First United Front
Chiang Ching-kuo was sent as a teenager to study in the Soviet Union during the First United Front in 1925, when his father's Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party were in alliance. He attended university there and spoke Russian fluently, but when the Chinese Nationalists violently broke with the Communists, Stalin sent him to work in a steel factory in the Ural Mountains. There, Chiang met and married Faina Vakhreva. When war between China and Japan was imminent in 1937, Stalin sent the couple to China. During the war Ching-kuo's father gradually came to trust him, and gave him more and more responsibilities, including administration.