North Korea’s recent enthusiastic support for Russia’s war in Ukraine is steeped in irony. Pyongyang now supplies artillery shells and even deploys troops to assist President Putin, a leader of an imperialist state that once brutally uprooted its own ethnic Korean population. In 1937, Stalin’s Soviet Union forcibly expelled roughly 170,000 Koreans (the Koryo-saram) from the Russian Far East to Central Asia, citing supposed fears of Japanese espionage. This under-reported atrocity, one of the largest ethnic deportations of the Stalin era, is largely forgotten today. Yet its legacy hangs as a specter over the current alliance: North Korea is effectively backing a regime that once branded Koreans as “potential spies” and treated them with extreme prejudice.
At the time of the deportation, Soviet propaganda even portrayed Koreans as indistinguishable from Japanese, a thin pretext for mass transfer. As a Soviet decree stated, the entire “Korean population” in the border districts was ordered out “immediately… to prevent the infiltration of Japanese espionage.” Historians note that Stalin had long held a “primordialist” view of nationality, carrying over Tsarist-era racism into Soviet policy. In the late 1930s, Stalin and Molotov personally signed Resolution No. 1428-326 on August 21, 1937, mandating the deportation of all Soviet Koreans from the Far Eastern border to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan by January 1, 1938. Officially, this was to “stop Japanese spies.” Still, no steps were taken to distinguish loyal Koreans from alleged infiltrators. In practice, it was indiscriminate: entire villages and families were rounded up with almost no notice and crammed onto freight trains.
Map: Deportation routes for Soviet Koreans, 1937. Koreans in the Russian Far East (far right) were sent to Central Asian SSRs (red area), a journey of up to 6,400 km.
Contemporary records and survivor interviews paint the harrowing picture. Soviet documents report that the transit to “unloading stations” took on average 30–40 days of travel. According to historian Igor Kim, by October 1937, NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov could boast to Stalin that “the eviction of Koreans from the Far East was completed,” over 170,000 people had been crammed into cattle cars and sent toward Central Asia. On the way, hundreds perished from hunger, cold and disease, mostly small children and the elderly. As one of the deportees later recalled, at every station stop “the doors opened and bodies of children, women, [and] old people” fell out of the cars; “there was no time to dig graves,” so the soldiers heaped stones over the remains.
Soviet NKVD officers had notified families of a brutal deadline. In one documented case, an official recounted how agents knocked on a Korean family’s door in the Primorye region and gave them just 30 minutes to gather their belongings: “They said the train will take us, you all must go, gather all your documents and luggage,” effectively announcing, “You are all being deported.” Accounts from survivors confirm the chaos and terror: many Koreans tried to smuggle food aboard or bribe soldiers, but these desperate acts did little to save lives. In one family described by journalist Victoria Kim, the grandparents gave up even the meager food they carried to feed their young grandchildren, only to die of starvation on the train themselves. No one kept records of those deaths; often, bodies were simply abandoned in the snow by the roadside. For the victims, the deportation was a catastrophe of unimaginable scale.
From Tsarist Borders to Stalinist Exile
The roots of this tragedy go back decades. In the 1860s, many Koreans migrated to Russia’s Far East to escape famine and turmoil on the Korean peninsula. By the early 20th century, the Korean population in the Primorye and Amur regions had swelled. A French historian notes that by 1910, there were over 51,000 Koreans in the Russian Far East, though only about 14,800 (29%) were Russian citizens. This large foreign minority unsettled Russian authorities, especially after Japan annexed Korea in 1910. (Japan was viewed as the likely aggressor over the border.) In the 1920s, Soviet officials toyed with relocating Koreans from the sensitive Primorye border zones; there were plans as early as 1927 and 1928 to move them, though these came to nothing at the time. The Koreans even had an autonomous district within Primorye in the 1920s. Yet, Stalin’s growing paranoia overshadowed any policy of inclusion.
By the mid-1930s, Stalin’s Great Purge was in full swing. The Soviet press had begun labeling border minorities, Poles, Germans, and Koreans, as potential “fifth columns.” Pravda ran a campaign accusing Koreans of being Japanese agents. In July 1937, the Politburo declared the entire Far Eastern frontier a “special defense zone,” heightening suspicions of all locals. Then, on August 21, 1937, the Council of People’s Commissars (Molotov) and Stalin issued decree No. 1428-326сс, which bluntly stated: “Deport all Korean population from the border regions of the Far East… relocate [them] to the south, Kazakhstan region, areas near the Aral Sea, Uzbek SSR.” This top-secret order was rushed to implementation.
The deportation operation began on September 1, 1937. Across Primorye and Khabarovsk, NKVD squads went door-to-door. People were allowed only minimal personal belongings; official “exchange receipts” forms were hastily issued but proved worthless. The entire population was rounded up and packed into old freight cattle cars. These trains were sealed, overcrowded, and unsanitary, not cavalry or passenger vehicles. Officials later wrote that each deportee was charged 5 rubles per travel day (and those who complied got a token 370 rubles), but this was meaningless to families starving and freezing in transit.
By September 10, the trains were moving. Hundreds of cars stretched in long convoys toward Central Asia. Guards along the route shouted to people to fetch water and dragged out anyone too weak to climb back on board. One child survivor recalls dragging a yoke and tea kettle to get water during a stop. Babies in her family fell ill and froze. Soldiers would kick people off at night if they felt weak. The journey often took over a month, up to 40 days according to official accounts, and the toll was enormous. Among the 172,000 deportees, at least “several hundred” died in transit, a figure many historians now believe was much higher (conditions suggest thousands could have perished).
Photo: Three Koreans deported to Uzbekistan in the fall of 1937, standing in a marsh where they were forced to work. In exile, they were given little support and often placed in empty barns, stables, or even former prisons, surviving on the meager food they carried.
The survivors who did reach Central Asia found harsh new realities. Soviet plans assumed that resettlement and evacuation to “new territories” could be completed by January 1938. In practice, nearly 20,800 Korean families (about 98,500 people) were dumped across Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan by early 1938. They were scattered wherever there was space. Actobe regional archives report that Koreans were shoved into any vacant buildings: barns, basements, even derelict mosques, and prisons. No provisions were given; deportees had to eat the scraps they had brought on the journey. The first winter was brutal. Records show Kazakhstan hosted 20,789 families by February 1938. Regions like Guryev (now Atyrau) were forced to absorb over a thousand families with no planning. In Guryev’s case, 1,266 Korean families were allotted to a state fish-processing factory and collective farms. Many labored in rice fields and cotton fields on the dusty steppes under NKVD supervision. Disease and malnutrition were rife, and mortality among children, women, and the elderly remained very high.
Survivor accounts from Central Asia, collected decades later, testify to the trauma. A Kazakh academic recalls interviewing elderly Koreans who were deportees: most could not even venture outside their homes by the 2010s, their speech and memories clouded. “Living history is disappearing,” one leader noted in 2017, as remaining eyewitnesses fade. Many ethnic Koreans in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan now live quiet lives; their grandparents’ stories of forced exile are rarely passed on in detail. Even among themselves, Koryo-saram often considers 1937 an “un-mourned tragedy” that was banned from discussion during the Soviet era. As historian Choi Jin-seok writes, Soviet authorities “forbade any mention” of the relocation and destroyed records, making it difficult even today to piece together the whole truth.
Yet some sources have preserved the facts. For example, the Academy of Korean Studies’ encyclopedia (a rigorous academic source) reports that in 1937, “about 172,000” ethnic Koreans in the Far East were forcibly moved to Central Asia. Any genuine military need scarcely justified the deportation; it was part of Stalin’s broader nationalities purge. (By 1937, Stalin had also deported Poles, Finns, Chinese, Latvians, and others from border zones.) Western observers in later years would only slowly learn of these crimes. Even in modern Russia, the subject has been taboo for decades, only debated openly after the Soviet collapse. As scholar Jon Chang observes, the Koreans’ ordeal “illustrated” how Russian imperial racism, latent even in Soviet ideology, was unleashed in Stalin’s time.
International Ironies: 2024 and Beyond
The ghosts of 1937 cast a long shadow today. It is a bitter historical irony that North Korea, which claims to be anti-imperialist, is now arming and even fighting alongside the very state that persecuted Koreans in its history. Reports from late 2024 confirm that Pyongyang has sent thousands of artillery shells and other munitions to Moscow and has even deployed troops to fight in Ukraine. As Reuters reported, Ukrainian officers found that North Korean ammunition accounts for “up to 70%” of some Russian units’ supply. Hugh Griffiths, a former UN sanctions expert, bluntly stated: “Without [Kim] Jong Un’s support, President Putin wouldn’t be able to prosecute his war in Ukraine.” In June 2023 Russia and North Korea signed a new “treaty of comprehensive strategic partnership” that explicitly includes military cooperation.
Even the United Nations has voiced alarm. In October 2024, the Security Council heard reports that Pyongyang was sending up to 12,000 troops to train in Russia’s Far East for possible combat in Ukraine. UN briefers warned that integration of DPRK soldiers into Russian units, some even led by Korean generals, would further internationalize the conflict. The U.S. representative noted sharply that “Russia knows [the DPRK] is a pariah with one of the world’s worst human rights records.” Yet, Moscow is placing that pariah’s people on the front lines. In short, North Korea today is backing an authoritarian power with a long record of violence against Koreans. This regime once deported its grandparents for being “too Korean.”
For historians and descendants, this alliance feels like a betrayal. Many Koryo-saram have pointed out how Moscow’s current campaign of “reclaiming historical lands” is grotesquely incongruous given Stalin’s historical confiscation of their ancestors’ land. To side with Russia now is to side with a past oppressor. Indeed, one cannot escape the nationalistic undertones: Russia’s hardline rise on the world stage today is ironically funded by a leader (Kim) who in the 1930s might himself have been seen as an “ethnic minority” among the Bolsheviks.
By bringing to light the 1937 deportation, a story almost unknown in the West, we confront this paradox. The credible sources we have assembled (including survivor testimonies, academic studies, and journalistic investigations) all point to a systematic ethnic cleansing of Koreans by Stalin’s regime. Yet, it remains unremembered mainly outside the Korean diaspora. Recovering these testimonies is urgent. As one journalist put it, the living witnesses are nearly gone, and the “living history” of this crime is in danger of vanishing. Telling their stories of weary cattle trains, of frozen infants, of families left in the icy steppes is not just about redressing a historical wrong. It also casts a harsh light on today’s geopolitical marriages. If North Korea remains silent about Stalin’s crime and instead militarily empowers Russia, it implicates itself in the legacy of that violence. And for the world, acknowledging this hidden past is a step toward understanding the full stakes of the present conflict.
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