102 Chapter 5mea sures against the aforementioned tanners is dependent on the momen-
tum of the strug gle, that is, state production against private capital that is so
strongly encroaching upon state production in our own okrug.”^91 The anti-
NEP campaigns in the RFE strayed far from its socialist “class par ameters.”
The end result was that the OGPU mainly confiscated the goods and work-
shops of Chinese urban craftsmen (the proletariat) rather than the professed
ideals of attacking cap i tal ists, merchants, and speculators.
Geitsman ended this section of the report on the OGPU campaign by
stating: “And who can guarantee now that when we only just pushed out the Chi-
nese merchant, then we discover him on the strength of this as evolved into a Korean
or a Japa nese. However, the last two types we have all the basis for considering as
one and the same in the matter of the owner ship of the Primore [ita l ics m ine].”^92
This is yet another example of a statement by Geitsman and the NKID that
conflated the identities of all three East Asian nationalities, though the lat-
ter pronouncement was the most primordialist and chauvinistic given the
known disparities. In 1928, the Koreans were a Soviet nationality who were
primarily peasants and agricultural workers living in families in the RFE.
The majority of the Chinese in the RFE were foreigners, only a minority of
whom intended to become Soviet citizens.^93 They were urban, single males,
and a majority of those living outside the city were merchants, traders,
storekeepers, servants, and middlemen.^94
Geitsman’s report comes across as promoting a very racialized vision
of who could and could not be “Soviet.” It never explained why the Koreans
were completely alien to “us” or whether this perception was simply Geits-
man’s own or part of the NKID’s institututionalized policies. Geitsman
overinflated the Korean’s alien profile; the more accurate mea sure would
have been citizenship data. His manipulation of passport data and the
NKVD’s “secret vote” (to deny eight thousand Koreans the right to citizen-
ship without due procedure) were not based on socialist class- consciousness
or ideas of contingent race.^95 Rather, the Geitsman NKID reports were ex-
amples of an unwillingness to properly identify and distinguish among the
three East Asian peoples living in the RFE. Conflating their identities into
a monolithic “yellow peril,” the reports treated the Chinese tanners as a po-
liti cal question that was to some extent a revival of “Rus sian resources for
Rus sians” and perpetuated a view of the Koreans as remaining unchanged
by Soviet culture and thus alien to the Soviet polity. The V. K. Arsenev re-
port (the “Doklad”) continued in this vein.
In late 1928, Arsenev was commissioned by S. A. Bergavinov and the
Dalkraikom (also called Dalbureau) to produce a “white paper”/report de-
scribing how the Soviet Dalkrai leadership should resolve the “yellow ques-
tion” with re spect to the Koreans and the Chinese.^96 This report was instru-