Renmin University of China was also the hardest hit by the Cultural Revolution. The wave of persecution not only engulfed many leading cadres and prominent intellectuals, but also affected ordinary teachers and their relatives. My Russian teacher, Kan Yuyao, hanged herself in her dormitory on September 7, 1966, the day when Zhou Enlai held a Red Guard meeting at Renmin University.
So many people died on that bloody day when “I cried and the wolves laughed,” as the Supreme Instruction said, “Deaths happen all the time.” However, when we heard the sad news about Mr. Kan, we still felt very sudden and shocked, and we did not expect it at all. Mr. Kan was just an ordinary teacher who had nothing to do with politics and was not involved in certain struggles. We couldn’t accept it in our hearts.
Mr. Kan was an excellent teacher, teaching very seriously and responsibly, and he was very kind and friendly to his students. At that time, the foreign language teaching conditions in secondary schools were very limited, especially from the rural areas, it was even worse. Most of our students, including me, were not good at foreign languages and had a hard time learning them. Mr. Kan took great pains to teach us patiently, starting from the pronunciation of letters.
There was a curly tongue sound in Russian, which some students from remote areas just couldn’t learn, and the classroom often laughed at the strange sound. As far as we know, Mr. Kan’s colleagues also spoke highly of Mr. Kan and were motivated to get ahead. So when the bad news came, we were all shocked.
Although it was already a fishy and tragic event, we couldn’t imagine how such a good teacher in his middle age could end his life like that. The sturdy figure, the kind smile, the typical magnetic male timbre, just disappeared forever, tragically in the horror of blood. It was also the blood and lives of these innocents that made me more quickly and deeply aware of the social conditions at that time, and more quickly and deeply aware of the Cultural Revolution under the banner of the revolution.
The cause of Mr. Kan’s death was a little different. He was not guilty of any “crime”, but was caused by the political pressure of the society at that time. Among the people close to Mr. Kan, there was a man named Yao Zhongyuan, the secretary of the school’s Youth League Committee, who was criticized by some people for posting a large-character poster earlier and for his radical remarks, which also involved Zhou Enlai and his disclosure of Khrushchev’s secret report against Stalin. Mr. Kan was usually a cautious person, which made him very nervous and stressed.
More importantly, Mr. Kan had an unusual revolutionary family, but this brought him an even more unusual end. His wife, Lin Li, was the niece of Lin Biao and daughter of Zhang Hao (Lin Yuying). Lin Li went to the Soviet Union with her mother in 1934, joined Soviet citizenship in 1947, entered Moscow University in 1949, graduated in 1954, returned to teach at Renmin University in the same year, was transferred to the Broadcasting Bureau in 1958, and regained Chinese citizenship in 1962.
While studying at Moscow University, Linley worked as an intelligence officer for the Soviet State Security Service. This job sounded intimidating on the surface, but in fact it was only to report to the organization the thoughts of the students in the class, to make a small report or something, and there was no way to find out if Lin Li had actually done it. But when it came to the Cultural Revolution, this was said to be a “Soviet agent”, a crime too big to be true.
“At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the Broadcasting Bureau censored Linley and concluded that there was no historical problem. The head of the bureau sent her conclusion to the central government for approval. Jiang Qing was furious and said, “If Lin Li is not a secret agent, who is?” In this way, the whole thing was turned upside down. In fact, Jiang Qing did not understand that the Lin Li she was talking about was not this Lin Li, but another person named Lin Li. The daughter of Lin Boqu was also named Lin Li (pronounced the same as “Lin Li”), older than Lin Li, and had been in the Soviet Union for many years, specializing in philosophy.
In the early 1950s, Stalin sent the famous philosopher Eugene to China, and Chairman Mao often met him, often talking all night, with the older Linley as interpreter. In order to distinguish the two Linleys, the Russian translators called Linley “Little Linley” and the older Linley “Big Linley”. “He was extremely dissatisfied with Jiang’s style and thus offended her. “As soon as the Cultural Revolution began, “Da Linley” was persecuted. Even this “little Linley” was also unlucky because Jiang Qing didn’t get it right.
Mr. Kan became more nervous because of this. Those days, he did not say anything, and when he returned to the dormitory, he lay on his bed, not eating or drinking. He saw the scenes of criticism outside, wearing high hats, hanging black tags, chains, pouring ink, punishing kneeling and crawling, and saying “I am guilty, I am guilty” even after being beaten up. Mr. Kan said to his mother, who was with him, “How can these people live in the future? The fear of a left-leaning disaster finally overwhelmed him. He was afraid that the increasingly cruel and unseen blows from society would eventually fall on his head. On the third day after his mother left, he died in despair.
After Mr. Kan’s death, his wife, afraid of implicating her children, held back the tears of blood in her heart and dared not go to collect his belongings. Even so, things did not get any better. His mother-in-law, Xu Kejun, came to Beijing from Kunming to take care of her daughter. The “rebels” learned that Xu Kejun was from a landlord family, had been to the Soviet Union, and had worked as a secretary under Liu Shaoqi, so they criticized her many times. In September 1968, just over a year after arriving in Beijing, this stubborn old man committed suicide in order to resist the criticism and censorship of the street rebels (it is also said that she was seriously injured and died) in a ditch in the streets of Beijing.
This unfortunate old woman was also a revolutionary old man. She was an early member of the Communist Party in the Yunnan region. She went to the Soviet Union in 1934, and in 1936 she was taken by the Stalinist regime to Siberia for eight years to work as a logger, and then went to work in a yarn factory instead because she was seriously ill. After the founding of the People’s Republic, he returned to China in 1951 after Cai Chang and others intervened. Who knew that the final ending would be so unpleasant and so unjust?
Lin Li herself was also innocently censored after the Lin Biao incident. Although she was Lin Biao’s niece, she did not have much contact with each other. She also unfortunately passed away early. Mr. Kan was not able to leave his ashes behind and is now buried with his wife Lin Li in Harbin with an omega gold-cased watch and a Zhongshan suit that he never wore to his brother.
Since the organization had not dealt with Mr. Kan before, and there was no conclusion, evaluation or anything like that at that time, there was no re-evaluation after the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Ms. Wu Jinzi, Mr. Kan’s granddaughter, saw this paragraph and got in touch with the author. She said she had never met her grandfather, and this was the first time she had seen an account of him, and was grateful for the passage. She also added some information about her family. After this memoir was serialized on the Internet, some people who were involved and informed contacted the author and added valuable information to the memoir, in addition to expressing their approval. I would like to express my deepest gratitude.
(This article is based on the author’s memoirs, “Remembering the Years (1962-1970)” (Lijiang Publishing House, 2012), Chapter 4, Chapter 7, Section 4, “Kan Yuyao’s Death”.
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