142 Chapter 6western and eastern Soviet borders. Thereafter, Soviet citizens began taking
active steps towards demonstrating their loyalties to their state. This is quite
unlike the Soviet and indigenous mobilization (1923–1930) when Soviet
citizens could passively reap the benefits of development, security, and the
indigenization programs. The large increase in the number of NKVD and
in f orma nt networks, as well as the modernist state ele ments of propaganda
(radio, newspapers), created a sense of encirclement by enemy forces. One
could no longer be sure that the Korean and Chinese illegal mi grants who
were caught crossing Soviet borders into the country were not the spies, di-
versionists, or wreckers whom the radio stations, newspapers, pamphlets
and signs had warned about. Many citizens redoubled their efforts and
viewed their ser vice as border guards as proof of their loyalty to the Soviet
state. Most, if not all, Soviet nationalities in the RFE served in the “assis-
tance brigades” and or Red Army/OKDVA border- guard regiments because
the threat of Soviet borders being infiltrated by land or sea was ubiquitous.
Guarding against this was an enormous task that provided a real or imagined
enemy, diversionist and wrecker, and caused a greater internalization of the
Homo Sovieticus identity.
The Koreans had a long verifiable rec ord of Soviet loyalty beginning
from the civil war/Intervention. There was also an equally long history of
chauvinism towards Soviet Koreans. Koreans had served as border guards
on their own collective farms from the mid-1920s. They served officially in
Red Army border- guard units from the early 1930s onward. The rec ords of
the 1930s show many Chinese and Korean illegal mi grants as having been
caught or shot while crossing into Soviet territory.^128 Many of the Soviet
Korean border guards evinced their loyalties and remorse by having to exert
deadly martial force towards unfortunate creeping figures and whispering
sounds that turned out to be cold and hungry illegal mi grants rather than
armed diversionist ele ments. Yet some historians, such as Francine Hirsch,
continued to doubt whether the deported Soviet minorities were or could
even have been taught to be po liti cally loyal. Hirsch stated:
It was not just that diaspora nationalities had real or imagined ties to other
states. Soviet leaders were concerned that these nationalities could not be
“re- i n vent ed” as Soviet nations— national in form, but socialist in content—
because other states or class enemies had “control” over the histories and
traditions that shaped their national consciousness.... The second [cat-
egory] were nationalities that resisted Soviet efforts to remake their tradi-
tions and reform their cultures; Soviet leaders referred to these peoples in
class terms as “petit- bourgeois nationalist.”... Nationalities from all three
groups [Hirsch listed three categories of “suspect” nationalities] were