The current article deals with a forgotten part of the intellectual genealogy of ‘colonial exploitation theory’ (sut’allon) in Korea – namely with the contribution made by Soviet-Korean activists and researchers of the 1920s and 1930s in formulating this theory in its application to the Korean realities. Initially, this theory was built by Lenin in 1916 on the basis of the pre-existing liberal critiques of imperialism and colonialism. According to Lenin, imperialist colonialism aimed at acquisition of resource extraction bases and captive markets which, in turn, could help to buy off the ‘labour aristocracy’ of the imperialist metropoles via sharing the ‘colonial super-profits’ with it. Following this logic, such diasporic Soviet-Korean revolutionaries as Pak Chinsun or Nam Manch’un described in the 1920s Japanese colonialism in Korea as a process of exploiting the colony by extracting cheap rice and minerals from there while dumping Japanese consumer goods on the captive colonial market. In the 1930s, Valentin Kim-Serebryakov built further on this analysis, describing Japanese domination of Korean banking and industry as well as geopolitical considerations-driven industrialization in the northern parts of Korea. This theory, pioneered in Korea proper by such Communist economists as Pae Sŏngnyong in the 1920s, was further systemized by Moscow-educated Kim Seyong and his collaborator, YiYŏsŏng, in the 1930s on the vast statistical material. It retained a status of orthodoxy even in anti-communist South Korea until the early 1990s. However, the Leninist roots of this theory were comfortably forgotten and the contributions of Soviet-Korean revolutionaries were too erased from South (and North) Korean public memory.