Introduction 5out their duties with a firm resolve. Their lives depended on showing not a
hint of remorse. Khai Ir Ti (Vasilii) was the one exception, and his testi-
mony was captured through interviews with his daughter. Nikolai Nigai, an
NKVD officer (who was Korean) participated in the 1937 deportation of
the Koreans. He and his sister, Raisa, stayed in Vladivostok until the depor-
tation had been completed, and then they too were deported, albeit to com-
paratively luxurious conditions as Soviet cadres. It had long been stated that
the “national” deportations of the Chinese and the Koreans were carried out
by NKVD members of their own nationality (respectively). This has now
been confirmed.^14
Also, geopolitics and the threat of war with Japan played a role in the
Korean deportation. However, there were never any verified Soviet- Korean
fifth columnists or anti- Soviet subversives, unlike in the cases of the Soviet
Poles, Georgians, Armenians, and others. Geopolitics and war, however, do
not explain the mea sures taken to deport the Koreans as early as December
1922 or the heavi ly racialized depictions of the Koreans as “alien to the Soviet
socialism” by Geitsman and Arsenev in their separate reports in 1928. These
events occurred well before the threat of war with Japan became tangible
( fter the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932). Lastly, one should not for a -
get that K orea had been colonized by Japan and was not an in de pen dent
country during most of the first half of the twentieth century. Therefore,
most Koreans on Soviet soil felt a heightened sense of loyalty towards the
USSR as well as a double dose of enmity towards the Japa nese empire and
other so- c alled cap i tal ist- imperialist nations. As for the Koreans who were
well assimilated and native or near native speakers of Rus sian, most considered
both the USSR as their homeland and Korea as an ancestral homeland.^15
In the chapters that follow, this study will demonstrate that the Ko-
rean deportation of 1937–1938 was not because of insufficient “remaking” as
Soviet citizens, the threat of fifth columnists/espionage from the Korean
community, or the Soviet ideological hatred of cap i tal ist- imperialist nations
(Koreans as pawns of Japan). The aforementioned geopolitics and subplots
played a smaller, secondary role. Instead, I will establish that the primary
reason for the Korean deportation was due to Tsarist legacies that carried
over into Soviet nationalities policies— specifically, Rus sian primordialist,
nationalist, and populist views that had not been extinguished by Soviet
socialism. Chapter 2 depicts Korean and Chinese life in the Rus sian Far
East u nder tsarism until slightly after the October Revolution. It establishes
that tsarist Rus sia developed certain views and policies towards East Asians
(e.g., as a colonizing ele ment), Rus sia’s resources and the competition be-
tween diff er ent national minorities being a contestation for cultural superi-