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

40 Chapter 3

the RFE villages. Red brigades also functioned as partisan detachments.

Korean Reds recruited their compatriots by uniting their sympathies for

Korean in d e pen dence with the anti- imperialist stance of the Bolsheviks.

Upon forming a local detachment, they were given the right to bear arms. Yi

Tong Hwi attracted a great number of Korean partisans to the Bolsheviks

and formed the initial Korean Communist Party in 1918  in Khabarovsk.

But for Yi and his followers, their casus belli was Korean in de pen dence

rather than socialism. Only the Bolsheviks were willing to supply them

with funds and arms. Yi explained his shortcut to Korean in de pen dence:

I have been in the Siberia area for a long time and I know a good many

Rus s ians. I hope to win cooperation from them.... To bring the matter

[of the in d e pen dence movement] before the League of Nations is one way,

but even if we fail, we must continue our efforts.... Although we have

some relations with the southern Chinese group [of Sun Yat- sen], we

cannot anticipate any great assistance. It is the same with France and

Eng land. The United States did not even join the League. To join with

the Rus sian Bolsheviks is therefore the only shortcut.^38

Beginning in the summer of 1918, the Japa nese military began to infil-
trate the Korean community in Vladivostok and conduct raids on and searches
of Korean organ izations, schools, and institutions. The Japa nese saw the RFE
Koreans and Korean partisans who had fled to Rus sia as a revolutionary ele-
ment that could stir up dissension among Koreans in the Japa nese Empire. In
early autumn 1918, Japa nese Consul General Kikuchi Giro made an inspec-
tion of a Korean school in Sinhanchon. He donated 200 rubles to the school,
but the teacher tore up the bills and burned them in front of Giro. Another
Japa nese official, Shinoda Jisaku, met with Andrei Khan (also known as Khan
Myon She), chairman of the Korean National Council (which previously was
the All- Russian Korean National Association) in March 1919. Khan began to
criticize Japan for not keeping the peace in East Asia (a Pan- Asianist ideal)
and stated that, during the Intervention, the Koreans of the RFE would con-
tinue to resist the Japa nese through nonviolent means. Jisaku wrote his im-
pressions of the meeting: “Sinhanchon is now out of control of the Rus sian
authorities and appears to be under the full rule of Andrei Khan and his fol-
lowers. Being a socialist and an extreme anti- Japanese, he is propagating his
thought widely. I am sure that it is of urgent necessity... to lead them under
the influence of the Imperial [Japa nese] administration.”^39
Even before korenizatsiia, here was a substantial core of Russified t
Koreans in the RFE’s urban areas such as Vladivostok, Nikolsk- Ussuriisk,
Khabarovsk, Bogorodskoe, Nikolaevsk, Suchan, Novokievskoe, Iman, Via-