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

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THREE

Intervention, 1918–1922

A strug gle must be carried on against reactionary and medieval

influences of the clergy, Christian missions, and other similar

ele ments. It is also necessary to combat the Pan- Islamic and Pan-

Asiatic movements and similar tendencies that aim at combining

the cause of the liberation movements directed against the Eu ro-

pean and American imperialists with the efforts to consolidate

the power of Turkish and Japa nese imperialism, or the power of

large- scale landowners, clergy, etc.

— Lenin, “ Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,”

Second Congress of the Comintern, July– August 1920

R

FE Koreans amply displayed their loyalty to the state during the First

World War and the Intervention, yet there were rumors, and even a

publication in 1922 from the Far Eastern Republic (FER) titled

Japa nese Intervention in the Rus sian Far East that linked Koreans to the forces

of Japa nese expansion. However, the guilty parties mentioned by the FER

monograph were Koreans from Korea, China, and Japan who worked to sup-

port Japa nese troops. Therefore, one weakness of Soviet nationalities policies

was, first, that they often did not distinguish between Koreans from China,

Japan, Korea, and the Soviet Union, and second, they assumed that the vari-

ous “Koreans” had similar po liti cal identities. This is primordialism, although

the Bolsheviks continually preached “national in form, socialist in content.”^1

Both ideas— the inability to separate culture from nationality and the con-

flation of po liti cal loyalties— formed the primary tension between the Soviet

state and the Koreans of the Rus sian Far East. This dynamic would hold

true for the 1930s as well, despite the Soviet Koreans being well represented

in Soviet institutions: NKVD, the Red Army, OKDVA, the Soviet border

guard brigades (brigady sodeistviia), and Komsomol (Youth Communists).

INTERVENTION AND BUILDING JAPA NESE EMPIRE

Just one year prior to the Intervention (March 1917), there were 2.8 million

refugees in Rus sia (Polish, Baltic peoples, Romanians, Persian, Chinese,