It would be possible to write this volume as though the Ussuri country were empty when the first cart arrived from Chernihiv, and a certain amount of writing about Zelenyi Klyn does exactly that. It is worth resisting, for two reasons. The first is that it is untrue. The second is that what happened to the Ukrainian community in the 1930s happened to several other peoples in the same territory at the same time, generally worse, and the comparison is the best available guide to what the Soviet state was actually doing.
The people who were already there
The Amur and Ussuri basins were the country of the Nanai, Udege, Orochi, Nivkh, Ulchi and Evenki — hunting, fishing and reindeer peoples whose total numbers were in the low tens of thousands across an area the size of France and Germany combined.
Their sovereignty was never a question anybody asked. The Treaty of Aigun in 1858 and the Treaty of Peking in 1860 transferred the territory from Qing China to the Russian Empire, negotiated between two empires at a moment when China was losing the Second Opium War and in no position to argue, and the people living on the land were not parties to either document.
What followed was the standard sequence of settler colonisation: epidemic disease, the loss of hunting grounds to farms, the fur trade and then the alcohol trade, missionary schooling, and in the Soviet period forced sedentarisation and collectivisation into fishing kolkhozes. Vladimir Arsenyev's Dersu Uzala, published in 1923 and filmed by Kurosawa in 1975, is the classic record — and Arsenyev's position in it, as a Russian army officer surveying the territory for the state while genuinely loving the Nanai hunter who guided him, is as exact an image of the whole business as anyone has managed.
The peoples survive. The Nanai number some 12,000, the Udege several hundred. Their languages are severely endangered, and for the same reason everybody else's was.
Chinese and Korean
Chinese presence on the land was continuous and predated the Russian acquisition: ginseng gatherers, trappers, gold prospectors and, after 1860, seasonal agricultural labour and the construction gangs that built the railways and the cities. Vladivostok had a large Chinese quarter, the Millionka, which was a town in itself.
Korean settlement began in the 1860s, when famine and Japanese pressure drove peasants north across the Tumen, and it was agricultural, permanent and remarkably successful: Koreans developed the rice cultivation of the Primorye valleys, and by the 1920s numbered around 170,000 in the Far Eastern Krai, a larger and more concentrated national minority than any except the Ukrainians.
Relations among the three farming populations were the ordinary mixture of competition and exchange. The Ukrainian settlers took soya and rice techniques from their Chinese and Korean neighbours; they also competed with them for land and complained to the administration about them, and the administration, which regarded all Asian settlement as a strategic threat, periodically restricted Korean landholding and Chinese entry.
The Blagoveshchensk drownings of July 1900, when the Russian authorities drove the city's Chinese population into the Amur during the Boxer emergency and killed several thousand people, is the episode that should be kept in view when the Far East is described as a place where peoples got on tolerably well.
1937
In August and September 1937 the Soviet government deported the entire Korean population of the Far East — some 172,000 people — to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, in sealed trains, over a period of weeks. It was the first wholesale deportation of an entire nationality in Soviet history, and it established the method that would later be used against the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars, the Volga Germans and others.
The stated justification was the prevention of Japanese espionage. The Korean population had lived in the region for seventy years, had its own schools and press under korenizatsiia, and had been among the more enthusiastically Soviet of the Far Eastern nationalities. Several thousand died in transit or in the first winter on the Kazakh steppe. The Korean-language institutions of the Far East ended in a fortnight.
The Chinese population was arrested, expelled across the border or deported in the same period; the Millionka in Vladivostok was cleared in 1936. The Harbin returnees were shot under Order No. 00593. And the Ukrainian institutions, as the previous chapter described, had been dismantled between 1932 and 1934 and their personnel arrested.
Set these side by side and the pattern is unmistakable. The Soviet state in the Far East was engaged in the removal of every national community whose loyalty it judged to be potentially divided by a foreign connection — which, in a border region, meant all of them. The Ukrainians received the mildest version of it, because there was no foreign state next door to deport them towards.
Birobidzhan
And then there is the exception, two hours west of Khabarovsk, which is the most useful thing in this volume for thinking about what might have happened instead.
In 1928 the Soviet government set aside a district of the Amur basin for Jewish agricultural settlement, and in 1934 constituted it as the Jewish Autonomous Oblast: a national-territorial unit with Yiddish as an official language alongside Russian, Yiddish schools, a Yiddish newspaper — Birobidzhaner Shtern, which still appears — and a state Yiddish theatre.
It never worked as intended. The land was difficult, the settlers largely urban, and the competition from Palestine and from ordinary Soviet urban life considerable; the Jewish population peaked at perhaps 30,000 in the late 1940s, always under a fifth of the oblast's inhabitants, and is now a fraction of one per cent. The institutions were purged in 1937 along with everything else, briefly revived after the war, and destroyed again in the anti-cosmopolitan campaign of 1948–52.
But the oblast exists. It is on the map, the station sign at Birobidzhan is in Yiddish and Russian, and there is a menorah in the square. What it demonstrates is that Soviet nationalities policy was entirely capable of creating a territorial autonomy in the Russian Far East when Moscow judged it useful — and that for a Ukrainian population a hundred times larger, already settled on the ground, and asking for precisely that, it declined.
The reason is not mysterious. A Jewish autonomous region in the Amur basin gave the Soviet Union an answer to Zionism and cost it nothing. A Ukrainian autonomous region in Primorye would have given institutional form to a national claim across eight thousand kilometres, at a moment when the regime had decided that Ukrainian nationality was the most dangerous one it contained. The congresses at Nikolsk-Ussuriysky had asked for the wrong thing from the wrong people at the wrong time.
End of Chapter IX