Korean Korenizatsiia and Its Socialist Construction 77tee in Moscow, and among Soviet cadres and officials. In this study, we have
examined several (archival) reports by the Soviet officials Mamaev (Tatar/
Turkic/Caucasian), Khan Myon She (Korean), and Geitsman (Jewish)— all
of whom were members of national minorities. All three cadres received plum
jobs and advanced in their careers because they could write fluently in a spe-
cific, bureaucratic white- collar register of the Rus sian language that employed
a plethora of socialist neologisms. Simply put, the Rus sian language and
Rus s ians had been and still were the lingua franca and the core people of the
USSR since its inception, despite the trumpeting of its being a “state of [many]
nations.” Mamaev, Geitsman, and Khan were proof of this.
The following examples will analyze differences in pay and work con-
ditions for Koreans and Eastern workers in comparison with Rus sians and
the established Soviet norms. We begin with an examination of collective
farm subsidies given to Koreans versus Rus sians. In the Khankai district,
the Korean farmers received a collective farm credit of 51 rubles per family
while Rus sians received 121 rubles. In the Lenin district, Koreans received
a farm credit of 42 rubles while Rus sians received 275. Likewise, in the
Pokrov district, Koreans received a credit of 48 rubles as compared to 248
rubles for a Rus sian house hold. Land was also unevenly distributed in cer-
tain districts based on nationality. In Olginskii district, the average Rus sian
family (on a collective farm) was given 10 hectares of land, while Korean
received only 4.7 hectares per family.^120
In the Artemovsk mines (near Suchan district, the Primore), there
were usually miners who cut the coal and a second miner who cleaned the
coal (see Table 5). The “Eastern miners” (mostly Chinese, with a smaller con-
tingent of Koreans) were generally more productive and paid less in Decem-
ber 1929 through January 1930. In January 1930, Rus sian miners who
“cleaned” the coal rock were noticeably more productive; this I attibute to
their receiving tools the Eastern miners did not. This report noted that the
housing conditions for Asian workers throughout the Primore were of lower
quality than for Rus sian workers. Asians typically resided in dormitories
converted from sheds or stables that often did not have beds. Rus sian work-
ers not only lived in real dormitories, but they had light fixtures as well. The
report noted that these differences seemed to be the general case, whether it
was for miners in Suchan and Artemovsk or factory workers, dock loaders,
and navvies in Vladivostok.^121
In February 1931, according to a report by Dalkom Social Insur-
ance, Chinese and Korean miners w ere not being paid their bonuses for
excess production. Yet, these miners were participating in state- sponsored
Stakhanovite- like competitions for “strike workers,” that is, miners who
could produce above the set norms. Chinese and Korean miners worked