Sergey Magay fled Korea for Imperial Russia when he was only a child. But after building a life in the rural hinterlands between Vladivostok and North Korea — working at a fishery, as a secretary and as a school teacher — he fell victim to the forced deportations of the paranoid Stalinist regime. Some 172,000 ethnic Koreans were forcibly relocated from Russia’s Far East in 1937, mostly to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

The family images from Sergey’s life in Tashkent captured the imagination of his grandson, Stanislav. Infused with the carefree atmosphere of perestroika, the images reveal family summers in a home where Soviet and Korean culture lay gently intertwined.