Rayna Prohme: A Retrospect

The Wuhan interlude of 1927 was one of the earlier major crises of the Chinese revolution which had begun in 1911 with Dr. Sun Yat-sen's establishment of the Kuomintang, that is, the National People's Party. Rayna Simons Prohme was a young American woman who became intimately involved in that crisis, and the letters that she wrote immediately before, during, and immediately after the Wuhan interlude make up the body of this book.

The letters fall into two groups, the first of which is a series that Rayna wrote to her closest friend, Helen Freeland, of Berkeley, California. The second is made up largely of the letters Rayna wrote to her husband, William ('Bill') Prohme, immediately following their forced separation in Shanghai in August 1927. The two sets of letters came to light quite independently and from entirely different sources – but not only do they dovetail perfectly, they complete each other in a dramatic way. Taken together they form a telling historical document, since Rayna came to be intimately connected with the three principal figures in the Wuhan drama: Mikhail Borodin, Madame Sun Yat-sen, and Eugene Chen.

Borodin was Stalin's chief official advisor to the Kuomintang. Rayna met him for the first time in Canton late in October 1926. Madame Sun Yat-sen was the widow of the founder of the Kuomintang, Dr. Sun Yat-sen. Rayna met her shortly after she met Borodin, but in Hankow (the largest of the three Wuhan cities), not Canton. Eugene Chen was the first of the 'Big Three' Rayna met. She went to work for Chen shortly after she and her husband had arrived in Peking in the summer of 1925. Chen was a London-trained lawyer and secretary to Dr. Sun destined to become the Foreign Minister of the short-lived Wuhan government.

Rayna's own story is fascinating, though heartbreakingly brief, for she died aged 33 while a refugee in Moscow. It was there on a bleak day late in November 1927 that her funeral cortege of some hundred mourners slowly made its way under intermittently falling snow from the Medical College of the First Moscow University to the State Crematorium some three miles distant.

Of the Wuhan 'Big Three', two were among the chief mourners. One was Madame Sun. At that date she was a frail lady in her thirties who had just risen from a ten-day illness. The Soviet authorities put a limousine at her disposal for the occasion, but she refused to ride in it. Instead, she walked, shivering, while the limousine followed at a respectful distance. She wore a navy-blue cape that she tried to wrap around her, but it was scant protection against the cold.

The second 'Wuhanite' present was Eugene Chen, who had joined the procession with his two daughters. But the main Wuhanite, Mikhail Borodin, was conspicuous by his absence, though his wife, Fania, walked in the procession. There were other Chinese mourners besides Madame Sun and Eugene Chen, including several important Chinese labor leaders and a number of Chinese students from Moscow's newly established Sun Yat-sen University, most of them refugees.

Finally, there were several Americans who formed a more varied group. These included labor delegates who had come to Moscow for the tenth anniversary of the Russian revolution, but also a number of American journalists, among them Louis Fischer and, especially, Vincent ('Jimmy') Sheean. Sheean was the most grief-stricken of the mourners and walked next to Madame Sun, trying to persuade her to ride in the limousine. On his other side was Dorothy Thompson, soon to become the wife of Sinclair Lewis. She wore a navy-blue cape and shivered with cold much as Madame Sun did. Nearby was still another American journalist, Anna Louise Strong, of communist leanings, also a refugee from Wuhan.

The mourners walked slowly behind the bier, set atop an open horse-drawn hearse. It was covered with red cloth and heaped high with asters, chrysanthemums, and other flowers, mostly gold-and-rust-hued, Rayna's favorite colors. The splash of color hardly shone in the November gloom, and Sheean later recorded that it was 'almost barbarously lugubrious'. The cortege reached the new Moscow crematorium which, with its all-white interior and high vaulted ceiling, looked, according to Louis Fischer, 'like a stream-lined cathedral'. There the casket was set on a raised platform that rose from a space in the floor. The flowers were placed all around.

Four orations were delivered, the two most interesting being those by Anna Louise Strong and a young Chinese named Chang Ke. Rayna had befriended Chang Ke in Peking in the fall of 1926 and he later found his way to Hankow. Now here he was in Moscow as the chosen spokesman of the Chinese students. In his eulogy Chang Ke quoted Li Ta-chao, who had been executed by the murderous Chang Tso-lin only six months earlier:

That part of her work for the Chinese revolution which was performed in Peking may be summarized in the words of Li Ta-chao expressed to us after Rayna Prohme and her husband had left for Canton, in October, 1926. 'Chang Ke', he said to me, 'look at the good example of Rayna Prohme. See how devoted she is to our cause. She worked for us here for a considerable time, but never once did she express one word of complaint, even under all sorts of difficulties which we had to face at that time.'

Chang Ke went on to say:

May we Chinese feel that she is buried, not in the earth nor in any one place, but at the heart of every revolutionary Chinese. May her spirit grow with the rising tide of the Chinese revolution, until China's millions are freed from their present yoke.

This was probably the greatest tribute paid to Rayna, coming, as it did, from those who knew of her work in China so intimately. But it was Anna Louise Strong who spoke first:

We of America may well be glad that we still produce some pioneers who stand at the forefront of earth's battles, that having given John Reed to the Russian Revolution, we gave Rayna Prohme to China. Her work in that revolution was deeper and more important than even the work done by John Reed for Russia, though because it was anonymous and because it came not at the crest of success, it may not be much spoken of.

The comparison was inevitable, since both John Reed and Rayna had been American journalists who, of their own accord, became involved in social and political upheavals far from home. Both died prematurely at the age 33, and both were given state funerals by the Soviets. These parallels are so striking that they tend to obscure the very different character of the two personalities.

By the time John Reed reached Russia in 1917 he had already been active in labor agitation in the United States and had published Insurgent Mexico (1911), a highly readable but not very accurate report on the revolution in Mexico. Rayna's...