Deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union

Deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union, originally conceived in 1926, initiated in 1930, and carried through in 1937, was the first mass transfer of an entire nationality in the Soviet Union. Almost the entire Soviet population of ethnic Koreans (171,781 persons) were forcefully moved from the Russian Far East to unpopulated areas of the Kazakh SSR and the Uzbek SSR in October 1937. The official reason for the deportation was to stem "the penetration of the Japanese espionage into the Far Eastern Krai", as Koreans were at the time subjects of the Empire of Japan, which was hostile to the Soviet Union. Estimates based on population statistics suggest that 40,000 deported Koreans died in 1937 and 1938 from starvation, exposure and difficulties adapting to their new environment.

Korean immigrants first appeared in the Russian Far East in the 1850s and early 1860s. By the 1890s, they had received the right to register as citizens of the Russian Empire, under the terms of a Russo-Korean treaty that determined their citizenship status at that time. Korean migrants who had moved to Russia referred to themselves as the Koryo Saram. As more Korean immigrants arrived in the Russian Far East, the Korean minority became one of the largest border minorities in the Soviet Union, facing in the 1920s and the 1930s the Japanese-occupied Korea on the other side. This minority had been gradually building up since the second half of the 19th century, as poor Korean peasants migrated across the border in search for land and livelihoods. The Korean immigration increased dramatically during the early 1920s, after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905 and Japan’s subsequent establishment of a protectorate over Korea.

By the October Revolution in 1917, there were about 100,000 Koreans in Russia. During the Russian Civil War, Korean allegiance lay primarily with the Bolsheviks, due at least in part to the fact that, “Japanese oppression in Korea and occupied Siberia made most Koreans, if not Bolsheviks, then enemies of the Bolsheviks’ enemies.” Korean immigrants began to submit applications for citizenship in the emerging RSFSR. Suspicions of the “political unreliability” of Koreans, however, meant that in practice relatively few would ever receive citizenship; in 1923, 1300 out of 6000 applicants were accepted for citizenship, and in the following year, 1247 out of 4761.

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