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Description

Anyone who knows Stalin's reign as the uncrowned Tsar knows that the man was all too happy to make merry with the demographics of the Soviet Union, at times relocating entire people-groups to suit his own ends. Germans in the USSR were expelled after WWII, the Kalmyks were forcibly deported in 1943 and only returned 10 years later, but the first large-scale relocation of people in the Soviet Union came in 1937, well ahead of the outbreak of World War II in Europe, and focused on the Korean people. In that time, many Koreans had relocated to the Soviet Far East well before the downfall of the Russian Empire, and had even seen the creation of a Korean raion in Posyet. But as tensions loomed with Japan's expansionist policy in Central Asia, Stalin and his NKVD looked at Soviet Koreans with suspicion, seeing them as having the potential to be infiltrated by Japanese spies. For this reason, and in pursuit of Stalin's efforts to Russify the Soviet frontiers, the Koreans were deported en masse to Central Asia.

The deported were sent to Central Asia en masse, often with nothing but livestock and the clothes on their back. Construction of houses stagnated and the Koreans were forced to make do. The whole process was shockingly slapdash, prompted at least in part by the Kazakh Famine of 1931-33 which drove some of Stalin's motivation to make up for labor shortages in the area. In the end the Korean population was primarily resettled along the banks of the Syr Darya River, which Stalin sought to make an agricultural center of production. For the Koreans, this meant rice, and within a few years the river was surrounded by rice fields fed by canals dug by the labor armies. What little internal migration saw most Kazakhs and Uzbeks move out of the region, unwilling to deal with the Koreans being there if Moscow demanded it. The sum total was a dramatic movement of demographics, where the Turkic cultures who had dominated in the region prior were almost wholly displaced by the Korean population.

A persistent effort was quickly implemented to try and crush Korean identity, but despite it all an undercurrent of common unity brought them together, reflected in the adoption of the adjective Goryeoin (literally "people from Korea") to describe themselves. Even if state publications were in Russian and use of Korean was banned, privately many maintained their old culture and customs as best they could in the harsh desert climate of the Kyzylkum, even under the watchful eye of Stalin's regime. Desert cities which had been centers of trade for years were soon festooned with trappings of Korean design and architecture where it could be gotten away with, and cities like Kyzylorda became Kijilo, with Korean authorities attempting to accommodate the Korean people by adopting unofficial Korean names using trisyllabic Koreanized versions of extant names left from the Turkic cultures, which prompted the emergence of a dialect emerging primarily from the Hamgyŏng dialect that became known as Goryeomal.

Matters remained tense in the region well after WWII and the end of Japan as a possible hostile force. What took its place was the problem of Korea itself, divided between a Soviet north and an American south. For the 5 years between 1945 and 1950, Stalin debated deporting the Koreans from Central Asia to the newly-organized "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", and the possibility of moving Uzbeks and Kazakhs back into the region. Indeed, some Goryeoin repatriated to Korea itself, but found it difficult to reacclimate to Korea after the years in Central Asia, especially with the unprecedented degree of autocracy that was emerging in North Korea. Not that it had much time to set in. In the course of just two years from 1950 to 1952, a war launched by the North to conquer the South collapsed in the face of UN intervention, and by 1952 the US-backed government in Seoul had pushed its control to the Yalu and Tumen Rivers, which itself then sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the corporatist dictatorship into China and the USSR.

For those who fled to the USSR, they saw the Korean settlements along the Syr Darya as their best opportunity for settling down, and so many made the journey across half of Asia. Stalin did his best to discourage this, but in 1953 when he died and Khrushchev took power, he sought to restructure the internal order of the USSR and bring the Koreans into the fold by both allowing the resettlement as well as going a step further in creating the Korean Soviet Socialist Republic, formally allowing self-governance for the Koreans of the region and letting the region's simmering tensions die down. Bolstered by refugees from "The Homeland" and with a new degree of internal rule, the Goryeoin were allowed to find a degree of prosperity and cultural flourishing inasmuch as the Soviet system would allow. Naturally, the Kazakh SSR from which the Korean SSR was created wasn't super happy about the matter, much less for the fact that it had now lost its access to the Syr Darya and much of the Aral Sea, but that would become its own problem before long.

In the second period of the USSR, everything which came after Stalin, the Korean SSR had already become a productive member of the USSR as a whole for its rice production, which itself was already water-intensive, but matters began to grow worse as plans along both the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya to the south began to divert water from the Aral Sea. Soviet "experts" varyingly considered it a necessary loss or an active correction of "nature's mistake", and while popular in Russia proper the Goryeoin were outraged at the proposal while the government of the KSSR did everything it could to try and slow the project as much as possible. True to form, the warnings of disaster would prove prescient and as the Aral Sea turned into the Aralkum, fishing industries were devastated. Seeing that the Uzbek SSR was far more cooperative with Moscow, the Korean SSR implemented a new plan to construct a dam to impound the northern extension of the receding sea. The Alexandra Kim Aerim Dam, hich still exists, was thankfully highly successful in this regard.

The fortunes of the KSSR declined with that of the Soviet Union more broadly. The projects along the Syr Darya stalled and stagnated, and while they provided employment the local economy remained stagnant well throughout the 1980s, worsened by the politics of Glasnost and Perestroika which just allowed the long-simmering anger and unhappiness most Goryeoin felt towards the USSR to be stated publicly. Notably, the Korean ASSR was the only one in Central Asia to oppose the New Union Treaty both before and after the August Coup of 1991. Notably it had declared independence on 18 February 1991, and shortly after began to form a bloc with the neighboring Karakalpakstan that was attempting to secede from both the USSR and the Uzbek SSR, both of which gained further support in this endeavor after the failure of the August Coup. Uzbekistan seceded in August of 1991, and by December of 1991 the USSR as a whole had ceased to exist. The problems, though, had only just begun.

Uzbekistan had not recognize the secession of Karakalpakstan, and sought to re-integrate it as an Autonomous Republic within Uzbekistan proper, but Karakalpakstan and Kijilkum began to close ranks. Although separated by culture, language, and economics, they shared a similar sentiment over the demise of the Aral Sea, and from that an opposition to surrounding governments and the Soviet system. Uzbekistan launched a military invasion in January of 1992, but with cooperation from Kijilkum the Karakalpaks began to push back against the Uzbeks. The matter only ended when tensions between Uzbekistan and the states of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan over the Fergana Valley threatened to drag Uzbekistan into a war in its east, and with negotiation from Moscow and Washington (mostly Washington) Karakalpakstan was formally declared independent from Uzbekistan, giving Kijilkum its only friend in the region and keeping Central Asia from exploding the way that Russia itself seemed to be.

That didn't really mean much in practice. Kijilkum was now one of only four doubly-landlocked states in the world along with Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan, and Liechtenstein, and even Liechtenstein had the Rhine. Considerations like "trade" and "international relations" meant next to nothing for it, focused primarily on the matter of internal development and limited trade with its neighbors. The biggest issue that Kijilkum had to deal with, ultimately, was Uzbekistan. Unique among the flotilla of states sandwiched between Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and Iran, Uzbekistan was uniquely positioned to assert itself over its neighbors by control of water resources, something that determined life and death for states in Central Asia. And yet even then, Kijilkum and Karakalpakstan, both states with bad relations with Uzbekistan, their determination to not find themselves under Uzbekistan's thumb led them to seek whatever degree of assistance they could from the United States, as isolated as they were from what was by then the world's only superpower.

Being the two states with the most coastline along the former Aral Sea, Kijilkum and Karakalpakstan have declared that an effort at restoring the Aral Sea to be "a matter of existential importance" to their nations and the region, and in the years since independence have been attempting to increase the amount of water discharged from the Amu and Syr Darya Rivers. But of course, the matter remains that these rivers both flow through Uzbekistan first, and as Uzbekistan controls most of what later flows into the two states, the actual success has been limited by Uzbekistan's refusal to reduce cotton production, which even in the 2020s makes up a sizeable portion of its economy. Of course, Uzbekistan's own troubles then come from the fact that the sources of those rivers are in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and the more that Uzbekistan finds itself unable to project power over its neighbors the more that Kijilkum pushes them to further align themselves into an anti-Uzbekistan bloc in Central Asia, which in recent years is only more prescient than ever.

The outbreak of full-scale hostilities between Russia and Ukraine and the disastrous consequences for the former have left Russia increasingly unable to prop up its allies in their territorial and political disputes, shown most clearly when in 2023 Azerbaijan fully reconquered Nagorno-Karabakh after nearly three decades of Armenian control. This bodes poorly for other entities like Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, but for Uzbekistan in particular is particularly troublesome especially as Kazakhstan also grows dissonant from Moscow's will. Emboldened by these events, Kijilo has only become more brazen in efforts to coordinate Nukus, Dushanbe, and Bishkek into an effort to encircle Uzbekistan and force it to submit to their demands, primarily over water usage and in some cases territorial claims. Moscow for its part has threatened "swift and decisive action" if Kijilkum continues to put pressure on Tashkent, but with the "three-day campaign" in Ukraine stretching for more than a year and a half, it's understandable why it would feel unconcerned by such a threat.

Kijilkum is an unusual entity in a lot of ways, but the Goryeoin have done their best to make do with what they can. Cities in Kijilkum have come to bear distinctive hallmarks of Korean architecture, design, culture, and history, and Goryeomal has become so distinct as a dialect some would consider it a separate language from Korean itself. Goryeoin likewise increasingly consider themselves a distinctive people unto themselves, and even if the Republic of Korea has democratized and established relations with Kijilkum, including a "return program" for Goryeoin who want to return to Korea, many see it as counterproductive. After most of a century spent in the desert, building a nation with sweat and blood, some have developed "national stockholm syndrome" to where they are loathe to simply abandon Kijilkum after so much was done to make it their new home, not least for the fact that many Goryeoin find it difficult to integrate into Korea proper and often report discrimination from the Hangugin.

With a population numbering some 600,000 people, Kijilkum is definitively the least populous and smallest state of Central Asia, even moreso than Karakalpakstan. However many attribute the influence and power which the state wields to a certain "fervor" among the Goryeoin, an attitude among people who were forced into a bad situation but became resolute in their desire to make it work regardless. And there have been some results. In 2015, heavy snowmelt forced a restoration of the "eastern lobe" of the Aral Sea, which has since been maintained by discharge from Karakalpakstan and Kijilkum managing a slow reduction of water-intensive crop usage. Without cooperation from Uzbekistan, the most populous and strongest of the Central Asian states, a full restoration is entirely unlikely, but that the sea still "exists" in some capacity is the pride of many Goryeoin, who see the effort as one to correct the mistakes of the past, and to fully move beyond the damage that the USSR did to both them and the land they now inhabit.

Description

Anyone who knows Stalin's reign as the uncrowned Tsar knows that the man was all too happy to make merry with the demographics of the Soviet Union, at times relocating entire people-groups to suit his own ends. Germans in the USSR were expelled after WWII, the Kalmyks were forcibly deported in 1943 and only returned 10 years later, but the first large-scale relocation of people in the Soviet Union came in 1937, well ahead of the outbreak of World War II in Europe, and focused on the Korean people. In that time, many Koreans had relocated to the Soviet Far East well before the downfall of the Russian Empire, and had even seen the creation of a Korean raion in Posyet. But as tensions loomed with Japan's expansionist policy in Central Asia, Stalin and his NKVD looked at Soviet Koreans with suspicion, seeing them as having the potential to be infiltrated by Japanese spies. For this reason, and in pursuit of Stalin's efforts to Russify the Soviet frontiers, the Koreans were deported en masse to Central Asia.

The deported were sent to Central Asia en masse, often with nothing but livestock and the clothes on their back. Construction of houses stagnated and the Koreans were forced to make do. The whole process was shockingly slapdash, prompted at least in part by the Kazakh Famine of 1931-33 which drove some of Stalin's motivation to make up for labor shortages in the area. In the end the Korean population was primarily resettled along the banks of the Syr Darya River, which Stalin sought to make an agricultural center of production. For the Koreans, this meant rice, and within a few years the river was surrounded by rice fields fed by canals dug by the labor armies. What little internal migration saw most Kazakhs and Uzbeks move out of the region, unwilling to deal with the Koreans being there if Moscow demanded it. The sum total was a dramatic movement of demographics, where the Turkic cultures who had dominated in the region prior were almost wholly displaced by the Korean population.

A persistent effort was quickly implemented to try and crush Korean identity, but despite it all an undercurrent of common unity brought them together, reflected in the adoption of the adjective Goryeoin (literally "people from Korea") to describe themselves. Even if state publications were in Russian and use of Korean was banned, privately many maintained their old culture and customs as best they could in the harsh desert climate of the Kyzylkum, even under the watchful eye of Stalin's regime. Desert cities which had been centers of trade for years were soon festooned with trappings of Korean design and architecture where it could be gotten away with, and cities like Kyzylorda became Kijilo, with Korean authorities attempting to accommodate the Korean people by adopting unofficial Korean names using trisyllabic Koreanized versions of extant names left from the Turkic cultures, which prompted the emergence of a dialect emerging primarily from the Hamgyŏng dialect that became known as Goryeomal.

Matters remained tense in the region well after WWII and the end of Japan as a possible hostile force. What took its place was the problem of Korea itself, divided between a Soviet north and an American south. For the 5 years between 1945 and 1950, Stalin debated deporting the Koreans from Central Asia to the newly-organized "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", and the possibility of moving Uzbeks and Kazakhs back into the region. Indeed, some Goryeoin repatriated to Korea itself, but found it difficult to reacclimate to Korea after the years in Central Asia, especially with the unprecedented degree of autocracy that was emerging in North Korea. Not that it had much time to set in. In the course of just two years from 1950 to 1952, a war launched by the North to conquer the South collapsed in the face of UN intervention, and by 1952 the US-backed government in Seoul had pushed its control to the Yalu and Tumen Rivers, which itself then sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the corporatist dictatorship into China and the USSR.

For those who fled to the USSR, they saw the Korean settlements along the Syr Darya as their best opportunity for settling down, and so many made the journey across half of Asia. Stalin did his best to discourage this, but in 1953 when he died and Khrushchev took power, he sought to restructure the internal order of the USSR and bring the Koreans into the fold by both allowing the resettlement as well as going a step further in creating the Korean Soviet Socialist Republic, formally allowing self-governance for the Koreans of the region and letting the region's simmering tensions die down. Bolstered by refugees from "The Homeland" and with a new degree of internal rule, the Goryeoin were allowed to find a degree of prosperity and cultural flourishing inasmuch as the Soviet system would allow. Naturally, the Kazakh SSR from which the Korean SSR was created wasn't super happy about the matter, much less for the fact that it had now lost its access to the Syr Darya and much of the Aral Sea, but that would become its own problem before long.

In the second period of the USSR, everything which came after Stalin, the Korean SSR had already become a productive member of the USSR as a whole for its rice production, which itself was already water-intensive, but matters began to grow worse as plans along both the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya to the south began to divert water from the Aral Sea. Soviet "experts" varyingly considered it a necessary loss or an active correction of "nature's mistake", and while popular in Russia proper the Goryeoin were outraged at the proposal while the government of the KSSR did everything it could to try and slow the project as much as possible. True to form, the warnings of disaster would prove prescient and as the Aral Sea turned into the Aralkum, fishing industries were devastated. Seeing that the Uzbek SSR was far more cooperative with Moscow, the Korean SSR implemented a new plan to construct a dam to impound the northern extension of the receding sea. The Alexandra Kim Aerim Dam, hich still exists, was thankfully highly successful in this regard.

The fortunes of the KSSR declined with that of the Soviet Union more broadly. The projects along the Syr Darya stalled and stagnated, and while they provided employment the local economy remained stagnant well throughout the 1980s, worsened by the politics of Glasnost and Perestroika which just allowed the long-simmering anger and unhappiness most Goryeoin felt towards the USSR to be stated publicly. Notably, the Korean ASSR was the only one in Central Asia to oppose the New Union Treaty both before and after the August Coup of 1991. Notably it had declared independence on 18 February 1991, and shortly after began to form a bloc with the neighboring Karakalpakstan that was attempting to secede from both the USSR and the Uzbek SSR, both of which gained further support in this endeavor after the failure of the August Coup. Uzbekistan seceded in August of 1991, and by December of 1991 the USSR as a whole had ceased to exist. The problems, though, had only just begun.

Uzbekistan had not recognize the secession of Karakalpakstan, and sought to re-integrate it as an Autonomous Republic within Uzbekistan proper, but Karakalpakstan and Kijilkum began to close ranks. Although separated by culture, language, and economics, they shared a similar sentiment over the demise of the Aral Sea, and from that an opposition to surrounding governments and the Soviet system. Uzbekistan launched a military invasion in January of 1992, but with cooperation from Kijilkum the Karakalpaks began to push back against the Uzbeks. The matter only ended when tensions between Uzbekistan and the states of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan over the Fergana Valley threatened to drag Uzbekistan into a war in its east, and with negotiation from Moscow and Washington (mostly Washington) Karakalpakstan was formally declared independent from Uzbekistan, giving Kijilkum its only friend in the region and keeping Central Asia from exploding the way that Russia itself seemed to be.

That didn't really mean much in practice. Kijilkum was now one of only four doubly-landlocked states in the world along with Karakalpakstan, Uzbekistan, and Liechtenstein, and even Liechtenstein had the Rhine. Considerations like "trade" and "international relations" meant next to nothing for it, focused primarily on the matter of internal development and limited trade with its neighbors. The biggest issue that Kijilkum had to deal with, ultimately, was Uzbekistan. Unique among the flotilla of states sandwiched between Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and Iran, Uzbekistan was uniquely positioned to assert itself over its neighbors by control of water resources, something that determined life and death for states in Central Asia. And yet even then, Kijilkum and Karakalpakstan, both states with bad relations with Uzbekistan, their determination to not find themselves under Uzbekistan's thumb led them to seek whatever degree of assistance they could from the United States, as isolated as they were from what was by then the world's only superpower.

Being the two states with the most coastline along the former Aral Sea, Kijilkum and Karakalpakstan have declared that an effort at restoring the Aral Sea to be "a matter of existential importance" to their nations and the region, and in the years since independence have been attempting to increase the amount of water discharged from the Amu and Syr Darya Rivers. But of course, the matter remains that these rivers both flow through Uzbekistan first, and as Uzbekistan controls most of what later flows into the two states, the actual success has been limited by Uzbekistan's refusal to reduce cotton production, which even in the 2020s makes up a sizeable portion of its economy. Of course, Uzbekistan's own troubles then come from the fact that the sources of those rivers are in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and the more that Uzbekistan finds itself unable to project power over its neighbors the more that Kijilkum pushes them to further align themselves into an anti-Uzbekistan bloc in Central Asia, which in recent years is only more prescient than ever.

The outbreak of full-scale hostilities between Russia and Ukraine and the disastrous consequences for the former have left Russia increasingly unable to prop up its allies in their territorial and political disputes, shown most clearly when in 2023 Azerbaijan fully reconquered Nagorno-Karabakh after nearly three decades of Armenian control. This bodes poorly for other entities like Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, but for Uzbekistan in particular is particularly troublesome especially as Kazakhstan also grows dissonant from Moscow's will. Emboldened by these events, Kijilo has only become more brazen in efforts to coordinate Nukus, Dushanbe, and Bishkek into an effort to encircle Uzbekistan and force it to submit to their demands, primarily over water usage and in some cases territorial claims. Moscow for its part has threatened "swift and decisive action" if Kijilkum continues to put pressure on Tashkent, but with the "three-day campaign" in Ukraine stretching for more than a year and a half, it's understandable why it would feel unconcerned by such a threat.

Kijilkum is an unusual entity in a lot of ways, but the Goryeoin have done their best to make do with what they can. Cities in Kijilkum have come to bear distinctive hallmarks of Korean architecture, design, culture, and history, and Goryeomal has become so distinct as a dialect some would consider it a separate language from Korean itself. Goryeoin likewise increasingly consider themselves a distinctive people unto themselves, and even if the Republic of Korea has democratized and established relations with Kijilkum, including a "return program" for Goryeoin who want to return to Korea, many see it as counterproductive. After most of a century spent in the desert, building a nation with sweat and blood, some have developed "national stockholm syndrome" to where they are loathe to simply abandon Kijilkum after so much was done to make it their new home, not least for the fact that many Goryeoin find it difficult to integrate into Korea proper and often report discrimination from the Hangugin.

With a population numbering some 600,000 people, Kijilkum is definitively the least populous and smallest state of Central Asia, even moreso than Karakalpakstan. However many attribute the influence and power which the state wields to a certain "fervor" among the Goryeoin, an attitude among people who were forced into a bad situation but became resolute in their desire to make it work regardless. And there have been some results. In 2015, heavy snowmelt forced a restoration of the "eastern lobe" of the Aral Sea, which has since been maintained by discharge from Karakalpakstan and Kijilkum managing a slow reduction of water-intensive crop usage. Without cooperation from Uzbekistan, the most populous and strongest of the Central Asian states, a full restoration is entirely unlikely, but that the sea still "exists" in some capacity is the pride of many Goryeoin, who see the effort as one to correct the mistakes of the past, and to fully move beyond the damage that the USSR did to both them and the land they now inhabit.