B00BY4HXME EBOK (2 page)

As we shall see, the North Korean elite are neither zealous ideologues nor irrational sadistic killers—even though they occasionally look like (and indeed want to look like) both of these. As a matter of fact, some of these people might be quite nice human beings who, from time to time, feel sorry about the suffering that their policies have inflicted upon their people. But given the present situation, they simply do not see how else they can stay in control and protect not only their property (quite meager by current international standards) but, more importantly, their freedom to act and their lives (as well as the freedom and lives of their loved ones). Their approach is often described as paranoid, but I will argue that there may be no alternative to the current North Korean policies if judged from the prospects of the regime’s survival, which is the supreme goal of North Korean policy makers. Their current survival strategy might inflict considerable suffering on ordinary people, make genuine economic growth
impossible, and generate significant international security risks. However, this strategy also ensures that a small hereditary elite keeps enjoying power and (moderate) luxury. And, sadly, there is no alternative that would be acceptable to the decision makers.

It has often been suggested that Chinese-style, market-oriented reforms are the solution to the North Korean problem. Some people believe that North Korean decision makers can be lured or blackmailed into starting reforms, while others hope that they will finally come to their senses and do the right thing for their people as long as the outside world stops meddling in their affairs. However, as we shall see, there is a sound logic behind the stubborn unwillingness among the North’s decision makers to follow the Chinese way. Their fears might be exaggerated, to be sure, but they are by no means unfounded.

This book might appear to be quite pessimistic. Even though I argue that there are ways to mitigate the problems and control the damage, it seems that there are no silver bullets or magic potions that can solve the North Korean problem instantly, easily, and painlessly.

Just as the book was going to print a new leadership has begun to emerge in North Korea. As one might expect, the emergence of this new leadership has been accompanied by expectations and hopes for a better future for North Korea. As we will see, however, the country’s past gives little ground for optimism, but it is not impossible that the plump and jolly-looking young new Kim may well seek to break with the past and reform the country. He is still surrounded by the advisers and senior lieutenants of his father, but he might not agree with the logic of their survival strategy. There is a distinct possibility that he will attempt to improve the situation. Such attempts might even succeed, but it is also possible that the old guard is right, and that tampering with the system will aggravate the situation and lead to an uncontrollable implosion of the regime—a nightmarish scenario for North Korea’s many neighbors.

At any rate, we might be on the brink of some serious changes, and even a transformation in North Korea. Taking into account the earlier experiences and sad present of this country, one should not expect a miracle. On the contrary, if past precedent is anything to go by, changes are likely to be
painful and dangerous, even if they remain preferable to the current sorry state of affairs.

Indeed, it might be that the worst is still yet to come—both for the North Koreans and outsiders. Hungarians are known to say: “What is worse than Communism? The things which come after it.” It is not impossible that one day, North Koreans will recycle this joke, saying, “What is worse than the Kim family regime? The things that come after it.” We do not know the final outcome, but it seems that the eventual transformation of North Korea is not going to be easy or unproblematic. I discuss some potential scenarios at the end of the book, and readers will see that some of these solutions might be more palatable than others. However, all are less than perfect.

The North Korean regime might be annoying and occasionally dangerous for the outside world—largely thanks to its nuclear brinkmanship and proliferation threats—but its major victims are the North Koreans themselves, the vast majority of some 24 million people who inhabit this unlucky country. They are the primary victims of the regime, but also victims of history. North Korean rulers do what they are doing not because they are “evil” or driven by some delusionary ideologies, but rather because they sincerely believe that their current policy has no alternatives, and that any other policy choice will bring ruin to them and their families. Unfortunately, their assumption and worries might be well founded, so the concerns of the “top ten thousand people” (as well as a million or two of their henchmen, big and small) are understandable. Nonetheless, it does not bring any relief to the vast majority of the North Korean population whose lives have been—and continue to be—ruined by the regime.

The transcription of Korean personal names has always been a challenge. The book generally follows the McCune-Reischauer system, but in the case of people whose names are frequently spelled differently in the mass media, the established spelling is used instead (this being the case with Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Nam, and other members of North Korea’s top leadership).

One cannot understand modern North Korea without having a look at its past. North Korea never experienced “reform,” that is, a government-initiated and government-controlled chain of systematic changes. But this by no means implies that North Korea has not changed. The North Korea of Kim Jong Il’s era was dramatically different from the North Korea of the 1953–1994 period. Nonetheless, what happened under Kim Il Sung has determined many of the features of modern North Korean society.

The North Korea of the Kim Il Sung era was a very peculiar place indeed—arguably, one of the most idiosyncratic places in the entire world. It was established as a Soviet client state but with a great deal of support, enthusiasm, and hope. Soon, it evolved into the archetypal National Stalinist regime, and in this form it managed to survive all outside challenges and exist without much change until the early 1990s. It was a time when the Kim family regime grew and matured, and it was also a time when it learned how to survive and manipulate an utterly hostile environment.

On some autumn September day of 1945 (the exact date is still in dispute, but it seems to be the 19th of September) a group of Asian-looking men, all clad in Soviet military uniform, disembarked from the Soviet steamer
Pugachev
at the Korean port city of Wonsan, then recently taken over by
the Soviet forces. Among the arrivals there was a slightly stout man in his early 30s, with the insignia of a Soviet Army captain. To his comrades he was known as Kim Il Sung, commander of the 1st (Korean) battalion of the 88th independent brigade of the Soviet Army.

This young Soviet captain was soon to become the supreme leader of the emerging North Korean state, but in 1945 he came back home after almost two decades spent overseas. In the 1930s Kim Il Sung was a guerrilla field commander in Northeastern China, and in the early 1940s he became a battalion commander in the 88th Brigade of the Soviet Army. Nonetheless, he was a native of the city of Pyongyang, which in late August became the headquarters of the Soviet forces in Korea.
¹

By late August 1945, after a short, intense, and successful military campaign, the Soviet Army found itself in full control of the northern part of the Korean peninsula. Had the Soviet generals only wished, they would have probably taken the southern part as well, but at that stage Moscow was still inclined to respect the agreements made with Washington. One such agreement envisioned a provisional division of the Korean peninsula into two zones of occupation. It took half an hour of deliberation by two US colonels (one of whom eventually became a US secretary of state) to draw what they saw as the provisional demarcation line between the Soviet and US zones of operations. Neatly divided by the 38th parallel, the two zones were almost equal in territory, but vastly different in population size and industrial potential: the South had twice as many people, but its industry was seriously underdeveloped (essentially, in the pre-independence days, southern Korea was an agricultural backwater).
²

When the Soviets found themselves in control of northern Korea, they had only a dim understanding of the country’s political and social realities. Suffice to say that when the Soviet troops entered Korea in August 1945, they had no Korean-speaking interpreters, since they were prepared to fight the Japanese army and hence all their interpreters spoke Japanese. Only in late August did the first Korean-speaking officers (almost exclusively Soviet citizens of Korean extraction) arrive in the country.

Newly declassified Soviet documents seem to indicate that until early 1946, Moscow had no clear-cut plans about the future of Korea. However,
the wartime alliance between the United States and Soviet Union proved to be short-lived, with the Cold War setting in. In this new era of hostile relations between the superpowers, neither side was willing to compromise. So by early 1946 the Soviet Union was increasingly inclined to establish a friendly and controllable regime in its own zone of occupation (arguably, the United States had similar plans in regard to the southern part of the peninsula). Under the circumstances of the era, such a regime could only be Communist. But there was one problem: there were no (well, almost no) Communists inside North Korea.

The native Korean Communist movement emerged in the early 1920s, and Marxism was much in vogue among the Korean intellectuals of the colonial era. Nonetheless, due to the harshness of the Japanese colonial regime, a majority of the prominent Korean Communists in 1945 operated outside the country. Those few Communists who in 1945
could
be found in Korea proper, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly in Seoul, outside of the Soviet zone. Therefore, from late 1945, Soviet military headquarters began to bring the Communist activists to North Korea from elsewhere. Some of them were Soviet officials and technical experts of Korean extraction who were dispatched to North Korea by Moscow; others came from China, where a large number of ethnic Koreans were active in the Chinese Communist Party since the 1920s. A third group consisted of those Communist activists who fled the US-controlled South, where in 1945–1946 the Communist movement experienced a short-lived boom, only to be driven underground and suppressed in the subsequent years. There were also the people who came back with Kim Il Sung, the former guerrillas who spent the war years in the Soviet Union.
³

It was the latter group that would have by far the greatest impact on Korea’s future, but initially it appeared to be the least significant. Those former guerrillas were survivors of a heroic but small-scale and ultimately futile armed resistance to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s. After the resistance collapsed around 1940, the survivors fled to the Soviet Union, where they were enlisted into the Soviet Army and retrained for a future war against Japan. Ironically, the victory against Japan was so swift that these people could not directly participate in the last decisive
battle with the Japanese empire. Nonetheless, even after the sudden end of the hostilities, the Soviet military authorities found a good use for these men (and few women). The Chinese and Korean ex-guerrillas were sent home on the assumption that they would be useful advisers and intermediaries serving the Soviet occupation forces.

Kim Il Sung was one of these former guerrillas. Efforts of North Korean propaganda-mongers and the power of hindsight have combined to ensure that historians tend to exaggerate his political significance in the years prior to 1945. Nonetheless, by the time of Korea’s liberation, Kim Il Sung was probably already seen as an important leader—in spite of his young age and, admittedly, somewhat unheroic looks (a participant of the 1945 events described to the present author his first impression of the would-be Sun of the Nation and Ever-Victorious Generalissimo in less than flattering terms: “He reminded me of a fat delivery boy from a neighborhood Chinese food stall”).

The events of 1945–1946 are a convoluted story, but to simplify it a bit we can say that Kim Il Sung was finally chosen by the Soviet military as the person to head the Communist regime that was to be built in North Korea. The reasons behind this decision may never be known with complete certainty, but Kim Il Sung seemingly had a combination of biographical and personal traits that made him seem a perfect choice to Soviet officials. He was a reasonably good speaker of Russian and his military exploits, though grossly exaggerated by propaganda of later days, were nonetheless real and known to many Koreans. It also helped that Kim was a native of North Korea and was never related to the crowd of Comintern professional revolutionaries and ideologues whom Stalin despised and distrusted.

Kim Il Sung was born in 1912 (on the day the
Titanic
sank, April 15) under the name Kim S
ǒ
ng-ju—he adopted the nom de guerre Kim Il Sung much later, in the 1930s. In their attempts to create a perfect biography for the Ever-Victorious Generalissimo, Sun of the Nation, North Korean official historians tried to gloss over some inconvenient facts of his family background and to present him as the son of poor Korean farmers. This is not quite true: like the majority of the first-generation Communist leaders
of East Asia (including, say, Mao Zedong), the future North Korean dictator was born into a moderately affluent family with above-average income as well as access to modern education. Kim’s father, a graduate of a Protestant school, made a modest living through teaching and practicing herbal medicine while remaining a prominent Christian activist.

Kim Il Sung himself graduated from high school—an impressive level of educational attainment for a Korean of his generation (only a small percentage could afford to take their education that far). Most of his childhood was spent in Northeast China, where his family moved in 1920.