Abstract

Korean migration to the Russian Empire and USSR occurred mainly during the years between 1869 and 1931. These Koreans came both directly from the peninsula itself and from Korean settlements in Manchuria. They remained overwhelmingly concentrated in the Russian Far East until 1937. From 9 September to 3 November 1937 the NKVD (Peoples’ Commissariat of Internal Affairs) of the USSR loaded around 172,000 ethnic Koreans into train cars and sent them to the Kazakh and Uzbek SSRs. This action cleared the eastern regions of the RSFSR (Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic) of the vast majority of its Korean population and created a significant diaspora in Central Asia. The official justification for this operation was the claim that the ethnic Koreans could serve to hide spies and saboteurs sent from the Japanese Empire. The relocated Koreans suffered from severe material deprivations during their initial years in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The Soviet government also placed its citizens of Korean ancestry relocated to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan under a system of legal restrictions termed “administrative exile.” Finally, after 1939 they eliminated almost all Korean cultural institutions until years after the defeat of Japan. These factors made adaptation by the Koreans to their new areas of settlement difficult. Nonetheless, they managed to eventually overcome these obstacles and successfully integrate into the social, economic, and even political spheres of Soviet Central Asia. This paper will examine the early years of the Korean diaspora in Central Asia from 1937 to 1945. It will look at how the forced resettlement and subsequent material and legal disadvantages during these years transformed the group from its previous existence in the Soviet Far East. The paper will also address the role of geopolitical conflict in Asia between the USSR and Japan in determining Soviet policy towards this ethnic minority.