?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.