54 Chapter 4The Korean youth were responding quite well to Sovietization. Those
Koreans who were older and more recent immigrants found it more difficult
to understand and internalize socialism and its values. The Soviet authorities
would find that the Sovietization of its vari ous nationalities was an ex-
tremely complicated pro cess. Traditional Korean society held that its el derly
males or u ncles (matabai) deci ded village or communal issues, and their
word was held in the utmost regard. In the case of the Komsomoltsy, the
Korean youth were trying to recruit and convert older Koreans to become
communists and to join the Communist Party. The Korean elders were of-
fended by this. The attempt would have been less problematic had all of
the Koreans lived in the RFE for three generations or so, but this was not
the case. Thus, it produced a culture clash within the community. V. V. Grave
had been the first to note a generational clash in relation to Russification, and
now it was occurring during Sovietization.^11 The end result was that many
of the young Korean Komsomol had little success in recruiting their elders.
In 1925, Avangard, a Korean- language newspaper, began publication. Its
publishers and editors were to be combined with many of those working
with Krasnoe znamia. Kvar Li eventually became Avangard ’s editor- in- chief
(see Figure 5).
As korenizatsiia continued to grow, thereby increasing the number of
ser vices, institutions, positions, and media for Koreans, the numbers of Ko-
rean vydvizhentsy increased several times over. Artels and collective farms
required chairmen (directors), accountants, NKVD police, and other Soviet
professional, martial, or bureaucratic positions. In the case of Soviet Koreans,
their social network overlapped with their work environment because they
were usually assigned to Korean artels, kolkhozes, and communes. The rise
of the Korean vydvizhentsy gave them the feeling that the Soviet state was
really theirs due to just one degree of separation between the working man
and his representative Soviet official or bureaucrat.
ECONOMIC LIFEKoreans and Chinese, through their agricultural work, formed a significant
tax base for the RFE. This tax base helped pay for the korenizatsiia pro-
grams, the expansion of the RFE educational network, and even colonization
funds that brought in Rus sian and Red Army settlers.^12 In 1923, Dalrevkom
initiated a “Commission on the Korean Question” in the Primore, which
found that the official Korean population was 120,980 in 1923, with
85.5 percent of the population rural and agricultural compared to 14.5 percent
urban. By occupation, Koreans were 80 percent employed in agricultural
work, 5–6 percent urban laborers, 10 percent petit bourgeois (meshchantsvo),