Russia Sought to Send Koreans to NK in 1947
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Staff Reporter
The government of the former Soviet Union had planned to forcibly relocate some 22,000 Koreans living in Sakhalin to North Korea in the late 1940s, according to documents released by the National Archives of Korea (NAK), Friday.
The document was among the 1,256 pages making up 214 confidential documents compiled by the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The NAK received the documents from the Russian national archive after requesting their declassification several times since 2005.
"The document officially verifies the plan to relocate Koreans in Sakhalin to North Korea, information which had been unconfirmed before this," an NAK official said. "However, it did not identify whether they were actually sent to the North or how many of them were sent."
The document is a letter sent between Russian government secretaries and says that if the Koreans were sent to North Korea all at once, the Sakhalin community would suffer economically, so they should be moved in phases. According to the document, 6,176 prisoners were held at a prisoner of war camp in Nakhodka and 2,161 of them were Korean.
There were photos of Soviet soldiers lecturing on socialism.
"There are about 4,000 more Korea-related secret documents in Russia and we will continue our efforts to collect them," the NAK official said. "These documents provide information that will aid research on the life of Koreans who lived in Sakhalin and how the Russian government handled them."