Borodin: Stalin’s Man in China

Dan Jacobs has rescued from relative obscurity the life story of Mikhail Borodin: his early struggle as a Russian-Jewish immigrant in America, his career as a shadowy Comintern agent in many lands and rise to prominence as the man allegedly in charge of the Soviet effort to turn China to communism in the 1920s (the main part of the book), and finally, the years of semi-disgrace ending in an unnoted death. A first-rate contribution, both as biography and as a study of Soviet policy toward China, to which Jacobs adds his own measured views.