Korea in the Russian and Soviet Imagination, 1850s–1945: Between Orientalism and Revolutionary Solidarity

The current article deals with the Russian and Soviet attitudes toward Korea and Koreans since the first modern visitations of Russians onto Korean soil in the 1850s and until the end of the Colonial Period in Korea (1945). Before the October 1917 Revolution, these attitudes, largely, did not significantly differ from colonial Orientalism elsewhere. Koreans were to be “saved” by the Russian Empire from their “primitiveness” and “inaptitude” and also from Japan’s encroachments. By contrast with the imperialist ideologies in more liberal states of Western Europe, Tsar officials also wished to save Koreans from the “liberal heresies,” for which they were not “mature” enough. Some changes in attitudes became visible after the Russo-Japanese War, as Korea was no longer a target for Russian imperial aggrandizement. The Korean Independence movement and its fight against Russia’s own erstwhile battlefield enemy, Japan, came to receive relatively sympathetic press coverage. The presence of the second generation, bilingual Russian Koreans among the interpreters of Korean affairs for the Russian public, was an additionally important factor. With the October 1917 Revolution, colonized Korea came to be perceived as the Soviet Union’s ally in its anti-imperialist struggles. Even Korean nationalist terrorists of non-Socialist persuasion were seen as potential allies, to be reeducated and integrated into the Communist-led anti-imperialist movement. This internationalism, however sincere many of its adepts (a good number of the Russian cadres who worked with Korea were Jews, a former persecuted minority themselves) could be, was, however, tinged with a feeling of superiority. The Soviet Union was the revolution’s center—and Korea qualified for a faraway periphery at best. By the mid-1930s, as the Soviet Union was gradually developing into a dictatorial state, increasingly nationalist and less and less interested in its erstwhile internationalist commitments, these superiority attitudes were mutating into sentiments of distrust toward Korean ethnic Others, now routinely suspected of being “secret agents of Japan.” These sentiments laid the discursive foundation for the forcible removal of Maritime Province Russian Koreans to central Asia in 1937. Still, due to the continuous importance of October 1917’s internationalist legacy for the Soviet policies and ideology, Stalin’s Korea policy did not fully metamorphose into Tsar-like imperialism—outright annexation of Korea, wholly or in part was never even debated. The Soviet pursuit of these geopolitical interests was restricted by the ideological constraints stemming from the revolutionary legitimation of the Soviet state.