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