70 Chapter 4
Party allegiance and serving one’s country.^87 Koreans performed astonish-
ingly well during many of these campaigns. The state knew this and thus
selected a group of Korean farmers from the Ussuri to be sent to the North
Caucasus to show the local nationalities (Rus sians, Ukrainians, Cossacks,
and others) the benefits of collectivization. Prior to 1923, Koreans favored
the Rus sian language as the medium of instruction and education. Suddenly,
during korenizatsiia, Korean became the language of instruction. However,
the ideas and lessons promulgated in Soviet Korean schools and institutes
were strictly “socialist in content.” For example, lessons regarding Marxist
and Rus s ian lit er a ture were standardized to teach Pushkin, Marx, Lenin,
and Stalin, but in the Korean language. These lessons would focus on class
distinctions with a historical materialist foundation. Schools, universities,
and rabfaks (workers’ night schools) were the key to building the new gen-
eration of young, vigilant, and well- trained revolutionary socialists, often
called vydvizhentsy. In the RFE, as schools and educational initiatives in-
creased, the enrollment of Koreans in education increased as well.
In 1923–1924, 716 Korean students went on to higher education in
institutes, technical schools, and universities all across the Soviet Union.
After korenizatsiia in higher education, this number went up tremendously.
In the 1924–1925 school year, Koreans had a higher proportion of school-
children than the Rus sian population. In the Vladivostok district, Korean
students outnumbered Rus sians 156 to 152 per population size 1,000 (n).
This led the newspaper Sovetskii Primore to remark, “Now isn’t that strange?”
This was the dilemma of the term “model moderns” who were able to chal-
lenge Rus sians in vari ous fields of cultural and economic life. The reason for
this is because Rus sian nationalist and populist views not only marginalized
minorities but made them “perpetual others,” that is, alienated from taking
advantage of their full rights. The system of natsionalnost (Soviet national-
ity) continued this. In fact, it went further. Natsionalnost linked the po liti cal
allegiance of the diaspora nationalities to their ethnic homeland and
made no distinction between Koreans from Korea and those from the Soviet
Union, Manchuria, Amer i ca, or Japan. This set up the diaspora nationalities
as “foreign,” which sometimes devolved into the category of an “ enemy
nationality.”^88 Soviet nationalities policies were perhaps more complex than
those of the tsarist period because of the promotion of three simultaneous
identities: one’s ethnic identity, an overarching Soviet identity, and the
ubiquitous reminder that “Rus sians” (which included all Eastern Slavs) were
the central Soviet nationality. Unfortunately for the state, supra-national
Soviet identity was never as strong as that of ethnic nationality except dur-
ing times of war, when a common enemy was invoked.^89 As Serafima Kim
said, “Our passports always said the USSR, but line 5 said ‘nationality.’ We