The Chinese-Lenin School of Vladivostok (Russian: Китайская Ленинская Школа во Владивостоке, romanized: Kitaiskaya Leninskaya Shkola vo Vladivostoke)[1] was a Soviet educational institution and espionage training center established for the official purpose of educating Chinese students into comrades of socialism.
[2] It was one of the major espionage training centers of the Soviet Union for East Asians,[3] opened in late 1924 and operated until early 1938.
[4][2] On October 29, 1923, the Primorskii provincial Communist Party voted to begin to invest in large scale infrastructure construction (schools, universities, radio stations, publishing houses and roads) in the Russian Far East to support their political, educational and occupational campaigns for the Chinese and Koreans of the RFE.
The Bolsheviks wanted to organize the “construction” of the Chinese and Koreans of the RFE as Soviet socialist peoples while increasing their educational networks (school systems), the number of “socialist” books, pamphlets and other materials and increase the recruitment efforts towards East Asians into Soviet institutions (as cadres) and as labor union members.
The CLS served to train qualified intelligence officers to work behind the "cordon" (behind Soviet borders) on the territory of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.
The cadets practiced their "tradecraft" two to three times a month visiting safe houses in which they had to pass certain tests working with various types of equipment.
[10] The students learned all the basics of Soviet spycraft, including intelligence, counter-intelligence, guerrilla warfare, radio communication, and techniques in rezidentura.
[13] Ancha and Miz's research based on the Soviet archives found that at least 180 out of 400 students of the Chinese-Lenin School were purged as "suspect nationalities".
[16] Ancha and Miz's Chinese Diaspora also gives profiles of cadets who enrolled at the Chinese-Lenin School (CLS) in the mid-1930s.
In that year, Vei Lianshan crossed the border covertly from Sakhalian (now Heihe, China) to Blagoveshchensk and was reassigned to study at the CLS in 1936.
[17] Wang Juntou (codename Fan Shohua) was born in 1912 and served as an intelligence agent in the RO, OKDVA.
[21][22] Two declassified CIA reports from March 1946, declassified in 1998 and 2000, mention the existence of Soviet espionage training schools in Vladivostok and the nearby cities of Ussuriysk, Khabarovsk, and Komsomolsk-on-Amur, with the espionage schools having students "of Russian, Chinese, Mongolian, and Korean nationalities."