Introduction
In the past two decades, historians began to problematize the normative category of citizenship, as race, class, and gender complicated the idea of a radically universalist, Enlightenment-inspired conception of modern political community as a gathering of individual citizens with equal rights (e.g., Sahlins Reference Sahlins2004; Gammerl Reference Gammerl2006; Lee Reference Lee2003; Ngai Reference Ngai2014; Smiley Reference Smiley2012, Reference Smiley2014; Yaroshevski Reference Yaroshevski, Lazzerini and Brower1997). This critical reading of modern citizenship also drew attention to practices of subjecthood and belonging to the polity in imperial formations of the past. In particular, in the history of the Russian Empire, several historiographic contributions stand out. Eric Lohr, in the first monograph on the subject, argued that the Russian Empire slowly yet steadily moved toward the modern practice of citizenship in the wake of the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s (Lohr Reference Lohr2012). This transformation is well illustrated by the gradual elimination of differences between the estates (Smith Reference Smith2014; Freeze Reference Freeze1986; Confino Reference Confino2009), the abolition of special privileges for desirable foreigners, and the introduction of the universal draft. In contrast, Jane Burbank argued persuasively that despite all these developments, until 1917 the Russian Empire practiced what she called “an imperial rights regime,” a sort of “mosaic” citizenship in which particular groups of the population enjoyed rights and privileges and owed the state duties through membership in legal estates (Burbank Reference Burbank2006). Alexander Morrison, looking at the practice of subjecthood in colonial Turkestan, suggested that belonging to the polity was not an open-ended phenomenon, and that in Central Asia native populations were excluded altogether from access to imperial subjecthood and membership in estates with attending rights and privileges (Morrison Reference Morrison2012). Research into the practices of subjecthood of the Chinese in the Russian Far East showed a complicated process, in which notions of modern citizenship coexisted with imperial practices of creating separate legal spaces for different groups of the population (Glebov Reference Glebov2017b). Moreover, in the last decades of imperial Russia, questions of subjecthood and belonging to the polity were increasingly influenced by the global circulation of ideas about race and civilizational competence, as well as by the rise of settler colonial projects in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Far East.
These discussions of the concepts and practices of imperial subjecthood and citizenship underscore the problem of belonging to the polity and, consequentially, the problem of empire as such in Russian history (Semyonov Reference Semyonov2008). From the perspective of new imperial history, empire is not just a massive, expanding, or liberty-denying regime. The main distinction between the imperial and the national models can be described in terms of their respective modes of rationalization of differences. While in the case of the nation-state we often find a universally applied and recognized criterion of difference, such as ethnicity or class, in the imperial situation multiple categories of difference coexisted synchronically (Gerasimov, Glebov, and Mogilner Reference Gerasimov, Glebov and Mogilner2016, 27–28). These regimes of difference did not supplant each other, and they only partially overlay. The imperial state treated all these different categories in different ways and also served as an active producer of new categories of difference (e.g., Burbank and Cooper Reference Burbank and Cooper2011; for a discussion of confessional difference and Russia as a confessional state see Crews Reference Crews2003).
The imperial situation did not mean that the late 19th century empire was a precursor to modern multiculturalism. The multiple overlapping identities did not preclude domination and power misbalance. However, these power misbalances are almost impossible to describe by a reference to a single ethnonational group on each side of the power divide. A Polish exile, a victim of imperial oppression in the European part of the Empire, could be a colonizer and empire-builder in Siberia or the Far East. A peasant, the ultimate subaltern of imperial Russia, becomes a privileged colonist in the imperial borderland. However, in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, the imperial situation was also marked by the nationalizing efforts of the imperial center. In the reigns of the last two emperors, the imperial authorities sought to transform the Russian Empire into a national state dominated by ethnic Russians, both discursively and in terms of administrative measures. To be sure, the meaning of Russianness shifted depending on the time and the place. In the case of the Russian Far East, the nationalizing efforts of the imperial state gradually assumed the language of race as a modern and comparative element (e.g., Mogilner Reference Mogilner2013; Tolz Reference Tolz, Miller, Sdvizhkov and Schierle2012; Glebov Reference Glebov, Mogilner and Turdaforthcoming). This language, however, did not become a single and universal point of reference, and imperial authorities continued to operate in the social and legal world of an empire where multiple categories of difference coexisted.
In the Far Eastern borderlands of the empire this meant that multiple understandings of imperial subjecthood clashed in the last decades of imperial Russia. In the case of Russian Koreans, their de facto treatment as members of the peasant estate was complicated by questioning of their belonging to the imperial polity on grounds of race and ethnicity (e.g., Chang Reference Chang2016; Park Reference Park2019; Sablin and Kuchinsky Reference Sablin and Kuchinsky2017; Tikhonov Reference Tikhonov2016). The problem of exclusion of Koreans from the imperial polity has been only cursorily treated in recent literature (Chang Reference Chang2016; Park Reference Park2019). Alyssa Park in particular describes the process by which Korean communities were given Russian subjecthood in the context of expanding territorial sovereignty of Russia, China, and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This focus on territorial sovereignty, though, tends to obscure the internal heterogeneity of the imperial space and the continued importance of categories such as estate or confession in the imperial management of populations.
The questioning of the Koreans’ position in Russia was influenced by at least four different factors. First, the spatial concentration of Koreans in the strategic border region troubled Russian and later Soviet imperial administrators, as they feared possible military conflicts with Qing China and with imperial Japan after 1910. Second, Japanese imperial designs in Korea and the annexation of the peninsula by Japan in 1910 turned Koreans on the Russian territory into a population with an external homeland controlled by a competing power. Third, the Korean population became entangled in the designs of the imperial administrators to settle the Russian Far East and in the process to Russify it by altering the demographic balance. As the colonial project in the Far East gathered momentum in the first decade of the 20th century, concerns about Korean occupation of lands that could be settled by “Russians” (the term refered to any arrivals from the European part of the empire except for Jews) increased as well. Finally, beginning in the 1890s, race emerged as a new category to rationalize human diversity and began to compete with other elements of the imperial repertoire of classificatory devices, such as estate and confession. While racial references were present before the 1890s in administrative discussions in the Far East, it was only in the last decade of the 19th century that some Russian bureaucrats in the region began to refer to immutable and primordial characteristics of Koreans. More importantly, in the 1880s and 1890s, Chinese and Koreans were treated very differently. The overwhelming majority of Chinese were categorized as foreign subjects and excluded from any claim to land, while many Koreans were provided with access to Russian subjecthood, albeit in constricted ways. In the new racial idiom after the 1890s, Koreans in the Russian Far East were often subsumed in the broader category of “the yellow race” (e.g., Stephan Reference Stephan1996; Kotkin and Wolff Reference Kotkin and Wolff2015; Zatsepine Reference Zatsepine2017; Siegelbaum Reference Siegelbaum1978; Stolberg Reference Stolberg2004).
These racial categorizations, though, did not translate into a universally applied policy. In this article, I am going to discuss the development of administrative language regarding and practice toward the Korean population in the Far Eastern provinces of imperial Russia. In doing so, I am making two interrelated arguments. First, I argue that settler colonization and the nationalizing empire were fundamentally important factors in shaping how Russian authorities imagined and practiced imperial subjecthood. The drive to transform the Far Eastern provinces into a bulwark of Russianness clashed with persistent attempts to conceptualize and manage imperial diversity in terms other than national. In the imperial situation, the idea of Koreans as peasants—and thus useful agents of colonization—conflicted with the notion that peasants, the ultimately “national” estate, ought to be ethnically Russian. Consequently, I argue that the neo-traditionalist practice of empire was still present—yet never articulated as a coherent vision for the organization of the imperial space—at the very peak of settler colonialism and the nationalizing empire (on late imperial neotraditionalism, see Riegg Reference Riegg2018). Practitioners of the neo-traditionalist approach were not necessarily premodern archaists who saw the empire as a combination of differently defined corporate groups. Neither were they entirely blind to the nationalizing, racializing, or geopolitical rhetoric. They did not disregard the particularities of various groups in some kind of imperial universalism. Rather, the neotraditionalist approach to difference was mostly pragmatic, ad hoc, and in search of balance. The neotraditionalists used the sediment of old imperial categories and identifications to manage diversity in the new environment of nationalizing claims and policies (Rieber Reference Rieber1989). Although these administrative debates focused on accommodation and exclusion of Koreans in the Russian polity before 1917, they also provide a useful background for understanding the deportation of Koreans by the Stalinist regime in 1937.
The Russian Far East as a Colonial Enterprise
The term “Far East” did not gain circulation in Russia until the beginning of the 20th century. The territories on the easternmost edges of the empire were largely referred to as Eastern Siberia or the Amur region (Amurskii krai) (Bassin Reference Bassin1999). The latter term in particular was applied to the territories gained by the Russian Empire from the Qing through the treaties of Aigun (1858) and Beijing (1860). These territories included the left bank of the Amur (Heilongjiang) River to its confluence with the Ussuri River, and the land between the latter and the Sea of Japan. These territories constituted the Amur province, located on the left bank of the river, and the Maritime province, stretching from the border with Korea in the south to the Bering straits along the Pacific Coast. Initially, the newly acquired territories were administered by the governor general of Eastern Siberia in Irkutsk. In 1884, as a result of administrative reform, the new governor generalship of the Priamur krai was established (Matsuzato Reference Matsuzato2012). It consisted of the two newly acquired provinces, Sakhalin Island and the Transbaikal province, transferred from the governor generalship of Eastern Siberia. The governor general resided in the village Khabarovka (from 1894 the city of Khabarovsk) at the confluence of the Ussuri and the Amur Rivers. The governor of the Amur province resided in Blagoveshchensk, and the Governor of the Maritime province in Khabarovka. At the same time, Muraviev-Amurskii Peninsula and the city of Vladivostok formed a separate governorship under the governor general. It was abolished in 1888, and the peninsula and the city reverted back to being a part of the Maritime province.
The incorporation of the Amur region into the Russian Empire was largely due to the relentless efforts of N. N. Muraviev (later Count Muraviev-Amurskii), who successfully used the unprecedented weakness of China after the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion to push the Qing government to cede what used to be the northeastern corner of Manchuria to Russia. Muraviev and the cohort of progressive administrators who he attracted to the region envisioned the Amur lands as a sort of tabula rasa. It was to become a part of Russia, a part that was modern and not burdened by the historical vestiges left in Europe. Supported by progressive bureaucrats in the capital (led by Grand Prince Konstantin Nikolaevich, the General Admiral of the Navy), Muraviev had envisioned the Amur krai as colonized by free settlers even before the abolition of serfdom happened in European Russia. However, faced with demographic and economic weakness on the remote borderland, Muraviev had to fall back on more familiar military and administrative means of colonization (Glebov Reference Glebov2017a).
As a result, in the first two decades of the imperial Far East, its civilian population remained miniscule. As was the custom elsewhere in the empire, Cossack settlements were established along the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, which formed the new border. The Cossacks for the Amur were drawn from the Transbaikal Cossack Host, itself a new creation by Muraviev who in 1851 organized the host by transferring serf peasants ascribed to the Nerchinsk mining district, Buriats, Evenks, and Siberian Cossacks to the Transbaikal Cossack Host. In 1858, the Amur Cossack Host was created, followed in 1888 by the Ussuri Cossack Host. Cossacks were settled in stations along the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, with locations for the stations chosen by administrators on the basis of convenience for postal communications rather than agriculture. Hence, in the first decades the Cossacks struggled to establish a functioning economy despite the extremely generous land allotments (Ivanov Reference Ivanov1912; Sergeev Reference Sergeev1983). Peasant settlement remained even scarcer than the Cossack one as Muraviev was only allowed to attract settlers from Eastern Siberia. By the end of the 1870s, the Russian population of the Amur and Maritime provinces was less than 50,000 people, and most of them were either Cossacks or regular troops.
However, as the Russian authorities embarked upon the building of infrastructure (port installations in Nikolaevsk-on-Amur and Vladivostok, road construction, military barracks, etc.), the demand for labor triggered a migration from China. Part of the larger Chinese outmigration in the 19th century, Chinese labor and mercantile migration to Siberia began as a trickle. 5,000 to 6,000 migrants arrived annually, mostly in Vladivostok and the southern part of the Maritime province. Like the global Chinese outmigration, the one to Russia gathered momentum toward the turn of the century (McKeown Reference McKeown2010). Although the Russian authorities attempted to limit and regulate it, by the end of World War I up to a half-million Chinese workers labored in Russia. Largely viewed negatively by the Russian administrators, the Chinese presence provided an important background against which the Korean migrants were treated (Nyiri Reference Nyiri2007; Sorokina Reference Sorokina1999; Petrov Reference Petrov2003; Park Reference Park2019; Nesterova Reference Nesterova2004).
In the early 1880s, in connection with the so-called Ili Crisis that threatened a war with China, Russian authorities brought troops to Vladivostok via a circumnavigation route from Odessa. The experience gave rise to the overseas colonization by peasants. The Volunteer Fleet began making regular journeys from Odessa to Vladivostok and before the beginning of the 20th century brought over 20,000 peasant settlers to the Russian Far East (Busse Reference Busse1896). This resettlement coincided with the rise of nationalizing rhetoric in the reign of Alexander III, a rhetoric that in the Far East began to assume a racial character. For instance, the Governor of the Maritime province wrote in his 1893 annual report to the Emperor that “one of the main undertakings of the government in the Maritime province is the peopling of the South Ussuri region by Russians. Their transportation by the sea is proceeding increasingly, and thus the nucleus of Russian villages here in the region is growing year by year and strengthening, thereby gradually creating a reliable bastion against the influx of the yellow race.”Footnote 1 The governor boasted that the total number of overseas settlers and their children reached 22,243 souls in 1893. Given generous allotments of 100 desiatins of land for a household, peasant settlers began to form the second largest group next to the Cossacks. As the Trans-Siberian railroad through Manchuria was completed in 1903, the number of settlers increased throughout the Far East (Marks Reference Marks1991). The new arrivals differed from the wave of colonists who came by sea. While the first group primarily originated in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire (due to the proximity of these provinces to Odessa), the latter group came mostly from the Russian provinces. They also differed in terms of their economic status: the overseas colonization required the prospective settler to pay the way, while the overland settlers were often sponsored by the state. Their land allotments differed, too: the earlier settlers received the 100 desiatins per household, while the later arrivals could count on 15 desiatins per male in the family.
By the time of the first Russian revolution in 1904–1905, the colonial project in the Russian Far East created a highly diverse society. So-called Russians (who could in ethnic terms belong to practically any group in the empire) consisted of Cossacks, old-timer and newly arrived settlers, troops, and military and civilian officers. A cosmopolitan mercantile elite of Russians, Poles, Finns, Swedes, French, Germans, and Americans emerged in the three largest cities, Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Blagoveshchensk. Chinese laborers were present in the cities (in Vladivostok in 1897 they were at least a third of the population, with the total number of foreign subjects reaching approximately half of the city dwellers) and in the countryside, where they either worked on the fields of the Russian peasants and Cossacks as hired hands, or in the gold industry in the Amur region. The story of Korean subjecthood unraveled against the background of this colonial project in the Russian Far East.
Koreans: Neither Foreigners nor Subjects
Although the northeastern corner of Manchuria, which became the Russian Far East, had the legacy of a powerful state presence as an important part of the Jurchen Jin dynasty and the early Korean states of Goguryo and Balhae, by the mid-19th century it was thinly populated. On the Chinese side, it was mostly due to the policy of Qing emperors, who resettled Manchus to the south of Manchuria, prohibited Han settlement in the area, and created and carefully guarded the image of Manchuria as the ancestral home of the dynasty (Elliott Reference Elliott2000). On the Choson side, the court sought to prohibit Korean migration beyond the Tumen River, apparently seeking to maintain the border area as a buffer against the Jurchen inroads and, after mid-17th century, to avoid problems with the Qing (Park Reference Park2019).
When the Russians arrived in the late 1850s and established the first garrisons and Cossack stations, the southern part of the Maritime province (known at the time as the Southern Ussuri region) appeared empty to them. However, it changed fairly soon. In 1864, only a year after the founding of the military post Vladivostok, a group of 14 Korean families settled near the Novgorodskii military post (later called Pociete). In a report to the Maritime provincial governor, Colonel Oldenburg wrote that “the [Korean] families are successfully engaged in gardening and agriculture and promise by their love of labor to be very useful settlers.” The Colonel reported on his own visit to the new Korean settlement that he “found 8 fanzas very well built, large and well maintained gardens, and land sown with chumiza, barley, buckwheat, and corn, up to 15 desiatins.” The Colonel did not just point out the success of Koreans as settlers in the newly acquired Russian territory but also suggested that the government should consider giving them grain as a loan if needed (Toropov Reference Toropov2004, 20).
This initial settlement was followed by another, and in a year time hundreds of Korean families began crossing the border. In 1865, the governor of the Maritime province reported on the new arrivals and explained that the Chinese authorities in the border town of Hunchun demanded from the Korean authorities a stop to migration and the return of all those who migrated. The Russian governor, P. V. Kazakevich, suggested that since Russia had no treaty with Korea and since Russia allows foreigners to become Russian subjects without asking permission from their native countries, it could be useful to enlist the newly arrived Koreans into the estate of state peasants so they are protected from Chinese and Korean authorities (Toropov Reference Toropov2004, 21–22). No particular action followed, and in the next two decades Koreans who lived on the Russian territory remained in a legal limbo. Formally foreigners, they nevertheless were often treated as de facto members of the peasant estate: their villages were self-governing under the tutelage of local police officials, they paid taxes, and they performed various duties expected of the taxed estate (such as road and bridge repairs, transportation services, etc.). In 1879, a report on the administration of Chinese and Koreans in Vladivostok pointed out, “Koreans are equalized with the settlers of the South Ussuri region. They live in Vladivostok with permits issued by elders of their villages.”Footnote 2
In 1884, imperial authorities in the Far East began to introduce new regulations on the border crossing (Glebov Reference Glebov2017b). Primarily aimed at controlling Chinese laborers and merchants, the new legislation abolished the article 172 of the Russian penal code that required the authorities to extradite to China those Chinese subjects who committed a crime on Russian territory. A new court was established in Vladivostok, staffed with Chinese and Korean interpreters (Sobranie Uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii pravitel’stva 1884, 865-866). All Chinese in the Russian Empire were divided into two categories, those who could prove their residence prior to the treaties of Aigun and Beijing, and those who arrived after the dates of the treaties. The first category, numerically very small, was considered to have established Russian subjecthood. Those in the second category were required to produce national passports, consular visas, and permits (bilety) for the right to stay and work in Russia for one year. The permits came with fees paid at the border crossings, where entry visas were exchanged for the permits. In theory, residing and working in Russia without the permits and national passports became illegal and made one subject to deportation. The reform produced few tangible results, as the institutions that were supposed to control the process were very weak. Border commissars and police and Cossack officers had no resources to implement the new policy.
As the imperial authorities developed this administrative process, though, they also began to consider the legal situation of Koreans. Baron A. N. Korf, the governor general of the Priamur krai who led the charge to introduce the border controls to the Chinese, fully shared in the nationalizing rhetoric of Alexander III’s reign. This nationalizing rhetoric also influenced his position on Koreans. In 1887, Korf wrote to F. K. Girs at the Ministry of Internal Affairs with an explanation for his plan of action in regard to the Korean population:
Initially, Koreans undoubtedly brought benefits, but now they are becoming a burden. The Russian population is arriving here, but nothing has been done to regulate Korean presence. Koreans occupy the best places and lands in the region, and these lands are not that numerous. And in all justice they should belong to the Russian settlers. They do not bring any income for the treasury, and they terribly exhaust the land, working it to the point that even grass cannot grow there.Footnote 3
Korf’s plan involved a separation of Koreans into Russian subjects and foreigners similar to the Chinese blueprint. He proposed to have a census of the entire Korean population on June 1, 1888, and after that to offer Korean villagers a chance to become Russian subjects. Korf insisted that Koreans had to be explained that once they became Russian subjects, they would have the same rights as Russian settlers, and the same obligations. For Korf, the most important sign that the Koreans agreed to Russian subjecthood was their hairdo. As he wrote to Girs, “It should be announced to them that only those of them can become Russian subjects who agree to leave behind the national hairdo, that is, to cut off the hair bonnet on their head and replace it with a European dress, along with baptism into Orthodoxy” (Russian State Historical Archive [RGIA] DV. F. 702. Op. 1. D. 69a. Ll. 20). Those Koreans who would not agree to these conditions by January 1, 1899, would be deprived of the right to use state land in the region in any form, and would be treated as foreigners based on the Chinese model.Footnote 4
However, when Korf requested the opinion of P. F. Unterberger, the governor of the Maritime province, where most Koreans resided, the response to his project was distinctly negative. Unterberger wrote to Korf in 1890 to express his reservations and explained that he was not yet sure of the “full solidarity of this population with the Russian interests in the region.”Footnote 5 Unterberger argued, “[Koreans have] much more in common in terms of beliefs and everyday life customs with the neighboring state than with us.” He claimed that if another state offered them better conditions, they would move out, since “one cannot speak of their consciousness that this would be contrary to the oath.” Moreover, Unterberger feared that in case of war, should the Chinese attack Korean villages, the Russian state would be obligated to protect them if their inhabitants were Russian subjects.Footnote 6 Unterberger’s proposal was to postpone indefinitely administering the oath of allegiance and for the time being to delay giving the status of Russian subjects to the Korean population.Footnote 7
Still, on July 21, 1891, Korf sent Governor Unterberger instructions to divide the Korean population into two main categories: those who resided in Russia before 1884, the year of the first treaty with Korea, and those who arrived later. The first category would be administered an oath of allegiance and become Russian subjects; however, the second would be required to follow the rules for foreigners along with the Chinese. As Unterberger reported to Korf, in the summer of 1892 local officials conducted the first censuses of Korean villages and announced conditions on which Koreans could become Russian subjects. Those Koreans included in the second category were given two grace years and were expected to leave afterward (Toropov Reference Toropov2004, 93–94). Similar censuses were conducted in 1893 and 1894. In 1893, a special commission was created by Unterberger to review the results of the census and divide all Koreans in the South Ussuri region into two categories. The commission was also charged with developing plans for administering the oaths of allegiance to the Koreans.
As Korf left the office and was replaced by General Sergei Dukhovskoi as the governor general of the Priamur krai, the issue of regularizing Korean presence was put on the backburner, possibly due to the crisis in Korea itself. But in the middle of the 1890s the bureaucratic machine moved ahead with the process of regularization and began accepting entire villages of Koreans into the Russian subjecthood.Footnote 8 At the same time, in the period of 1893-1895, imperial administrators began removing from the land those Koreans who were enlisted in the second category. In some instances, the land from which Koreans were removed was allocated to village communes of Russian settlers. The process immediately generated a crisis as several hundred displaced Korean families complained to the governor general, pointing out that the commission of 1893 made numerous mistakes during the census and enlisted in the second category many families who had been among the very first arrivals in the South Ussuri region. Others pointed out that the authorities never informed them of the two-year grace period but threatened that if the Koreans did not leave immediately, they will be removed by force and their houses burned. In Pociete district, over 260 households were thus enlisted in the second category and complained. Many petitions appealed to the Russian authorities’ sensibilities about Russification and assimilation. As one petition explained, “we had arrived along with those who were enlisted in the first category, we cut off our queues, taught our children the Russian language, and returning back to our homeland will be equal to our ruin and death.”Footnote 9
In April 1895, the governor general Dukhovskoi dispatched his senior official for special assignments to study the complaints of Korean communities. The official, N. A. Nasekin, thoroughly studied Korean settlements and economy and became convinced of the Koreans’ utility for Russia (Nasekin Reference Nasekin1904). In his report to Dukhovskoi, he found that by and large the complaints of the Koreans in the Pociete district were justified and that the commission often assigned people to wrong categories. Nasekin reported to the governor general that Koreans blamed not just the commission of Russian officials which classified them wrongly but also Korean county and village elders who, in the words of the petitioners, “acted mostly in favor of their relatives and did not care much about other Koreans.”Footnote 10 A Russian official Chuprov, who acted as a plenipotentiary on behalf of the two complaining Korean villages in the Suifun district also pointed out how many Korean households classified in the second category had actually been listed in the census conducted in 1877-1878 by the Russian official Vislenev, which proved without any doubt their right to Russian subjecthood while undermining the accuracy of the 1893 commission’s findings.
Nasekin presented the arguments against the displacement of those Koreans who were not enlisted in the first category in a way that spoke to the concerns of the Russian officials, ever fearful of the emergence of landless rural proletariat. As he argued, “the eviction of a few hundred Korean families is undesirable because they will disperse as hired laborers and homeless vagabonds while the region will be deprived of a few hundred hard-working and settled families who are accurately paying their dues and no doubt are bringing significant benefit.” He also addressed the possibility of some Korean families moving to Manchuria, pointing out, “They will settle there but will display animosity against Russia.” In Nasekin’s view, the land taken from Koreans would not have been suitable for Russian settlers: “It is sandy and rocky and is not appropriate for sowing wheat and rye.” Russian officials often sought to take into consideration the economic prosperity of the Korean households when offering Russian subjecthood, and Nasekin explained, “Koreans enlisted in the second category appear poorer because since 1893 they are harassed by the demands to leave and many have sold their cattle and deserted the field, but they are not different from the first category in terms of their love for labor.”Footnote 11
The governor general received Nasekin’s report and in June 1895 ordered governor Unterberger to immediately administer the oaths of allegiance to the Koreans of the Suifun district, to be followed by the Koreans of the Pociete district in the fall of the same year. Dukhovskoi permitted local officials to reenlist Koreans of the second category into the first “if there [were] respectable reasons to do so.” The Koreans who were administered the oath were to be left on the land they occupied and equalized in their status with Russian peasants. The governor general ordered that starting on January 1, 1896, the Koreans had to be taxed with state and local taxes, as well as dues, equally with members of the peasant estate. Relying on the recommendations of Nasekin, who argued that Koreans eagerly convert to Orthodoxy and send children to Russian schools, Dukkhovskoi also ordered the governor “to strengthen measures aimed at their assimilation and forbid them to wear the national hair dress.”Footnote 12
The administrative process required the Koreans to sign acknowledgment receipts that they were informed of the repercussions of the new regulations. Thus, on April 2, 1897, the officials collected such receipts signed by both male and female Koreans (presumably, heads of households). The receipts claimed, “We, the below signed Koreans of the first and second categories of the Pociete district, the South Ussuri region, the Ianchihe county, villages of Krasnoe Selo, Nagornaia, Ianchihe, Upper Ianchihe, Baranovichi, Tuinhe, Krabbe, and Sukhanovka gave this receipt to the chief of the South Ussuri region in that the orders and the telegrams of the Governor General and the Military Governor of the Maritime province were announced to us, and that we agree to the conditions and to become Russian subjects in accordance with our own will.”Footnote 13
Such receipts were signed en masse by Koreans and bound together with collective oaths of allegiance. For instance, in 1897, such receipts were signed by 77 men and 75 women of the village Sukhanovka. On October 22, 1896, 104 men and 109 women signed the receipt in the village Riazanovo, 27 men and 24 women of the village Klark, and so on and so forth. Overall, a few thousand Korean households were asked, and they signed the receipts and were administered oaths of allegiance to the Russian state.
In 1893, over 15,000 Koreans lived in Russia, and most of them became Russian subjects by the turn of the century.Footnote 14 However, the border was not closed, and Koreans continued to arrive in the Russian Far East annually. Many of them leased land from Koreans who had become Russian subjects, or, much more often, from Russian settlers and Cossacks, whose land allotments could not possibly be farmed by a single family. In 1897, according to the annual review of the Maritime province, 23,279 Koreans (14,181 men and 9,095 women) resided in the province. Of that number, 15,573 were Russian subjects, while the rest were considered foreigners. It is possible that the number of Koreans, that is, foreign subjects, was even higher due to poor reporting and registration. In the following years, local administration continued to administer oaths of allegiance and confer subjecthood, sometimes to individuals and sometimes to entire settlements, but continued migration ensured that Koreans remained divided between those in Russian subjecthood and those who were outsiders. When governor general Dukhovskoi submitted his report to the Emperor for the year 1896–1897, he used three categories to describe Koreans: (1) those who settled before 1884; (2) those “who settled after 1884 that lived a settled life; and (3) those who lived in the Maritime province with permits as foreign subjects. According to the report, only in 1896–1897, 10,343 Koreans were accepted into Russian subjecthood, of whom 701 individuals had initially been classified as belonging to the second category. At the same time, 4,158 Koreans were considered foreign subjects.Footnote 15 These numbers, likely inaccurate especially in the case of the second and third category, nonetheless demonstrate the continued influx of Koreans into Russian territory. Just three years later, in 1900, governor of the Maritime province N. M. Chichagov reported that 16,150 Koreans who were Russian subjects and 13,909 Koreans who were foreign subjects resided in the province.Footnote 16 The initial idea of Korf to regularize the position of Koreans and to divide them neatly into Russian subjects (with the status of the peasants) and foreigners presumed a synchronic solution to the dynamic situation. In reality, the multiple statuses of Koreans (as reflected in the three categories) continued even across the time of the revolution and the Civil War, as newly arrived Koreans swelled the ranks of those who were considered foreign subjects.
Settler Colonialism, Russification, and Imperial Subjecthood at an Impasse
But if the administrative apparatus slowly but surely arrived at a point where imperial subjecthood was granted to many (albeit not all) Korean households, the central issue of Korean subjecthood began to emerge. If Koreans were to become Russian subjects, they would only become such as members of the peasant estate, since one could not be a Russian subject without a corresponding membership in an estate. As peasants, Korean village communes would be entitled to land. But were they to be granted land according to the rules promulgated for the settlers at the rate of 100 desiatins per family (or 15 desiatins per member of the household after 1901)? The problem presented a political, legal, and administrative collision. On the one hand, the general policy required efforts aimed at the Russification of the borderland and the increase of the demographic power of Russians (any arrivals from European Russia regardless of their ethnic identities, except for Jews, were considered Russians). On the other hand, regularizing the position of Koreans as Russian subjects and members of the peasant estate would entitle them to all the privileges of the peasant estate in the Far East, and in particular to the communal right to land. Since the regulations applicable to peasant settlers allowed for large land allotments, the land occupied by Koreans would become inaccessible for Russian settlers.
The collision was resolved temporarily by altering the procedure for acquiring Russian subjecthood. In theory, any person residing in the Far Eastern provinces of the Empire could request admission to Russian subjecthood from the governor general of the Priamur krai. The governor general would then investigate the request and recommend the conferral of subjecthood to the minister of internal affairs, who would in turn request the emperor’s permission. When the permission was granted, the standardized text of the oath would be administered by local officials in the presence of the governor or governor general. The person requesting subjecthood would indicate the legal estate into which the petitioner would be inscribed once subjecthood was granted. In most individual cases, such estates were those of merchants or town dwellers. In the Korean case, the mass conferral of subjecthood required alterations and simplification of the procedure for logistical reasons, but it also involved something rather unusual. Although Koreans accepted into Russian subjecthood became members of the peasant estate (in theory, their Koreanness would become invisible to the imperial state as they would be legally referred to as peasants), in practice the imperial administration in the Far East altered the oath of allegiance administered to the Koreans. Along with the oath, Koreans signed a promissory note, in which they agreed,
We became Russian subjects on our own accord, and we agree with the requirements. We will not have any complaints about receiving an allotment of land in one common place for villages, for each family no more than 15 desiatins. These lands that may be in our temporary possession can be cut off by the local administration’s decision, and we agree with that. We also agree right away that such cutoffs can happen immediately if the local administration deems it necessary in favor of already existing or future Russian villages.Footnote 17
Already in 1895, governor general Dukhovskoi read the list of questions regarding Koreans from the chief of the South Ussuri region and left remarks on the margins of the document, which were supposed to be instructions for action. For instance, the chief asked what to do in the case of the Russian village of Pokrovka, which received part of the lands occupied by Koreans. As they became Russian subjects, their land allotments shrunk to only 10 desiatins, and the so-called excess land was transferred to Pokrovka. The governor general said that the officials should continue with the process anyway. When the chief of the South Ussuri region wrote that Koreans would lack enough land and be forced to move, the governor general confirmed, commenting, “It is entirely their own business. Those for whom there is not enough land may petition for resettlement elsewhere.”Footnote 18 Governor general Dukhovskoi also sent an instruction to the Maritime province governor, in which he ordered, “the overall amount of land now in use by Koreans should not be increased at the expense of Russian settlement, and wherever there is a possibility you should carve out from among the Korean settlements allotments for the accommodation in the future of peasants of smaller Russian settlements (hamlets). You should not allot more than 15 desiatins of convenient or inconvenient land per family, without feeling bad if that number is lower than this maximal norm.”Footnote 19 The tensions between Russian subjecthood with attending rights and obligations of the peasant estate on the one hand and the necessities of settler colonialism within the nationalizing empire on the other were thus resolved at the expense of Russian subjecthood. Koreans became Russian subjects and peasants, yet they were excluded from the rules, regulations, and practices applied to Russian peasant settlers in the Far East.
At the turn of the century, a series of developments occurred in the Russian Far East and sharpened the officials’ attention toward Koreans who settled in the strategically important southern tip of the Ussuri region. Russian imperial intrusion into Manchuria, the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, and the Boxer Rebellion with subsequent Russian occupation of Manchuria contributed to the officials’ concerns (Lukoianov Reference Lukoianov2008). At the same time, the great powers intervention in China added to the circulation of racialized rhetoric about the Chinese and Koreans. Russia’s emperor himself fully shared in the discourse of the so-called yellow peril and set the tone of the administrative language. In his report to the Emperor in 1901, Governor of the Maritime province N. M. Chichagov wrote, “In this province, the question of the presence of the representatives of the yellow race is more important than elsewhere as it is a strategic question.” Partaking in the nationalizing rhetoric of Nicholas’s reign, Chichagov claimed that it was his administration’s goal “to make sure that these representatives of the yellow race did not gain a firm and leading role in the economic life of the region, even if this role can just slow down rather than stop the firm establishment of the Russian element here.”Footnote 20
However, Chichagov’s position uneasily combined the new racializing rhetoric so characteristic of the last Romanov reign in Russia with what one can call a neo-traditionalist view of imperial diversity (for a discussion of neo-traditionalist rule in the Caucasus in the aftermath of 1905 revolution, see Riegg Reference Riegg2018). While Chichagov was determined to limit the presence of the Chinese, he was surprisingly positive in his tone about the Koreans. He claimed that Koreans had settled “almost the entire region of the border with Korea” and that “their hard-working habits in agriculture and especially their way of working the fields are good examples for Russian peasants.” Chichagov pointed out, in contrast to his predecessor P. F. Unterberger, “It is characteristic of these representatives of the yellow race to strive for assimilation with the Russians.” In Chichagov’s view, the signs of this could be found in the fact that Koreans accept Orthodoxy, build schools, and hire teachers. He pointed out that Korean schools no longer have Russian teachers because many Koreans speak Russian and can teach.Footnote 21 Addressing concerns about the Koreans’ loyalty to Russia, Chichagov explained that during the Boxer Rebellion and the Russian invasion of Manchuria the “peasant militia included two Korean detachments, each one hundred strong, and they had to go across the border to pursue gangs of bandits, which was completed by them with great success.” Chichagov asserted in his report, “Koreans are not a harmful element, and the only discomfort is that they are settled near the border.” Footnote 22 Chichagov’s suggestions were thus to stop additional Korean immigration into the Pociete region, as well as to resettle some Koreans to the northern part of the Ussuri region.
The Gondatti Era: Neo-Traditionalism vs Modernizing and Nationalizing Visions
Russian loss in the catastrophic Russo-Japanese War stoked racial fears and security concerns along the border. Especially after 1910, when Korea was annexed by the Japanese empire, these factors began to play a larger role and had a real impact on daily lives of Far Eastern populations. At the same time, in the wake of the first Russian revolution, P. A. Stolypin reforms merged nationalism, paternalistic bureaucratism, and colonialism in an attempt to resolve Russia’s social ills by resettling Russian peasants to the Far East (Yaney Reference Yaney1961; Zen′kovskii Reference Zen′kovskii1986; Ascher Reference Ascher2002). The defeat of Russia’s imperial expansion in southern Manchuria also redirected the attention of imperial authorities toward the Russian provinces proper. All these developments occurred in the context of a nationalizing empire—a series of diverging policies since the reign of Alexander III—that sought to transform imperial Russia into a nation-state on the example of the French Third Republic.
Among the new cadres who pursued these policies after the Revolution of 1905 was Nikolai L’vovich Gondatti (1860—1946). Gondatti was appointed governor general of the Priamur krai in 1911. The son of an Italian sculptor and a Russian noblewoman, Gondatti was an unusual imperial administrator in that he was, in fact, an academic (Remnev Reference Remnev2004, 26.). A graduate of Moscow University, he taught at the Moscow Aleksandrovskii Institute. A student and follower of Russia’s leading anthropologist D. N. Anuchin, Gondatti went to a scholarly expedition in Western Siberia, where he collected anthropological materials on the Mansi and quickly established his reputation as an expert in Finnish mythology. Soon, Gondatti emerged as the secretary of the Imperial Society of Lovers of Natural Science, Anthropology, and Ethnography. Although Gondatti worked in a field that was dominated by political exiles, in 1894 he assumed the position of an administrator in the Empire’s most north-easterly region, the Chukotka peninsula. In two years there, he became an expert in Chukchi ethnography and language and a scholar of international reputation (Remnev Reference Remnev2004, 448). In 1906, as part of P.A. Stolypin’s influx of new cadres into imperial governance, Gondatti became the governor of the Tobol’sk province in Siberia, which was followed by governorship in Siberian Tomsk. In 1910, Gondatti was appointed to lead the gigantic Amur expedition, the last large scale expedition mounted in imperial Russia, with the charge to map and explore the Amur region for the planned railroad there, which was to parallel the Chinese Eastern Railway running through the Japanese-threatened Manchuria. In 1911, in an unexpected move, Gondatti was appointed governor general of the entire Priamur krai, a post which was traditionally occupied by a high-ranking military officer. Gondatti remained the viceroy of the Russian Far East until the end of the imperial era. Gondatti’s combination of administrative progressivism, reputation as a scholar, ardent Russian nationalism, and willingness to work for the imperial administration were all characteristic of the Stolypin generation of imperial administrators who saw the business of empire in more modern and nationalizing terms (Dubinina Reference Dubinina1997).
Gondatti’s appointment as governor general made the connection between knowledge and imperial power very tangible. An ethnographer, anthropologist, statistician, and economist, Gondatti was also intensely nationalist and pursued radically anti-Chinese policies in the Russian Far East. He took an anti-Chinese position in the debate on the closing of the Russian labor market and worked tirelessly to aggressively increase Russian colonization of the region. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gondatti also was suspicious of Jews and was set on limiting Jewish presence in the Far East (Romanova Reference Romanova2001). His seven-year tenure as the imperial viceroy in the Far East was accompanied by economic expansion, modernization, and settler colonization of the region.
Following the stabilization of imperial authority after the First Russian Revolution, P. A. Stolypin’s reforms focused on creating an independent farmers class in Russia, which would be supportive of the monarchy. One of the central foci of these policies was peasant resettlement and massive colonization of Siberia and the Far East. The Resettlement Administration became an important player in the Far Eastern territories as its officials surveyed, measured, and carved out entire village settlements (Holquist Reference Holquist2010; Sunderland Reference Sunderland2010). It was in the context of these new efforts to speed up resettlement that the conflict between N. L. Gondatti and a representative of the Resettlement Administration occurred. Russian Koreans who lived in the Pociete district became entangled in this conflict, which also highlighted that formal imperial subjecthood was now more than ever supplanted with considerations of ethnicity and race.
The representative of the Resettlement Administration in question was Aleksei Alekseevich Tatishchev (1885–1947). In many ways, he was in direct opposition to Gondatti, whom Tatishchev described, using the English phrase, as a “self-made man” (Tatishchev Reference Tatishchev2001, 106). The son of a court chamberlain with a successful record of foreign service and Princess Meshcherskaia, Tatishchev came from a prominent aristocratic family based in the Tver province. The Tatishchevs did not just count Vasilii Tatishchev, the first modern historian of Russia and a prominent Petrine administrator among their ancestors. They were connected through marriages to the old aristocratic families at the very heart of imperial power. It was also a sign of the growing importance of colonization that Aleksei Tatishchev graduated from the Imperial Alexander Lyceum in 1906 and took up service in the Resettlement Administration as a clerk. He accompanied Head of the Resettlement Administration G. V. Glinka in his trip to Siberia and the Far East in 1909. In 1911, Tatishchev assumed the position of the head of the Vladivostok-based Maritime Resettlement district, which covered the Maritime province. As the positions of such regional heads were normally occupied by low-born beneficiaries of imperial upward social mobility, the arrival of the Moscow aristocrat was clearly reflective of the status of the institution among the elite layer of Russian nobility. Colonization was no longer a borderlands affair but a central project of the Empire’s transformation.
When Tatishchev arrived in Vladivostok in 1911 and assumed his duties as the head of the Resettlement district, he immediately encountered what he saw as irregularity in the settlement of Koreans. As he later described it in his memoirs, in the 1880s Korean land allotments of 15 desiatins per family were all located in the valleys along the banks of the rivers. This particular arrangement made it impossible to create new allotments for settlers on the slopes of the hills running down to the rivers, as Korean villages would block access to water for the newly planned settlements. Having encountered the technological problem, Tatishchev set out to resolve it in a technological way: Koreans had to be incentivized to move from those areas, where the rearrangement of land allotments would drastically reduce their landholdings. Therefore, the plan he developed envisioned offering Koreans large land allotments, 15 desiatins of land per family member, that is, equally with European settlers, in the northern part of the Maritime province (Tatishchev Reference Tatishchev2001, 109-110).
It is important to note that Tatishchev’s approach was likely shared by other resettlement officials who preferred to disregard racial or ethnic differences in the process of colonization. V. F. Romanov, a senior official in the Resettlement Administration who personally visited the Far East and was employed as the head of the Amur Expedition chancellery, thus expressed this colonization ideology:
Our colonial policy […] cannot be built on the narrowly national principles. It must go the American way. Every useful worker, Greek or Jew, must be used by the colony, especially like our Priamur’e […] where on the one hand rapid mass population is impossible and on the other hand our neighbors China and Japan, being in a better geographic situation, can more easily strengthen their political and economic influence in these empty regions. Hence it was clear to me that we needed to strengthen Russian influence in the Far East on the principles of subjecthood, even by settling even the yellows, like Koreans, not to speak of Jews.
(Romanov Reference Romanov2012, 190)Tatishchev traced the origins of his plan to the 1908 consultative meeting in Khabarovsk, which was organized during the visit of Senator B. E. Ivanitskii and V. G. Glinka to the Far East. This particular visit resulted in the 1909 formation of the St. Petersburg-based Committee for the Settlement of the Far East, of which Prime Minister P. Stolypin became the chair. The meeting in Khabarovsk led to the decision to speed up the settlement of the Far East, and it highlighted the necessity to reconfigure the land allotments of Koreans in the Pociete district. According to the report by Tatishchev to the governor general Gondatti, in 1910, the land surveyor Liubatovich was dispatched to create a general plan of new land allotments, and “for the 12 villages of the Adimi district new plans were created, according to which the lands on the slopes of the hills were added to the Korean allotments, while lands on the banks of rivers were cut off.”Footnote 23 On May 31, 1911, Tatishchev wrote to his subordinate, surveyor Liubatovich and told him to go to the Pociete district and allocate land in such a way that the slopes could be added to Korean allotments and the cutoffs could “be settled by Russian people.” According to Tatishchev’s instruction to Liubatovich, those Koreans who were Russian subjects could “instead of their plowed land receive new allotments in the remote parts of the Maritime province on the same conditions as Russian settlers.” The instruction added, “In general, all those who would like to resettle to other parts of the Province can do so on conditions for Russian settlers.” The last two lines were underlined by Gondatti, whose office immediately wrote to Tatishchev and informed him that his instructions went against the principles of the governor general’s policies regarding Korean resettlement from the border region. The office pointed out that governor general Gondatti had consulted with the Head of the Main Administration for Land Settlement and Agriculture, Krivoshein, and the latter did not object to Gondatti’s idea to limit land allotments for Koreans who chose to move.Footnote 24
Tatishchev was not clear about the origins of Gondatti’s position. However, he remarked in his memoirs, “Indeed, in those years, the slogan ‘Russia for the Russians’ proclaimed in Stolypin’s era took somewhat ugly forms in the Far East” (Tatishchev Reference Tatishchev2001, 112.). In the mind of the Moscow aristocrat, “the limitation of the land allotment deprived the resettlement of any meaning.” Characteristically, Tatishchev described Koreans as “very undemanding and hard-working […] and their harvests were relatively high while the cultivated surface amounted to nothing” (Tatishchev Reference Tatishchev2001, 111.). Describing the Stolypin-era policies as “narrow-mindedly nationalist,” Tatishchev viewed Koreans the way he viewed Russian settlers, paying attention to their ability to perform a particular activity (agriculture) rather than their civilizational competence, race, or assimilability. In his response to Gondatti on August 20, 1911, Tatishchev attempted to marshal the bureaucratic paper trail and explained, “I was guided by the opinion of the Committee for the Settlement of the Far East, which, with your participation in the meeting of April 9, 1910, pointed out that ‘one of the measures to incentivize the Koreans to voluntarily resettle to the areas more remote from the border could be the provision of land allotments on the same conditions as for Russian settlers, namely 15 desiatins of land per every male head’.”Footnote 25 However, Gondatti remarked on the margins of the explanation that the Committee’s recommendation “was just a suggestion.” In his response to Gondatti’s office, Tatishchev also explained that many Koreans petitioned for a permission to move together with Koreans—foreign subjects, who were working on their land. Tatishchev argued that he did not see any particular reason to reject these petitions: “Many years of practice legalized this situation, and I consider it just to allow this resettlement.” However, Gondatti, who saw continued Korean immigration as a problem, remained unconvinced and noted on the report that “this is exactly why they want larger land allotments.” The governor general also noted, “Right now arrangements are being made for the eviction of these Koreans.”Footnote 26
Gondatti’s determined opposition to providing Koreans with land allotments sufficient to stimulate their resettlement in essence put an end to Tatishchev’s plan. However, discussions about Korean (as well as Chinese) presence in the region continued. Tatishchev himself explained later that the Ministry “initiated a struggle against the decades long practice of leasing land to the Chinese as well as against the use of yellow agricultural workers on leased state lands.” Tatishchev pointed out the absurdity of this regulation as hiring of Chinese and Korean workers by private holders of land boomed (Tatishchev Reference Tatishchev2001, 112). One example can help illustrate the desperate attempts by the Gondatti administration to limit the presence of Asian workers in the regional agriculture. In 1913, the administration ordered the meetings (skhody) of the Cossack stations to discuss possible prohibitions on hiring Chinese and Korean workers. The Cossacks, however, resented the idea. At the meeting in Poltavskoe, the Cossacks pointed out that they are often called to perform military service, commenting, “Only an elderly head of family is left in the station.” They also explained, “Besides losing workers to the service, each family has to spend upward of 400 rubles on equipping the Cossack for service.” Under these circumstances, the Cossacks claimed they “could not manage without hiring the foreign workers.” Russian workers were more expensive, and “since the prices for grain [were] regulated by the market,” prohibition on foreign workers on the lands of the Ussuri Cossack host would result in the ruin of Cossack households.Footnote 27 The beginning of the war a year later put an end to the administrative efforts to prohibit the Chinese and Korean labor as mobilization of Russians depleted the labor force. In fact, in 1915 the authorities launched a massive recruitment effort in China to supplant the rapidly declining labor force on the Russian railroad system, bringing hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers into Russia. Although a few high-profile ethnic Germans prominent in the Far Eastern society, like the manager of Kunst & Albers, Adolph Dattan, had been interned and deported, in the conditions of the rapidly depleting labor force, any notion of the further Russification of the borderland had to be put on the backburner.
Conclusion
In the period from 1864 to 1917, Koreans in the Russian Empire were treated as de facto peasants. Initially, many among the imperial administrators also saw them as highly desirable agricultural settlers. Imperial administrators sought to regularize their position in legal terms, extending Russian subjecthood to those members of the Korean communities who had arrived prior to 1884, the time of the first Russian-Korean treaty. Many Koreans who arrived after that date also petitioned for subjecthood and received it. However, beginning in the 1880s and growing with every year, anti-Asian sentiment culminated during the tenure of N. L. Gondatti from 1911 to 1917. During the 1890s, a conflict arose between the logic of settler colonialism on the imperial frontier and the logic of imperial subjecthood. As imperial subjects, Koreans were enlisted in the peasant estate. It was this particular estate that was supposed to agriculturally colonize, settle, and Russify the Far Eastern provinces of the Empire. The outcome was yet another exceptional case: some Koreans were admitted into Russian subjecthood but treated as a special case of the peasant estate. While Koreans were granted access to the right to land, the conditions of that access differed from those of the so-called Russian peasant communities. The need to expand the demographic presence of Russians in the Far East also led to the first plans to stimulate resettlement of Koreans from the south of the Maritime province to other parts of the region. The administrative conflicts surrounding these plans for resettlement reveal how the question of Korean subjecthood was entangled with the projected colonization and land use in the region. Finally, one can also infer that these conflicts did not entirely disappear in the Soviet period, as the Bolshevik rulers of the Far Eastern krai designed their own plans for development, colonization, and resettlement, which, in turn, influenced the decision to deport the Korean community as a whole from the Russian Far East in 1937.
Disclosure
Author has nothing to disclose.
Financial Support
Research for this article has been made possible by financial support from the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities of Tyumen State University.
