Koryo Saram, a documentary about the hundreds of thousands of Koreans forcibly deported to Kazakhstan in 1937, looks fascinating. From the movie website:
In 1937, Stalin began a campaign of massive ethnic cleansing and forcibly deported everyone of Korean origin living in the coastal provinces of the Far East Russia near the border of North Korea to the unsettled steppe country of Central Asia 3700 miles away. This story of 180,000 Koreans who became political pawns during the Great Terror is the central focus of this film. With political scientist and executive producer Meredith Jung-En Woo and cameraman Matt Dibble, Chung traveled to film the survivors of the deportation and their descendants who still live in Kazakhstan today.
Koryo Saram (the Soviet Korean phrase for Korean person) tells the harrowing saga of survival in the open steppe country and the sweep of Soviet history through the eyes of these deported Koreans, who were designated by Stalin as an “unreliable people” and enemies of the state. Through recently uncovered archival footage and new interviews, the film follows the deportees’ history of integrating into the Soviet system while working under punishing conditions in Kazakhstan, a country which became a concentration camp of exiled people from throughout the Soviet Union.
Today, in the context of Kazakhstan’s recent emergence as a rapidly modernizing, independent state, the story of the Kazakhstani-Koreans situated within this ethnically diverse country has resonance with the experience of many Americans and how they have assimilated to form new cultures in our world of increasingly displaced people.
Thousands were simply deposited on the open steppe, with no shelter, no resources, and no help. Like most things involving Stalin, his deep inhumanity is stomach-churning, as is the apparent lack of resistance. What’s even worse is that the Koreans weren’t alone: hundreds of thousands of Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Tatars, and Chechens were thrown into the steppe as well, left to fend for themselves on the horrid collective farms. Kazakhstan as the dumping ground of the Soviets. Disgusting. Still, it is comforting to see them thrive, and even manage to maintain their culture despite Stalin’s history-hating cultural policies.
On a personal level, I enjoyed some delicious Korean food in Karaganda (including the dog soup). The few Koreans I met were really awesome people, and got along with the Kazakhs much much much better than with the Russians. The DVD of the movie is not yet released, though I am eager to get my hands on it.
(h/t Michael Rank)
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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{ 1 comment }
I would love to see this film. It is a story that was repeated in central asia for countless people of numerous ethnicities. I have not read “The Silent Steppe” by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov yet, but it looks at what happen in the Kazak steppe through the eyes of someone who lived through it all. My comment is essentially a dialectic. Let us not forget what occured in the USA during WW2 for americans of Japanese descent. Your comment about the Koreans getting dumped in the steppe, an enviorment that was probably like being dumped on the moon for them, reminded me of the fate of a small group of Aleuts who were removed from the Aleutian Islands and dumbed in the coastal rain forests of southeast Alaska. Anyway, just a short comment to illustrate some sort of common human denominator that seems to exist in democratic and totalitarian societies, all intentions aside.