The year 2017 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the political repercussions of which still reverberate across the globe. The USSR’s implosion in 1991 continues to hold contemporary relevance as well, not least because this super-state arguably represented the last great multinational empire in history. By any criterion, the enormous Soviet state inherited a difficult legacy from its tsarist forebears, but the Soviet empire also had to grapple with the fateful consequences of its own often contradictory and fluctuating policies, whether the mass repression of particular peoples or the more progressive affirmative action practices toward its more than one hundred officially recognized nationalities.
American historian Jon K. Chang’s recent groundbreaking effort, Burnt by the Sun: The Koreans of the Russian Far East,examines the history of one of the Soviet Union’s deported and repressed nationality groups during
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