Security Concerns Trumping Korenizatsiia 145ists, wreckers, and adventurists. The strength of the Soviet po liti cal police
lay in its national diversity. Soviet Greek, Polish, Ira nian, or Korean agents
could be chosen to play the role of the “foreign businessman/official” in
OGPU/NKVD “dummy” organ izations ( whether local or abroad) set up to
catch Soviet citizens in the act of committing po liti cal crimes. The only
limitation to their cover was that the Greek or Korean spoken by the
agent/“foreign executive” was a dialect found readily in the USSR but less
so among the Greeks and Koreans in their native countries.^143
In the fall of 1935, around 1,200 to 1,400 Koreans were deported to
Central Asia and the Caspian Sea.^144 Nor were Koreans the only diaspora
nationalities deported in 1935: German, Poles, and Finns were deported
from the Soviet Union’s western border areas. A specific order was given in
January 1935 to “resettle” or deport Germans and Poles who lived within
eight hundred meters of the Polish border. The Germans and Poles who
were deported in the spring of 1935 numbered around 24,000, and in the
fall of 1935, 1,500 additional Polish families were deported to Eastern
Ukraine.^145 In March 1935, Latvians, Estonians, and some 7,000 to 9,000
Finns were deported to Central Asia and Siberia.^146 The Soviet Union was
“priming the pump” for its mass operations (deportations) geared towards
diaspora nationalities.
The partial Korean deportation of 1935 did not occur in isolation, nor
was it primarily due to Japa nese geopolitics. In 1935, we saw that the con-
cept of “ enemy nations (nationalities)” was beginning to take root. The depor-
tations of several Soviet nationalities on the western borderlands and the
Koreans in the RFE took place because of a xenophobia toward diaspora
nationalities that had its origins in tsarism. Certainly, the first Dalbureau reso-
lution to deport all Koreans (1922), Arsenev’s “white paper” (1928 and 1934),
and Geitsman’s report (1928) demonstrate that Koreans were seen as “aliens”
even in the early Soviet period when korenizatsiia programs were in full
bloom.^147 All three of the aforementioned reports/resolutions also occurred
before the establishment of Japanese- controlled Manchukuo and Japan’s in-
vasion of China proper (1937).^148
Stepan Kim called the partial deportation of 1935 a “trial run” for
- A full echelon of wagons were filled with Koreans. His father had
been arrested and sentenced to exile. Stepan’s family followed his father to
Central Asia.^149 Also in that year, Afanasii Arsenevich Kim was removed
from his post and expelled from the CP for “lack of vigilance.”^150 A. A. Kim
was the undisputed leader and voice of the Soviet Koreans, representing
them at the All- Union 17th CP Congress, through his vari ous articles in
Krasnoe znamia, and as chairman of the Poset CP. In January 1936, during
meetings of the Poset CP, Li Kvar (Figure 5) was introduced as the temporary