180EIGHT
Voices in the Field
I
spent vari ous parts of six years in Central Asia interviewing primarily
el derly Soviet Koreans in their homes about their lives prior to and after
their deportation in 1937.^1 My goal was to write a study that went be-
yond the par ameters of an ethnographic or archive- dominated historical
study by investing “agency” in several sites and actors: the Soviet Koreans,
the collective community, and the Soviet state and its institutions. Field-
work provided many interviews, but also unearthed a wealth of stories from
the pictures the subjects provided. Many of the photo graphs helped to con-
firm histories which are not in the archives nor available to researchers.
For example, in the cover photo, two of the three Korean Soviet
OGPU officers were of middle- to- high rank. Yet in all of the lit er a tures that
I have seen in Rus sian on the Soviet secret police (GPU/OGPU/NKVD)
there is little or no mention of Korean or Chinese officers.^2 It is likely that
all three Koreans seen in the photo were repressed during the Great Terror.
During and after the Terror, the remaining Korean NKVD officers were
released, as they were a “suspect” nationality. In addition, as Khisamutdinov
explained, the files on the Chinese and Korean NKVD regiments that par-
ticipated in the deportations of 1937–1938 are off- limits to researchers and
have been since the early 1990s.^3 Th ese factors have created something of an
erasure of the contributions of Koreans to the development of the Soviet
Union from the late 1930s until Stalin’s death.
To counter the lack of available resources and histories, I went to Cen-
tral Asia and spent a large amount of time living among and interviewing
el derly Koreans. Some were willing to grant interviews right away. Some
were not. But the best interviews came on the second, third, or fourth at-
tempt. The goal of my research was to capture an “au then tic” voice that would
represent the lives and the community to the greatest extent pos si ble. This
voice would narrate a “social history,” which could then be paired with the
archives, the secondary lit er a ture, and digital technology to produce a socio-
po liti cal study, or perhaps a “new ethnography,” of the Soviet Koreans.