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ADRIFT ON A RUSSIAN ISLAND, Part 2
A political crisis erupts
By Andrei Lankov

PART 1: Koreans left high and dry

YUZHNO-SAKHALINSK - In 1976-1977, Soviet authorities on Sakhalin Island, located off the east coast of Russia and to the north of Japan, found themselves in the midst of a political crisis involving the local Korean population. The ethnic group then numbered some 30,000, and had always been seen as somewhat suspicious. After all, they were from South Korea - the embodiment of capitalist evils in the Soviet propaganda of the era - and many of them did not take Soviet citizenship until decades after the Soviet Union took ownership of the island in 1945.

The older generation wanted to go home, and made no secret of the fact. However, for a while it was not possible as the the Soviet

  

Union had no diplomatic relations with South Korea and even Japan would not accept Sakhalin Koreans. It was Japan that had first sent (or rather lured) many of the Koreans to work on the island in mines and fisheries owned by Japanese authorities and companies during the late 1930s and early 1940s.

By 1974, the Japanese government, assuming that many of the Korean's would eventually go on to South Korea, said it would accept Sakhalin Koreans who wished to move to Japan. Somewhat surprisingly, the Soviet government accepted the proposal and government agencies in Sakhalin began to collect applications from those who wished to go.

As one former official told this author, the Soviet authorities initially believed the number of applicants would be small, since by that time the younger generation of Sakhalin Koreans was doing quite well in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). However, these estimations were proven wrong, and Soviet officials were wrong when they assumed that the younger generation would not particularly want to leave.

First, the authorities underestimated the lure of the developed world which, as most Soviet people knew, lay outside the closed borders of the USSR. Second, they did not take into account the patriarchal nature of traditional Korean families. The father (or grandfather) knew best, and the older generation would stop at nothing to go back home.

The number of applications began to climb, creating the potential for a major political embarrassment. A likely large-scale exodus of people from the USSR to South Korea would seriously damage the image of the USSR - as well as create additional troubles in already tense relations with North Korea. So, the policy was suddenly reversed, and in late 1976 the Soviet authorities stopped accepting applications. They made it clear that people would be allowed to go only under exceptional circumstances (indeed, such permits were occasionally issued, but the numbers were small).

This led to a minor political uprising. Sakhalin Korean activists began to collect signatures and draft letters of protest. In late 1976, inhabitants of Korsakov, a tiny town in the southernmost part of the Sakhalin Island, witnessed a scene nobody would expect to see in the sleepy and politically docile Soviet countryside - a real anti-government demonstration. A small group of people gathered near the local city hall, equipped with slogans - "Let's us go! We do not want to live in the USSR!" The police had no trouble in dispersing the group, which essentially consisted of one family, that of To Mang-san.

The authorities did not want the crisis to spread. At the same time, they preferred to avoid responsibility (and bad publicity) by prosecuting the dissenters through normal legal channels. After all, by 1976, Joseph Stalin rule was a thing of the past and - contrary to what many people in the West still believe - politically motivated arrests were relatively rare. In the USSR of the 1970s, less than 1,000 people were in prisons as political criminals - a great difference to the 1.2 million imprisoned at the time of Stalin's death.

Authorities found a way to teach a cruel lesson without compromising themselves. Unfortunately, some prominent activists of the repatriation movements, including the unlucky participants of the Korsakov demonstration, had North Korean citizenship. Therefore, they were aliens that could be easily deported if they made trouble.

In 1977, five activist families, including that of To Mang-san (some 40 people altogether) were deported to North Korea. It seems that in some cases the law was broken, since a few of the deportees (children of the main troublemakers) had acquired Soviet citizenship. Most deportees made it clear that they had no wish to leave the USSR and go to their country of citizenship, but they were nonetheless escorted by the police to the border railway station and from there transferred to North Korean authorities, to be never seen or heard of again.

There are few doubts that a sorry fate awaited them. In 1977, North Korea was a truly Orwellian state, so Pyongyang authorities would not view well at all North Korean citizens who had publicly expressed the desire to defect to the South. Throughout the last two post-Soviet decades, civil society in Sakhalin as well as the authorities undertook measures to learn about the fate of To Mang-san and other victims, but no reply was ever received from the North Korean side.

The Sakhalin Koreans were aware enough about North Korea, so the deportation of the activists sent waves of terror through the community and immediately silenced the repatriation movement.

These events also coincided with a generational shift within the Korean community. The younger generation had other goals in mind, many did not see South Korea as their lost home, and were quite eager to gain Soviet citizenship. As of 1988, out of some 35,000 Sakhalin Koreans, only 2,621 had no citizenship, and merely 456 remained citizens of North Korea. Their home was on Sakhalin, and this soon came to be felt.

The first generation of Sakhalin Koreans did not boast a good education, even by the meager standards of the era. They came to the island as unskilled laborers. The Soviet takeover did not change their lives that much. The Koreans worked at the fisheries and mines, and sometimes they were also employed as loggers.

None of the first generation spoke fluent Russian in 1945, and few of the adults acquired a good command of the language. For a while, Sakhalin had a fully functional Korean-language cultural sphere. Until 1964, Koreans attended schools where Korean was the only language of tuition. Teachers for those schools were trained on the island, in a two-year college program, in the town of Poronaisk.

A Korean-language newspaper, first called "Korean Worker" but then properly renamed "Lenin-ui kil-lo" (Following Lenin's Way), was published on the island. In the 1970s, it was issued five times a week and boasted a disproportionately large staff of 30 journalists and editors.

For a while, a Korean Culture House operated in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the island's capital. A Korean-language theater even briefly existed there. All these were money losing activities, so only the generous support of the state made it possible. As a Korean newspaper's former chief editor told the present author, "Back then, in the 1970s, we had no trouble with recruiting. We paid good salaries, and the local authorities immediately provided our journalists with good apartments." Needless to say, apartments were government property and came almost for free. This lavish support was justified - and usually sincerely perceived - as a manifestation of the "Leninist policy in the nationalities' question".

Already in the late 1950s, local teachers had began to notice that Korean children were over-represented among the academically successful students, even though their parents could seldom express themselves in Russian. This made Koreans stand out from other local ethnic minorities, whose representatives were quietly believed to be academically unpromising. The trend became even more pronounced in the 1960s and later; the best students on Sakhalin tended to be Korean. 

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