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Burnt by the Sun examines the history of the first Korean diaspora in a Western society during the highly tense geopolitical atmosphere of the Soviet Union in the late 1930s. Author Jon K. Chang demonstrates that the Koreans of the Russian Far East were continually viewed as a problematic and maligned nationality (ethnic community) during the Tsarist and Soviet periods. He argues that Tsarist influences and the various forms of Russian nationalism(s) and worldviews blinded the Stalinist regime from seeing the Koreans as loyal Soviet citizens. Instead, these influences portrayed them as a colonizing element (labor force) with unknown and unknowable political loyalties.
One of the major findings of Chang’s research was the depth that the Soviet state was able to influence, penetrate, and control the Koreans through not only state propaganda and media, but also their selection and placement of Soviet Korean leaders, informants, and secret police within the populace. From his interviews with relatives of former Korean OGPU/NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) officers, he learned of Korean NKVD who helped deport their own community. Given these facts, one would think the Koreans should have been considered a loyal Soviet people. But this was not the case, mainly due to how the Russian empire and, later, the Soviet state linked political loyalty with race or ethnic community.
During his six years of fieldwork in Central Asia and Russia, Chang interviewed approximately sixty elderly Koreans who lived in the Russian Far East prior to their deportation in 1937. This oral history along with digital technology allowed him to piece together Soviet Korean life as well as their experiences working with and living beside Siberian natives, Chinese, Russians, and the Central Asian peoples. Chang also discovered that some two thousand Soviet Koreans remained on North Sakhalin island after the Korean deportation was carried out, working on Japanese-Soviet joint ventures extracting coal, gas, petroleum, timber, and other resources. This showed that Soviet socialism was not ideologically pure and was certainly swayed by Japanese capitalism and the monetary benefits of projects that paid the Stalinist regime hard currency for its resources.
Jon K. Chang is an American researcher who holds an MA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a PhD in Russian/Soviet history from the University of Manchester.Jon K. Chang is an American researcher who holds an MA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a PhD in Russian/Soviet history from the University of Manchester.
Bruce A. Elleman, U.S. Naval War College, author of Diplomacy and Deception:One of the first scholarly books to link the mass deportation of ethnic Koreans from the Russian Far East to Central Asia during the mid-to-late 1930s with escalating Soviet-Manchukuo border tensions. Just as Tokyo was bringing in hundreds of thousands of Japanese peasants from its home islands to fortify its side of the border, Soviet Koreans—the great majority of whom were loyal to Moscow—were being forcibly relocated and replaced by European Russians, largely Slavs, purged by Stalin during the Great Terror. A must-read for both Asian and Russian historians.
Hiroaki Kuromiya, Indiana University, author of Voices of the Dead:This highly original work provides a fascinating insight into the lives of individual Koreans in Russia/the Soviet Union. It also shows that the infamous view of the “yellow peril” survived into the Soviet period and was responsible, to a significant degree, for the almost wholesale deportations of ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Maritime province in 1937–1938.
Hyun Ok Park, York University, author of Two Dreams in One Bed:In this rare invitation to reckon with modern violence and its tenacity in surviving the epic revolution, Jon Chang interrogates the universalism and multiculturalism of Soviet socialism with exemplary historical sensibility. Summoning the Korean minority from the deathbed of twentieth-century socialism, Burnt by the Sun honors the people whose only choice was to migrate—and keep migrating—or suffer deportation.
Jeffrey Burds, Northeastern University, author of Holocaust in Rovno:Burnt by the Sun is the best book in any language on the experience of Koreans inside Russia and the Soviet Union. It is first and foremost a micro-history of Koreans in the Soviet Union—initially greeted as allies in the building of communism, then victimized by Stalin’s “national operations” that targeted Koreans as likely traitors and fifth columnists working with the Japanese.
To begin with, the book is a valuable reminder of how multiethnic the Russian Far East was at the beginning of the 20th century. . . . Overall, this is a fascinating book that makes excellent use of a wide-range of sources (including interviews with around sixty elderly Koreans deportees) in support of a clear and convincing argument. . . . Having said this, not only those with an interest in the Korean diaspora, but also anyone wishing to learn more about the history of the Russian Far East, of Soviet nationalities policy, or of Japan’s relation with Russia will find much of value in this monograph.
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