186NINE
Conclusion
Already in May 1914 a Rus sian law prepared for war by remov-
ing the right of court defense for suspected spies.... An official
army pamphlet that was distributed widely among the troops
warned that any ethnic German was a potential spy, and the
army press expanded such warnings to include Jews and foreign-
ers in general.
— Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Rus sian Empire^1D
uring the First World War, Rus sian nationalist and populist views
and beliefs turned Jews, Poles, Germans, Chinese, and others into
“ nemy aliens” who e were deported from Rus sia’s western borders.
The epigraph was meant to evoke parallels between Rus sia’s First World
War deportations and the Soviet Union’s nationalities deportations that
were due to the inherent qualities of foreignness in (despite their being Rus-
sia’s national minorities) and foreign ties held by the diaspora nationalities.^2
But during the nineteenth century the vari ous national minorities were
visibly (and experientially) identifiable and differentiated by language, dress,
religion, and even geo graph i cal and residential quarters and restrictions.
One example of this are the Jews of Odessa, who in 1900 were readily
identifiable and differentiated by dress, customs, language, and districts.^3
However, Koreans were more readily identifiable, but in their case by phe-
notype.^4 In the former USSR, a non- European phenotype was a “racial
uniform” that marked one as an “other.” It could not be easily discarded,
altered, or assimilated.^5 Thus, the assimilation of the Koreans in Rus sia/
USSR depended to a greater degree on progressive and liberal attitudes,
laws, and social policies.
Koreans arrived in the RFE and immediately established themselves
as potential citizens, not just sojourners. Unfortunately, however, tsarist
Rus sia had a long tradition of seeing a nearly unbridgeable gap between Eu ro-
pean and Asian.^6 Primordialist thinking on the part of ethnographers, phi-
los o phers, and Priamur governor- generals such as E. E. Ukhtomskii, V. K.
Arsenev, P. F. Unterberger, and N. L. Gondatti helped establish restrictions
and quotas on “yellow labor.”^7 Th ese beliefs were carried over into Soviet