ABSTRACT
Slezkine’s seminal article (1994a) employed the analogy of a building (‘the Communal Apartment’) to explicate the core logic of the Soviet Union’s nationality policy. In a similar vein, Grant’s In the Soviet House of Culture (1995) illustrates how the Soviet Union pursued its policy of enlightening ‘backward’ groups of people by incorporating various nationalities into a single, socialist ‘house of culture’. The metaphor of a house has also been used by ordinary citizens to describe the Soviet Union (and, in more recent years, Russia): such as the catchphrase ‘Rossiia – nash obshchii dom’ (‘Russia – our common house’). Given the strong symbolic meaning of the word ‘house’ to describe a sense of communality, it is not surprising that the two-storey building near city center of Ussuriisk was widely referred to as Koreiskii Dom (‘Korean House’, hereafter Koreiskii Dom without italicization, see Figure 5.1). The official owner of this building is an ethnic Korean organization called ‘The Fund for Rehabilitation of Koreans in Primorskii Krai’ (Vozrozhdenie, Fond Primorskikh Koreitsev Kraevoi, hereafter ‘the Fund’). 1 As discussed in earlier chapters, the social world of Koreans in the RFE is centered on their individual households, with wider social interactions based on inter-household exchange via kinship and alliance networks. In this context, Koreiskii Dom is a newly created public space that provides Koreans with a social arena beyond their households.
