Burnt by the Sun. The Koreans of the Russian Far East - Jon K. Chang

90 Chapter 5

view of Koreans as “alien” to Soviet internationalism. The Rabkrin report is

a vivid example of Soviet fears of being “surrounded or infiltrated by enemies

and wreckers.” It functioned in some ways like a Rorschach test wherein the

subject (the Soviet state) created a report on a tabula rasa that revealed more

about itself than the subject(s) of Japa nese expansion and the Korean dias-

pora. The Koreans in Gando and the RFE were never legally or diplomati-

cally claimed as “Japa nese citizens” from 1915 to 1937.

Nonetheless, Soviet institutions such as NKID and Rabkrin trans-

formed local Koreans into Japa nese subjects and geopo liti cal threats to the

Soviet Union without proper justification or legal basis. Marina Mogilner’s

Homo Imperii noted that the Soviet term “nationality” continued to carry

within it racial connotations and meanings from tsarism. However, overt

race, racial science, and its overtones were only allowed in nonofficial Soviet

discourse and popu lar life and culture. She asserted:

During this period [Soviet], real “differences” were not only not overcome

in socialist practice, but were even implanted and strengthened on an

official level—in part, through the obligatory fixing of nationality in the

passport. “Nationality” in Soviet passports, was determined by father’s or

mother’s “ blood ”; this was in essence not only racial, but “racist,” in that it

was understood that these categories were insurmountable stigmas or inherited

advantages [ita l ics mine]. It was not pos si ble to choose or “construct” one’s

parentage. [At the same time] in the background, [ there was] the repression

in the USSR of serious academic discussion on race, nationality, [and]

ethnic identity as serious languages of difference. The legal and ordinary

racial thinking of the passport was greatly disseminated, [while] the

au then tic language of difference remained at the disposal of the population

and the authorities.^49

In Chapter  3, the FER report quoting a Japa nese Army statement
called RFE Koreans an “anti- Japanese threat.” Yet the 1929 Rabkrin report
presented the Soviet geopo liti cal landscape as one with omnipresent ene-
mies, alliances, and conspiracies that were gathering strength and preparing
for an assault. Ken Kotani’s Japa nese Intelligence during World War II found
that “Japa nese [intelligence] operations in the Far East were exaggeratedly
reported to Moscow.”^50 Tellingly, the Rabkrin viewpoint justified the mas-
sive Soviet increases in industrialization, militarization, and increases in the
NKVD apparatus that began concurrently with the first Five Year Plan
(1928).^51 It accused a Soviet nationality (the Koreans) of being willing par-
ticipants in “fifth- column- like” activities without having the proper legal or
diplomatic sources or documentation. The Rabkrin report would be repeated