 Additionally, the Soviet government finally began to permit the Sakhalin Koreans to naturalize. However, as many as 10 % continued to refuse both Soviet and North Korean citizenship, and demanded repatriation to South Korea. By 1976, only 2,000 more of their population had been able to obtain permission to depart from Sakhalin, but that year, the Sakhalin government made a public announcement that people seeking to emigrate to South Korea could simply show up at the Immigration Office to file an application. Within a week, they had received more than 800 such applications, including some from North Korean citizens; this caused the North Korean embassy to complain to their Soviet counterparts about the new emigration policy. The Soviet authorities in the end chose for unspecified reasons to refuse to issue exit visas to most of those concerned, leading to the unusual case of public demonstrations about the refusals by Korean families. This level of open dissent provoked the authorities to completely reverse their liberalising stance towards the Sakhalin Koreans; they arrested more than 40 protestors, and in November 1976 deported them, but to North Korea rather than to the South as they desired. Further purges and intimidation of those seeking to emigrate also followed. Through to the early 1980s, locally born Korean youth, increasingly interested in their heritage, were seen as traitors by their Russian neighbours for wanting to know more about their ancestral land and for seeking to emigrate. The nadir of ethnic relations came after the 1983 shooting-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Union.
