This is the second in a series of articles highlighting the life of Koreans in Sakhalin.

By Andrei Lankov
Korea Times Columnist

Nowadays, it's difficult to believe that North Korea, a brutal but impoverished dictatorship, once enjoyed great popularity among Asian countries and also in Korean communities overseas.

Indeed, in the mid-1950s most ethnic Koreans of Japan chose North Korean citizenship, even though they largely originated from the southern part of the peninsula.

In the 1960s, North Korea, due partially to its actual achievements but also to the skill of its propaganda mongers, was seen as a beacon of progress in many Asian countries.

The Sakhalin-Korean community did not avoid this temptation, and for a brief while it appeared that Sakhalin Koreans were eager to side with Pyongyang and perceived North Korea to be their'true motherland.'

This did not last for long, though.

By the late 1950s, the Sakhalin-Korean community consisted of two major groups. First, there were some 22,000 people who moved to Sakhalin prior to 1945 when it was a part of Japan. They came from southern provinces of Korea and largely remained stateless. A smaller group of some 8,000 consisted of the North Korean workers who were recruited to work at the Sakhalin fisheries by the Soviet military administration in the late 1940s. By definition, they were North Korean citizens.

The first group, comprised of southerners, then still in their 40s, badly wanted to return to their native lands, but Soviet authorities would not allow such a large-scale resettlement to South Korea.

However, they had a different attitude to those Koreans who had arrived in Sakhalin from North Korea. Authorities wanted them to leave, and from 1954, instructions were sent to the local police to persuade the former North Korean contract workers that it was a good idea to go home.

Around the same time, officials of the North Korean consulate, located in Nakhodka near Vladivostok, became active on the island.

Obviously, North Korean diplomats and spies were encouraged by their recent political success in Japan. Japan had a large Korean population, whose members, much like the Sakhalin Koreans, were recent migrants from South Korea.

The North Korean agencies succeeded in persuading them to choose North Korean citizenship and for a while the Japanese-Korean community remained surprisingly loyal to Kim Il-sung's regime.

Their association became a powerful state-within-state that often broke Japanese laws with impunity and provided the North Korean regime with considerable funds. Pyongyang also succeeded in luring some 95,000 ethnic Koreans from Japan to North Korea.

In Sakhalin, North Korean diplomats and intelligence agents persuaded some 'stateless' Koreans to choose North Korean citizenship. They insisted that, after all, "Korea is one,"and it would not matter which side of the native country a person would live in for a while. Unification was just beyond the corner, they assured.

In the late 1950s, Sakhalin Koreans tended to prefer North Korean, not Soviet, citizenship. For example, in 1958, the Sakhalin police office surveyed the local 'stateless' Korean population (that is, Koreans who originally came from the South). According to the survey, 9.836 said, given the choice, they would rather remain people without citizenship. Of those remaining, 6,346 opted for the North Korean passports, while merely 1,008 expressed the desire to become Soviet citizens.

Between 1956 and 1962, some 4,000 Sakhalin Koreans moved to Kim Il-sung's 'paradise on Earth.' This number included few formerly-stateless Koreans.

At the same time, the North Korean agents began to create a semi-clandestine network through which they hoped to remove local Koreans from Soviet influence and reincorporate them into the 'loyal soldiers of the Dear Leader.' The 'study groups' looked innocuous at first. They taught Korean language, history and culture, heavily mixed with North Korean propaganda, of course. Soon, however, the groups began to change.

The pro-Soviet Koreans participating in the groups were pushed aside and sometimes subjected to violent attacks. A clandestine pro-Pyongyang network began to emerge.

However, it did not last. First, the Soviet Union was not Japan, and the KGB would not tolerate a pro-North Korean organization. After all, in spite of official rhetoric, relations between Moscow and Pyongyang in the 1960s were tense, even hostile at times. Second, Sakhalin Koreans themselves soon became disappointed in North Korea.

Stories about life in North Korea began to filter out in the late 1950s, and in no time the idea of repatriation to North Korea lost its appeal. The last group, some 500 people, left the island for North Korea in 1962.

Since then, nobody wanted to go. By the mid-1960s few had doubts that life in the USSR, however poor and restricted it might have been, was still free and affluent compared to Kim Il-sung's alleged paradise.

Three former Sakhalin Koreans who made the mistake of going to the North staged a bold escape back across the Soviet border. They were allowed to regain their Soviet citizenship. One of them eventually became a journalist in Moscow radio. Some others could not escape but smuggled letters which left no doubt about how North Koreans really lived.

So, North Korea became decisively unpopular within the community. An elder Korean intellectual told me: "Frankly, we were not proud of being Korean until the late 1980s. Everybody back then thought of North Korea as a sole Korea, and people here, in Sakhalin, knew very well what an awful place it is."The North Korean mirage, briefly attractive in the late 1950s, collapsed in just a few years.

The writer is an associate professor of Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.