North Korea News Podcast by NK News - How Russian tiger hunters got roped into a plot to kill the North Korean leader

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

In this episode, Professor Andrei Lankov and NK News’ Anton Sokolin discuss the fascinating story of the Yankovskys — a Russian family whose journey took them from Siberian exile to colonial Korea, and ultimately, to the heart of North Korea’s tumultuous 20th-century history. The discussion centers on the family’s time in what became the DPRK […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private-feed uh... Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jaco Zwetser, and this episode is recorded in the NK News studio today on Wednesday, the 2nd of July, 2025. And today we have in the studio two special guests returning to the show.

First we have Professor Andrei Lankov from Gungwan University, and then we have my colleague and friend Anton Sokolin from NK News and today we're here to talk about the tragedy of East Asia in the 20th century, nationalism, war, communism, exile and loss as seen through the remarkable saga of one Russian family, the Jankowskis and this is inspired by Anton's June 20th story. You'll find it on NK News, the improbable tale of the Russian tiger hunters recruited to kill Kim Il-sung. It's a great story with great photographs you'll find it on the website but Ondra you know that I've been fascinated by the Jankowski saga since 2004. It's not a very well-known story but it has been out there but let's get into it.

Thinking about how to approach today's story, I tried to summarize it. This is how it seems to me. It's a family of originally Polish nobles, exiled to Siberia, ends up running a tiger hunting resort in colonial Korea, and later finds itself negotiating with Soviet and American intelligence officers while trying to avoid being imprisoned in a gulag. What do you think? Is that a fair summary?

Andrei, why don't you start off? Well, basically I would say it's a fair summary, but it probably makes them more independent than they really were. I would not say they were negotiating as if they were equal. They were looking for, first of all, ways to survive and also for their own place in the then going political and ideological worldwide struggle. And frankly, I think they, in spite of their Russian origin, they were far definitely, definitely associate themselves with the United States in say the late 1940s.

Then it was much more preferable to them than say Soviet Russia under Joseph Stalin. Okay, Anton, what do you think? Well, I think it is fairly a fair summary, but indeed we need to point out that there was a lot of agenda surrounding the Jankowski story and first of all yes they are of noble descent right they are what we call white Russian emigres. Let's just explain what white Russians is this is not a racial characterization it's also not a drink of choice of the dude in the Coen Brothers movie the big Lebowski is not

that white Russian it's the Russians who were on the side of the Tsar in the Civil War of the late 1910s. Right it's a Russian aristocracy. A bit more complicated because a significant part of them maybe majority of you against the Tsar. Okay but they were anti-communist There was a very broad coalition of everybody who disliked the communists. So you were either red or white? Absolutely. And the white, including everybody from the extreme right, extreme monarchists who were a minority, later the communists tried to make a kind of propaganda statement that most

of the white were dreaming about return of the monarchy. It was not the case. Two modest socialists. Just to remind our listeners, there were two revolutions in 1917 in Russia, right? There was the first bourgeois revolution in February, and then the one that became known to the October revolution. And it's two different cases where the first one addressed specifically

the issue of the inequality, like the representation, right? So that basically bourgeois, even aristocrats, like just Professor Lengov said, they were against the Tsar's rule. And only at a later stage we had the October Revolution where the communists actually took over. So it's a bit different. But regardless of that, Russian emigres, that was essentially people that were fleeing from the Bolsheviks in the first place. And they were against the Communist Party. They didn't really accept the way of life that the Communist Party was professing there. And the Yankovskys were exactly that kind of very typical emigre family that chose quite an exotic place to settle down in.

Because mostly Russian immigrants, they would go where? They would go to the US, for example. They would go to Harbin in Northeastern China. That was a very common destination, because that part of China used to be under Russian control for a certain period of time. Harbin was built by Russian engineers also at a certain point and Shanghai as well. There's a large community of white Russians in Shanghai, some in Japan.

Indeed, but again, I just want to return to the fact that there was a lot of agenda surrounding them. So they were anti-communist. That's first thing. The second thing would be that they did have a certain good relations with the just Japanese authorities back then. It wasn't out of thin air that they materialized in South Korea. There was a connection there. And probably the third thing is their relations with Soviet authorities because, well, some of them fell victim of Soviet propaganda, believed whatever the Communist Party was throwing out there through their propaganda channels.

Some of them returned to Russia and ended up, well, sent to Gulag. Some of them were taken to Gulag. And as we will probably discover today, that one of the main characters of this story, and actually his father and his brother were sent to Gulag. And these memoirs, they were written way later, at a later point. And of course, they were written by the victim of the Gulag system that also carries a certain agenda there.

And to be honest, we are basing this story on multiple accounts, different researchers, but the primary source is Valeriy Yankovsky's memoir. And in that book, he does paint a very black and white picture, whereas his people, which include white aristocrats, nobility, whatever authorities that they were interacting with, as good for colonial authorities. I mean, and everybody else are given either a neutral depiction or they are painted in very dark tones. So we should keep that in mind. So they, yeah, there they were in Eastern, far Eastern Siberia, not too far from Vladivostok

in this area called Sidemy, I believe. There was a peninsula named after them, Yankovsky Peninsula. And fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, they took some of their possessions and people and moved down to an area near Chongjin, to a place called Novena. So tell us a bit more about this Yankovsky compound called Novena, where it was was and what made this isolated compound so distinctive compared to other places that white Russians fled to after the Bolshevik Revolution? Okay, we need to provide a bit of background how they managed to build this sort of a state, right? To give them some certain credit, they were very versatile and they had very good history of surviving in

Siberia, building things in Syria from the scratch, and this experience definitely helped them to settle down in North Korea, in the northern part of Korea at the time. And just a bit of background about their ancestor, right? So like we said, their main ancestor, Mikhail, Mikhail Yankovsky, a Polish aristocrat, participated in an uprising in 1863 against the Russian Emperor, exactly, and was sent to Siberia. According to Valeriy Yankovsky... That's the son of Mikhail. That's the grandson of Mikhail. His grandfather was made to walk all the way, all the distance from basically modern-day Belarus to Siberia.

And after that, the man managed to survive the labor, the hard labor. He was later pardoned by the emperor, and he built a very successful career as a zoologist, as an ornithologist, a scientist, an explorer of the region. He did study the Amur River. He did study birds, and some of them were catalogued for the first time actually by him. Some of them are named after him. And butterflies as well. So it's a big achievement.

And he was also known as Nenuni, right? Four eyes. Four eyes in Korean. There's the local Korean residents that were kind of settlers that moved to Russia called him back there Because of his ability to shoot over his shoulder riding horseback shoot Chinese bandits or Tigers as well and building on that so they had a solid foundation. Thanks to Mikhail When the Bolshevik Revolution came it was a very turbulent period between when the Bolshevik Revolution came it was a very turbulent period between 1917 and 1922 when they actually decided to move and it was because the Bolshevik Revolution

it took some time to move all the way east across Russia it didn't happen overnight exactly and different white Russian armies there were different commanders right there was a General Simonov there was Kolchak they were controlling different parts of the territory, especially in the Far East. But the Bolsheviks were encroaching eastward, and it was a very turbulent period because the American forces, the U.S. and Japan, they sent their intervention forces to sort of prevent the encroachment of the Reds. And in that period, the Yankovsky had to live through it by basically, well, they were basically

shielded by these forces, by their White armies, by the intervention forces. They had decent relations with the occupation forces. But the fall of the White army was inevitable. And at some point, Uri, the son of Mikhail, he made the strategic decision, okay, we are packing stuff up, yeah, closing shop and just moving to Korea. And that's where the story really begins. Right, and we know that they already had contact

with Koreans because there were Koreans living, who had moved across the border into Far East Russia. So they were coming into contact with Korean diaspora communities in Sidemi and so it was not that strange a decision that they chose you know we can't stay in Russia we're gonna move somewhere else we'll move to Korea. Indeed and also considering that they they had decent working relations with Japanese authorities that helped them settle down. Valeriy Yankovsky recounts this story

that back in the day when they were still in Vadyvostok, so it's already the civil war period, 1917, 1922, when they hosted a Japanese student living with them, basically studying Russian, who later rose to be, just conveniently, of course, rose to be a police officer stationed in Chongjin, the very destination where they would end up. And of course given that we can assume, we can deduce certain facts that, all right, they were not going to nowhere, they actually knew what they

were doing. It was very hard to settle down there. There were of course financial difficulties because they needed to tend to themselves. They needed to build all the houses and everything from the scratch. And few years, they were quite difficult, to be honest. And it's quite understandable. But at the same time, they did manage

to build a very successful estate focusing on hunting and deer breeding. This hunting part is very interesting. It's really of note because Michals, you know, pardon, Yuri's sons, Valeri and Arsenij, they would actually take foreign tourists from all over the world, from the U.S., from Sweden, from the U.K., on these so-called Eastern safaris to hunt tigers and you know tigers were becoming scarcity in Korea already at that time and people were ready to pay a good dime to go on that kind of trips and probably

at this point just since we gave you a little bit of an overview what it was like to settle down there we can move to describe their lifestyle, etc. Yes. Now, before they were forced to flee the Bolsheviks, as I said, they were in contact with these Korean migrants. Now, a 1981 short story published in a Korean diaspora newspaper in Kazakhstan, a story that I once translated poorly, features a character named Yurike, a Russian landowner in Seremey, who aligns himself with the Japanese and imposes harsh tenancy fees

and violently represses the local Koreans. It seems very clearly modeled on the character of Yuri Yankovsky. What might such a portrayal tell us about how Korean migrants in the Soviet Union remembered the white Russian presence in the Far East? Curious to hear the rest? Become an NK News subscriber today for the white Russian presence in the Far East. episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast Feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private dash feed.