Koreans in Central Asia
The presence of a Korean minority in Central Asia resulted from the Stalinist ethnic purges of the 1930s, when the Soviet premier Joseph Stalin ordered the mass deportation of ethnic Koreans residing in the Vladivostok region and the Far East Maritime Province to the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Some 175,000 Soviet Koreans were forcibly removed from their homes, loaded onto railroad freight cars, and transported to Central Asia.
Following the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, Koreans had begun migrating to the Russian Far East and over time had integrated themselves into the local Soviet culture and economy. However, as tensions between the Japanese empire and the Soviet Union escalated over Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, Stalin became fearful that Koreans residing in the Russian Far East harbored pro-Japanese sympathies. Thus on 21 August 1937, he ordered the transfer of Koreans to Central Asia, and the forcible displacement occurred from September to November 1937.
During the long period of deportation, many children and elderly people died of malnutrition and disease. Scurvy, typhoid, diphtheria, dysentery, measles, and scarlet fever took the lives of those who were weak and infirm, as families were forced to live in unsanitary conditions aboard the freight trains, with little or no food for most of the trip. On their arrival in Central Asia, regional and local governments did what they could to feed and house the Korean refugees, but many families were forced to live in warehouses, barns, mosques, and converted prisons while they struggled to build homes for themselves.
Following World War II Koreans remained in the Central Asian republics and began integrating and assimilating into Soviet society, where they soon thrived as agricultural technicians, agronomists, and managerial professionals. To this day, there are still large Korean communities in Kazakstan and Uzbekistan.
Keith Leitich
Further Reading
Gelb, Michael. (1995) "An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far Eastern Koreans." Russian Review 54, 3 (July): 389–412.
Huttenbach, Henry E. (1993) "The Soviet Koreans." Central Asian Survey 12, 1: 59–69.
Kho, Songmoo. (1987) Koreans in Soviet Central Asia. Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society.
Ota, Natsuko. (2000). "Deportation of Koreans from the Russian Far East to Central Asia." In Migration in Central Asia: Its History and Current Problems, edited by Hisao Komatsu, Chika Obiya, and John Schoeberlein. JCAS Symposium Series 9. Osaka, Japan: Japan Center for Area Studies, National Museum of Ethnology, 127–145.
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