The Red Empires: A Tale of Love Divided - Hardcover

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Born in Tunisia in 1953, Patrick Lescot is the editor-in-chief of the foreign news service Agence France-Presse. He spent several years in China where he reported on Tibet's uprising in Lhasa and the Tiananmen Square events. He lives in Paris.

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'Patrick Lescot brilliantly succeeds in portraying the interlinked Chinese and Soviet tragedies through the story of Li Lisan, whose destiny spanned both countries.' Le Monde

Li Lisan was an idealistic and principled man and a founder of Chinese Communism. Yet he was also married to a former Russian aristocrat, a marriage that endangered them both when the Russian and Chinese states moved apart. As regimes of fear grew under Stalin and Mao, Li Lisan refused to bend to their commands, a crime for which he suffered many years of imprisonment in Stalin's gulags and ultimately death under his former comrade, Mao. Throughout this time his wife Lisa stood by him and together they resisted all attempts by the state to force them apart. This is the story of their tragedy and that of the countries that they loved.

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A major figure in the early history of Chinese communism, Li Lisan was a charismatic leader who created the Chinese labour movement. He was one of the chief organizers of the Chinese Communist Party and played an important role in the development of the Chinese Red Army. Having fallen into disfavour with Stalin because of his fiery independence, Lisan was summoned to Moscow and interned there for nearly twenty years. Re-elected in absentia as a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, he was finally allowed to return to China in 1945 as Minister of Labour in the first government of the People's Republic of China. But he soon found trouble with Mao and was once again arrested, imprisoned and tortured. This time he did not survive.

Li Lisan emerges from Lescot's remarkable account as a complex, dedicated man whose honesty and integrity caused him enormous suffering, which he bore with extraordinary determination. Lescot sets his tale against vivid descriptions of China and Russia in some of the most terrible and momentous phases of the history of the twentieth century.