The Forgotten Women : Repressed Ethnic Korean and Chinese Women in the Great Terror from 1937 to 1938

Sammanfattning

In the 1920s, during Soviet campaigns for anti-imperialism and indigenization, the regime created a concept of vostochnitsa (“woman of the East”) who were ethnic minority women suffered from the “unbearable exploits” of the past and “lived in complete darkness without will and agency to change their situation” (Nukhrat, 1932, pp.3-19; Gradskova, 2019). Then, in Stalin’s Great Terror, some of the Korean and Chinese women who were supposed to welcome the Soviet emancipation of vostochnitsa suddenly became active members of various anti-Soviet organizations and spies for foreign intelligence; and therefore, became the victims of the political repression. In this thesis, I will explain the puzzles of repression towards ethnic Chinese and Korean women in the USSR during Stalin’s Great Terror. I will present who they were through quantitative analysis and geographic information systems, and test how the victims match the Soviet concept of vostochnitsa. Then I will interpret the puzzles using existing knowledge of the so-called “national operations”. I found out that the victims were actually on the two extreme sides of the spectrum of the Soviet narratives of vostochnitsa, but eventually suffered similarly fatal outcomes. And the repression of these Korean and Chinese women was just like the Soviet emancipation of vostochnitsa, where these ethnic minority women were always considered objects for achieving Soviet political agendas without intentions to understand the true identities of these women.