136 Chapter 6Eastern Army). These units conducted air- raid drills at local collective
farms, collected reports on illegal border crossings, and patrolled the RFE’s
maritime and land borders (with China and Korea). I estimate that there
were around 1,200 Soviet Koreans in the OKDVA in 1930. Generally, 1930
represented a peak number for Koreans in military ser vice.^111 Their numbers
were diminished by the chistki (purges) and the euphemistically named
“checking of Party documents” from 1930 to 1937, and in par tic u lar the
years 1932–1933, 1935–1936, and 1937–1938 (the peak repression years
of the Terror). The goal of the purges and the checking of Party docu-
ments was to purge the CP and the Soviet organs of “unreliable ele ments.”
It is likely that these chistki contained regional and local quotas for the num-
ber of (in this case) OKDVA soldiers to be purged. The nature of the Stalin-
ist regime in the 1930s supports this. In August 1937, a formal census list of
OKDVA soldiers and officers of the Korean nationality was compiled. This
list found a total of 747 Koreans in the OKDVA (668 soldiers and 79
officers).^112
The OKDVA was surprisingly “international” in regard to the breadth
of Soviet nationalities in its ranks, which included Jews, Rus sians, Ukraini-
ans, Udmurts, Koreans, Buryats, Ossetians, Circassians, Tatars, Belorus-
sians, Chuvash, Mordvins, Poles, Germans, and even Gypsies.^113 But this
national diversity was to be severely reduced throughout the 1930s. In
the case of Koreans, many were dismissed from the Red Army because of
the label or accusation of being po liti cally suspect due to nationality or national
origins. The following are several examples. On March 5, 1934, Mun Dun
Li, commander of the 107th Rifleman’s medical division, and Sut Bak Ten,
commander of the 107th Rifleman’s regiment were both dismissed by the
Zabaikal OKDVA. A prominent factor in both men’s files was the fact they
were born and (in the case of Ten, raised until his early teens) in Japan.
F. V. Bolotskii, a Korean who was the commander of the 2nd Rifle-
man’s com pany, was dismissed from the Zabaikal OKDVA on February 5,
1936, due to his “nationality and other reasons that [made him] undesirable” in
his regiment. Bolotskii’s file reads:
By nationality, Korean.... He arrived in [the] regiment in 1935 with the
position of commander of the com pany from [his previous] position as the
director of a Yakutsk national school. He was removed from the position of
the head of the Yakutsk national school for drunkenness and for [his] daily,
moral, and po liti cal decay, which destroyed the school.... In the regiment,
he barely worked because he suffered from a serious case of syphilis. By
[ ecause of] his nationality and the other aforementioned reasons, he was b
unwanted.^114