From the middle of 1904 to the end of January 1905, Borodin lived in exile in Bern. In 1905 and 1906 he worked in social democratic organizations in Riga, and in 1905 he was elected a secretary of the committee of the Riga RSDLP organization. He was a delegate to the Tammerfors Conference (1905) and to the Fourth Congress of the RSDLP (the Unity Congress, 1906). At the end of 1906, Borodin emigrated to England. From early 1907 to July 1918 he lived in the USA, where he organized a special school for political emigres and actively participated in the Socialist Party of America, the left wing of which subsequently formed the Communist Party of the USA (1919). In 1919 he was the first consul general of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in Mexico. From 1919 to 1923 he worked in the Comintern. From 1923 until July 1927, upon the invitation of Sun Yat-sen, Borodin worked in China as chief political adviser of the Kuomintang Central Executive Committee. He was a personal friend of Sun Yat-sen. After his return from China to the USSR, he was deputy people’s commissar of labor, deputy director of Tass, and, from 1932, editor in chief of the newspaper Moscow News. From 1941 to 1949, Borodin was also editor in chief of the Soviet Information Bureau. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.afternoon.

27th September, 1920: "I spent the evening with Michael Borodin. Michael Markovitch, as Borodin is called, lives in our house. He is a man with shaggy black hair brushed back from his forehead, a Napoleonic beard, deep-set eyes, and a face like a mask. He talks abrupt American-English in a base voice. I have not seen much of him as he works half the day and all the night, like the other Foreign Office officials. He is usually late for meals, eats hurriedly and leaves before we have finished. As soon as Vanderlip had gone Borodin switched out all the drawing-room lights that Vanderlip had put on, except one. I asked him why he did this, and he looked round the garish room and gave a slight shudder: "It is parvenu," he said; then sinking back into his chair he looked at me intently, and asked: "What is your economic position in the world?" It is the first time he has talked to me, and I found myself answering as if my life depended on my answers. Happily no one in this country knows anything about my family, up-bringing, or surroundings. I have not got to live down my wasted years. I can stand on my own feet and be accepted on my own merits. Borodin mystifies me, I cannot make out, when all his questions have been answered, what he thinks.

One night a Foreign Office official called Mikhail Borodin, who lived in the house, came and joined us. Vanderlip thereupon got up (quickly, of course), and retired to his room. Borodin turned out all the lights except one.

"The vulgarity," he murmured.

He lit a cigarette and sat back in a tapestry chair and looked at me through half-closed eyes and raised enquiring eyebrows. It was the first time that a Russian had taken any notice of my existence, although I had been in the house at least a week. He had straight, rather long, shiny black hair that would not stay back, although he continually ran his fingers through it. His little pointed beard was well trimmed, and he wore the Russian blouse, embroidered, high-necked and tied round the waist with a red cord.

Lenin hated to admit even to himself that he was beginning to lack the time and energy for any meaningful direction of world communism. Months of neglect would be followed by a hurried reading of the French or German press and a directive to Zinoviev or a letter to the foreign comrades. The sporadic and necessarily dilettantish character of such interventions can be judged from a letter of July 13, 1921, to M. Borodin, then an expert on American affairs. He asks about an American third party, "the Worker Peasant or the Worker Farmer Alliance" (actually the Farmer Labor Party) which allegedly is "in power" in North Dakota. "I would like to have a few, but the most important documents about this party and its activity in North Dakota... and a short note from you about this whole question." On receiving Borodin's reply Lenin jotted down on it for his secretary: "Please bring it to my attention within a week." Borodin was subsequently charged with analyzing the Farmer Labor materials for the Comintern journal, but he was ordered to omit from his article their anti-Communist polemics.

"Front to the masses," "united front from below," "the campaign against centrism," such were some of the jerky, shifting postures through which the Western Communists had to go in those early days. In fact their story is like a replaying of the drama of the history of Bolshevism in Russia, but this time, if one disregards the awesome consequences in Italy and Germany, as a comedy.

Borodin is a stoutly built man of forty, with a good deal of humor, an excellent knowledge of English (the language through which he communicates with the Chinese), a downright manner of talking, and, when he talks of the Chinese, very much the attitude of mixed admiration, laughter, and annoyance which in the course of years seems to become that of most foreigners who have much to do with them."

In Moscow he (Borodin) was appointed chief civilian member of the group of some 40 Soviet advisors sent to China, as a result of the Joffe-Sun Yat-sen conversations of 1922-23, to help reorganize the Kuomintang. Borodin went openly as a representative of the Russian state and a guest of the Kuomintang, but he tried to coordinate his activities with those of the official Soviet diplomatic corps, so far as the chaotic situation in China and the contradictory orders from Moscow would allow. He was able to counter attempts by members of the Kuomintang to exclude members of the Chinese Communist Party and he succeeded in obtaining substantial financial help for the Kuomintang.

China may have been the largest ''colony of imperialist exploitation,'' but to the Chinese it resembled, to use Dr. Sun Yatsen's phrase, a ''table of sand.'' From his southern base at Canton, Sun sought to reorganize his political party, the Kuomintang (K.M.T.), into a militant revolutionary force backed by a disciplined, well-trained army - to subdue the warlords and spread his form of socialdemocratic republicanism throughout the mainland.

Spurned in his requests for assistance by the United States, Britain and Japan, Sun turned to the Russian Bolsheviks. In them, the Chinese leader sensed a natural ally; they had successfully, if bloodily, brought all of peasant Russia to a new ''socialist'' life. For his part, Lenin gladly obliged: He saw, in the ''revolutionarynationalist'' Sun Yat-sen and K.M.T., a golden opportunity to apply Bolshevik ''united-front'' tactics and strategy and to convert the ''patriotic'' struggle into the ''higher'' phase of Soviet-style armed seizure of power by a clique of Communists.

So, on Sun's invitation the first Soviet mission arrived in China in 1920 and by 1923 had set up shop in Canton, the K.M.T. capital. Under Borodin's direction, the Bolshevik ''advisers'' (sovetniki) established the Whampoa Military Academy; its commander was Chiang Kai-shek, but the guiding hand on the staff was General Blyukher's. Simultaneously, Borodin's sovetniki planted Chinese Communists (whose party had been founded in 1920) in key positions within the K.M.T. and its ''National-Revolutionary Army.'' They even drafted the K.M.T. party program and statutes while teaching its members the agitprop art of inciting Chinese workers into armed, terrorist programs against Western ''imperialist'' businessmen and property.

Naturally I wanted to see him (Borodin) in Hankow. The appointment was arranged by Rayna Prohme, a dynamicyoung woman from Chicago, then editing The People's Tribune, organ of the Red rule. She was the wife of William Prohme, another journalist of rare intelligence who at that time was head of the nationalist News Agency - a propaganda organization in Shanghai. Both are now dead. Rayna (as everyone came to know this quite amazing girl with her shock of flaming red hair) died some years ago in Moscow of overwork and brain fever; Bill died in 1935 in Honolulu, after suffering for years from a pulmonary illness. Despite political differences, all who met Rayna and Bill were influenced by their personalities and their clarity of vision.

In Hankow, Rayna was very much alive and arranged my entree to the great man's sanctum that week in late April (1927) with no apparent trouble. She said: "You want to see Borodin? Okay, I'll see what can be done". I got a note the third day I was in Hankow, telling me that the meeting had been arranged.

It was in pursuance of this policy that in 1923 a Soviet emissary, Adolt Yoffe, of Brest-Litovsk fame, signed the celebrated agreement with Dr. Sun Yat-sen of the Kuomintang. Soviet Russia would help the Kuomintang, until then holding power only in an area in the south, around Canton, in its attempt to unite China and free it from warlords and foreign imperialists alike. The Chinese Communists would enter the Kuomintang without giving up their own party.

During the next three years both sides profited by this agreement. Communist influence, Soviet experts, and Soviet advice transformed the Kuomintang from what it had been prior to the Sun-Yoffe agreement - a group of intellectuals seeking leverage within this or that warlord group - into a modern well-organized party. Like its Bolshevik prototype, the Kuomintang developed techniques for exploiting the numerous social ills and grievances of the unhappy country: the peasants' exploitation by the landlords, the workers' struggle to exact a living wage from their (mostly foreign) employers, the almost universal resentment against Western imperialism. The Communists, in turn, gained in numbers and influence. Many foreign observers concluded overhastily that the Kuomintang was but a front for the Communists. Certainly Chiang Kai-shek, its leader after Dr. Sun's death in 1925, leaned heavily on Soviet advisers.

The most prominent of these were Michael Borodin, a Russian Communist with an American background, whom many in 1925-26 considered the real ruler of South China, and the chief military expert, "General Galen," whose real name was Vassily Blucher, a famous Red officer in the Russian Civil War and a future Soviet marshal.

In those days foreign journalists were vouchsafed some contact with lower echelon Soviet bosses, besides an occasional sight of the top ones; even of the boss of the bosses, Stalin himself. He would walk into view on a platform, or appear in a box at the Opera House, or at the topmost end of a reception, always to the accompaniment of protracted cheers that were precisely timed by the GPU men in attendance. Their duration steadily increased, and at the time of Stalin's death had reached a minimum of seven and a half minutes. It was a preview of the studio audience. Sometimes, again, one would catch a glimpse of the back of his head, with its thick neck, as his heavily escorted car shot past, going to or from the Kremlin.

The receptions, whatever their occasion, were invariable. There would be a long table loaded with food and drink beside which officials would cluster like foraging bees, eating as hard as they could, and sometimes, when no one was looking, surreptitiously pocketing something portable to take home for their dear ones. A regular attender at these functions was Borodin, who at one time had played an important role in the execution of Soviet policy in China. Now, in semi-disgrace, he had been made, of all things, editor of the Moscow Daily News, an English language propaganda sheet published in Moscow. The unfortunate man had on his staff some ebullient English and American Communist and Communist-leaning girls of quite exceptional horror. When I read of his inevitable eventual arrest and disappearance, I thought that perhaps there might have been a tiny element of relief as he was taken off to Lubianka in the thought that he would no longer have to cope with these unspeakable harridans. At the reception he would sit alone, quietly drinking champagne and chain smoking, wearing an expression of oriental vacancy.

I was present once in Borodin's office in the Moscow Daily News when an American radical, a lad of twenty-three who worked on the paper, came in. Borodin scolded him for falling down on a story. The American argued. Borodin became angry. The American yelled, "You can't talk to me that way". Borodin yelled back. They both waxed hot. Borodin finally threw his hands above his head and shouted, "Get out of here. You're fired". The great statesman who had ruled millions at war and moulded big Chinese minds to his will could not manage a cub reporter.

Early in 1949 Mikhail Borodin was arrested. In the twenties he had been the chief political adviser to Sun Yat-sen and the National Revolutionary government of China. Sun Yat-sen, just before his death in 1925, had given him a letter to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. It was the political testament of that great Chinese revolutionary, which the present leaders in Peking want to forget. After the Second World War Borodin worked as editor in chief of the English-language newspaper Moscow Daily News; later he transferred to the Communist Information Bureau. Almost the entire editorial staff of the paper was arrested along with him, including the American journalist Anna Louise Strong, who was accused of espionage and expelled from the USSR.