All rights reserved. In the s, Czarist Russia opened up the virtually uninhabitated Far East for settlement, welcoming waves of destitue farmers from the neighboring northern Korean peninsula.
The group quietly flourished while their homeland was suffering from ongoing aggressions from Japan, which eventually annexed Korea in But in , as Soviet-Japanese border conflicts grew, Stalin became wary of Koreans spying for Japan and ordered their deportation from the Far East to Soviet Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where they were expected to start collective farms. Overnight, tens of thousands of Koreans were told to pack their belongings and depart on windowless cattle trains. The exiles soon found out that promised building materials and cash assistance would never arrive.
Kim, a linguistic student at the time, came across the unique dialect of Koryo-mar spoken by Soviet Koreans while researching his dissertation. The dialect is a curious blend of Russian and a distinct Korean dialect from the northeast that dates all the way back to the 10th century.
However, decades of forced assimilation led to the adoption of Russian as the first language of most Koreans in Central Asia.
After the Korean War, both North Korea and South Korea went through the process of standardizing their languages, wiping out the roots of Koryo-mar. Today, Korean language schools there are mostly taught by South Koreans. Instead, Kim hopes his photos will help document the dying dialect and its untold history, but not to revive it.
