LIFE HAS NOT always been easy for ethnic Koreans in Kazakhstan. In the 1930s, hundreds of thousands of them from across the Soviet Union were deported to central Asia since Stalin believed they were spying for Japan. As a result, Koreans were treated with suspicion by the Kremlin, and their cultural, linguistic and religious rights were brutally suppressed.
But with the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 the 100,000 or so ethnic Koreans in Kazakhstan, known as Koryo-sarams, witnessed a dramatic turnaround in their social and economic fortunes and have helped to form the basis for the development of strong links between Kazakhstan and South Korea.
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