Introduced to Korea around 1900, the modern idea of the ethno-nation (minjok) developed into one of the most important intellectual and political concepts circulating in the country by the early 1920s. From the nationalists’ viewpoint, the ethno-nation, seen as an unchanging and homogenous entity, was the primary site for individuals’ belonging. The national collectivity was a prerequisite for individuals’ existence. While nationalists had been celebrating a primeval, immutable and rather ahistorical “Korean-ness” since the last precolonial decade (the 1900s), the Marxists—strongly influenced by Otto Bauer’s and Joseph Stalin’s understandings of nation as a product of capitalist modernity—started to question the nationalistic approach to Korean identity as a matter of principle by the late 1920s and early 1930s. There was no full agreement among them on how to understand the history of the Korean ethno-nation. Some of them believed that the Korean ethnic core dated back to the age of the Three Kingdoms (the first century BC to AD 668). Others put heavier emphasis on the role of proto-capitalism and markets in the modern development of national consciousness, tracing this development to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. This article summarizes these debates—between nationalists and Marxists, and also within the Marxist milieu—and links them to Marxist intellectual developments elsewhere. The author argues that the “proto-constructivist” approach articulated by some colonial-age Marxists was an important counterweight to the nationalist nativism of the 1920s and 1930s and, in the end, made a significant—and still largely unappreciated—contribution to the development of scholarship on Korea’s history and culture. Keywords: ethno-nation, nationalism, communism, socialism, Comintern, Korea, Paek Nam’un, Hong Kimun

This article deals with the noted Russian Narodnik revolutionary Nikolai Sudzilovsky-Russel (1850–1930), his views on China and Japan, and the background of those views in the Russian intellectual tradition. Russian revolutionaries tended to share many of the Eurocentric biases of their Westernizer (Zapadniki) mentors and often viewed Asia—East Asia included—as retrograde, Japan being seen as an exception. Russian Narodniks’ positive view of Japan was not unrelated to their belief in the unilineal hierarchy of progress and civilization, in which Japan was seen as topping Russia. Sudzilovsky-Russel’s views originally developed as a continuation of this paradigm. However, his observations of the contemporaneous Chinese revolutionary movement and personal exchanges with Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) showed him the revolutionary potential of China. In the end, he accepted the idea that a political revolution in China would provide an important impulse to the cause of social revolutions in the West. Concurrently, in the dialogue between Russian and Chinese revolutionaries, something akin to a general strategy for radical change on the world’s agricultural periphery was taking shape, anticipating a number of later ideological and political developments in both China and Russia. Sudzilovsky-Russel viewed the tasks facing Russian and Chinese revolutionaries as essentially similar: while catching up with the supposedly advanced societies of the West, both were to bypass the “plutocratic” capitalist stage on their way to an emancipatory, alternative modern future.  Keywords: Narodnik, Nikolai Sudzilovsky-Russel, Sun Yat-sen, socialism, revolution, catch-up modernization, China, Japan, Russia