96 Chapter 5[members]. In the Spassk Uezd, we have 7 branches of 140 total Pioneers.
In Nikolsk- Ussuriisk, we have 14 branches with 261 Pioneer members.”^70
Already in late 1924, Koreans wanted full Sovietization. Judging by their
remarks on education and their emphasis on Rus sian language and Rus sian
teachers, they understood Sovietization to be similar to Russification. Re-
garding the Korean Question at that time, Chen Min stated, “We need to
raise the level of economic life and cultural level of the Koreans, then we
can fully ‘Sovietize’ them.” Fi nally, the census of 1924 counted 114,000 Ko-
reans, only one- third having Soviet citizenship.^71
At the same time, life in many villages did not offer equality to women,
even those of the newer Soviet generation. Korean families emphasized the
family line through sons. Sons were also pushed to go further in education
even if it that meant that their sisters had to work to pay for their brothers’
education. The article “Korean Women in the Home and in Everyday Life”
gave an example of women’s life at one extreme— that is, in the village. It
stated that village women were ashamed to give birth to daughters. Daughters
from the age of ten to twelve years old were sometimes sold. “Her life consists
of only working in the house, no playing outside, no going to school. From
the ages of ten to twelve, sometimes these women are given away to men,
two, three times older than they are.”^72 It also mentioned that sometimes
women were sold for bundles of opium. Then there was a practice in the
Korean villages of the RFE that was also common in China. If a family with-
out a son had a daughter around the age of eigh teen to twenty, this family
would marry her off to a poorer family with several sons. Typically a son around
ten to twelve years old would be chosen; this young boy would marry and live
with his wife’s family. In this way, the family without an heir would gain a son
and a husband for their daughter. Marriages of this sort were rarely happy.^73
Krasnoe znamia described this latter practice with im mense disdain.
In late 1924, Stalin began a nascent promotion for “socialism in one
country.” However, at that time, he could not dictate to the Central Commit-
tee and Politburo to take such an isolationist route because he was opposed
by party leftists (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev) and rightists (Bukharin, Rykov,
and Tomsky). But “socialism in one country” launched a formal questioning
of the importance of Soviet internationalism, korenizatsiia, and Comintern
policies while proposing the idea of Rus sians and the Rus sian language as
alternative unifying themes for the Soviet Union. At the time, most Bolshe-
viks still held out hope for a world socialist revolution; thus policies based
on internationalist, indigenous, and Comintern ideals continued.^74
By 1926, the public excoriation of the Chinese in newspapers and
other media had lessened significantly.^75 The Chinese and Koreans still
dominated trade at the markets, but their reputations were being rehabili-