Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  An opponent of serfdom and government censorship, Konstantin Nikolayevich spurned his father’s legacy to advocate openness, reform, and the cause of liberal bureaucrats such as Nikolai Mi-lyutin and Alexander Golovnin. The grand duke believed that peasants should receive title to their own private holdings. In 1857, to speed deliberations over serf emancipation, Tsar Alexander II appointed him president of the Secret Committee on the peasant question. Following emancipation in 1861, Konstantin Nikolayevich served for two decades as president of the Main Committee on Peasant Affairs, which oversaw implementation of peasant-related reform legislation.

  Meanwhile, as a counter to growing Polish opposition to Russian rule, the grand duke in March 1862 also received appointment to Warsaw as viceroy and commander-in-chief. He was removed

  Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, second son of Nicholas I. © HULTON ARCHIVE in August 1863, after his liberal “policy of pacification” had failed to forestall open rebellion. Nevertheless, throughout the 1860s and 1870s he remained a staunch advocate of his brother’s Great Reforms, supporting them from various influential governmental positions, including presidency of the State Council between 1865 and 1881. In general, the grand duke also backed the military policies of war minister Dmitry Milyutin, while resisting the reactionary policies of Dmitry Tolstoy, the minister of education. In 1866 Konstantin Nikolayevich unsuccessfully sponsored moderate legislation that would have introduced into the State Council representatives from both zemstvo and noble assemblies. During the last years of his brother’s reign, he sided with the liberal policies of Mikhail Loris-Melikov, Minister of the Interior. Upon the accession of Tsar Alexander III in 1881, the grand duke left state service.

  A cultivated man, Konstantin Nikolayevich read widely, maintained diverse interests, and played the cello. He was accepted in intellectual circles and

  KOPECK

  maintained honorary membership in a number of learned societies. He left important memoirs and an impressive correspondence, much of which has been published. See also: ALEXANDER II; GREAT REFORMS; MILITARY, IMPERIAL; MILITARY REFORMS; PEASANTRY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Spassky, Ivan Georgievich. (1968). The Russian Monetary System: A Historico-Numismatic Survey, tr. Z. I. Gor-ishina and rev. L. S. Forrer. Amsterdam: J. Schulman.

  JARMO T. KOTILAINE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Lincoln, W. Bruce. (1990). The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press.

  LARISSA ZAKHAROVA

  KOPECK

  The kopeck (kopeyka)-equal to one-hundredth of the ruble-was first introduced as part of a 1534 monetary reform as equal to 0.68 grams of silver.

  The silver coin was twice as heavy as the Muscovite denga (moskovka) and known as denga kopey-naya, because-like its Lithuanian model-it depicted a rider carrying a lance (kope). The name novgorodka, initially much more common, reflected the fact that it equaled in value the old Novgorod denga. In spite of the reform, the Muscovite denga and altyn (the latter equal to three kopecks) remained the basic units of accounting until the eighteenth century. The kopeck was the largest denomination minted until the 1654 monetary reform, along with the denga and the polushka (one-quarter kopeck). Vasily Shuisky briefly minted gold kopecks, and during Alexei Mikhailovich’s currency reform from 1655 to 1663, kopecks were minted of copper. Alexei also began to mint ruble, poltina (50 kopecks), and altyn coins, as well as, experimentally, the grosh (two kopecks). In 1701 the polupoltinnik (25 kopecks), the grivna (10 kopecks), and the polu-grivna (5 kopecks) were introduced.

  Peter I’s monetary reform of 1704 introduced a decimal system with the copper kopeck as the basic subdivision of the silver ruble, although silver kopecks continued to be minted until 1718. Fifteen-and twenty-kopeck coins were introduced in 1760. Coins of up to 5 kopecks during the rest of the Imperial Era tended to be minted of copper, regardless of transition between silver, gold, and paper rubles. During the Soviet period, kopecks were minted of an alloy of copper and zinc. See also: ALEXEI MIKHAILOVICH; ALTYN; COPPER RIOTS; DENGA; RUBLE; SHUISKY, VASILY IVANOVICH

  KOREANS

  Korean emigration to Russia began in 1864 and continued until the late 1920s, when the Communist authorities managed to close the border. This migration was driven largely by the abundance of arable land in the Russian Maritime Province, as well as by political reasons. By 1917 there were some 100,000 ethnic Koreans residing in the Russian far east.

  During the Russian Civil War, Koreans actively supported the Reds. However, in 1937 all Soviet Koreans in the far east were forcefully relocated to Central Asia, allegedly to undermine the Japanese espionage networks within their ranks. Until the late 1950s, Soviet Koreans largely engaged in farming, but after Stalin’s death they began to move to the cities. By the 1980s Koreans had become one of the best-educated ethnic groups in the USSR.

  In 1945 the USSR acquired southern Sakhalin from Japan. The area included a number of Korean workers who had been moved there by the Japanese colonial administration. Most of these workers came from the southern provinces of Korea. Until the 1970s they were not allowed to become citizens of the USSR, and held either North Korean citizenship or no citizenship at all. Within the Soviet Korean community, these Sakhalin Koreans have formed quite a distinct group.

  Most of the Korean migrants initially spoke the Hamgyong (northwestern) dialect, which is quite different from standard Korean, although the Soviet Korean schools taught the standard Seoul dialect. From the late 1950s young Soviet Koreans switched to the exclusive use of Russian. Most Korean schools were closed in the late 1930s, but two Korean-language newspapers and a Korean theater survived. Korean was also taught as a second language in some schools in Korean villages. In Sakhalin secondary education in Korean was available until 1966 and a part of the Korean community still uses Korean.

  After the collapse of the USSR, most Koreans remained in Uzbekistan (some 200,000) and KazaKOREAN WAR khstan (100,000). The Russian Federation has an estimated 140,000 ethnic Koreans. Their numbers are rapidly increasing due to migration from Central Asia, where Koreans are often discriminated against. There is almost no return migration to South Korea. See also: CENTRAL ASIA; FAR EASTERN REGION; KOREA, RELATIONS WITH; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Kho, Songmu. (1987). Koreans in Soviet Central Asia. Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society.

  ANDREI LANKOV

  KOREAN WAR

  Following the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Soviet Union and the United States jointly occupied Korea, which had been ruled by Japan for four decades. After the United States and USSR failed to agree on the composition of a government for the country, separate states were established in 1948 in the two occupation zones, each aspiring to extend its rule over the remainder of the country. In 1949 North and South Korea engaged in serious fighting along their border, and on June 25, 1950, the North Korean army launched a massive conventional assault on South Korea, led by Soviet-made tanks.

  Because North Korea was closely controlled by the Soviet Union and heavily dependent on Soviet assistance, Western leaders unanimously viewed the attack on South Korea as an act of Soviet aggression. Fearing that a failure to repel such aggression would encourage Moscow to mount similar invasions elsewhere, leading possibly to a third world war, the United Nations (UN) for the first time in its history authorized the creation of a multinational force to defend South Korea. The United States commanded the UN forces and contributed the overwhelming majority of troops, supplemented by units from Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Greece, Turkey, Ethiopia, South Africa, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Colombia.

  The invasion of South Korea also prompted the United States to take a series of actions that shaped the Cold War for the remainder of the USSR’s existence. The United States sent naval forces to protect Taiwan from an attack from the mainl
and, strengthened its support for the French in Indochina, solidified NATO, moved toward the rearmament of Germany, signed a separate peace treaty with Japan, tripled its military spending, and began to station troops overseas indefinitely.

  After UN forces advanced into North Korean territory in October 1950, the People’s Republic of China sent massive numbers of troops to prevent a North Korean defeat. The Soviet Air Force also intervened, thinly disguised as Chinese, beginning an undeclared air war with the United States that was the only sustained military engagement between the two superpowers. By the spring of 1951 the war had become a stalemate along a front roughly following the prewar border. Negotiations for an armistice began in the summer of 1951, but the war was prolonged another two years, at the cost of massive casualties and intensification of the East-West conflict worldwide. The armistice signed in July 1953 left intensely hostile states on the Korean peninsula, the North backed by the Soviet Union and China, and the South by the United States and its allies.

  Russian archival documents made available in the 1990s show that Western leaders were correct in assuming that the decision to attack South Korea was made by Josef Stalin. His chief aim was to prevent a Japanese attack on the Soviet Union through the Korean peninsula, and he concluded that the U.S. failure to prevent a communist victory in China indicated that it would not intervene to prevent a similar victory in Korea. He was never willing to commit Soviet ground forces but urged the Chinese and North Koreans to keep fighting. Immediately after Stalin’s death the new leadership in Moscow decided to bring the war to an end. See also: CHINA, RELATIONS WITH; COLD WAR; KOREANS; KOREA, RELATIONS WITH; UNITED NATIONS; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Stueck, William. (1995). The Korean War: An International History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weathersby, Kathryn. (1995). “To Attack, or Not to Attack? Stalin, Kim Il Sung and the Prelude to War.” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 5:1-9. Weathersby, Kathryn. (1995-1996). “New Russian Documents on the Korean War.” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 6-7:30-84.

  KOREA, RELATIONS WITH

  Weathersby, Kathryn. (1998). “Stalin, Mao, and the End of the Korean War.” In Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945-1963, ed. Odd Arne Westad. Washington, DC, and Stanford, CA: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Stanford University Press.

  KATHRYN WEATHERSBY

  KOREA, RELATIONS WITH

  The first contact between Russia and Korea can be traced to the seventeenth century, but it was only from 1858 to 1861, when Russia established its control over the lower Amur River and acquired a short (8.7-mile [14-kilometer]) land border with Korea that the interaction of the two countries began in earnest. Formal diplomatic relations were established on July 7, 1884, when a Russo-Korean Treaty of Amity and Commerce was signed in Seoul.

  From 1890 to 1905, Korea featured prominently in Russian diplomatic designs as a major target of economic and political expansion in the Far East. Russia was also heavily involved in Korean domestic politics. Attempts to increase the Russian influence in Korea and Manchuria were among the reasons for the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 to 1905.

  After the October Revolution in 1917, Soviet-Korean exchanges remained limited in scope. The Soviet Union was instrumental in the creation of the local communist movement in Korea. Moscow promoted the unification of leftist groups into the short-lived Korean Communist Party (created in 1925 and disbanded in 1928). In the 1930s the USSR also provided support to Korean communist guerrillas in Manchuria.

  World War II led to a dramatic change in the situation. On August 11, 1945, the Soviet Army crossed the Korean border and within a week established control over the territory north of the 38th parallel (this parallel had been agreed upon with the U.S. command as a provisional demarcation line). Meanwhile, the southern half of Korea was occupied by U.S. forces in September. From 1945 to 1947 the Soviet and American governments made some progress toward a compromise over the future government of a united Korea. At the same time, the Soviet military administration was actively establishing a communist regime in the north.

  The Soviet administration backed Kim Il Sung, a former Manchurian guerrilla commander who had served in the Red Army since 1942. After the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was declared in September 1948, Russia was the first country to establish diplomatic relations with the new state (October 12, 1948). Relations with the south, where the Republic of Korea was proclaimed in 1948, were meanwhile completely frozen.

  From 1948, Kim Il Sung lobbied Moscow for permission to attack the South. Initially these suggestions were rejected, but in late 1949 Josef Stalin approved the proposal. Russian advisers were sent to Pyongyang to plan the operations, which commenced on July 26, 1950. The North Korean armed forces were trained by Soviet advisers and equipped with Soviet weapons. During the war, the USSR also dispatched several units of fighter jets to fight on the North Korean side.

  After the Korean War, Russia remained the main source of military and economic aid for North Korea. On July 6, 1961, a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance was signed in Moscow. According to this treaty, Russia was obliged to protect the DPRK militarily in the event of a war (this clause was deleted from a new treaty signed in 2000).

  In the late 1950s Kim Il Sung refused to follow the new policies of de-Stalinization. He skillfully used the Sino-Soviet rivalry to extricate North Korea from Soviet control and proceeded with the construction of his own brand of national Stalinism. North Korea remained neutral in the Sino-Soviet conflict and was more politically distant from the USSR than any other communist state apart from China and Albania. However, strategic considerations forced Moscow to continue with its economic aid to the North.

  With the advent of perestroika, the changing strategic outlook led the USSR to seek rapprochement with the Republic of Korea (ROK), which was seen as an important trading partner. In the late 1980s the USSR engaged in numerous unofficial exchanges with Seoul, and on September 30, 1990, official diplomatic relations between the USSR and the ROK were finally established.

  After the collapse of the USSR, the new Russian government refused to subsidize the trade with its erstwhile ally. Trade collapsed (from 2.3 billion USD in 1990 to 0.1 billion USD in 1995) and has remained insignificant ever since (0.1 billion USD in 2000). At the same time, attempts to influence the security situation in northeast Asia and other strategic considerations prompted Russia in the late

  KORENIZATSYA

  1990s to increase its diplomatic exchanges with the DPRK (including a visit by President Vladimir Putin in 2000).

  Meanwhile Russian exchanges with the ROK were developing rapidly. By 2001 the trade volume between the two countries had reached $2.9 billion. South Korean companies imported raw materials, scrap metal, and seafood from Russia while selling finished goods, including consumer electronics, textiles, and cars. See also: KAL 007; KOREANS; KOREAN WAR; PUTIN, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH; RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Il Yung Chung, ed. (1992). Korea and Russia: Toward the 21st Century. Seoul: Sejong Institute. Lensen George. (1982). Balance of Intrigue: International Rivalry in Korea amp; Manchuria, 1884-1899. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida. Ree, Erik van. (1989). Socialism in One Zone: Stalin’s Policy in Korea, 1945-1947. Oxford: Berg Publishers.

  ANDREI LANKOV

  KORENIZATSYA

  The USSR’s founding agreement of 1922 and its Constitution of 1924 gave it the form of a federal state that was organized according to national principles. This marked the beginning of a phase of limited autonomy for the non-Russian ethnic groups living in Soviet Russia and the blossoming of nationalism, which sometimes went as far as the actual formation of nations. Not only the large nationalities, but even the smaller, scattered peoples were given the opportunity to form their own national administrative territories. The will of the Communist Party-which was expressed in the program of the Twelfth Party Cong
ress in 1923- was that all Soviet institutions in non-Russian areas, including courts, administrative authorities, all economic bodies, the labor unions, even the party organs themselves, should consist as much as possible of local nationality cadres. Korenizatsya was supposed to protect and nurture the autochthonous population’s way of life, its customs and traditions, and its writing system and language. Up to the middle of the 1930s, korenizatsya was a central political slogan whose program was diametrically opposed to a policy of Russification and national repression. Especially in the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, korenizatsya (which is also referred to in research literature as indigenization or Stalin’s nativization campaign) achieved significant success. Forty-eight nationalities, including the Turkmen, Kirgiz, Komi, and Yakut peoples, received a written language for the first time. The status of the Ukrainian language greatly increased. In Belarus a strong and lasting national awakening occurred. The use of the national languages in schools and as administrative languages was, without a doubt, a nation-forming factor. The proportion of national cadres greatly increased in all sectors. Attributes of nation states, such as national academies of science, national theater, national literature, national historical traditions, and the like, were established or consolidated and staffed by indigenous personnel.