"Russian Koreans Tsoi, Kim, Ju": How did they end up in Central Asia and who are their ancestors

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In Korea they are called "koryo saram", and they themselves are so deeply rooted in our Russian lands that it would be time to simply call them "Russian Koreans." After all, they are for the most part the descendants of those who moved here from the East in the middle of the nineteenth century. Yes, and we unconditionally accept our famous Koreans (both long gone, and now living) for our own. Viktor Tsoi, Julius Kim, Kostya Tszyu, Anita Tsoi … well, what kind of strangers are they?

They willingly accepted Russian culture

Until now, quite a few Koreans live in the Far East (Khabarovsk Territory, Primorye, Sakhalin), as well as in the southern regions of Russia. There are many of them in Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were many times more of them in our country.

Representatives of this eastern people had to move to Russia for various reasons: hunger, military conflicts, political pressure, natural disasters. And in 1860, when, according to the Beijing Treaty concluded between Russia and the Qing Empire, part of the territory of South Primorye was ceded to us, more than 5 thousand Koreans living on it automatically became citizens of the Russian state. Even then, more than five thousand Koreans, who received Russian citizenship, lived on these lands.

The first documented mass immigration of Koreans to Russia is considered to be the resettlement in the 1854s of 67 Korean peasants who founded the village of Tizinhe in the Ussuriysk Territory. By 1867, there were already three such Korean settlements.

At that time, Koreans in the Far East were treated well: immigrants from the East, thanks to their innate hard work and discipline, actively developed agriculture, moreover, they not only accepted Russian citizenship, but also willingly converted to the Orthodox faith, and quickly mastered the Russian language. And Korean men even refused to wear traditional hairstyles (a kind of bump of hair), which was also a prerequisite for accepting Russian citizenship. This Asian people was able to very delicately and organically integrate into Russian society, without causing rejection among ordinary residents - they were not perceived as hostile outsiders.

Beginning in 1910, after Japan made Korea its colony (this period lasted until the surrender of the samurai country in 1945), the Koreans already living in Russia were joined by immigrants who left their homeland for political reasons. By the 1920s, they accounted for a third of the population of Primorye. In some localities, the representatives of this people were generally in the majority. And after the Russo-Japanese War, there were even more Korean settlements in this part of Russia.

Speaking about "Russian Koreans", one cannot but mention such a sad fact in history as deportation. While willingly letting immigrants into their lands, Russia was at the same time worried about such a rapid increase in the number of immigrants. Local authorities saw them as a potential economic threat, but failed to do anything serious. Unlike the Bolsheviks …

Mass relocations to Central Asia

In 1929, the Soviet Union gathered more than two hundred "volunteers" who were sent to Central Asia. In Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, they were ordered to organize rice-growing collective farms.

A huge number of Koreans were evicted by the authorities from the Amur and Primorye regions in 1937. When moving, families were allowed to take property and livestock with them. That year, in just a couple of months, more than 170 thousand people from Korea were deported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan from the Far East. And by 1939, according to the census, there were only about two and a half hundred Koreans in the Far East.

Historians note that the forced evictions of Koreans from the South Ussuri region took place at the beginning of the last century. And by the beginning of the 1940s, the Soviet authorities saw a different kind of threat in the Koreans - a military one: they began to fear that they would take the side of Japan.

Meanwhile, the thousands of Koreans who lived on Sakhalin mostly stayed there. Today, more of them are concentrated on the island than anywhere else in Russia. The same Koreans who moved to Central Asia, overwhelmingly settled on the new land and never returned to the Far East, and their descendants are no longer "Russian Koreans" (the Soviet Union, after all, collapsed), although initially their ancestors went from their homeland to Russia.

If we talk about famous people with Korean surnames, then each of them has their own family history.

Julius Kim

The legendary bard, playwright and dissident was born in 1936 into a family of a translator from the Korean language. Julia Kim's mother was Russian.

His father, Kim Cher San, was shot a couple of years after the birth of his son, and his mother was sent to camps and then to exile. She was released only in 1945. During her imprisonment, the boy was raised by relatives.

Viktor Tsoi

The father of the Russian rock idol, engineer Robert Maksimovich Tsoi, comes from an ancient Korean family, and a very eminent one.

Viktor Tsoi's great-grandfather Yong Nam lived in a fishing village on the shores of the Sea of Japan. At the beginning of the last century, during the war between Japan and Russia, he was in the ranks of resistance against the dictator Rhee Seung Man, as a result of which he had to leave his homeland. On Russian soil, in Vladivostok, he got married. Yeon Nam died in 1917.

Anita Tsoi

The surname Tsoi, by which the singer is known to Russian fans, Anita received from her husband Sergei (a famous person in the oil sector, former press secretary of Yuri Luzhkov, president of the Russian Karate Federation). However, she herself, like him, has Korean roots. Anita's maiden name is Kim.

The famous singer 's grandfather, Yoon Sang Heum, moved to the USSR from Korea in 1921. In 1937, he was deported to Uzbekistan, where he became the chairman of a collective farm. In Central Asia, he married and had four children. By the way, Anna's father, who, like her husband's, was called Sergei, left them with her mother when the girl was very young.

Kostya Tszyu

The father of the famous athlete, Korean Boris Tszyu, in his youth worked at a metallurgical plant, and his mother (Russian by nationality) was a nurse.

They say that it was dad who brought nine-year-old Kostya to the boxing section of the children's and youth sports school. By the way, although the great-grandfather of the boxer, Innokenty, was a thoroughbred Korean who came to our country from China, his grandfather practically did not know the Korean language.

Even today, news from North Korea leaves no one indifferent. The whole world is concerned about the news from the life of the leader of North Korea. And we have collected for our readers 7 odious facts from the life of the North Korean leader that shook the world.