Conclusion 191Asia. At the same time, they realized that the same national, individual,
and civic rights were rare, if not non ex is tent, in the East Asian socie ties of
their forefathers. The Great Terror, combined with forced exile, annihilated
a wh ole stratum of the intellectual, social, and po liti cal leadership of Soviet
national minorities, social groups, and religious communities throughout the
entire USSR. A korenizatsiia- ike atmosphere for national minorities and l
individual rights did not return until glasnost and Gorbachev.^26
As further proof that Rus sians were not inherently the most loyal So-
viet p eople (and that po liti cal loyalty should not be attributed or mea sured
wholesale based on race and ethnicity), one can examine the large- scale de-
fection of former high- ranking Soviet KGB and the sale of former Soviet
enterprises during the early- to- mid-1990s.^27 Radek Sikorskii recalled that
in the spring of 1992 many of the former Soviet KGB (turned businessmen)
were offering to sell the new Polish government nuclear warheads and
stinger missiles from their local arsenal in Poland.^28 Many of these post-
Soviet businessmen and ex- KGB defectors were Rus sians/Ukrainians who
Fig ure 16. Gum Nam Kim, lead engineer for the Northern Light house collective farm, fall
- G. N. Kim is seated in the first row, second from the right. All the other men were
North Korean specialists and engineers. Kim taught them how to operate and fix Soviet
excavators. Note the overhead banner (in Rus sian) welcoming the men from the DPRK
(Demo c ratic People’s Republic of Korea) to the Soviet Union. Photo courtesy of G. N. Kim,
Kolkhoz Severnyi Maiak, Uzbekistan.