The Soviet Far East

Burnt by the Sun examines the history of the first Korean diaspora in a Western society during the highly tense geopolitical atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. Author Jon K. Chang demonstrates that the Koreans of the Russian Far East were continually viewed as a problematic and maligned nationality (ethnic community) during the Tsarist and Soviet periods. He argues that Tsarist influences and the various forms of Russian nationalism(s) and worldviews blinded the Stalinist regime from seeing the Koreans as loyal Soviet citizens. Instead, these influences portrayed them as a colonizing element (labor force) with unknown and unknowable political loyalties. One of the major findings of Chang’s research was the depth that the Soviet state was able to influence, penetrate, and control the Koreans through not only state propaganda and media, but also their selection and placement of Soviet Korean leaders, informants, and secret police within the populace. From his interviews with relatives of former Korean OGPU/NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) officers, he learned of Korean NKVD who helped deport their own community. Given these facts, one would think the Koreans should have been considered a loyal Soviet people. But this was not the case, mainly due to how the Russian empire and, later, the Soviet state linked political loyalty with race or ethnic community. During his six years of fieldwork in Central Asia and Russia, Chang interviewed approximately sixty elderly Koreans who lived in the Russian Far East prior to their deportation in 1937. This oral history along with digital technology allowed him to piece together Soviet Korean life as well as their experiences working with and living beside Siberian natives, Chinese, Russians, and the Central Asian peoples. Chang also discovered that some two thousand Soviet Koreans remained on North Sakhalin island after the Korean deportation was carried out, working on Japanese-Soviet joint ventures extracting coal, gas, petroleum, timber, and other resources. This showed that Soviet socialism was not ideologically pure and was certainly swayed by Japanese capitalism and the monetary benefits of projects that paid the Stalinist regime hard currency for its resources.

Based on a quarter-century of research by a leading authority on the area, this is a monumental survey from prehistoric times to the present. Drawing from political, diplomatic, economic, geographical, social, and cultural evidence, the book reveals that this vast, rugged, and supposedly insular land has harbored vibrantly cosmopolitan lifestyles.

Drawing from political, diplomatic, economic, geographical, social, and cultural evidence, the book reveals that this vast, rugged, and supposedly insular land has harbored vibrantly cosmopolitan lifestyles. For over a millennium, Chinese culture found expression in Tungus, Mongol, and Korean politics. Russian penetration in the seventeenth century eventually turned the region into a colony sustained by state subsidies, foreign enterprise, and a mosaic of Ukrainian, Estonian, Finnish, German, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese communities. Tsarist and Soviet penal policies contributed to the diversity and volatility of Far Eastern society. Regional aspirations articulated by Siberian intellectuals, disingenuously institutionalized in a Far Eastern Republic (1920-22), survived lethal bouts of economic and demographic engineering to come to life again in the post-Soviet era.

The Russian Far East was a remarkably fluid region in the period leading up to, during, and after the Russian Revolution. The different contenders in play in the region, imagining and working toward alternative futures, comprised different national groups, including Russians, Buryat-Mongols, Koreans, and Ukrainians; different imperialist projects, including Japanese and American attempts to integrate the region into their political and economic spheres of influence as well as the legacies of Russian expansionism and Bolshevik efforts to export the revolution to Mongolia, Korea, China, and Japan; and various local regionalists, who aimed for independence or strong regional autonomy for distinct Siberian and Far Eastern communities and whose efforts culminated in the short-lived Far Eastern Republic of 1920–1922. The Rise and Fall of Russia’s Far Eastern Republic, 1905–1922 charts developments in the region, examines the interplay of the various forces, and explains how a Bolshevik version of state-centered nationalism prevailed.

Arranged in chronological order and by region, each of these studies is written by a specialist who has participated in some or all of the archaeological expeditions reported here. They show not just the unanticipated richness of the archaeology of the Russian Far East but, more important, the contributions these sites can make to the archaeology of the region and of the world.

The Soviet Far East (1957) examines the Soviet economic and political development of the Russian Far East between Lake Baikal and the Pacific, as it gained importance as the geographic base of Soviet power in the Far Eastern theatre of international politics and strategy.