Conclusion 187policy in the form of unequal land grants, the renting of land to Koreans
well into the Soviet period, a very long and difficult pro cess to obtain citi-
zenship ( until around 1926), and the repeated rejection of a Korean auto-
nomous oblast.^8 All of the aforementioned factors, despite avowals to the
contrary, indicated the use and implicit categorization of the Koreans as a
colonizing ele ment rather than a Soviet nationality equal to all others. Their
survival after their deportation to Central Asia (in open steppes, with a bare
minimum of materials for housing and provisions) surely maximized their
skills as “harvesters of the land.”
One of the principal arguments of this research has been that primor-
dialist sentiments, categories, and beliefs have a long history in Rus sia and
the Soviet Union. I would like to provide three current examples of Soviet
primordialism that have survived and influenced life and relations in the
former USSR. In 2006, I met a Rus sian woman, Irina, who was in her early
thirties and was born and raised in Kyrgyzstan. She was emigrating to Rus-
sia in 2006 and had never lived there except when visiting relatives. She
grew up with a Soviet Korean family that I knew. We both knew “ Uncle Stas,”
who was an ethnic Korean and Rus sian citizen. Irina said of him: “He will
always be a foreigner in Rus sia. He will never be a native like me. Rus sia
belongs to me. He will never know its customs and culture like I do.” Yet,
Stas’ father was born in Rus sia (sometime around 1918, in the Primore) and
spoke Rus sian without an accent. In the second case (also in 2006), I and
some other Americans routinely would hire a par tic u lar Korean cab driver
who parked near our university in Kyrgyzstan. Our driver was in his mid-
to- late fifties. During this time, North Korea was playing some qualifying
matches for the World Cup. Our driver asked me if I was going to watch the
match, and I responded no. He chastised me, saying, “You know you’ve got
to support your home team!” When I asked him what he meant by this, he
replied: “I am Korean and I have to support Korea, whether it be North or
South. This is my home country.” I was amazed by this, because our driver
had never been to either of the Korean states, nor to my knowledge did he
speak Korean beyond a very basic level. In all of the aforementioned cases,
the persons involved other than myself had come of age and received all or
most of their education while the Soviet Union was still extant. Primordial-
ist ideas of race and who one can and cannot be still exists in the new
post- Soviet states.
My final example of a surviving primordialism is a linguistic one. In
the Rus sian language, a Korean from Rus sia, Central Asia, or the former
Soviet Union is called a Russian- Korean and not (such as in the En glish
syntax of North Amer i ca) a Korean- Russian. This applies to all of the na-
tional minorities in Rus sia. Thus Poles, Greeks, and Germans from Rus sia