An Early Soviet Ethnic Deportation: The Far-Eastern Koreans

The world has long known of Stalin's deportation of the punished peoples. These deportations had their own logic-cruel and inaccurate, but nonetheless understandable: with the Wehrmacht crashing through Ukraine in 1941 the Stalinist imagination naturally perceived in the Volga Germans potential fifth columnists. Similarly, the willingness of representatives of many Soviet peoples-notably the Crimean Tatars and several small nations of the North Caucasus-to meet the Germans as potential liberators marked them for the regime's revenge after the turn of the tide at Stalingrad.1 The dominant image defines their repression as a product of wartime circumstances.