Burnt by the Sun

Reviews / Votes

"Burnt by the Sun is the best book in any language on the experience of Koreans inside Russia and the Soviet Union. It is first and foremost a micro-history of Koreans in the Soviet Union-initially greeted as allies in the building of communism, then victimized by Stalin's "national operations" that targeted Koreans as likely traitors and fifth columnists working with the Japanese." - Jeffrey Burds, Northeastern University, author of Holocause in Rovno.

"This highly original work provides a fascinating insight into the lives of individual Koreans in Russia/the Soviet Union. It also shows that the infamous view of the "yellow peril" survived into the Soviet period and was responsible, to a significant degree, for the almost wholesale deportations of ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Maritime province in 1937-1938." - Hiroaki Kuromiya, Indiana University, author of Voices of the Dead

"One of the first scholarly books to link the mass deportation of ethnic Koreans from the Russian Far East to Central Asia during the mid-to-late 1930s with escalating Soviet-Manchukuo border tensions. Just as Tokyo was bringing in hundreds of thousands of Japanese peasants from its home islands to fortify its side of the border, Soviet Koreans-the great majority of whom were loyal to Moscow-were being forcibly relocated and replaced by European Russians, largely Slavs, purged by Stalin during the Great Terror. A must-read for both Asian and Russian historians." - Bruce A. Elleman, U.S. Naval War College, author of Diplomacy and Deception.