the repression of soviet koreans during the 1930s

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T H E R E P R E S S I O N O F S O V I E T

K O R E A N S D U R I N G T H E 1 9 3 0 S 1

A L E X A N D E R K I M

In the opinion of many historians of the USSR and Russia, the 1920s and 1930swere the most contradictory and tragic of the Soviet state’s history. An importantpart of those years constitutes the process that Russians have given the genericname of “repressions,” even if these were conducted for different reasons andunder various slogans.2 Among the most tragic episodes was the persecution ofindividuals because of national traits, which, in essence, flew in the face of Sovietsupport for the equality of peoples.3 The scars of that drama survive until this day,and continue to have an impact both on politics and the way in which the nationalquestion plays out in general in contemporary Russia.

The first victims of these ethnic repressions were Soviet Koreans, a nationalminority living in the Far East that was not hostile to Soviet power and to a highdegree loyal to the Soviet leaders’ policies.4 In Russian, relatively many workshave been published about the Soviet Koreans, but their attention has mainly been

Alexander Kim is an Associate Professor at Primorye State Agricultural Academy, Institute ofHumanitarian Education in the Department of History and Humanitarian education. His recentpublications include, “Relations between Bohai and Silla from the Seventh to the Ninth Century:A Critical Analysis,” Acta Orientalia, 3, 2011, 345–56, and “On the Origin of the JurchenPeople (A Study based on Russian Sources),” Central Asiatic Journal, 55, 2011, 165–76.

1. The author thanks Kees Boterbloem for translating this essay and Andrea Pittard, BenSperduto, and Kees Boterbloem for editing the article for an English-language audience.

2. In English, these repressions are often grouped under generic rubrics, such as dekulakization(occuring mainly 1929 to 1932), the Ukrainian, Kazak, and South-Russian famines (in 1932and 1933), and the Great Terror (of 1937 and 1938).

3. In English, see, among others, Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations andNationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2001; Pavel Polian,Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, Budapest:Central European UP, 2004. The Soviet Union had some 140 different ethnic groups within itsborders, which were usually called “nations.”

4. See for English-language works detailing some of the Koreans’ fate, Terry Martin, “TheOrigins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” Journal of Modern History 4, 1998, 813–61; MichaelGelb, “An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation,” Russian Review 3, 1995, 389–412; Dae-SookSuh, ed., Koreans in the Soviet Union, Honolulu, HI: U. of Hawaii P., 1987.

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on separate incidents and specific aspects of their fate.5 In addition, little has beensaid about the long-term effect of these repressions on the Korean ethnos or theprecise nature of Slavs’ attitude toward the Soviet Koreans within Russian orSoviet society.

The goal of this article is to present a more nuanced and comprehensive pictureof the repressions against the Soviet Koreans, based not merely on archivalmaterials and the works by Soviet or Russian scholars, but also on the recollec-tions of witnesses who underwent the national persecutions from the 1930s to the1950s. I will also analyse the specifics of the repressions and suggest a periodiza-tion as well as address their consequences.

***

The Koreans lived in a territory in the south of what is now Russia’s Far Eastbefore the arrival of Russian explorers in this area. Thus they constitute a corepopulation of the contemporary Primor’e Region of the Russian Federation. Inmuch of the nineteenth century, however, the Koreans in the southern part ofthe Russian Far East were comparatively few. Beginning in the late nineteenthcentury, because of the difficult economic circumstances on the Korean penin-sula and the expansion of Japan, many inhabitants of this “country of themorning freshness” (as Koreans sometimes fondly call their country) began tomove to the Russian Far East. The Russian attitude towards this immigrationwas contradictory. A number of lower-level Russian bureaucrats opposed thesearrivals since they saw Koreans as part of the “Yellow Peril,” but many high-ranking officials of the Russian Empire, on the contrary, encouraged the processas a counterweight to the Chinese population there.6 Koreans’ truck farmingplayed a great role at a more practical level: Through it, they supplied the localRussian population with produce, especially with vegetables. The Russian peas-antry had only barely begun to bring land there under cultivation, poorly knewthe particulars of local agriculture and could therefore insufficiently resolve theregion’s supply problems.

5. Apart from Polian, Nikolai Federovich Bugai wrote several books in which he discussed thefate of the Soviet Koreans; see, for example, N. F. Bugai, L. Beriia-I. Stalinu: “Soglasnovashemu ukazaniiu . . .”, Moscow: Airo-XX, 1995; N. F. Bugai et al., Chaeso Hanindul uisunansa: haesol mit kwan gye kongmunso, Kyonggido Songnam-si: Sejong Yon guso, 1996.See below for one of Bugai’s key early articles on this topic.

6. See A. S. Zakolodnaia, “Istoriia izuchenii pereseleniia na Dal’nii Vostok na sovremennometape,” in Iu.V. Latushko, I. V. Stavrov, eds, Tikhookeanskaia Rossiia i strany ATR v izme-niaiushchemsia mire, Vladivostok: Nauka, 2009, 253–62: 258.

2 6 8 T H E H I S T O R I A N

The Koreans supported the October Revolution of 1917 and the struggle of theReds against the Old Regime for two key reasons. The Bolsheviks proclaimed asprinciples of their new government that land was to go to the peasants and thatall peoples were to receive equal rights. Those principles were welcomed by thebroad masses of the Korean and Chinese population of the Far East.7 This wasbecause Chinese and Koreans frequently were tenants or landless laborers. Before1917, Russian officials reluctantly proceeded to give them land, while, unsurprs-ingly, Russian peasants received land without any particular problems. Suchdiscriminatory policies could not but lead to disaffection.

The second principle had an even greater effect than the first. In tsarist Russiathe attitude toward inorodtsy (those of non-Slavic ethnicity, especially in theCaucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia) was generally negative. The Russian Empiredid not prosecute the Russian population for the murder of inorodtsy, which attimes led to the massive, lawless carnage of non-Russians or non-Slavs.8 Such acareless attitude on the part of the state to the non-Slavic population was evenreflected in literature.9 The inequality between the population groups causedtensions between them. Thus, when the Bolsheviks announced the equality of thepeoples, the proclamation was met with great enthusiasm among the Koreans,who joined the Red Army and partisan detachments in massive numbers duringthe civil war that broke out in the course of 1918.

The Japanese expansion in the Far East was a further contributing factor to theKoreans’ great support for the Bolshevik side. Many Koreans had arrived onRussian territory following the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula.They decried the appearance of Japanese units in the Russian Far East during thecivil war. This caused the Whites who collaborated with the Japanese to considerthe Koreans their enemies.

After their victory, the Bolsheviks delivered on their promises.10 On the Pri-morye region’s territory, a national Korean district (the Pos’etskii raion) was set

7. Andrei Lan’kov, “Koreitsy SNG: stranitsy istorii,” Seul’skii vestnik, 13 February 2002(available at: http://russedina.org/frontend/foreign/korea?id=16622, accessed 10 November2011).

8. Viktor Innokent’evich Diatlov, “Blagoveshchenskaia ‘utopiia’: iz istorii materializatsii fobii,”in S. A. Panarin, ed., Evraziia: liudi i mify, Moscow: Natalis, 2003, 123–141. The tsaristgovernment considered all Eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusyn) to beRussians.

9. See for example Lev Nikolaevich Kniazev, Zalpy v taige, Vladivostok: Dal’nevostochmoeknizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1976.

10. The Japanese expedition forces left mainland Soviet territory in 1922, although elsewhere thecivil war ended in the course of 1920.

2 6 9R E P R E S S I O N O F S O V I E T K O R E A N S

up, while Koreans were also identified living in 28 other districts of three regionsin total.11 In the very first years after the Japanese retreat from the Primorye regionin 1922, a Korean pedagogical institute was founded in the town of Nikol’sk-Ussuriisk, as were Korean-language schools, a Korean theater, and a Korean-Chinese printing press.12 As a rule, Korean families had many children, and theKorean population of Russia grew very quickly.

This explains why Khan Men-she (Russian name: Andrei Khan), a member ofthe Central Bureau of the (Soviet-) Korean Communist Party, requested in awritten petition to the highest authorities of the Russian Socialist FederativeSoviet Republic (RSFSR, founded in 1918) to consider the creation of a Korean“national administrative unit.”13 Even if this request was rejected, the Soviet-Korean community thrived until it was faced with the repressions of the Stalinistperiod by the late 1920s.

Much has been written about the causes of the forced deportations.14 Insummarizing the opinion of historians in general terms, the following pictureemerges.15 The majority of Soviet and Russian scholars, as well as investigatorselsewhere in the Commonwealth of Independent States (the organization ofpost-Soviet states), propose that the deportation of the Soviet Koreans was apreventative measure.16 Opinions, however, differ on why this was done. Some

11. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation,Moscow), fond 1235, opis’ 130 (1935), delo 3, listy 20–1 [from here indicated as: GARF1235/130 (1935)/3, ll. 20–1]. Fond means, more or less, “collection” in English; opis’“inventory”; delo “file”; and listy “pages.”

12. Svetlana Georgievna Nam, Koreiskii natsional’nyi raion: Put’ poiska issledovatelia, Moscow:Nauka-Glavnaia redaktsiia vostochnoi literatury, 1991; Iosif Kim, Sovetskii koreiskii teatr,Alma-Ata: Oner, 1992; Li U Khe, Kim En Un, eds, Belaia kniga o deportatsii koreiskogonaseleniia Rossii v 30–40kh godakh, Moscow: Moskovskaia konfederatsiia koreiskikh assot-siatsii, 1997, 50–1.

13. GARF, 1318 (1922–1923)/670, l.64.

14. Apart from the books noted in footnotes 2 and 3 above, see as well Aleksandr Nekrich, ThePunished Peoples, New York: Norton, 1981; and Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of theDead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s, New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007, 125–140. It is notwithout interest to take note of a letter of January 1923 by Khan Men-she to one of Stalin’sassistants in the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities; Khan refers to a plan by the FarEastern Bureau of the Communist Party’s Central Committee suggesting the banishment ofall Koreans from the Maritime region (see Li, Kim, eds, Belaia kniga, 63). And this was in1923!

15. See German Kim, Istoriia immigratsii koreitsev, vol. 1: Vtoraia polovina xix v.-1945g.,Almaty: Daik-press, 1999, 186.

16. For a listing, see Kim, Istoriia, vol. 1, 185–6n105. Kim notes in the same place variousAmerican, Japanese, and Korean authors who pondered these deportations before the Sovietimplosion of 1991.


scholars argue that the fact that the Koreans lived in close proximity to eachother in itself caused trepidation among the authorities. Others think that thebasis for the deportation may have been the demand for national autonomy. Athird group maintains that the Koreans were to fill a labor-resource vacuum inCentral Asia. Still others suggest that a foreign-policy calculation caused thedeportation of the Koreans. The Soviet regime was following a strategy of rap-prochement with Japan. Japan was annoyed with activities of Korean partisanswho were based on territory in the Soviet Far East and roamed in Japanese–controlled Manchuria and on the Korean peninsula. Several other researcherstrace the fundamental cause to the adoption of a Great-Power identity thatexpressed itself in both the totalitarian regime’s domestic and external policies.The deportation of the Koreans was a “planned, organized and carefully con-trolled large-scale action of a totalitarian regime, trying out a mechanism ofmass forced migration.”17

It should, however, be noted that the Koreans had already suggested to theSoviet leadership to grant Korean autonomy in the early 1920s, but no onedeported them for this proposal from the Far East at that time.18 As we showedearlier, the Koreans had their national district, and this did not bother the stateuntil the 1930s. And the argument about the labor shortage raises the questionwhy it was necessary to bring the Koreans from the Far East, if the denselypopulated districts of Western Siberia could be found far closer; the transfer ofpeople from this area would also have been cheaper. In Khrushchev’s time (1953–64), the problem of labor resources in Kazakstan was also acute, but the GeneralSecretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party solved them by voluntary means,and found no need for a forced deportation.19

Without a doubt, the campaign that deported the Koreans was well plannedand organized. But German Kim’s view that the process was essentially a try-outto see if the mechanism of mass deportations of entire populations worked seemstoo simplistic. He makes it seem as if the Korean population was repressed onlybecause similar actions were in the works. Instead, I argue that the Soviet lead-ership had more fundamental reasons to start the persecution of the Koreanpopulation. I will explore this below.

17. Kim, Istoriia, vol. 1, 190; see further ibid., 149–202.

18. Even though the pre-revolutionary antagonism between Koreans and Slavic settlers endured,leading to renewed local calls for Koreans’ deportation (alleging that the Koreans wereJapanese allies) in the late 1920s (see Martin, “Origins,” 834–5).

19. As in the famous Virgin Lands Campaign that started in 1954.


Both in Soviet and in Russian historiography there is consensus that therepression of the Koreans was limited to 1937 and 1938. This creates the impres-sion that the dekulakization and inner-Party dramas of the early 1930s did notaffect the Soviet-Korean population. In my opinion, however, the repression of theKoreans can be divided into three stages. The first stage was the persecution of theKoreans in the course of collectivization from 1930 to 1933; the second, the Partypurges from 1934 to 1938; and the third stage was the repression on the basis ofnational markers in 1937.

While in much of the country the collectivization of agriculture began in 1929,this process was unleashed about a year later in the Far East. The idea ofcollectivization was already conceived in the early 1920s, when Vladimir Il’ichLenin (1870–1924) introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP). It is significantin this respect that Lenin wrote Lev Borisovich Kamenev (1883–1936) in one ofhis last letters in March 1922: “It would be a great mistake to think that the NEPputs an end to terror. We will return to terror and to economic terror.”20 Itherefore suggest that the NEP (lasting from 1921 to 1927) was introduced to givethe population the opportunity to recover after two wars, the First World War andthe civil war, adjust to peaceful life, and gain some wealth, so that the governmentin the future could use the stores acquired by its citizens for its own purposes.Lenin’s death in 1924 did not change the Communist Party’s line. In 1927 theNEP was curtailed when the Party leaders decided that the time for the purging ofthe population was at hand. Of course, no exceptions were made, and the specificsof the development of the country’s various regions were not taken into account.But the plan that was designed would have been hard to implement immediatelythroughout the whole country; therefore, dekulakization and collectivizationoccurred in the Far East a little later, starting about a year after they began in thewest of the country.21

The full-fledged collectivization of the Russian Far East that began in 1930affected the Korean peasants as well. A part of the Koreans were dekulakized, butno massive risings against Soviet power occurred among the Korean population.Many of those dekulakized underwent this fate with comparative calm. After theyhad been expelled from their communities, people were driven into collective

20. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 44, Moscow: Politizdat, 1967, 428.

21. Most comprehensive is V. Danilov et al., eds, Tragediia Sovetskoi derevni: Kollektivizatsiia iraskulachivanie, 5 vols, Moscow: Rosspen, 1999–2006. Part of this has been translated intoEnglish, see Lynne Viola et al., eds, The War Against the Soviet Peasantry, vol. 1, NewHaven, CT: Yale UP, 2005.


farms under pressure of the authorities.22 The response from the Korean novice-kolkhozniks to this coercion is noteworthy.23 While most Russian peasants in theFar East voiced their displeasure, several wrote petitions, and some took up armsto restore their rights (about 4,000 of them have been counted), the Koreans choseanother way to resist.24

State coercion, mass searches and arrests, in other words the tyranny of theauthorities, caused Soviet Koreans to leave in huge numbers for China. Thus 60%of the Korean population of the Shkotovskii and Suchanskii districts left forChina, as did 50% of the Grodevskii district, 45% of the Chernigovskii district,and so on.25 Of course, only those Korean families that had a residence permit andwere Soviet citizens were counted. There were, however, also Koreans who livedin the USSR who were not registered and because of this fell outside of theauthorities’ field of vision. Their number is difficult to estimate, but they mighthave amounted to no less than half (and perhaps even more) of all Koreans onSoviet territory. Those unregistered Koreans also engaged in agriculture andplayed a role in providing the region with food.

This massive departure led to great problems in the agriculture and habitationof these districts. The following numbers only concern the proportion of thedeparted population that had been officially registered: In 1938, some years afterthe massive exodus of the Korean population to China, Koreans constituted 20%of the population in the Grodekovskii and Shkotovskii districts.26 Between 1930and 1934, as we saw earlier, 50% of the Koreans of Grodekovskii district left.Based on those numbers, it transpires that the Korean population in these districtsformed 40–50% of the total population around 1930. Thus one could concludethat a number of administrative units lost between a fourth to a third of thepopulation to emigration.

Of course, a number of Koreans who had been dekulakized by the new regimewrote petitions. Thus, for example, Viktor Vasil’evich Kim, from the village of

22. Liudmila Ivanovna Proskurina, “Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia i ee vliianie na derevniu rossi-iskogo Dal’nego Vostoka: kollektivizatsiia i ee posledstviia,” Rossiia i ATR 3, 2008, 22–30:26.

23. Kolkhoznik: Collective-farm worker.

24. Rossiiskii Gosudartsvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Dal’nego Vostoka (Russian State HistoricalArchive of the Far East, Vladivostok) [from here: RGIA DV], 2458/1/216, l.83.

25. Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Khabarovskogo Kraia (State Archive of Khabarovsk Region,Khabarovsk)[from here: GAKhK] P2/2–4/169, ll.78–9.

26. GARF, 1235/130 (1935)/3, ll.20–21.


Korsakovka of the Suifunskii district of Vladivostok county (okrug), dispatched atelegram to the “All-Union Village Elder” Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin (1875–1946), the official Soviet head of state.27 Kim wrote that his family was composedof eight people of whom he was the only able-bodied breadwinner, that he workedthe land manually, and barely made ends meet. Because the family had a bull, acalf and seven beehives, it was first burdened with an impossibly high tax assess-ment and then faced the confiscation of its farm and property and their sale byauction. In this manner, it had been doomed to “death by famine and cold.”28

After the peak of collectivization in the Far East, however, many Koreanfarms owned a significant number of cattle for personal use. I have personallyspoken with Kim Yun-Sen, who remembered the deportation of the SovietKoreans in 1937.29 His family owned a considerable number of farm animals in1937, among which were several pigs, which seems out of the question foraverage kolkhozniks at that time. Normally, the organizations assigned to suchmatters ascribed peasants with such a farm to the kulak category and pros-ecuted them. Many of the repressed Koreans remember that their families alsoremained prosperous after collectivization, which is confirmed by the evidencegathered by the agents of the NKVD who tallied the property confiscated fromthe Koreans forcibly dispatched to Central Asia.30 Before the mass repression of1937, many Korean peasants had not only decent farms, but also large houses.It should be remembered that after the mass deportation and before the inven-tory made by the NKVD organs, a part of the victims’ property was stolenwithout authorization by the local population.31

In my view, such a curious policy toward the Koreans by the authorities can beexplained. The massive flight of the population that engaged in truck farmingruined the economy of the area. Korean peasants provided the main supply ofvegetables to the cities. A continuation of the dekulakization policy threatened tolead to a supply crisis in the Far East, for in the northern and central parts of thisregion the natural environment made it impossible to effectively engage in truck

27. Nam, Koreiskii natsional’nyi raion, 7.

28. Ibid.

29. As relayed by Kim Yun-Sen (d. 2007) in a conversation with the author and in Ussuriisk in2005.

30. NKVD: Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del, People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs,under whose authority fell the Soviet security organs in the second half of the 1930s.

31. Vladimir Baturov, “Repressii protiv Kitaitsev v stalinskom Sovetskom Soiuze,” Velikaiaepokha, 27 April 2010, 1–2. (available at: http://www.epochtimes.ru/content/view/36457/34/, accessed 12 November 2011).


farming. Although the Russian peasant population had generally resided in theMaritime Province since the beginning of the twentieth century, they could notprovide the area with vegetables because they had not become accustomed to theregion’s natural circumstances.

It is for this reason that I suggest that the provincial executive committee ofsoviets (oblispolkom, or the local government) and the local NKVD departmenthad been earlier forced to abandon the repressions against the Koreans in thecourse of collectivization. At a time when many Russian peasants who had beenascribed to the kulaks’ ranks were exiled outside of their native region, the Korean“kulaks” escaped this fate. In this way one may conclude that the massive exodusof Soviet Koreans abroad proved a more effective means to fight dekulakizationthan the more regular forms of protest in which the Russian population engaged,such as the distribution of pamphlets, terrorist actions, the theft of foodstuffs,open rebellion, and the like. OGPU troops, who numbered more than 7,000 in thesouthern area of the Far East during the 1930s, suppressed all open manifestationsof protest.32

It was, however, far more complicated to combat massive population flightinto China, given that the length of the contemporary border was more than800 kilometers. Controlling the Chinese border demanded the deployment ofconsiderable armed detachments, which was beyond the capacity of the Sovietregime at that time. Furthermore, there was no real cause for the use of militaryforce, for the population did not conduct terrorist acts, openly resist theauthorities, or engage in armed revolts. But the Stalinist servants studied thisform of struggling, which was reflected in the tactics of the repressive organs in1937. Of course, the authorities did not abandon their ideas about restrictingthe freedom of the Soviet Koreans. Even in 1922, several Soviet leaders sug-gested exiling the Koreans to other areas, particularly to the remote districts ofthe Khabarovsk Region.33

In the recollection of those Koreans who lived in the southern Far Easternregion during the 1920s and 1930s, many Koreans freely crossed the Soviet-Chinese border on foot from the Pos’etskii district, bought needed goods in China,sold their products, and returned home. Soviet Koreans’ freedom of movementgreatly troubled the USSR’s leadership, as it gave rise to a situation that was

32. OGPU: Ob’edinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, or United State PoliticalDirectorate, was succeeded by the NKVD in 1934; Proskurina, “Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia iee vliianie,” 26.

33. GARF 1318 (1922–1923)/670, l.64. See as well Li, Kim, eds, Belaia kniga, 63; and Martin,“Origins,” 828, 833–4.


unwelcome for the Soviet authorities. It appeared that in the event of a massivepersecution campaign of Koreans, those who could easily depart for Chineseterritory would not be apprehended. This necessitated the leaders to conduct acautious policy toward the Koreans. In addition, those unencumbered bordercrossings by Soviet Koreans might influence Russian kolkhozniks, among whoma highly dissatisfied attitude toward the Soviet authorities prevailed as well.

It is also important to take the economic side of things into account, becauseafter crossing the border Soviet Koreans traded with the Chinese without anyhindrance. The Soviet authorities poorly controlled the transfer of money acrossthe borders. In this respect, the preparation for the economic terrorization of thepopulation required time and care. If not, the Korean population’s actions couldhave thwarted every attempt to bridle it. A mass exodus of Soviet Koreans duringthe collectivization campaign only confirmed the caution of the Party’s brass.

In this way the Soviet leaders concluded that the Koreans needed to bedeported to the inner depths of the country through a swift action that woulddeprive them of the option to escape the country quietly. In 1932, the Politburo ofthe Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee thus once more reiterated itsdirective of 1930 that called for a massive administrative removal of the Koreanpopulation from the border districts of the Maritime Region.34

We can conclude that several concerns motivated the forced migration of theKoreans from the Far East. In the first place, the Korean population’s freedom ofmovement disturbed the Soviet authorities and made the Koreans comparativelyimmune to the state’s coercion. Secondly, their economic activity was not con-trolled by state organs and defied attempts to expropriate the property of Koreanpeasants. Thirdly, the desire to appease Japan, a power that actively pursuedexpansion in East Asia, may have been involved. The aggregate of those causes,with a clear emphasis on the first and second, led to the forcible deportation of theSoviet Koreans.

This in itself was, however, not easily accomplished. On the one hand, therewere Koreans among the Communist Party leaders in the Far East who had beenBolsheviks even before Soviet power had triumphed. They belonged to theso-called “Old Party Faithful” (starye partiitsy), and their status was considerably

34. See for more Li, Kim, eds, Belaia kniga. This “White Book” details much of the unfolding ofthe tragedy of the Soviet Koreans’ deportations, from Stalin and Molotov’s decree orderingthe deportation to various communications between Ezhov and local NKVD chiefs as well asbetween Ezhov and the other Soviet leaders (see ibid., 64–5, 73—including the note–, 82,89–92, 94, 98–9, 101, 105, 114–15). The Communist Party’s Politburo was the highestpolitical body in the Soviet Union, responsible for all key decisions of the Soviet regime (evenif after 1929 in practice many of these decisions were made by Stalin alone).


high. On the other hand, by that time the Russian population’s attitude towardthe Koreans was friendlier than the Soviet leaders would have liked. The statetherefore was faced with the necessity of preparing the country’s population forthis upcoming episode of the repressions in a manner that would avoid provokingopposition and protest among the non-Korean population about the first massdeportation of people because of their nationality.

This was a key motive in the second phase of repression of the Koreanpopulation, the purge of the Party organizations. The NKVD crushed thousandsof Korean activists, of whom a part was executed by firing squads, including forexample Afanasii Kim (d. 1938), someone who had known Lenin. It should,however, be noted that not all Soviet Koreans were repressed on grounds of theirnationality, because a general cleansing of the Party apparatus was unfoldingthroughout the Soviet Union. It is therefore difficult to establish which Koreanactivists were arrested because of their ethnicity and which ones were groupedunder the rubric of the definitive settling of accounts with various Party factionsthat were alleged to oppose the Stalinist clique.35 As a result of this stage of thepurges, practically all principal Party leaders were killed or dispatched to jail andthe overwhelming majority of Korean army officers ended up in the NKVDdungeons as well. The entire Korean section of the Communist International wasexecuted. In addition, the majority of Koreans who had enjoyed higher educationfell victim to the persecutions. Furthermore, the settling of scores with the Koreanpopulation’s leaders continued into 1938, even after the forced deportation of theKoreans to Central Asia had occurred.36 In 1937 alone, NKVD plenipotentiary G.S. Liushkov (1900–45) arrested 2,500 Koreans in the Far Eastern Region. Ajudicial case was fabricated that led to the arrests of Koreans organized in a rebelcenter that allegedly was preparing a revolt aimed at the Far Eastern Region’sseparation from the Soviet Union.37 Concomitantly Russian communists, who hadsupported Korean Party officials, suffered.

35. In 1936 and 1937, the Great Terror at first targeted groups of Party members who allegedlyhad formed illegal opposition groups against Stalin and his cronies, and were often linked to(former) opponents of Stalin’s regime such as L. D. Trotsky (1879–1940), G. E. Zinov’ev(1883–1936), L. B. Kamen’ev, N. I. Bukharin (1888–1938), and A. I. Rykov (1881–1938).Others were accused of conspiring with monarchists, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Mensheviks,or various other opponents of the Bolsheviks of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionaryperiods.

36. Lan’kov, “Koreitsy SNG.”

37. Aleksandr Stepanovich Suturin, Delo kraevogo masshtaba, Khabarovsk: Khabarovskoeknizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1991, 188.


It should be noted that the liquidation of the activists among the Koreanpopulace played an important part in the preparation of the third comprehensivestage of repressions against Soviet Koreans. In this way, the Korean populationlost the most revered and influential representatives of its community, who mighthave been able to lead disaffected Koreans against Soviet power.

The Soviet authorities thoroughly prepared themselves for the first mass repres-sion based on national identity. In the first place, leading NKVD staff was sentfrom Moscow to the Far East. This personnel had extensive experience and knewhow to operate in a sufficiently severe manner. For example, Genrikh SamuilovichLiushkov enjoyed the personal trust of NKVD People’s Commissar N. I. Ezhov(1895–1940), and had played an active role in a number of important cases; hewas transferred to the Far East to conduct the large-scale repressions, includingthose against the Koreans.38

The state also gradually prepared the Russian population for the impendingrepressions. Thus, Russian mass media publications during the 1930s sought toincite the population against the Koreans and Chinese. Among the most tellingexamples of these were two articles published in the country’s largest newspaper,Pravda. In April 1937 the paper ran items about Japanese espionage in the SovietFar East.39 These pieces claimed that Japanese spies were active in Korea, China,Manchuria, and the Soviet Union and that they used Chinese and Koreans whopretended to be local inhabitants as spies. To be specific, the paper wrote that“declassé and corrupt elements among the native population of Manchuria andKorea and professional smugglers and spies” had become in essence Japaneseagents.40 Other papers followed suit. The second-largest newspaper, Izvestiia,hinted that the Koreans were Japanese spies:

In 1934 in Moscow an espionage organization stood trial that had been“unknown” to our intelligence agencies. Heading this organization was theKorean Kim-Za-En, who had adopted Soviet citizenship in 1929. Althoughin our press it was not indicated in the service of which country Kim-Za-En’s organization worked, the embassy of a certain country in Moscow

38. Subsequently, Liushkov defected to the Japanese (NB!) and actively collaborated with Japa-nese counterintelligence’s work against his motherland. He was murdered in 1945 in Dairenby Japanese officers when he refused to commit suicide.

39. Pravda, 16 April 1937, 1; I. Volodin, “Inostrannyi shpionazh na sovetskom Dal’menVostoke,” Pravda, 23 April 1937, 1.

40. Volodin, “Inostrannyi shpionazh,” 1.


believed it to be possible to turn to our authorities with a statement, thatsince Kim-Za-En was a Korean and had arrived from Manchuria, that hemust be a subject of this certain country.41

In terms of circulation, Izvestiia was only second to Pravda in the Soviet Union.Pravda diffused the “Korean Theme” involving Kim-Za-En as well and directlystated that he was a very important Japanese spy.42 Special publications appearedas well, including a brochure by well-known journalists and “fighters againstespionage,” in other words, NKVD chiefs. One of them noted that the Koreanshad been Japanese spies even before the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05:

Long before the war, the Japanese General Staff studied not merely the FarEast, where the Japanese army’s operations needed to unfold, but also sentstaff officers disguised as Koreans, Chinese, Mongolians, and disguised astraders, jugglers and so on to Petersburg and Moscow and planted themalong the entire route of the Siberian railroad.43

The brochure’s author also confirmed that the Koreans had continued to spyfor the Japanese until that very moment.44

At best, these statements were based on the testimony of merely one person:Kim-Za-En; it is unclear even now whether he was a spy. As we see, the baitingwith juggled facts and false accusations in the newspapers and other printedmatter was in full swing.

On 7 July 1937, the Japanese army invaded North-East China, and Sovietauthorities immediately began to prepare for the deportation because of Korea’soccupation by Japan. Thus the accusation against Soviet Koreans that they spiedon behalf of Japan was driven to absurd heights. It was fully ignored that the area

41. K. Kirillov, “Shpiony nekoi derzhavy,” Izvestiia, 27 June 1937, 1. The skepticism regardingthe information wielded by the 1934 Soviet intelligence agencies in the quotation(“unknown”) betrays the fact that those preceding Ezhov’s crowd in the NKVD were bymid-1937 considered to have been duplicitous foreign agents. For more on the trials againstKoreans during the middle of the 1930s, see Li, Kim, eds, Belaia kniga, 22–3.

42. N. Rubin and Ia. Serebrov, “O podryvnoi deiatel’nosti fashistskikh razvedok v SSSR izadachakh bor’by s neiu,” Pravda, 29–30 July 1937, 1.

43. Leonid Zakovskii, “O nekotorykh metodakh i priemakh inostrannykh razvedyvatel’nykhorganov i ikh trotskisto-bukharinskoi agentury,” in S. Uranov et al., O metodakh i priemakhinostrannykh razvedyvatel’nykh organov i ikh trotskistsko-bukharinskoi agentury, Moscow-Leningrad: Partizdat TsK VKP (b), 1937 (available at: http://vault.exmachina.ru/spy/3/,accessed 15 November 2011). L. M. Zakovskii (1894–1938) was then chief of the LeningradNKVD.

44. Ibid.


along the Ussuri river was a base for Korean partisans active against the Japanesearmies on the Korean peninsula. Of course, if the Soviet Union considered theJapanese Empire a foe, it would have been more useful to utilize Korean partisanactivity toward destabilizing the Japanese regime in the Country of the Rising Sun.However, as I remarked previously, the Soviet leadership had its own plansregarding the Koreans that had nothing to do with any genuine fear of Koreansupporters of Japan’s expansionism.

Before the start of the deportation, lists of the Koreans living in the southernparts of the Far East were made up. On 21 August 1937, the Communist Party’sGeneral Secretary Stalin and the Soviet prime minister V. M. Molotov (1890–1986) signed the first decree about the deportation of the Korean population.According to this document, the eviction of the Koreans needed to happen in threestages.45 The first stage would be the deportation of Koreans from the borderareas, while the second and third stages would involve the interior areas depend-ing on their distance from the borders. The plan called for the completion of thedeportation of the Korean population from the Far East to Central Asia by 1January 1938.

As we can see, the Soviet leadership had studied the lessons of collectivizationand decided not to allow the Koreans to flee to China. Even if the resolution underpoint five ordered “not to counter the effort of the Korean population to departif they wished abroad and to allow them to cross the border in acceleratedfashion,” this was not allowed to occur in practice.46 This sort of ignoring ofresolutions was routine, as we will see below; they more often than not onlyexisted on paper. In the wake of Stalin’s and Molotov’s decree, People’s Commis-sar Ezhov sent a directive to Liushkov regarding the preparation and deploymentof the NKVD to expel the Koreans from the Far Eastern Region on 24 August1937.

But the crucial work in executing this operation occurred at district level andwas conducted in the following manner: A head-count of the Korean populationwas written down on lists; a time table for the deportation was developed anddistributed; the automobile and animal-drawn transport for transfer to collection-and-departure points was organized with the aid of a time table; documents wereprepared to estimate and record the value of property that would be left behind tocompensate their former owners, the Korean kolkhozniks and individual peas-

45. Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Archive of the President of the Russian Federation,Moscow) 3/58/139, 1–2 (Protokol no.52).

46. Ibid.


ants, and so on.47 In similar fashion preparation was undertaken for the depor-tation of the Korean population to Central Asia. But subsequent events show thatthis was done very poorly, leading to the deaths of thousands of repressed people.

I meanwhile suggest that a part of the Korean population realized in whichdirection the newspaper propaganda and the arrival of NKVD troops in the FarEast were leading. Approximately 172,000 Koreans were subjected to forceddeportation. According to the numbers of a head count in 1935, 204,000 Koreanslived in the Far Eastern Region, however; that is, after collectivization’s peak andthe mass exodus of the Korean population to China.48 Among those 204,000 werenot counted those who did not have Soviet citizenship, but the 1937 repressionsonly affected those who did have a Soviet passport in any case. Taking as well intoaccount that a high birth rate was common among the Soviet Korean population(given that the average size of a Korean family was made up of five to six people),the size of the Korean population in the Far East Region in 1937 must have beenconsiderably greater than in 1935.49 Of course, a part of the Koreans avoidedforced deportation for a number of reasons, but that was a comparatively smallgroup, a few thousand, or perhaps only a few hundred, people. It appears,therefore, that more than 30,000 Koreans escaped from this ethnic repressioncampaign.

A question then arises: Where did those tens of thousands of people go whowere not among those staying behind or repressed? Before 1937, no evidenceindicates mass executions or massive deportation of Koreans occurring. Nor isthere any information about epidemics or the voluntary mobilization of thepopulation to other districts before 1937.

I propose therefore that a part of the Koreans managed to evade the repressiveyoke by fleeing to China not long before the start of the deportations. It is notprecisely clear what the compelling trigger was for the massive exodus of theKorean population from the Far Eastern Region to China. We merely notethe fact of the absence of tens of thousands of Soviet Koreans at the time of theoperation’s start. This question can only be investigated in the course of a

47. See Li, Kim, eds, Belaia kniga, 64–92.

48. GARF 1235/130 (1935)/3, ll.20–1; see as welll Michael Ellmann, “Soviet Repression Statis-tics: Some Comments,” Europe-Asia Studies 7, 2002, 1151–72: 1158, 1163.

49. The grounds for this estimate are the numerical size of the repressed families, the number ofpeople per family as calculated according to the total number of people and of families. It isin addition important to take into account that these numbers may be lower. One of myrelatives was deported to Central Asia in 1937, but three of his family members went toChina.


separate study and through work with materials of the Chinese side, which doesnot fall within the scope of this article. We may suggest the possibility that theKorean population, foreseeing or expecting the beginning of the repressions,gradually began to leave for China, which might have provoked the authorities toaccelerate the pace of the deportations. It is noteworthy that the original decreesigned by Stalin and Molotov was dated 21 August 1936 and was relayed to theFar East by 24 August, whereas the rounding-up of Koreans only appears to havecommenced on 1 September.50

In September 1937 NKVD troops began deporting the Korean population fromthe southern Far East. The exiling of Vladivostok’s Korean population began atthe end of September. Formally, compensation was supposed to be given to thedeported people for the farms, equipment, and harvest they had to leave behind.On paper, it was proposed to transport the cattle to the deportees’ destination, butthat did not happen in practice.51 Sixty trains were assigned for the transport ofthe Korean forced migrants, while for their provisioning sixty army kitchens and3,100 stoves equipped and placed in heated-good wagons from the mobilereserves were used.52

Each train was given a number that indicated the place of loading and the timeof its dispatch.53 A train was led by a supervisor, who oversaw elders in each carwho had been picked from among the most trusted Koreans. On average, a trainconsisted of 50 cars holding people, one regular passenger car, one hospital car,one kitchen car, five-to-six closed cargo wagons and 2 flat-bed cars. The cars thattransported goods were in a slapdash manner equipped with cattle and carriedbunkbeds and a small stove. In each car, some five to six families (25–30 people)were transported. The time en route from the Far Eastern region to the destinationin Kazakstan was 30 to 40 days.

A comprehensive calculation shows that 171,781 people, who formed 36,442families, were deported from the Far Eastern Region (other counts suggest about175,000 Koreans were brought to Central Asia).54 But that does not mean that allKoreans were deported to Central Asia. A small number of Koreans weresomehow not repressed, such as the teacher Nikolai Ten and his family, who lived

50. See Li, Kim, eds, Belaia kniga, 64–5, 68–71, 94.

51. GARF 5446/57/52, l.29; 5446sch/29/48, ll.63–4; 5446sch/29/51, l.16.

52. GARF 5446/57/52, l.39.

53. Li, Kim, eds, Belaia kniga, 90–2, 103–4, 106–12.

54. N. F. Bugai, “Vyselenie sovetskikh koreitsev s Dal’nego Vostoka,” Voprosy istorii 5, 1994,141–8.


in the south of the Far East, a small community on Kamchatka, and several others.Apparently, a fraction of the Koreans either appeared so trustworthy to theauthorities that they decided to leave them untouched, or their influence was sogreat that it outweighed all of Moscow’s directives. But the overwhelming major-ity of Koreans were far less fortunate, and the long road from the Far East toCentral Asia was fatal for many of them.

Thus, Zinaida Iuirovna Anakhovich (maiden name Khegai) remembered:

They transported us in the course of three months from the Far East andbrought us to the Golodnaia Step’ station in Uzbekistan. They depositedus, in effect, in an absolutely barren steppe. My family, my parents andtheir four children, had been exiled from the Maritime Region, from thevillage Zarech’e in the Mikhailovskii district, which is a district along theborder. . . . We arrived, four children and their parents. We were the onlyfamily in that train which had remained complete after sustaining thattrip. My parents told us that all families lost children, and some even twoor three. We Koreans had large families in those days. . . . En route therewas sabotage, there were wrecks; they killed us Koreans however theycould. . . . At each station they buried someone, parents, children, theelderly. People died. That history is very difficult, dark and very sad [shesighs]. They brought us to the steppe in essence abandoned us. I was bornin May, and was three-and-a-half-months old when they put us in thetrain in September, and we arrived in December. The oldest child wasseven.55

The trains arrived in Central Asia at the beginning of the winter of 1937–1938.The Koreans were housed in haphazardly built huts that could not save manypeople; a third of the breast-fed infants died that winter.56 Many elderly died aswell. Here again is Z.Iu. Anakhovich, who remembered that in that winter

we lived in a dug-out, and then we were transferred to a stable. . . . We ategrass. We ate a swan, dandelions, wild onions. My parents walked longdistances, 50 and more kilometers in search of grasses. The state gave us asa ration flour and we baked flat cakes. . . . Without the grasses we would

55. Sergei Mukhanov, “Deportatsiia koreitsev s Dal’nego Vostoka. ‘Ia vyzhila tol’ko blagodarialiubvi i zabote roditelei’,” Smolenskaia gazeta, 1 February 2011 (available at: http://www.smolgazeta.ru/history/5859-deportaciya-korejcev-s-dalnego-vostoka-ya-vyzhila.html,accessed 16 November 2011).

56. Lan’kov, “Koreitsy SNG.”


not have survived. At the outset of the new year [1938] they began toorganize a collective farm. After all, the Koreans always engaged in agri-culture. . . . In that year the winter was short and spring came early and thenunder the snow they looked for dandelions, wild spinach. . . . We wereprohibited to go further than 35 kilometers away from our settlement.Therefore at night, when they could not be seen, the adults went to searchfor grasses beyond that zone. It was utterly dreadful.57

Another participant of these events, Liubov Khvan, recalled that “they depos-ited us in a barren steppe, and somehow we made out of rags a curtain against thestrong winds. It was utterly difficult.”58

Some of the Korean population was sent to areas where it was impossible toengage in agriculture. There was nothing in the land that was conducive tocultivation. Existence was similarly impossible for fishermen.59 Only after greatsuffering and death did the Soviet leadership decide to transfer these repressedpeople to places where the land could be tilled.60 In the course of this renewedmigration, a part of the Korean families ended up in Astrakhan and Rostovprovinces (in European Russia), where they engaged in fishing. In 1941 and 1942,because of the southern offensive of the Nazi armies the latter group (at Rostov-na-Donu) were transported again to Central Asia.

The precise number of the Koreans who died during and after the deportationsfrom the Far East is unknown. No one has yet undertaken a calculation of thoselosses. We may hypothetically suggest that if every family on average lost onemember during the deportations, that the transports themselves took the lives ofno fewer than 30,000 people, largely children and the elderly, as 36,442 familieswere shipped. To that number several thousand Koreans who died in the NKVDprison empire should be added. The first winter in Central Asia also cost the livesof many infants and old people. Therefore, we can conclude that the losses amongthe Korean population amounted at a minimum to 40,000 people, which trans-lates into almost a quarter of all Koreans who were exposed to the deportations.Proportionally, the Soviet Koreans were in this way one of the ethnic groups whosuffered most in the course of Stalin’s repressions.

57. Mukhanov, “Deportatsiia koreitsev.”

58. Conversation between Liubov Khvan and the author in Ussuriisk in 2009.

59. GARF 5446sch/29/49, ll. 29–30.

60. GARF 5446sch/29/49, l. 35.


The sufferings of the Korean population of the USSR had not ended yet,however. In 1945, NKVD People’s Commissar L. P. Beria (1899–1953) sanctionedthe Koreans who lived in Central Asia further. They were classified as specialsettlers (spetspereselentsy), which restricted their movement in Uzbekistan andKazakstan.61 Only in 1953 did the Koreans receive the right to return permanentlyto the Far East. One should say, too, that not only the Soviet Koreans sufferedfrom the 1937 deportations. Particularly, according to the recollections of elderlypeople today, after the massive emigration from the Far Eastern territories ashortage of vegetables became manifest that continued to plague the area for along while.

Undoubtedly, the ethnically motivated deportation left a deep imprint on theSoviet Koreans. The deportation led to a massive death toll among the Koreansduring the resettlement, and in the 1950s, after returning to the Far East, theywere exposed to nationalist discrimination. Even during the 1970s, young Rus-sians gathered in large groups to “beat up Koreans” in the city of Ussuriisk in thePrimorye region. That led to massive fights, which only ended after the death ofone of the participants. The authorities usually ignored the many incidents ofinsults, assault, and other crimes on ethnic grounds against Koreans. The admis-sion boards of several institutes of higher learning observed a tacit rule to createdifficulties for Koreans who sat the entry examinations. Despite the fact thatKoreans were fine cultivators of the land, most eligible young Koreans did notstudy agriculture at institutes. In 1957, for instance, only two of 218 studentsadmitted at the Maritime Agricultural Institute were Korean.62 The cause of sucha discriminatory policy in the Soviet Union was a legacy of the Stalinist repres-sions. The anti-Korean mood continued until the late 1980s.

The repressions on ethnic grounds also played another role, however. Becauseof discrimination, the majority of the Soviet Koreans grew closer, supported eachother, cultivated their cultural traditions and language, and stubbornly resistedassimilation. Only during the second half of the 1990s, when the nationalisttensions evaporated in the Far East, did the process of assimilation of the Koreanpopulation acquire a swifter pace.

61. Bugai, “Vyselenie sovetskikh koreitsev,” 147–8.

62. Arkhiv Ussuriiskogo Gorodskogo Okruga, Fond Primorskogo Sel’skokhoziaistvennogoInstituta (Archive of Ussuriisk City County, Collection of the Primorye Agricultural Institute,city of Ussuriisk), “Godovoi otchet o rabote instituta po osnovnoi deiatel’nosti za 1957–1958 gg.”


the repression of soviet koreans during the 1930s

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