The Koryo-saram: Uzbekistan's Korean Community
Who the Koryo-saram are: Stalin's 1937 deportation of Koreans to Uzbekistan, the record-breaking kolkhozes, the food they left, and the community today.
The Koreans of Tashkent are not expats. A visitor who hears Russian spoken by someone named Kim, Pak or Tsoi at a bus stop is very likely meeting a family that has lived in Uzbekistan since 1937. They call themselves Koryo-saram. Almost none of them chose to come.
This guide covers how they arrived, what they built on the collective farms around Tashkent, what survives of the language and food, and where a traveller can actually see that history today.
Who are the Koryo-saram?
The name means, roughly, "Koryo people", after the old name for Korea that also gives English its word. It covers the ethnic Koreans of the former Soviet Union, as distinct from South Korean business people posted to Tashkent, who are a separate and much newer group.
Their ancestors crossed from northern Korea into the Russian Far East in the late 19th century, fleeing famine and settling as farmers around Vladivostok and the Posyet district. Many came by way of the Hamgyong region in the north-east of the peninsula. That origin still shows in Koryo-mal, the community's own dialect: the linguist Ross King of the University of British Columbia described it to The Korea Times in 2011 as rooted in north-eastern dialects that levelled out into two main varieties, and as "moribund" even then.
So the first thing to know is that the Korean spoken in Seoul and the Korean once spoken on an Uzbek rice farm are not the same language in practice. Most Koryo-saram today speak Russian at home. Plenty speak Uzbek too. Fewer and fewer speak any Korean at all.
What happened in 1937?
On 21 August 1937 the Soviet government and the Communist Party Central Committee issued resolution No. 1428-326ss, signed by Stalin and Molotov, ordering every Korean out of the Far Eastern border regions. The pretext was espionage for Japan, which had annexed Korea in 1910 and invaded China in July 1937. The Kazakh historian Herman Kim, writing in The Times of Central Asia in May 2026, argues that spying was the excuse rather than the cause, and that planning for a removal went back to the late 1920s.
The operation was quick and thorough. On 29 October 1937 the NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov reported that 124 trains had carried 36,442 families, 171,781 people, to Central Asia. Journeys lasted up to 40 days. People were told little, fed badly and given almost no medical care on the way.
Roughly 74,000 of them ended up in Uzbekistan in October and November 1937. Late autumn is a bad time to arrive anywhere with nothing. The first winter was spent in dugouts, barracks and requisitioned warehouses, short of fuel, clothes and food, and the death rate was highest among small children and the old.
Then the controls. Identity documents were taken away. Historians of the deportation record that in 1945 the Koreans were formally treated as "special settlers", the category used for deported peoples, and when internal passports came back in the late 1940s they were valid only for Central Asia. A Korean graduate from Tashkent could not simply take a job in Moscow. Those limits were relaxed only in the years after Stalin died in 1953.
Uzbekistan now marks 31 August as its remembrance day for victims of repression, and the 1937 deportation sits inside that story alongside the purge of the Uzbek reformers covered in our piece on the Jadid movement and its destruction.
The kolkhoz years: rice, kenaf and record yields
Here's the part of the story that surprises people. Within about a decade of arriving with nothing, Korean collective farms in the Tashkent region were among the most productive in the Soviet Union.
The Koreans had been rice growers in the Far East, and they brought that skill to the irrigated land along the Chirchiq river near Tashkent. They grew rice, kenaf (a fibre crop used for sacking), maize and, inevitably, cotton. The historian Kim Chang Jin, in a two-part 2024 study in the journal Russian Peasant Studies, calls these the "advanced kolkhozes" and notes that the overwhelming majority of them were in Uzbekistan rather than Kazakhstan.
Two names come up again and again.
- Polyarnaya Zvezda (Polar Star), chaired by Kim Pen Hwa (Kim Byung Hwa) from 1940 to 1974. He was made Hero of Socialist Labour twice, in 1948 and 1951, and after his death the farm took his name. A bronze bust stands on the former farm in the Srednechirchik (Orta Chirchiq) district of Tashkent region, and a memorial museum in his name keeps the farm's old photographs.
- Politotdel, chaired by Hwang Man Gim from 1954 to 1985, Hero of Socialist Labour from 1957. The farm ran its own Korean song and dance ensemble, Cheongchun, which performed through the 1970s and 1980s, and in 2019, his centenary year, the mahalla where he lived was named after him.
Across Central Asia, Kim Chang Jin counts 206 Koreans awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour title between 1948 and 1976. The best farms spent their surplus on schools, hospitals, kindergartens, small power plants and clubs.
Should that be read as a success story? Partly. These were still farms inside a system that also produced the forced cotton labour described in our history of Uzbekistan's cotton economy, and the high yields were probably also a way for a distrusted minority to show its loyalty. Our view: both things are true, and the museum photographs of beaming brigades don't tell the second half.
The model didn't outlast perestroika. Kim Chang Jin's verdict is that this "paradise in the desert" was lost between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s, as privatisation broke up the farms and the younger generation moved to Tashkent.
A short timeline
| Year | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Late 19th century | Korean farmers settle in the Russian Far East | Al Jazeera, 2024 |
| 21 Aug 1937 | Resolution 1428-326ss orders the deportation | Times of Central Asia, 2026 |
| Oct to Nov 1937 | About 74,000 Koreans arrive in Uzbekistan | Times of Central Asia, 2026 |
| 1940 | Kim Pen Hwa becomes chairman of Polar Star | Russian Peasant Studies, 2024 |
| 1948 and 1951 | Kim Pen Hwa's two Hero of Socialist Labour titles | Russian Peasant Studies, 2024 |
| 1989 | Last Soviet census counts about 183,000 Koreans in Uzbekistan | 1989 Soviet census |
| 1991 | Association of Korean Cultural Centres of Uzbekistan founded | gov.uz |
| Jul 2017 | Gratitude monument unveiled in Tashkent's Friendship Park | gov.uz |
| 20 Apr 2019 | House of Korean Culture and Art opens in Tashkent | Kun.uz, 2019 |
The food legacy, in brief
The most visible trace of the Koryo-saram for a visitor is on a plate. With no napa cabbage, daikon or sea fish on the steppe, cooks rebuilt their side dishes from carrots, onions, river fish, vinegar and coriander seed. The result was morkovcha, the "Korean carrot" salad now sold in supermarkets across the former USSR, plus cold kuksi noodles and vinegar-cured he.
We've written that story up properly, dish by dish, in the Koryo-saram kitchen guide. The short version: go to the Korean salad row at Chorsu Bazaar in the morning, point at four tubs, and you'll have eaten 1937 history before lunch.
After 1991: language, emigration and the Korean wave
Independence hit the community hard in one specific way. Soviet Koreans were Russian speakers almost to a person, and when Uzbek became the state language, many lost their jobs. Some left for Russia. Others went to South Korea, which became reachable just as the old life ended. Al Jazeera reported in 2024 that at least 80,000 Koryo-saram had moved there.
At the same time South Korean money arrived. Diplomatic and trade ties began in 1992, Daewoo's car plant at Asaka followed in the mid-1990s, and the old diaspora suddenly had something rare: a language connection, however faint, to a big foreign investor. A few families did very well out of it.
How many Koryo-saram live in Uzbekistan now? Nobody publishes a clean recent count. The 1989 census gave about 183,000; The Korea Times used "approximately 200,000" in 2011; other estimates run lower, around 170,000 to 180,000, after two decades of emigration. The 2025 population figures we found (37.5 million people on 1 January 2025) come with no ethnic breakdown. Treat any single figure with suspicion (last checked: October 2026).
The community's main body is the Association of Korean Cultural Centres of Uzbekistan, founded in 1991. According to the government's inter-ethnic relations committee, it has 23 branches, from Tashkent to Karakalpakstan and Khorezm, and has been chaired since 2012 by Viktor Pak, who also sits in parliament. Korean is now taught at 12 universities and 48 schools and lyceums.
And here's the twist. Many of the people learning Korean in Tashkent today aren't Koreans at all. Al Jazeera found that the King Sejong Institute's enrolment had doubled from about 300 to 600 in six years, with roughly 40% of students ethnic Uzbeks, pulled in by K-pop, Korean dramas and the hope of a work visa. So the grandchildren of deportees who lost the language sit in the same classroom as Uzbek teenagers learning it from scratch.
Customs survive better than the language. Families still mark Seollal, the lunar new year, and Chuseok, which Al Jazeera describes as a more sombre occasion in Central Asia than in South Korea.
Where can a traveller see this history?
Honestly, there's no single Koryo-saram museum in central Tashkent, and the sites are scattered. What exists:
- House of Korean Culture and Art, Tashkent. Opened on 20 April 2019 by presidents Mirziyoyev and Moon Jae-in, according to Kun.uz. It has a 478-seat cinema and concert hall, a library, an art gallery and a restaurant. Concerts and film nights are the easiest way in; check its current programme before going.
- The gratitude monument in Friendship Park. Unveiled by the Korean community in July 2017, for the 80th anniversary of the deportation, as thanks to the Uzbeks who took them in.
- The Kim Pen Hwa bust and memorial museum, on the former Polar Star farm in Tashkent region. Opening hours aren't published online, so this is a trip to arrange through a local guide or the Korean cultural association rather than to attempt on spec. It's a natural add-on to the routes in our list of day trips from Tashkent.
- The State Museum in Memory of Victims of Repression, in the memorial park on Amir Temur Street, for the wider 1937 context.
If you go to only one, make it a weekday morning at Chorsu followed by an evening event at the House of Korean Culture. One shows the history as people eat it. The other shows how the community presents itself now. The gap between the two is the most interesting thing about the Koryo-saram, and it's still being worked out, mostly in Russian, by people who will tell you without hesitation that they are from Tashkent.