Denouement Of Borders

This chapter examines Soviet and Japanese disputes over the Korean population in the Maritime Province from the 1920s to 1945. It shows that heightened geopolitical tensions in Northeast Asia resulted in a renewed effort on the part of the Soviet Union to institute citizenship, migration and resettlement, and cultural policies among Koreans. Tensions inside the Maritime also escalated in the late 1920s and 1930s due to collectivization efforts and the Great Terror. Soviet policies culminated in the 1937 forced deportation of Koreans to Central Asia. The chapter argues that the deportation was an extreme attempt by the Soviet state to align its authority over territory and people in a sensitive border region. The chapter ends with a discussion of Korean migration, citizenship, and the border region between Russia, North Korea, and China after 1945.

Civilizational Border

This chapter examines Russian officials’ debates and policies regarding Koreans in the Maritime Province from 1880 to the 1920s. It sees these policies as part of a broader project to revise the practice of plural jurisdiction, in which the empire ruled its vast territories and peoples through a flexible legal regime. Amidst a growing wave of nativist sentiment, officials aimed to standardize the privileges respectively held by subjects and foreigners and to institutionalize borders. In the Russian Far East, suspicions about the interference of the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese governments led officials to categorize the resident Korean population as subjects and aliens, experiment with policies to ban the settlement of Koreans in the border region, institute border and passport laws, and discuss the benefits and dangers of continued Asian migration to Russia. The chapter further explores how Koreans subverted these laws and policies to their own ends.