Notes to Pages 141–145 231
the Rus s ian Empire. During the Rus sian Civil War, these laborers formed some 61separate
“Chinese” Red Army and Red Partisan regiments and units. As they were being demobi-
lized in 1921, many joined the Cheka/OGPU; see Karpenko, 12–13, 322–325. When the
regiment was called “Chinese,” it did not mean that every single member of it was Chinese;
there were likely some Koreans or Koreans from China. Gleb Li’s grand father, Shen Li,
reportedly began working for the Soviet po liti cal police during the Cheka period. Thus his
family continued to refer to the grand father as a Chekist.
- Wada, “Koreans in the Soviet Far East,” 45, and Bugai and Pak, 14 0 let, 237–238.
- Steven E. Merritt, “The Great Purges in the Soviet Far East, 1937–1938” (PhD
diss., University of California, Riverside, 2000), 177, gave a figure of 60,000 persons detained,
arrested, or shot between 1930 and 1936. In June 1936, there were six border incidents in-
volving only fifteen Chinese and Koreans. Coox stated that the Soviet border authorities in
the RFE attributed 1,850 border incidents and illegal crossings to the Japa nese from 1932
to 1945. See Coox, Nomonhan, 1:99.
- Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics,” 38. Madina Tlostanova
offers a sharp rebuttal of Hirsch’s argument. Tlostanova’s work on Soviet nationality and
the issue of race is perhaps some of the finest and most nuanced that I have read in Soviet/
Rus sian studies. See Tlostanova, Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands, 114 –129.
- Wada, “Koreans in the Soviet Far East,” 44–45. Getty explains that the euphe-
mism “the checking of Party documents” during the Terror often meant repression by
NKVD troikas; see J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party
Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 124.
- Kuzin, Dalnevostochnye Koreitsy, 112–113. Kuzin cited Dalkraikom’s Resolution
9, issued on July 10, 1929, which stated: “The groupist strug gle among Korean communists
in recent times depends on reductions [purges]. This aided Resolution 9 of the Party Con-
ference, which banned the leader of the [Korean] group Nationality Soviet Men’s Khan
Myon She along with other mea sures from the Vladivostok Okrug Committee that trans-
ferred him out from the borders of the Vladivostok Okrug.”
- RGASPI, f. 17, op. 21, d. 5411, l. 273.
- See Documents 123 and 125 as cited in Vanin, Koreitsy v SSSR, 289–290, 292.
- Wada, “Koreans in the Soviet Far East,” 52.
- Kim Zayon was rehabilitated on November 3, 1956, in a Soviet Higher Military
Court; see Vanin, Koreitsy v SSSR, 290.
- Wada, “Koreans in the Soviet Far East,” 46.
- Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilization, 334–338.
- Wada, “Koreans in the Soviet Far East,” 46.
- Unfortunately, Kuzin does not give figures for the number of Koreans purged;
Kuzin, Dalnevostochnye Koreitsy, 112–113.
- See “Rabota sredi natsmenshinstv,” Krasnoe znamia, August 26, 1924, no. 194
(1210); “Rabota koreiskoi organizatsii,” Krasnoe znamia, March 15, 1925, no. 61 (1376); and
other issues of Krasnoe znamia.
- Kuzin, Dalnevostochnye Koreitsy, 113.
- The OGPU/NKVD recruited heavi ly from the Soviet prison population both
during and after prisoners’ incarceration.
- For the last point, I refer to Pontic Greek and the Hamgyong dialect of Korean.
Regarding the in for mant networks, see Shearer, Policing Stalin’s Socialism, 130–138
(especially 135, agent networks); and Read, From Tsar to Soviets, 205. Read emphasizes that
these practices were originally introduced by the tsar’s secret police force (the Okhrana).
