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  However, the events of the early 1960s made Pyongyang reconsider its passive approach to the unification issue. For one thing, the sudden outbreak of the April Revolution in 1960 led to a collapse of the Syngman Rhee regime in Seoul. The April Revolution produced an unstable democratic regime that was soon overthrown by the military. Kim Il Sung saw these events as proof that a revolution in South Korea was possible. Indeed, the 1960s and 1970s outbreaks of mass opposition movements occurred in South Korea frequently, and huge rallies on the streets of Seoul encouraged optimism in Pyongyang.

  The decline of Soviet influence in Pyongyang also encouraged hopes of unification. In the new situation, Kim Il Sung could hope that he would be able to take advantage of a favorable turn of events in the South without worrying excessively about Moscow’s position.

  Another event that had significant impact on North Korean thinking was the steady escalation of the war in Vietnam. Indeed, Vietnam and Korea had a lot in common. Their histories and cultures have remarkable similarities and after the Second World War both countries were divided into a Communist North and capitalist South. Like their North Korean comrades, Vietnamese Communists once reluctantly accepted a ceasefire under pressure from Moscow and Beijing. However, unlike the North Koreans, the Vietnamese Communists did not keep the promises they made under duress, and began to increase their support for Communist guerrillas in the South Vietnamese countryside. Eventually this led to a full-scale US intervention, but by the late 1960s it became obvious that this intervention was failing. For Pyongyang leaders, Vietnam increasingly looked like an encouraging example.

  With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that these expectations were unfounded, since South Korea was no South Vietnam. In the 1960s the South Korean government became remarkably efficient in promoting economic growth, while the South Vietnamese government was the embodiment of corruption, inefficiency, and factional strife. The brutal experiences of the North Korean occupation of 1950–1951 made the majority of South Koreans staunchly anti-Communist. Whatever they secretly thought about the then current government in Seoul, they saw Kim Il Sung as the greater evil. Last but not least, South Korean terrain made guerrilla operations difficult. At the time, before the successful reforestation program of the 1970s, most of South Korea’s land was treeless and hilly, so guerrillas would be sitting ducks for choppers and light planes.

  Nonetheless, all of this became clear only later. In the late 1960s the North Korean government made another bid for unification—so intense, actually, that it is sometimes described as the “Second Korean War.”20

  The North Korean plan for unification generally followed a well-established Communist pattern, known as the “United Front” strategy. At first, North Korea hoped to create a broad left-leaning opposition movement that would be led and manipulated by clandestine organizations of the South Korean Communists (or rather, Jucheists). It was assumed that a broad coalition would first topple a pro-American military regime. After this, the clandestine pro-Pyongyang core would discard and, if necessary, destroy their temporary allies and eventually emerge as the driving force of a truly Communist revolution.

  Kim Il Sung and his people, being former guerrillas themselves, also pinned great hope on the emergence of armed guerrilla resistance within South Korea. Obviously in emulation of Vietnamese experience, they expected that a small number of North Korean commandos, often of South Korean extraction, would serve as a nucleus for a future South Korean guerrilla army.

  In the 1960s, encouraged by the signs of the leftward drift of some South Korean intellectuals, Pyongyang undertook a few attempts to establish an underground party in Seoul. The most successful of these attempts was the “Revolutionary Party of Unification” established in 1964. The party, however, never managed to reach prominence and was finally destroyed by the South Korean authorities. Some of its leaders were executed while others were sent to jail for years.

  There have been subsequent attempts to reestablish the pro-Pyongyang underground and recruit some promising young leftists to its ranks. The present author personally knows people who once used to commute to Pyongyang via submarine (the usual way of ejecting and infiltrating agents or full-time activists out of and into South Korea). In three cases that I am personally aware of, these trips and a short exposure to Pyongyang life led to an immediate disillusionment with North Korea.

  The South Korean Left was revived around 1980, as we’ll see later. Indeed, it is hard to deny that the Korean leftists, self-proclaimed “defenders of the human rights and enemies of authoritarianism,” have demonstrated a surprisingly high level of sympathy—or, at least, toleration—for a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship in Pyongyang. It is not impossible that some of the prominent leftist activists have been occasionally sponsored by Pyongyang and in one instance the existence of such subsidies was eventually proven (I am referring to the case of Professor Song Du-yul, a prominent leftist/nationalist ideologue who admitted that he received such subsidies). However, one should not believe in the conspiracy theories that are so popular within the South Korean Right. Both the revival of the South Korean Left and the remarkable popularity of Generalissimo Kim among its followers have few if any relation to the efforts of Pyongyang’s spies, but rather reflect the peculiarities of South Korean capitalism and the South Korean political structure. On balance, North Korea’s United Front strategy has been unsuccessful.

  Military operations have also ended in failure. On January 21, 1968, 31 North Korean commandos infiltrated Seoul. Their goal was to storm the presidential palace and slaughter everybody inside. Obviously, Kim Il Sung believed that this bold attack, to be attributed to the local guerrillas, would be good for revolution and perhaps would spark a mass armed resistance. The raiding party was intercepted at the last minute, so an intense firefight took place in downtown Seoul. One commando escaped North, where he received a hero’s welcome and eventually became a general; another was captured alive to become a Protestant pastor in South Korea; and all others were killed in action.

  In late 1968 some 120 North Korean commandos landed on the East Coast, where they hoped to establish a Vietnamese-style guerrilla base. They took over a few villages and herded villagers into ideological indoctrination sessions where the farmers were harangued about the greatness of the Great Leader, the happiness of their northern brethren, and the assorted wonders of the soon-to-come Communist paradise. But inflexible, doctrinaire North Korean propagandists were no match for their North Vietnamese comrades, and failed to impress the villagers. Thus, the expected uprising didn’t happen, and the commandos were hunted down by the South Korean military.

  At the same time, the North Koreans began to escalate tensions on the DMZ, often attacking South Korean and American border patrols. In January 1968, almost immediately after the Blue House Raid, the North Korean Navy captured the US naval intelligence ship Pueblo and kept the ship and its crew in captivity for more than a year. After it occurred, the episode was seen as part of a grand Communist strategy. Actually, though, the oral tradition of the Soviet diplomatic service holds that on the night after the seizure, Soviet experts spent sleepless hours looking for an excuse that would allow the Soviet Union to avoid entering a potential war between the United States and North Korea. Finally, they found one: the 1961 treaty between the USSR and the DPRK stated that the Soviet Union had a duty to defend its ally against acts of military aggression, but because the Pueblo seizure was an act of aggression by North Korea, the Soviet Union had no duty to intervene.

  However, between 1971 and 1972 it became clear that all these adventurous and sometimes bloody efforts had come to naught. South Korean “toiling masses” were not going to take up arms and go to the mountains. The average South Korean remained anti-Communist or, at least, deeply suspicious of North Korea.

  In this situation, the North Korean leaders made a U-turn and began secret negotiations with the South, on assumption that some kind of provisional coexistence (until the forthcoming revolution) woul
d be necessary. In July 1972 the South and North issued a North-South Joint Communiqué that theoretically committed them to the goal of eventual peaceful unification of the country. It was rhetoric pure and simple, but it created a framework within which the two Korean states began to talk and interact when they considered it necessary. The policy of mutual nonrecognition continues to this day (and is likely to endure into the foreseeable future), but since 1972 Pyongyang and Seoul have always maintained direct contacts of various kinds.

  There were, however, some occasional relapses into revolutionary adventurism. In 1983 North Korean intelligence operatives planted a powerful bomb in Rangoon, Burma, where the South Korean president was on a state visit at the time. The device was detonated too early, so the president survived the explosion, but a number of dignitaries were killed. The three North Korean operatives, none of whom spoke Burmese, could not escape. Two were taken alive after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, and another was killed after a firefight with the Burmese soldiers. Not only the Burmese (never staunch opponents of Pyongyang) but even the Chinese were annoyed by this adventurism.

  Another act of open violence was the bombing of a South Korean passenger jet in November 1987 by two North Korean intelligence officers. Obviously this was done in order to create the impression that Seoul would be an unsafe place for the coming Olympic Games of 1988. The bombing killed 115 crew members and passengers (many of whom were construction workers on their way back from the Middle East). One of the two agents was captured, another committed suicide, but the overall political impact of the operation was close to zero.

  There might have been other undisclosed or aborted operations of a similar kind, but on balance from the mid-1970s the North Korean leadership came to the conclusion that a South Korean revolution was unlikely to happen any time soon. The support for the South Korean “revolutionary forces” was never completely dropped from the Pyongyang agenda, but as time went on its significance steadily diminished. From the early 1990s, when the economy began to fall apart, Pyongyang’s agenda was dominated by the necessity of defense, not offense.

  ICONS

  The personality cult of the Kim family has long been a peculiar and often bizarre feature of North Korean society—and like any cult, it has iconography. Normally, four members of the Kim family are considered worthy of depiction—Generalissimo Kim Il Sung, Marshal (from 2012, posthumously, also Generalissimo) Kim Jong Il, General Kim Jong Un, and General Kim Jong Suk (the latter being Kim Il Sung’s first official wife and Kim Jong Il’s mother). Some other members of the family are occasionally depicted as well, but the images of those four are virtually omnipresent and come in many forms.

  North Korea is a country of portraits. From the 1940s, depictions of Kim Il Sung were common, but from the 1970s, it was decreed that every house should have a portrait of the Great Leader. The state bestowed people with portraits and directed them to put them in their living rooms. They were to be placed on a wall devoid of any other adornments and cleaned regularly.

  From 1972, Kim Il Sung’s portrait was also placed at the entrances of all factories, railway stations, and airports. A portrait of Kim Il Sung (from the mid-1980s) was to be present in all railway and subway carriages, but for some unknown reason not in buses or trams. In the late 1970s, North Koreans were directed to place standardized portraits of Kim Jong Il alongside those of his father.

  A further layer of complexity was added in the 1990s. From then on, every single Korean house was to have three portraits: one of Kim Il Sung, one of Kim Jong Il, and yet another of the two great men talking about some highly important matters of statecraft. Privileged officials, however, were lucky enough to be issued with a different third picture, the visage of Kim Jong Suk. Due to reasons unknown, many offices still have portraits of the Dear Leader and Great Leader only.

  Another important icon of the personality cult is the badge that all adult North Koreans have been required to wear permanently since the early 1970s. This badge usually depicts Kim Il Sung. (In some rare cases badges feature a portrait of Kim Jong Il alongside the visage of Kim Il Sung.) There are a great number of badges, and an experienced observer can learn a lot from the type of badge a North Korean wears. Officials of some important government agencies are issued their own particular type of badges.

  Of course, we should not forget statues. The first statues of Kim Il Sung appeared in the late 1940s, but the vast majority of them were constructed in the 1970s and 1980s. Most counties and cities have their own statue of Kim Il Sung, located in the central part of the area. If such a statue is absent, the symbolic center will house a large mural depicting one of the Kims. Similar murals can be found on major crossroads in the cities and occasionally in the countryside.

  During every major official holiday, all North Koreans are expected to pay a visit to a local statue and, after a respectful bow, to leave flowers honoring the Generalissimo (usually Kim Il Sung, but in some cities other members of the Kim family can be commemorated as well). The largest and most important statue(s) is located on Mansu Hill in downtown Pyongyang. Initially the 22-meter-high statue was gilded, but in 1977, for some reason, the gold was removed and replaced with gold paint. Recently, in April 2012, the statue got company. The likeness of Marshal (now Generalissimo) Kim Jong Il was placed next to his father. The original statue of his father had a face-lift: a broad smile and pair of glasses were added to his face, which had been up until then very austere and stern looking. Interestingly, in Kim Jong Il’s lifetime, very few statues of Kim Jong Il were constructed.

  In an emergency, statues and portraits are to be protected whatever the cost, as any sacred object should be—and North Koreans are reminded that they must safeguard the images. For example, in 2007 the official media widely reported an incident that allegedly occurred in August of that year.

  During a severe flooding, Kang Hyong-kwon, a factory worker from the city of Ich’on, was trying to make his way to safety through a dangerous stream. While leaving his flooded house, he took the two most precious things in his life—his five-year-old daughter and portraits of Leaders Generalissimo Kim Il Sung and Marshal Kim Jong Il. Suddenly overwhelmed by the current, he lost grip of his daughter, who fell into the swollen waters, but still managed to keep hold of the sacred images. The media extolled North Koreans to emulate Kang Hyong-kwon, a real-life hero.

  THE COMMAND SOCIETY

  In the decades during Kim Il Sung’s rule, North Korea became a society where the level of state control over the average citizen’s public and private life reached heights that would be almost unthinkable in any other country, including Stalin’s Russia, which in many cases served as a prototype for Kim Il Sung’s social experiments. In a sense, Kim Il Sung and his supporters managed to out-Stalin Stalin himself.

  Private initiative was almost completely eliminated from North Korea’s economic life, and the role of money diminished greatly. Few items could be freely bought and sold in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. In 1957 the private trade in rice and other grains was banned, so that grains (by far the most important source of calories in the diet of the average North Korean) could be distributed by the state alone. From that time and until around 1990 grains could be acquired almost exclusively through the public distribution system (PDS). Every North Korean was made eligible for a fixed daily grain ration, which was provided for a token price.

  The exact size of the ration depended on one’s job; the average working adult received a grain ration of 700 grams a day, a housewife would be given merely 300 grams, while a person doing heavy physical work (a miner or, say, a jet fighter pilot) was eligible for the highest daily ration of 900 grams. The ratio of rice to other (less nutritious) grains in a ration depended largely on one’s place of residence. During the affluent 1970s, the privileged inhabitants of Pyongyang received more than half of their grain rations in rice, while in the countryside nearly the entire ration came as corn and wheat flour, with rice being a luxury food reserved for special occasions.
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  In 1973, when the economic situation began to deteriorate, rations were cut for the first time. For example, a typical adult’s ration of 700g was reduced to 607g. The next cut came in 1987, when the same standard daily ration went down to 547g. Officially, these cuts were considered to be “voluntary donations,” but nobody asked the North Koreans whether they were willing to “donate” their food to the state.

  Rationing was not about the grain alone. Other foodstuffs were rationed as well: people were issued rations of soy sauce, eggs, cabbage, and other basic ingredients of the traditional Korean diet. Meat was distributed irregularly, a few times a year, usually before major official holidays, but fish and other types of seafood were more readily available. In autumn there might have been occasional distribution of apples, melons, and other fruits.21

  Basic consumer goods were also rationed, even though the mechanism of their distribution could be different. Items like wrist watches and black-and-white TV sets—the major symbols of consumerism during the 1960s and 1970s—were usually distributed through people’s work units. In some cases, especially valuable items were given to distinguished individuals as “presents of the Great Leader.” This particular form of distribution clearly was good also for the ideological health of the nation, since it reminded the North Koreans whose wisdom and hard work kept them fed and well-provided with daily necessities.

  Contrary to what has often been claimed, private markets were never banned in North Korea. They operated under manifold restrictions and were small in scale, but they existed nonetheless. However, the average North Korean of Kim Il Sung’s era seldom shopped at the market. Items on sale at the marketplace were overpriced and usually seen as unnecessary luxuries. The average North Korean was seldom prepared to pay above half of his/her monthly wage for a chicken, and this was a normal market price for a chicken in the early 1980s. In most cases, the North Korean consumers were quite content with what they got through the PDS.