Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  Kim read a speech drafted by Soviet occupation officials. During the speech, rumors began flashing through the crowd that he was a fake and a Soviet stooge.21 Koreans had been brought up to respect age and seniority.

  Until that moment they had imagined Kim Il-sung as a grizzled veteran. Only thirty-three and looking even younger with a blue suit too small for him and what an unfriendly onlooker described as “a haircut like a Chinese waiter,” the speaker hardly seemed the man behind the legend.22

  Soviet officials polled the audience after the speech and were dismayed by the reaction. According to one report the Russians had been leaning toward making Kim defense minister—the strong man’s post—in a regime to be headed nominally by Cho M.an-sik.23 But it would not do to have the Korean populace believe the Russian occupiers were installing a stooge.

  The answer was a propaganda offensive to shore up Kim’s image. That campaign sought to turn his youth into a virtue. As an official biography later expressed the formula, a promise of “everlasting prosperity to the people” is delivered convincingly not by “an old man given to reminiscing on past glories but a young man who looks to the distant future.24 By most accounts Kim, during that period, displayed a modest, unassuming demeanor. His Soviet handlers thus had a fairly easy time of it as they worked to correct the initial image problems of the attractive young leader. Here is a description by an apparently dazzled reporter for a South Korean newspaper who interviewed him in December 1945:

  A dimpled smile, gentle eyes and the light of genius glittering in them. … Let me present the appearance of the General in detail. Sunburnt brown complexion, short, modern-style hair, gentle, double-lidded eyes, dimples appearing when he smiles—he is a perfectly handsome youth. His height is probably about five feet six and he is not so plump. Generous, open and cheerful character and modest, yet clear-cut attitude make people feel as if they have been his friends for a long time. It is difficult to guess where his ambitious spirit and daring are hidden. … The General uses simple and clear expressions. He is modesty itself, and when asked if he had any intention of becoming a statesman, he answered that he is not fitted for such a name. When youthful people or students call him General, he replies: “I am not a General, but your friend. Please call me dongmoo [comrade].” … He loves the masses of people; above all, young people he loves deeply; he meets everyone with good grace, listens to them with sincerity, and answers their questions with kindness. General Kim is now among our people as a simple citizen. How his youthful wisdom and courage will reflect themselves in the development of our nation must be a great matter of concern of Korea.25

  The Soviet authorities’ initial plans ran into a roadblock when Cho Man-sik showed that he would be no pliant figurehead. He complained that Soviet occupation troops had confiscated grain needed by the hungry Koreans.26 That same issue in November 1945 inspired student-led riots in Sinuiju, ?which ushered in several months of often-violent struggle.27

  More significantly Cho refused to compromise his demands for immediate independence in favor of a “trusteeship” plan for Korea. Actually put forth first by the Americans, that plan called for up to five years of tutelage by four Allied powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and Nationalist-ruled China. During that time the Koreans would learn to govern themselves. The American proposal responded to concern over the resource imbalances and other ill effects of dividing Korea into exclusive American and Soviet zones. Trusteeship offered unity for the country and its economy under a single government.28

  Many Koreans, however, felt insulted and outraged by the notion that they needed tutelage. In the South, opposition from such right--wing nationalists as Rhee Syngman and Kim Ku was ferocious. American occupation officials—including some who had been suspicious of the idea to begin ?with—quickly sought to distance themselves from the hot-potato trusteeship proposal. In the North, Cho Man-sik had put behind him his longtime advocacy of nonresistance and national self-improvement. With the Japanese defeated, it was time for independence. Cho was not the least bit interested in exchanging Japanese rulers for new foreign masters under the rubric of “trusteeship.”

  Moscow, however, refused to budge from its public stance. The USSR’s position was curious. The Soviet occupation for its first few months otherwise gets generally high marks for responsiveness to Korean aspirations— especially when compared with an often overbearing American occupation in the South. And analysts in the USSR could see clearly that trusteeship would dilute Moscow’s control in North Korea, to the benefit of the United States and the other two noncommunist Allies.

  How, then, and “why did the Soviet authorities get themselves and their Korean communist allies into the unpopular position of appearing to champion “trusteeship”? One theory is that the communists, needing time to strengthen their political forces in the South, saw a trusteeship of several years as in their interests.29 Dutch scholar Erik van Ree puts forth a different argument, based on Soviet documents made available after the USSR’s collapse. Moscow did not really want trusteeship, van Ree asserts; its supposed support of the concept was merely camouflage and a delaying tactic while it pursued its true aim: planting a satellite regime in the North. “Moscow was not anxious to reunify Korea,” he says. The Americans, on the other hand, initially favored unification out of the belief that, since they controlled Seoul and two-thirds of the population, “they would profit more from unification than the Russians.30

  As the Cold War loomed, it is clear, both the Soviet Union and the United States gave priority to ensuring ideological compatibility in the respective zones they occupied in Korea, at whatever expense to Koreans’ yearning for independence and reunification. The country north and south, was “a shrimp crushed in a battle of the whales,” in the words of an old Korean proverb.31

  The Soviet authorities in January of 1946 placed Cho Man-sik in custody dispensing with all but a semblance of coalition politics. Cho’s precise fate is unknown, but it is thought that authorities killed him later, around the time of the Korean War.32 The Soviet generals moved to place Korean administrative organizations and political parties in the hands of the communists—a group of Koreans largely willing to swallow nationalistic objections to the trusteeship concept, once Moscow cracked the whip.

  Several prominent communist, anti-Japanese figures were available to choose among. Moscow ruled out one group as being too close to the Chinese communists.33 Pak Hon-yong led another group, the “domestic” communists. Pak’s problem was that, like most other leading politicians of all stripes, he was based in the capital, Seoul, and thus in the American occupation zone. Pak headed a single communist party, headquartered in Seoul, which sought to speak for both halves of Korea. He was also involved in an ambitious united-front scheme to draw nationalists from all across the ideological spectrum into a “Korean People’s Republic” that claimed legitimacy throughout the peninsula. Moscow withheld support, out of concern about dilution of Soviet control in the North in case the Korean People’s Republic or any other Seoul-based pan-Korean government should come into being.34

  For his part, Kim Il-sung actively attacked the Korean People’s Republic’s pretensions to Korea-wide governance. It was in the northern part of Korea, he argued, that “favorable conditions have been created for building a new country”35 He did not mention the likelihood that this would mean a new country in which the leading role would go to Kim Il-sung, not Pak Hon-yong.

  Kim also attacked Cho Man-sik and Cho’s followers for joining with “reactionary strata of the United States” to oppose the agreement on trusteeship.36 As he wrote in his memoirs, Kim since his student days had despised the reformists—precisely on account of their submission to foreign rule during what they viewed as a period of “preparation” for independence. He purportedly hated the implication that Korea was an “inferior” nation. But now the Japanese were defeated and Soviet generals were in charge of deciding which Koreans would achieve power in Pyongyang. By supporting trusteeshi
p, Kim could be seen as having traded places on this key nationalist issue with the doomed Cho Man-sik.

  Stated baldly, Kim was opposing both immediate unification (under the Seoul-based People’s Republic, which Pak Hon-yong supported) and immediate independence (-which Cho had demanded). There apparently is no record of any pangs that these stands may have caused his patriot’s heart to suffer. Perhaps he reasoned that the Soviet Union, having supported Korean liberation for decades, had earned the right to his deference.37 In any case it is possible to see much of his subsequent career as a conscious, decades-long effort to redeem the nationalist credentials he had soiled by taking orders from Moscow on the People’s Republic, trusteeship and other issues. From this point it is not always easy to distinguish actions Kim took out of genuine nationalist convictions from ploys he intended first and foremost to help consolidate and expand his own power.

  Kim Il-sung had become chairman of the North Korean branch of the Korean Communist Party in December of 1945. On February 8, 1946, with heavy backing from the Soviet authorities, he became chairman of the Interim People’s Committee. That made him the top Korean administrative leader in the North.38 He was to remain in power until his death on July 8, 1994, forty-eight years and five months later. Thus to an extraordinary extent, as Dae-Sook Suh observes, the study of Kim and his rule “is the study of North Korea.”39

  Kim’s Interim People’s Committee quickly proclaimed the equality of the sexes, nationalized major industries and, most significantly, launched a drastic land reform. Although those measures all represented Soviet policy as handed down by Stalin, there is little reason to believe Kim harbored major reservations about carrying out the 1946 reforms.40 Certainly they benefited him politically. Farmland owned by Japanese and Korean landlords went to hundreds of thousands of peasants, the majority of whom had been tenants or mere farm laborers. The redistribution instantly created a devoted popular following for the new regime. “Is this land going to be ours forever?” a former tenant farmer asked Kim when he visited the man’s village. The new leader’s reported reply: “It was to give this land back to you that the anti-Japanese fighters shed much blood.41

  The haves resisted the handover of their property to the have-nots, and anti-Soviet Korean patriots opposed Kim Il-sung as Moscow’s “puppet.” One Russian general reported that rioting and terrorism around that time reminded him of the civil “war in his homeland. Some of the violence came perilously close to Kim. Four days before the land reform decree of March 5, 1946, a would-be assassin threw a grenade at the platform where Kim, with other North Korean officials and Soviet officers, watched a celebration of the anniversary of 1919’s March 1 uprising. A Russian security guard who caught the grenade was seriously injured. A few days later, assassins struck the home of Kim’s relative and former teacher, Methodist pastor Kang Ryang-uk, chief secretary of the provisional government. Kang’s son and daughter and a visiting cleric died in the attack. Soon, however, the authorities captured most of the conspirators and put down other rebellious Northerners.42

  Mean-while, a great many disgruntled citizens voted with their feet. Land reform and nationalization of industry drove away a very large percentage of wealthy and educated people who resented the communist program and who could have been expected to put up further resistance if they had stayed. An estimated one million people migrated to the capitalist South.43 American historian Bruce Cumings has argued that the radical reforms achieved an overnight revolution in the class structure of North Korea: Most Koreans who had prospered by collaborating with Japan were gone now, living in the South—or, if they remained in the North, were shorn of their wealth and power. Families that had occupied the lower strata for generations now found themselves in the upper ranks of society.44

  Another way of looking at the exodus of the well-off and better educated, however, is that it created a vacuum of qualified technical and administrative personnel that the former lower classes simply-were not prepared to fill, regardless of their upward social mobility. Evidence from the former Soviet Union shows that the USSR filled that vacuum for many years by sending Soviet personnel who called many of the shots in the economy, the government and the party. Historian Kathryn Weathersby has found that a large part of the archival record of Soviet–North Korean relations during the period consists of messages from Pyongyang—often from Kim Il-sung himself—asking Moscow to send specialists.45

  As the state took over some 90 percent of industry in 1946, it outlawed many of the labor abuses of the past. A new law set standard working hours and mandated sexual equality in pay levels. Kim’s government proceeded with Soviet-style economic planning from 1947. Soviet assistance poured in. The regime called upon the hard work and enthusiasm of those subjects who felt grateful for the end of the old order and the dawn of the new. Stakhanovite campaigns urged industrial workers to sacrifice for productivity. One highly publicized group of locomotive factory workers marched off as “storm-troopers” and reopened an abandoned coal mine, to cope with a coal shortage that was keeping trains from running. A campaign exhorted farmers to turn over portions of their rice harvests for “patriotic” use in emulation of a farmer named Kim Je-won; he supposedly had been so moved by land reform that he donated thirty bales out of his rice harvest, leaving only enough to feed his family for the following year.46

  Kim Il-sung traveled far and wide to give “on-the-spot guidance” to his subjects. Visiting a mountain village in the spring of 1947, he explained that even poor land could be made to yield crops if heavily fertilized with manure. Urging that steep land be cultivated, he exhorted his listeners: “Reap golden ears from all mountains.” (Wherever he may have come up with that idea, to the extent it did not involve terracing the policy—-which he continued for decades—-was foolish. Ultimately it proved disastrous for North Korean agriculture.) At a 1947 firing ceremony in Hwanghae for a coking furnace, which the spiteful Japanese had put out of commission at the time of their defeat, Kim urged workers to redouble their efforts and get a critically important blast furnace back into operation, as well. “The Korean people can do anything that they attempt,” he proclaimed. He advised the managers to deal with shortfalls in the workers’ living standards by creating a fishing fleet and vegetable gardens.47

  Efforts to increase productivity through attitude changes worked, to some extent, and North Korea managed a burst of economic development in 1947 and 1948, particularly in heavy industry. The Hwanghae blast furnace, for example, reportedly was restored within four months, even though the Japanese supposedly had said it could not be put back into operation even in ten years.

  It was not that the phenomenon was unique to North Korea. The Soviet Union’s new Eastern European satellites at the time were enjoying similarly impressive advances—as had the USSR itself in the early, enthusiastic years of communist rule. But a special factor in the North’s favor was the way it was blessed with the lion’s share of the peninsula’s mineral resources. Reflecting that, several cities on its east coast had formed the hub of Korean industry that the Japanese colonialists developed.48

  Worth noting also is that, in this period, many elements of capital were still privately held. While the state officially owned title to the farmland following the land reform, the redistribution had placed it in the possession of the individual tillers—supposedly for their lifetimes.49 Although Korean communists wanted full collectivization of farming, the Soviet advisors had restrained them, insisting that the country was not yet ready.

  Shortly after liberation Northerners had survived serious food shortages.50 For 1948, however, the regime boasted of a grain harvest of 1.78 million tons—more than 10 percent larger than the biggest ever recorded during the Japanese period.51 Farm mechanization got much of the official credit. For farmers, however, gaining land they could call their own may well have stimulated greater effort and output.52

  A nationwide literacy campaign contributed to economic development even as it raised citizen morale. By March of
1949, North Korea claimed to be the first Asian country to have eliminated illiteracy completely. The country had dispensed with complex Chinese characters in favor of sole reliance on the indigenous, simple and phonetically precise hangul writing system.53 The state built schools both for children and for adults. The northern half of Korea had been without colleges and universities under Japanese rule. When the Northern regime founded Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang in October 1946, it was over the objections of “unsound elements,” who complained that the country had not yet built proper foundations upon which to erect a structure of higher education. By the time the North started to introduce compulsory elementary education, in 1950, it had an additional thirteen colleges.54

  The pride many North Koreans felt in the transformation of their society was very real, as outsiders who spent some time in the North testified. London Observer correspondent Philip Deane, captured in 1950 in the early days of the Korean War, remained a prisoner in the North almost for the duration of the conflict. He later sprinkled his memoirs of confinement with quotations from North Koreans expressing their pride in the new, classless and, from their viewpoint, far more just society. North Korea, “under the guidance of our great leader and teacher Stalin, and in accordance with the orders of General Kim Il-sung, has emancipated “women,” an interpreter in Pyongyang boasted in one such exchange. “Everybody is learning to read—young and old.”55

  While many factors actually combined to produce early successes, Kim was happy to take all the credit and many of his followers were eager to give it. By 1947, he had became the center of a personality cult, modeled on Stalin’s, in which he was pictured as wise, strong, compassionate—and energetic enough to involve himself in virtually every significant decision. He was reported to have supervised closely even the composition of the national anthem. Perhaps calling upon his experience as a church organist, he urged the committee involved to insert a refrain between the verses, to “improve the rhythm and harmony of the music [and] add to the solemnity of the song as a-whole, and inspire the singer with national pride and self-confidence.” According to an official biography, “none of the poets and composers assembled there had thought of this until he pointed it out.”56