Additionally , the Soviet government finally began to permit the Sakhalin Koreans to naturalize . However , as many as 10 % continued to refuse both Soviet and North Korean citizenship , and demanded repatriation to South Korea . By 1976 , only 2,000 more of their population had been able to obtain permission to depart from Sakhalin , but that year , the Sakhalin government made a public announcement that people seeking to emigrate to South Korea could simply show up at the Immigration Office to file an application . Within a week , they had received more than 800 such applications , including some from North Korean citizens ; this caused the North Korean embassy to complain to their Soviet counterparts about the new emigration policy . The Soviet authorities in the end chose for unspecified reasons to refuse to issue exit visas to most of those concerned , leading to the unusual case of public demonstrations about the refusals by Korean families . This level of open dissent provoked the authorities to completely reverse their liberalising stance towards the Sakhalin Koreans ; they arrested more than 40 protestors , and in November 1976 deported them , but to North Korea rather than to the South as they desired . Further purges and intimidation of those seeking to emigrate also followed . Through to the early 1980s , locally born Korean youth , increasingly interested in their heritage , were seen as traitors by their Russian neighbours for wanting to know more about their ancestral land and for seeking to emigrate . The nadir of ethnic relations came after the 1983 shooting-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by the Soviet Union
Korean Air Lines Flight 007
Korean Air Lines Flight 007
Sakhalin Koreans