Korean Korenizatsiia and Its Socialist Construction 59beatings sometimes lasted until the planks/rods broke. Nearly the entire
village of Padushi grew opium openly until 1927 (when opium was out-
lawed in the USSR). After this period, she stated: “The NKVD would come
and destroy our opium crop with hoes or scythes. Koreans would go to
prison if caught growing opium. But we still grew it, we just grew smaller
amounts in hidden places like on mountain tops or in the forest. How else
were we going to get money to buy shoes and clothes? [Traditional] Farm-
ing did not earn enough money for these things.”^40
Gum Soi Kim also spoke about opium. She was born in the Korean
village of Si Cha in Suchanskii raion, Rus sia, in 1921. Her grand father had
come to the RFE in 1887. Within a few years, he obtained land, and when
he informed his immediate and extended family in Korea of his bounti-
ful harvests in the RFE, many of his relatives immediately migrated to the
RFE and to Si Cha. Gum Soi Kim’s family grew corn, potatoes, millet,
bean plant (fasol used to make Korean bean paste), garlic, and green onions.
She stated that the Koreans who grew opium were richer, but her family did
not grow it. “The Chinese bandits would come to rob us [Koreans]; they
even carried a flag [to mark which gang they belonged to]. There were Korean
in for mants within the Korean community; their only job was to inform
the Chinese [bandits] which Korean grew opium and which had beautiful
daughters.” She implied that the Korean in for mants were opium or morphine
addicts. “The bandits would come and kidnap the daughters. Koreans would
have to pay the ransom in pigs, cattle, cash, or opium.” Her village was unique
in that it contained a large number of Christians (ca. the 1930s). She stated:
“I was not a Christian, but then my older sister began going to church. I fol-
lowed, and then I became a Christian.”^41
The Chinese during the early period of indigenization were routinely
depicted as a merchant class (Nepmen), along with Koreans, who exploited
the Rus sian peasant and laborer. This trope is quite evident in the two il-
lustrations that follow this page (Figure 2). The illustration on the left “The
Theme of the Day” (Na temy dnia) shows Vladivostok police taking mea-
sures to “pop” the artificially inflated prices of Chinese merchants there. Of
par t icu l ar note is the fact that the Chinese merchant is caricatured to resem-
ble a pig along with having a pig’s ear. Soviet caricatures of cap i tal ists depicted
them as pigs.^42 The illustration on the right depicts Chinese merchants
“squeezing the Rus sian peasant” for his last kopeck (cent), as the former had
been accused of ratcheting up prices artificially in Churkin, an isolated
coastal village. In this case, the Chinese were the only merchants willing to
open a store there. To conclude, there are two main points that one can
glean from the two illustrations.First, using the racial ele ment by blaming
an Asian merchant is much more power ful than the class message. This was