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Return to *North Korean Studies*
ed.,
Dae-sook Suh, Korean Studies: New Pacific Currents, Centre for Korean
Studies, University of Hawaii, 1994 pp.41-57
In the far northeast corner of Korea at the mouth
of the Tumen River, Korea and Russia share a thirteen-mile land frontier. Beyond
it is the Bay of Posset, the port of Vladivostok lying at the eastern end of the
Trans-Siberian Railway, and the Ussuri River, which serves as the Russo-Manchurian
border.
Until the mid-nineteenth century,
"Russia" lay far to the north above the Amur River, its boundary
defined by treaties with China in 1689 and 1728. In the 1880s, however, after
the Russians had acquired the Ussuri country from China, they began building the
Trans-Siberian Railroad, tackling the difficult job of laying track through the
tundra along the Amur River. To hasten their penetration of the area, they
persuaded tine' Chinese to let them build the straight line Chinese Eastern
Railway southeast through Manchuria to Vladivostok, with Russian outposts along
the way. The largest of these, at Harbin, became a Russian town as developers
maneuvered to win rights to build another spur south to the Yellow Sea, assuring
Russia year round ice-free access to the Pacific Ocean.
This nineteenth century wave of railroad
development brought many kinds of Russians to East Asia: officials, railroad
workers, miners, laborers, adventurers, pensioners, priests, and hunters. They
represented various ethnic backgrounds: some were Caucasian, while others were
Mongol, Siberian, and even Turkic. Beginning in the 1890s, a certain number of
them migrated via Manchuria into northern Korea, where they turned up in small
provincial towns supporting themselves by whatever trade they could find. In
fact, throughout the history of their community down to World
War II, the thing that distinguishes them most dramatically from other Westerners in Korea (if a Turkic Russian can be called "Western") was their complete lack of any institutional support: they had no medical plans or pensions or access to special schools for their children and were entirely dependent on whatever opportunities they found wherever they happened to settle. They were truly "displaced persons," at the mercy of the international political currents in the early twentieth century.
At
the turn of the century, the heart of Korea's Russian community was the upper
end of Chŏngdong in Seoul, the location of the Russian Legation (1890) and
the Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Nicholas (1903). Until 1925, when Soviet
representatives took charge of the consulate, the compounds of the consulate and
church were connected. This made for a true Russian enclave within the city,
with apartments for officials, priests, and several
Russian families and individuals, as well as guest rooms for Russian travelers.
Holy Days and national holidays were occasions for the community to gather and
enjoy Russian food and festivities, as were the visits of crews from warships
that put in at Inch’ŏn.
The
heyday of the Russian Legation was the 1890s, as Russia pushed for influence in
Korea, and Russian agents came in search of port facilities and concessions for
such things as timber and railroads. In 1896, after Japanese agents murdered
Queen Min, there was a period of nearly a year when the terrified King Kojong
had actually lived on the Russian compound under the protection of Minister Karl
Waeber. But defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 ended Russian ambitions in
Korea, and spurred Japanese ambitions there. The legation became a mere
consulate-general, and the Russians living there went from being an imperialist
vanguard to being just one element in the Western expatriate community.
Consul Sergei Tchirkine was one of those who
served the Czar in Seoul for several years after the Russo-Japanese War.
Tchirkine had started out in the diplomatic service as an Arabic specialist,
with posts in Persia and India before coming to Seoul in 1910-1911. A tour in
Bukhara came next, followed by a stint in the Russian protectorate of Turkestan.
In Tashkent, Turkestan, Sergei met and fell in love with Natalya Efremoff,
daughter of the civil governor, and the couple were married just before the
Bolshevik revolution. When the Reds entered Tashkent, Sergei and Natalya fled to
India, where sympathetic British officials sheltered them while they counted up
their assets: they had their health, good education, enough of Natalya's jewelry
to take care of emergencies, and friends in foreign capitals. One of these was a
German in Seoul, someone with whom Sergei had often played billiards at the
Seoul Club. An exchange of telegrams brought encouraging news: there was work to
be had in Korea. A trip on a British-paid ticket followed, and the Tchirkines
were back in Chŏngdong.
The
Bolsheviks had not yet appeared in the Far East when Sergei and Natalya
Tchirkine reached Seoul, and the Russian compound there was still in Czarist
hands. The Tchirkines were assigned an apartment next to the Orthodox Church,
alongside several other stalwarts of the congregation. Sergei found a desk job
in the Bank of Chosen. Natalya took a diamond ring which Sergei had bought in
Bukhara, sold the stone, went to Harbin for a course in hairdressing, and opened
a parlor in Chŏngdong. Twin sons, Cyril and Vladimir, were born in 1924,
and Natalya adjusted by working at home giving music lessons and running a
dressmaking studio. Sergei moved to the tourist bureau to handle
foreign‑language correspondence and edit publicity. He later began
teaching languages at Keijo Imperial University and Seoul Foreign School. These
combined labors earned enough to maintain a dignified existence as leaders of
the Russian community in Seoul.
Not
long after the Tchirkines reached Korea, the number of Russians migrating
southward from Siberia began to swell. As the Red Army fought its way east along
the Trans-Siberian and the anti-Bolshevik defenders fell back mile by mile
toward Vladivostok, it became obvious that the merchants, landlords, and czarist
officials of the Russian Far East (the "White" Russians) were going to
have to answer to the Reds. In October 1922 came the decisive battles, with
thousands of casualties and rising panic. As the Reds entered Vladivostok, the
people were told to take what they could carry and put out to sea on anything
that would float. More than 15,000 men, women, and children set out on a motley
flotilla of gunboats, freighters, fishing boats, scows, and rafts heading south
along the coast past the Bay of Posset to the Korean port of Wonsan. Of these,
approximately half continued on to Shanghai but seven thousand remained behind
in Wonsan to spend the winter in makeshift shelters provided by the Japanese.
The
Government-General of Chosen was unprepared to handle the wave of refugees at
Wonsan, and every charitable organization in the country was asked to help. The
Russians wintering in Wonsan were those who had not managed to flee Vladivostok
with money or valuables that could be used to buy passage onward to Shanghai.
Men
offered a day's work for a cup of tea and some bread, but no one would hire
them. Some were too injured from the fighting even to look for work, and in the
harsh conditions many got sick. W. A. Noble, an American missionary, described
the situation at the time:
There are about 2,500 officers
and soldiers on the ships in Wonsan harbour and on the shore and 2,800 other
fugitives from the civilian population which include 1,600 women and children.
There are about 2,000 of this number still remaining aboard ship. Eighty percent
of these people are of the peasant class, and illiterate. Twenty per cent are
educated, and represent a fine type of the Cossack people. The condition of
those aboard ship can best be described by reading the tales of the slave ships
of the early days of colonial American history. The people on shore are housed
in the discarded customs go‑downs. They are living on the concrete floors,
and the only heat in the building comes from a small stove located in its center
. . . During these many weeks they have been living in improvised camps, and
aboard ship without means of ordinary comfort and sanitary privileges. They are
therefore helpless victims of filth and vermin, while famine stares them in the
face.
In the spring, the refugees began to disperse.
Some did manage to go on to Shanghai or Harbin, or even Mexico, Brazil, and
Chile. A few went out to sea as pirates. Those remaining in Korea drifted to
various provincial towns where they opened little shops, usually selling
clothing. Some went to work for the foreign mining concessions. In Seoul, the
refugees struggled for survival. Some went in for smuggling, bringing gold
watches and jewelry back across the border from Harbin. Russian prostitutes
appeared in the Nandaimon-dori district. The circumstances bred conflict among
the Russians themselves and between Russians and Koreans and Japanese over such
things as overdue rent and debts. But there were also those who carved out
legitimate livelihoods. The Sizransky family started a bakery in the Saito
Building in Nandaimon 4-chome. The Goncharoff family opened a confectionery
called "Flora," and sold creme brulee and various combinations
of chocolate and bananas, pineapple, and cream. Russian tailor shops sprouted in
Honmachi while individuals worked at odd jobs in hotels and banks and freelanced
as translators, teachers, and household servants.
Meanwhile,
the defunct czarist regime's representative in Seoul, Maximilian Hefftler,
continued to occupy the consulate in Chŏngdong, benefiting from Japan's
refusal to recognize the Bolshevik government. Hefftler and his vice consul,
Aleksander Troitzki, were not forced out until February 1925, when Japan finally
recognized the Soviet Union.s The new Red consul, Basil Charmanoff, set himself
apart from the cultured Hefftler by his boisterous behavior upon arrival at the
Chosen Hotel. In fact, his entourage was involved in a shooting incident on
their first night in town. A secretary who was playing with Charmanoff's
revolver while the consul was in the bathtub accidentally fired it into the
wall, damaging the woodwork and upsetting the Japanese police and hotel staff.
The
Seoul Russian Community in the 1930s
One
of Charmanoff's first acts was to announce an amnesty for the White Russians in
his jurisdiction, offering Soviet citizenship and travel papers to any Russian
resident who came in to apply
before 1 May 1926. There were virtually no takers. The Whites hated the Reds,
and for the next twenty years there was icy distance between the small consular
staff and other Seoul Russians, even those across the wall in the church
compound. People thought it silly that the consulate set up loudspeakers to
blare martial music across the Chŏngdong landscape on Soviet holidays.
The
children picked up their parents' conflicts and there were rock fights over the
wall between the Tchirkine twins and the son of a Soviet consul who lived inside
the consulate compound. Nearly a hundred Russians lived in Seoul in the late
1920s, but hardly any of them were Reds. Like all the other foreigners in Korea,
they continued to live in enclaves: in the market districts of Nandaimon-dori
and Honmachi as well as the church-owned compound in Chŏngdong. Most of
them spoke Japanese and Korean but few were as well educated in English and
other European languages as the Hefftlers, Troitzkis, and Tchirkines. There were
sharp class differences: most of the market Russians were Turkic
"Tatars," not Europeans, and they had little to do with people of the
same class as the Tchirkines. Even among the European Russians there was a
pecking order, with former officials such as the Hefftlers taking precedence.
Chief
among the residents of the Orthodox Church compound was the church patriarch
Archimandrite Theodosius and his co-priest, Father Sergei. Father Theodosius was
the dean, in effect, of the entire Russian community until his death in 1932.
During that time he was a refugee himself, having been cut off from his source
of income in the homeland and needing to support the entire mission and train
Korean leaders without any funding except subventions from Harbin and Japan,
rents from the other church apartments, and whatever the 150-member
congregation—including Koreans—put in the offering during services.
Together
with Father Theodosius and Father Sergei and the Tchirkine hmily in the church
apartments were other neighbors, including the family of Andrei Belogolovy, a
former czarist soldier who supported himself as a clothier while his wife ran a
dress shop, and Ivan Tikhonoff, sometimes called "Father Christmas"
because of his full beard. Tithonoff made his living by making face cream and
other cosmetic potions and selling them door-todoor in Seoul's downtown neighbourhoods,
playing a concertina as he walked. His "factory" was the tiny kitchen
in his apartment where he rendered various animal products into soap and face
cream and sent noxious fumes wafting through the building, much to the disgust
of Mesdames Tchirkine and Belogolovy. Tikhonoff was a recognized eccentric on
the Seoul scene, and people liked to quote things he said in his personal
patois: for instance, the sentence "It has been raining and the river is
up," would come out "Pi‑ga wave river
ippai."
Novina,
the Russian Resort in North Korea
Without
a doubt, the most remarkable pocket of Russians in prewar Korea was a place
called Novina, a resort near Ch'ŏngjin, maintained for more than twenty
years by the White Russian exile George Yankovsky, sometimes called "Asia's
Greatest Tiger Hunter." George Yankovsky's father Mikhail Jankovskii
originally was a Polish nobleman who was exiled to Siberia by the Russians when
they crushed the Polish rebellion in the 1860s. In Siberia Jankovskii remade
himself as a Russian named Yankovsky, found his way to the Bay of Posset south
of Vladivostok, a rugged and unoccupied seacoast where he established himself in
what might be called a feudal fief, which he named Sidemy, the "Sitting
Place." There he set about building up a herd of the little Sika deer whose
antlers were so prized by declining Chinese men. His neighbors were mainly
wolves and bandits, the notorious Manchurian Honghuzi, or "Red Beards," so Yankovsky also recruited a
private army—of Koreans, as it turned out, because he mistrusted all Chinese
as potential Honghuzi. With his Korean
"subjects," as they called themselves, he hunted—in no particular
order—bandits, wolves, tigers, leopards, and boar, becoming a first-class
naturalist in the process. In fact, items in the flora and fauna of the Ussuri
country still bear his name: the swan Cygnus
jankowskii, the bunting Emberiza
jankowskii, and the beetle Captolabrus
jankowskii, among others. Because of his keen eye for beetles, boar, and
bandits, his "subjects" nicknamed him "Four Eyes"—chetire
glaza in Russian and ne nun in
Korean; and naturally his children became "nenun
ui aidul," "Four Eyes' kids."
By
the turn of the century, civilization had intruded on Sidemy, which by that time
had been built up to look something like a feudal castle. There were neighbors,
including Julius Bryner, a border region timber concessionaire whose holdings
had much to do with the Russo-Japanese War, but whom we shall mention here as
the grandfather of world-famous, Harbin-born actor Yul Brynner. City people came
to visit from Vladivostok. There were music lessons and books for "Four
Eyes' kids," and then boarding school in Vladivostok when they were older.
For George, the oldest son, there was also romance with Margerite Sheverdloff,
daughter of a Russian tea merchant from Hankow, and the two were married in an
elegant Orthodox wedding in 1907.
When
Mikhail Yankovsky died in 1912, George and Margerite ("Daisy")
inherited Sidemy. Five children were born to them there, and George busied
himself diversifying the economy of Sidemy, which had lost much of its
wilderness aspect. There were still thousands of deer, but the fief's pastures
now supported horses to be sold in the city. The private army had turned into a
labor force hauling sand in British-built barges to build a Vladivostok city
beach. The Red Beards were gone—but on the horizon there were new Reds—the
Bolsheviks—and George Yankovsky knew that Sidemy could not long survive the
fall of Vladivostok as its time approached in October 1922.
Thus
the Yankovsky flotilla—ship, barges, wife, children, mother, brothers,
servants, retainers, deer, and horses—headed south to Ch'ongjin aboard
George's tugboat, the Priscack, and
the sand barges. Reestablishing the Yankovskys in Korea was no small task. To
meet expenses they sold off some of their animals and experimented with various
small businesses. They tried to break into the transportation business but
failed when local carters went to the authorities to object. A try at herring
fishing in the Sea of Japan brought protests from the local fishermen. Yankovsky
was forced to furlough many of his "subjects," and grew desperate for
a means of livelihood until explorations in the hinterland turned up intriguing
opportunities. The underpopulated foothills of the Ever White Mountains were
covered with forests that were rich in game animals, including deer for horn and
venison, and boar for pork. In 1926, Yankovsky signed a contract with the
Japanese army to supply meat for the troops and, with this much steady income
assured, he set up his hunting headquarters on a site twelve miles above the
town of Chuŭl (which the Yankovskys referred to in Japanese as "Shuotsu")
on a horseshoe bend of the rushing Chuŭl River, a spot he christened Novina,
the "New Place."
Novina
lasted nineteen years, from 1926 to 1945, during which White Russian communities
all across East Asia used it as a prime vacation spot. The Yankovskys drummed up
business with a brochure, which they mailed to Harbin, Tianjin, and Shanghai.
Ironically, however, few Westerners within Korea ever paid much attention to
Novina or even knew of its existence. This was partly because most of them used
English, spoke no Russian, and preferred their own resorts at Sŏrae and
Wonsan. It was also because the Yankovskys started out regarding Novina as an
"invitationonly" place for their far-flung relatives and friends and
not a public place. As years passed it became more commercial, with rental
cabins on the hillside, but it never lost the family flavour. It remained George
Yankovsky's homestead, first and foremost: his farm, his deer and horse pasture,
and his hunting base. On a cliff above the river he built the family's main
house, an interesting building constructed around the trunk of a great tree that
appeared to be holding it in place. Above the house he built a "Tower of
the Ancestors," a replica of one of the Sidemy towers, and next to this a
lodge that was partly in a cave that the family used as a kind of Great Hall.
Below, he stretched a chain bridge across the Chuŭl River, and farther down
he built a row of huts for his servants and farmhands. There were orchards for
apples and pears, fields for vegetables, and hives for honey, all tended by
Novina's Korean workers, while the mountain forests furnished unlimited venison,
pork, and pheasant. Evenings at Novina often featured dinners with as many as
twenty people seated at the dining table, followed by vodka and storytelling by
the fireplace in the cave.
George
and Daisy Yankovsky's children—daughters Muza and Victoria, and sons Valerii,
Arsenii, and Yuri—grew up at Novina. As part of their Swiss Family Robinson
existence the Yankovskys maintained a surprising standard of civilization.
Educating children was the duty of Novina's "home gymnasium" teacher
who came from Harbin to teach in the camp's Great Hall. Sunday services also
took place there, with especially memorable observances for Easter. And summer
was Novina's theater season: Daisy's family, the Sheverdloffs, had some stage
background and her relatives in Shanghai were connected with White Russians in
the entertainment business there. Many of these sought the coolness of Novina in
the summer and amused themselves by organizing dramas. The cast depended on who
was present and was filled out by ordinary guests and Yankovsky family and
retainers.
But
Novina remained little more than a rumor within Korea. One American from Seoul
who discovered the place was so enthralled by the setting and the extraordinary
people there that she pieced the Yankovskys' story together into a fanciful book
where Novina took on fairytale characteristics:
If
one believed [the Korean rumours], one must also believe that this was not only
a family of fabulous hunters, but that they lived in a castle which was only
prevented from sliding into an abyss by one great tree that supported it. This
castle, it was said, had a high tower, in which a gruesome dragon was kept
prisoner, because he had fallen in love with the hunter's beautiful daughter.
One only had to hear his woeful bellowing to know that this was true! Hearsay
also had it that the Hunter-in-chief had saved his wife's life by cutting out
her appendix with his hunting knife, and it was also said that his family lived
solely on tiger steak and vodka! But, said the informants, the most astonishing
thing of al1 was that rhe Japanese allowed
such barbarians to remain in the country, and even let them fly the "Flag
of all the Russias."
Victoria,
the Yankovskys' second daughter, was the child who seemed to embrace life at
Novina with the greatest gusto—much to her father's delight. She grew up
tracking game in the mountains and was as good a shot as any of Novina's men.
She also affected a unique style, wearing a trademark headband, draping herself
in jewelry made from tiger’s teeth, and wearing Indian dresses or—when it
was warm enough—daring two-piece outfits like the one in the treasured 1932
snapshot where she stands with a rifle cocked on her hip. It was Victoria who
would hail the passing logging train in the morning to take groups of Novina's
guests upstream to the Three Cups Waterfalls for swimming; and when the train
came down it was Victoria who perched highest on the logs for the thrill of
careening around the mountain curves.
Most
people took Victoria's penchant for adventure as her way of showing adoration
for her father. But she also had a moody side, and liked to spend quiet hours
above the camp perched on rocks writing poetry by herself, 12 or in the tiny
cabin that her father built for her by the river. Inside the cabin she fashioned
an altar with icons and candles, and people who visited Novina as children
remember how deliciously scary it was to sneak up on Victoria's cabin and catch a whiff of
incense while listening to her chant her private mantes.
All
through the 1930s the Japanese permitted Novina to continue undisturbed. George
Yankovsky kept up good relations with the provincial authorities and even as the
Japanese were developing Ch'ongjin as a military port and other foreigners were
being harassed about their cameras, maps, and radios, he was allowed to open a
second resort on the seashore near Kyongsong, on a stretch he named "Lukomorie."
Yankovsky's guests kept arriving at Shnotsu Station through the early years of
the war in China and right up until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941.
Meanwhile,
though, things changed with the family. Muza had been in Shanghai since 1929.
Daisy died of cancer in 1936. George remarried shortly thereafter, and Victoria,
disliking her stepmother, married one of Novina's Russian retainers and moved
away to Changchun, the capital of Manchuria.
Back
at Novina, the war brought difficulties. By 1944, when it was clear that things
were not going well for the Japanese and they were likely to lose. George
Yankovskv pondered ways to protect his family.
He decided to set up a homestead for his son Valerii and daughter Victoria in
the mountains 100 kilometers north of the
Korean border "at the crossroads of the world for boar and
tiger," where they could hunt for a living and ride out whatever
troubles might follow the Japanese defeat.
The
Years of World War II
During
the war, while the 32 resident Russians at Novina were confined to their resort,
the White Russians elsewhere in Korea faced new challenges. Some started
claiming safer nationalities — like the Salahudtinoffs who changed their names
to "Salahudtin," thereby increasing the number of registered Turks in
the city by five.l4 The Tchirkines sent their twin sons to Shanghai to attend
a French engineering academy.
Though Sergei Tchirkine died in 1943, Natalya lived to see the end of the
war—though she was arrested in August
1945 and put in a cell where she could hear people being beaten elsewhere in the
building.
The Fate of Novina and the White Russian Community
When
the Soviet Red Army swept into north-eastern Korea at the
end of the war, they happened on the Yankovsky colony at Novina. The Reds
had several grievances against the Whites, the most recent of which was the
Yankovskys' collaboration with the Japanese army. The Japanese had treated
Yankovsky preferentially, letting him own land, trade supplies, run tourist
resorts, and trek through military areas, all in return for supplying the
Japanese army, paying taxes, and helping keep order among the Koreans.
At first it was only interrogation: George and his son Arsenii were taken
to headquarters and then released. Son Valerii returned to Novina from the
homestead in Manchuria to work with younger brother Yuri as a "volunteer"
interpreter for the Red Army, while Arsenii interpreted for the Southern Naval
Defense Area (Yuzhnii
Morskoi Oboronitel'nii Rayon, or YUZHMOR)
at Ch'ŏngjin and for
the Kontrazuedba (military intelligence, also
known as SMERSH, for smyert
shpionam, "death to spies"). The motives of the
Yankovsky brothers in working for the Reds were simple: as SMERSH explained
the situation to Arsenii, the entire family would be punished unless they
cooperated. So for survival's sake the brothers went against their family's
strong anticommunist tradition and agreed to work for the Reds.
But
as things settled down in North Korea, the Russians decided that notorious
collaborators like the Yankovskys could not be let off so lightly, and in the
summer of 1946 their fates unfolded. George was arrested again and sent to a
prison camp at Tumen on the Soviet-Manchurian border. Valerii was dispatched to
Siberia, drafted to shoot wolves from airplanes until he tried to escape, and
then shipped to Magadan to spend several years working in a lead mine. The
youngest brother Yuri was exiled to Kazakhstan, where he worked at various camps
in the desert, reportedly digging holes to hide from the sun by day, working at
night, and being abused with such things as chlorine in the eyes, as a result of
which he lost some of his vision.
Meanwhile,
at her homestead in Soviet-occupied Manchuria, Victoria Yankovsky tried to hide
her identity by using her married name, Yusakovsky, though Yusakovsky himself
had absconded in fright. When the Russians left, the Kuomintang came; and then
came the Chinese communists with their people's tribunals. The Chinese Reds
discovered Victoria's identity as a member of the notorious Yankovsky landlord
family and started demanding her land, marching her, hands bound behind her
back, to witness executions for emphasis. In time she was divested of her farm
and released, then she remarried and was rescued by Irish missionaries who put
her in touch with the United Nations Displaced
Persons program. Through the UN she began a second odyssey of more than twenty
years, which took her to Tianjin, Hong Kong, Santiago, Chile, New York, and
finally to the banks of the Russian River in the wine country of northern
California. "
Arsenii,
meanwhile, kept his job with YUZHMOR and
SMERSH until well after his father's
exile to Tumen. YUZHMOR needed him; but then the
Russians started pulling back to Vladivostok, and Arsenii was left exposed to
the attentions of SMERSH. Certain
of imminent arrest, he packed up his wife and fled across the border into South
Korea at the beginning of 1947, where he reported to the American Military
Government's G-2 section. With character witnesses like Natalya Tchirkine and
the czar's ex-consul Maximilian Hefftler, he was cleared of suspicion and put to
work by the Americans under a new name: "Andy Brown." In this
incarnation, he worked with American intelligence in Seoul, Tokyo, and
Washington until 19S4, when the Army jettisoned him as an embarrassment just
before the Army-McCarthy hearings.
The Fate of the Soviet Consulate in Seoul
During
World War II, the Soviet Consul-General in Seoul was Alexander Sergeyevich
Poliansky. Poliansky and his retinue of 36 men, women, and children, spent the
war years safe in the chancellery on Chŏngdong Hill. They were not arrested
even after the Soviet Union entered the war on 8 August 1945. In fact, Poliansky
was among the first to greet
the incoming Americans at the end of the war.
But
the Americans were sceptical about Poliansky from the beginning. He seemed too
sure of things at a time when everything else was chaos and confusion. Though he
got all the courtesies that the Americans offered other Allied delegations—the
PX, the army mail facility, and even a plane to take him to Japan to get more
money from the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo when his funds ran low—U.S.
counterintelligence reported that he and his staff were busy undermining the
American occupation government by keeping surreptitious contact with leftist
groups in South Korea. Since the U.S. Army was dealing with Soviet Army
authorities in North Korea and had no use for Poliansky's diplomatic channels,
there was really no reason for him to remain in Seoul. Nor did it
make sense to have a Russian consul in a place that was
not technically a sovereign country. The fact that the Americans were not
allowed any corresponding consular facility in Pyongyang made his presence in
South Korea all the more anomalous and irritating.
As
a representative of the Soviet Union in South Korea, one of Poliansky's jobs was
disseminating favourable information about the Soviet Union. This included
showing movies to Korean audiences, something that the Military Government
allowed until it was discovered that the movies were being used as recruiting
tools for the left. The Americans were also galled by films that exaggerated the
role of the Russians in winning the war against Japan. Friction increased until
the Americans caught Poliansky's staff showing films commercially. In diplomatic
practice, films imported by embassies and consulates via the pouch were not to
be used commercially, and the distribution of Poliansky's films to
theatres was ruled a violation. Poliansky apologized, then
repeated the offence, at which point the American authorities called him on the
carpet and presented him with an ultimatum: either allow the Americans to open a
consulate in Pyongyang or leave South Korea. In Moscow, Foreign Minister
Valentijn Molotov lodged a protest that was rejected by the Americans there, and
on 2 July 1946, Poliansky closed the consulate, loaded his staff and dependents
into vehicles, drove up to the 38th parallel, and disappeared into Soviet-occupied
North Korea.
What traces remain of this almost-forgotten Russian community in pre-war Korea? Though members of the community continued in South Korea through the Korean war and after, I know of only one who remains in place, if the rumours are correct, as an underworld figure in Namdaemun Market. In 1984, Father Boris Moon of the Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, now moved to Map'o and calling itself "Greek" Orthodox, told me there was one pre-war Russian communicant left, a woman named "Tatiana," but she would not grant me an interview.
The
Yankovskys are scattered: Valerii is a poet in Moscow; "Andy Brown"
and Yuri are dead; and Muza and Victoria live in the California bay area. In
1991, Victoria and her son Orr Chistiakoff were invited by the local government
in Vladivostok to rendezvous with Valerii at Sidemy, on the Bay of Posset, to
unveil a statue of Mikhail Yankovsky and restore him to the status of pioneer
and hero.
Natalya Tchirkine's sons Vladimir and Cyril
graduated with engineering degrees from the University of California at
Berkeley, and worked all their lives for Pacific Gas & Electric in San Francisco.
Natalya followed her sons to California in time to escape the Korean War, and
supported herself as a seamstress, living to the ripe old age of 96. Cyril
Tchirkine is alive and well, as are the Belogolovy sisters.
There
remains, then, the row of Orthodox gravestones in the Seoul Foreigners' Cemetery
at Yanghwajin, Seoul. Here are the graves of Sergei Tchirkine, Ivan Tiknonoff,
and a group of Russians who died in North Korean captivity during the war. And
in Chŏngdong there is the white tower of the former Russian consulate,
wedged between tall buildings but preserved by the Korean government as a
historic site, while the new embassy of the Russian republic is located in a
rented suite on the south side of the city in Kangnam-gu.
See more about Russian Novina at North Korean Kyongsong Hot Springs
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