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

1

ONE

Introduction

Besides this, the Chinese and Koreans are industrious and steady

workers, which is not always the case with the Rus sians here. Then

there is the fact already alluded to, that the yellow men are clever

craftsmen.... That a Chinese businessman is everywhere the

successful rival of a Rus sian or a Eu ro pean is well known. And

these qualities, as the Rus sian writer Bolkhovitinov puts it, are

more dangerous than either the Chinese army or navy.

— Fridtjof Nansen, explorer, October 1914^1

I

n 1926, the Soviet Union listed among its population over 190 nation-
alities or socio- historical ethnic groups.^2 The USSR contained large
numbers of groups considered to be “Western Eu ro pe ans” such as Ger-
mans and Greeks and every variety of “Asians,” from Muslims, Christians,
and Jewish Asians in the Caucasus (Ingush, Georgians, and Mountain
Jews/Tats who spoke Persian) to Asians in the Rus sian Far East (RFE) lo-
cated thousands of miles away on the Soviet Union’s Pacific Coast.^3 In the-
ory, the Soviet Union offered all nationalities within its borders, at least in
princi ple, cultural and territorial autonomy, education in their native lan-
guage, and other rights that constituted self- determination and individual
rights promising equality under Soviet law regardless of religion, national-
ity, place of origin, language, and other markers of identity.^4 All of the
aforementioned rights were offered in an indigenization program called ko-
renizatsiia, which began in 1923 and ended for the Koreans with their de-
portation from the RFE in 1937.
Unfortunately, despite having been born in Rus sia or the Soviet Union,
the diaspora peoples such as Germans, Poles, Greeks, Koreans, Chinese
and Ira n i ans were often seen as having homelands and po liti cal allegiances to
countries bearing their ethnonym, that is, ancestral homelands.^5 This study
focuses on two primary questions and their arguments. The first is: “Why
were the Koreans of the Rus sian Far East viewed as a problematic or maligned
nationality during the Tsarist and Soviet periods?”^6 The second question
addresses the implementation of socialism upon a multinational population
and consists of two parts. Therefore, “Was the Bolshevik government clouded