This is the third in a series of articles highlighting lives of Koreans on Sakhalin.
By Andrei Lankov
Korea Times Columnist
SAKHALIN ― In 1945, when some 24,000 Koreans found themselves locked in Sakhalin, few if any of them could utter a word of Russian. Those who came to the island from North Korea between 1946 and 1949 to work in the fishing and timber industries hardly had better command of the language.
Thus, for a decade or two the Sakhalin-Korean community could function in Korean only.
The local administration did its best to adjust to the situation which, of course, made them quite uncomfortable. The Sakhalin bureaucrats asked Moscow for assistance, and some 2,000 ethnic Koreans from Central Asia were sent to Sakhalin in the late 1940s.
Those sent included teachers, interpreters and journalists. Even ethnic Korean police and KGB officers were sent to the island, both to maintain law and order, and keep an eye on the new community.
Demonstrating a somewhat unusual approach, the Sakhalin administration required local doctors to undergo a crash course in Korean, just to enable them to talk to their monolingual patients. (After studying Korea for two decades, this author is somewhat skeptical about the efficiency of the latter measure.)
In the 1950s, most Korean children attended Korean language schools. In the post-war Soviet Union, still a very poor place, it took major efforts to provide these schools with textbooks. They had to be either translated from Russian or written specially and then printed, but it was done.
Until the early 1960s, the Korean Culture House operated on the island's administrative center. For a while, even a small Korean language theater existed on the island. North Korean films were screened, and in some cases, Korean subtitles were prepared for Russian language films.
From 1951, a Korean language newspaper called Following Lenin's Path began to be published on the island. It was generously subsidized by the administration, and from 1952 it was published five times a week, with circulation of 10,000-12,000 copies. Sakhalin radio stations made regular Korean language broadcasts.
In 1963-64, however, a major change took place: all Korean schools were closed down and their teachers and students were transferred to Russian schools. This step is often described as an attempt to force Russification, but talk to elder Koreans and you'll likely get a different view.
The witnesses insist the major force behind the switch to Russian-language education were Koreans themselves.
By the early 1960s, the Korean community had changed. Many elders still hoped to go home, but the younger generation had different ideas. Sakhalin was their home, not some province of Korea. In many cases, parents also changed their minds. Like Koreans worldwide, they highly valued education and jobs that were associated with education. From 1956, even stateless Koreans could be accepted at local colleges, and very soon they came to be overrepresented among the most successful students.
However, a Russian-language education greatly increased their chances to succeed in a Russian-speaking environment. Graduates of Korean middle schools had problems with advanced education.
Had their parents wanted their kids to become fishermen, miners or vegetable farmers, they would not probably have minded. But they had far more ambitious plans in mind and did their best to teach their children Russian, so they could become engineers, doctors or professors.
Once the hopes of repatriation diminished after 1970, Koreans began to take Soviet citizenship. It liberated their children from manifold restrictions; as Soviet citizens they could enter the best schools and occupy almost any job. However, some discrimination persisted. It was an open secret that only people born as Soviet citizens were eligible for the most prestigious and sensitive jobs.
Nonetheless, education became increasingly significant, as many new life paths could be open to educated Korean youngsters.
In a sense, this was reminiscent of the changes of another, much larger, Soviet-Korean community, that of Central Asian Koreans. There, too, the change of life strategies dealt a heavy blow to Korean-language education. For an aspiring engineer or lawyer, learning Korean was, essentially, an unproductive use of time, so only few undertook such an endeavor.
However, even after the switch to Russian-language education, the Korean culture sphere survived on the island, largely thanks to generous government subsidies.
It was an interesting peculiarity of Soviet policy. On one hand, the state did encourage Russification, but at the same time it spent huge sums of money supporting minorities' languages and cultures, even when the minorities in question were not particularly interested in their supposed'heritage.'
Hence, the elder Korean intelligentsia remembers the 1970s with somewhat mixed feelings. It was a time of restrictions, when even minor activities needed official approval and the approval was not necessarily forthcoming. At the same time, subsidies for officially endorsed projects, such as Korean-language newspapers, were lavish.
Nonetheless, the younger generations were increasingly assimilated into Russian culture. According to the 1970 census, 28,000 of some 35,000 Sakhalin Koreans listed Korean as their primary native language. In 1989, there were only 13,000 such people. In other words, by 1990 some two-thirds of Sakhalin-Koreans had limited or no knowledge of their ancestors' language. Somewhat surprisingly, the collapse of the USSR sped this process up.
The writer is an associate professor at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.