Korean Diaspora in Uzbekistan

KOREAN DIASPORA IN UZBEKISTAN by Victoria Kima This year marks the 80th anniversary of the 1937 deportation and arrival of ethnic Koreans in Uzbekistan. Many legends surround the decision to deport ethnic Koreans from the far East to Central Asia. The most widespread opinion held today is that Joseph Stalin and his closest advisors, including Lavrentiy Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov, regarded Soviet Koreans as Japanese spies. The complexity behind the Russo–Japanese relationship in the beginning of the 20th Century, until the late 1930s/early 1940s, serves as historical background, allowing us to prove this theory. In 1905, Russia lost the war to Japan with an historic defeat of its army and navy in the battle of Tsushima and the subsequent occupation of Sakhalin Island by Japanese troops. Since the early 1890s,1 Japan had already been moving aggressively towards the Russo–Chinese border in the far East. In the course of the first Sino–Japanese War, it acquired full influence over the Korean peninsula and—after the Russian defeat of 1905—formalised that control by annexing Korea and making it a Japanese colony in 1910. At the same time, Japan had also been strengthening its military influence over Qing Dynasty-run Manchuria in northeastern China right until it seized the region in 1931 during the Mukden Incident.2 That same volatile border between Russia and China was the area where ethnic Korean peasants from the north of the Korean peninsula had been moving to since the late 1850s and into the early 1860s, in an attempt to escape dire poverty and starvation in the feudal and rundown Korea of the time. They had been moving first to Chinese territory and then to what officially became Russian land after the Treaty of Peking, signed between the Qing Dynasty and Imperial Russia in 1860. The first 13 Korean families were found along the Tizinhe river by a Russian military convoy in 1863,3 and this is the event and date which post-Soviet Koreans or Koryo Saram (as they call themselves) consider their arrival in Russia. We can, with full certainty, say that those regional wars fought with Japan by Russia and China along the far Eastern borders reflected a vkimsky@gmail.com 48 the uneasy global situation of the times, and ethnic Koreans became the immediate victims of that situation and of those wars. Korean peasants in the Russian far East had been regarded suspicious subjects ever since 1905, when Russia started recognising the Korean peninsula as Japanese territory. Since 1907, anti-Korean laws were effectively applied against those Korean peasants residing on Russian territory; for example, their lands were seized by the Russian government.4 At the same time, an increasing number of ethnic Koreans from the north (mostly from Hamgyong province) were escaping the war and Japanese colonisation on the Korean peninsula by crossing the border into Russia. By the early 1920s, their numbers exceeded 100,000.5 After the Soviet revolution of 1917, all ethnic Koreans in the far East became Soviet citizens.6 They heroically fought against the Japanese during the Civil War in the far East throughout the early 1920s, and they lived mostly in the Maritime province (Primorskiy Kray) in the Korean national district of Posyet, established through the Soviet policies of Koreanisation based on the original 105 Soviet Korean villages in the Russian far East.7 At the same time and with the official annexation of Manchuria in 1931–1932, Japan was now populating its Manchurian territory right across the border from the Soviet Korean district of Posyet with its colonial Korean subjects, both as soldiers and as forced labour.8 These might have been different Koreans from those in the south; they probably even spoke a slightly different Korean dialect from the Soviet Koreans speaking Koryo mar, which is mostly based on the northern dialect of Hamgyong province. But in the eyes of the Soviet leadership they were all the same—unreliable people. The decision to deport all ethnic Soviet Koreans from the far East to Central Asia had been in planning since the late 1920s and throughout the early 1930s, with intelligence reports speculating that the Japanese were effectively sending ethnic Korean spies to the neighbouring Soviet Maritime province. In August 1937, Stalin signed the infamous Resolution No. 1428-326CC, condemning 171,781 Koreans—the whole Soviet Korean population of the far East—to deportation to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.9 This deportation became the first population transfer of an entire nationality (ethnic group) in the Soviet Union; it took less than two months to be executed effectively. By October 1937, all Koreans had been forcefully shipped to Central Asia with almost no possessions or 49 resources to survive through those long and hungry winter months of crossing Siberia in cattle trains.10 Those few Koreans who were not deported with the rest of the civil population were purged and sent to the Siberian gulags, if not immediately exterminated. They mostly happened to be members of the Soviet military or party cadres, but also other highly educated Soviet Korean intelligentsia. Russo–Korean families were split up, with all Korean members deported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, including children and the elderly, and Russian members left behind.11 Central Asia was chosen as the site of the relocation because of its remoteness and underdevelopment. Historically, many unwanted people had been deported to the southeastern outskirts of the Russian Empire, including revolutionaries, political opposition members, and even the grandson of Emperor Nicholas I, Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich Romanov, who ended up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, at the end of the 19th Century.12 At the same time, the Soviet regime needed a labour force to develop underpopulated lands for agricultural purposes, and Soviet Koreans were put to work in what became the Soviet Union’s first forced labour camps.13 Their life has been extremely hard, and those Koreans paid a high price to be accepted nowadays as one of Uzbekistan’s most honoured diasporas.14 The Uzbek state and people recognise Koreans for their hard work and their contributions to the economy (especially, in agriculture). Everyone is used to seeing Korean faces on the streets among Uzbeks, Russians, Tatars, and others. Korean food is an integral part of the Uzbek cuisine, with typical North Korean salads being sold in the stalls in every market across Uzbekistan.15 Thanks to its unique history, Uzbekistan has acquired and assimilated almost all of the Soviet Union’s ethnic groups and nationalities. From the early 1930s, the country began receiving Germans, Poles, Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Kurds, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and others.16 At the beginning, people were forcefully deported to Central Asia, mostly for political reasons; during World War II the Soviets were actually trying to save the civil population of the Union’s west by moving it away from the actual war front to remote areas in the southeast not directly affected by the ongoing war in Europe.17 As a result, it became a truly multi-ethnic society, where people mutually respected each other, different cultures, traditions, and 50 beliefs. However, even in the present-day Uzbekistan people do not know all facts behind the 1937 deportation of ethnic Koreans. Discussions of this topic had been strictly prohibited by the Soviet state until the most recent past, and it still remains very secretive, with all those personal stories disclosed only among the closest family members—and thus passed from one generation to another.18 When the Koreans first arrived in Soviet Uzbekistan in 1937, they were forced to work in the swamps surrounding Tashkent. Under 24/7 military guard, they lived in barracks and worked, drying out the swamps.19 In about three years, they dried the swamps, cut all the cane, and turned the lands into productive fields. Nowadays, Tashkent is surrounded by cotton fields and fruit orchards. Partially, this is thanks to those Koreans. They also introduced new sorts of rice and other grain cultures and taught the locals traditional Korean agricultural techniques. As a result, Uzbekistan became the Soviet Union’s granary, with rice eaten here as a staple food and still lovingly called Korean. These humble, honest, and very hard working people slowly gained the trust of locals and even the Soviet military, under whose guard they were being kept day and night. Eventually, they were permitted to build their own houses from clay and mud on the lands they had been developing and cultivating with so much love. In time, the first Korean kolkhozes (collective farms) were established throughout Tashkent province. Initially, these kolkhozes were closed and controlled spaces, populated and managed by the same Koreans who had earlier been forced to live and work on the same swamplands where the Korean kolkhozes eventually appeared. Slowly, they became very prosperous and successful, and they were even commonly referred to as the ‘millionaire kolkhozes.’ Again, all of this has been achieved only thanks to the very hard work and physical labour of their Korean inhabitants and farmers. Many heroes of Socialist labour came out of those Korean kolkhozes with numerous awards, certificates, and medals.20 The real change came after the death of Stalin in 1953, when his personality cult was purposefully destroyed by the incumbent Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. In 1956, Khrushchev took the historic decision to give the deported Koreans their full rights and freedoms back, which meant that—as fully fledged Soviet citizens—their movements were no longer restricted to the region they had been deported to.21 Surprisingly or not, most Uzbek Koreans stayed in the same 51 kolkhozes they had developed, where they had built their homes and bore their children. They really had nowhere else to go. Uzbekistan had slowly become their one and only home. Their children were also coming back to the same Korean kolkhozes after being educated all over the Soviet Union. The new generation of managers, engineers, and agricultural experts took care of the lands their parents had come to in 1937. Slowly and painfully, this land has become truly theirs. Nowadays, Koryo Saram are members of a unique diaspora that left Korea in the early 20th Century, when it was still a unified country. Even though most originally spoke no Russian but their local dialect, which served eventually as a foundation for Koryo mar, the Soviet regulations did not permit them to maintain their original language. Most Soviet Koreans were forced to learn Russian and study, work, and publish in Russian, too. Such was the reality of the times for all Soviet ethnicities—Russian was the official language and Soviet Russian culture was the predominant one which had to be followed in all Soviet republics, even if the population had their own centuriesold culture, traditions, and language.22 Uzbek and other Central Asian Koreans were able to keep the fundamental traditions of all Korean people, such as their celebrations of the autumn and spring equinoxes (Chusok and Hansik), the first and 60th birthdays (tol and hwangab), burial commemorations and wedding celebrations, and certain rituals, like showing respect to the elderly in the form of traditional kneeling.23 Some of these customs and traditions evolved, adapted to local surroundings and ingredients. The same thing happened with Korean food and the Korean language. Currently, hundreds of thousands of descendants of the originally deported Koryo Saram live all over Central Asia and Russia. The reality of their lives is the same as that of other ethnicities populating what used to be their common motherland, and Koreans now move voluntarily, searching for better lives and a better future. South Korea supports the Korean diasporas in the former Soviet Union, both in terms of funding and cultural and professional exchanges for ethnic Koreans. In Uzbekistan, younger people are able to learn the Korean language freely in language schools and cultural centres, mostly sponsored by South Korea. The classical Seoul dialect, however, is quite different from the Koryo mar that the older generation used to speak within their tight family circles after their initial arrival in Soviet Uzbekistan. 52 Some Uzbek Koreans live, study, and work in South Korea. The question of temporary and/or permanent emigration to South Korea has always remained somewhat complicated for those Koreans for a number of reasons, including language and cultural differences.24 Younger and more adaptable Koreans have been able to move and grow accustomed to local life in South Korea. The older Koryo Saram probably do not see it as their real home anymore, as it had forever stayed lost and found in Central Asia, on those swamplands and steppes they had turned into productive fields. The stories of the 1937 deportation of ethnic Koreans to Central Asia, their perseverance, and their success on the lands they originally came to develop as a labour force is part of our common history—the history of all Korean people and humanity, in general. The suffering and achievements of these Koreans must therefore never be forgotten by future generations. Endnotes 1 Chung, Y., 2005, Korea Under Siege, 1876–1945: Capital Formation and Economic Transformation, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, pp. 42– 44, 57. 2 Lew, C., Pak-wah Leung, E., 1873, Historical Dictionary of the Chinese Civil War, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press Inc., p. 269. 3 Pak, B. D., Bugai, N. F., 2004, 140 let v Rossii, Moscow, p. 18; Pak, B. D., 1993, Koreitsy v Rossiyskoi Imperii, Moscow: IB RAN, pp. 18–19. 4 Bugai, N. F., Chaeso Hanindul ui sunansa, transl. by Woon, C. J., 1996, Kyongido: Sejong Youngguso, p. 7. 5 Kim, G. N., Deportation of 1937 as Product of Russian and Soviet National Policy, http://world.lib.ru/k/kim_o_i/dgt6rtf.shtml (Accessed 26 April 2017). 6 Pohl, O., 1999, Ethnic cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949, Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, pp. 9–18. 7 Ibid. 8 Park, H., 2005, Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria, Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, pp. 141–142. 9 Bugai, N. F., 1996, The Deportation of Peoples in the Soviet Union, Commack, NY: Nova Science Publ., pp. 26–29. 10 Ibid., p. 56. 53 11 Polyan P., 2007, The Great Terror and deportation policy, Demoscope Weekly, No. 313–314, 10–31 December. 12 Massie, R., 1995, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, London: Random House, p. 255. 13 Kim G. N., 1999, Istoriia Immigratsii Koreitsev, Almaty: DaiK Press, p. 164. 14 Kwon, H., 1996, Segye ui Han minjok, Seoul: Tongirwon, p. 114. 15 Kim, V., 2016, Lost and Found in Uzbekistan: The Korean Story, The Diplomat, 8 June, http://thediplomat.com/2016/06/lost-andfound-in-uzbekistan-the-korean-story-part-1/ (Accessed 26 April 2017). 16 Uzbekistan People: Nationalities, Ethnic Groups, http://www.advantour.com/uzbekistan/people.htm (Accessed 26 April 2017). 17 Wada, H., 1987, Koreans in the Soviet Far East, 1917–1937, in Suh, D.-S., ed., Koreans in the Soviet Union, Honolulu, HI: Center for Korean Studies, p. 51. 18 The participation of Soviet Koreans in the Korean War shoulder to shoulder with Kim Il-sung is still, probably, the most secretive part of this generally deeply secretive period in Soviet history. Indeed, these were Koreans mostly from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan who were serving in the Soviet military or studying at military academies in Central Asia at the beginning of the Korean War. One such academy, for example, was the Chirchiq military academy near Tashkent. Kim Il-sung personally appealed to all Koreans to join him in liberating the Korean peninsula from the capitalist ‘aggressors.’ Over 100 Central Asian Koreans in the military ranks joined him and became generals, marshals, and admirals in the newly established Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Many of them married or re-married in North Korea and became members of the DPRK’s first government and military apparatus. Kim Il-sung also requested that they surrender their Soviet citizenship. Many of them did, which eventually turned out to be a tragic mistake. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Mao Zedong’s China and Kim Il-sung’s North Korea experienced a rapid fall out with the Soviet Union. Fearing a possible coup d’etat orchestrated by the new Soviet leadership, Kim Il-sung began suspecting that his closest advisors, mostly Central Asian Koreans, were preparing a secret revolt. His former Soviet friends and allies who had helped him establish the DPRK were purged throughout the 1950s and into 54 the late 1960s. Their families back in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan never learnt all the details of their ordeals and disappearances in North Korea. The few lucky ones who were still able to maintain their Soviet citizenship or who were somehow related to the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang managed to escape and return to Central Asia. The majority, along with their North Korean passports and new families in the DPRK, have silently disappeared forever. Kim, V., 2016, The Soviet Korean Who Ended The Forgotten War, The Diplomat, 24 August, http://thediplomat.com/2016/08/the-sovietkorean-who-ended-the-forgotten-war/ (Accessed 26 April 2017). 19 Kwon, op. cit., p. 78. 20 Chang, J., Park, J., 2013, Soviet Koreans, Redemption through Labor and Sport, Eurasia Stud. Soc. J., 2(3), pp. 4–5. 21 Kim, G. N., 2001, The Koryo Saram: Koreans in the former USSR, Kor. Kor. Am. Stud. Bull., 12(2/3), 19–45. 22 Medlin, W., Cave, M., 1971, Education and Development in Central Asia: A Case Study on Social Change in Uzbekistan, Leiden: E. J. Brill, p. 103. 23 Lee, K.-K., 2000, Overseas Koreans, Seoul: Jimoondang Publ., pp. 245–250. 24 Baek, I., 2005, Scattered Koreans turn homeward, Joongang Daily, 14 September; http://mengnews.joins.com/view.aspx?aId=2618389 (Accessed 26 April 2017). 55