vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #149 / Social life / Reading article...

Sixty years after Stalin deported more than 171,000 Koreans from the Far East, thousands are returning. They find they’re not always greeted with open arms.

The commissars waited until the harvest was gathered, then loaded the Koreans into trains and sent them to Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

In the overcrowded trains there was not even space for a bucket of water – the passengers had to wait for a stop to slake their thirst. Thousands of people died from epidemics. One train crashed near Khabarovsk, crushing hundreds of victims. Those who survived the trip west had to start a new life.

Sixty years ago, the government deported 171,781 Koreans from the Far East, following Stalin’s decree targeting “Japanese espionage in the Far East.” (The real reason may have been that Stalin feared Koreans would try to form an autonomous movement.) Primorye was the area most affected, since 95 percent of all Russia’s Koreans lived here.

Svetlana Kan, 50, now works at a travel agency in the Hyundai Hotel. Her mother was deported with her family from Vampaushe (Shkotovsky) County in 1937. Kan’s father lived in a Russian orphanage in Ternei. He was 14 years old when he was taken from the orphanage and sent to Kara-Kalpakiya, Uzbekistan. Most of the Koreans arrived at the steppes in the late autumn, when it was very cold. Since there was no shelter, they dug holes in the ground to live in.

The Uzbeks, however, accepted their new neighbors. “Koreans even brought some civilization to the land,” Kan said.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, some Koreans returned to the Far East. The Kan family was one of the first: They returned in 1959, when Svetlana was 11. Most of her relatives stayed in Uzbekistan.

Kan-Pende worked as a teacher of Korean in the Vladivostok’s Korean pedagogical college. The whole college – faculty and students — was deported to Kyzyl-Orda in Kazakhstan. Kan-Pende, his father, his wife Kan In-nen and their daughter ended up in a rice-growing collective farm. Ernest Kim, their son, recalled, “Once we had terrible floods and had to move up to the hills. My father dug a hole in the ground, and we lived there until he built a clay home. Judging by his skills, it was not the first time he did that.”

Kim moved to Vladivostok in 1972 and now teaches Korean in the Oriental School. His sisters still live in Kirgizia.

“With the republics getting sovereignty, the Russian-speaking population feels very uncomfortable there,” said Telmir Kim, chairman of the Primorye Koreans Revival Fund. Already 26,000 of Koreans returned to Primorye and more are expected. Some are coming as refugees, like Florida Tsoi. Tsoi’s family was deported in 1937 from Suchan to Uzbekistan. “I was three years old then,” she recalled. “We arrived at an empty marshland; there were only reeds there.” Her father worked hard, and the Uzbekistan government even awarded him. The family made rags from reeds and sold them.

A former chief engineer of a shoe factory and afterwards of a concrete factory, Tsoi had to flee Tajikistan in 1993 without even taking extra clothes with her. Tajiks slaughtered her family during pogroms carried out against non-Tajiks. After the melee, some Tajik friends found her in her apartment, unconscious and covered with blood. They took her to a Russian family, who helped her out.

Tsoi came to Vladivostok and sought help from Korean consulate, but the consul could not do much, since she was a Russian citizen.

The Korean community calls this “the third forced migration of Koreans on Russian territory.” The first one started in 1863, when Koreans illegally crossed the Russian border as refugees and took Russian citizenship. Czarist authorities didn’t exactly welcome them, but gave them documents and let them live in peace. In 1917 many Koreans helped to establish Soviet power and participated in the Civil War on the Bolshevik side. The NKVD, predecessor to the KGB, ignored these facts: Koreans were treated as spies, and many perished in Gulag.

In 1993 the Supreme Soviet issued a decree “On the rehabilitation of Soviet Koreans” and established a federal program to help the Korean population, even covering emotional damage. However, the program has not been implemented due to lack of money.

Maybe the government will pay them when we become richer, said Zinaida Zayika, head of the department for nationalities with Primorye administration. Until then, the Koreans who are coming back are on their own. Korean associations do not have much to offer the settlers either.

Koreans biggest concern is the “Asia-phobia” of some organizations and media toward the returning Koreans. A story in Kommersant Daily, a central newspaper, raised once again Stalin’s old canard that Koreans wanted to create an autonomous region in Primorye and reunite with South Korea.

“We do feel resistance, which is connected with economic conditions,” said Telmir Kim, head of the Korean revival fund. “What adds to the resistance is the arrival of Chinese and Chinese Koreans.” The krai administration denies that there is a reluctance to accept returnees. “Thanks to the wise policy of our governor, we had not a single conflict between nations in Primorye,” Zayika said. “One hundred nineteen nationalities live like one big family here.”

However, Tsoi, in her desperate search for job and shelter, encountered hostility many times. The labor exchange sent her to the Far Eastern Technological University to work as a porter, Tsoi said, but an official there told her, “We don’t take Koreans — you’ll make a market here.” The Krai Migration Service gave her 13,000 rubles and the Red Cross gave her 2,000 rubles as a refugee. The Korean association did not give her any money, the Korean consul gave her a coat and sent a pastor to help. People from the Presbyterian church helped her with food and clothes. However, she had to sleep at a railway station in constant fear that the police would take her away.

“I would close myself in the bathroom and sit quietly for hours,” Tsoi recalled.

Now she works as a doorkeeper and a laboratory assistant at the Korean College at Far Eastern State University, and lives in university dormitory. However, she says, she constantly lives in poverty and in fear of being fired.

Crying, Tsoi showed her payment slips. For both jobs, her average salary is only about 170,000 rubles ($29) a month. The accountants say this is the base salary of a doorkeeper and others were in the same boat.

Koreans are commemorating their deportation. They held ceremonies for the 60th anniversary in Nakhodka Aug. 30. Further ceremonies were planned in Partizansk Sept. 6, Ussurisk Sept. 13 and Vladivostok Sept. 16.

“For us, it is very important that all of mankind and all Russians know our history,” Telmir said. “We don’t want anything like that to repeated.”