Burnt by the Sun. The Koreans of the Russian Far East - Jon K. Chang

188 Chapter 9

are called Russian- Poles, Russian- Greeks, and Russian- Germans. In Amer-

i a, c these groups would be called Polish, Greek and German Americans.

This semantic difference to the placement of the word “Korean” was explained

to me during my time in Central Asia. The term “Russian- Korean” indi-

cates that one knows the Rus sian language and Rus sian customs but at heart

(koren) one is and remains a Korean, and thus the Korean language and

customs w ill always be more natu ral no matter if one has been in Rus sia for

five or a hundred generations.^9 This is a primordialist view of race. In con-

trast, the North American terminology for ethnicity would be “Korean-

American,” which is meant to evoke the idea that one is Korean on the

outside by race, but by cultural values and mindset, American.^10

A NEW PERSPECTIVE: INTERVENTION AND THE MYTH

OF RUS SIANS AS THE MOST LOYA L NATIONALITY

Japan’s victory in the Russo- Japanese War changed the status of yellow
labor to “yellow peril.” The threat of rule by the Japa nese, coupled with
views from a recent (tsarist) past, had the potential to disturb the existing
harmony of “socialist internationalism” in the Rus sian Far East. Kalinin’s
speech in Vladivostok in August 1923 regarding Soviet domestic interna-
tionalism included the statement: “Workers who come to us, we must treat
as equal- r ights members... so that the workers, our Chinese, develop a
po l iti cal consciousness equal to the Rus sian worker.... If this is fulfilled,
our anxi eties will not come to pass.”^11
One of the principal impediments to the establishment of true “interna-
tionalism” within Soviet borders was the unspoken implementation through
policy and implicit and, later, formal ac cep tance of Rus sians and of Rus sian
language and culture as the unquestioned standard- bearers of the Soviet
Union.^12 This belief had been an integral component of tsarism but ran
counter to socialism and korenizatsiia. Soviet socialism promoted three nation-
ality platforms institutionally and in popu lar culture: a supranational “So-
viet” nationality; each individual’s inherited nationality; and a pan- Eastern
Slav core identity, which I have called “Rus sians, first among equals.”^13 The
Eastern Slavs as the “leading nation” in a socialist state is the most contro-
versial because it mea sured racial/national groups on a vertical hierarchy.
“Rus sians, first among equals” gave Eastern Slavs a peculiar type of nativist
advantage (cultural and institutional) throughout the Soviet Union. Fur-
thermore, the need to link po liti cal might, land, and resources to Eastern
Slavs while denying indigenous agency and social capital to others such as
Mordvins and Udmurts (two of the historical indigenes of the Volga and Ural
regions) was imperialist and bourgeois.^14