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  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.

  The Soviet decision not to get involved in land warfare in Korea was also of great help to Kim Il Sung. From that time, the influence of the Chinese could be relied on to counter the influence of the Soviets—more so since the relations between Beijing and Moscow were never as good as official rhetoric implied. The two Communist great powers began to drift toward open hostility in the late 1950s, and this shift gave the North Korean leadership ample opportunities to exploit the contradictions between its two major sponsors. Indeed, from 1953 the Soviet control, so omnipresent in the late 1940s, greatly weakened, and Kim Il Sung began to take cautious measures that were aimed at reducing the ability of the “great Soviet Union” to mingle in North Korea’s internal affairs. Some prominent pro-Soviet officials were ousted from their jobs, and the leader of the pro-Moscow group was first demoted and then found dead in his house (officially this was ruled a suicide).

  However, on that stage the purges largely targeted the “domestic” Communists, those who had been involved with the Communist underground of the colonial era. In 1953–1955, a majority of these Communist zealots were purged, with some prominent leaders subjected to show trials and others shot or imprisoned without much attention to the legal niceties. The accusations were standard for the Stalinist regimes: the founders of the Korean Communist movement were asserted to be spies and saboteurs, on the payroll of the Americans and Japanese (as usual, the accusations were often comically inconsistent, but who cared?). In most cases, purge meant the death of the major culprits and permanent imprisonment of his/her family, including even distant relatives.

  In 1956, however, Kim Il Sung faced a major and unexpected political challenge. His unabashedly Stalinist ways provoked dissatisfaction among the top officials, much influenced by the ongoing de-Stalinization in Moscow. Some of these high-ranking party dissenters obviously wanted to use this opportunity for their own career advancement while others might have felt genuine compassion about the plight of common people who bore the major burden of Stalinist policies. The pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions within the North Korean leadership conspired to move the country toward a more moderate political line, akin to the policy of the post-Stalin Soviet leadership (then briefly supported by China as well). To make this possible, they wanted to remove Kim Il Sung from power. The Soviet and Chinese governments were aware and mildly supportive of the scheme. In August 1956, during a Central Committee meeting, the opposition openly challenged Kim Il Sung and his policies.

  This challenge was crushed, largely because the younger generation of the officials, deeply Nationalist, hardened by war and eager to see their country less dependent on Moscow, saw no need in the proposed liberalization and rallied around Kim. Having defeated the challengers, in 1957–1959 Kim launched a new, more thorough purge of party functionaries who had worked with the Soviets and Chinese by exposing their connections—whether real or alleged.9

  WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE …

  One of the sad facts of Communist history is that most of the founding fathers of Communist states perished at the hands of their own comrades, becoming victims of the machine they had themselves created. North Korea was no exception. If anything, the founders of the North Korean state fared worse than their Chinese or, for instance, Hungarian counterparts.

  To confirm this, one has to look at the subsequent fate of the members of the North Korean Politburo in 1949. In Communist countries the Politburo was the supreme executive committee of the party and state, superior to any other institution, including the Cabinet of Ministers. The 1949 North Korean Politburo was technically the first executive board of the unified party. Before that there had been two independent parties, one operating in the North and the other in the South.

  The 1949 Politburo had ten full members. It was headed by Kim Il Sung, the Party chairman, who remained the North Korean dictator until his death in 1994. He had two vice chairmen, Pak Hǒn-yǒng and Hǒ Ka-i.

  Pak Hǒn-yǒng, the leader of the Korean Communist underground in the colonial era, was for a long time the chairman of the South Korean Workers’ Party. After the merger of the two parties, he became second in command in the unified Party, and was also given the post of foreign minister in the DPRK government. However, in 1953 he was ousted from his position and soon arrested. In 1955 he faced a kangaroo court and was executed as an “American spy.”

  The other vice chairman, Hǒ Ka-i, was a seasoned Soviet bureaucrat of Korean extraction who was dispatched to North Korea to develop the local government and party machinery. In 1949 he was also the Party’s first secretary. His close connection with Moscow made him the first target when Kim Il Sung decided to distance the North from its one-time Soviet sponsors. Hǒ Ka-i was accused of “political mistakes” in 1951, and in 1953 he was shot dead in his home. Official reports claim that Hǒ Ka-i committed suicide, but it is possible that he was assassinated on Kim Il Sung’s orders. We may never know.

  Another member of the 1949 Politburo, Yi Sǔng-yǒp, a prominent leader of the South Korean Left, was, at that time, responsible for the guerrilla movement in the South. In 1953 he became a major defendant at the largest show trial in North Korean history. Yi Sǔng-yǒp was said to be an American spy who was planning to stage a coup in the North that would pave the way for a large-scale American landing in Wonsan. Broken, Yi Sǔng-yǒp delivered an expected penitence and was sentenced to death.

  Only two of the ten members of that initial Politburo were killed by t
heir enemies rather than by their comrades. Kim Sam-yong, a leader of the Communist underground in the South, was arrested by the South Korean police and hastily executed in the first days of the Korean War. Kim Ch’aek, once a guerrilla fighter in Manchuria, was killed in an American air raid in January 1951.

  Of the four other members, Kim Tu-bong was probably most prominent. In 1949 he was the North Korean head of state. This was a largely ceremonial position that well suited the character of this outstanding scholar, a founder of modern Korean linguistics. He tried to distance himself from daily politics. This did not help: in 1957 Kim Tu-bong was purged, subjected to public humiliation, and disappeared from public view. We do not know whether he died in prison or was killed.

  Another 1949 member, Pak Il-u, the then minister for the interior, suffered a similar fate. He was purged in 1955 and then disappeared. His fate remains unknown to this day.

  Pak Chǒng-ae, the only female in the 1949 Politburo, survived longer than most of her fellows. She was purged in the late 1960s and spent the next decades exiled in the countryside. She resurfaced in the late 1980s, after two decades in the camps, but never regained her influence.

  Apart from Kim Il Sung himself, only one 1949 Politburo member, Hǒ Hǒn, died of natural causes. In 1949 he was 63 years old, in bad health, and had only two years to live.

  Thus, out of the ten people who ran the country in 1949, only two avoided persecution and died natural deaths. Of the others, two were killed by people whom they regarded as enemies. Of the remaining six, all were purged by their own comrades.

  Should we see them as sincere idealists and tragic victims, or should we notice that many of these supposed victims, while in power, had sent a striking number of people to the execution grounds? Maybe it would be best to leave these questions unanswered ….

  The purges of the 1950s led to a nearly complete reshuffle of the North Korean leadership. From the late 1950s onward nearly all top positions in the North Korean party-state were controlled by the former Manchurian guerrillas and other Kim Il Sung appointees (including a small but growing number of his family members). They stayed in control, more or less unchallenged, until their own physical demise in the 1980s and 1990s.

  Only a few of them had graduated from high school and an absolute majority of them had no formal schooling whatsoever—being children of poor subsistence farmers, they could not attend even a primary school.10 Their earlier experience was also of little help in running a modern state. Nonetheless they were unconditionally loyal to Kim Il Sung and shared his vision of the country’s future. And this was the thing that really mattered.

  BETWEEN MOSCOW AND BEIJING: THE FOREIGN POLICY OF KIM IL SUNG’S NORTH KOREA

  As we have mentioned above, until the late 1950s, North Korea was essentially just another “People’s Democracy,” a term the newly established pro-Soviet regimes chose as a self-description. In the late 1950s things began to change. What emerged as a result was a unique state that had almost no equivalents in 20th-century history—a truly fascinating topic for any cultural anthropologist, historian, or sociologist.

  There were many reasons behind the emergence of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. For example, the personal changes in the leadership were important: the Communist leaders of the first generation were largely university graduates who combined a measure of nationalism with a modern and relatively cosmopolitan worldview, but in the late 1950s they were replaced by the former guerrillas whose worldview largely reflected the dreams, values, and aspirations of the traditional East Asian peasantry. Like it or not, radical leaders like Mao or Pol Pot to a very large extent wanted to actualize the utopian dreams of premodern peasantry (which of course didn’t stop them from killing and starving peasants in droves). Another contributing factor was the impact of the Korean War, which led to a militarization of North Korean society and helped to transform the entire country into a nearly perfect garrison state (or as the North Korean official propaganda prefers to put it, “made the entire country an impregnable fortress”).

  However, all these trends could develop only due to a massive geopolitical shift in the late 1950s—that is, the Sino-Soviet split. For nearly three decades the two major Communist states had fractious relations and sometimes came quite close to the brink of war. Each one was peddling its own version of Communism. The Soviet brand probably appeared more dull, and no longer attracted the starry-eyed radicals in Western university campuses, but it was also much more permissive and liberal, much less indifferent to the daily needs of the average citizen and marginally more efficient (or should we say “less inefficient”?) economically. The Chinese brand of Communism was all about the endless ideological mobilization, selfless dedication and sacrifice to the cause, and the omniscient leader.

  The changes in the post-Stalin USSR were significant. In the decade that followed Stalin’s death in 1953, the number of political prisoners in the Soviet Union decreased nearly a thousandfold, from some 1.2 million to between one and two thousand. Restrictions on the domestic movement of collective farm workers were lifted (contrary to the assumptions of many Westerners, the short-term domestic trips of the urban population were never seriously restricted in the USSR), large-scale housing construction programs were launched, and consumption goods became more affordable to the average Soviet citizen. In China, the same decade was marked by the collectivization of agriculture (i.e., the abolition of individual ownership of land) and the insane millennialism of the Great Leap Forward. These experiments might have looked attractive to the denizens of Paris cafés who (like Sartre) instantly switched their enthusiasm from Stalin’s Russia to Mao’s China. To the Chinese themselves, however, this “bold social experimentation” brought the worst famine in modern history, leaving between 20 and 30 million people dead.

  Initially North Korea was much attracted to the Chinese austere and autocratic notion of Communism. The Maoist ideal resonated well with Kim Il Sung’s own notion of the perfect Korea he hoped to build. In the vision of the North Korean leaders, their realm should become a country where all of the people would work hard on huge state-owned farms and factories, breaking the records of productivity while being motivated by unswerving ideological zeal and love for country. Everybody would be issued roughly the same ration of heavily subsidized food and basic consumption goods, and no selfish profiteering would be tolerated, so money would gradually be deemed useless. Such a society would be led by a small army of devout and selfless officials and presided over by the omniscient Great Leader, whose word would be the law. Obviously, at the time, many common North Koreans didn’t find this ideal unattractive (it is not incidental that peasant rebels across the globe frequently dreamt of similar things).

  When they talked of future prosperity, Kim Il Sung’s promises were not too wild or too excessive. In the early 1960s he famously outlined his vision of coming affluence by saying that in the near future all North Koreans will “eat boiled rice and meat soup, dress in silk and live in houses with tile roofs.” This promise—repeated by the Great Leader a number of times—does not sound too ambitious, but we should remember that for centuries the Korean farmers could not afford to eat rice every day (barley or corn was their staple), that a meat soup was a meal reserved for a special holiday occasion, and that only landlords could afford a tile roof rather than the thatched roof of the majority. Thus, Kim Il Sung promised his subjects that his regime would eventually deliver the standards of life that had been seen as reasonably luxurious by premodern villagers—but not much more.

  Kim Il Sung’s initial decision to side with China was only partially driven by ideological considerations. The pragmatic political calculations played a role, too: after the failed 1956 conspiracy, Kim Il Sung and his supporters began to see the Soviet Union as a source of dangerously liberal ideas. They soon grew frightened that the Soviet slogan of the “struggle against the personality cult” might be easily used against Kim Il Sung, whose own personality cult so obviously followed the Stalinist patterns.<
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  After the 1956 crisis, the relations between North Korea and the Soviet Union began to deteriorate, reaching the point of almost open hostility between 1962 and 1963. References to the Soviet Union almost disappeared from the official media, and the Soviet advisers were sent home. The same was the fate of a few hundred Soviet and Eastern European wives of North Koreans who studied overseas and married women from other Communist countries. Their North Korean husbands were ordered to divorce foreign women, who were then summarily expelled from the country. By 1960, all North Korean students were recalled from the ideologically suspicious Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and only two decades later were these student exchanges restarted—albeit on a significantly smaller scale.

  Pravda and Rodong Shinmun, the major official newspapers of the USSR and North Korea, respectively, were engaged in open polemics: Rodong Shinmun accused the Soviets of being exploitative and ready to take advantage of Korea’s weakness, while Pravda lamented the ingratitude of the North Korean leaders who suddenly became silent on the Soviets’ significant aid efforts (indeed, since around 1960 and until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, North Korean media seldom admitted the very existence of continuing economic aid from the Soviet Union). A North Korean ambassador to Moscow wrote a highly critical letter to Kim Il Sung and then asked Moscow for asylum. His request was granted by the Soviet government—a nearly unprecedented situation in the history of the Communist bloc.

  Pyongyang’s relations with Moscow partially recovered after 1965. Changes in the Soviet leadership, specifically the replacement of impulsive and reform-minded Khrushchev with the more conservative Brezhnev, did play some part, but there were more important reasons. First, during the relations crisis, Soviet economic assistance declined, while China was proving to be neither willing nor able to compensate for this loss. Second, in 1966 China itself plunged into the bloody turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. For the North Korean elite, the Cultural Revolution was the embodiment of utter chaos; it might have been seen in Pyongyang as even more dangerous than Soviet liberalization (privately, when talking to Brezhnev in 1966, Kim Il Sung described the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a “massive idiocy”).11