The Migration Regime among Koreans in the Russian Far East

The Migration Regime among Koreans in the RussianFar East

H.G. PARK

University of Cambridge, [email protected]

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the settlement experience of multiple groups of Koreans inthe Russian Far East, which were formed by their temporally different migra-tions. By focusing on the temporal dimension of migration rather than theconventional focus on the spatial dimension which is usually found in the schol-arship of migration studies, this article explores the ways in which the differenttime of migration diversifies the experience of people who moved to the RussianFar East, and examines how this is interlinked with radical socio- economicchanges. I argue that the differences among Koreans in Primorskii Krai, Russia,create the basis for coalition among the Korean sub- groups and I also show howthe place integrates these intra- ethnic differences derived from historical timeswith the more dynamic and inclusive ethnic identification of Koreans in theRussian Far East.

Keywords:migration, citizenship, the notion of locality, temporality of migra-tion, Russian Far East, Primorskii Krai, Koreans

KOREAN AS AN UMBRELLA TERM IN THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST

The migration explosion which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union hasoften been termed an ‘ethnic migration’ (etnicheskaia migratsiia) (Panarin 1999;Pilkington 1998; Vashchuk et al. 2002). This characterisation of the migrationexplosion was derived from the political situations which centred on the issue ofethnicity in the former Soviet Union, such as upheavals of autochthonous nation-alism in the CIS countries, which were often accompanied by the outbreak ofviolent civil wars and the creation of a large number of refugees and forcedmigrants. Koreans who moved from Central Asia to the Russian Far East (here-after RFE)1 in the early 1990s were one of those ethnic groups affected by thisissue in post- Soviet space.

Focusing on Korean migrants in the RFE, this article presents the diverse

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strategies and different ways of conducting the settlement process exhibited by sub- groups of Koreans in Primorskii Krai, Russia. The reason why this articlefocuses on the differences within a broad ethnic group, rather than the homo-geneity, lies in my intention to illuminate not only inclusiveness based on a moreextensive and flexible notion of ethnicity, but also to highlight the limit of such aninclusiveness among different groups of Koreans in the RFE.

The aim of this article derives from my ethnographic observations among theKoreans in the RFE, but it has also been inspired by other anthropological studieson the question of ethnicity as a relational term, rather than as an absolute cate-gory which distinguishes one ethnic group from another. In his study of the ‘supra- tribal’ ethnicity of southern Africa, Richard Werbner (2002) proposes themetaphor of an ‘umbrella’ in understanding the ‘cosmopolitan ethnicity’ of theKalanga in Botswana. He argues that the social categories which refer to the twomutually constitutive ethnic groups in Botswana, the Tswana and the Kalanga,are ‘umbrella terms, opening out, more or less, according to the climate, as itwere, rain or shine’ (Werbner 2002: 733).

Neither of these groups is a political community or a territorial group, butthey ‘emerged as a broader category of culturally related people’ across tribes anddiasporas as a result of their migration in the region of southern Africa during theBritish colonial period. In unpacking this metaphor, Werbner underlines thenotion of ‘ethnic inclusion and interpenetration’ with a focus on the Kalanga asthe most significant ‘Other’ vis- à- vis the majority Tswana in Botswana. On theone hand, he notes that the Kalanga accept their minority identification inresponse to the majority Tswana’s claim that they do not belong to Botswana andthe Tswana’s fabrication of a historical past for the Kalanga which casts doubt ontheir loyalty. Another way in which the Tswana deal with the minority group is tomake a deliberate connection between the Botswana Kalanga and ‘their ethnicfellows in Zimbabwe’ (Werbner 2002: 735). Referring to this inter- ethnic rela-tionship as ‘minoritisation’ from the point of view of the Kalanga, Werbnerillustrates how this process began with abuse and exclusion by the Tswana duringthe post- colonialisation period in the mid- twentieth century and he also shedslight on the Kalanga’s inverting of these exclusionary measures into some kind ofbasis for the formation of their open and extensive partnership with other ethnicgroups, such as Indians and Tswanas, by means of marriage and cooperation inbusiness by the Kalanga entrepreneurial elites. The later post- colonial period,which began in the mid-1980s, corresponded with the development of the capi-talist economy and the state in Botswana. Most importantly, and of greatestrelevance to the main argument of this article, Werbner also reports that this post- colonialisation is national for the Kalanga, rather than international, creating aclear political divide from the Zimbabwean Kalanga, though the culturalboundary remains flexible enough to allow cooperation with those fellowKalangas who reside beyond the national border of Botswana.

To reiterate the main point, Werbner’s metaphorical use of the ‘umbrella’ asan ethnic term relates to the case of ‘Korean- ness’ in the RFE in the sense that it is

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based on their dual usage of their cultural difference in the consolidation anddiversification of Koreans. In other words, cultural difference is used not only todistinguish fellow Koreans from other ethnic groups (the opening of theumbrella) but also to highlight internal divergence (the closing of the umbrella),which leaves room for coalition with and acceptance of other ethnic people.Thus, the ethnographic task in this article will be to explore what kind of politicaland economic climate motivates the opening and closing of this umbrella and togauge its diameter and range. Later in this article, I will describe how this diver-sity among Koreans was created from the different historical backgrounds of themigration for each of the sub- groups of Koreans; and I will show how this differ-ence is played out against the backdrop of changes in the citizenship law and anti- immigration sentiment in the RFE.

This peculiar aspect of Korean ethnicity in the region – the diversification of aunitary ethnic group – also affirms their integrity to the region, as their differenthistorical experiences of migration and the resulting sub- grouping also allude tohistorical specificity in the making of the region.2 Ever since the first arrival ofKoreans in the RFE from the Korean Peninsular in the 1860s, shortly after thecreation of the border between Russia and the northern part of Korea, Koreanshave occupied a significant but awkward position in the RFE. The changingnumber of the population of Korean origin in the RFE in the early twentieth cen-tury reflected the oscillating stance of the Russian authorities in the colonisationprocess: on the one hand, the authorities acknowledged the utilitarian use of theKorean population as a labour force, which was deemed beneficial for the coloni-sation of the region, while on the other hand, they were seen as a reminder of theproximate location of the region to East Asian rather than Slavic civilisation, withthe assumption that this threatened Russian sovereignty in the region.

This contradiction resulted in the totalitarian solution in 1937 of the cleansing(otchistka) of the entire population of Koreans, which numbered around 175,000,and their expulsion to Central Asia. Afterwards, the gap left in industry was filledby the migration of the Slavic population and the security of the region was rein-forced by the establishment of army settlement cities and the closing of theborder from the outside world until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despitethese totalitarian measures, which aimed to cut off any connection between theKorean population and the region, this article will show that the presence ofKoreans in the RFE was continuous and was tolerated, but not welcomed, thoughtheir number was small during the period when the region was a specially securi-tised region until the 1980s.3

It was in the early 1990s, when a significant number of Koreans migratedfrom Central Asia at one extreme of Eurasia to the RFE at the other, that thismigration attracted public interest and resulted in the publication of articles inlocal newspapers in order to explain to the public why a large number of Koreanshad suddenly begun to appear in the RFE. The historical fact that a large Koreanpopulation had at one time existed in the region was suppressed, not only in thewhole Soviet Union but even more so in the RFE during the socialist period.

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However, together with public curiosity concerning the reason for the increase inthe number of Koreans, there was also anxiety and fear. Combined with hardshipand uncertainty about the future in the course of the post- Soviet transition, peoplebegan to worry about the fate of this region, which lay at the furthest easternreaches of Russia.

ExCLUSION AND THE MIGRATION REGIME IN THE RFE

Presenting ethnographic cases of the different social conditions of migrationamong Koreans, I draw on the issue of ‘inequality and exclusion’ in Russia raisedby Caroline Humphrey (2001). She addresses a peculiar ‘inequality’ in Russia thatcannot be explained in terms of clear criteria such as ‘economic exploitation, classor race’, but is derived from ‘exclusionary practices’ (2001: 334) which appear tobe arbitrary and depend on public emotion. According to Humphrey, ‘“practices ofexclusion” refers to processes such as exile, banishment or limits on residence oremployment that radically disadvantage people but do not expel them entirelyfrom society’ (2001: 333). Furthermore, those inequalities or the effects of exclu-sionary practices cannot be explained in unitary terms, as the boundary iscontinually reviewed and reset as a historical variant as a certain condition of ‘dis-possession’ (2001: 348). In such a quandary of exclusionary practices, she paysattention to the emotional aspect4 in politics expressed in ‘the nexus of anxiety’ ofthe ‘unity’ (edinstvo) pervasive from the national level to micro- level like a smallgroup of ordinary people in the form of a ‘collective’ (kollektiv).

In this article, I also argue that exclusionary practices have changed the scaleof the collective or the boundary of exclusion/inclusion during the 1990s in thedifferent treatment of migrants in the RFE. In the early 1990s, a specific groupformed by migration was accepted as equivalent to the collective within the con-tinuity of Soviet practices. Thus, a clan or extended family group was admittedinto a village or a city, although they were not incorporated fully into the localsociety. Rather, some Koreans preferred to remain outside of the old system, thusallowing them to attain significant economic opportunities by remaining freefrom the pre- existing socialist morality embedded in the locality. However,exclusionary practices shifted their focus from the collective as a socio- economicunit to a national one in the later 1990s, as Humphrey hinted (2001: 347). In par-ticular, the change of citizenship law in 2002 signified such a shift, and I willdescribe the effects of such changes on the Koreans who migrated from the endof the 1990s.

While Humphrey (2001) insightfully charted a subtle and complex differencein the creation of inequality in Russia, it is my intention to supplement her formu-lation with the ethnographic cases in this article. Simply speaking, I have come towonder how these disadvantaged and dispossessed people could settle in the RFEand continue to live there, some with economic success, despite such exclu-sionary practices.

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My ethnographic cases show that there were certain tactics and strategiesamong the excluded in dealing with ‘exclusionary practices’. I argue that there isa certain conversion of exclusion amongst the Koreans in the RFE, enabled bythe partnership and exchange amongst different sub- groups of Koreans. Thisconversion seems to be possible due to the duality of the collective in Russia,namely the dual positioning across the boundary, so that being inside carries abinding obligation towards the collective but results in safety and protection,while being outside means freedom from the morality and loyalty that the collec-tive imposes on its members (Humphrey 2001: 345) but results in lack ofprotection.

I also borrow and modify David Anderson (1996)’s notion of ‘citizenshipregime’ in order to conceptualise such practices for coalition and exchangeamong the sub- groups of Koreans. I propose to use the term ‘migration regime’as a twin concept with Anderson’s citizenship regime with the purpose ofexplaining the social arrangements and actual practices around the issue ofmigration, thereby shifting the focus from the state institution to the associationsand exchanges among the people just outside the state enterprises. Anderson(1996: 110) discusses the ‘culturally appropriate triangulation of a person withina position, a collective and a citizenship regime’ in his study of Evenki reindeer inSiberia. In the arrangement of the ‘bundle of rights’, the position of a personwithin the state enterprise was measured using certain assumptions about theircircumstances, such as nationality, gender, length of residence and educationalqualifications, rather than by a universal concept of equal individual rights andduties as might be implied in Western liberal- democratic concepts of citizenship.In this kind of social provision in the citizenship regime, nationality and migra-tion are salient aspects in defining a person’s position, given the coincidence ofincomers as Russians and natives as locals in the case of Anderson’s ethno-graphic study.

However, we need to rework the relevance between nationality and migrantin the case of the RFE, as being local (mestnyi) does not necessarily mean beingnative and not all incomers are Russians in the case discussed by this article.5Rather, the distinction changes in accordance with the time of migration and theemplacement process. The distinction between older residents and newcomers isnot fixed, but is reset with each wave of more recent incomers, and this change ofdistinction marks significant changes in the making of the region and also insome important social categories. Furthermore, while Anderson’s notion of citi-zenship regime located the state enterprise at the centre, I argue that there ismigration regime alongside the citizenship regime and it is located at the marginor outside of the state institutions. This paired notion is particularly useful andnecessary, given that the two spheres of inside and outside state institutions arenot clearly separable, but complement and interpenetrate each other.

For the purpose of this article, I propose this concept in order to capture thechanges and dynamics in migrants’ and local people’s diverse responses to thecrumbling of the old Soviet socialist state institutions. As I shall describe later in



this article, Korean migrants who came to the RFE and are located in this regimetake up various positions and these positions move in the direction of bettermentin terms of economic situation in the 1990s, depending on the individuals’ tacticsand strategies for dealing with new changes effectively.

Therefore, not all the Korean migrants were in inferior positions; in fact,some had a good chance of making a fortune by adroitly navigating the migrationregime and manoeuvring in partnership with older resident Koreans and ChineseKoreans at least until the late 1990s. In interactions amongst these sub-groups ofKoreans, each group would carry out an exchange for something that the otherparty did not possess, such as cheap Chinese goods, local connections, freedomfrom the anxiety of being excluded, and the ability to occupy spaces outside thelegitimate social ones, usually in market places and in domestic cultivation.However, as Humphrey noted (2001), this excluded space can also be subject tochange as a result of the continuous review of boundaries. In this unstable situa-tion, the two groups of Koreans from Central Asia who came in the 1950s andthose who arrived in the 1990s both constituted their locality based on theremains of the past in terms of Soviet values, in contrast with the Koreans whocame from China. For the convenience of description, let me begin with anoverview of these three sub- groups of Koreans in the RFE so that we can have abetter understanding of their historical circumstances, taking into account themigration policies during the Soviet period and afterwards.

‘OLD RESIDENT’ KOREANS OUTSIDE THE SOVIET MIGRATIONPOLICy

The ‘old resident’ Koreans in the RFE are not well known to the outside world,whereas the migration rush of Koreans from Central Asia following the collapseof the Soviet Union received the spotlight of media attention not only in theregion but also in South Korea (Lee 1998). After their deportation in 1937,Koreans in Central Asia were only officially allowed to move outside their resi-dent republics from 1956 onwards. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the politicalatmosphere of ‘melting’ (otoplenie) was the condition under which this permis-sion was granted. It was at this time that Koreans began to return to the RFE.6Nevertheless, only a small number of Koreans decided to return to their home-land, as the majority of them had already been settled in Central Asia for nearlytwo decades since 1937.

Repatriation after 1956 was carried out according to the peoples’ willingness(dobrovol’nost’) rather than by any plan of the state.7 In other words, it was a ‘dis-organised’, ‘personal’ and ‘quiet’ migration without any institutional support interms of migration management in the Soviet Union (Rybakovskii 1990).According to the all- Soviet Union census in 1959, there were 6,952 Koreans whomoved from Central Asia between 1954 and 1959, out of the total population of1,381,018 in Primorskii Krai (Itoki Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1959 goda,

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cited in Vashchuk et al. 2002: 110). According to the census in 1989, the numberof the Koreans was 8,125,8 which means that the number of Korean migrantsbetween 1959 and 1989 was very small, while the state carried out affirmativeactions to relocate the Slavic population to the RFE, which resulted in theswelling of the total population of Primorskii Krai up to around 2 million (ItokiVsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1959 goda, cited in Vashchuk et al. 2002: 110).

Many Koreans who repatriated to the RFE in the 1950s migrated to engage inrice cultivation, which was their traditional livelihood, and they wanted to returnto the place of their birth. Their movement needs to be understood not only as partof the post- war demographic change among Koreans in Central Asia, asdescribed by Kim and Men (1995), but also within the context of Soviet migra-tion policy, in order to understand their social position in relation to theirmigration to the RFE.

The central allocation of labour power or ‘the regulation of population move-ment’ (Kotkin 1995: 103) was a pre- requisite of the ‘allocative power’ of thesocialist state (Verdery 1998), as the labour force was the ‘means of production’in the Soviet economy (Ssorin- Chaikov 2003). Therefore, migration policy wascrucial in enabling the state to regulate the labour force; the residence of someneeded to be fixed to live and work, while others needed to be free to move else-where to fill shortages in the labour force. On the continuum of migrationpractices during Soviet times, there was, on the one hand, ‘optimal migrationaccording to the perceived needs of the state economy’ with the allocation ofwork by the state institution (Buckley 1995: 904), and on the other hand, therewas ‘personal’ (lichnaia), ‘voluntary’ (dobrovol’naia) and ‘quiet’ (tikhaia)migration, which impeded the distribution network of the state. The latter wasstrongly discouraged during the 1930s and later disadvantages were accrued bysuch people. This contrasts with the encouraged migration that was accompaniedby the granting of many state benefits to the settlers in underdeveloped marginalregions of the USSR, including the RFE.

The social arrangement for the distribution of the labour force became thebasis of rights and duties recognised by ordinary people. Thus, there was animplicit hegemonic consensus as to the categories of people who were to haveaccess to certain things and services and those who did not. While ‘incomers’(priezzhie) were ‘people who have been sent with a particular project or mission’and were ‘often bound up with an accusation of intrusiveness, acquisitivenessand an insensitivity to local ways’ in subarctic Siberia (Anderson 1996: 102), inPrimorskii Krai there existed a persistent distinction between ‘old residents’(starozhily) and ‘new residents’ (novosely) from Imperial Russia, which subse-quently merged together with the incoming waves of more recent new residents.9The contrast between these two groups and the subsequent weakening of thiscontrast is a way of understanding the region’s backwardness and frustration inthe process of emplacement. The new residents came to understand by theirexperience what the old residents complained of (cf. Vashchuk et al. 2002), andthis complaining about the marginality of RFE in the process of emplacement can



be viewed as one of the ways of asserting one’s belonging and identity with thelocality, in contrast with the European part of Russia.

However, apart from encompassing locality in contrast with the Europeanpart of Russia, there has always been the fear of ‘partitioning off’ from the whole-ness of Russia or the USSR (cf. Humphrey 2001). On the one hand, during Soviettimes many Koreans in the RFE had to put up with the fact that such fear wasimposed on them as a marker of the marginality of the region as a borderland ofEast Asia. On the other hand, they were also deeply localised, internalising such anotion of the marginality of the region in past years with an emphasis on theirbelonging to the region as old residents rather than as an ethnic minority. Thus,they sometimes tactically use the words for ‘locals’ (mestnye), ‘old residents’(starozhily), and ‘Primorians’ (primoritsy) in describing themselves in contrast tothe ‘migrants’ (pereselentsy), ‘newcomers’ (novosely or priezzhie), and ‘peoplefrom Central Asia’ (Chen 2003: 42).10 Nevertheless, they seem to have obtainedbetter connections owing to their long residence in this region and this socialasset provided them with great potential for forging partnerships with other kindsof Koreans who came to the RFE in subsequent years.

However, we have to bear in mind that these local connections were formed inthe context of anti- Korean sentiment during Soviet times. According to an inter-view with an old resident Korean described by Vashchuk et al. (2002: 118), whenhe returned to RFE with his family in the 1950s, the neighbours yelled ‘Here comenegroes!’ (Ponaekhali suda negry). Also, many Koreans who repatriated to theRFE in the late 1950s without institutional support did not have access to socialprovisions such as housing and employment. This led to considerable hardship forthe early repatriates, compared to the improvement in life conditions for Koreanswho remained in Central Asia. Many of the first generation repatriates could notsecure jobs at state enterprises since they moved to this region ‘quietly’ (stikhinno)and ‘personally’ (lichno). An elderly woman, Anya Vladimirovna, who was bornin 1934 and who came to Primorskii Krai in the 1950s and graduated fromyekaterinburg University where she studied journalism, was unable to get a per-manent job, despite her qualification in higher education; only intermittent andtemporary positions such as maternity or sick- leave cover were available to her. Inan interview, she recollected that ‘otherpeople feltverysorry for theKoreans in thepast, as we were not given proper jobs (ustroilis’)’. Thus, the first generation ofrepatriated Koreans seem mostly to have worked at private farming with tempo-rary contracts with the state farms, while the second generation were able to obtainmore stable jobs after having received an education.

Overall, most older resident Koreans consider that the increase in the numberof Koreans in the province is very good for them in their temporal comparisonbetween before and now; they typically say that ‘it is now better to have moreKoreans here than before’. However, this positive evaluation of the increase inKoreans in Primorskii Krai needs contextualisation, as there is still a lingeringfeeling of fear concerning the question of nationality (vopros natsionalnosti)which illustrates why the past was generally perceived to be ‘bad’ for the Korean

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minority in Primorskii Krai, while more recent newcomers from Central Asiaevaluate the past better, but the present worse in terms of the nationality question.

The fear is subtle and hard to describe, as fear itself prevents them from talkingabout the topic freely with a stranger like me. It was discussed only in a social con-text in the presence of newcomers from Central Asia when such a topic is reflectedon without any hesitation, which is telling as regards the attitude of newcomerKoreans about questions of nationality. The subtlety of ethnographic contextswhere I could sense the fear was manifested through their refusal or their attemptsto avoid talking about the topic. The meeting with Anya Vladimirovna, ayekaterinburg graduate, was a typical example. As she was talking about the dis-crimination against Koreans in the region during Soviet times, I showed moreinterest in that topic and began asking further questions. From that momentonwards, the atmosphere became awkward and her hospitality suddenly changedinto haste to finish the conversation. I had similar experiences with other old resi-dent Koreans when the flow of talk stopped when the question of nationality arose.In fact, until those moments happened, I did not realise the sensitiveness of thatissue, as most newcomer Koreans from Central Asia freely talk about the topic in acasual way. Before I return to this subject, I would like to present the overall situa-tion of migration for newcomer Koreans and their settlement process in the 1990s.

NEWCOMER KOREANS AND THE MIGRATION REGIME

The migration and settlement process for the Koreans from Central Asia inPrimorskii Krai in the early and mid-1990s shows that there was muted consentin accepting a certain group of people within the boundary of a state enterprise orvillage. In that sense, in Primorskii Krai the Soviet- type collective was still ameaningful categorisation in defining one’s position in the local context until themid-1990s. There was no problem with the legal status of an individual as a partof the collective at this stage and covert admission enabled a certain group ofpeople to obtain residency permission.11 I believe that it was around the late1990s when this trend changed, due to the slowdown in refugee outflows fromCentral Asia and the increase in migration caused by economic difficulties.Migration based on economic motivation was deemed to be selfish and to beharmful for communal values, and extreme abhorrence was shown towardstraders (Humphrey 1999; Dyatlov 2000).

Compared to migration in the early 1990s, many Koreans came from CentralAsia temporarily to the RFE as guests on an individual basis from around themid-1990s, shuttling between the two regions and involved in trading activities.Though kinship connections remained crucial in motivating them to visit thisregion ‘to have a look’, what encouraged them to settle was often their unex-pected success in entrepreneurial activities. One case which illustrates this is awoman called Lena who was born in 1958. She sold fur coats from a stall whichshe owned in the Chinese market at Ussuriisk. She came to Ussuriisk in 1992,



originally as the guest of her cousin. She did not intend to move there, but hadcome in order to escape a difficult personal situation. She used to be a school-teacher, teaching history at a secondary school in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In theearly 1990s, along with many other schoolteachers, she tried shuttle tradingduring her vacations, importing some angora shirts from China. For this trade,she borrowed US$2,000 from an acquaintance, but the trading was not successfuland she was left in debt. She was in trouble, as there did not seem to be any way topay back the debt. Then, her cousin in Ussuriisk suggested that she visit him. Sheand her husband came to her cousin as guests during the summer holiday and shebought vegetables from a Chinese Korean and sold them in the market. It wasvery successful with a long queue of buyers every day. After only one visit shewas able to repay her debt when she returned to Tashkent. She continued this sea-sonal activity for a couple more years and was able to buy a flat in Ussuriisk; shemoved there permanently with her two children in 1995.

As shown by Lena’s story, a quick economic gain obtained from the connec-tion with a Chinese Korean who came there at a similar time to the influx ofKoreans from Central Asia enabled this woman to settle in the RFE. At least untilthe early 2000s, with the crumbling of old Soviet state enterprises, the source ofwealth was limited to natural resources like oil and gas, which were under themonopoly of oligarchs and resulted in little economic benefit for ordinary people.In this situation, visible economic wealth available for the general populace in theRFE came from trading foreign products, as a result of the weakness of thedomestic production sectors. Some Russian Koreans have been able to gainwealth quickly in cooperation with Chinese Korean traders. The following twoaspects have enabled this intra- ethnic cooperation to become viable.

First, there is communicability between Russian and Chinese Koreans, giventhe historical background that not only did they interact with each other until theKoreans in the RFE were relocated to Central Asia in 1937, but also that theirancestors commonly came from the northern part of the Korean peninsula. WhileRussian Koreans had great difficulty in understanding my South Korean speechdue to strong vernacular differences, they continually emphasised that they wereable to understand each other well when they speak with Chinese Koreans.12

Despite the lament about the loss of native language since perestroika, manyKoreans older than middle- aged (or first or second generation after the relocationin 1937) were capable of at least a passive understanding of their vernacularKorean, as their parents used to speak Korean at home.13 Typically, they say, ‘athome our parents spoke in Korean, and we answered in Russian’. Thus, if one notonly understood but also spoke their vernacular Korean, it was a great asset inobtaining Chinese products to sell on the streets in the mid 1990s and in workingfor them as interpreters. However, this was the case only until the mid 1990s, asmany Chinese Koreans had already established their own connection with localKoreans by the end of the 1990s. Instead, newcomer Koreans from Central Asiafrom the end of the 1990s onwards began to work as hired traders at stalls in theChinese markets.

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Secondly, in addition to language capability, personal skills and networkscould quickly improve one’s economic situation during this period. For example,many Korean women began catering businesses with their cooking skills, run-ning street- food stalls or eateries. One elderly woman whom I met retired from agarment factory in the early 1990s. She became acquainted with a ChineseKorean who brought angora shirts in bulk from China. The goods were squashedin the course of importation and were not in a fit condition for sale. With experi-ence from her work place, she could transform squashed angora shirts intobeautiful fluffy ones, which were then very popular among local consumers.With the money she earned from this work, she was able to buy a flat for herdaughter.

These personal skills acquired during the Soviet period could become moreeffective when combined with the power of local people, in addition to the‘Chinese’ connection. There was a man called Mikhail Kim, who was killed in ashooting in 1995, and who was remembered as ‘a great man’ (ogromnyi che-lovek). He owned several big businesses in the city, including an up- marketItalian restaurant, an agricultural enterprise and a large share of the wholesalevegetable market.14 He came from Ushtobe, Kazakhstan, to Primorskii Krai in1991 and he used to work as a television repair engineer. He was promoted to theposition of head engineer of the state enterprise, but when autochthonous nation-alism arose, he walked away from the system and formed his own business, asthere was no longer any future promise for his career within the system, ‘as aperson was not evaluated by his activities, but by nationality (po natsional’nomupriznaku)’ (Chen 2003). When the Soviet Union was dissolved, he moved toUssuriisk and registered a private enterprise (chastnoe predpriiatie) with the cityexecutive committee in Ussuriisk. Beginning by selling foodstuffs, he alsochanged his business to a workshop for making and repairing shoes and boots.While repairing boots, he was also preparing to establish a factory with equip-ment to produce his own brand of shoes. However, with the opening of theborder, cheap shoes and boots suddenly became available as imports from China.Thus, instead of building a factory, he engaged in foreign trade with China incooperation with Chinese Koreans, importing not only shoes but also other prod-ucts.15 In the course of expanding his business, the crucial connection for him wasnot only with Chinese Koreans, but also with old residents who already had con-nections with the local authorities.16

Thus, the formation and expansion of corporate enterprises by Koreans waslocated in a triangle of products through connections with Chinese Koreans, per-sonal skill and knowledge involved in business, and protection from localauthorities and mafia groups. The expansion of business depended on one’s loca-tion in this triangle, which was formed just outside or near the boundary of thecitizenship regime proposed by Anderson (1996), and the case of Mikhail Kimexemplifies a typical successful navigation of the migration regime.



OTHER OUTSIDER KOREANS AND THE RISE OF ANTI- IMMIGRATION SENTIMENT

From the 1990s, Primorskii Krai saw an increase in other kinds of Korean popula-tion such as people who came from South and North Korea and northeast China.South Koreans were usually engaged in business or came as Christian mission-aries, while North Koreans were contract workers. Koreans from northeast Asiawere mostly traders. These ‘other Koreans’ tended to resort to local RussianKoreans for help in practical matters and this was repaid by counter- help in theform of employment or cooperation in business, as described in the previous sec-tion. Among these other Koreans, the largest group is the Chinese Koreans, whorefer to themselves as Joseonjok.17 They are usually considered to be just Chineseand their ethnic Korean origin is generally not well known to local residents. Onlyasmallportionofpopulationwhohavehaddirectandclosesocial interactionswiththem are aware of the fact that some Chinese citizens are ethnic Koreans.18

Concerning this, we need to note the rising anti- Chinese sentiment from thelate 1990s, and the fact that these Chinese Koreans were never considered to beKoreans even if they interacted with local Koreans. As in many eastern provincesin Russia, the increase in Chinese traders and their trading activities created fear ofa takeover of the eastern part of Russia by China, not only for the central govern-ment but also for local people, similar to the spectre of the ‘yellow peril’ of pre- revolutionary times (Dyatlov 2012). This Sino- phobic racist atmosphere inthe RFE was expressed through the use of abusive words such as ‘yellow faces’and ‘slit eyes’ which depict physical features of the East Asian population. Thisracial antipathy was not irrelevant for Russian Koreans, as their physical featuresstill remained East Asian, despite their native use of the Russian language.

Furthermore, together with this anti- Chinese sentiment, there arose furthertightening of immigration from countries of the former Soviet Union, includingrepublics of Central Asia, following the change of the citizenship law in 2002. Thisdirectly affected Korean migrants who came to the RFE from the late 1990sonwards and it also signified a shift in the notion of the collective and the locality,resetting boundaries in terms of nationalist rhetoric.

In response to this change, Russian Koreans claimed that they belonged toRussia in two ways. Firstly, they distanced themselves from the other types ofKoreans and, secondly, they emphasised the multi- ethnic nature of the RussianFederation, expanding its national boundary to include all those who had a longhistory of attachment to the Soviet Union. For example, a businessman who accu-mulated a large fortune through the international trade in timber with China inpartnership with the Chinese Koreans claimed that ‘as much as the ChineseKoreans resemble the Chinese, we act and think like Russians (rossiiany). I hadinteractions with South Koreans and I feel myself different from them as well’. It isremarkable that in his claim for belonging to Russia, he chose the word rossiianin[Russian citizens] rather than russkii [ethnic Russians].19 In Werbner’s discussionof cosmopolitan ethnicity in Botswana, which I introduced at the beginning of this

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article, the Kalanga also tried to claim their belonging to Botswana in nationalterms, and for them nationalisation did not mean ‘Tswana- isation’ but ‘Botswana- isation’ (Werbner 2002: 752). Similarly, for Russian Koreans the nationalboundary making of Primorskii Krai must not be Slavicisation but Rossianisation,which includes Russian- speaking peoples. However, it must be noted that it is theKoreans from Central Asia who could actively and confidently make these claims,rather than the old resident Koreans who had suffered from Slavic nationalismduring the Soviet Period and had to internalise such ethnic nationalism due to somedegree of fear. I will discuss this aspect of boundary remaking and the RussianKoreans’ assertion of their allegiance to Russia derived from their Soviet past inthe remaining sections with more detailed ethnographic stories.

THE CHANGE IN THE CITIZENSHIP LAW AND ITS EFFECT ONNEWCOMER KOREANS

While many Koreans, though not all, who came to the RFE around the early andmid-1990s settled in more favourable economic and political conditions, thepeople who came later suffered the most. From around the late 1990s, thefavourable economic conditions for the newcomer Koreans changed. The tradersfrom China no longer needed new connections, as their trading place in the late1990swassecuredwhen theChinesemarketwasopened inUssuriisk.Theclearestchange which affected the status of migrants was the amendment of the Russiancitizenship law, put into practice in July 2002, which not only disadvantagedmigrants who arrived after this time but also those who had come before withoutRussiancitizenship.Thecitizenship lawaimed to restrict theunregulated inflowofmigrants to Russia and made it harder and longer to obtain Russian citizenship.Under the old citizenship law passed in February 1992, citizens of the formerSoviet Union could change their old Soviet passport to a Russian one simply byattaching a slip to it. It was even possible to buy one. Up to 2002, migrants from the‘near abroad’ (CIS countries)20 did not have any difficulty in obtaining citizenship.Rather, the more difficult issue was the residence permit (propiska), which was thebasis for many other documents and rights. Until 2002, once one had a residencepermit, citizenship could be obtained after three years’ residence in Russia.

However, because of the new law there are now many other obstacles toobtaining Russian citizenship, even if one has a residence permit. At first, it tookat least seven years to get Russian citizenship – two years’ temporary residence(vremennoe prozhivanie), when registration had to be renewed every threemonths, and five years’ permanent residence (vid na zhitel’stvo). Secondly, citi-zens of CIS countries needed to nullify their old citizenship in order to gainRussian citizenship, a matter that is beyond the control of an individual but ratherconstitutes a diplomatic matter between Russia and the country in question. Thisbecame a serious problem for people from Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan, whichdid not allow their citizens to change their citizenship freely to a Russian one,



while Kazakhstan and Kirgizstan reached a mutual agreement with Russia not toplace restrictions on changes in citizenship in 1999 and 2001 respectively.Thirdly, in addition to these restrictions, a series of documents needs to be handedin and deposit money and fees paid into the bank. Migrants are also required tohave HIV and other medical tests every three months and to pass a Russian lan-guage exam (even if their native language is Russian), which also requires a fee.In the first half of 2003, only 213 people were able to obtain Russian citizenshipin the whole of Russia (Semenova 2003).

During Soviet times, a person’s residence permit came through his or her workand it guaranteed basic welfare benefits as part of ‘a bundle of rights’ (Anderson1996). The residence and internal passport system was devised to control people inthe allocation of work and residential places.21 However, the system could not con-trol the entire population. Rather, it left many holes through which people wereable to subvert the gaze of the system. One might even say that people who movedwithout regard to the population regulation system were tolerated and included onits margins, filling in niches in the official Soviet economic system, as the old resi-dent Koreans opted for in their settlement in the RFE. As Humphrey (2001: 333)noted, the system did not ‘expel’ these people ‘entirely from society’, but left themin an unstable position with various disadvantages.

The change in the citizenship law in 2002 represents the disintegration ofsuch ‘a bundle of rights’. As Buckley (1995: 915–16) pointed out, while thepropiska and passport systems were ‘a transmitter between collective and indi-vidual interests in the distribution of the population’ during Soviet times, thesesystems also seem to have been ‘a vehicle’ in the privatisation and capitalisationprocess during the post- Soviet transitional period in Russia by requiring peopleto be private homeowners and individual workers in order to conform to its direc-tives. It is no longer possible to receive housing and get allocated work, but ratherit is necessary to buy a house for propiska22 and be employed in Russia. However,employment seems neither to be regarded as it was during the days of the Sovietsystem, nor conceptualised in a Western or capitalist way. Rather, most peoplework in a private family business by running it jointly or being employed as daylabourers, as in the case of Koreans who work in the Chinese market as hiredstaff. Here, work is arranged as a relationship between two private persons(chastnoe litso), rather than between an economic entity and a juridical indi-vidual. Thus, although the citizenship law was modelled after the WesternEuropean system, the reality does not actually conform to these regulations.What one sees instead are detouring tactics and the handing over of bribes for asimplified scheme (uproshchennaia skhema).

The change in the citizenship law also affected people who had moved to theRFE long before July 2002, as many Koreans did not deal with the changes in cit-izenship in time, even if they had been able to do so. There were two reasons forthe Koreans’ delay in dealing with citizenship. At first, if one had a residencepermit, Russian citizenship was not seen to be of any great use to many Koreans.Pensioners processed their citizenship change quickly in order to receive a pen-

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sion, although a minimal one,23 but many people of working age, especially men,did not bother to instigate the citizenship process, as there was no disadvantagefrom not having citizenship nor were there any identifiable benefits to be gainedby possessing citizenship. However, with the increase of migration labour toSouth Korea from the early 2000s, the problem with citizenship has begun to berecognised as an issue, as the South Korean consulate in Vladivostok refused toprocess visa applications from those who did not have Russian citizenship,though this policy has since changed.

Secondly, there was a deep sense of belonging to the former Soviet Union andof the unacknowledged border between Central Asia and Russia until the late1990s. Despite the declaration of the independence of the CIS countries, peopledid not think of each country as being separate. This seemed to be more so inRussia as it was considered the successor to the Soviet Union. However, thissense of belonging becomes ambiguous with the disadvantages Koreans had togo through after their migration, especially with the strengthening of restrictionsin the citizenship law.

Nevertheless, an interesting attitude of newcomer Koreans is their persistentoptimism. A man called Sasha might be a good example of this. Although he wasupset by the fact that he could not go to South Korea owing to his lack of Russiancitizenship, he was not overly concerned about the matter. He told me that ‘itwould be sorted out soon. I heard that President Putin is going to announce some-thing to solve that problem’.24 His optimism was based on the intuition that heshares this problem with ethnic Russians from CIS countries. There was anoutcry by Russians criticising the new citizenship law in that it put ‘our people’(sootechestvenniki) from CIS countries in a difficult position. In this outcry,although Koreans are not mentioned, historical experience ties them togetherwith ethnic Russians as developers of Central Asia.

Koreans in Central Asia never thought of themselves as inferior or equivalentto the autochthonous people and considered themselves to be in a position similarto that of Russians as collaborators in developing Central Asia, an attitude whichis not found among the old resident Koreans in Primorskii Krai. This under-standing is manifested in their perception of local Russians in the Far East:newcomer Koreans from Central Asia kept saying ‘Russians here [in PrimorskiiKrai] are completely different from Russians there [in Central Asia]’.Interestingly, this comparison between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is converted to ‘now’and ‘before’ in certain contexts when the nationality question is highlighted anddifferent experiences between old residents and newcomers are articulated inconversations.

THE SHIFTING NOTION OF LOCALITy

In the triangular exchange among three groups of Koreans in Primorskii Krai, thenewcomer Koreans from Central Asia occupy an important and interesting posi-



tion in terms of the nationality question, which is linked to the notion of localityin the region. As it is the case for both old resident and newcomer Koreans thatthey themselves or their forebears experienced displacement in 1937 and lived inCentral Asia, there is not any clear distinction between the two groups ineveryday transactions. Moreover, many of them were kin- related or in marriagealliances25 which reinforced the merging of these two groups.

However, when it comes to the question of ethnic discrimination, differentperceptions arose between these two groups, which present a peculiarity of theregion. It will suffice to describe two episodes that show the perceptual differenceconcerning ‘ethnic discrimination’ in Primorskii Krai. The first episode involveda couple, living in a village located about 150 km north of Vladivostok. The hus-band, Leonid, was born in Kazakhstan in 1960 and his wife, Olga, was born inUzbekistan in 1974. Leonid is an old resident, having come to Primorskii Krai in1968, whereas his wife, Olga, moved from Uzbekistan in 1995. During a dinnerto which I was invited, I asked their opinions about ‘the nationality question’.The conversation went as follows:

LEONID: The nationality question didn’t officially exist during Soviet socialisttimes (ofitsial’no), but in reality (v samom dele) it did.

OLGA: No! Even in reality there wasn’t a nationality question in the past. It’s onlyafter the dissolution of the Union that the nationality question arose.

HGP: I’ve heard that Koreans had a hard time around the time of the border con-flict between China and the USSR at the end of the sixties. Is that true?26

LEONID: yes, Koreans went through very difficult times. At school I was beaten upby the other children, as I looked like the Chinese. But I understand them, astheir brothers and fathers were killed in the conflict.

Here, we witness an inversed evaluation of the nationality question between hus-band and wife, juxtaposed with ‘before’ and ‘now’. I happened to have a similarconversation with some elderly Koreans.27 I visited the house of an elderlyKorean couple, together with two elderly women, one of whom, SvetaSergeevna, came from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1992, and the other, Kang OkSun, who came from Sakhalin Island to Primorskii Krai in the 1960s.28 The eld-erly couple were born in Khasanskii Raion in the 1930s. This region bordersNorth Korea and is an area where Koreans made up around 90 per cent of thepopulation until 1937. They moved from Central Asia to Primorskii Krai in 1957,so they were among the very first repatriates. At the end of my interview with thecouple, Sveta Sergeevna grumbled that people blame Koreans for ‘standing inthe marketplace even though it’s not only Koreans but also Russians who do thesame thing’.29 Kang commented on her complaints by saying that ‘national dis-crimination has lessened now, but it was very severe in the past’ and the elderlycouple agreed with Kang’s opinion. Then Sveta Sergeevna opposed their evalua-tion, raising her voice as Olga had done in the previous episode, and saying ‘No,we lived harmoniously before, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union,national discrimination has increased’. Here again we witness that the evaluation

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of national discrimination is inversed between old residents and the newcomersin terms of the temporality of ‘before’ and ‘now’.

In the absence of any form of institutionalised discrimination, to what does this‘national discrimination’ spoken of by the Russian Koreans refer? It is exactly thepolitics of exclusion/inclusion discussed by Humphrey, which is presented in atautological manner by Koreans; ‘they criticize (rugayut) us for standing in themarket, because we are Koreans’, ‘the policemen push us out, not accepting ourpapers, becauseweareKoreans’, etc.30 ForRussianKoreans, it isperceivedalmostas an ontological question. Secondly, in relation to exclusion, there is the issue ofhow to understand this inversed evaluation between two groups of Koreans on thesame topic and my focus is on the role of newcomer Koreans in the formation ofdifferent notions of locality in the 2000s. In short, they wrap up the locality withrecourse to the past and to ‘Soviet- ness’, as I discussed earlier.

The position of newcomer Koreans is similar to the stranger in Simmel’s soci-ology of association. According to Simmel (1971: 144), ‘the stranger is anelement of the group itself, ... whose membership within the group involves bothbeing outside it and confronting it’ and ‘the distance within this relation indicatesthat one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicates that one who isremote is near’ (1971: 143). However, what is interesting in the case of Koreansin Primorskii Krai is that the locality of Koreans is reinforced and affirmed by thepresence of more strangers and by different kinds of Korean migrants, in partic-ular Chinese Koreans and sometimes South Koreans as well.31

One of my interlocutors, Natasha, referred me to a conversation that she hadwith a train conductor during a journey from the village in which she lived toUssuriisk City. She told me this story in order to provide an example of how new-comer Koreans from Central Asia like herself became ‘second class’ (vtoroi sort)in Primorskii Krai, but also covertly to indicate some kind of confidence aboutbelonging to Russia. The conductor on the train asked her and her co- travellersfor identity documents for inspection, something that happens very often inRussia, and the conversation went as follows:

CONDUCTOR: Who are you? (Kto vy?)32

NATASHA: We are Koreans (My koreitsy)CONDUCTOR: Which? Chinese or other? (Kakie? Kitaiskie, chto li?)NATASHA: We are locals, Soviet Koreans (My mestnye, sovetskie koreitsy)

As soon as he heard this, he didn’t ask any more questions and went away.Their Soviet localness welds together old resident and newcomer Koreans by

virtue of the emergence of strangers such as Chinese or South or North Koreans.Their emphasis on the legitimacy of their residence as locals is manifested andvalidated by the presence of these other third parties in political terms.



CONCLUSION

In this article, I have tried to show the complexity of ethnicity in the migrationprocess in post- Soviet changes in the RFE through ethnographic examples ofKorean migrants from Central Asia. By contextualising the migration of Koreansin Primorskii Krai, Russia, the article has explored a certain political and eco-nomic logic underlining state- led migration policy during the Soviet period andits continuing transformation in the post- Soviet period. This suggests that a kindof adjunctive informal regime accompanies the citizenship regime, whichAnderson (1996) devised as a concept in order to explain the working logic of thecollective in Russia, and I have referred to this adjunct as the migration regime.

Between old resident and newcomer Koreans, evaluations of the nationalityquestion are manifested as different on the temporal dimension, though they bothacknowledge the presence of ethnic discrimination in Primorskii Krai. Throughthe effect of a temporal dimension in evaluating the nationality question, time canbe shown to ‘serve to separate more than to connect’ (Casey 1996: 30). In otherwords, newcomer Koreans expressed their different evaluation based on theirexperience not in terms of the spatial ‘there’ and ‘here’ but in terms of tempo-rality, the ‘before’ and ‘now’ watershed caused by the collapse of the SovietUnion, which they experienced through their movement from Central Asia to theRFE.

However, it is the place that ‘gathers’ (Casey 1996) their opinions and experi-ence, as it seems obvious that both groups experienced discrimination in thecourse of their emplacement in Primorskii Krai at different historical moments,which are not acknowledged in daily experience. Casey added that this placegathering is like a ‘sieve’ to ‘hold in and out’.

To gather placewise is to have a peculiar hold on what is presented (as well as rep-resented) in a given place. Not just the contents but also the very mode ofcontainment is held by a place. ‘The hold is held’. The hold of place, its gatheringaction, is held in quite special ways. First, it is a holding to gather in a particularconfiguration: hence our sense of an ordered arrangement of things in a place eventhough those things are radically disparate and quite conflictual ... Second, thehold is a holding in and a holding out. It retains the occupants of a place within itsboundaries: if they were utterly to vanish and the place to be permanently empty, itwould be no place at all but a void. But, equally, a place holds out, beckoning to itsinhabitants and, assembling them, making them manifest ... It can move place- holders toward the margins of its own presentation while, nevertheless, holdingthem within its own ambiance. (Casey 1996: 25, his emphasis)

It is notable that the ‘sieve’ of the holding place is historical. Thus, the ‘sieve ofholding in and out’ locates the Soviet period at its boundary, and hence the role ofnewcomer Koreans from Central Asia has been critical in the formation of a newpolitical and economic order in Primorskii Krai, lifting the fear that old residentKoreans used to experience.

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However, the temporal dimension of the notion of locality in Primorskii Kraidoes not extend to the pre-1937 period when Koreans on the Chinese and Sovietsides did not consider each other as different nations, but exchanged visits andmigrated using circuitous routes from the northern part of Korea to China via theRFE and to the RFE via China. Nevertheless, these spatiotemporal dynamics donot allow this separating force by temporality to be permanently fixed and this iswhy it would be interesting to see how this notion of locality purported by new-comer Koreans from Central Asia rooted in the Soviet past will change in theregion in future.

NOTES

*Acknowledgement: I am grateful for two reviewers’ comments which helped me torevise this article and to clarify its main argument. Needless to say, all the shortcomingsremain solely my responsibility.1 In this article, ‘Primorskii Krai [the Maritime Province]’ and ‘the Russian Far East’ areused interchangeably, although the latter is a higher administrative category and covers awider area. The data this article draws on came from my fieldwork research in 2003–4,mainly conducted in a city called Ussuriisk and in a few villages in the Krai. I used pseu-donyms for my interlocutors in order to protect their identities.2 One reviewer reminded me of this integration between Koreans’ displacements and theregion making of the RFE.3 I am grateful for the comment from a reviewer who brought to my attention the issue ofborder security in the region in relation to the migration of Koreans.4 I would use ‘socia(bi)lity’ (Simmel 1971) instead of emotion in explaining such prac-tices, as emotion is only observable in practices of sociality. Specifically, many Koreansused the example of tea hospitality in describing the change of attitude of people towardseach other.5 People’s perception of locality and immigrants in Irkutsk discussed by Dyatlov (2000) issimilar to the case of the RFE. Dyatlov noted that nearly all the residents in Irkutsk areimmigrants. It was from the beginning of the post- Soviet period that anti- migrant senti-ment emerges, in the cases both of Dyatlov’s article and of this article.6 In fact, after the Second World War, some Koreans moved to the RFE with missionsassigned to them by the state. Some were sent to North Korea to help in building socialismthere and others were sent to the RFE, assigned to supervise contract workers from NorthKorea to Russia in the late 1940s, while others were to teach the Korean language to thechildren of Sakhalin Koreans who had been involuntarily left behind at the end of theSecond World War and to the children of North Korean contract workers.7 For categorisation of migration during Soviet times, especially focusing on the RFE, seeRybakovskii (1990).8 Between 1959 and 1989, around 1,500 Koreans moved to Primorskii Krai. The migra-tion in this period seemed to be in accordance with job allocation or entrance to highereducation in the Krai. Thus, these people migrated in accordance with the norm of Sovietpolicy for migration. Indeed, many Koreans who migrated during this period occupiedsecure positions in state enterprises during Soviet times. In a book which is a kind of Who’sWho for Koreans in Primorskii Krai, there are many biographies of such Koreans whomigrated during this period (see Chen 2003).



9 Rybakovskii (1990) suggests that one of the features of population movement in theRFE is that ‘newcomers’ are people from Siberia who also moved from the western part ofRussia. Thus, ‘the wave’ of migration begins from the western part of Russia and ebbs inthe RFE.10 Chen (2003) notes that the length of local residence became ‘background [informa-tion]’ (obstoiatel’stvo) when some Koreans introduced each other at their first meeting,especially in the 1990s.11 Also until this time, house prices in Central Asia were not very low compared to the late1990s. As time went on, house prices in Central Asia dropped, while prices were rising inthe RFE. This also made the settlement process harder for migrants in later years.12 The vernacular Korean language used in the northern part of Korea is called ‘Yuk- jin’Korean. Yuk- Jin means ‘six settlements’, which were established in the fifteenth centuryby the Chosun Kingdom, not only to protect it from invasion by various groups of alienpeople (now ‘indigenous peoples’) along the Korean Peninsula, but also to assimilatethem by settling them in these specially designated fortresses. For a more specialised dis-cussion, see King (2006).13 A similar trope for native language as domestic language is found among Buryats inRussia. See Humphrey (1989).14 I heard that he was killed by his opponents in a battle for control of this wholesalemarket, but I could not obtain any more detailed information. The following informationabout this man comes from Chen (2003: 57–63).15 He was also enthusiastic about the national revival movement, having been the firstChair of ‘National and Cultural Autonomy for Koreans in Ussuriisk’.16 There is the other half of the success story on the Chinese side, like the opposite side ina decalcomania. These stories are available in the local Korean Chinese newspapers andwebsites. For example, <http://www.krcnr.cn/jj/qyft/201202/t20120226_265533.html>(Anon 2012) tells the success story of a Chinese Korean businessman who accumulated‘original capital’, taking advantage of border trading with Russia. He is now CEO of alarge corporate business group with a value of nearly $300 million. More discussion of theother side of the story is beyond the scope of this article, but it must be noted that this suc-cessful businessman emphasised that he could earn money in Russia thanks to the help of‘Koreans in Russia’ (rossiia joseonjok in Korean).17 I have not conducted proper fieldwork research among these Chinese Koreans; rather,my fieldwork research focused on Koreans who came from Central Asia in the 1990s.Therefore, the data in this article are limited. For a general introduction to ChineseKoreans, see Olivier (1993) and for a more thorough historical survey of the formation ofthis people, see Park (2005). Lee (2005) presents preliminary findings from his researchon the migration of Chinese Koreans to the RFE, which is of relevance to the topic of thisarticle. It is hard to know the exact size of this group, but Lee estimates that around 1,000–1,200 traders were active in Ussuriisk in 2002.18 It is also interesting to note that the Chinese are considered to be a single race or ethniccategory, with no distinctions made between them. This racial image of the Chinese pre-vents local people perceiving ethnic Koreans among them. One reviewer pointed out thatthese Chinese Koreans might be considered to be ‘newcomer Koreans’, but again I need toemphasise that this Korean ethnicity is not visible at all and that the notion of localitywhich emerged in the 2000s worked in a way to downplay such ethnic commonnessbetween Chinese and Russian Koreans. With anti- Chinese measures, these ChineseKoreans remain sojourners, rather than settling migrants. They are thus never consideredto be ‘incomers’ (priezzhie), but are simply viewed as Chinese or foreigners. This con-

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trasts with the case of local Chinese in the Baikal region, discussed by Safonova andSántha (2010), in which the Chinese who were born and grew up in the region were con-sidered to be local, despite the fact that their foreignness did not completely disappear.Here, we see the regional difference between the case in this article and the one inSafonova and Sántha’s. In 1937, when Koreans were relocated to Central Asia, theChinese population in the RFE was deported to China, except for a very small number ofChinese men who were married to indigenous women.19 My ethnic Russian friends found this new word, rossianin, awkward and unfamiliarand said that they rarely used it in colloquial speech.20 Despite the geographical distance between the RFE and Central Asia, it is described asthe ‘near abroad’. Aware of this incongruence in the RFE, Vashchuk et al. (2002) suggestusing the terms ‘new abroad’ for CIS countries and ‘traditional abroad’ for foreigncountries.21 The practice was rooted in Imperial Russia, but was abolished with the revolution. In1932, Stalin re- introduced this internal passport system.22 Many Russian Koreans get help with propiska from family members or relatives whoown houses by registering using their addresses. Among newcomer Koreans, it is thosewho do not have such relatives who suffer the most from the change of the law.23 Many elderly Korean people could not claim their full pension, as they did not bringdocuments from Central Asia, so they received a minimal amount, generally around 600roubles in 2003–2004. The pension has increased rapidly since then, reaching a minimumof 3–4,000 roubles in 2010, but living expenses and housing costs have also risen.24 Indeed, Putin announced some measures in order to simplify the process of citizenshipapplication for migrants from CIS countries in 2003 and early 2006.25 Old residents used to say that it was good to have more Koreans from Central Asia,enabling them to practise ethnic endogamy.26 There was a violent conflict between the Chinese and Russian border armies on anisland in Khanka Lake in 1969, which was called the ‘Daman Affair’ (Damanskoesobytie). After this conflict, public rallies, gatherings and pickets were organised with anti- Chinese slogans. As Koreans were ‘East Asian’ looking people, they became the target ofsuch anti- Chinese mobilisation. Another man who is also an old resident told me that hisdaughter often came home crying around this time as other children spat in her face atschool.27 This conversation was conducted in Korean.28 I do not provide any further context for those Koreans like Kang Ok Sun who werestranded on Sakhalin Island after the Second World War, as this goes far beyond the scopeof this article.29 This negative evaluation of traders lies in the Soviet denunciation of trading activity, assuch people were considered not only to hinder the socialist planning of the economicsystem but also to gain profit from exchange rather than from labour. Humphrey (1999)and Dyatlov (2000) discuss this anti- trade atmosphere in Siberia.30 It is worth noting that many Koreans think that this problem of discrimination appliesnot only to Koreans but also to non- Slavic national groups of migrants such as Kazakhs,Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks and Armenians, etc.31 Thus, ‘local’ and ‘strange’ are relative terms, not fixed ones for a specific group ofpeople.32 For minority nationalities in Russia, the question, ‘Who are you?’ implies that one isasking about nationality, despite the omission of the phrase, ‘by nationality’ (po nas-



tional’nosti). However, for Russians, this question seems to be understood in terms ofprofession.

REFERENCES

Anderson, D.G. 1996. Bringing civil society to an uncivilised place: citizenship regimein Russia’s arctic frontier, in C. Hann & E. Dunn (ed.), Civil society: challengingwestern models: 99–120. London & New york: Routledge.

Anon. 2012. Kukkyŏngsŏ saengsa nŏmnadŭltŏn pottarisang chosŏnjok ch’oego kiŏp-kaŭi hanaro [A Joseonjok shuttle trader who risked his life at the border became oneof the best businessmen]. Hŭngnyonggang Newspaper. Available athttp://www.krcnr.cn/jj/qyft/201202/t20120226_265533.html (accessed 14 April2012).

Buckley, C. 1995. The myth of managed migration: migration control and market in theSoviet period. Slavic Review 54(3): 896–916.

Casey, E.S. 1996. How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: phe-nomenological prolegomena, in S. Feld & K.H. Basso (ed.), Senses of place: 13–52.Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Chen, N. 2003. Deti svoego naroda: knigi o primorskikh koreitsakh [Children of ournation: a book on Primorskii Koreans]. Tashkent: Izdatel’stko- politicheskii tvorch-eskii dom imenii Gafura Gulyama.

Dyatlov, V. 2000. Anti- immigrant attitudes in the socio- political life of a Siberian city:the example of Irkutsk. Inner Asia 2(1): 13–24.

2012. Chinese migrants and anti- Chinese sentiments in Russian society, in FrontierEncounters: Knowledge and practice at the Russian, Chinese and Mongolianborder: 71–87. Cambridge UK: Open Book Publishers.

Humphrey, C. 1989. ‘Janus faced signs’: the political language of a Soviet minoritybefore Glasnost. Sociological Review 36: 145–75.

1999. Traders, ‘disorder’, and citizenship regimes in provincial Russia, in M.Burawoy & K. Verdery (ed.), Uncertain transition: ethnographies of change in thepostsocialist world: 19–52. Lanham (MD): Rowman & Littlefield.

2001. Inequality and exclusion: a Russian case study of emotion in politics.Anthropological Theory 1(3): 331–53.

Kim, G. & Men, G. 1995. Istoriia i kul’tura koreitsev kazakhstana [History and cultureof Kazakhstan Koreans] Almaty: Izdatel’stvo ‘Gylym’.

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The Migration Regime among Koreans in the Russian Far East

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