The Marmot’s Hole

As both a Korean history buff and an expat in this country, it’s always fascinating to read up on the tales of my lost, melanin-deficient ancestors. This chapter by Donald N. Clark, who was an American missionary in pre-war Pyongyang*, tells the tales of perhaps the most completely lost white dudes in Korean history - the pre-war Russian community. As he writes:

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.

Read this piece straight through to the end - YOU WON’T REGRET IT! Learn about the great 1922 boat-lift to Wonsan of White Russian refugees fleeing the fall of Vladivostok to the Bolsheviks, tensions between the post 1925 Soviet consulate and Seoul’s fiercely anti-Soviet pre-war Russian community, and the Russian resort of Novina — located near the North Korean port of Ch’ongjin and owned by “Asia’s Greatest Tiger Hunter,” George Yankovsky. And, of course, read what fate had in store for Korea’s Russians** - both White and Red - following Japan’s defeat in WW II.

* Being an American missionary in Pyongyang isn’t as strange an idea as current political realities would suggest. It’s often forgotten than Pyongyang was a major missionary center before the colonial period and the following communist takeover (it was such a hotbed of Christian activity that some nicknamed it “The Jerusalem of the East”; Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth Bell Graham, went to high school there in the 1933), and the surrounding Py’eongan Province may have had the largest concentration of Christians in Korea. I forgot where I read this, but if memory serves me right, the Catholic Church lost 3/5 of its flock following the Communist takeover of North Korea, with other Christian denominations suffering similar losses.

** I have long been fascinated with the history of the Far East’s Russian exile community - they were as remarkable a group of individuals (and not always in a positive sense) as there has ever been in modern times. Coincidentally, one of these refugees, Victor Starfin, eventually ended up on the Japanese island of Hokkaido as a youth. Starfin grew up to become one of Japanese baseball’s greatest all-time pitchers, amassing a career record of 303-176 with a life-time ERA of 2.09 — mostly with the Yomiuri Giants. In 1939, he set Japan’s single-season win record was 42. Now, this wasn’t enough to prevent the Japanese from putting Starfin under house arrest during WW II on account of his Russian heritage, but they did make it up to him in the end, eventually enshrining the pitcher in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, where he joins career home-run leader Sadaharu Oh — who for reasons beyond my ken still carries a Taiwanese passport to this day, apparently — as the only two foreign players in the Hall. Of course, this assumes one doesn’t count Masaichi Kaneda, the greatest pitcher in Japanese history (the man holds Japan’s career win record despite playing much of his career for a shitty team) who just happened to be an ethnic Korean (and quite proud of it, it’s said).

(Hat tip to Far Outliers, who’s setting a bit of a record here at the Marmot’s Hole for most links in a 7-day period)