Authors: Andrei Lankov
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
W
ITH
F
RIENDS
L
IKE
T
HESE
…
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 H
ǒ
n-y
ǒ
ng and H
ǒ
Ka-i.
Pak H
ǒ
n-y
ǒ
ng, 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, H
ǒ
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. H
ǒ
Ka-i was accused of “political mistakes” in 1951, and in 1953 he was shot dead in his home. Official reports claim that H
ǒ
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 S
ǔ
ng-y
ǒ
p, 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 S
ǔ
ng-y
ǒ
p 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 S
ǔ
ng-y
ǒ
p delivered an expected penitence and was sentenced to death.
Only two of the ten members of that initial Politburo were killed by their 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 Ch
ǒ
ng-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, H
ǒ
H
ǒ
n, 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.
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.