B00BY4HXME EBOK (3 page)

With his good education, Kim Il Sung could have probably opted for a conventional career and become a well-paid clerk, businessman, or educator. He made another choice, however: in the early 1930s he joined the Communist guerillas who fought the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

The North Korean narrative always plays down the Great Leader’s foreign connections, so it remains silent on his decade-long membership in the Chinese Communist Party and his actual position as a junior officer in the essentially Chinese guerrilla force. Instead, the official narrative insists that the Dear Leader created a Korean guerrilla army at the age of 20 (we should not be surprised: if this narrative is to be believed, he became the supreme leader of all Korean Communists at the tender age of 14). Actually, until 1945 Kim Il Sung’s military career was spent entirely under Chinese and/or Soviet command, albeit usually in ethnic Korean units.
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What made young Kim S
ǒ
ng-ju choose the arduous and harsh life of a guerrilla, and what kept him in this dangerous pastime for over a decade? Obviously, he was an idealist, a fighter for (and believer in) a Great Cause—in his case, it was the cause of Communism. However, one should keep in mind how the ideology of Communism was understood in East Asia. While in Europe aspiring Communists were motivated, above all, by the desire to ameliorate social injustices, the East Asian version of Communism had both social and nationalist dimensions. In the 1920s and 1930s, in the era when Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh were young idealists, Communism in East Asia was widely seen as a shortcut to the national revival and modernity, a way not only to solve social problems but also to leapfrog past stages of backwardness and colonial dependency.
In the last years of his life, Kim Il Sung would confess that he was both a Communist and a Nationalist. Frankly, the same could be said about a majority of East Asian Communists of his generation.

Even though initially installed in power by the Soviet military, Kim Il Sung had no desire to be Moscow’s puppet—or, for that matter, anybody’s puppet. In the 1940s the young ex-guerrilla probably still sincerely believed in the cause of international Communism but he, as well as a majority of his supporters, did not want to sacrifice Korea’s national interests in the name of other countries, however progressive or revolutionary these countries said they were. If judged from the Soviet perspective, the Soviet officers in 1945–1946 made a poor choice: they decided to promote a shrewd man who was probably more Nationalist than Communist in his worldview. In due time this made him a serious thorn in the side for the Moscow (and, for that matter, Beijing) diplomats. However, taking into account the situation of late 1940s Korea, had the Soviet officials chosen someone else the eventual outcome would have probably been quite similar. Subsequent events demonstrated that Korean Communist leaders (and, for that matter, other Communist leaders of East Asian countries) made bad puppets—not least because of their deeply ingrained Nationalist convictions. Surprisingly, the leaders’ stubborn adherence to the spirit of national independence was not always good news for their subjects: the post-Stalin version of the Soviet Communism that the East Asian strongmen so decisively refused to emulate in the late 1950s was remarkably softer on the common people than locally grown varieties of this revolutionary doctrine.

However, all these complexities became obvious only later. Whatever were Kim Il Sung’s secret thoughts, between 1945 and 1948 the nascent North Korean regime operated under the complete control of the Soviet supervisors. The Soviet advisers drafted the above-mentioned land reform law and Stalin himself edited the draft of the 1948 North Korean Constitution. The Soviet military police arrested all the major opponents of the emerging Communist regime, who were then sent to prison camps in Siberia—no North Korean penitentiary system existed as yet.

Even the relatively mundane actions of the North Korean government on that stage needed approval from Moscow. The most important speeches to be delivered by the North Korean leaders had to be first pre-read and approved in the Soviet Embassy. For more important decisions, an approval had to be received from higher reaches of authority. The Soviet Politburo, the supreme council of the state, approved the agenda of the North Korean rubber-stamping parliament and even formally “gave permission” to stage a military parade in February 1948, when the establishment of a North Korean army was formally announced.
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My favorite story in this regard occurred in December 1946, when the first elections in the North were being prepared. On December 15 Colonel General Terentii Shtykov, then responsible for the political operations in Korea, discussed the future composition of the North Korean proto-parliament with two other Soviet generals. The Soviet generals (not a single Korean was present) decided that the Assembly would consist of 231 members. They also decided the exact distribution of seats among the parties, the number of women members, and, more broadly, the precise social composition of the legislature. If we have a look at the actual composition of the Assembly, we can see that these instructions were followed with only minor deviations.
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Guided and assisted by the Soviet advisers, between 1946 and 1950 North Korea quickly went through a chain of reforms that were standard for nascent Communist regimes of the era. In the spring of 1946 radical land reform led to the redistribution of land among peasants, while also sending a majority of former landlords fleeing South. Around the same time, all industries were nationalized, even though small independent handicraftsmen would still be tolerated until the late 1950s. In politics the local incarnation of the Leninist Party, known as the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP), began to exercise increasingly thorough control over society.

In spite of the Christian family background of Kim Il Sung and many other Communist leaders, Christians were persecuted with great ferocity. Like landlords, many former entrepreneurs and Christian activists chose to flee South across the badly guarded demarcation line. Nobody bothered to collect exact statistics, but the number of North Koreans who had fled
South between 1945 and 1951 was approximately 1.2 to 1.5 million, or some 10–15 percent of the entire North Korean population. Among other things, this exodus meant that the potential opposition exiled itself, inadvertently making the emerging regime more homogenous.

At first glance the North Korean state of the late 1940s appears to be a nearly perfect specimen of what the cold warriors once described as a “Soviet satellite regime.” But such a view, while not unfounded, is incomplete: North Korea might have been a puppet state, but this does not necessarily mean that the new regime was unpopular and lacked support from below.

In the late 1980s the Marxist and semi-Marxist Left reemerged in South Korea as a political and intellectual force, and soon afterward the nature of the early North Korean regime became a topic of hot (and largely ideology-driven) debate in Seoul intellectual and academic circles. The left-leaning historians and journalists usually present the events of 1945–1950 as a home grown popular revolution that might have been triggered and assisted by the Soviet presence, but generally developed spontaneously and independently. It is not surprising that South Korean leftist historians have demonstrated a remarkable ability to ignore newly published documentary evidence if it shows the true extent of Soviet control and hence undermines their cherished fantasies.

At the same time, the South Korean Right remains strangely obsessed with the desire to prove that Syngman Rhee’s regime in South Korea was the “sole legitimate government of the entire Korean peninsula.” Therefore, the right-leaning historians seem to be unwilling to pay attention to ample evidence for the genuine popularity enjoyed by Kim Il Sung’s government in its early days.
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This argument, being essentially ideological in nature, sometimes turns vitriolic and is likely to continue for years if not decades. Nonetheless, it seems to be based on a false dichotomy, since the events of the late 1940s were
both
a foreign occupation and a popular revolution. The Soviet authorities and the then accepted Communist orthodoxy to a very large extent determined the shape of the emerging North Korean society and its institutions. Nonetheless, the promise of the Communist project generally coincided with what many North Koreans sincerely wanted at the time.
The dream of universal equality and affluence, enforced by the watchful but benevolent state, was difficult to resist—particularly when a blueprint of such a society was presented in the “modern” and “scientific” jargon of Marxism-Leninism and supported by the seemingly impressive success of the Soviet Union. After all, in those days, everybody knew that the USSR made good fighter jets and had the world’s best ballet while almost nobody knew that a few million Soviet farmers had starved to death in the 1930s. So, the government initiatives, even imposed by the Soviet advisers, often met with enthusiastic response from below.

By late 1946 the division of the country had become a fact of life, and in 1948 two Korean states formally came into being: on the 15th of August, the Republic of Korea (ROK) was proclaimed in Seoul, and on the 9th of September, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was declared in Pyongyang. Neither state recognized the other; each government claimed itself to be the only legitimate authority on the entire Korean peninsula. This still remains technically the case now, six decades later.

Sometimes both sides went to slightly comical extremes to emphasize their fictional control over Korea in its entirety. For example, until 1972 Seoul (not Pyongyang!) was constitutionally the capital of the DPRK. Concurrently, the ROK government still appoints governors to the provinces of North Korea. Incidentally, the joint offices of these five governors are located not far from the university where this book was being written—and these offices are bustling with bureaucratic activity every time I visit. Both Korean states claimed—and still claim—that the national unification is their paramount political goal. Nowadays, as we will see below, such claims are increasingly shallow and disingenuous, but back in the late 1940s both Pyongyang and Seoul meant what they said.

Both Right and Left were willing to use force for the unification. The Seoul government, however, was engaging in bellicose rhetoric without doing much of substance to prepare for war. Meanwhile, the North Korean
leadership kept petitioning Moscow for permission to invade the South and “liberate” its allegedly long-suffering population from the yoke of the US imperialists and their puppets. Kim Il Sung—and, for that matter, other Korean Communist leaders—assured Stalin that the victory would be quick, with America having neither time nor will to intervene. Kim Il Sung cited the reports of the South Korean Communists, who insisted that the entire people of South Korea would rise up against the hated pro-American clique of Syngman Rhee at the first news about the North Korean tanks rolling across the border.
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Stalin was initially unenthusiastic about the bellicose mood of his Korean appointees: he didn’t want to get plunged into a full-scale confrontation with the United States, then the world’s sole nuclear power, by the excessive nationalist zeal of some third-rate Communist leaders. However, by late 1949 things changed: in August, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear device and soon afterward, in October, Communists took power in China. Finally, the Soviet intelligence reports seemingly confirmed that the United States did not see Korea as vital for their own strategic interest. In this new situation, the Korean gamble looked less risky, and Kim Il Sung kept pressure on.

So, in early 1950, Stalin gave in. On January 30 Ambassador Shtykov met Kim Il Sung and told him of Stalin’s approval. As the ambassador’s cable to Stalin says, “Kim Il Sung received my report with great satisfaction … Kim Il Sung, apparently wishing once more to reassure himself, asked me if this means that it is possible to meet with Comrade Stalin on this question.” Indeed, it was possible: in April 1950 Kim rushed to Moscow, where he spent a few weeks discussing the operational plans. He repeated his assurances of swift victory. As a Soviet memo says, he pledged to Stalin: “The attack will be swift and the war will be won in three days: the guerrilla movement in the South has grown stronger and a major uprising is expected.” So, the Soviet generals were dispatched to Pyongyang to draw up the operational plans, and by June 1950 everything was ready for a liberation of the South.

The war began on June 25, 1950. Initially, everything went according to the optimistic expectations of the Pyongyang leaders. The anticipated
mass uprising in the South never happened, but by early August 1950 the North controlled some 95 percent of the Korean peninsula. However, the United States finally decided to join the war, this decision turning the tide.

A massive American intervention began in September 1950. In a couple of weeks, the North Korean forces were all but annihilated and the North Korean leadership had to flee to the Chinese border. In turn, China decided to intervene and in late November of that year staged a massive counterstrike that probably became the most successful large-scale operation in China’s recent military history.

After much fighting and bloodshed, the front line hardened and stabilized by the spring of 1951, even though trench warfare and intensive bombing campaigns continued for another two years. The final front line ran almost exactly where the initial demarcation was drawn in 1945. In 1953 the Armistice Treaty was signed and the front line became the DMZ, a border between two Korean states. Millions died, but the war ended in a nearly perfect draw.

The Korean War greatly strengthened Kim Il Sung’s personal power. Before the war he was one of many North Korean Communist leaders, merely a primus inter pares in Pyongyang—one whose slightly special standing was largely, or even exclusively, derived from Soviet support. After the war, Kim emerged as the undisputed national leader; people who joined the Korean Workers’ Party during the war and who remained the core of the North Korean bureaucracy for decades to come were joining the Party of Kim Il Sung. He was the only leader they knew. Understandably, he also used this opportunity to promote his guerrilla friends to positions of power.