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

2 Chapter 1

by its own Tsarist past (based on a colonial ideology of conquering lands,
resources, and natives) during the execution of Soviet socialism?” and, if so,
“How did these Tsarist continuities affect the implementation of Soviet
policy towards the Koreans?” After all, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and other “Old
Bolsheviks” had come of age under the tsar as subjects of the Rus sian Empire.
This second question also examines the effects of Soviet nationalities policies
on the Chinese, German, Jewish, and Polish communities of the USSR.
Leading an underground group of revolutionaries is one thing, but the
execution of a socialist system based on “ actual and legal equality” to over
192 distinct nationalities speaking over three hundred diff er ent languages is
quite another. As this study will demonstrate, the Soviet Koreans partici-
pated vigorously in all of the major sociopo liti cal (and propaganda) cam-
paigns during korenizatsiia. Yet the charges of their being “alien,” more
suitable as laborers than as citizens, and inveterate agents/minions of the
Japa nese empire never ceased— this, despite the fact that a significant number
of RFE Koreans had fought in every Rus sian and Soviet war as conscripts
and officers since the First World War. Fi nally, perhaps the end result of
korenizatsiia and the Soviet nationalities policies was the division of the
USSR itself into more than sixteen diff er ent nation- states ( after 1991), which
gave the new nation- states greater autonomy and civic freedoms than they
had possessed as constituent parts of the USSR. Closely related to the subject
of Soviet Korean history in the RFE are the discussion and problematiza-
tion of how historians within the field of Soviet/Rus sian history frame race,
ethnicity, and Soviet nationalities policies.

AFANASII A. KIM: BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

Afanasii A. Kim’s life and his rise to the top of the Communist Party in the

Rus sian Far East mirrored the lofty dreams and ascent of other Koreans

during the korenizatsiia (indigenization) period of 1923 until the Korean

deportation. Kim rose from life as a peasant farmer to become the highest-

ranking Soviet Korean cadre in the USSR. He went on to meet Vladimir

Lenin in 1921 and then was selected to give a rousing emotional speech

at the Seventeenth Congress of the CPSU in January 1934. There, Kim

pledged the loyalties of the Koreans of the Poset district to Soviet power.

Here is an excerpt from that speech: “We know that the task of Korean

kolkhoz peasants and Korean workers is to defend our red borders of the

Soviet Far East until our last drop of blood.”^7

However, the life of Afanasii Arsenevich Kim would not follow the

typical trajectory of a great Soviet vozhd (leader) because his community