East Asians in Soviet Intelligence andthe Chinese-Lenin School of the Russian Far East
Jon K. Chang

Abstract1
This study focuses on the Chinese-Lenin School (also the acronym CLS) and how the Soviet
state used the CLS and other tertiary institutions in the Russian Far East to recruit East Asians into
Soviet intelligence during the 1920s to the end of 1945. Typically, the Chinese and Korean intelligenceagents of the USSR are presented with very few details with very little information on their lives,
motivations and beliefs. This article will attempt to bridge some of this “blank spot” and will cover the
biographies of several East Asians in the Soviet intelligence services, their raison d’être, their worldview(s) and motivations. The basis for this new study is fieldwork, interviews and photographs
collected and conducted in Central Asia with the surviving relatives of six East Asian former Soviet
intelligence officers. The book, Chinese Diaspora in Vladivostok, Second Edition [Kitaiskaia diaspora
vo Vladivostoke, 2-е izdanie] which was written in Russian by two local historians from the Russian
Far East also plays a major role in this study’s depth, revelations and conclusions.2
Methodology: (Long-Term) Oral History and Fieldwork
My emphasis on “oral history” in situ is based on the belief that the state archives typicallychronicle and tell a history in which the state, its officials and its institutions are the primary actors and“causal agents” who create a powerful, actualized people from the common clay of workers, peasantsand sometimes, draw from society’s more marginalized elements such as vagabonds and criminals. The
state archives and especially those of the former USSR were often culled meaning that some or many
documents are regularly removed, transferred or simply destroyed especially those which contradict The author was based at Lingnan University, Tuen Min, Hong Kong, and can be contacted at: jonntexas@gmail.com
1 Special thanks to Li Khuei (the former PRC ambassador to Russia), Dmitrii Ancha and Nelli Miz.
2 Kitaiskaia diaspora vo Vladivostoke [Chinese Diaspora in Vladivostok], first edition was a project which theAmbassador of the People’s Republic of China to Russia, Li Khuei negotiated with the Russian Federation and
two Russian authors (Dmitrii Ancha and Nelli Mix) to bring to fruition as a monograph and archival document
collection (from several archives in Russia) from 2012 to 2014. It was printed in both Chinese and Russian by theSocial Sciences Academic Press of China in 2014. The rights of the first edition belong exclusively to the PRC.
Ancha and Miz’s second edition of the same book was self-funded and published in Vladivostok by Dalnauka in2015 and was made available to the public with permission by the PRC and its representatives. Ancha indicatedthat he was the main author of the first and second editions and that he had been working on collecting the articles
and archival documents for the monograph for over 20 years. The work of the second edition supports the same
history (that of East Asians in Soviet intelligence) that this author (Jon K. Chang) had been collecting (throughoral history/fieldwork) in situ in Central Asia from 2006 to 2017.
DOI: 10.14943/ebr.9.1.45

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >the intended socio-political narratives and the political position(s) en vogue. 3 There were threeadvantages of in situ fieldwork which I primarily conducted in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. First, there
was a first-hand opportunity to see the nature of the relationships and economics (various economies
including barter) on the former Soviet collective farms. Second, in conducting fieldwork, I was able tobring with me a video camera and portable scanner (for photos) which often helped to corroborate thehistories that I had recorded. Third, the Chinese and Korean deportations were undertaken with the helpof Chinese and Korean NKVD officers.4 Through my extended interviews, I was able to meet six East
Asian families who had relatives in the Soviet OGPU/NKVD or GRU. The NKVD/KGB/FSB archivesof the Russian Federation have not been opened despite the opening of the other archives since 1991.
This was an opportunity to obtain a level of depth (third person narratives from relatives andphotographs in uniform) that possibly even the FSB archives did not have.
Soviet Intelligence: Who, How Many and Why?
Many East Asian migrants to the USSR as well as those from the Korean and Chinese
communities in the Russian Far East (thus, “native” to Russia) were captivated by Soviet socialism andits message. Not only were they captivated by the socialist message, but many returned home to put
their words into action. Many of Chinese students in the USSR and France in the 1920s and 1930s
returned home to establish local Chinese Communist Party committees in their native cities or towns.5
Many also stayed in the USSR. One of the weaknesses of Soviet socialism was that once the Civil War
had been won and the borders secured on the European side of the USSR, the “class-line” was quickly
forgotten. Many of the Chinese Cheka and Red Army veterans were quickly discarded or forgotten
after February 1921. Amazingly, a nearly identical story (of East Asian agents serving the Soviet state)continued thousands of miles away in the Russian Far East from the 1920s onwards. This is because
the “enemy” which was the Japanese empire was still growing in Manchuria and Korea.
The findings from this study focus on the four hundred East Asians recruited into the Soviet
GRU and OGPU/NKVD6 through institutions of higher education and another two-to-three hundred
3 Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2004), 2–3; Jeffrey Burds, “Ethnicity, Memory, and Violence: Reflections on Special Problems
in Soviet and East European Archives,” in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory, eds.
Blouin, Jr., Francis X. and William Rosenberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 469, 472, 474;
Theodore Karasik, The Post-Soviet Archives Organization, Access, and Declassification (Santa Monica: Rand
Corporation, 1993), 6.
4 Amir Khisamutdinov, The Russian Far East: Historical Essays (Honolulu: CeRA, 1993), 120–121. NKVD
stands for “the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs [Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del]” that is, theSoviet political police.
5 Arif Dirlik, The Origins of Chinese Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 1–54; Marilyn Levin,
The Found Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe during the Twenties (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1993). The ECCO and ECCP mentioned by Levine’s The Found Generation were not funded by theComintern.
6 GRU refers to the “Main Intelligence Directorate,” that is the military intelligence division of the Red Army. The
OGPU (1922 to 1934) refers to the Soviet political police. It was the predecessor to the NKVD.

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who were recruited by other means especially through the Soviet military. In November 2016,
Memorial released its internet list of 40,000 NKVD agents compiled by Andrei Zhukov specifically
NKVD in “state security.”7 Memorial’s list contained only the names of Grigorii Eliseevich Khan and
Nikolai K. Khan out of the six total families that I interviewed (with intelligence connections). However,the 1937 census of the all-union NKVD indicates that there were a total of 270,730 employees.8 Someof the Chinese and Koreans sent on missions to Korea, Manchuria and China proper (e.g. Shanghai,another known destination for the East Asian agents of the OGPU/NKVD) will never be found on the
OGPU or NKVD lists because these agents were simply ad hoc employees for that particular mission,
trip or for a set period (for example, six months). The Chinese and Koreans agents sent to Manchuria
could also have been listed as Internal Security Troops (VOKhR) and NKVD border guards. The
appellation “border guards” could include any agents who “accidentally” crossed the borders as well.9
Finally, the contributions of the East Asian agents to the defense of the USSR (and Russia) are an
absolutely forgotten and under-researched part of Russian, Soviet and Northeast Asian history which
this study intends to remedy.
Introduction
The contributions of the Chinese (and a few Koreans) to the Bolsheviks during the Russian
Civil War in the European theater (the western borderlands of the former Russian empire) is generally
known and there are various sources about these histories.10 This study begins in the western Soviet
borderlands. On November 14, 1920, Pyotr N. Wrangel the Commander of the White Army fled with
146,000 of his troops to the Crimea where they were evacuated to Constantinople. The Civil War was
effectively over in southern Russia.11
In spring 1921 with the Russian Civil War mostly won, the Cheka and other state security
organs began evacuating foreigners who had served in “internationalist” brigades, labor brigades andthe like during the First World War and the Russian Civil War based on order no. 9612, issued in
7 See: Shaun Walker, “Stalin’s Secret Police Finally Named but Killings Still Not Seen as Crimes,” The Guardian,February 6, 2017. Accessed February 18, 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/06/stalin-secretpolice-killings-crimes-russia-terror-nkvd
8 Paul Gregory, Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin: An Archival Study (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009), 1–2.
9Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1937 goda: obshchie itogi. sbornik dokumentov i materialov [All Union Census
of the Population of the Year 1937: General Totals, A Collection of Documents and Materials], eds. Iu.A. Poliakov
and V.B. Zhiromskaia (Moskva: Rosspen, 2007), 313–314, 317 for border guards; George Leggett, The Cheka:
Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 164, 183, 201–213 for VOKhR. Thanks to Dr.
George Lin, a specialist on the NKVD for his suggestions.
10 Dmitrii Lappo, Stranitsy velikoi druzhby: uchastie kitaiskikh dobrovol’tsev na frontakh grazhdanskoi voiny v
Sovetskoi Rossii, 1918–1922 [Pages of the Great Friendship: The Participation of the Chinese Volunteers on the
Front of the Civil War in Soviet Russia] (Moskva: Izd. Sotsial’no-Ekonomicheskoi Literatury, 1959); I. Babichev,
Uchastie kitaiskikh i koreiskikh trudiashchikhsia v grazhdanskoi voine na Dal’nem Vostoke [The Participation of
the Chinese and Korean Workers in the Civil War in the Far East] (Tashkent: GIUS, 1959).
11 Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000), 270.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >February 1921 on the southwestern front. Regarding the Cheka (VChK), this was one of several names
for the Soviet political police known as the “secret police” due to its members possessing extra-legal
powers to arrest, sentence and repress Soviet citizens for “political crimes” such as mutinies by sailors,
unrest led by local peasants and national revolts led by the Soviet Union’s various minority peoples.
During the civil war, the Soviet political police (Cheka and GPU) had many duties. First, they
conducted operations against domestic and international enemies, anti-Soviet groups andcounterintelligence. A second duty was to requisition food supplies from peasants. Third, Cheka agentssupervised the Soviet labor and prison camps. Fourth, Cheka troops guarded the USSR’s railways.
Finally, some Cheka detachments such as CHON also fought alongside the Red Army in battles. There
were a host of other duties and uses for the Cheka.12
Returning to the subject of the coerced or semi-coerced “evacuations” of the Chinese Red
Army soldiers and Cheka after February 1921, the former Russian imperial subjects (prior to 1917)
such as Latvians, Lithuanians, Finns and Poles were exempt from evacuation. They were allowed tostay in the Russian empire even after their military obligations had terminated. However, the Chinese
in Russia without citizenship (or who were not Russian subjects) were given strong encouragement toreturn home. This “encouragement” took the form of the Red Army veterans being refused residence
permits or visa extensions in some instances even when they had married Russians and Ukrainians.13
Many of the Chinese had married local women during the Civil War. One might ask, “Howdid this happen?” since it was reputed that few spoke Russian well. In Russia and Ukraine, many of theEast Asian men (whether born in Russia or otherwise) found the process of meeting someone, courtingthem and then proposing marriage “Western” or Russian style to be very liberating and moreprogressive than working through an arranged marriage between Chinese or Korean families in the
Russian Far East, China or Korea.14 The Chinese and Koreans may have had disadvantages due to raceand language, but many Russian women found them to be thrifty, steady, trustworthy and familyoriented.15
In April 1921, Fin Fu Rin, a Red Army soldier during the Civil War, was evacuated fromDonetsk by the Cheka to Moscow. From Moscow, he was sent to China. Chin Kho Khai wasdemobilized from the Red Army at around the same time and sent to Manchuria where he wasimmediately arrested. He escaped and made his way to Volgodonsk, Russia.
The Chinese in the police force and Cheka were generally not demobilized until 1922. In May
1922, all foreign citizens through NKVD regulations in all regions and cities of the Ukraine were forced
12 Leggett, The Cheka; John Dziak, Chekisty: A History of the KGB (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988),

39–50. In general, the timeline for the various names and incarnations of the Soviet political police are: Cheka(1917–1921), GPU (1921–1922), OGPU (1923–1934), NKVD (1934–1953), and KGB (1953–1991).
13 Nikolai Karpenko, Kitaiskii legion: uchastie kitaitsev v revoliutsionnykh sobytiiakh na territorii Ukrainy, 1917–
1921 gg. [The Chinese Legion: Participation of the Chinese in the Revolutionary Events in the Territory of Ukraine,
1917–1921](Lugansk: Alma Mater, 2007), 322–324.
14 This is based on my historical research and fieldwork among Soviet Koreans and Chinese from 2006–2010,2014, 2016–2017 in Russia (the Russian Far East), Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
15 Pal Nyiri, Chinese in Eastern Europe and Russia: A Middleman Minority in a Transnational Era (London:
Routledge, 2007), 42.

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to re-register on the records of their local NKVD. Many of the foreign residents of Ukraine were also
“invited” to return to their respective homelands since the Civil War was all but over. An NKVD orderon September 29, 1922 ordered all foreigners in the Don guberniia (province) within a two-week period
to register with local authorities (NKVD) bringing three photos, certificates of identification anddocumentation and their questionnaire forms in order to receive a certain type of Ukrainian citizenship(allowing further residence). On this matter, Karpenko noted that many foreigners were not able togather the necessary documents or gather documents that had the certifications or were properly
confirmed such as prior citizenship and passports.16 It was at this time that the number of Chinese
Cheka was pared down from a maximum of around 1,000 to around 40–60.17 By late 1922, the Soviet
borders had been secured and resistance was minimal and fading (especially after the Japanese left
Russia in October). If the USSR had wanted to keep the Chinese Red Army veterans and Chinese
Chekists in the recognition of their contributions, bravery and as part of a class-line based socialism,
the state would have found a way to do so. After all, at first blush, the residency and or citizenshiprequirements were not that stringent. After 1922, there is little or no mention of the Chinese Chekists
in the western borders of the USSR. The following section (until the conclusion) covers new historicalground, that of the contributions of the Soviet Chinese and Korean to Soviet intelligence and militaryin Siberia and the Russian Far East (the eastern borders of the USSR) from roughly 1920 to 1945.
The Chinese-Lenin School and Maki Mirage
At the same time (early 1920s), one sees an entirely different story in the Russian Far East(also the acronym RFE) where the East Asian communities were being consolidated, indoctrinated andconstructed as “Soviet peoples.”18 This is because the Japanese empire was growing and bordered theSoviet Far East in Korea and (later) in Manchuria. In this section, the Korean and Chinese “sections”
of the Comintern and the Far Eastern Communist Party School will be examined. The Chinese section
at least evolved into the Chinese-Lenin School. The Korean section of the Russian Communist Party
was created in May 1922.19 The Koreans of Russia had organized a Korean Socialist Party (in diaspora)as early as June 26, 1918. The All-Russian Korean National Association even held its “Second General
Assembly” between June 12–June 24, 1918 in Nikolsk-Ussuriisk where they voted to pledge theirloyalty to the new Bolshevik state. The four thousand Koreans who fought for Russia during WorldWar One had begun to return to their homes by early spring 1918 (due to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty).
Khan Chan Ger (Gol) was one of the most active Bolshevik organizers returning from the war. He

16 Karpenko, Kitaiskii, 324.
17 Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (New York: Random

House), 72. Page 72 mentions the use of some 500 Chinese Cheka (circa 1919) during the civil war when Russian
soldiers refused to carry out executions. The maximum number of Chinese Cheka was probably around 1,000.
18 This is in part because in 1920, the RFE had far less resources and economic power. The East Asians in the RFE
provided much of the foodstuffs, labor and economic backbone for the region.
19 Semen Anosov, Koreitsy v Ussuriiskom krae [Koreans in the Ussurii Region] (Khabarovsk: Knizhnoe delo,
1928), 24.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >organized a “village soviet” (a village council) in Nikolaevka which elected him as their chairman.20
Note that Koreans also attended the Chinese-Lenin School, but typically they were INO (the ForeignIntelligence Department of the GPU, OGPU, and later NKVD), GRU and former soldiers or partisans.
On October 29, 1923, the Primorskii provincial Communist Party resolved to begin massive
political, educational and occupational development for the Chinese and Koreans of the Primore andthe RFE. This program in general was named korenizatsiia (indigenization). The Communist Party
wanted to organize the “construction” of both communities as Soviet peoples while organizing theireducational networks (school systems) to emphasize socialist concepts, their professional lives throughSoviet labor unions and to hire and promote qualified Koreans and Chinese within Soviet institutions
after their initial technical or university education was finished. The construction of both groups as“Soviet nationalities” included building Red corners and libraries throughout the RFE which provided“sections” or “bureaus” within Communist Party (henceforth, CP) executive committee groups which
published books, magazines and literature(s) in the Chinese and Korean languages.21
At the Aleksinskii mines in 1924–1925, in a literacy survey among Chinese miners, theauthorities found that out of 606 Chinese: 420 were illiterate (70 percent), 112 were partially literate(17.5 percent) while 74 (12.5 percent) were literate. Out of 162 Koreans surveyed: 82 (51 percent) were
illiterate, 65 were partially literate (40 percent) while only 15 (8.1 percent ) were literate.22
On June 4, 1925, the Chinese section of the Primorskii guberniia (Provincial) Soviet Party
School was formed. This was the predecessor to the Chinese-Lenin School. In 1929, this “section” wasreorganized into the Chinese Regional Soviet Party School. Finally, on March 1, 1933 theaforementioned entity formally became the CLS located in Vladivostok. At its inception, there were
207 students. The students were separated into those studying at the preparatory stage (preparatory
education), middle stage (high school equivalency) and higher education stage (university level). In
1933, there were only 43 students studying at the level of higher education. The average student stipend(scholarship) per month was 130 rubles. University students received 160 rubles per month, secondary
education students 130 rubles and preparatory students 100 rubles. University students with excellent
marks could receive up to 190 rubles per month in scholarship monies.23
There were two directors of the CLS (and its predecessors). The first, the son of a peasantfarmer Georgii Ilich Stakanov, whose Chinese name was Tsin Dao Pan, was born in Sichuan, China in
1904.24 Stakanov belonged to the Chinese Komsomol (Youth Communist organization) and Chinese
Communist Party. He studied for two years in the physics and mathematics faculty in a university in
China and then the KUTK (Sun Yat-Sen Communist University of the Workers of China) in Russia.
20 Teruyuki Hara, “The Korean Movement in the Russian Maritime Province, 1905–1922,” in Koreans in the Soviet

Union, ed. Dae-Sook Suh (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988), 8–9.
21 Dmitrii Ancha and Nelli Miz, Kitaiskaia diaspora vo Vladivostoke: stranitsy istorii, 2-e izdanie [Chinese

Diaspora in Vladivostok: The Pages of History, Second ed.] (Vladivostok: Dalnauka, 2015), 248.
22 Krysov, “Zhizn’ vostochnykh rabochikh: plan kul’traboty [Life of the Eastern Workers: Plan for Cultural Work]”
Krasnoe znamia, January 1, 1925, issue no. 1(1,316).
23 Ancha, Kitaiskaia diaspora, 248, 254–255, 260.
24 Throughout this article, Chinese names from Ancha’s Kitaiskaia diaspora will be transliterated from Russian toEnglish using the Library of Congress’ transliteration system (LOC). One example is Tsin Dao Pan.

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After his studies at KUTK, he was sent to the Chinese section or Chinese Regional Soviet Party School
as a teacher in Marxist-Leninism. He served as the director of the CLS only until October 1933 when,after a reorganization of the school, he was replaced by I.N. Guiskii. There were three faculties at the
CLS: economics, history and language/linguistics.25
Ivan Nikolaevich Guiskii (Chinese name unknown) was a Chinese man originally from
Sichuan province, China. He was born in 1905 and came to the USSR in January 1927 when the
Chinese Communist Party sent him to Moscow to study. He studied for two years at the KUTV(Communist University of the Toilers of the East) and then finished his degree at KUTK. He became amember of the Communist Party Soviet Union in 1931. He married a Russian woman, L.D. Pozdneeva
who also worked at the Chinese-Lenin School’s affiliated publishing house and translation bureau.
Guiskii had three daughters, Maia, Svetlana and Alla.26
One reason that “China,” “Chinese comrades” and the CLS were given such a high profile in
the Soviet Union was because of the need for a “world socialist revolution” which would defeat all of
the world’s great capitalist-imperialist powers (Western Europe and the U.S.). Nikolai Bukharin gavea speech in January 1927 emphasizing that China’s population was more than three times that of the
USSR. He gave very rough population estimates: 420 million for China, 120 million for the USSR.27
The investment in young Chinese socialists/communists (who would be learning Russian, then working
and studying in the USSR) would give the USSR the opportunity to heavily influence the understanding
and political direction of socialism in China. Their “investment” in budding communist polities wasthought to pay large dividends later on for the Soviet Union through their principle of “democratic
centralism” which meant that the Soviet hoped to lead, control, and influence the communist acolyte
states.28
The Chinese-Lenin School’s (Not) Closely Guarded Secret
The Chinese-Lenin School’s students, whether actual students or “cadets” who had alreadyhad military, intelligence or partisan experience, were continually sent to Manchuria on espionage
operations for either the Soviet GRU (military intelligence) or the OGPU (later NKVD). The work of
the Chinese-Lenin School coincided with that of operation Maki Mirage by the NKVD fromapproximately 1924 to 1937. In operation Maki Mirage (if Maki Mirage was indeed a real operation),
the NKVD placed several moles inside of the Japanese anti-Soviet intelligence operations run by

25 Ancha, Kitaiskaia diaspora, 252–253, 255.
26 Ibid., 252–253.
27 For China’s 1926 population, Populstat gives 482 million, see: Accessed March 28, 2018: http://www.populstat.

info/Asia/chinac.htm Populstat gives population statistics for many of the countries of the world. Also see Bruce
Elleman, Moscow and the Emergence of Communist Power in China, 1925–30: The Nanchang Rising and the
Birth of the Red Army (New York: Routledge, 2009), 55–56.
28 Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to
Stalin (London: MacMillan Press, 1996), 4–5.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >Miiazaki and Kumazava in Sakhalien, China (next to Blagoveshchensk, currently named Heihe).29
They fed the Japanese disinformation while gathering information on the two hundred plus Japanese
intelligence agents and informants throughout Manchuria, the Russian Far East and the Zabaikal area.30
Meanwhile, Soviet intelligence sent hundreds of agents to Manchuria between 1920 and 1945. From1941 onwards, the center for its military intelligence operations was in Chita and run by the Russian
General Staff. Incredibly, four hundred alone had been “students” whether real or fictive at the ChineseLenin School.31 Dmitrii Ancha, the author of Chinese Diaspora (Kitaiskaia diaspora 2015) and others
were fortunate to have utilized his local Soviet archives (RGIA-DV, Vladivostok) in the early 1990s
before these items were reclassified or transferred to the FSB archives which are off-limits toresearchers. Ancha and a few others began writing and collecting information about the Soviet Chineseand Koreans in the late 1980s. Unfortunately, Ancha did not provide the authors, titles and citationmaterials of the other articles. However, he stated through email correspondence that 180 of the 400
agents trained by the Chinese-Lenin School were arrested and or repressed during the Great Terror.32
A discussion on the Chinese-Lenin School (located in Vladivostok) based upon the evidencecollected in Ancha’s Chinese Diaspora (Kitaiskaia diaspora) will now begin. The Chinese-Lenin
School was established for the expressed purpose of teaching and educating future Chinese
comrades/socialists, creating a publishing and translation house for socialist literature in the Chinese
language and establishing a recruitment and training center for East Asian (Koreans and Chinese)
agents of Soviet intelligence. Note that the acronyms OGPU/NKVD also included a subdivision, theINO (the Foreign Division of the Soviet political police) and the acronym GRU (Soviet military
intelligence) also included its regional nomenclature the RO, OKDVA which stands for “theIntelligence Division of the Special Banner Far Eastern Army.” Some students at the CLS were in fact
“cadets” who had been recruited from the two Soviet intelligence organs, OGPU/NKVD and OKDVA(Red Army).
A significant number of the East Asian agents also attended other Soviet institutions of higher
education throughout the Russian Far East and Siberia (Chita). The cadets were on reserve, ready at a
moment’s notice to serve on missions crossing into Manchuria or as it was known beginning in 1932,
Manchukuo. They were training in reconnaissance and sabotage outside of the USSR and trained andsent in “special groups” from between five to ten people.
The following are two short biographies of two “cadets” from the CLS. Vei Lianshan (born Ui
Lianshan) worked in intelligence for the OKDVA. He was involved in an underground anti-Japanese
movement in Manchuria. His group and work was uncovered in 1934 and in that year, Vei Lianshan
crossed from Sakhalien (now Heihe, China) to Blagoveshchensk. The second cadet was Van Vychin. It
29 Drs. Kuromiya and Peplonski also believe that Maki Mirage was a deception operation, see Hiroaki Kuromiya

and Andrzej Peplonski, “The Great Terror. Polish-Japanese Connections,” Cahiers du monde russe 50: 4 (2009):
661.
30 S. Nikolaev, Maki Mirazh: iz istorii otechestvennykh spets-sluzhb [Maki Mirage: From the History of the
Fatherland’s Special Service] (Khabarovsk: Khabarovskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 2000), 78–224.
31 Ancha, Kitaiskaia diaspora, 285.
32 Dmitrii Ancha, email to Jon Chang, February 20, 2018.

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appears that he was a GRU agent who was sent to Manchuria fighting in a Chinese anti-Japanesepartisan unit. He would repeatedly pass information to Soviet intelligence about the Japanese army. In
1936, he enrolled in the Chinese-Lenin School but was arrested and repressed in 1938 during the Great
Terror.
Comrade Usenko taught the cadets to shoot. They were tested while firing from a shooting
range and hitting targets on the run. There was also training at local safe-houses which covered thephysical, technical and theoretical components of intelligence. Students would learn how to physicallycollect intelligence and conduct reconnaissance. Students would also demonstrate their knowledge of
how they would operate various electronic devices and other equipment (technical). Third, the cadets
were tested on the theoretical bases behind various operations and why some operations or tactics were
employed rather than others. Finally, the instructors Zybalov and Makstis (see Figure 3) gave thestudents regular boxing and weight-lifting sessions. This entire program was supervised by L.V. Popov,
a lieutenant in the INO of the NKVD and P.M. Altshuller, a lieutenant and operations representative of
the INO, NKVD.33 Some of the agents (especially those who were not born in the USSR) were given
multiple aliases, both in Chinese (sometimes for Koreans) and Russian.34
Finally, it seems apparent that the school’s secret mission like all matters regarding access toprivilege, higher pay and extremely high status (work as NKVD or GRU agents) was widely known
among the students. In December 1937, Chzhao Zy Zhen, a student at the CLS asked several other“students” how he might participate in the school’s “special work.” Ian Khin Shun reported this to thedirector of the school, Guiskii on December 31, 1937.35 One might ask, “Why would the Chinese andKoreans of the USSR so readily join Soviet intelligence forces and risk their lives in dangerous
assignments overseas (to Korea and Manchuria)?” One, whether they were born in Russia or the USSR
or whether they came as migrants (as laborers or as students), both groups wanted to “fit in,” beaccepted, contribute and if possible to obtain status and recognition. When one is a national minority
or a new immigrant, these desires are often accentuated.36

33 Ancha, Kitaiskaia diaspora, 285–287.
34 Ibid., 252.
35 Ibid., 287.
36 Herbert Blalock, Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1967),

79–80; George Leggett, The Cheka, 262; Fedor Fomin, Zapiski starogo Chekista [Notes from an Old Chekist](Moskva: GIPL,1962), 53- see especially the Fomin book; Nikolai Shek, Interview by Jon Chang, August 9, 2008,
Kolkhoz Sverdlov, Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Nikolai Shek in an interview with the author in 2008 stated, “When wewere young guys [adolescents around 15–16], we fought everyone. The fights then were between groups of young
men from different kolkhozes. The fights often had a ‘national’ [ethnic] component to them. We had to prove toothers [in the USSR] that Koreans were tough and worthy. Some people thought because we were smaller that wewould be afraid to fight or that we would run away. We did not hit any less hard than anyone else. I do not remember
us running away ever.” Nikolai Shek, Interview by Jon Chang, August 9, 2008, Kolkhoz Sverdlov, Tashkent,
Uzbekistan.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >Soviet socialism constantly spoke about
overthrowing the capitalist-imperialists of theworld to set up a “worker’s paradise.” Signing up
to serve in Soviet intelligence was merely the actof turning words into deeds. It was also a
psychological and compensatory maneuver,
because the Koreans and Chinese of the Soviet
Union were often treated as “colonizing elements”
in the Russian Far East and in general society.
Asians were often welcomed when times wererough or they could be seen to bring some sort oreconomic or labor advantage. However, theirattempts to become citizens and partake of the
fruit of Soviet socialism was often met with
Figure 1: Nikolai Shek at Kolkhoz Sverdlov,
derision, exclusion or quotas. This occurred,
August 9, 2008. Photo by author.
despite the proclaimed “class line” and “real37
equality” offered by Soviet socialism. As J. Stephan wrote in The Russian Far East, “In Vladivostok
Chinese were mimicked, muddied, and mulcted. Such hooliganism was publicly deplored but officiallywinked at.”38 Sometimes, these acts were also taken against the Koreans, but the Koreans typically had
local ties to the authorities, a stronger desire to organize, speak out and fight back and fluency in the
Russian language. All of the aforementioned gave the Koreans some form of redress or defense.
In the following pages, there are two short case studies with information and photos obtained
from fieldwork conducted by this author. Note that I did not conduct the Ven Sian Liu interview in
Bukhara, Uzbekistan in 2017. However, I first heard of this story from Emil Liu in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
in 2007 while I was teaching English at a university in Central Asia. In 2017, I asked E. Liu to videotape
the interview of his grandmother, Ms. D. Abuziarova. The case studies display the depth of theinformation and histories which can be recovered through oral history as opposed to the archives.39

37 Jon K. Chang, Burnt by the Sun: The Koreans of the Russian Far East (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press,

2016), 27, 53, 65, 82.
38 John Stephan, The Russian Far East: A History (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1994), 74.
39 The following url contains the names of approximately 40,000 NKVD agents, officers, translators andadministrators. This list was compiled by Andrei Zhukov by spending hours in the Russian/former Soviet
NKVD/KGB archives. Note the lack of depth regarding personal histories, lives, motivations, etc. provided by thearchives. Here are two names of East Asian agents in the Memorial List: Lennintsev, Sergei Mikhailovich (Chinesename Khou Minchi) and Khan Chan Ger (also known as Khan Chan Gol, Russian (birth) name Grigorii EliseevichKhan). Accessed December 14, 2017: http://nkvd.memo.ru/index.php?title=%D0%9D%D0%9A%D0%92%D0%94:%D0%93%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0 The following is the url for the Guardian article on Andrei Zhukov andhis phenomenal labor towards compiling the Memorial 40,000 agents list: Accessed December 14, 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/06/stalin-secret-police-killings-crimes-russia-terror-nkvd

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Jon K. Chang

Figure 2: Members of one particular mission of Operation Maki Mirage, photo taken sometime in the
1930s. Note that Sin Sinsan is in the top right corner (from the CLS). The Chinese man to the far right,
bottom row is possibly Vrubel, also formerly a student at the CLS. Photo was taken in Blagoveshchensk,
Russia prior to the group being sent to Sakhalien, Manchuria. Photo courtesy of Komsomol’skaia pravda,
June 28, 2014, article,“Velikaia Otechestvennaia Voina mogla nachatsia ran’she na tri goda.”

Figure 3: Top row, L-R- Sin Sinsan (mid-1920s photo) andUsenko. Middle row, L-R- Zybalov and Makstis. BottomVrubel (Chin. name- I Tinsan). Photos courtesy of Dmitrii
Ancha.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >Ven Sian Liu, GRU AgentThis interview was conducted on April 15, 2017 in Bukhara, Uzbekistan by Emil Liu (thegreat-grandson of Ven Sian). The interview questions were written by the author. There were several
follow-up questions and interviews by email between the author and the Liu family from April to June
2017. The primary interviewee was Diliara Khabirovna Abuziarova, the daughter-in-law of Ven Sian
Liu, who was born in Orenburg, Russia in 1936. Ven Sian Liu was born in Shandong Province in 1904.
His family emigrated to Vladivostok in 1913 when Liu was nine. V.S. Liu lost his family en route to
Vladivostok and was taken in by the Popov family. Ven Sian’s parents were peasant-farmers.
The Popovs were composed of a husband and wife who were both doctors in Vladivostok.
They found Ven Sian in the streets lost, hungry and sick. They took him in and gave him a home until
he was 14 years of age. At 14, he took a job as a cook in a cafeteria. During this same year, V.S. Liu
joined the Red Army. His superiors changed his age on his recruitment papers from age 14 to 16 or 17.
This was immediately after the October Revolution in early 1918. Ven Sian soon found himself in
European Russia in Budyonny’s Red Cavalry along with another Chinese, Li Tan. Budyonny had one
Chinese regiment or detachment in his Red Cavalry.40
From the Red Cavalry, Ven Sian transferred to the military intelligence division of the Red
Army which was called GRU. It is unclear in which year Liu was transferred to GRU work. Liu gave
Ms. Abuziarova two indications of the type of work that he did. One, he worked in surveillance overthe “immigrants” in the RFE. The term “immigrants” referred to the Chinese and Koreans of the RFE
most likely in various small towns there such as Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Iman, Ussuriisk,
Blagoveshchensk and others.41 During the 1920s and 1930s, the term “the immigrants” was continuallyused by state officials and the Soviet security organs to refer specifically to the Chinese and the Koreans.
As Liu spoke Chinese, this work was a good fit for him. Second, according to Diliara, Liu “participatedin the war against the Japanese.” This was before his release in 1937. This “war against the Japanese”
refers to clandestine intelligence work and operations which sent him as a Soviet agent to Manchuria(and later, “Manchukuo”).
Around 1934, he met a widowed Korean woman, Anastasiia who was working in a local
cafeteria. He married her and began to live with her and her son Yuri. Yuri was her son from a previous
marriage to a Korean Red Army soldier. In 1935, Anastasiia gave birth to Ven Sian’s first son, Filipp(the husband of Diliara). In 1937, Ven Sian served on two missions for the GRU to Manchuria. In latefall 1937, Ven Sian returned home from a “mission” and found that his wife Anastasiia and Yuri had
been deported to Central Asia. He was immediately given permission by his colonel to go to Central
Asia and find his family. He found them in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. But Yuri became ill en route to
Uzbekistan and died shortly after his arrival. Anastasiia left Ven Sian due to the events of the
40 Alexander Larin, “Chinese in Russia: An Historical Perspective,” in The Chinese in Europe, eds. Gregor Benton

and Frank Pieke (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 291.
41 Tatiana Pozniak, Inostrannye podannye v gorodakh Dal’nego Vostoka Rossii, vtoraia polovina XIX- nachalo XX
v. [Foreign Citizens in the Cities of the Russian Far East, Second Half of XIX to the Beginning of the XX Century](Vladivostok: Dalnauka, 2004).

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Jon K. Chang

Figure 4: Ven Sian Liu’s Profintern or union card. See his date of birth, line 3 at left － 1904. Photo
courtesy of Emil Liu.

Figure 5: Ven Sian Liu left with his son, Filipp (right) in 1944 right after Liu returned home from thewar front. Photo courtesy of Emil Liu.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >deportation and the loss of her son. She had continued to wonder why Liu had been absent when his
family (Anastasiia and Yuri) had been rounded up and deported. She died in Kazakhstan.
After Liu’s deportation, astonishingly, he continued to work for the MVD (Soviet police
department) as a non-state, state employee. This is an extremely odd state of affairs as he was“unreliable” based on his nationality, yet “a loyal Soviet citizen” based on his work history and what
the state knew about him outside of his ethnicity. He was given an automatic carbine machine gun andworked prosecuting cases of robberies, embezzlement, swindling and the like between 1937 and 1941
in Bukhara. In 1941, after Germany invaded the USSR, the GRU asked Ven Sian to return and do
military reconnaissance on the war front since he was a former GRU agent. He agreed after someflattery (and compliments) which helped Liu overcome his initial resentment (from the events of 1937).
During the Second World War, from 1941 to 1944, Liu fought on the front against the German Army.
He was injured while doing reconnaissance behind the German lines, remained on the front for a shorttime as a cook and then returned home to Uzbekistan in 1944. Again, after 1944, Ven Sian was released
from the GRU. If he had received an offer to stay and train other Red Army GRU candidates (albeit in
Uzbekistan), he almost certainly would have accepted such an offer.

Figure 6: Ven Sian Liu’s funeral. Liu died on January 14, 1972. Note Filipp Liu and his wife, Diliara
Abuziarova at the top left of the casket. Filipp has his hair slicked back. To the right of Diliara (inheadscarf) are Ven Sian’s children from his second wife: Nikolai, Nera, Sonia and Ira. Photo courtesyof Emil Liu.
After this, Liu remarried and fathered another son, Nikolai and three daughters. He ran a state
owned store in Bukhara until his death on January 14, 1972. In Bukhara, after the Second World War,58

Jon K. Chang

Ven Sian met another Chinese man with the surname Li. Mr. Li also married a Korean woman and hada child or two with her. He also was separated from her during the Korean deportation (1937) and neverfound his family again. For many of the Chinese, this type of loss was especially painful because theycame to the USSR as single men. Their wives provided them with family and extended family. V.S.
Liu’s surviving daughters from his second wife (Nera and Ira) declined multiple times to grant aninterview.42
The Nigais: A Soviet (Korean) Cadre Family
Raisa Vasilevna Nigai and Nikolai Vasilevich Nigai were part of a Soviet cadre family of
Koreans. “Soviet cadre” refers to the fact that their grandfather was a Soviet official as the chairman of
the Lower Adimi collective farm in the Poset district near the Russian-Korean border. She was born on
June 16, 1918. Her brother, Nikolai Nigai was born in 1908 and died in 2000.
Raisa often spoke in Korean (Hamgyong dialect), but she did not have a Korean name. Her
grandfather was Ivan Ivanovich Nigai and a collective farm chairman. He himself was very Russified
and felt that Russia, not Korea was his homeland or perhaps, just the Primore, which to Koreans was
not solely Russian nor Korean, but both. In much of the narration that follows, Ms. Nigai did not give
specific dates. From the Poset district, her family moved to Shkotovo which is outside of Vladivostok.
Somehow, their neighbor was Ural, the head of the local OGPU/NKVD. In 1928, Nikolai began workat the Passport Division of the OGPU. He worked as a translator and at some point in the 1930s, he
was transferred to regular NKVD work (OGPU became the NKVD after July 10, 1934).
In the fall of 1932 (or thereabouts), Raisa began her university education at the Korean
Pedagogical Institute in Nikolsk-Ussuriisk. She left the university in February or March of 1937 withjust 3–4 months until her graduation. Raisa stated that she quit because she ran out of money. Yet fromMarch 8–10, 1937, Ms. Nigai attended a Soviet Korean women’s conference which reinforced thebelief that the Soviet state would continue to build a Korean community in the RFE. The state seemed
to be disguising its plans to deport the entire Korean population.
Nikolai was earning a very nice salary. Raisa was receiving a stipend (scholarship) for her
room and board and her tuition was completely free. In Ms. Nigai’s August 15, 1937 photo, taken withher friends in winter clothes (along with another photo in summer clothes which is not included in thisarticle; both photos were taken at the same photo studio) made it apparent that instead of “running out
of money,” it is more likely that her brother informed her in early spring 1937 that the Koreans would
soon be deported. This is also why Raisa and her friends took her “goodbye” photos in winter andsummer wear on August 15, six days before the Korean deportation order was issued by Soviet state(on August 21, 1937).
During the first interview (September 9), she had told me that her brother had not participatedin the Korean deportation. After the interview on September 20, Ms. Nigai showed me her photos
42 Diliara

Khabirovna Abuziarova, Interview by Emil Liu, April 15, 2017, Bukhara, Uzbekistan. Interview
questions composed by Jon Chang.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >(taken prior to and during the Korean deportation) and I understood that he, in fact, did. I then asked
her again if her brother had taken part in the Korean deportation. She answered, “He was doing his
work then.” I rephrased the question. “Was he doing NKVD work or passport work?” She answered,“He was doing NKVD work.” I then inquired about Nikolai Nigai’s children. Two of the three werestill alive. I asked Nikolai’s son for an interview. He was 72 years old in 2009. He refused. He thenspoke to his aunt, Raisa and began haranguing her about “keeping quiet” and “do not tell him anything.”
She did not like this but it continued for another five to seven minutes. After this, I think that Ms. Nigai
was angry at me, so I left her home. The pictures had answered the main question(s) for me (along with
her narration of the context behind the pictures).
In December 1937 or early January 1938, both of the Nigais and their mother arrived in
Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Ms. Nigai only stated that, “It was very cold when we arrived in Kazakhstan.”
Their deportation experience was not at all like that of the common citizen, that is, the Koreans who
were not Soviet cadres. The Nigais arrived and were met by some of the officials from the local CP
committee (Raikom). They received a warm house and plenty of food during their first year in
Karaganda. They also spoke mostly Russian the entire year as they socialized and worked with mostly
native Russian speakers (Russian, Ukrainians and others). After his work in the Korean deportation,
Nikolai as part of a “politically suspect” nationality was released from the NKVD. He took a stipend
to study a short course in accounting and then began work in a bank as an accountant.43

Figure 7: (Left) photo- Raisa Nigai and her friends, August 15, 1937 in winter clothes at a photo studio.
(Right) The backside of the photo is dated August 15, 1937 with the names Liubov Rudich, Shepelenko,
Gala (iu) and Raisa Nigai. Courtesy of Raisa Nigai.
43 Raisa Nigai, Interview by Jon Chang, September 9 and 20, 2009 in Kolkhoz Sverdlov, outside of Tashkent,

Uzbekistan.

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Jon K. Chang

Figure 8: Nikolai Nigai in his NKVD
uniform, Shkotovo branch, May 29, 1934.
Photo courtesy of Raisa Nigai. Date fromthe backside of the photo.

Figure 9: Nikolai Nigai (left) in 1935 with his friend, the Korean man who replaced him in the passport
division of the NKVD office. See white-collar uniform of the passport division circa 1930s to the right.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >Figure 10: Raisa Nigai (far right) and mother (second from far left) at Sanatoria Okeanskaia translated
as either “Pacific Spa” or “Ocean Spa” on October 22, 1937. They were waiting for Nikolai to complete
his work.
Conclusion
The findings from this study focus on the four hundred East Asians recruited into the Soviet
GRU and OGPU/NKVD through institutions of higher education plus another two hundred or more
recruited through other means and channels. The reason for the addition of the latter is because thisauthor met and interviewed the families of six Chinese and Korean Soviet intelligence agents (Shen Li,
who began GPU work in 1920 and Khai Ir Ti, Grigorii Eliseevich Khan [Khan Chan Ger], Ven Sian
Liu, Nikolai Nigai and Nikolai Kuzmich Khan). Only Nikolai K. Khan had any possibility of entering
an institute of higher education as he was recruited at a rabfak (a remedial-education institute forworkers which typically offered very basic educational services) in 1935.44
Prior to this article, there had been little in-depth research and oral history on East Asians in
the Soviet intelligence organizations. The historiography of East Asians in the NKVD and GRU had
also been very sparse and intermittent. In the literature on the Soviet intelligence organs, one could findtypically only one-to-two lines about the Chinese or Koreans in the Red Guards, OPGU, NKVD or
GRU. There was little or no character development and very little sense of these Soviet agents as fully
developed, three dimensional personages. However, this lack of depth is reflective of how the Soviet
archives depicted the achievements and the lives of their diaspora peoples and national minorities(especially those without autonomous republics and or union republics during the Stalinist period suchas the Chinese and the Koreans). This weakness and bias of the Russian archives has been offset or
44 Elizaveta Li, Interview by Jon Chang, December 18, 2016, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

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Jon K. Changameliorated through long term fieldwork, interviews and contemporary photographs which werecollected by this author.
From 1920 to 1945, the Soviet East Asian agents repeatedly crossed the Soviet borders into
Korea, Manchuria (Manchukuo) and China to complete dangerous missions for the Soviet Union. The
six hundred plus total agents were, typically, voluntarily recruited into the Soviet intelligence organs.45
They were heavily swayed by several significant factors which Soviet socialism offered: equality, abrotherhood of workers and peasants (a feeling of unity), the utopian ideal of a world revolution andan ideology which recruited and converted believers with not only words and literature, but alsomaterial advantages, that is, educational opportunities, scholarships and jobs as Soviet cadres in state
institutions. Soviet socialism and Soviet intelligence’s heavy reliance on humint (human intelligencecollection) gave incredible educational and occupational opportunities to young Soviet Koreans fromthe Russian Far East, some Soviet Chinese (such as Ven Sian Liu) and many young Chinese studentemigrants. For the young Koreans, many achieved status and recognition far beyond that of their peers,parents and extended families. Their completion of higher education and subsequent Soviet cadre jobs
lifted them out of the collective farms and moved them into white collar jobs in the cities, as
administrators and leaders on the collective farms and as Soviet political police agents and officers.
Then beginning in late 1935, the Great Terror began. The diaspora peoples of the USSR wereaccused of being “enemy nations,” wreckers, diversionists and fifth-columnist spy elements for theirancestral homelands.46 Some 180 out of the 400 students recruited at the Chinese-Lenin School werearrested during the Great Terror. 47 In the author’s opinion, the number of arrested students is anextremely conservative estimate because as Ancha’s Kitaiskaia diaspora notes the Chinese agents usednumerous Russian and Chinese names as well as various aliases.48 They were and remain impossible
to track. The Terror also led to the closing of the CLS in 1938.49 This research as well as others by thisauthor puts to rest the idea that the nationalities deportations (as specifically related to the Soviet

45 Ancha’s history of the CLS did not provide any accounts of students being coerced into working for Soviet

intelligence. Additionally, this author met and interviewed the families of six East Asian NKVD and GRU agents.
All six had joined voluntarily and enthusiastically. All sixty of my Soviet Korean interviewees wholeheartedly
supported the Soviet government while almost all disagreed with the necessity of the Korean deportation. It is my
opinion that I have provided an accurate assessment of the Russian-Korean deportees and their community via
structured interviews, fieldwork, photos (from the subject’s personal photo album) and videos shot from 2005 to2017. There are few photos of Soviet Koreans and Chinese in the archives. Those which are present have typically
been used several times. A full three-dimensional historical study on the Soviet Koreans and Chinese required that
I collect and build my own photo archive, conduct interviews in situ (in Soviet Central Asia), in some cases,
conduct multiple interviews with typically one to two years in between and read and try to understand the narrativeof the Soviet state archives. The latter, in my opinion, typically provides a history or point of view which is quitedistinct from that of oral history. It is a state-sanctioned narrative.
46 Chang, Burnt, 151–179.
47 Dmitrii Ancha, email to Jon Chang, February 20, 2018.
48 Ancha, Kitaiskaia diaspora, 252.
49 Ibid., 284.

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Eurasia Border Review < Article >Koreans and Chinese) were purely ideological50 and as a result of the two Soviet diaspora peoples being
disloyal and or displaying an inability to fully “Sovietize” or reforge themselves as loyal Soviet
citizens.51
Some of the Soviet Chinese did have problems with being considered somewhat to very
“foreign.” However, the USSR clearly stated during this period that its policies were to produce various
peoples and ethnic groups who were “national in form [racial, ethnic], socialist in content [ideology].”52
The Chinese at the CLS clearly demonstrated that they were Soviet in content. They were foreign, but
most could speak Russian competently while being able to read Russian much better than they could
speak it. The Koreans had far fewer problems with assimilation to either Russian or Soviet culture sincemost had been born in Russia and were bilingual.
Both diaspora groups served the USSR in intelligence operations from 1920 to 1945. If they
had truly been disloyal, unable to Sovietize or incompetent, these problems would have surfaced muchearlier (such as in the early 1920s) and their deployment would have ended. The Soviet state would nothave re-recruited East Asians after 1938 (the year that the Great Terror ended) for service in Soviet
intelligence operations had they not been loyal and sufficiently Soviet in their ideology. The argumentof “Soviet xenophobia,” that is the ethnic cleansing53 of the two East Asian nationalities during the“Great Terror” and similar theories have been debunked.54 Both Liu (Chinese) and Ti (Korean) either
served or were offered work as Soviet intelligence agents after 1938. Ven Sian Liu conducted GRU
reconnaissance missions from 1941 to 1944. Khai Ir Ti was recruited by the Russian General Staff and
the GRU for a mission to Manchuria sometime between 1942 and 1945. Mr. Ti (a former NKVD officer
from 1935 to 1941) refused the offer.55
Their nationalities remained the same. The threat of war against Japan only increased
exponentially after 1938 due to the battles against the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) at Khalkhin Gol
50 Terry Martin, “Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing,” The Journal of Modern History 70: 4 (1998): 829, 860. See

page 860, “However, the Soviet case is unusual since, as I have emphasized, Soviet xenophobia was an ideologicalrather than an ethnic concept.” Other research by this author refers to the monograph, Burnt by the Sun: The
Koreans of the Russian Far East.
51 Francine Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics,” Slavic Review 61: 1 (2002): 38; see pages 40,
42, and 43 for similar statements.
52 Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (repr. 1935, Honolulu: University Press of the
Pacific, 2003), 260.
53 In this context, the ethnic cleansing of both the Soviet Chinese and Koreans include: their removal from the Red
Army, their removal from positions as Soviet cadres, their repressions and their deportations.
54 See Martin, “Origins,” 829 which states, “Soviet xenophobia was ideological and not ethnic. It was spurred by
an ideological hatred and suspicion of foreign capitalist governments, not the national hatred of non-Russians.” Inregards to “similar theories,” see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times.
Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 7 (the entire middle paragraph, see “theenemies, like witches in earlier ages, bore no reliable external marks.”); Amir Weiner, “Nothing but Certainty,”
Slavic Review 61:1 (Spring 2002): 46 (see “it was their territorial identity and not …”); and Francine Hirsch,
Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2005), 264, 272, 275, 295.
55 See Anna Vasilevna Ti interview, Interview by Jon Chang, November 21, 2016, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Ms. Anna
Ti was the daughter of Khai Ir Ti.

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Jon K. Chang(1939) and Lake Khasan (1938). Instead, the main problem which led to the nationalities deportations
and the closing of the CLS was that in the 1930s, the Soviets regarded nationality and political loyalty
as primordial and essentialized qualities.56 These policies did not differentiate (in the case of the Soviet
Koreans) between Koreans from Japan, Manchuria, USSR or Korea. All were ascribed to be equally
Korean and loyal to Korea. Likewise, the Soviet Chinese were judged to be loyal to China no matter
how many missions they served for Soviet intelligence.57 These views and practices are absolutely nonMarxist and forms of ethnic chauvinism. For the diaspora nationalities, this was a no-win situation.
During World War One, Tsarist Russian views of race and its ethnic minorities led to thelabeling and deportation of Russia’s Germans, Jews and Poles as “internal enemies” and “alien
enemies.”58 These categories and deportations strongly resembled those of the Great Terror and thedeportations of the Soviet Koreans and Chinese during the late 1930s. In the author’s opinion, if theSoviets and Stalin had kept an open mind (and had conscientiously practiced Soviet socialism), theywould have understood that the cultural similarities between the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans did
not lead to a Japanese-led “yellow juggernaut” which sought to overthrow the USSR.59 The political
identities of the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans had been separate and distinct for over a thousand
years. The three groups had fought, subjugated and humiliated one another under all manners of states,
alliances, and political entities. Likewise, the political loyalties of the Soviet Koreans and Chinese weredistinct from those of their co-ethnics from Korea and China. If the Soviets had truly understood theirown slogan “national in form, Soviet in content,” the nationalities deportations and the closing of the
CLS would not have taken place.

56 For the Chinese and Koreans, this had been a constant since the inception of the USSR.
57 Chang, Burnt, 49.
58 Ibid., 29–32. Also a few thousand Chinese laborers in Russia were labeled as German spies and deported during

World War One.
59 “Yellow juggernaut” refers to Japan as a military and imperial force during the early 1930s to the end of theSecond World War. In this context, “juggernaut” is the more appropriate term (rather than “yellow peril”).

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