Decree 1428-326ss of 21 August 1937, signed by Stalin and Molotov, ordered the removal of the Korean population from the border districts of the Far Eastern Krai on the stated ground of preventing Japanese espionage; within weeks the order was extended to the whole krai. About 172,000 people were loaded into freight trains and carried some 6,000 kilometres to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, where they were settled on the steppe and in the Aral and Syr Darya districts, often without prepared housing before winter. Korean schools, newspapers and the Korean-language pedagogical institute were closed, and the deportees were placed under residence restrictions that were not lifted until the 1950s. The operation coincided with the arrest and execution of much of the Korean Soviet intelligentsia. It became the template for the wartime deportations of other nationalities.
The Soviet Council of People's Commissars and the NKVD deported the entire Korean population of the Far Eastern Krai to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
NKVD operational records report 171,781 people deported in 124 trainloads between September and October 1937, and the 1937 Soviet census recorded a Korean population of similar size. The operation was designed to remove the entire community, so the recorded deportation total is effectively the population count.
There is no reliable count. NKVD transport reports record only a few hundred deaths en route, which specialists regard as an undercount; Korean community and later Soviet-era estimates of deaths in transit and during the first winters in Central Asia run from about 16,500 to 40,000. The disagreement turns on whether deaths from exposure, hunger and disease in 1937-38 in the reception areas are counted.
The confiscation of property, the closure of Korean-language institutions and the parallel arrest and execution of Korean party and cultural figures are documented in the Soviet decrees and NKVD reports cited by Polian and Chang.
Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan