Migration History of the Koreans in Russia and Required Legal Support

Abstract

Currently some half a million Koreans are residing in the regions of the old Soviet Union. Most of them are the Koreans and their decedents who lost their livelihood in the Maritime Territory Russia and migrated to Central Asia during the period of forced mobilization in 1937. More than 50 percent of them are still living in Central Asia, yet others are spread throughout the Maritime Territory, Sakhalin, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic. Some of them who had to be deported half a century ago lost their homeland once again after the collapse of the Soviet Union and were forced to move to other regions. The typical such case is the Koreans in Tajikistan. Tajikistan located in Central Asia went through civil war in 1992, and as many as 18,000 Tajik Koreans lost their home from the war in an instant and became ‘refugees’ who needed to flee to other countries. It is known that most of them who moved to Russia had settled around Volgograd at southern Russia. In the early phase of migration in 1992, they had to manage their new life on a barren, inhabitable field, just as their forefathers did 70 years before. Up until the early 2000s, 10 years after migration, they had not been able to build a stable base for their livelihood. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians and other minority groups as well as Tajik Koreans were leaving Uzbekistan of Central Asia except for the Uzbeks until the early 2000s. Uzbekistan implemented strong ethnocentrism policies after the independence, and consequently other minority groups tended to worry for their future and moved to other countries. As for the Koreans in particular who engaged in farming, they moved in search for farmland, and many of them migrated to the Russia’s southern region as well. Interestingly, it was found that there have been differences by region in the society of overseas Koreans residing in the regions of old Soviet Union, known as Koreans in the former Soviet Union. Thus, this study aims to look into those differences, the background behind their settlement and relevant problems, and seeks necessary support measures. The target regions of this study include Uzbekistan and the Republic of Kazakhstan in Central Asia where the largest number of Koreans are residing, as well as Russia’s southern region where second and third settlements took place in earnest after the collapse of the Soviet Union.