Wagon (family) Lists of deported Koreans as a poly-variant source for research

Abstract

The paper is a pioneering study of wagon (family) lists of deported Koreans through the prism of the polyvariant use of a historical source. Archival documents on the deportation of Koreans, kept for many decades as "top secret", became available in the early 1990s, but the wagon (family) lists never became the object of a special analyze and were only mentioned in some publications. Despite the limited and concise information, the lists provide rich material for verifying existing knowledge and identifying new aspects in demographic issues, such as: the average size of a Korean family, its composition, the number of children of Koreans, etc. Surnames, first names and patronymics (if any) indicated in the lists of deported Koreans are a source for studying the anthroponymy, the peculiarities of transcription of Korean surnames in Russian, how the names were given, etc. The topic of the citizenship of the deported Koreans became a key and priority issue because it remained a "blank spot" in research discourse.  Opinions turned out to be diametrically opposed: most of the deported Koreans were not citizens of the USSR and vice versa - most of them had Soviet citizenship. Wagon (family) lists indicating the number of confiscated passports and the calculations made on this data, gave a clear answer that the overwhelming majority of Koreans were citizen of USSR. The article used only a small part of the wagon lists found in the archives of the Russian Federation, so the search for these sources and research from the point of view of various social sciences and humanities are ahead.

Key words: wagon lists, source, deportation, Koreans, citizenship, demography, anthroponomy