NORTHEAST ASIA PEACE AND SECURITY NETWORK
***** SPECIAL REPORT *****
January 5, 2001

The following is a book review by Elizabeth Wishnick, a Senior Research Analyst at the East West Institute in Hawaii, on Vladimir Li's recent book, ROSSIIA I KOREIA V GEOPOLITIKE EVRAZEISKOGO VOSTOKA (Russia and Korea in the Geopolitics of the Eurasian East), (Moscow: Nauchnaia Kniga, 2000).
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Russia's Korea policy has been very much in the news in the past year.  First, in February 2000, Russia and North Korea signed a new cooperation agreement.  Then in July, President Vladimir Putin made a high profile visit to Pyongyang in an effort to demonstrate that Russia could play an effective part in ongoing efforts to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula.  How do we explain the recent activity in Russia's Korean diplomacy? A new book by Vladimir Li, an eminent expert on Korea and Russia's Asia policy at the Russian Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy, provides important historical context for current Russian diplomatic efforts.

The author himself has been both a participant in this history as well as an insightful political and historical analyst.  Born in the city of Chita in Eastern Siberia to Korean parents, Li went on to earn a Ph.D. in history and spent nearly four decades analyzing political developments at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow.  When Mikhail Gorbachev made it possible to revise repression of minorities during the Soviet era, Li became
active in the newly formed association of Soviet Koreans and turned his attention to the study of their history.  By 1991, as Moscow was reorienting its diplomacy away from alliance with Pyongyang to partnership with Seoul, Li became director of Asian Studies at the Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy, where South
Korean president Kim Dae Jung did his graduate studies.  Li's book presents a panorama of the evolution of Moscow's Korea policy by providing a compendium of his own writings spanning the past several decades on issues such as Asian political development, the history of Russian-Korean relations, the plight of the Korean minority, and current foreign policy issues.

Li's discussion of the history of Koreans in Russia adds a new dimension to our understanding of Russian policy toward Korea by underscoring the historical roots of Russia's role in Northeast Asia as well as the domestic importance of the Korean question. Relying on newly released archival material, Li traces back the ambivalent attitudes towards Koreans in Russia--first welcoming the economic migrants who helped populate Russia's newly acquired eastern territories in the mid-19th century, then fearing that the thousands of Koreans and Chinese who resided in these regions by the end of the century were creating a "yellow peril" for Russians.   Japanese colonization of Korea in the early part of the 20th century prompted a new wave of emigration, this time by intellectuals, some of whom would go on to play important roles in Russian progressive movements. 

Several chapters in the volume address the repression of the Korean population in the 1930s, which led to the deportation of 180,000 from the Russian Far East to Central Asia, and the death of more than 20,000 by imprisonment, forced labor, or the perils of relocation.  Although Stalinist paranoia about infiltration by Japanese spies prompted the mass deportations, Li notes that the Koreans could just as easily been brought to more remote areas of the Russian Far East.  Why were they sent to Central Asia? In Li's view, the agricultural expertise of the Koreans was in high demand in Central Asia because collectivization had decimated the population of needed agricultural workers. 

Li also describes the difficulty in reversing decades of hostility toward Koreans and efforts by conservatives in Moscow and Primorskii Krai in the early 1990s to resist any efforts to repatriate Koreans from Central Asia.  He rejects the notion that the Korean community ever had any intention of returning en masse to Primorskii Krai.  Although Li highlighted the progress that has been made since Gorbachev's day in addressing the legacy of repression of the Korean community, he noted that "it would be impossible to overcome all the difficult consequences of the ethnic degradation of the Korean diaspora in Russia and other CIS countries in just one decade." (p. 461)

Li's volume addresses many important issues in the history of Soviet-Korean and Russian-Korean relations.   The book is strongest in its discussion of the thinking that led to Moscow's new demarche vis-à-vis North Korea. Li asserts, as have many Russian scholars, that it made no sense for Russia to develop relations with Seoul at the expense of Pyongyang, as did the Yeltsin government.  North Korea borders on Russia and its
stability is of critical importance, especially for the Russian Far East.

Although Moscow's ties with Seoul have registered progress, the downgrading of relations with Pyongyang meant that Russia was excluded from multilateral efforts to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula. In an interesting chapter on Sino-Russian relations, Li points out that despite the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, Beijing has been "passive" in responding to efforts to leave Russia on the sidelines of processes of economic
integration and content to exclude it from talks on Korean issues (p. 275). 

The unfolding developments on the Korean peninsula unfold have crucial importance for the stability of international relations in Northeast Asia.  As Li's volume attests, Russian attitudes toward Korean issues have had profound implications for the region for more than a century.  President Putin's effort to fashion a balanced policy toward the two Koreas demonstrates that once again Moscow is seeking to influence a region of strategic importance, although it remains unclear, barring splashy diplomatic encounters, what resources an economically weakened and politically fragmented Russia can bring to bear on one of the few remaining Cold War conflict zones.

Professor Vladimir Li can be reached at the following address:

Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation
Institute of Contemporary International Studies
4, Bolshoy Kozlovsky pereulok, Moscow, Russia 107078
Tel 7-095-208-1368 FAX 7-095-208-9466
[email protected]  (general institute e-mail address)