North Korea THE NATIONAL DIVISION AND THE ORIGINS OF THE DPRK
The United Front Tower, a 13.5-meter high monument
rebuilt in 1990 to commemorate the North-South Joint Conference
on national salvation and reunification held in P'yongyang on
April 19, 1948
Courtesy Democratic People's Republic of Korea, No. 417,
1991
Revolutionary art in the Taean Heavy Machinery Works,
Taean, Namp'o, urges workers to march forward toward new victory
under the leadership of the party
Courtesy Tracy Woodward
The crux of the period of national division and opposing
states in Korea was the decade from 1943 to 1953, and the
politics of contemporary Korea cannot be understood without
comprehending this decade. It was the breeding ground of the two
Koreas, of war, and of a reordering of international politics in
Northeast Asia.
From the time of the tsars, Korea had been a concern of
Russian security. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 was fought in
part over the disposition of the Korean Peninsula. It was often
surmised that the Russians saw Korea as a gateway to the Pacific,
especially to warm-water ports. However, the Soviets did not get
a warm-water port out of their involvement in Korea.
There was greater complexity than this in Soviet policy.
Korea had one of Asia's oldest communist movements. Although it
would appear that postwar Korea was of great concern to the
Soviet Union, many have thought that its policy was a simple
matter of Sovietizing northern Korea, setting up a puppet state,
and then, in 1950, directing Kim Il Sung to unify Korea by force.
However, the Soviets did not have an effective relationship with
Korean communists; Joseph Stalin purged and even executed many of
the Koreans who had functioned in the Communist International,
and he did not help Kim Il Sung and other guerrillas in their
struggle against Japan.
The United States took the initiative in big power
deliberations on Korea during World War II, suggesting a
multilateral trusteeship for postwar Korea to the British in
March 1943, and to the Soviet leaders at the end of the same
year. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, concerned about the
disposition of enemy-held colonial territories and aware of
colonial demands for independence, sought a gradualist, tutelary
policy of preparing former colonials--such as the Koreans--for
self-government and independence. At the Cairo Conference in
December 1943, the Allies, under United States urging, declared
that after Japan was defeated Korea would become independent "in
due course," a phrase consistent with Roosevelt's ideas. At about
the same time, planners in the United States Department of State
reversed the traditional United States policy of noninvolvement
in Korea by defining the security of the peninsula as important
to the security of the postwar Pacific, which was, in turn, very
important to American security.
At a midnight meeting in Washington on August 10 and 11,
1945, War Department officials, including John J. McCloy and Dean
Rusk, decided to make the thirty-eighth parallel the dividing
line between the Soviet and United States zones in Korea. Neither
the Soviet forces nor the Koreans were consulted. As a result,
when 25,000 American soldiers occupied southern Korea in early
September 1945, they found themselves up against a strong Korean
impulse for independence and for thorough reform of colonial
legacies. By and large, Koreans wished to solve their problems
themselves and resented any inference that they were not ready
for self-government.
During World War II, Stalin was mostly silent in his
discussions with Roosevelt about Korea. From 194l to 1945, Kim Il
Sung and other guerrillas were given sanctuary in Sino-Soviet
border towns, trained at a small school, and dispatched as agents
into Japanese-held territory. Recent research suggests that
Chinese, not Soviet, communists controlled the border camps.
Although the United States suspected that as many as 30,000
Koreans were being trained as Soviet guerrilla agents, postwar
North Korean documents captured by General Douglas A. MacArthur
showed that there could not have been more than a few hundred
guerrilla agents. When Soviet troops occupied Korea north of the
thirty-eighth parallel in August 1945, they brought these
Koreans, now in the Soviet army, with them. They were often
termed Soviet-Koreans, even though most of them were not Soviet
citizens. Although this group was not large, several of them
became prominent in the regime, for example H Ka-i, an
experienced party organizer, who was Soviet-born, and Nam Il, who
became well known during the Korean War when he led the North
Korean delegation in peace talks. The Soviet side quietly
acquiesced to the thirty-eighth parallel decision and then
accepted the United States plan for a multilateral trusteeship at
a foreign ministers' meeting in December 1945. Over the next two
years, the two powers held so-called joint commission meetings
trying to resolve their differences and establish a provisional
government for Korea.
The United States military command, along with emissaries
dispatched from Washington, tended to interpret resistance to
United States desires in the south as radical and pro-Soviet.
When Korean resistance leaders set up an interim "people's
republic" and people's committees throughout southern Korea in
September 1945, the United States saw this fundamentally
indigenous movement as part of a Soviet master plan to dominate
all of Korea. Radical activity, such as the ousting of landlords
and attacks on Koreans in the former colonial police force,
usually was a matter of settling scores left over from the
colonial period, or of demands by Koreans to run their own
affairs. But it immediately became wrapped up with United States-
Soviet rivalry, such that the Cold War arrived early in Korea--in
the last months of 1945.
Once the United States occupation force chose to bolster the
status quo and resist radical reform of colonial legacies, it
immediately ran into monumental opposition to its policies from
the majority of South Koreans. The United States Army Military
Government in Korea (1945-48) spent most of its first year
suppressing the many people's committees that had emerged in the
provinces. This action provoked a massive rebellion in the fall
of 1946; after the rebellion was suppressed, radical activists
developed a significant guerrilla movement in 1948 and 1949.
Activists also touched off a major rebellion at the port of Ysu
in South Korea in October 1948. Much of this disorder resulted
from unresolved land problem caused by conservative landed
factions who used their bureaucratic power to block
redistribution of land to peasant tenants. North Koreans sought
to take advantage of this discontent, but the best evidence shows
that most of the dissidents and guerrillas were southerners upset
about southern policies. Indeed, the strength of the left wing
was in those provinces most removed from the thirty-eighth
parallel--in the southwest, which had historically been
rebellious (the Tonghaks came from there), and in the southeast,
which had felt the greatest impact from Japanese colonialism.
By 1947 Washington was willing to acknowledge formally that
the Cold War had begun in Korea and abandoned attempts to
negotiate with the Soviet government to form a unified,
multilateral administration. Soviet leaders had also determined
that the postwar world would be divided into two blocs, and they
deepened their controls over North Korea. When President Harry S
Truman announced the Truman Doctrine and the containment policy
in the spring of 1947, Korea was very nearly included along with
Greece and Turkey as a key containment country; Department of
State planners foresaw an enormous US$600-million package of
economic and military aid for southern Korea, and backed away
only when the United States Congress and the Department of War
balked at such a huge sum. Instead, the decision was made to seek
United Nations (UN) backing for United States policy in Korea,
and to hold a UN-supervised plebiscite in all of Korea if the
Soviet Union would go along, in southern Korea alone if it did
not. North Korea refused to cooperate with the UN. The plebiscite
was held in May 1948 and resulted in the establishment of the
Republic of Korea in August of the same year.
From August 1945 until January 1946, Soviet forces worked
with a coalition of communists and nationalists led by a
Christian educator named Cho Man-sik. Kim Il Sung did not appear
in North Korea until October 1945; what he did in the two months
after the Japanese surrender is not known. When he reappeared,
Soviet leaders presented Kim to the Korean people as a guerrilla
hero. The Soviets did not set up a central administration, nor
did they establish an army. In retrospect their policy was more
tentative and reactive than American policy in South Korea, which
moved forward with plans for a separate administration and army.
In general, Soviet power in the Asia-Pacific region was flexible
and resulted in the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Manchuria in
early 1946.
Whether in response to United States initiatives or because
most Koreans despised the trusteeship agreement that had been
negotiated at the end of 1945, separate institutions began to
emerge in North Korea in early 1946. In February 1946, an Interim
People's Committee led by Kim Il Sung became the first central
government. The next month, a revolutionary land reform took
place, dispossessing landlords without compensation. In August
1946, a powerful political party, the North Korean Workers'
Party, dominated politics as a result of a merger with the Korean
Communist Party; in the fall the rudiments of a northern army
appeared. Central agencies nationalized major industries that
previously had been mostly owned by the Japanese and began a
two-year economic program based on the Soviet model of central
planning and priority for heavy industry. Nationalists and
Christian leaders were ousted from all but pro forma
participation in politics, and Cho Man-sik was placed under house
arrest. Kim Il Sung and his allies dominated all the political
parties, ousting resisters.
Within a year of the liberation from Japanese rule, North
Korea had a powerful political party, a growing economy, and a
single powerful leader, Kim Il Sung. Kim's emergence and that of
the Kim system dated from mid-1946, by which time he had placed
close, loyal allies at the heart of power
(see Party Leadership and Elite Recruitment
, ch. 4). His prime assets were his
background, his skills at organization, and his ideology. Only
thirty-four years old when he came to power, Kim was fortunate to
emerge in the last decade of a forty-year resistance that had
killed off many leaders of the older generation. North Korea
claimed that Kim was the leader of all Korean resisters, when, in
fact, there were many other leaders. But Kim won the support and
firm loyalty of several hundred people like him: young, tough,
nationalistic guerrillas who had fought in Manchuria. Because the
prime test of legitimacy in postwar Korea was one's record under
the hated Japanese regime, Kim and his core allies possessed
nationalist credentials superior to those of the South Korean
leadership. Furthermore, Kim's backers had military force at
their disposal and used it to their advantage against rivals with
no military experience.
Kim's organizational skills probably came from experience
gained in the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s. He was also a
dynamic leader. Unlike traditional Korean leaders and
intellectual or theoretical communists such as Pak Hn-yng, he
pursued a style of mass leadership that involved using his
considerable charisma and getting close to the people. He often
visited a factory or a farm for so-called "on-the-spot guidance"
and encouraged his allies to do the same. Led by Kim, the North
Koreans went against Soviet orthodoxy by including masses of poor
peasants in the party; indeed, they termed the party a "mass"
rather than a vanguard party.
Since the 1940s, from 12 to 14 percent of the population has
been enrolled in the communist party, compared with 1 to 3
percent for communist parties in most countries. The Korean
Workers' Party (KWP) was formed by a merger of the communist
parties in North Korea and South Korea in 1949. The vast majority
of KWP members were poor peasants with no previous political
experience. Membership in the party gave them status, privileges,
and a rudimentary form of political participation
(see The Korean Workers' Party
, ch. 4).
Kim's ideology in the 1940s tended to be revolutionary-
nationalist rather than communist. The chuch'e ideology
had its beginnings in the late 1940s, although the term
chuch'e was not used until a 1955 speech in which Kim
castigated some of his comrades for being too pro-Soviet. The
concept of chuch'e, which means placing all foreigners at
arm's length, has resonated deeply with Korea's Hermit Kingdom
past. Chuch'e doctrine stresses self-reliance and
independence, but also draws on neo-Confucian emphasis on
rectification of one's thinking before action in the real world.
Soon after Kim took power, virtually all North Koreans were
required to participate in study groups and re-education
meetings, where regime ideology was inculcated.
In the 1940s, Kim faced factional power struggles among his
group. Factions included communists who had remained in Korea
during the colonial period, called the domestic faction; Koreans
associated with Chinese communism, the Yan'an faction; Kim's
Manchurian partisans, the Kapsan faction; Soviet Union loyalists,
the Soviet faction. In the aftermath of the Korean War, amid much
false scapegoating for the disasters of the war, Kim purged the
domestic faction, many of whose leaders were from southern Korea;
Pak Hn-yng and twelve of his associates were pilloried in show
trials under ridiculous charges that they were American spies,
and ten of them subsequently were executed. In the mid-1950s, Kim
eliminated key leaders of the Soviet faction, including H Ka-i,
and overcame an apparent coup attempt by members of the Yan'an
faction, after which he purged many of them. Some, such as the
guerrilla hero Mu Chng, a Yan'an faction member, reportedly
escaped to China. These power struggles took place only during
the first decade of the regime. Later, there were conflicts
within the leadership, but they were relatively minor and did not
successfully challenge Kim's power.
In the period 1946 to 1948, there was much evidence that the
Soviet Union hoped to dominate North Korea. In particular, it
sought to involve North Korea in a quasi-colonial relationship in
which Korean raw materials, such as tungsten and gold, were
exchanged for Soviet manufactured goods. The Soviet Union also
sought to keep Chinese communist influence out of Korea; in the
late 1940s, Maoist doctrine had to be infiltrated into North
Korean newspapers and books
(see The Media
, ch. 4). Soviet
influence was especially strong in the media, where major organs
were staffed by Koreans from the Soviet Union, and in the
security bureaus. Nonetheless, the Korean guerrillas who fought
in Manchuria were not easily molded and dominated. They were
tough, highly nationalistic, and determined to have Korea for
themselves. This was especially so for the Korean People's Army
(KPA), which was an important base for Kim Il Sung and which was
led by Ch'oe Yng-gn, another Korean guerrilla who had fought in
Manchuria. At the army's founding ceremony on February 8, 1948,
Kim urged his soldiers to carry forward the tradition of the
Koreans who had fought against the Japanese in Manchuria.
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was established on
September 9, 1948, three weeks after the Republic of Korea had
been formed in Seoul. Kim Il Sung was named premier, a title he
retained until 1972, when, under a new constitution, he was named
president
(see Constitutional Framework
, ch. 4). At the end of
1948, Soviet occupation forces were withdrawn from North Korea.
This decision contrasted strongly with Soviet policies in Eastern
Europe. Tens of thousands of Korean soldiers who fought in the
Chinese civil war from 1945 to 1949 also filtered back to Korea.
All through 1949, tough crack troops with Chinese, not Soviet,
experience returned to be integrated with the KPA; the return of
these Korean troops inevitably moved North Korea toward China. It
enhanced Kim's bargaining power and enabled him to maneuver
between the two communist giants. Soviet advisers remained in the
Korean government and military, although far fewer than the
thousands claimed by South Korean sources. There probably were
300 to 400 advisers posted to North Korea, but many of those were
experienced military and security people. Both countries
continued to trade, and the Soviet Union sold World War
II-vintage weaponry to North Korea.
In 1949 Kim Il Sung had himself named
suryng (see Glossary),
an old Kogury term for "leader" that the Koreans
always modified by the adjective "great"--as in "great leader"
(Widaehan chidoja). The KPA was built up through recruiting
campaigns for soldiers and bond drives to purchase Soviet tanks.
The tradition of the Manchurian guerrillas was burnished in the
party newspaper, Nodong simmun (Workers' Daily), perhaps
to offset the influence of powerful Korean officers, who like Mu
Chng and Pang Ho-san, had fought with the Chinese communists.
Data as of June 1993
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