The RFE as a Frontier Melting Pot 27Many in the RFE knew or had heard about this and the trope of
Koreans as “white swans.” S. Anosov referred to it in a article in Krasnoe
znamia, a Russian- language newspaper in the RFE (see Chap. 4) in 1927.
He stated, “it is impossible to demand that forgotten Korean ‘swans’ whom
Rus sians and Cossacks loved to hunt in their free time, considering them
worse or lower than animals— that these peasants [Korean] could be able
to understand Soviet power immediately.”^86 In his June 6, 1906, diary entry,
V. K. Arsenev wrote of his encounter with a Rus sian hunter of white swans
and grouse. Both groups worked in the mines and came home along paths
in the taiga. These Rus sian hunters would ambush the miners, kill them,
and steal their money. Some expressed neither sympathy nor remorse for kill-
ing t hese men because, as one stated: “Are these really men? They are reptiles,
and they are as numerous as ants! Now such hunts are rare, as they begin to
use railroads and ships and only the poorest ones wander through the forest.
Besides, the authorities punish Cossacks and peasants with six months of
prison for killing a White Swan, and Cyril Fomenko got a whole year because
a consul made a claim.”^87
Sergei Shirokogoroff, a Rus sian professor of ethnography, affirmed
that this practice also existed in Manchuria. “They [Chinese] are not, how-
ever, quite safe in their migrations, for it happens very often that they them-
selves become very attractive game for Rus sian settlers and on rare occasions
for Tungus aborigines;... The hunting down and murdering of the Chi-
nese, who usually carried gold with them, was for some time a very impor-
tant branch of local trade.”^88 Shirokogoroff failed to mention the sobriquets
of “grouse” and “swan,” but they were part and parcel of why it was called
“hunting.” It was an extreme form of racism. The zoological tropes about
the two East Asian groups valued their industrious “working hands,” while
denying them their humanity and agency as tsarist subjects, soldiers, tax-
payers, and farmers— all working to build a prosperous Rus sia. This was the
category of the “colonizing ele ment,” that is, productive laborers but dubious
tsarist subjects. However, in this case, the Chinese and Koreans in their roles
as swans, ants, or grouse were viewed as “unfit” to become tsarist subjects.
From 1907 to 1912, Japan and Rus sia signed a series of three treaties
or “ententes” concerned with maintaining a peaceful rivalry between the
two nations. The vari ous treaties led Japan to join the Allies (as an ally of
Rus sia) during the First World War. Incredibly, beginning in August 1914
Japan began to help rearm Rus sia as a major supplier of arms and muni-
tions.^89 However, Japa nese expansion was still treated as a “yellow peril.”
General Aleksei Kuropatkin, who was Rus sia’s minister of war (1898–1904),
promulgated this view, stating, “But the par tic u lar threat to Eu ro pe ans is