The Korean Deportation and Life in Central Asia 179their door with an accusation that this was the home of an anti- Soviet agent
of cap i tali st imperialism or a socially harmful ele ment. In fact, this document
concealed and obfuscated the nearly complete obliteration of individual
rights and civil society in the USSR. The 1936 Constitution guaranteed
individual rights and legal protection against discrimination based on one’s
nationality and religion.^149 Yet the Koreans were collectively deported as a
nationality in 1937–1938. The Terror had a vertical structure, with its principal
architects and agents being (from the top): Stalin, the NKVD chief, Politburo,
Central Committee, Union Republic, and ASSR First Secretaries, regional
executive committees of the CP, and so on (in this author’s configuration).
Likewise, Korean hands played a part in the Korean deportation and in
informing on other Korean cadres, which resulted in their arrests, depor-
tation, and deaths. Individual and collective agency, combined with the
desire to create a new society, were part of the utopian allure of social-
ism.^150 Unfortunately for Bolshevism, its architects substituted arrests,
torture, and repression for ritual cleansing.
Arriving in Central Asia, the deported Koreans strug gled mightily,
but they rebuilt their lives and communities. They demonstrated their char-
acter by quickly regrouping and by serving the Soviet state productively as
tractor drivers, farmers, chairmen of kolkhozes, teachers, linguists, Soviet
in f or mants, and NKVD agents.^151 These strong characteristics helped Kore-
ans form one link in the backbone of Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat
from the 1920s onward.^152