The Korean Deportation and Life in Central Asia 163par t icu l ar group or nationality targeted should suffer. Article 5 of the first
Korean deportation order allowed hidden spies and their information to
be transmitted scot- free. Molotov epitomizes the aforementioned logic in
the following quote: “Stalin, in my opinion, pursued an absolutely correct
line: so what if one or two extra heads were chopped off (puskai lishnyaya
golova sletit), there would be no vacillation in the time of war and after
t he war.”^65
Furthermore, the second deportation order (1647–377ss), together
with the first (1428–326ss), required all Koreans in the RFE to be deported.^66
Yet, approximately two thousand remained in North Sakhalin specifically to
work on the Soviet- Japanese oil and coal concessions; that is, several steam-
ships came to North Sakhalin to pick up the Koreans, yet picked up only
1,155 leaving 2,000 or so.^67 These Soviet Koreans, along with Rus sians and
other Soviet citizens, worked with Japa nese laborers (some of whom were
Koreans from the Japa nese Empire recruited to work in Sakhalin) and Japa-
nese man ag ers.^68 This evidence demonstrates that the Soviet government un-
derstood very well how to maximize earnings by leasing out resources and
land to the Japa nese. In this instance, they were hardly anticapitalists and
teetotaling socialists.
Essentially, Stalin viewed the Koreans as a fifth- column potential threat
despite the evidence other wise. This was due primarily to the stated “tsarist
continuities” that viewed Koreans, as well as their po liti cal loyalties, as re-
maining alien and non- Soviet. These “continuities,” which drifted into Soviet
socialism, were the driving forces that influenced both the implementation of
social and po liti cal policies and the decision for the “total” deportation of the
Koreans.^69 No single nationality or Soviet citizen was ever completely “re-
made” under Bolshevism; this remaking was a utopian ideal. But the Koreans
came as close as any other nationality. By the mid-1930s, Stalin was in total
control. With his mea sures of population control (the NKVD, passportiza-
tion, informer networks, the censure of certain social groups) and state poli-
cies, he had produced a siege mentality within the USSR both in the general
populace and in state cadres. Stalin had removed any feedback mechanisms
for his decision making, because the Old Bolsheviks whom he repressed and
executed during the Terror were the very men in the Communist Party who
had shown opposition to his views (Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin,
among others). In 1934, Arsenev’s white paper was revived and reviewed
again by the members and candidates of Dalkraikom.^70 Arsenev had already
passed away (1930), and the primary reason for reviving his report was to
recommend a total deportation of “ those alien people [Koreans].”^71
Many written accounts have attributed Stalin’s ascendancy to his guile,
cunning, and meticulousness in outwitting his rivals in the Communist