In academic circles, it’s well-known that there have been North Korean workers in the Russian Far East since the 1960s – it was then that the first logging camps appeared in the wilderness of the Siberian forests.

However, what’s less well known is that the 1967-1991 logging project had a precedent: in 1946-1950 and then again in 1957-1964 large numbers of North Korean workers were shipped to the Soviet Far East.

The story of these workers has begun to garner academic interest, ever since a number of Russian historians (mostly those working in smaller universities and colleges in the Far