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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 Sǒng-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.
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.4
What made young Kim Sǒng-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.5
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.6
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.7
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.
WAY TO WAR
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.8
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.