During the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet government forcibly transferred thousands of Chinese nationals and ethnic Chinese citizens from the USSR to Almaty, Kazakhstan (where some 4,000 remained and were kept as they were native speakers and were useful to the USSR working in translation and Soviet publishing houses). Meanwhile, the remainder (some 14,000 or more) were sent out of the country (USSR) to China. A number of memoirists (such as Israel Emiot's short chapter "With the Chinese Prisoners") mention the tight organization of the Chinese in the Soviet Gulag system. Many had landed in the Soviet forced labor camps (Gulag) accidentally. Some were the "Soviet" ethnic Chinese who were born in the USSR. While others were legal guest workers (laborers with visas to work in the USSR) or the unfortunate few who had accidentally crossed over the Chinese–Soviet border in the Russian Far East and the Zabaikal regions. Most of the deportees were deported to the Chinese province of Xinjiang and Soviet-controlled Central Asia. Although there were more than 70,000 Chinese living in the Russian Far East in 1926, the Chinese had become almost extinct in the region by the 1940s. To date, the detailed history of the removal of the Chinese diaspora in the Russian Far East requires more research and more articles to be written. The Chinese archives and the Russian/Soviet "off-limits" archives with materials on sensitive subject matters (such as politically sensitive topics between China and Russia and the INO, NKVD missions utilizing East Asians in Soviet intelligence) need to be opened for scholars to peruse. To date, there are eight major research articles on the Soviet Chinese deportation of 1937-1939. Two are newspaper articles written with data from the archives. The eight articles are: Karin-Irene Eiermann's "The Fate of the Chinese Population in Soviet Russia (2007)," GuangMing Yin's "A Historical Study of the Soviet Union's Handling of the Chinese Issue in the Far East (2016)," This is Yin's research paper translated in English. Ablazhey and Potapova's "Repressive Policy as a Tool of Resolving the 'Chinese Issue,' " , Vladimir Baturov's "The Repression of the Chinese in Stalin's Soviet Union," E.G Kalkaev's "The Place of Repression against the Chinese in the 'National' Operations of the NKVD," and Jon K. Chang's "Battling for Equality (2025)." The remaining two articles on the Chinese deportation were written by Elena N. Chernolutskaia.
The two articles by Chernolutskaia are written with very distinct and opposing views towards the Soviet Chinese. The first, "Russians and Chinese, Brothers Forever?" was written in 1993 in the period right after the collapse of the USSR during a period of deep-soul searching about the nature of repression in the USSR and the proclamation of independence and autonomy for all of the "nations" ("nations" in Russian refers to "peoples") of the former USSR. The 1993 article is very sympathetic to the suffering and repeated violations of human rights (and the 1936 Soviet Constitution) that occurred during the Sov. Chinese deportation. The second article is chapter 3 from Chernolutskaia's Forced Migration in the Russian Far East, 1920-1950. It depicts the Chinese as absolutely non-Soviet, unassimilated and a vector for opium abuse (use, distribution and proliferation) and espionage (through Japan). The tropes and depictions that this and other Soviet academic literatures, archival reports, and newspaper accounts produced strongly exhibit various forms of Soviet racism and essentialized race. Essentialized racial tropes were important in carrying out ethnic cleansing because the deleterious traits of the targeted people would not change. Hence, deportation was the only solution.
Often considered strangers to Soviet society, the Chinese were more prone to political repression, due to their lack of exposure to propaganda machines and their unwillingness to bear the hardship of socialist transformation. From 1926 to 1937, at least 12,000 Chinese were deported from the Russian Far East to the Chinese province of Xinjiang, around 5,500 Chinese settled down in Soviet-controlled Central Asia, and 3,932 were killed. In the meantime, at least 1,000 Chinese were jailed in forced penal labour camps in Komi and Arkhangelsk near the Arctic. Even today, some villages in Komi are still called "Chinatown" because of the Chinese prisoners held in the 1940s and 1950s. Unlike other deported peoples, the deportation of Chinese and Koreans was carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) members of their own nationalities. While Koreans, Chinese and Japanese were forced to leave the Russian Far East, the Soviet government launched the Khetagurovite Campaign to encourage single female settlers in the Far East, which unwittingly replaced part of the deported Asian populations.
The human rights group Memorial International kept the records of over 2,000 Chinese victims of Soviet political repression, yet it has been almost impossible to recognise their original Chinese names from Russian scripts. On 30 April 2017, the Last Address set up an inscribed board in memory of Wang Xi Xiang, a Chinese victim of the Great Purge, at the Moscow Office of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Background Origin of Sinophobia Through the Aigun Treaty of 1858 and the Peking Treaty of 1860, Russia acquired the lands north of the Amur and east of the Ussuri from China, since which Russia began to colonise the lands. It became urgent for Russia to integrate the acquired lands after it was defeated by Japan in 1905, as the lands became a potential target of Japanese expansionism. Lack of manpower in the Russian Far East due to insufficient domestic migration, along with Chinese policies to colonise its Northeastern borders with Russia, led to an influx of Chinese labourers in the region.However, the growing Chinese population and trade with China led to a mounting concern within the Russian government, considering that the Chinese immigration would reshape the demography of the region. As a result, the Russian government began to restrict the Chinese economic influence, especially when they realised that the local natives still regarded the Chinese as the owner of the lands, despite Russian conquest. As V. V. Grave, a Russian diplomatic who explored the region in the 1910s, put, In the meantime, Chinese diasporas in Russia formed their own communities that circumvented Russian authorities and practised Chinese customs, where crimes also emerged. Compared with Russian workers, the Chinese labourers were cheaper, more obedient and more efficient, which made them popular in the Russian business sector. Meanwhile, these qualities also led to a growing concern in the Russian society and government, in which the Chinese were considered a threat to the Russian nation. The Yellow Peril was a popular term to refer to this threat in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Even though they were born in Russian soils, ethnic Chinese in Russia, like other diaspora peoples, were still more often considered to be loyal to their ancestral homelands. As described by Fridtjof Nansen in 1914,
Anti-Chinese campaigns In 1900, the military governor of the Amur region, Konstantin Nikolaevich Gribskii, ordered to expel the entire Chinese population in the region. His army surrounded more than 3,000 Chinese near Blagoveshchensk and forced them into the Amur River, among which only a few hundred survived. In 1911, Russia again deported thousands of Chinese from the Far East in the name of epidemic control, which received criticism within the Russian government and industry, due to the important role of the Chinese in the local economy. In 1913, although some of the members of the Khabarovsk congress again identified Chinese labourers as a major threat to the borders of Russia, the authority refused to take any extreme actions against the Chinese, due to the indispensable role of the Chinese in the local commercial activity, but rather hoped to attract more European immigrants to the Russian Far East. During the First World War, as the Russian Army High Command claimed that Germany recruited Chinese spies from Manchuria, several thousand Chinese traders were deported from all areas under military rule in 1914. Meanwhile, the Chinese were also banned from entering the empire, despite the Chinese government's neutral stance over the war.
The attempt to stop Chinese immigration was soon interrupted as the world war caused a severe manpower shortage in Russia. With the restrictions on Chinese migrants lifted, the Russian government began proactively introducing massive Chinese to work in Russia in 1915. As a result, the government recruited some 400,000 Chinese workers working in all parts of Russia. However, they suffered from the subsequent civil war in Russia, as they became discriminated against and repressed by multiple parties of the war. For example, the Japanese-backed Semyonov and Kalmykov regimes specifically targeted Chinese businesspeople, rather than their Korean counterparts, for robbery. According to Chinese diplomatic documents, the White Army executed the Chinese they captured and displayed their bodies in public as an act of intimidation. Chinese males were often rounded up and summarily executed. The Red Army was arguably even worse. Undisciplined Red Army soldiers looted and burned ethnic Chinese villages, raped women, killed random Chinese, imprisoned and tortured males of military age and interned women and children. Many junior officers of the Red Army regarded anyone who could not speak Russian as potential spies or foreign agents. Besides, the Allied army randomly searched the belongings of the Chinese workers. They would regard the workers as communists if they thought anything was suspicious and kill them without interrogation. Eventually, among the Chinese workers in Russia, around 50,000 joined the Soviet Red Army, whilst most of the rest returned to China with the help of the Chinese government, the Chinese Red Cross Society and the Chinese trade union in Russia.
Chinese interventionism According to the Aigun Treaty of 1858, the Chinese population in the former Chinese lands conceded to Russia remained Chinese subjects that had extraterritorial rights and immunities from Russian rule. Chinese diplomatic interventions to protect such rights were often successful and still valid until the Boxer Rebellion. With the formation of the Republic of China in 1912, the republican government, compared with the previous imperial government, cared more about overseas Chinese citizens and encouraged its citizens in Russia to form various self-governing groups. These groups were co-registered with the Russian and Chinese governments, with their annual reports sent to Beijing and their leaders mandated by Beijing. The Russian government only had limited knowledge regarding the groups' close ties with China. At the same time, the Chinese societies settled disputes within the Chinese community, despite Russian jurisdiction, due to the weak Russian administration in the Far East.
During the Russian Civil War, while the United States and Japan sent troops to Vladivostok to protect their citizens, Chinese officials, including the Chinese Charge-D Lu Shiyuan in the city, made requests to Beijing for military protection in 1917. Thus, in April 1918, the Chinese government sent the cruiser Hai Yung from Shanghai to Vladivostok. In the following months, the Chinese government rented several passenger ships from China to evacuate its citizens in the region. In 1919, Chinese warships Chiang Hung, Li Chuan, Li Sui, and were further deployed, in order to protect the Chinese navigation right in the Amur. In 1920, the Yung Chien was sent to Vladivostok to replace Hai Yung. Yung Chien was also the mission's last Chinese warship, leaving Vladivostok in early 1921.