This paper aims to outline the origins and main dimensions of the Chinese immigrant communities which were established in the Russian heartland (Western Siberia) during the interwar period (1920s-1930s). It argues that Chinese -primarily male groups - had managed to adapt peacefully, though temporarily, into the local environment due their particular mentality and social features: they were often occupying free labour and demographic lacunae, caused by the losses of men in WWI/Russian civil war and devastation of economy/infrastructure. The growth of authoritarian tendencies under the Stalinist regime in Soviet Union, economic shortcomings and the ethnic purges of 1930s closed the agenda of Chinese presence in the western Siberian, as well as in the whole Soviet scene. Actually all persons of Chinese origin were accused of being 'outside' (Japan's) collaborators, and they were assassinated or, at best, forwarded to concentration camps. Just a few survived. The Chinese in Western Siberia represented a very particular sociodemographic and ethnical phenomenon, remarkably distinctive from other similar, Russian Far East or worldwide, immigrant communities.

The article is based on data drawn from local Siberian (regional and district) archives and is a part of a broader project on Chinese and other immigrant communities of Oriental origin in Asiatic Russia. Its purpose is to advance the study of this multi-faceted phenomenon of critical historical and current relevance.

Cross-border migrations between Russia and China are among the most actual problems of contemporary Russia-Chinese relations. Their history and dimensions have been shaped by the neighbouring positions of the two states and also by objective economic factors. The social-political situation on either side the border has also played a crucial role in determining the character, direction and 'algorythm' of these migrations. Historically it came about that the main form of migrational interaction between Russia and China was the movement of Chinese into the spacious regions of the Russian Far East and Siberia. The specifics of this presence, its socio-demographic structure and its possible consequences require further research and analysis. One element of such an analysis is the exploration of the history of Chinese immigration into Russia, specifically into West Siberia. We should note that this subject has not been well studied, either by Russian or foreign scholars, because of its political sensitivity and the lack of access to sources.¹ The present article is based on Siberian archival materials. It attempts to provide a social, and to a lesser degree a political, snapshot of the urban and rural Chinese communities of Western Siberia as they developed during the 1920s and 1930s.

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, there were only just over 40,000 Chinese in the region. Very few of them lived in the southern and western parts of this vast area. The situation changed significantly during the years of the First World War and the 1920s. Hundreds and then thousands of Chinese migrants attached themselves to the hitherto tiny islands of Chinese scattered in the large cities of Western Siberia. They were mostly contract workers on war-related projects and seasonal workers. A great proportion of them were entirely taken up with the problems of their own survival, while others were directly drawn into the internal Russian military conflicts caused by the revolutionary events of 1917 and the deep crisis in the country. These Chinese migrants were mostly people from the lower social layers. They voluntarily entered the international brigades of the 3rd and 5th Red Armies, which were active at the time on the Eastern front. They revealed themselves to be brave fighters, which caused them to be much detested by their opponents. It is known that brutal punishments of Chinese prisoners of war from the Red Army were carried out by Kolchak's troops. In the winter of 1918, for example, at the station of Tyumen, two hundred people had their clothes removed and were then sent off naked to a distant prison camp. Only forty of them survived.²

Chinese units became part of the garrisons of a number of West Siberian towns. In 1920, for example, a Chinese battalion commanded by Gao Hai-fun³ was stationed at Omsk, and their compatriots also served in the Omsk Emergency Committee.

The presence of large numbers of Chinese migrants in Russia forced the Russian powers and the leaders of the Chinese communities to form governmental institutions to resolve problems that arose. As early as 1919 they founded an organisation called the 'Union of Chinese Citizens in Russia', headed by Liu Tse-zhun. This was originally imagined as a temporary structure, whose main task was to organise the repatriation of most of the Chinese back to their homeland. However, the evacuation was delayed. The new government of Russia decided to give a new profile to the Union, namely to transform it into a mechanism for the control and 'Bolshevisation' of tens of thousands of Chinese migrants, thus turning it into a solid basis for revolution in the East. With this goal in mind, as Soviet power was gradually established in the region, the NKID (People's Commissariat of International Affairs) of the Russian Federation created separate sections of the 'Union of Chinese Workers' (this was the new name of the organisation) for each area of concentrated Chinese settlement. Thus already on 12th December 1919 the S iberian section of the NKID registered the statutes of such a Union in Omsk, under the leadership of Tun Vin-fun, and by 1920 a series of similar organisations had been set up in Novonikolaevsk, Tomsk, and other cities. It was also planned to organise the same kind of Union in Semipalatinsk, which would include in its membership Chinese living in Barnaul and Biisk.⁴

On the 20th April 1920, a congress of the representatives of Chinese Workers' Unions was held in Omsk and a coordinating committee was chosen. The main goals of this organisation were proclaimed as follows: 'to rally, protect, and provide help to the Chinese workers, and to support their legal rights and interests in Soviet Russia'. Support for moral and cultural development was also envisioned. The class-based character of the Union was especially emphasised. It was open only to workers and students.⁵

In summer 1920, direct political leadership for the 'Chinese masses' in Siberia was created by forming a special Chinese Department of the Eastern Section of the Siberian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RKPb (Bolshevik Workers' and Peasants' Party), which was in power at the time in Omsk. The Section strove to put all nationality-based workers' unions under the strict control of the local (also national) Communist Party cells. The reason given for this was that'... speculator elements often penetrate into the Unions in the guise of workers. This is particularly the case with the Chinese'.⁶ But in fact, it turned out to be very difficult to 'Bolshevise' the Chinese. There were 450 Chinese living in Omsk in 1920, but only 33 of them expressed support for the RKPb. In winter 1921, Lin Chan-li, who was the representative of the Central Bureau of Chinese communists tried to create a Chinese section in the Omsk Regional party organisation (the Siberian Bureau having been moved meanwhile to Irkutsk). But even strong agitation succeeded in attracting only 20 members. A Chinese party cell existed for a time in the Chinese Workers' Union. It was headed by Van Tsun-yi, but he was a less influential figure than Van Tso-bin, who was the chairman of the Workers' Union. Fairly soon, by summer 1922, the majority of Chinese communists had moved away from Omsk and from Siberia.

Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 1920s, rather stable, though small, Chinese colonies had formed in many cities and other settlements of Western Siberia. For example, in the Altai and neighbouring areas, Chinese communities numbering between 20-100 people, were living in Rubtsovsk, Slavgorod, Biisk, and Barnaul.⁷

The path of Chinese coming to live in Western Siberia was a very difficult one. Many of them had started out as contract labourers for the Tsarist government, taking part in heavy war-defence works in European Russia in 1914-1917. Others were recruited by various firms for large construction projects, mainly railway building. These included projects in Murmansk in the far north, on the Trans-Siberian Railway and branch lines from it, such as the Kundulinsk line. Yet others were brought in to work in mines, lumber-camps, stone-breaking yards, and so forth. Only a very few started out with 'shuttle' border trade and an even smaller number were smugglers.

It was not the frontier itself that was the problem. At this period it was almost unguarded. Later, the migrants' position was improved when Chinese Consulates were established in Irkutsk and Semipalatinsk. Also, as they accumulated experience of living in Russia, the immigrants could pass on the reputation of places that were good to stay in, especially in the big cities of Western Siberia such as Novosibirsk and Barnaul. Soon they began to take up new occupations of petty trading,⁸ home services for the local population (such as laundries, photo-processing, etc.), and various kinds of artisan work. With the start of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in Russia in the 1920s, the number of Chinese in Western Siberia rose significantly, some of these people coming from other parts of Russia and as well as from China. In fact, the Chinese were some of the first in the country to make use of this comparatively liberal economic regime. They opened stalls selling clothing, jewellery and accessories, and set up workshops of various kinds. But soon, they were subjected to heavy taxation, and most of them had to return to hiring themselves out in heavy manual labouring jobs, or else they were forced to battle for work on the local labour market. In Barnaul, for example, apart from wholesale and retail trade, they engaged in shoe repairs, mending mirrors, and they were wandering photographers. They got work in new industrial enterprises, such as a blended-yam factory. Although they experienced particular difficulties, even discrimination (open or hidden) in the economic space of the Asiatic frontier of Russia, they were nevertheless able to integrate demographically without special problems. As a group they were mostly single-sex (male), but they had no matrimonial problems in Siberia. Available documents provide evidence that they gradually married Russian partners, including not only the many widows who had appeared as a result of the First World War and the Civil War, but also young girls. It seems that several factors enabled them to adapt relatively successfully to the receiving society and find a niche there. The first was the severe deficit of males locally, because of the years of wars. But the mutual tolerance shown by both the Chinese and their local partners in matters of religion, psychology and culture, the traditional Chinese uxoriousness, even towards step and adopted children, and the image they had among Russian citizens of being hard workers and generally 'positive' people were also important factors."

It should be noted that for the first ten years of their existence, i.e. in the 1920s, Chinese communities in Western Siberia were almost exclusively urban. The geographical origin of the migrants was extremely wide: they came from Beijing, Hubei Province, and more rarely from Qili and Xinjiang, but without doubt the largest number came from Shandung, especially the city of Chifu. In a few cases even the village of origin is given in the archives. We can see from this that previous village and kinship ties were very important in the local concentrations of Chinese migrants when they came to Siberia. Later, this type of 'exit structure' for people leaving China changed under the influence of internal Chinese and international events, notably the ravages of the Chinese revolution in 1925-7, the Japanese invasion, and the new inflow of migrants (including refugees) from Manchuria and other less fortunate regions of China.

However, in the mid l920s, and especially towards the end of the 1920s, the situation also changed in the USSR. As free market relations were inculcated from above, the political regime also became harsher. Along with the usual procedure of regular re-registration of Chinese who retained their national citizenship, administrative and even punitive measures were also taken against them (for violating the visa regulations, forging documents, and so forth). As a result, the Chinese immigrants increasingly began to take Soviet citizenship. According to the 1926 census, there were over 1,400 such people in Siberia, though the number of those keeping their own national passports was one and a half times higher.

Already by September 1924, party and state organs had been given a secret instruction not to support the Unions of Chinese workers, because of their 'enmity to Soviet power and the proletarian revolution' and their 'nationalism'. Rather, Chinese were to be 'drawn into our normal trade unions according to their place of work'.¹⁰ However, having starting the process of getting rid of the Workers' Unions, the Soviet state was left with the responsibility of carrying out certain of their functions of a social type. For example, by an order of the Siberian Regional Committee (Sibraikom) of the VKPb of 1st September 1928, the regional labour department was obliged to carry out an inspection of the work conditions of the Chinese hired in craft firms and independent craftsmen and provide support for this category of workers."

The dismantling ofNEP and the general worsening of the economic situation at the end of the 1920s put the Chinese communities in a very difficult position. This was exacerbated by the intensification of administrative-command methods of government in the USSR and by the conflict in 1929 between the Soviets and the Chinese over the railway between built in North China by the Russians (KVZhD). And their situation was made still more difficult by a flow of new migrants escaping from the instability in China (the coup by Chiang Kai-shek and the sporadic continuation of the civil war). At the end of the 1920s, the USSR carried out the first great wave of arrests and trials, and Chinese people were included in these purges. Thus in Barnaul in September 1929, a group of eight people was arrested. They were accused of spying and various other misdeeds such as smuggling hard currency and high value metals. The pretext for such serious charges was the finding among the accused of silver coins, 'dubious' handwritten notes, and correspondence with colleagues in Siberia and China. They were all sentenced to relatively short prison sentences, including the most prominent person in the Chinese community of Barnaul, Van Lin-tin.¹² But ten years later they were all executed during the repressions of the late 1930s.

Several Chinese communal organisations (obshchiny) arose in the 1930s in Siberia, though they too experienced very specific problems. For example, a group of Chinese organised a commune near Novosibirsk named after Sun Yat-sen with the intention of growing vegetables. The local government classed it as a private enterprise, however, and used its punitive taxation policy to close it down. In 1936, the former communards tried to revive their offspring in the form of a co-operative (artel') called 'Labour of China' at the village of Tai'menka near Barnaul. As the former head of this village acknowledged much later, 'The co-operative operated successfully. It had a good income. You could get scarce things there, like vodka and beer.' But this project too was short-lived, though for a different reason. Hardly any of its members survived the ethno-political purges that were sweeping the country at the time.

Chinese co-operatives were set up and collapsed on more or less the same lines in a number of places, like Slavogorod, Klyuchi, andZavyalovo,i.e. mainly in rural areas, which had the necessary raw materials. As a rule, the Chinese established public eating places or food-producing enterprises, and they also made fruit-juices and ice-cream. But the people working in such places, who might have either joined independently or been sent there by the administration, turned out to be those who had infringed the visa regulations or were other undesirables like interned soldiers from the Japanese-run Manchukuo government in Manchuria, etc. Co-operatives and settlements made up of such people did not survive for long.

It is true that there were background reasons why the Chinese were accused of political unreliability and (usually imaginary) crimes. After all, they were external observers who were capable of surveying the Soviet socialist experiment fairly objectively. They were hardened by life's ups and downs, and they were by no means cowed. And so the immigrants of this ethnic group did not always hide their critical attitude to the scarcity of food products and manufactured goods, their low quality and high prices, nor to the bureaucratic requisitioning practices, such as voluntary-obligatory subscription to state campaigns. It was not the case, however, that the Chinese formed a distinct social lobby. It was just that being somewhat distanced from the contemporary system of political indoctrination and from the Soviet system as a whole, they could quite easily take on some of its external forms (communes, co-operatives, etc.), while at the same time actually operating them through their own national traditional norms and customs. They mimicked assimilation, and only occasionally voluntarily experienced it.

The Chinese communities of Western Siberia were extremely dispersed, both in their places of origin and in their settlements in Russia. Furthermore, their external social relations had a highly marginalised character, due to the influence of a number of factors, some of which have already been mentioned. The main one, however, was the practical impossibility of their returning to Kuo-min-tang China. As we have seen, the degree of their integration into the receiving society achieved by the end of the 1930s, both on the micro-level of the family and at the group level of the work-place and the neighbourhood, turned out to be insufficient for them to survive the conditions of mass repression, international crises and wars of those days. As a result of these cataclysms, the Chinese practically disappeared from the ethnic map of Russia as a significant socio-demographic and cultural element. Even the numerous children of the first wave of Chinese immigrants were subsequently largely dissolved into the multi-national diversity of the Siberian regions, by the casuistry of the bureaucratic-demographic practices of the late Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods. In this sense, the history and basic features of the West Siberian Chinese diaspora are sharply different from analogical Chinese diasporas in East Asia, America, and a series of other countries.¹³ The subject should be studied more deeply, as it may help to solve a number of important moral, academic and applied issues. These concern the past, present and future of Russian-Chinese inter-state and inter-regional relations, in the interests of further co-operation between the great peoples of Russia and China.

NOTES

The initial version of this paper was presented at international conference 'Actual Issues of Russian-Chinese Relations' in October 1999 (Altai State University, Barnaul, Russia). Translated from Russian by Caroline Humphrey.

¹In Soviet and post-Soviet literature in the field the main attention was and is devoted to Chinese labour migration to the Russian Far East. See, for instance: Soloviyev F. Chinese Labour Migration to the Russian Far East during Capitalist Times (Kitayskoe otkhodnitshestvo na rossiyskiy Dalniy Vostok v period capitalizma) M., 1989, as well the contributions by A. Alepko, V. Datsishen and others in the conference proceedings Diasporas in Historical Time and Space (Irkutsk, 1994). Related issues of current relevance are explored by V.I. Dyatlov with regard to Eastern Siberia. Thus he analysed the features of the new Chinese diaspora in Siberia as a security factor at a recent conference 'Siberia in the System of International Relations of Russia' (Tomsk, 1999). On Western Siberian routes of Chinese migration, see V. S. Boyko 'Chinese Migration to Western Siberia in the First Third of the 20th century', Second Far East Conference of Junior Historians (Vladivostok, 1992); V. S. Boyko 'National Minorities of Eastern Origin in the Altai', in National Politics of Russia and the Altai (Barnaul, 1991); N. Gordeeva 'Western Siberia in Russian-Chinese Relations', paper given at Conference devoted to the memory of N.M. Yadrintsev, Panel on Russian history (Omsk, 1992). Among recent contributions from overseas scholars the following should be noted: Tion Zhang, 'The Present and Past of Overseas Chinese in Siberia', Paper presented at 35th International Congress of Asian and African studies (Budapest, 1997). The Encyclopedia of The Overseas Chinese, Chinese Heritage Centre (Singapore, 1999), contains an essay on the Chinese community in Russia. An excellent theoretical framework on the subject is provided by Adam McKewon in his recent article 'Conceptualizing the Chinese Diasporas', Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 58(2), 1999, 306-337.^Sibirskiye Ogni (Siberian Lights), 1935, No 1, pp 46-67.

⁷See, for instance, the data on Rubtsovsk: Altaiskiy Yezhegodnik za 1921-1922 khoz. god (Altai Annual for 1921-1922 financial year) Barnaul 1923, pp 64-65; State archive of Altai region (Rubtsovsk branch). Collection. 58, list 1, file 21, p. 96 back. 'The term uzelochnyi (lotochnyi) was used by Chinese themselves to refer their business. 'Chinese normally gave Russian names to their numerous descendants, who were buried in Siberia. Moreover, in family and work circles some of them preferred to use Russian patronyms (e.g. Sergey Panteleevitsh Radaykin instead ofIn-Khun-Qeng, Ivan Shabido instead of Sha Bi-Dao, etc. Some immigrants had parallel families in China and supported them. Celibacy (non-marriage) was a rare phenomenon among this group; only elders (60 or older) and economic marginals remained single. '"Boyko, 'Chinese migration to Western Siberia ...', p. 101. '' Communist Party archive of Novosibirsk Oblast (PANO), Collection 2, list 1, file 2338, p. 89.

¹²Van Lin-Tin, originally from Shandong, who had mastered the mirror-making business and learned Russian in Harbin, was one of those who corresponded to the notion of the Chinese as the 'civilised nation of East Asia'. He expanded his knowledge of sciences and Esperanto, subscribed to the local Russian newspaper Red Altai, carefully and skilfully budgeted personal expenses, and took care of his health. But the Barnaul bureaucrats, first in the police and then in the local government, put obstacles in the professional career of this talented foreigner, leaving him no option but to be an individual craftsman. He was saved neither by marrying a Russian woman, nor by accepting Soviet citizenship. In 1929 political detectives 'recognised' 'Valentin Valentinovich' as a spy - an officer of the Chinese army. He was sentenced to three years of reform labour and later eventually assassinated on false accusations in 1938. See the Special Data Collection at the Altai Regional Archival Department (Barnaul), File 6178, p. 113-114, and File 6110, p. 35

¹³ See the considerations by late S.R.Laynger on the basic features of Chinese exile communities, their legal status, ties with their homeland, etc. in her book Iz istorii kitayskogo emigrantskogo dvizheniya. Seredina XIX-XX vv (The History of Chinese Emigration. The Middle of the 19th and 20th Centuries), Moscow 1992.

* Some missing footnotes will be added later after checking with the author. Any inconveniences regretted.