The paper is devoted to the field work carried out by outstanding psychologist Alexander R. Luria and his team in isolated villages in Uzbekistan and mountain Kyrgyzstan (1931- 1932) and its place in cross-cultural studies. Many people of these places never went out of own villages. That time, in the Western social science racist theories that interpreted the differences in ways of thought in terms of biology were popular. These theories were based on application of "standard intellectual tests" to illiterate peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America. A. Luria has criticized these "standard intellectual tests", and results of his survey gave strong proof of ties between level of social conditions and peculiarities of mental processes but not between race and mind. Long before the famous Western works on comparative psychology and cultural anthropology (J. S. Bruner, M. Cole, P.M. Greenfield, J. Gay, C. Levi-Strauss, etc.) published in 1950-1970-s, the A. Luria' research expedition has anticipated the main directions and results of future crosscultural studies.

The process of resettlement in 1937 and adaptation to new places in Central Asia had a dramatic character for Koreans. However, the Koryŏ saram’s history cannot be reduced to a plethora of sad pages. Koreans could and have achieved amazing results in many spheres and have obtained high status in the USSR and later, in Post-Soviet Central Asia. Among them there were/there are the Heroes of Socialist Labor (the highest non-military title in the USSR), Vice-Prime Minister, ministers and vice-ministers, senators, members of National parliament, winners of Olympic Games and World championships, rectors of universities, outstanding scholars and businessmen, etc. Koryŏ saram have lived in different political and economic systems, and in various ethnic environments. Their identity is composed of a multicultural character which includes elements of traditional Korean, Central Asian, Russian, Soviet and Western cultures. This has led to the flexible behavioral models. After collapse of the USSR, Koreans have faced with new challenges that imply new attitudes to the strategies of Koreans and Korean organizations. This article is based on the ideas that have been published and presented at various conferences and in the various works in the 1990s and the early 2000s. However, in the present article these ideas are generalized taking into consideration the changes over the past years.