peking headed by Yüan Shih-kai, the increasingly dictatorial president of China, and set himself up as president of a self-proclaimed national government in Canton. He would need allies in his effort to liberate northern China. The Comintern had ordered Voitinsky to explore the feasibility of joining the Communists to the Kuomintang, a union of Russian-style Communism and Chinese-style nationalism. After all, hadn’t Sun Yat-sen sent a telegram of congratulations to Lenin soon after the Revolution?
    According to the family