Presentation "Koryo-Saram - A missing meso-link?" by Evgenia An (PhD Candidate, Goethe University, Frankfurt) for the Conference "Strange Korean Parallels", Helsinki.

1. Koryo-Saram Diaspora –
A missing meso-link?
Evgenia An
PhD Candidate
Goethe University, Frankfurt
Department of Sociology

2. What is
Global
History? –
Competing
Approaches
• …Transcending narrowly national perspectives
and going beyond the interpretative
hegemony of the West…
• "I have to confess' admits C. A. Bayly, "that I
find 'transnational' a restrictive term for the
sort of work which I am interested in. Before I
850, large parts of the globe were not
dominated by nations so much as by empires,
city-states, diasporas, etc.“

3. Aim of the presentation
• Telling in short a long story of the koryo-saram diaspora – the
Koreans of the former Soviet Union
• Through this story, highlight the challenges of the current
interdisciplinary research of social phenomena and how diaspora
narratives can potentially resolve the challenges
• Showing how macro-level structures, such as empires and nation-
states, used the ethno-national and gender regimes/orders to gain
political and economic legitimacy through ethnic minorities, i.e.
koryo-saram diaspora.

4. Koryo-Saram Journey
• This journey is a long one both in terms of time (from 1860s to 2020s) and
in terms of space (from Amur Region to Central Asia to South Korea).
• In addition to the time and space dimensions, Koryo-Saram have crossed
several political borders throughout their journey. First, the border
between Joseon Dynasty Korea and Qing Empire and Russian Empire.
Through deportation, Koreans were forced to enter the freshly established
borders of the Soviet Socialist Republics in Central Asia, which all lied
within the bigger political entity – the USSR.
• Finally, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Koreans were crossing the
new national borders of Central Asia, and finally started crossing the South
Korean border as labor migrants.

5. Challenges of
interdisciplinarity
- migration,
gender and
diaspora
research
First: Choosing a right scope (level of analysis)
Second: Setting a right context (space and time)

6. Transnational Migration Studies
„[…] even under the same macro-structural conditions, people
show different mobility behaviours […] In order to account for
such differences, we need to introduce the ‚missing meso-link‘ of
migrant networks, migration networks and other elements of a
conducive migration infrastructure“
(Faist 2000: 96, cursive by the author)

7. Gender Studies: Intersectional approach to
inequalities
„We cannot study gender in isolation from other inequalities, nor
can we only study inequalities‘ intersection and ignore historical
and contextual specificity that distinguishes the mechanisms that
produce inequality by different categorical division, whether
gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, or class.“
(Risman 2004: 443, cursive by the author)

8. Analytical level Social phenomena
(diaspora migration)
Source of data type of data and
tools f analysis
Macro level Nation-states, empires, political
entities
Labour market segments
Korenizatsiya
Labor law, visa regime, and
four types of social insurances
Documents/texts such as legal
acts, contracts, official policies
from Ministries.
Meso level Communities
Organisation of work
Diasporas, Migrant networks,
community organizations
Ethnic kolkhoses
Expert interviews, group
discussions, flyers from the
organizations
Micro level Individuals
Individual practices, identities,
positions
Autobiographical narrators,
families
Biographical interviews

9. What is diaspora?
• According to Safran (1991), one of the pioneers of diaspora studies,
based on the Jewish experience, the definition of diaspora is bound to
six core characteristics, which are interwoven with trauma, nostalgia
and aspirations to “return” (pain).
• Yet, the definition of diaspora, proposed by Clifford (1997) offers an
alternative to the nation-centered, nostalgia-based diasporic identity,
which was earlier offered by Safran.

10. What is diaspora?
• Clifford in his turn considers diaspora as a new form of collective
solidarity and consciousness, that arises in the period of displacement
and destruction of previously established macro-level political and
territorial paradigms, while the micro- (individual) and meso-level
(community) consciousness persist irrespective of (or maybe even
due to) structural social destabilization.
• For the dissertation, I will use the definition of Clifford, which serves
one of the previously outlined purposes, namely, de-essentializing
the national.

11. What is diaspora? (etymology)
• The Greek word diaspora consists of two parts.
• Διά (Dia) is a preposition which means “between”, “through” or
“across”, and, when used in compound words, gain a meaning of
division and dispersion.
• The word σπείρω (speirō) literally translates as "I sow”, or “I scatter
seeds".

12. Diaspora = communities of dispersion
(Tölölyan)
• Dispersion (to sow) • Settling down (Growing roots)

13. 1850s-60s
Crossing the borders of Qing
Empire and Russian Empire
1937 - Deportation to Central Asia (MASSIVE dispersion)
Cultural isolation in kolkhoses
Restricted mobility
Growing roots
1950s - death of Stalin; Khruschev’s speech on Cult of
Personality
Freedom to move – urbanization and seasonal migration
across the USSR
Growing roots
1990s - Collapse of the Soviet Union
New wave of dispersion
2000s - Migration to South Korea
Dispersion and Growing roots?
1920s – the USSR established
Korenizatsiya
Growing roots

14. Koryo-Saram diaspora – a missing meso-link?
Let‘s take an example of the 1850s-60s when Koreans were crossing the
borders of Qing Empire and Russian Empire
In year 1858 the Treaty of Aigun and in 1860 Treaty of Beijing (Peking)
were signed between Tsarist Russia and Qing Dynasty represented by
Manchu rulers (Manchuria).
New territory - 600,000 square kilometres – started belonging to
Russian Empire (Far East of Russia)
This event thereby established a borderline not only between two geo-
political rivals in the Amur region – future China and Soviet Russia – but
also the Joseon Dynasty (future North Korea) in the Maritime region.

16. Table 2: The Increase Rate of Koreans Living in the Maritime Province 1906-1910
YEAR RUSSIAN KOREANS FOREIGN KOREANS TOTAL
1906 16965 17434 34399
1907 16007 29907 45914
1908 16190 29307 45497
1909 14799 36,755 51,544
1910 17080 33885 50965
l Note: G.N. Kim made this table, based on the report of Unterberger, Governor General of
Priamurskii Krai.

17. Stalin in 1920s: The policy of korenizatsiya
(growing roots)
• De-Russification – Marxism and the National Question (Stalin 1913)
• National identity – support of the minorities (against “the Great-Russian
Chauvinism and Imperialism”)
• 105 Korean village soviets (councils) in mixed-nationality raion (district)
• An entire raion for the ethnic Koreans - the Pos'et Korean National Raion
(activities conducted entirely in the Korean language)
• 380 Korean schools, two teachers' colleges, one pedagogical school, three
hospitals, a theatre, six journals, and seven newspapers (the largest of
which, Vanguard, had a circulation of 10,000).
• The 1937 Census showed 168,259 Koreans in the Far East of the Soviet
Union.

18. Stalin, Ezhov and Molotov – The Great Purge
1930-40s (dispersion)
• Re-Russification and assimmilation of minorities
• Ethnic minorities are increasingly seen as vulnerable to influence from
across the border
• “Fifth columns" for expansionist states seeking to acquire Soviet
territory inhabited by their own ethnic group
• The Far-Eastern Koreans fell under this category of “unreliable
people” and “enemies of the state” (Gelb 1995).

20. To sum up
• Diasporas, as meso-level communities, are unique, but comparable;
they go beyond the national (macro-level) but are grounded in the
diverse narratives.
• While macro-level context constitutes the general dynamics of the
global history, the meso-level is filling the fundamental content of
how this dynamic is expressed in the real communities and
represented in the life stories.

21. “The heart of diaspora is pain. The idea that you can’t live in your ancestral
homeland, that you can’t be where you want to be, that perhaps you can’t practice
your religion or culture you otherwise would. But what results from the pain is
innovation, that you can change some of the traditions, and adopt them, and
modernise them, and make them relevant wherever you are.”
- Rabbi Joshua Stranton, from the documentary “Jeronimo” by Stephen
Juhn, November, 2019.