#Koryo Saram

[maggiecheungs]

"My son, you came into this world for one reason: revenge."

REVENGE (1988) dir. Yermek Shinarbayev

[safije]

Koryo Saram - Korean Diaspora of the Soviet Union

In the late 1800s thousands of people mostly from Northern Korea went to East Russia to escape famine. Decades later another mass migration from Korea to Russia happened as people fled from Japanese invaders and were attracted by the Bolshevik's promise of free land for peasants. The Korean community thrived in the Soviet Union during the earlier years with many becoming high ranking Communist Party officials, but by 1937 even the family of these high ranking officials would be rounded up and shipped off in cattle trains to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan during Stalin's ethnic deportations. Some people did not survive the harsh conditions of this trip and their corpses would be left unburied at the train stops. Despite all of what they endured in the past, today majority of the Koryo Saram still live in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan where they've kept their traditional Korean customs mixed with the cultures of Central Asians, Russians and other ex-Soviet nationalities.

[deathlygristly]

This is a really interesting episode of the Dark Side of Seoul podcast, with an interview with a woman whose ancestors moved from Korea to Uzbekistan. The group of Koreans who migrated are known as Koryo Saram.

[chrysocomae]

[k-star-holic]

Jung Dong-won, "The King of Baking Table Tennis" ('earth exploration life')

Source: k-star-holic.blogspot.com

[teleportzz]

i think i need to start making something very clear, as i should have done a long time ago.

Ukraine hasn't stopped needing your help and listening to our voices hasn't stopped being important

i think i've been way too patient and understanding with non-ukrainians following me. but i'm tired and angry and hurting and i've been carrying this burden, as all ukrainians have, for a very long time.

i am officially completely done with all those posts fucking "comparing" ukraine and palestine. i've tried to be understanding. i know you're trying to say that ukrainians get slightly better press coverage in the west due to white privilege, but our press coverage in the west is still dogshit. our genocide and colonization is still reduced to a "war" ukraine is still described as a "post-soviet state" and ethnic minorities in ukraine are still never mentioned. crimean tatars, koryo-saram, romani-ukrainians, jewish ukrainians, muslim-ukrainians, and many other communities have been disproportionately targeted by ruzzia's relentless violence and you still say nothing of their unique struggles and experiences. not to even mention how, although ukrainian diaspora in north america, like myself, have white privilege, ukrainians in europe face discrimination from both ruzzia and western europeans. they are not privileged

we are called slurs and subjected to other ethnically and culturally motivated violence by ruzzians very frequently when we try to tell our stories. ukrainian diaspora try to use our privilege and knowledge of english to advocate, but we are always shut down by ruzzians because we are always somehow either "too western" or "too ukrainian" to know what we are talking about.

and it really doesn't help that SOMEHOW none of you seem capable of caring about more than one genocide at a time. those posts comparing ukraine to palestine is all you have to say about us as our printing houses are being destroyed and our babies are being taken away and raised as ruzzians. weird! i don't seem to have this problem! caring about multiple genocides at a time and advocating for the liberty and power of all oppressed people is second nature to me. maybe because i don't have the privilege of only caring about one genocide at a time.

like sorry but i'm officially done. comparing which genocide is """""worse""""" is such a horrible and incomprehensibly evil thing to do. victims of genocide are standing together in solidarity. westerners with no connection to these issues do not have a seat at this table

[itstokkii]

weird question but are you koryo saram? i swear i'm not trying to be weird but part of why i'm into hetalia is because i'm interested in ethnicities and like how they've come about and whatnot so i was just curious. you don't really have to answer this and i'm sorry if this makes you feel uncomfortable

(doofenshmirtz voice) if I had a nickel for everytime someone asked me this I'd have 2 nickels which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice

im not actually(crowd boos), my parents moved to korea years ago so my siblings and I were born here + naturalized lol. i understand why i get this question though

my mom is part of the uzbek kazakh community in kazakhstan(where apparently they moved there all the way in the karakhan period 1000 years ago), so on paper our family looks like a korean kazakh family but we're ethnically all uzbek

there are a lot of koryo saram here too though! I don't know about now, but for a while they were allowed to get citizenship because of their ethnicity, and integration would depend on things like where they'd work to, what extent they'd be included in the space they were in(😔), also how good they can speak korean...

some koryo saram here have opened russian schools where the medium of instruction is russian, and ik some kids from the post soviet sphere go there, especially russian kids whose parents want them to keep their language.

there's also a post soviet neighborhood in incheon, there's uzbek bread places and restaurants wherever you go, and some signs(ex academies kindergartens) are in russian for the post soviet kids to understand.

[tomirida]

i remember the time when someone wanted to organise a tour through korean kolkhozes for south koreans but the problem is that

1) most koreans don't live in rural areas anymore;

2) the most notable places with korean history are qızılorda (which is on the other side of the country away from almatı) and üctöbe (3-4 hours away from almatı by car);

3) üctöbe's history is mostly preserved through the local korean graveyard and a single very old korean lady who was a child when her family was deported;

4) bringing south koreans tourists to gawk at a small town with nothing to do but look at graves and harass an elderly woman about traumatic memories is. uh. a morally dubious idea;

5) koryo-saram don't speak koryo-mar anymore—the older generations, i.e. deportees and their children might still remember, but it was never a written language, so at best you'd only speak it or at least write approximations of pronunciation in cyrillic; and the younger generation doesn't know korean at all, and if they learn it they learn the standard of south korea.

so yeah... no kolkhoz tours

[quark-nova]

Still baffled that some people will try to justify ethnic cleansing or deportation in some circumstances. Like, no, even if their government is shitty or they share an ethnicity/language with a war enemy, that never justifies deporting hundreds of thousands of families away from their homes.

This isn't aimed at one specific group, there are quite a few that should hear this. And concerningly this also holds true in some leftist circles.

"Stalin did nothing wrong" tankies who actively try to justify the deportations of the Mekshetian Turks, of the Crimean Tatars, of the Koryo-saram, of the Volga Germans. Because "sharing an ethnicity with people colonized by an enemy" justifies labelling thousands of people as potential spies and deporting them to Kazakhstan according to them.

Fringe "Palestinian liberation" folks who pollute a perfectly legitimate (and needed) movement by forgetting the whole point of self-determination and instead calling for Israeli Jews to be deported back to Europe. (Yes I'm always ashamed to see the fraction of Palestinian liberation discourse that gets polluted by antisemitic shit)

On the other side, fringe "landback" folks who cheer on Palestinians being deported and expelled from Area C (even though that was never close to what landback was ever supposed to mean).

Yes, I've seen all of these in (different) leftist (or at least self-proclaimed leftist) circles and I'm ashamed. At some point you just have to realize that you're talking about other human beings, and that these are just ways of perpetuating state oppression and dividing people even more, which is the opposite of what leftist thought should stand for. We can do better, much better.

[norelationtodonkeykong]

Lowkey because the Ukraine War is 1 of those things where everyone is lying I kinda want to call cap on the "North Koreans fighting in the Russian Military" story, I'm like 25% confident that those are either Koreans from the Russian Far East or Koryo-Saram from Central Asia but idk

[sudensk-the-stallionist]

Ethnic minorities had a far better life during Soviet development than before or after.

The Jews were awarded the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and various high-ranking Jews, like Sverdlov and Kaganovich, existed in the Soviet government; meanwhile, Tsarists, local nationalists such as the OUN during WW2 and Petliura during the Civil War committed various Pogroms.

The Crimean Tatars were deported in a relatively safe way considering the extreme hardships that were in the USSR during WW2, with more than 30 million dead individuals - and, in a way, they did have it coming: according to Grover Furr, "In 1939 there were 218,000 Crimean Tatars. That would mean about 22,000 men of military age – about 10% of the population. In 1941, based on contemporary Soviet figures, 20,000 Crimean Tatar soldiers deserted the Red Army. By 1944, 20,000 Crimean Tatar soldiers had joined the Nazi forces and were fighting against the Red Army. So the charge of massive collaboration is valid. The question is: what should the Soviets have done about it? They could not have done anything but take action – let them all go unpunished. Well, they weren’t going to do that! They could have shot the 20,000 deserters. Or, they could have arrested – deported – just them, the young men of military age. Either of these actions would have virtually spelled the end of the Crimean Tatar nation, as there would have been no husbands for the next generation of young Tatars. Instead, the Soviet government decided to deport the entire nation to Central Asia, which they did in 1944. The Crimean Tatars were given land, and a few years of relief from all taxation. The Tatar nation remained intact, and grew in size through the late 1950s."

Siberians are not an ethnic group. I do not know what you're talking about. I also did not heard of Kazakh genocide anywhere.

I do not have enough information on the Kalmyks or the Koryo-Saram to make a point.

Besides, i believe that, considering how ethnic minorities were massacred, russified, expelled and dehumanized during the Tsarist time, the existence of autonomous governments for them and by them, with recognition of national autonomy and recognition, was much better. And i'm pretty sure i won't just ignore the fact someone allied themselves to literal Nazis because "they were oppressed". Firstly because they weren't oppressed, second because, even if they were, the Soviets give you autonomy and the Nazis want you to be dead or at least germanized. I won't, for example, excuse Ukrainian nationalists for commiting mass killings of Jews and helping the SS just because they were "fighting for their freedom". The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was also extremely necessary for the defeat of Nazism. The USSR knew very well since the inception of Hitlerism in power that they would come for Soviet land; without mass industrialization, without the delay of German agressiveness, and without preparations, the immense death toll of the Eastern Front would be a lot worse, and it would be very possible for the USSR to fall and the world be doomed to a Cold War between Nazism and the West.

i've been reading another view of stalin recently and even if i already had found out about a good amount of the contents of it through other means the things ludo martens tells you are absolutely baffling, like, unironically groundbreaking. i remember reading khruschev lied by furr and him saying how he can't just disprove the entire "stalin stigma" in one book (and he's right, it would be a gigantic task) but martens is able to shred light into SO MUCH of it. like i SWEAR after reading how the kulaks killed like almost 100 million animals in livestock to sabotage collectivization, and then how the ukrainian fascists all talked about how they were involved in burning crops and doing sabotage left and right in the 30s (the same fascists who later joined hitler and committed the most horrible pogroms), or how the bukharinists, the trotskyites and the military bonapartists had absolutely no issue in just collaborating with nazis, with japanese imperial officers, or how almost every single source for famous holodomor books are literal nazi collaborators using photographs from the tsarist times and from the 1922 famine (WHICH WAS CAUSED BY FOREIGNER INTERVENTION) to prove the "evils" of the USSR, it all just fucking made me want to scream on liberals going on and on about how "ukraine was a rebellious republic... stalin wanted to kill them all and he succeeded" or that "dekulakization was almost as bad as the holocaust". also like mate i don't require everyone to have intricate knowledge about stalin's period on names and dates but some of these people go on alledging stuff while they can't even, like, name who zinoviev was. or who bandera was. jesus christ

[star-the-gremlin]

Instead of Ari Yoon being from Korea, maybe she could be ethnically Korean but born and raised in Russia? According to google, there is a group like that called Koryo Saram

I actually had an idea to fix my lil dumbassery situation

cause I do wanna keep the "moved to another country to get rid of shitty parents" thing

Maybe at first the parents agreed that she can stay and study there but then they changed their mind and wanted her to come home but since she didn't want to go back she made a deal that if she doesn't find a place to live before she finishes school then she'll come back

hows that

[k-star-holic]

Jung Dong-won, 'Uzbekistan's earth exploration life'

Source: k-star-holic.blogspot.com

[oroichonno]

I found this leed, a likely sway on Koryo-Mar. One thing's for sure, it's distinct & is almost only spoken among the elder lines/generations Jaegaseung people (whose heritage language is lost) & Jaejung dongpo (ethnic Koreans in my southern neighbour's country) plus about 1 in 10 of Koryo Saram (from ex-Soviet countries including from my northern & western neighbours & excluding Sakhalin Koreans, who instead speak from one based off a landspeech/dialect from southern parts [Jeolla & Gyeongsang] of South Korea despite writing by North Korean standard). Not quite the same thing as the Hamgyong landspeech, but it's closer to Korean than is Jejuan, even though neither are really mutually understandable with Korean landspeeches or especially the North or South standard leeds. Apparently, a wordbook (dictionary) bestands/exists between Korean & Yukjin, but do feel free to show us any such works on it that do.

[schleyer]

why not both?

every new thing i learn about the russian language makes korean not seem so bad after all