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The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology

ISSN: 1444-2213 (Print) 1740-9314 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtap20

A House of Our Own: Diaspora Politics AmongKoreans in the Russian Far East

Hyun-Gwi Park

To cite this article: Hyun-Gwi Park (2015) A House of Our Own: Diaspora Politics AmongKoreans in the Russian Far East, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 16:5, 431-447, DOI:10.1080/14442213.2015.1083048

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2015.1083048

Published online: 07 Oct 2015.

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A House of Our Own: Diaspora PoliticsAmong Koreans in the Russian Far EastHyun-Gwi Park

This paper discusses the newly formed public space that exists for Koreans in the RussianFar East (RFE). It shows that the notion of diaspora is a fluctuating political subjectivityin Russia that is largely defined and regulated by the state. It examines the changes thathave taken place in the local politics surrounding the Korean diaspora in the RFEresulting from their experience of the Stalinist purge and their return from CentralAsia during the post-socialist transition. Central to this research is a building calledKoreiskii Dom and the conflicts surrounding its ownership and use. By examiningthese conflicts, this paper explores how the focus of community for Russian Koreanshas shifted from national rehabilitation to cultural recognition influenced by theincreasing prominence of businessmen in local politics, and the substantive demandsmade on public spaces for practices of cultural reconsolidation.

Keywords: Diaspora; Koreans; Russian Far East; Local Politics; Post-Socialism;Nationality Policy in Russia; Autonomy

This paper discusses newly formed public space for Koreans in Primorskii Krai,Russia, during the post-socialist transitional period. It was prompted by a methodo-logical question that arose during my initial period of ethnographic fieldwork in theearly 2000s. Compared to more traditional place-bound fieldwork, working withdiasporas involves the practical problem of first locating and identifying people whohave by definition been ‘dispersed’. This is the problem that I faced upon arrival inthe city of Ussuriisk1 in the Russian Far East2 (RFE) in 2002. Luckily, I happened toencounter some Russian Koreans (self-designated as Koryosaram) in the street and,after hearing about my interest in researching the Korean community in the RFE,they directed me to Koreiskii Dom (Korean House, not italicised hereafter) in thecity centre. The fact that they had directed me to a building led me to think about

Hyun-Gwi Park is a Research Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. Correspondence to: Hyun-GwiPark, Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, Herschel Road, Cambridge, CB3 9AL, United Kingdom. Email:hgp20@cam.ac.uk

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2015Vol. 16, No. 5, 431–447, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2015.1083048

© 2015 The Australian National University

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who or what represents ‘community’ for a diasporic people. Later I discoveredthat although several Korean civil organisations are housed in Koreiskii Dom (seeFigure 1), many people are unaware of their names and they are rarely mentionedin conversation. It became increasingly clear that the building itself held greater sig-nificance for Korean people in Primorskii Krai than the organisations housedwithin it.In this paper, I focus on Koreiskii Dom and examine the boundary-making and

boundary-changing that has taken place within the Russian Far East Korean commu-nity by examining the conflicts and competition surrounding the use and ownership ofthis building. This focus follows Pnina Werbner’s (2000) suggestion that the study ofdiaspora must examine ‘real politics’ that are performed on a material basis.In particular, I approach the building from two perspectives: firstly, as a public

symbol representing the group identity of Korean-Russians who have been subjectto a series of dispersals and are not otherwise publicly represented in the politicalrealm on a regional, national or transnational level; and secondly, as a substantiveresource for group identity that is used for various political, cultural and social net-working activities. I show that these alternative meanings of this iconic buildinghave resulted from the post-socialist transition in local politics in which boundariesin the community have been redrawn. Built up by key figures in the early post-socialistera, the significance of Koreiskii Dom subsequently shifted and fractured amidst a

Figure 1 Koreiskii Dom Owned by the Fund.

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national shift from a politics of restorative justice to a cultural politics of recognition,and under the increasing political influence of businessmen in the Korean communityof the Russian Far East.

Koreans in the Russian Far East: A Background

The ethnographic research for this article was conducted in the city of Ussuriiskduring 2003–4.3 After Vladivostok, Ussuriisk is the second largest city in PrimorskiiKrai (also known as Maritime Province) with a population of approximately150,000 of whom Koreans make up around 10 per cent, although it is difficult toknow their exact number owing to the influx of undocumented migrants in theearly 2000s. As a result of its significant proportion of Korean residents, the city issometimes referred to as ‘the Korean capital of Primorskii Krai’.The high proportion of Koreans in Ussuriisk can be seen as part of a general post-

Soviet trend in which large numbers of people migrated from Central Asia to theRussianFederationowing to theoutbreak of civilwars in the early 1990s. The rise of auto-chthonous nationalism in Central Asia also contributed to this out-migration. Koreanswho had originally been deported to Central Asia during the Stalinist era and who hadthenmigrated to the RFE toldme: ‘Our childrenwere bullied at school…wewere forcedout of our jobs… people were not evaluated according to their skills and ability but bytheir “ethnicmark” (etnicheskii priznak)’. In particular, the violent conflicts inDushanbein Tadzhikistan and in the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan in the 1990s forced manyKoreans to flee to the Russian Federation. Within this overall migratory trend, manyKoreans specifically chose the RFE as their destination due to the fact that theirparents or grandparents had been born there.4 Some lucky ones had relatives orfamily members who had previously settled in the region and could help them relocate.5

Within the RFE, the city of Ussuriisk attracted migrants due to its growth as animportant commercial centre benefiting from its location close to the border withChina and its good transportation links with the Trans-Siberian Railway and themain highway to Moscow. The city’s large Chinese market, second-hand Japanesecar market and wholesale market for fruit and vegetables provided many migrantswith employment. Koreans played an instrumental role in establishing and expandingthese markets, and this has produced many wealthy businessmen,6 some of whomhave become important figures engaged in local politics in the city. In short, historicalties and the expansion of commercial markets have acted as ‘pull factors’ to the city,while civil wars and the rise of autochthonous nationalism in Central Asia have actedas ‘push factors’ (cf. Pilkington 1998).The increase in the number of Korean migrants in the 1990s resulted in the topic of

the historical link between Koreans and the RFE appearing with increasing frequencyin public discourse and local newspapers. This link dates back to the late nineteenthcentury when Koreans migrated to the region from the northern part of the KoreanPeninsula. The borders of Imperial Russia were expanded to the northern part ofKorea (then the Chosun Kingdom) under the Peking Treaty of 1860,7 and Korean

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peasants began to move to the RFE shortly afterwards. Initially, only thirteen Koreanpeasant families officially requested permission from the Russian border guards tosettle in the Russian territory in 1864, but the number of migrants from the KoreanPeninsula increased dramatically with every passing year.8

In the Stalinist purge of 1937, however, 36,442 Korean families (totalling 171,781people) in the RFE were forcibly displaced to Central Asia.9 While the scope andfocus of this paper prevents a more thorough discussion of this historical event,10 itmust be noted that Korean ties with co-ethnic communities across the border innortheast China and the northern part of the Korean Peninsula were the ostensiblereason for the deportation, as such ethnic ties were considered to make the borderporous, creating international tension between Japan and the Soviet Union. It wasthose diasporas with ‘cross-border ethnic ties’ and a ‘homeland’ state across theborder that were designated as ‘enemy nations’ and subject to mass deportation,while stateless diasporas such as Roma (Gypsies), Jews and Assyrians were not themain target of the Great Terror (Martin 2001, 340 n. 178).During the Soviet period after the 1937 relocation, these ties were buried beneath

the Iron Curtain, not only because it was a forbidden subject in the Soviet publicsphere but also because the existence of Koreans in the Soviet Union was largelyforgotten in South Korea. Political change brought about by perestroika and thepost-socialist transition provided the opportunity for recovery of buried memoriesof the deportation and rediscovery of ties across the border, especially with capitalistSouth Korea.

Rehabilitation and the ‘Fund for the Revival of Koreans in Primorskii Krai’

On 14 November 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR discussed the ‘politics offorcible migration’ and ‘reflected on the fates of Koreans, Greeks, Kurds andothers’; this led to the passing of the law ‘On the Rehabilitation of RepressedPeoples’ in 1991 (Bugai 2002, 18). Legislation followed pertaining to particularminorities such as Germans, Cossacks and Finns, and on 1 April 1993 by ‘On theRehabilitation of Russian Koreans’ (Bugai 2002, 23).Through this law, the state recognised past injustices and signalled reform of Soviet

nationality policy. Specific government programs in Russia to support the revival ofthe language and culture of those who had experienced political repression in theform of forcible relocation were proposed in the law. Further, legal grounds for com-pensation of losses incurred in the deportation were created by granting certainbenefits to the returnees and their children. However, the disintegration of theSoviet Union and the dismantling of the socialist order in the mid-1990s meantthat many state institutions were already dysfunctional as a result of political crisisand economic deterioration and these programs existed in name only; they lackedany operational power (Bugai 2002, 14–19).It was shortly before the introduction of the law ‘On the Rehabilitation of Russian

Koreans’ in February 1993 that a group of Koreans in Ussuriisk founded an

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organisation called the ‘Fund for the Revival of Koreans in Primorskii Krai’ (‘FondVozrozhdenie Koreitsev Primorskogo Kraia’ in Russian; ‘Rosia Yonhaeju Koryo Chae-saeng Gigŭm’ in Korean; hereafter the ‘Fund’).11 The idea of vozrozhdenie (revival)was based on the notion of the unity and integrity of the nation, which had beenseverely damaged by the Stalinist purge. The objectives and activities pursued bythe Fund share some similarities with Lenin’s nativisation (korennizatsiia) policy ofthe mid-1920s (see Martin 2001, Chapter 1) which aimed at granting autonomy toeach ethnic group in its own territorial administration free from imperialist oppres-sion. The Fund publicly deplored the fact that many Koreans could no longer speakthe Korean language and had forgotten traditional customs, so from 1994, it endea-voured to provide Korean language courses and published a newspaper called‘Vondong’ (meaning Far East).The first president of the Fund, Tel’mir Kim, played a pivotal role in its founding.

His family background, which was steeped in the legacy of the Soviet past, enabled himto represent the collective history of Koreans in the RFE, while the power and influ-ence that he was able to wield in the 1990s derived from his personal connectionswith Nazdratenko, the governor of Primorskii Krai.It is helpful to introduce his family background to understand the motivation for his

involvement in the revival movement. Tel’mir Kim was born in 1933 in KhasanskiiRaion, which today borders North Korea. His father, Afanasii A. Kim, was the Sec-retary of the Communist Party of the district then known as Pos’etskii Raionduring 1935–6 and was widely known as the ‘Korean Lenin’. He was an ardent social-ist, an anti-Japanese partisan, a journalist and a Communist Party cadre, who metLenin in person while working as an interpreter for Korean socialist delegates in1921. Despite this (or because of it), he was purged along with 2500 other Koreansin local administrative posts and was executed during Stalin’s Great Terror in 1938.At this time, Tel’mir Kim was still a child, but after completing his secondary edu-cation he decided on a career at sea in order to escape his father’s shadow. Hemoved to Primorskii Krai in the 1960s and began working in the fishing industry.It was during this time that he established a close working relationship with the gov-ernor of Primorskii Krai, Nazdratenko,12 upon whom he was able to call directlywhenever the need arose.13

Following the establishment of the Fund, the governor’s support proved to be par-ticularly beneficial when Tel’mir Kim tried to expand the rehabilitation project beyondthe revival of the native language and traditional culture to provide Korean refugeesfrom Central Asia with the practical help they needed in the absence of statesupport during the post-socialist crisis.

Networking the Korean Revival: Koreiskii Dom and the Settlement Project

In his study of post-Soviet changes in Kazakhstan, Nazpary (2002, 16) suggests thattwo kinds of network emerged in the course of the disintegration of Soviet society:the ‘network of new riches’ and the ‘network of the dispossessed’, which he also

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describes as the ‘network of influence’ and the ‘network of survival’. There is no doubtthat the daily struggle faced by ordinary Koreans in the RFE resulted in their depen-dence on the ‘network of survival’ that revolved around the face-to-face exchange ofgoods and favours and the rotation of credit in order to make ends meet.14 The situ-ation faced by Koreans arriving in the RFE in the early 2000s was made even moredifficult by the introduction of new citizenship regulations in 2002 (see Park 2013)which limited newcomers’ rights with regard to employment, welfare and freedomof movement due to the difficulty in obtaining Russian citizenship. For these newco-mers, the network of survival, usually based on ties of kinship and friendship, wascrucial as it offered the opportunity for sharing accommodation, receiving informationabout employment opportunities and borrowing money.In contrast, Nazpary (2002) describes the post-Soviet ‘network of influence’ as a

‘chaotic mode of domination’ in which the political elite took advantage of their pos-itions in state institutions to plunder state assets and accumulate private wealth.Although the two networks were not completely separate, it was usually the casethat wealth did not flow from the network of influence to that of survival. Interestingly,Koreiskii Dom became one of the few portals where these two networks of influenceand survival became directly interlinked after the building was donated to the Fund.The building was originally used as a state bank, but was taken over by a local

Korean businessman,15 Sasha Ten, who was well-connected in Ussuriisk as hisfather had returned to the RFE from Central Asia in the mid-1950s. Sasha Ten hadserved as a Soviet army officer and had spent some time in prison in the 1980s,although the reason for his imprisonment is unclear. After his release, he acquiredthe building during the process of privatisation and established himself as a successfulbusinessman. He sold Koreiskii Dom for US$100,000 to a South Korean companyowner, who then donated it to the Fund in November 1994 in memory of his latefather, who had resided in the RFE in the 1910s as a political exile from Japaneseimperialism (Lee 1998).16

Following its donation to the Fund, Koreiskii Dom became a centre for activities forthe revival of Korean culture, such as Korean language classes, traditional Koreandance classes for children, the publication of Korean language newspapers and theprovision of free legal services to Korean migrants related to rehabilitation andRussian citizenship. Young people could hang out together in the lounge and corridorspace before and after lessons and older people could gather at parties, celebratingtraditional folk holidays such as Lunar New Year or Harvest Day. The building wasbig enough to accommodate all of these activities and also to house the office of theFund; hence it functioned as a portal for a wide range of matters related to Koreansin the city and became a conduit for channelling resources accrued in the networkof influence to many ordinary Koreans in the network of survival. It received insti-tutional support from the regional government in the RFE and material resourcesfrom South Korean NGOs and religious charities.17 In the late 1990s, the hardshipsfaced by Korean refugees in the RFE received considerable attention in the SouthKorean media, and by way of response, civil and religious organisations donated

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money and resources such as medicine, agricultural machinery, household goods andclothing. Koreiskii Dom served as a hub for the collection and distribution of thesedonations, and subsequent criticism of the management of this process by Tel’mirKim led to his political downfall and a change in the leadership of the Fund.By redistributing resources garnered from his network of influence to the refugee

Koreans, Tel’mir Kim hoped to encourage many more Koreans to return to the RFEfrom Central Asia so that the Korean population in the RFE could recover topre-1937 levels. Taking advantage of not only his personal connection with the gov-ernor of Primorskii Krai but also his position as the president of the Fund, he wasable to reach two agreements at local and transnational level. At the local level, theFund was able to acquire the ‘unconditional rights of use of the deserted armysettlements’ from the regional government.18 At the transnational level, the Fundsigned a contract with the Association of House Building Companies from SouthKorea for their investment in the building and refurbishment of housing andagricultural developments. In this way, Tel’mir Kim was able to use his influenceand connections to combine the land resources of local authorities with investmentfrom South Korea and the labour of migrant Koreans, to achieve his political ends.However, it was not long before differences in the objectives of the various partiesbegan to appear.By 1998, following a couple of years of strenuous efforts, the Fund had established

six camps in Primorski Kraii. Hundreds of Korean refugees settled in these formerarmy settlements and embarked on agricultural work. However, in an interviewwith Tel’mir Kim, I learned that a conflict of interests soon arose between the twoparties because, ‘for the South Korean Association this was an investment, but forthe Fund it was a project to obtain historical justice and to help Korean refugees’.19

In addition to these problems, the first year’s harvest was so meagre that the residentsin the camps had insufficient food reserves for their own survival, and in August 1999,the Association withdrew financial support, nullifying the contract. From this pointonwards, the finances of the Fund deteriorated, resulting in further suffering for thecamp residents. In some extreme cases, the electricity supply was disconnected andresidents suffered from frostbite and poor health because the Fund was unable topay the bill. Tel’mir Kim had little success in finding other financial sponsors andeventually many camp residents dispersed of their own accord to look for othermeans of survival.There was also increasing antagonism amongst the residents of Ussuriisk towards

the Fund’s settlement project. This came to a head in 2000 when the Association ofHouse Building Companies began to construct an estate of around thirty red-brickhouses in a small town near Ussuriisk after breaking their contract with the Fund(see Figure 2). The houses were all the more conspicuous for their ‘cottage’ (kottedzhi)style, which was a symbol of the Russian nouveau riche. These houses provoked anti-Korean sentiment among local residents as they believed that special privileges hadbeen extended to the Koreans for their construction.20 Such sentiments can be seenin the following letter to the local authorities and President Putin, which was

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written and signed by ‘Primorians’ (People of Primorskii Krai) and published in thelocal newspaper:

Talks are currently taking place with Korean migrants from Kazakhstan, Tajikistanand Uzbekistan. It would have been understandable if they had settled together withus on a common basis [obshikh osnovaniiakh] in accordance with actual legislation… The fundamental reason for their migration [from the Korean Peninsula] washunger… they were emigrants and foreigners [inostrantsy] and came to Russiaby virtue of the goodwill of the Russian authorities [po dobroi vole russkikhvlastei]. And their subsequent long residence in our territory of Krai is thanks tothe goodwill of our people—nothing else [kak dobraia volia nashego naroda, nebolee]. It was the evil orders of Stalin that forced Koreans to change their residence,but we note that, although they had been living in the territory of Primorskii Krai,they did not leave behind any cultural or religious buildings or well-designed struc-tures. It is possible to conclude that they did not plan to live here permanently [post-oianno].… Primorskii Krai borders North Korea and is not far from South Korea.Would it not have been a more reasonable decision for Korean migrants to return totheir original homeland [iskonnuiu rodinu]?… If Koreans do not want to live on acommon basis with us but desire instead to live as their own separate ethnic group,we need to help them return to their original homeland. And their homeland is nextdoor…

A. Anokhin and 70 signatories. (Kommunar, 3 August 2000)

Figure 2 ‘Friendship Village’ Constructed by the Association of House Building Compa-nies of South Korea.

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Humphrey (2001) discusses the exclusionary discourses and social anxiety directedat certain social groups in contemporary Russia that are usually located at the margin,but not completely expelled from society. According to this work, such exclusionarypractices in Russia are often based on emotion rather than on specific grounds or cri-teria such as race, class or religion. The letter above illustrates such an anxiety wherethe main concern is that Koreans have been granted special favours in relation to theirhousing, despite the fact that the new houses were in practice neither particularly lux-urious nor special in any way. However, it was not only Russians but also manyKoreans who were critical of the settlement projects.Tel’mir Kim’s cooperation with the South Korean Association of House Building

Companies in the settlement project and his confrontational stance in meetingswith Krai officials about ‘discrimination towards Korean migrants’ (Chen 2003) ledmany Koreans to believe that he had directly contributed towards the strengtheningof anti-Korean feeling by confronting it, rather than avoiding it. Their views, publishedin the equivalent of ‘Who’s Who’ for Koreans in Primorskii Krai (Chen 2003),expressed a fundamental opposition to the philosophy of the settlement project, asthey believed that people must be ‘taught how to fish’ rather than be ‘given a fish’on their plates (cf. Ferguson 2015).Following the publication of this letter, Tel’mir Kim was impeached at the annual

conference of the Fund in December 2000 and stepped down from his post as presi-dent (Vondong Newspaper, December 2000; January 2001). The main protagonistsbehind his impeachment were those Korean Fund members who had disagreedwith the settlement project and the management of resources donated to KoreiskiiDom. For example, one person who had worked as an interpreter told me that hehad not been paid for several months, since the donated resources were being chan-nelled to the camps. Another had argued with Kim when he declined to fund herdance team to participate in a competition in Moscow as the Fund’s finances werein a parlous state because of the settlement project. Whereas Tel’mir Kim’s focuswas on the wider revival of the Korean community, many of his opponents weremore concerned with the sociality formed around Koreiskii Dom, wishing to limitits boundary of community to those who were actively engaged in social activitiesheld at the building.This conflict can be seen as one of the consequences that emerged in the early 2000s

as a result of the succession of the Russian presidency from Yeltsin to Putin.21 AsN. Petrov (2011, 82–6) has suggested, at this time central government sought tobring the provinces under its control by weakening local networks that had developedduring the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years. In the case of the RFE, Putin dispatched anenvoy to Primorskii Krai in spring 2000 in an attempt to replace the governor and thelocal elite with his allies. This coincided with widespread local discontent following anenergy crisis during the winter that had left more than 90,000 residents withoutheating and electricity and resulted in the resignation of Nazdratenko as governor(see Alexseev 2002). This resignation may have also facilitated the removal of hisally, Tel’mir Kim, by his opponents.

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Cultural Recognition and Contestation over Diasporic Space

The rehabilitation-focused nationality policies in Russia in the early 1990s outlinedin this paper raised the possibility of ‘territorial rehabilitation’ and encouraged someregional and ethnic leaders to pursue territorial autonomy, even to the extent of‘sovereign status’. This was naturally regarded as a ‘serious threat to the integrityand sovereignty’ of the Russian Federation (Zorin 2003, 127) and the central auth-orities responded to the crisis by shifting to a cultural autonomy-focused nationalitypolicy, which resulted in the passing of the Federal law on National-CulturalAutonomy and the setting up of branches of ‘national cultural autonomies’ (natsio-nal’no-kul’turnaia avtonomia, hereafter NKA) in many cities for variousnationalities.The NKA of Koreans in Ussuriisk was formed swiftly after this law was passed

in 1996. According to a council member, ‘a decree came from Moscow to organ-ise a NKA and the city administration ordered us to form such an organisationfor Koreans’.22 One of Ussuriisk’s wealthiest businessmen became the first NKApresident, and after his murder in the late 1990s, was succeeded by his youngerbrother (Chen 2003). However, the Korean NKA in Ussuriisk remained nomore than a nominal organisation under the umbrella of the Fund until theearly 2000s.After Tel’mir Kim was forced out as president of the Fund, several significant

changes occurred at Koreiskii Dom. Soon after his impeachment, a fire occurredwhich resulted in the building remaining closed for several months as there were nofunds available to repair the damage. In late 2001, two NGOs from South Koreaoffered to finance the refurbishment of the building,23 and when I arrived in thecity in 2002 many popular activities had resumed such as Korean language classes,computer classes and traditional dance lessons. Also by this time, the Fund hadelected a new president, a wealthy businessman who had made his fortune throughthe market trading of vegetables (Chen 2003).After 2001, changes also took place in the relationship between the Fund and the

NKA, and in the type of activities carried out by these organisations. In contrastwith the situation in the late 1990s, the NKA began to play a leading role in ethnicpolitics, while the Fund became an inactive nominal organisation. Whereas theFund had focused on the distribution of donated resources during Tel’mir Kim’spresidency, the NKA placed more emphasis on obtaining recognition for Koreans,for example, by sending representatives to the All-Russian Association of NKAs forKoreans,24 celebrating national commemoration days such as Victory Day and organ-ising events to mark the first settlement of Koreans in Russia.25 Although they receivedsome funding from local businessmen, it was Peace Asia, a South Korean NGO activein humanitarian aid work for Korean refugees in the RFE which chiefly financed theseactivities.26 Peace Asia appealed to South Korean donors by presenting the tragichistory of Russian Koreans and featuring pictures of their activities in their pamphletsand on their website.

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Despite the changes and conflicts among political actors and organisations sur-rounding the building, the meaning of Koreiskii Dom as a social space for ordinaryKoreans is demonstrated by ‘The Club for Elderly Koreans’ (‘Klub Pozhilykh’ inRussian; ‘Noindan’ in Korean). The only civil organisation that existed among theKoreans in Ussuriisk during the Soviet period, Noindan was a loose gathering ofelderly Koreans who created a common fund to help those in need to pay the costsof a traditional Korean-style funeral. The names of members and the accounts offees and expenditure were recorded in a small notebook which was passed fromone successive treasurer to the next, but they had no access to any other facilities.27

Following the acquisition of Koreiskii Dom by the ‘Fund for the Revival of Koreansin Primorskii Krai’, Noindan was granted the use of a small room and its membersbegan to organise their own social activities such as singing groups and dance teams.Every year, the Club helped to organise a New Year party for the elderly in Ussuriisk

in one of the large halls in Koreiskii Dom. Wealthy businessmen donated money andmiddle-aged women voluntarily cooked or donated food for the party so that Koreansin their sixties and seventies could dress up and enjoy a fun night out. At one suchparty in 2004, I was busy video-taping lively singing and dancing when all of theelderly people spontaneously broke into song with one voice. It was a song called‘Mountains and Rivers of my Homeland’ (koguksanch’on in Korean). The lyrics trans-lated from Korean into English are as follows:

Being in a foreign land thousands of miles distant from my homeland,Sending my regards from another country where the mountains and rivers areunfamiliar,My sad heart longs for my homeland,And all I can think of is my parents and brothers and sisters.28

It is the spatial capacity of Koreiskii Dom that enabled this opportunity for people togather together and share an experience that reinforced their identity as a social andethnic group. This spatial capacity is also flexible, in the sense that it can provide arange of social experiences depending on the occasion and the composition of theparticipants. For example, the same hall described above was also used for politicalactivities ahead of the local city council duma election in spring 2004. At themeeting, relatives and supporters of the two Korean candidates for the city councilmade speeches appealing to the audience to vote for the candidates based on theirshared nationality.However, the space of Koreiskii Dom is not available for all uses and activities. Who

can utilise this space and for what purpose is a highly politicised question, as illustratedby the impeachment of Tel’mir Kim and the opposition to his activities at KoreiskiiDom. What constituted valid use of the building changed following the suddendeath of the second president of the Fund from a heart attack in early 2004. In a sub-sequent meeting held to choose the next president, Sasha Ten, the businessman whohad originally acquired the building from the state, was elected. I listened to his

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acceptance speech in which he stated, ‘I will make sure that Koreiskii Dom earnsmoney for itself’ (zarabotat’ dlia sebia). Under Sasha Ten’s presidency, the Fundhas increasingly come to resemble a privately run company rather than a public organ-isation, and when I visited Koreiskii Dom in 2010 the whole building had been refur-bished and rented out to private firms. It was no longer being used as a centre for socialactivities, the NKA had moved out of the building and I was unable to make contactwith any representatives of the Fund.29 On my latest visit to Ussuriisk in 2013, I hearda rumour that Sasha Ten had sold the former Koreiskii Dom for US$2 million and wason the run for tax evasion.30

In response to the commercialisation of this diasporic meeting point, in 2004 PeaceAsia launched a campaign in commemoration of the 140th anniversary of the firstKorean migration to Russia, to raise funds for the construction of a new buildingfor the NKA and the Koreans in Ussuriisk. The building was opened in 2009.31 It isthis building that is now referred to as Koreiskii Dom rather than the old one associ-ated with the Fund (see Figure 3). The new building is bigger and has many morefacilities than the previous one; some space is rented out but it is mainly used forlanguage classes, dance and martial arts teams, the Korean newspaper and also as alibrary and museum. Commercial rents charged for private use of some of therooms ensures that the public space within Koreiskii Dom is financially sustainable

Figure 3 The New Building Owned by the Korean NKA in Ussuriisk.

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and independent of the need for other funding from the Russian state or NGOs fromSouth Korea.

Conclusion

In an ethnographic study of indigenous movement in the north Arctic, Patty Gray (2005,25) suggests that ‘the predicament for indigenous residents’ after the collapse of Sovietsocialism lay in their own spaces for local newspapers and representative organisationsbeing merged into ‘Russian spaces’ due to the cessation of state funding. After their longhistory of dependence on the state during the Soviet period, indigenous peoples wereunable to maintain their own space without the state’s support. Our examination of theKorean case, however, has revealed how Koreans in the RFE have succeeded in creatingandmaintaining their ownpublic spacedespite changes in thewiderpolitical environment.For Koreans in the former Soviet Union, it was their perceived ties with the Korean

Peninsula that led to the accusation of ‘disloyalty’ to the Soviet Union and their forceddisplacement to Central Asia in 1937. This history was re-examined in the 1990s afterperestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union and resulted in legislation aimed atrecovering historical justice for those ethnic minorities repressed during the Stalinistpurge. The ethnic revival movement that followed with its demands for greater terri-torial autonomy and the fear that the Russian Federation would disintegrate intonumerous nation-states led the central government to promote the term ‘diaspora’and to emphasise the notion of cultural autonomy in place of the former territory-based nationality policy of the Soviet Union. By examining the historical conditionsof Koreans who were considered to have cross-border ties not only in the 1930s butalso in the 1990s, this article has shown that context is critical to the shaping formsof diasporic subjectivity rather than diaspora being a pre-given identity (cf. Axel 2004).Koreans in the RFE have adopted a pragmatic approach towards changes in the

post-socialist political and economic environment, exploiting these for the purposeof creating a space for ethnic reconsolidation. However, this reconsolidation processwas marked by considerable turbulence as leadership in such initiatives passed fromnetworked individuals who were locally based under Yeltsin, to powerful businessmenwith nationwide and transnational networks in Putin’s Russia. The downfall of Tel’mirKim and his project to reclaim historical justice and make use of the ‘network of influ-ence’ to contribute towards the needs of those in the ‘network of survival’ can be seenas reflecting the collapse of Soviet socialism and its emphasis on equality and economicredistribution. Similarly, the changes that took place in the Fund under the leadershipof Sasha Ten and the subsequent power shift away from the Fund to the NKA can beseen as a reflection of the move towards a market economy and towards a post-nation-alist cultural politics of recognition. Throughout such changes, however, Koreans inUssuriisk have tenaciously preserved Koreiskii Dom as a house of their own—apublic space for the Korean community—that has maintained autonomy within itswalls by adapting to the winds of change outside them.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers whose constructive comments were extremely helpfulto the process of revision of this article. I am also indebted to the editor, Philip Taylor, and to NikolaiSsorin-Chaikov, Marilyn Strathern, Sayana Namsaraeva and Su Jong You for their comments atdifferent stages of writing this paper. In Russia, Tel’mir Afanasievich, Nikolai Sergeivich and officersof the NKA in Ussuriisk helped me greatly during my fieldwork, and I would like to dedicate thispaper to Tel’mir Afanasievich in recognition of his unfulfilled ideal.

Funding

This research was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Grant PTA-026-27-2155), but I am solely responsible for any errors or shortcomings that it contains.

Notes

[1] This paper uses real place names and personal names rather than pseudonyms, and any trans-lation provided in the text is by the author.

[2] The Far East (Dal’nyi Vostok) in the Russian Federation is an administrative region thatincludes Primorskii Krai and other provinces. In this paper, however, I use ‘the RussianFar East’ and ‘Primorskii Krai’ interchangeably, depending on the context.

[3] This initial field research was later supplemented by short follow-up visits in 2010 and 2013.My analysis also makes use of local newspaper articles and interviews with people involved inthe political arena.

[4] Besides the RFE, a considerable number of Koreans migrated to other regions of Russia whichhad been popular destinations for the informal nomadic agriculture brigades in which manyKoreans had participated during the Soviet period.

[5] According to the final census carried out in the former Soviet Union, there were 8494 Koreansin Primorskii Krai in 1989. For detailed information on annual changes in population bynationality in Primorskii Krai in the 1990s, see Vashchuk et al. (2002, 157).

[6] Korean businessmen owned these markets and all of them were closely involved in Koreanethnic politics. See Park (2013) for a discussion on the entrepreneurship that emergedamong migrant Koreans in the RFE.

[7] See Stephan (1994) for a more detailed discussion of this topic.[8] For a more detailed discussion of the early settlement of Korean immigrants in the RFE, see

Boris Pak (1993) and Aleksander Petrov (2000). Vashchuk et al. (2002) present extensiveresearch on the migration process in Primorskii Krai from the late nineteenth century upto the 1990s.

[9] Bugai (1992, 158; cited in Martin [2001, 334]).[10] For an in-depth discussion of the deportation of Koreans in 1937, see Son (2013) and Cher-

nolutskaya (2011). The first work to introduce this event in English was Gelb (1995), but in myview, Terry Martin’s (1998, 2001) work provides a more comprehensive explanation for thedeportation, as he discusses the case of Koreans together with the ethnic cleansing thattook place in other border regions of the Soviet Union.

[11] December 2000 and January 2001, Vondong Newspaper.[12] For more information on Nazdratenko and his opposition to Moscow concerning the ‘threat

from China’ in Primorskii Krai, see Alexseev (2002).[13] The author’s field note, 4 August 2004.

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[14] For more extensive research on networking relationships (blat) and informal economicexchanges in Russia, see Ledeneva (1998).

[15] He was alleged to be the most powerful leader of the Mafia in the city. Many leaders of Mafiagroups in Russia transformed themselves into businessmen and politicians in the late 1990s.

[16] The Fund registered its ownership in December 1994 and called it the ‘Centre of Revival forPrimorskii Koreans’ (Vondong Newspaper, December 1994).

[17] For example, the provincial government allocated 10 million Rubles to help the Fund organiseevents to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the deportation in 1997 (Bugai 2002, 219). In1997, US$1 approximately equalled 5560 Rubles, so the value of 10 million Rubles was aroundUS$1800.

[18] These were the settlements abandoned by army officers and their families when they moved towestern Russia in the early 1990s.

[19] Interview with Tel’mir Kim, 3 April 2004.[20] Troyakova (2008) also highlights this project as the main reason for the rise of anti-Korean

sentiment in Primorskii Krai. Tel’mir Kim explained the opposition to this Korean collectiveresidence in an interview with me as follows: ‘If one Korean family lives in a village mainlyconsisting of Russians, the relationship is very good and the Russians are very friendly. Butif more than twenty to thirty Korean families live in a village, the Russians become quiteantagonistic towards them’ (author’s field notes, 3 April 2004).

[21] See Rozman (2008) for an informative discussion on Putin’s approach to Primorskii Krai andthe response by the local elite.

[22] Interview with a member of the Korean NKA in Ussuriisk, 18 December 2003.[23] Interview with a staff member of Peace Asia, 21 February 2003.[24] It is worth noting that the Fund is a local organisation (kraievoi fond) without any other

branches, though it collaborated with Korean associations in other cities in Primorskii Krai.In contrast, NKA is part of an extensive national network, making it a more useful platformfor businessmen to connect with influential people beyond the RFE. I am grateful to SayanaNamsaraeva for pointing out this difference.

[25] For a discussion of global political trends from redistribution to recognition, see Fraser (1995).[26] For further information about Peace Asia, see their website at <http://www.peaceasia.or.kr/>.[27] An interview with the treasurer of Noindan, 2 July 2004.[28] I transcribed the Korean lyrics of this song on another occasion with the assistance of an

elderly woman who did not come to the party but sang the song at my request. In fact, Iwas so moved by the atmosphere at the party that I was unable to take notes when thesinging began.

[29] The privatisation of public space in Russia has also been reported in ethnographic studies ofthe ‘Houses of Culture’ that were established as community halls in many towns and villagesduring the Soviet period; see Donahoe and Habeck (2011).

[30] I have been unable to confirm the veracity of this rumour.[31] The official name of the new building is the ‘Korean Cultural Centre in Ussuriisk’, but in the

media it is also referred to as the ‘Memorial Complex’. The final stage of construction wasfinanced by the president of the NKA and the building is now owned by the NKA.

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