Perspectives on the Global Past. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. x, 273 pp. (Illustrations.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5678-6.
Burnt by the Sun depicts the fates of ethnic Koreans in the Russian Far East from the late nineteenth century until their deportation to Central Asia. The book is based on extensive archival research in Russia, Japan, and the US, as well as on interviews with some sixty surviving Korean deportees in Central Asia. The book makes an original contribution to the debate on the nature of Soviet nationality policies. The main objective of the book is to prove that the ethnic policies of the Soviet Union were not only based on ideology and security considerations, as previous research has maintained, but rather stemmed mainly from the “Tsarists continuities” that fed Russian chauvinism and colonial attitudes towards the border regions, and that regarded nationalities as primordial racial categories. At the same time, the book aims to convince the reader of the loyalty of local ethnic Koreans to the Soviet Union, and tries to rectify their unjust labelling as an enemy nation.
The book is chiefly organized in a chronological manner, stretching from 1863 until the early 1940s. After the introduction, the second chapter (1863–1917) serves to lay the ground for the argument about Tsarist continuities. It traces the shift from the label “Yellow labour” to “Yellow peril,” a term that came to denote not only the Japanese, but also the Chinese and the Koreans who lived in the Russian Far East. It also shows how the ethnicity of diasporic groups became equated with political allegiance during periods of crisis. The next chapter deals with the period of Japan’s intervention, and it describes vividly the different groups of Koreans who lived and worked in the Soviet Far East during that time: early agricultural settlers who had already developed a local identity and loyalty towards Soviet Russia, more recent waves of Korean immigrants inspired by the promises of the new Soviet Russia, Koreans who had fled from Japanese occupation, and those who were recruited from the Korean Peninsula and Japan to serve the local Japanese rulers. As the author shows, the Soviet leaders were unable to differentiate between these various groups, which led to the image of all Koreans having aided and abetted the Japanese occupation, although many of them had, for example, fought and died in the ranks of the Red Army.
The next two chapters deal with the Soviet indigenization or korenization policy, which allowed ethnic minorities to establish autonomous regions at various administrative levels, and invited them to participate in the society and administration to remake them as “Soviet people.” The policy was based on the principle of “national in form, socialist in content.” The author shows how the Koreans were able to excel in their educational pursuits, and describes their devoted contributions towards local affairs. Their success is mainly described as a result of the affirmative policies, but here, it would have been interesting to know to what extent the Korean Confucian traditions contributed to their laudatory performance. The successful integration of ethnic Koreans into Chinese society has been explained by their Confucian traditions that emphasize education and service in the government.
The sixth and seventh chapters focus on the policies and developments that led to the deportation of Koreans from the Soviet Far East to Central Asia. These chapters bring up the contradictory, if not schizophrenic, features of this period, when race-based deportations were planned and undertaken, and purges took place despite ethnically tolerant socialist korenization policies. In spite of being an exemplary minority, ethnic Koreans were regarded as a security threat because of their birth, and as aliens who could not possibly become loyal Soviet citizens. The Koreans were the first Soviet nationality to face total deportation. However, the author has found earlier undiscovered evidence of some two thousand Koreans who were able to remain in northern Sakhalin Island and work for Soviet-Japanese companies. According to the author, this proves that the nationality policies were not solely based on ideology, but also pure economic calculations, which affected the complex policy implementation process. The last chapter before the book’s conclusion provides a brief description of the author’s fieldwork in Central Asia.
While the author has produced valuable work in putting together the narrative of Soviet Koreans in the wider context of ethnic purges in the Soviet Union, the reader might still have appreciated better editorial efforts to make the text more fluent and its structure more cohesive. It is intermittently difficult to follow the story, and reading the first half of the book requires detailed knowledge of the history of the two World Wars. Moreover, additional maps and tables about the number of Koreans would have brought more clarity. Occasionally, the author’s aim to prove the loyalty of the Soviet Koreans results in repetitive content. Sometimes the author relies on generalizations which undermine the strength of the argument, in statements like, “all [Koreans] were acting out of loyalty to the state” (143).
To sum up, the book is a rich micro-history of the construction and purge of the Soviet Korean nationality in the multicultural, geopolitically complex Soviet Far East. In addition to an academic readership, this book will also fascinate readers with an interest in East Asian and Russian political and military history. With regard to the increasing xenophobia in the Russian Far East towards Chinese immigrants, the “Tsarist continuities” theory provides a useful framework for an analysis of contemporary developments in the region.
Outi Luova
University of Turku, Turku, Finland
pp. 833-835