This proximity, and the relative ease of movement implied, led to a direct, material fusion between the new revolutionary struggles in both countries, largely fueled by mass migration of Koreans to Russia to escape feudal bondage and starvation. In Korea, Japan’s attempts at territorial expansion and regional dominance-which both fueled and resulted from its burgeoning industrial revolution-led to Korea’s colonial subjugation to Japan, sharpening the already violent contradictions within feudal Korean society between a largely destitute peasantry and the ruling yangban aristocracy.Ĭritical to this particular history is the geographical proximity of the two countries, with the Russian Far East accessible to Koreans by crossing the Tumen River. In Russia, the proletariat and peasantry, led by the Bolshevik Party, successfully overthrew the tsarist autocracy and ushered in the era of the fight for socialism, with all of its attendant class struggles and contradictions. This transition manifested in distinct but intertwined historical processes in Russia and Korea. On the broadest level, this story of Kim and the first Korean communists unfolds amidst the chaotic and uneven disintegration of feudalism and the transition to industrial capitalism and its imperialist stage.

This story of Korean workers and peasants, and their struggle for land and liberation, is intertwined with the story of Alexandra Petrovna Kim, a naturalized Korean born in the Russian Far East in 1885 who is popularly considered to be the first Korean communist she would join the Bolshevik Party in 1917, only a year before her death at the hands of the anti-Bolshevik White counter-revolutionaries and Japanese imperialists. Told from the perspective of the class formation and divisions within the region’s Korean migrant community, this moment would decisively influence the trajectory of the 20 th century Korean revolutionary movement.

This is a by no means exhaustive history of the birth of Korean communism in the Russian Far East through 1920.

Portrait of Alexandra Kim - Unknown author

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