Security Concerns Trumping Korenizatsiia 137This profile of Bolotskii appears to have been added to his file postscript after
he had been called for review, and his dismissal based on the fact that he
was of a po liti cally suspect, diaspora nationality (a Korean, and thus viewed
as having ties to Korea and the Japa nese Empire). This, more than anything
else, made him “po liti cally unreliable.”^115 If the statements regarding his
work as a school director had been true, he would never have been recruited,
accepted, and promoted into the OKDVA as com pany commander in a
highly sensitive area during an extremely tense era (the late 1930s). He likely
had had previous Red Army experience (possibly during the Intervention),
but this information is not in the archives.
The next case involves that of En Un Sim, a Korean who was dismissed
from the Red Army and then repressed due to having been born and raised
in Korea (the Japa nese Empire). Sim’s case ignores the real question of “po-
liti c al loyalty” to the Soviet state. Sim was a se nior po liti cal instructor in the
OKDVA’s 76th Rifleman’s regiment. He was born in Korea and came to the
USSR at the age of sixteen. During a routine check of the 76th regiment, a
document was found in which Sim had supposedly written the following:
“Zinoviev is highly educated.... Without a doubt, Zinoviev and others like
him committed crimes. However, if we compare Zinoviev with Stalin and
Voroshilov, Zinoviev stands head and shoulders above the latter two and,
generally, Zinoviev is wiser than Stalin and Voroshilov.”
There is very little chance that an officer of po liti cal education in the
Red Army such as Sim would have uttered much less written such state-
ments. This document was used by the NKVD in April 1937 to prosecute
and, later (March 1938), execute En Un Sim as an anti- Soviet wrecker and
Trotsky- Zinoviev supporter. The NKVD’s repression of En Un Sim as an
anti- Stalinist Trotsky supporter was particularly egregious for its lack of
verisimilitude. Sim’s life and ser vice in the CP and Red Army contradicted
the statement found by the NKVD. He was also a CP member from 1921(at
eigh teen years of age) until his arrest in 1937.^116 Therefore, the document
was almost certainly falsified in order to remove Sim, who at the height of the
Terror was viewed as “po liti cally unreliable” in an extremely sensitive posi-
tion (a po liti cal instructor). This was primarily due to his profile as a Korean
who was born and raised until adolescence in Korea and spoke Rus sian with
a foreign accent. The cases of Bolotskii and Sim point to the fact that the
Soviet archives are neither infallible nor incorruptible.^117 The reports on
both men were written and added to their files after the decision to dismiss
them had already been made.
In August 1937, NKVD Commissar Ezhov (in Moscow) requested
that the OKDVA’s commissar Vasilii Blukher (in the Rus sian Far East) com-
plete a list of the number of Korean officers in the OKDVA. This report,