Security Concerns Trumping Korenizatsiia 127ties policies seems to have had two lines: one of repression and the other of
promotion. Both lines continued si mul ta neously. Second, essentialist ideas
regarding diaspora nationalities were already quite pronounced by the late
1920s. From the beginning of collectivization, Poles and Germans were vir-
tually synonymous with the term “kulak.”^54 For example, this phrase arose
from collectivization: “raz Polak znachit kulak” (the Polish race means ku-
lak).^55 In 1930, Comrade Dvorets, a Soviet commissar addressing the Cen-
tral Committee CP Turkmenia on a proposed plan to collectivize the Ger-
man villages there, stated, “In relation to the German settlements, there
should absolutely not be any speeches about collectivization because the
Germans are kulak colonizers to the marrow of their bones.” Yet, the So-
viet authorities had identified the Poles and Germans who were being
collectivized as “landless and poor peasants.”^56 The Affirmative Action Em-
pire identified the stigmatization of the German and Polish batraki (poor
peasants) as class and ideological enemies, primarily due to the fear of
anti- S oviet ideologies such as foreign capitalism and their repre sen ta-
tion of ancestral homelands (Poland and Germany) as antithetical to So-
viet socialism.^57 However, it would be highly unlikely that the trope could
have been so deeply etched into the minds of Soviet peasants and commis-
sars solely since the establishment of the USSR in 1922.^58 This link ap-
pears to have been a transference of ancient beliefs that reified the Poles
and Germans as rich nobles and landowners possessing huge tracts of
land— namely, gentry who exploited the peasantry. These characteriza-
tions had some historical veracity in the centuries past, but the pres ent
Figure 10. (Left) Sergei Kim, first row, second from left, first class (third grade equivalent)
in a Korean village in the RFE, 1933. Note straw on the floor. (Right) Sergei Kim at Kolk-
hoz Old Lenin’s Way (Staryi Leninskii Put), Uzbekistan, 2009. Photos courtesy of Sergei
Kim and the author. In the 1930s, the “first class” of Russian school began at age eight.