Koreans Becoming a Soviet People 91(especially prior to and during the Terror) in vari ous forms towards many
Soviet nationalities.^52
Yet sometime in late 1926 to early 1927, Poset officially became a Ko-
rean National Autonomous district, and shortly afterwards Afanasii Kim
was named its Party chairman.^53 Poset shared a border with Korea. If any of
the rumors or innuendos of Korean collaboration had been proven or vouch-
safed, there would have been little or no possibility of Poset becoming a
“Korean district” with Afanasii Kim (a Korean) chairman of the CP of that
region. In addition, Poset did not become a “forbidden border zone” like
some of the regions or districts (raions) in the Western borderlands.^54 How-
ever, the granting of Poset as a Korean district was most likely due to the
per sis tent campaigning of Khan Myon She on the issue of territorial auton-
omy. Thus, Poset was prob ably a korenizatsiia concession as part of national
construction despite its geopo liti cal risk, as it was the only Soviet territory
that bordered Korea.^55
KHAN MYON SHE/ANDREI A. KHAN:
THE FOURTH KOREAN INTERNATIONALISTAndrei Abramovich Khan (Khan Myon She)^56 was perhaps the most fer-
vent Bolshevik of all Soviet Korean leaders. His reports requesting territo-
rial autonomy as part of the cultural construction of Soviet Koreans was one
of the principal factors for the granting of Poset as a Korean autonomous
raion in 1926/1927. Khan’s per sis tence, however, would have dire repercus-
sions for him during the Terror. Andrei Khan, Grigorii Eliseevich Khan
(Khan Chan Gol), and many other Soviet Koreans reverted to their Korean
names (rather than birth names) during much of the korenizatsiia period.
This was in ser vice to Moscow, because their leadership of the vari ous So-
viet Korean groups such as the Irkutsk faction (Korean government in exile
in Irkutsk), Korean Bureau, and the like helped to promote “international-
ism,” albeit somewhat artificially.^57 Andrei Abramovich Khan (birth name)
was born in 1885 in Tizinkhe, one of the first Korean villages established in
Rus sia in the 1860s. He remembered long days of farming and farm work
until he was eigh teen years old, when he received a scholarship to the Kazan
Seminary. In 1904 (at age nineteen), he was sent to Manchuria to help the
Rus sian Army translate intelligence documents collected during the Russo-
Japanese War. In 1917, Khan participated in the First All- Russian Korean
Congress and vari ous local “zemstvo” co ali tion governments in the Primore
(in the latter, he would be working among all nationalities, but primarily
Rus sians and Ukrainians). In 1919, he left the Socialist Revolutionaries
(SRs) to join the Rus sian Communist Party, of which he became a member