116 Chapter 6On June 28, 1928, Li Kvar, the editor of Avangard (Sonbong in Korean)
requested that Koreans begin latinization.^14 First, Li noted that several
Turkic languages had already latinized their scripts and had discarded Ara-
bic. Second, Li explained that latinization would replace the Chinese script
with one that was easier to learn. Third, latinization would remove the in-
fluence of Korean bourgeois ele ments over Soviet Koreans. Pak noted that
the Koreans in the RFE were descended from the peasant classes; thus
their socialist mentality was in opposition to the traditional Korean lite-
rati and their lit er a tures.^15 Ke Pong U, an academic who edited Soviet
Korean c hildren’s print lit er a ture, countered that Korean script should
simply limit the number of Chinese characters to 2,300.^16 ater, other Ko L -
rean intellectuals, educators, and linguists such as Khan Songgol, Pak Kun
Sik, O Chang Hwan, and Khan Song Gol published their views and their
in de penden t ideas on latinization in Sonbong as well.^17 In 1930, Li Kvar
published an article titled “Cultural Revolution and Latinization.” At this
time Li was an editor at Avangard, a Korean- language newspaper that pub-
lished using only hangul (the Korean alphabet) without any Chinese charac-
ters.^18 In this article, Li wrote that he felt hanmun (the Korean script) was
delaying the development of socialist mentality among Koreans and that it
was “grammatically undeveloped,” containing an “awful orthography.”
These are strong condemnatory words coming from Li, who worked exclu-
sively in Korean script for Sonbong. They would seem to have been written
by Li’s superiors or by members of the Committee of the New Alphabet
(who were in charge of the RFE’s latinization).^19 Li’s statements (an “awful
orthography”) showed a strong Western- language bias. But Li followed the
Party line even when it went counter to his own beliefs.^20
In 1930, Moscow sent I. Bulatnikov, a commissar from Narkompros
(the Ministry of Education) to the Poset district. He noted that Korean
latinization would be complex and required, first, the removal of Chinese
“hieroglyphs,” and second, the development of a new Korean phonetic base,
followed by latinization. Koreans by and large seemed unwilling to give up
their writing system (the Soviet Korean language), which employed from
two to three thousand Chinese characters and hanmun, a phonetic alphabet.
King told of the story of meeting Khvan Ungen in 1989 who was a Dalkrai
(RFE) commissar in Korean education. Khvan admitted that he received
many orders towards latinization. However, without ever protesting, he
placed them in his desk and would con ve niently forget about them.^21
Nikolai Pak was the first Korean gradu ate of the renamed Eastern
Faculty (Vosfak/Oriental Studies at Far Eastern University in Vladivostok).
He studied under A. V. Grebenshchikov, who was a noted Chinese/Man-
chu/Tungusic linguist and ethnographer.^22 Pak also produced a proposal for