52

FOUR

Korean Korenizatsiia and Its

Socialist Construction

Towards natsmen, we also have two opposing cultures. One bour-

geois culture where strong national chauvinist tendencies reside

and our culture [Soviet]. We should cut out to the core and nip

in the bud all national chauvinistic tendencies. We should fight

against all chauvinistic moods and temperaments.... We need

to create conditions so that the Chinese and the Koreans know

that these Soviet institutions are their institutions, which

serve them. And that they can go to these institutions without

any prob lem and speak to them.

— Comrade Tishkin at Dalkrai 4th Regional (okrug)

Communist Party Conference, 1929^1

K

orenizatsiia was a modernist program of domestic Soviet nationali-
ties policies aimed towards promoting and educating Soviet national
minorities in order turn them into fervent Soviet cadres and to fill
many Soviet institutions with the said natsmen vydvizhentsy (national minor-
ity young Soviet cadres).^2 The Soviet regime expected to win the loyalties
of national minorities through providing territorial autonomy and native-
language institutions, newspapers, theater troupes, and radio stations for each
nationality. However, in the 1920s 65 to 70  percent of the Korean popula-
tion was both poor and landless. Koreans needed both land and citizenship
as prerequisites to their construction as a Soviet people. Korean korenizatsiia
and a nationality’s “socialist construction” had a great deal of overlap, with-
out a clear demarcation between the two. Both terms refer to the “construc-
tion” of the Koreans as a Soviet people.

AGENCY AND REPRE SEN TA TION

The korenizatsiia period was a brilliant and rare example of state policy

meeting individual and collective needs for repre sen ta tion and agency.

Repre sen ta tion of the common natsmen in media and institutions meant the

democ ratization of state power to the level of the populace. It offered