Dudin P.N. On the Question of the Fate of the Teachers at the Faculty of Law in Harbin Who Returned to the USSR

Abstract: The subject of this study is the legal status and political fate of the teachers at the Faculty of Law in the city of Harbin who after 1935 arrived in the Soviet Union. Following the Japanese occupation, a number of teachers was forced to switch to Soviet citizenship and to return to the USSR, while the Faculty itself ceased to exist in 1937. The faculty staff subjected to repressions can be roughly divided into 3 groups: 1. Those sentenced to capital punishment; 2. Those serving their sentences in camps; 3. Those subjected to repressions but with unknown fates. All of them were prominent scholars in the field of Chinese government, law, history and economy. The article’s research is carried out through a study of archival data, report material from the Faculty of Law, information on sentences with regard to repressed citizens, memoirs and recollections. The study’s novelty lies, above all, in presenting for the first time a complete list of victims of political repressions among the teachers at the Faculty of Law in the city of Harbin; secondly, the article publishes for the first time the biographical data of the most important scholars-Sinologists of that time: N. E. Esperov, A. A. Kamkov, M. L. Shapiro and others.

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