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

by Bradley K. Martin

  Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, in Uncertain Partners, say (p. 327, fn. 29) that “Lim Un” obtained most of the materials for the book from Yu Song-chol and Yi Sang-jo. They base that conclusion on an interview with Yu.

  In June of 1995 Russian scholars told me that Ho Jin was still living in Moscow, where he was operating a theater.

  Lankov (From Stalin to Kim Il Sung) gives a different name for the author: Ho Un-bae. When I queried him by e-mail, Lankov was kind enough to reply: “The person in question normally called himself Ho Un-bae, but the name of Ho Jin was used frequently as well. I do not know how he came to have two names, but they were used interchangeably”

  Scholars have reacted to the “Lim Un” book in various ways. Seiler (Kim Il-song 1941-1948, p. 14) writes, “This book, a compilation of interviews conducted with exiled Soviet-Koreans who played pivotal roles in the establishment of the Kim Il-song regime, corroborates much of what other Soviet-Koreans and former Soviet officials are revealing now on the background of Kim and the founding of his regime.” He notes, however, that in some academic quarters the work “has been dismissed as yet another personal vendetta against Kim.”

  One scholar who has dismissed the work is Bruce Cumings, who refers to Lim as a “mysterious high-level defector” and observes that “Lim takes it upon himself to refute every anomaly in the record. … This is the surest evidence of any that the book was ghost-written in Seoul” (Origins II, p. 591; p. 884 n.).

  As for being a “defector,” perhaps the term can be used. However, it was not to South Korea but to the USSR, his home country, that Lim/Ho fled. And while The Founding of a Dynasty is a bitter book, I do not find it informed by Seoul-style anti-communism. To the contrary, the author’s voice consistently comes through as that of a dedicated Soviet communist of Korean extraction, horrified by what he views as Kim Il-sung’s perversion of sacred Soviet-communist doctrine. He contrasts Kim’s personality cult and lavish lifestyle with the behavior of Lenin, who once stopped a comrade’s speech to scold the speaker for praising him—and who refused special rations during a food shortage, fainting from hunger in his office one day (p. 318).

  As Cumings s remark about refuting every anomaly suggests, the book does show evidence of considerable access to research materials, especially in the portions concerning periods after Lim/Ho would have left North Korea. However, I see no reason to assume on that basis that the book was ghostwritten in South Korea. Presumably, considerable materials on North Korea were available in the Soviet Union, particularly to former high-level officials such as Yu and Yi and to an official of the Association of Soviet Koreans, such as Ho Jin. And the USSR had definite ideological and other disagreements with Pyongyang during the period before and after Ho left North Korea, disputes regarding which Lim/Ho consistently argues the Soviet case.

  Dutch scholar Erik van Ree relies to a great extent on Russian sources for his 1989 study, Socialism in One Zone. He describes Lim Un (p. 30) as “very favorably disposed towards the USSR” and adds that Lim’s “factual information on the Soviet military establishment is, according to my assessment, generally correct. … Lim’s account is, moreover, the most detailed and lively version available to my knowledge.”

  While the English version reveals many lapses, especially in clarity, I, too, find that much of the work rings true, both in its account of the facts and in its assessment of Kim Il-sung. (Kim “was mediocre, but there is no doubt that he was real,” Lim says on page 148, summing up his lengthy and persuasive rebuttal of the many theories advanced by others calling Kim a “fake.”)

  60. The South Korean ruling group, according to a 1948 CIA analysis, “has been forced to support imported expatriate politicians such as Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku. These, while they have no pro-Japanese taint, are essentially demagogues bent on autocratic rule” (cited in Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War [London: Viking, 1988], p. 23). Cumings (Origins II, pp. 190–192) also observes, “The object of every Korean ruler is to inculcate proper ideas in everyone in the realm, to push a uniform pattern of thought to the point that it becomes a state of mind, and therefore impervious to logic and argument. This is taken to be the essence and ideal of stable rule.”

  61. Halliday and Cumings (Korea, p. 57) note that the intent of eliminating non-leftist political opposition “was the same as that of the right wing in the South, to squash alternative centers of power.” The Northerners, however, “did it much more effectively because of their superior organization and the general weakness of the opposition.”

  62. Pak Pyong-so, quoted in Suh, Kim Il Sung, p. 78.

  63. Quoted in Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 360.

  64. Ibid., p. 382.

  65. Ibid., p. 348.

  66. Speech at the meeting ratifying the united-front policy and creating the North Korean Workers’ Party, quoted in Cumings, Origins I, p. 420. Although his regime enacted a women’s rights law outlawing sale of women into concubinage and prostitution, Kim himself was no stranger to kisaeng houses.

  67. Van Ree, Socialism in One Zone, pp. 157 and 197, cites two such speeches, in April and August of 1946.

  68. See Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, pp. 298–311.

  69. David Halberstam observes that “the postwar drawing of lines between the communists and the Western powers probably had a historical inevitability to it. Two great and uncertain powers were coming to terms with each other … like two blind dinosaurs wrestling in a very small pit” (The Best and the Brightest [New York: Random House, 1972], p. 106).

  More specifically, Van Ree’s analysis (Socialism in One Zone, p. 275) is that the Russians “showed remarkably little interest in moves toward Korean reunification via the Soviet-American negotiations.” Reunification would have meant shared influence throughout Korea and “Moscow found American influence in the northern zone more threatening than it found its own in the southern zone attractive.”

  Kathryn Weathersby put it more succinctly in the 1995 conference paper cited earlier: “Once Korea was divided at the 38th parallel into Soviet and American occupation zones, the chances for unification of the peninsula became very slim. … The Americans would only accept a government hostile to communists and the Soviets would only accept a government thoroughly sympathetic to .Moscow. The goals of the two great powers were thus mutually exclusive.”

  For a contrasting view, that “Soviet documents seriously undermine the argument that .Moscow was responsible for the deadlock perpetuating Korea’s division,” see Matray “Korea’s Partition.”

  70. Suh, Kim Il Sung, p. 97.

  71. According to the North’s account, Kim charmed Southern delegates into becoming born-again believers in him as Korea’s rightful leader. Rightist South Korean leader Kim Ku, for example, was “converted,” was “captured by his character and personality,” was “reborn as an enlightened human being in the rays of the shining sun of the nation, Comrade Kim Il Sung” (Baik II, pp. 243–251). Suh dismisses such claims, saying, “Nothing could be further from the truth” (Kim Il Sung, p. 366).

  72. “Since two years of direct negotiations with the Soviet Union in Korea had failed to bring agreement on peninsulawide elections, the American move was actually intended to obtain a UN sanction for U.S.-sponsored elections in the South—the political division of Korea” (Frank Baldwin, in his introduction to Without Parallel, p. 11).

  73. Baik II, p. 225.

  74. Yu Song-chol’s testimony, Hankuk Ilbo, November 9, 1990.

  75. New York Times, March 2, 1950, quoted in Robert R. Simmons, “The Korean Civil War,” in Baldwin, Without Parallel, p. 143.

  76. “[T]he moral condemnation and one-sided portrayal of North Korea as ‘aggressive’ and ‘bellicose’ was a cold war contrivance. Assuming that North Korea started the Korean War, one man’s ‘aggression’ is another’s patriotic duty to restore national unity” (Baldwin, Without Parallel, p. 32).

  77. Goncharov, Lewis and Xue say (Uncertain Partners, p. 152) that in
buying into Kim’s invasion plan “the Soviet dictator would be pursuing his goals on several levels—to expand the buffer zone along his border, to create a springboard against Japan that could be used during a future global conflict, to test the American resolve, to intensify the hostility between Beijing and Washington, and, finally and foremost, to draw U.S. power away from Europe.”

  78. Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 393.

  79. In early 1950 Yu Song-chol’s KPA operations bureau received intelligence reports suggesting that Rhee would attack the North in August, after the summer rainy season (Hankuk Ilbo, November 9, 1990). That does not necessarily refer to a full-scale invasion but could refer to yet another of the series of lesser attacks that each side had launched against the other.

  Cumings notes the border clashes along with other fighting in his argument that the question of who started the shooting on June 25, 1950, is secondary, since it was merely a phase in a revolution that had been in process on the Korean peninsula since 1945. “The basic issues over which the war in 1950 was fought were apparent immediately after liberation, within a three-month period, and led to open fighting that eventually claimed more than one hundred thousand lives in peasant rebellion, labor strife, guerrilla warfare, and open fighting along the thirty-eighth parallel—all this before the ostensible Korean War began. In other words, the conflict was civil and revolutionary in character, beginning just after 1945 and proceeding through a dialectic of revolution and reaction. The opening of conventional battles in June 1950 only continued this war by other means” (Cumings, Origins I, pp. xx–xxi). In an interview after the Soviet archives had started to yield their information pointing to Stalin’s role, Cumings told Prof. Paik Nak-chung of Seoul National University that “by 1949 if not earlier, both Korean states thought that war was the way—perhaps the only way—to settle the national division. … Even if new information should disclose a North Korean invasion apart from any southern provocation June 25, that would still not mean the North ‘started’ the conflict, only that it took the existing armed conflict to a new and more destructive phase” (Korea Herald, January 20, 1993, excerpting from an unspecified recent issue of Korea Journal).

  While Cumings advances understanding by focusing on civil origins of the conflict, his “only” seems a curiously mild way to talk about an invasion that led to the deaths of millions of people. Somewhat in contrast to the way he minimizes the importance of the question of who invaded whom, Cumings emphasizes that it was the South that had made the first moves toward the creation of separate regimes, in the final three months of 1945. “We could argue, of course that a separate northern regime was inevitable. But the sequence remains undeniable: the south moved first” (Origins I, p. 403).

  80. This part of Khrushchev’s recollection is translated from tapes studied by John Merrill. See Merrill, Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1989), p. 25. (A nearly identical translation is in Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, translated and edited by Strobe Tal-bott [New York: Bantam Books, 1970], p. 401.) Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, quoting it (Uncertain Partners, p. 138), say it appears to relate to Kim’s first visit to Moscow, in 1949, not his 1950 visit.

  81. These documents ’were translated by Kathryn Weathersby and published in articles in Bulletin of the Cold War History Project, nos. 4 and 5 (1995), Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C

  As for Kim’s political worries about the mood of his subjects, recall that the wing of the Workers’ Party whose members hailed from the South still had strength in North Korea.

  82. Goncharov, Lewis and Xue, Uncertain Partners, p. 137, citing a 1966 Soviet Foreign Ministry top-secret account of the Korean War. On page 143 they say the visit lasted from March 30 to April 25.

  83. Khruschev, Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 401–402.

  Regarding the North’s economic reasons for planning a war, Suh says (Kim Il Sung, pp. 114 ff), “One cause of the war that has often been neglected is the economic situation in the North. Kim had completed two one-year economic plans for 1947 and 1948, which he claimed were resounding successes. By the time of the Korean War, he had instituted a two-year economic plan for 1949–1950 which was in considerable difficulty. … Kim may have been advised by his comrades of the futility of trying to develop an independent North Korean economy with only half the labor force of the South while military conquest of the South and economic plans for all Korea seemed so close at hand.”

  84. See Weathersby’s 1995 conference paper, “Limits to Revisionist Interpretations.”

  85. One Korea specialist wrote, “If the United States should have to fight Russia, the rugged mountains of Korea, some 5,000 miles from .Moscow, would be the last possible place chosen for battle with the Soviets. The military argument for the withdrawal of every American soldier from Korea is unanswerable. In war with Russia, Korea would not be a Bataan but a Guam, with every soldier lost to the enemy in a few days. That is the military picture—if we should have to fight Russia. If we don’t, then this is not the military picture. Today there seem to be no signs that war is coming in the immediate future. If that is so, then it seems that political rather than military considerations should govern the withdrawal of the last few United States troops still remaining in Korea. .Many observers believe that the North Korean communist army will not attack the south so long as American soldiers are there to get in the way” (Harold J. Noble, “Korea Must Stay Half Free,” New Leader, June 18, 1949).

  86. David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), pp. 65–67. “As Acheson once noted,” Halberstam adds, “the foreign policy of the United States in those years immediately after the war could be summed up in three sentences: ‘1. Bring the boys home; 2. Don’t be Santa Claus; 3. Don’t be pushed around.’”

  87. Goncharov spoke of the document on June 13, 1995, in the author’s presence, at the Seoul conference “Rethinking the Half Century of Liberation,” sponsored by Korea Press Center and the Graduate School of Journalism and Mass Communication of Korea University.

  88. See Cumings, Origins II, for a lengthy and rather compelling recital of the evidence. On pp. 64–66 Cumings argues that the American policy of seeking containment in Korea through the United Nations instead of unilaterally—a policy he dates to several years before the June 25, 1950, outbreak of full-scale war— “was essentially the product of the State [Department]-military stalemate over how to defend southern Korea. Instead of an internationalism that abjured containment—the standard interpretation—American policy garbed containment in internationalist clothes. … Acheson could bring the prestige of the UN to bear on his desire to maintain American credibility in Korea, in the face of military and congressional unwillingness to back the $600 million [aid] program for Korea. He later noted that the problem was turned over to the UN because the military was pressing to get its troops out of Korea, something that ‘we delayed until June 29, 1949. ”

  89. See Cumings, Origins II, pp. 42–61. On the question of Korea’s military-strategic importance, Cumings notes that not everyone in the Pentagon agreed that it was negligible. The War Department’s director of intelligence said Korea “had ‘high strategic value to the USSR,’ completing ‘a perfect outer perimeter protecting the Siberian Maritime Province’ and especially the base of Vladivostok; it put Soviet ground and air forces ‘within easy striking distance of the heart of the Japanese islands’” (p. 59).

  90. Ibid., p. 161.

  91. Arguing Acheson’s case for him, Cumings says (Origins II, p. 428) that

  “telegraphing” to the Soviets that Washington intended defense of particular places aside from the big ones, Japan and Germany, “would be the height of stupidity.” Why? Cumings does not elaborate here. Did Acheson envision a predatory Moscow using the information to bring about, by remote control, a in a place—such as Korea—that would tie U.S. forces down so that they could not defend against a later blow planned in Europe? L
ater (p. 430), Cumings suggests the possibility that the speech was purposely ambiguous to keep .Moscow and Pyongyang guessing.

  92. Cumings (Origins II, pp. 615–619) says it is legitimate to speculate that “a small group of officials in Tokyo and Washington saw the attack coming, prepared to meet it, and then let it happen—while keeping Congress in the dark, then and thereafter.” He approvingly quotes Stone: “The hypothesis that invasion was encouraged politically by silence, invited militarily by defensive formations, and finally set off by some minor lunges across the border when all was ready would explain a great deal” (I.F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952]; paperback, 1970, p. 44). Cumings states outright (Origins II, p. 602) that Acheson “wanted the communists to strike first along the containment periphery.”

  Cumings makes the comparison of the Korea and Pearl Harbor theories, observing that “even a lifetime of research would not prove definitively that Roosevelt was either guilty or innocent of ‘maneuvering the Japanese,’ and the same is true of Acheson and Korea. We do not have signals intelligence that would suggest American advance knowledge of North Korean action, a major lacuna that we do have for Pearl Harbor” (Origins II, p. 435).

  Maneuvering by Acheson was not Cumings’s preferred scenario for how the invasion came about. Rather, in Origins II, he favored the theory that South Korean troops striking north provoked a counterattack by North Korean troops who had been hoping and planning for just such a provocation so that they could unleash a full-fledged invasion in response. Evidence since publication of that book has shown that awaiting a Southern provocation “with the riveted mix of alarm and relish of a cobra lying in wait” (Origins II, p. 574) had indeed been Kim Il-sung’s posture earlier—because Stalin had told him not to attack first— but that Kim, tired of waiting for Rhee to hand him a provocation, had persuaded Stalin to back his unprovoked invasion.