68 Chapter 4ele ments.^75 In the case of the Jews, the termination of NEP put 1.1 million
out of work. Twenty- one thousand five hundred relocated to Birobidzhan in
the RFE from 1928 to 1933.^76
Many Koreans supported the small- scale collectivization that had
begun in the RFE in 1926 because it provided them with land, jobs, homes,
and citizenship. Land distribution also helped them obtain membership in
artels, communes, and collective farms. Work on the collective farms and
communes gave Koreans the opportunity to obtain citizenship though their
place of work. However, one aspect of Soviet terror came through the back-
door with collectivization: dekulakization, that is, the removal of wealthy
peasants. Evgenia Tskhai mentioned having a relative with the surname Iugai
who was removed from Blagoslovennoe and resettled in Kazakhstan.^77 Viktor
Li stated that his father was investigated as a kulak sometime around 1929.
Tit Li (Viktor’s father) had a lame right arm, so he hired an employee to
help him with his work. Viktor’s mother, Fyokolia Mikhailovna, called on
her brother who worked in the Soviet district administration (Raikom), and
he helped Tit Li to explain his case and avoid repression as a kulak.^78 The
following from Vasily Grossman’s Forever Flowing captures the cruelty of
Soviet collectivization, the arbitrariness of the quotas, the denuciatory culture
in rural Soviet life, and the function of repression as social policy and con-
trol. Grossman’s work is an example of collective voice- historical lit er a ture
based on multiple experiences compiled as one voice (with many parallels to
Solzhenitsy n’s Gulag Archipelago). The character describes collectivization:The province authorities sent the plan down to the district authorities—
in the form of a total number of “kulaks.” And the districts then assigned
proportionate shares of the total number to the individual village soviets,
and it was in the village soviets that the lists of specific names were drawn
up. And it was on the basis of these lists that people were rounded up. And
who made up the lists? A troika— three people. Dim- witted, unenlightened
people determined on their own who was to live and who was to die.
Well, that makes it all clear. Anything could happen on this level. There
were bribes. Accounts were settled because of jealousy over some woman or
because of ancient feuds and quarrels.... The most poisonous and vicious
were those who managed to square their own accounts. They shouted about
po liti cal awareness and settled their grudges and stole. And they stole out of
crass selfishness: some clothes, a pair of boots. It was so easy to do a man in:
you wrote a denunciation; you did not even have to sign it.^79In the fall of 1930, the influx of Red Army settlers to the RFE began
in full force.^80 Primarily Eastern Slav settlers were recruited (no Chinese or