Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  In the several years following the armistice North Korea did rebuild its shattered economy, with a lot of help from its friends. The country—especially its capital, Pyongyang—became something of a socialist showcase. Meanwhile Kim consolidated power through continued purges against his rivals at home. His concern to limit the country’s dependence on its larger communist neighbors inspired him to begin developing a self-reliant brand of communist economics.

  Although Kim would not acknowledge the failure of the war, the country was in ruins and someone had to take some sort of responsibility. He moved to defuse the situation by blaming mid-level and low-level bureaucrats for foul-ups.2 That was not enough, though, and he sacrificed some of the leadership.

  Even as the Korean War fighting raged, Kim parceled out blame among high officials. On December 21, 1950, he addressed a meeting of the central committee of his Workers’ Party, attacking named individuals for mistakes. Some of those errors were substantive snafus, but others were “defeatism” and other attitude problems. The offense of one high official who lost all his official posts was to have remarked that it would be hard to fight without more airplanes—a comment whose truth should have been evident in view of the devastation wrought when the Americans unleashed their air power.

  Kim called for a purge of the party, asserting that the war had shown certain members to be disloyal.3 His approach was to pick off potential enemies, one group at a time, before they could build enough political support to use his failure in the war to push him out. Removed from their official and party positions in the course of a long series of purges—and in many cases exiled, imprisoned at hard labor or killed—-were most of the members of rival factions plus some old comrades from Manchuria belonging to his own faction. Those purged eventually included an astonishingly high proportion of the KPA generals who had been involved in the war—about nine out of ten, according to Yu Song-chol.4

  Kim’s skill at cutthroat, divide-and-conquer maneuvering can be seen in the purge of Ho Ka-i. A vice-chairman of the party Central Committee and vice-premier, Ho was also the leader of Soviet-born ethnic Koreans, including Yu Song-chol, who had come in with the Soviet occupation troops. Ho and Kim clashed over whether to make the Workers’ Party an elite organization, as in the USSR, or the mass party that Kim wanted.5 Yu said that another Soviet-Korean, Pak Chang-ok, one day took Ho a copy of a party draft document full of flowery praise of Kim Il-sung—the sort of tribute that was to become de rigueur. Ho criticized the language as excessive, whereupon Pak invited him to edit the document. Taking the bait, the unsuspecting Ho underlined the offending passages in red ink. The other man took the marked-up document straight to Kim. Later Ho visited the premier’s office. Armed now with proof of Ho’s disloyalty, Kim “pulled the draft out of his drawer, his face flushed.”

  At a party Central Committee meeting November 1, 1951, Ho’s erstwhile factional ally Pak Chang-ok led a criticism session that dredged up a number of alleged errors. Ho lost his party position and membership. He stayed on for a time as vice-premier. Kim assigned him to restore, by a certain deadline, a dam that had been destroyed during the Korean War. It was a task at which, Yu said, Ho was bound to fail. In 1953, Ho was found dead of-what was described as a self-inflicted pistol wound. Yu thought it was really an assassin’s bullet that killed him.6

  In 1952, North Korean authorities secretly arrested twelve communists who had been active in the South Korean Workers’ Party before fleeing to the North. According to the charges against them, “on the orders of U.S. imperialists” they had planned a coup to replace Kim with their fellow Southerner and faction leader, Pak Hon-yong. They were also accused of destroying “democratic forces” in the South and of spying on behalf of the United States. A spy gang affiliated with them, in a “vicious counterrevolutionary crime,” allegedly had ignored Kim’s orders to strengthen the defense of the west coast, especially the Inchon-Seoul area, in July of 1950—and thus the North Koreans had not been ready to repel the Inchon landing.7

  In fact this group had challenged Kim’s ’wartime leadership and sought to overthrow him, but the charges tying members to the American enemy almost certainly were trumped up.8 The twelve went on trial in August 1953, right after proclamation of the armistice. Ten drew death sentences while the other two were sentenced to imprisonment for decades. The authorities held Pak Hon-yong himself incommunicado, from February 1953, and condemned him to death in December 1955.

  Besides eliminating his most dangerous opponent, Kim used the trials to drive home the notion that U.S. and South Korean aggression had caused the war. More important, he shifted the blame for the war’s failure to those rivals’ alleged collusion with the United States. As an official biographer enthuses: “To have successfully fought U.S. imperialism, the strongest enemy, while such wicked spy cliques were entrenched in the Party and carrying out their intrigues! How great is Comrade Kim Il-sung!”9 Kim had learned to fend off challenges to his rule by wrapping himself in the flag.

  Yu Song-chol described the way Kim Il-sung “displayed his astute political tactics by creating dissension among the different factions. On a personal level, Kim would hand out special promotions and assignments in order to court his opponents’ favor. Then, at the moment they became careless or inattentive, he would either purge or remove them like a lightning bolt out of the blue.”

  A core group of Kim Il-sung loyalists did his bidding in those purges. Yu counted around twenty-five guerrilla partisans who had been with Kim in Manchuria and at the Eighty-eighth Brigade camp, then followed him to North Korea. Most of them Yu described as next to illiterate, some never having finished even the four years of elementary school. In a period when members of other groups were gritting their teeth at the ever-increasing extravagance of Kim’s personality cult, the partisans were delighted to see their leader rendered such praise. “There was no ideological discord between them and Kim Il-sung,” Yu said of the partisans. Because of their limited backgrounds, “they could not become a power that could challenge him, and none of them could survive on their own in case of a break-up.10

  Kim compared the “sectarian elements” he was purging to rats that required complete extermination: “If we don’t catch the rat, it will give birth to young. They-will gnaw holes through the walls and finally destroy the whole house.”11

  An official biography claims that even as the Korean War raged, Kim had one eye on post-war economic development: “Can he not create vast farms on the unexplored plateaux of the north? Can he not reclaim the tidelands from the West Sea? Where is a great metallurgical base to be built and a base for light industries? How and where will the city apartments and countryside housing be built? These are the questions he thought over time and again as he looked far into the future.” In the dark days of 1951, Kim supposedly came up with a vision for the rebuilt Pyongyang and called in an architect to discuss it as planes buzzed and anti-aircraft guns boomed. “Already his eyes saw the splendid, the magnificent streets extending one beyond the other, … the beautiful parks where children frolicked and cultural institutions of marble and granite stood.”12

  When the time came to transform the vision into reality, Kim turned the capital’s reconstruction into a nationwide “battle,” in the Soviet Stakhanovite pattern, with college students and office workers pressed into service to keep the building sites humming day and night.13 Other “battles” ensued, to rebuild factories and transportation facilities as Pyongyang fully nationalized the country’s industry. Clearing away the ashes and ruins of war, North Koreans laid an impressive base for economic development. between 1954 and 1958, Pyongyang reported that combined output from mining, manufacturing and power transmission increased more than threefold.14 Industry’s role in generating national income rapidly outdistanced that of agriculture—a key indication of industrial development.15 between 1947 and 1967, per capita income was reported to have grown at an average rate of 13.1 percent a year.16

  Other communist countries helped,
but there is a debate whether that help came in the philanthropic form of foreign aid or in simple trade and investment. By one account, between 1946 and 1960, North Korea received foreign aid equivalent to about $125 per person (approximately the same per capita amount as South Korea received from its donors). The aid came from the Soviet Union, China, Eastern European countries and even Mongolia.17 However, announcements of grants to North Korea are conspicuously lacking from the Soviet records of the period. That is a good reason to think that there were no grants, since Moscow in other cases was never shy about taking credit for philanthropy. Substantial Soviet shipments of raw materials, industrial equipment and fuel were extremely helpful to the developing North Korean economy—but probably came on credit, to be repaid with North Korean products.18

  It is one thing to receive help from abroad, quite another to use it well. Many recipient countries had dismal records, but foreign analysts were impressed that North Korea used what it got to press forward with its industrialization drive. Pyongyang took effective advantage of the country’s high degree of centralization, its compact economy and an unusual lack of corruption and mismanagement. Its success “makes North Korea’s model unique among the world’s many aid-receiving aspirants of development,” said a study published by a conservative American think tank.19

  What Kim promised North Koreans was phrased in the terms traditionally used to describe the good life. The people would “live in tile-roofed houses, clothed in silk, eating rice and meat soup.”20 Although those goals were to remain elusive, the economy chalked up so many early successes that Kim perhaps started to believe the “genius” claims his subordinates were putting forth.21 Hearing choruses of praise for what he had done already22 Kim Il-sung felt a surge of confidence for the future. In 1958, he even boasted that North Korea had the ability to “catch up with Japan in the machinery industry”23

  Underlying all his policies was Kim’s unchanged determination to reunite the country. He sought more subtle ways of disengaging the Seoul government’s American defenders. Still far from his mind was any notion that the capitalist South and socialist North might coexist peacefully. In the cause of ultimate reunification,the prime duty of North Korean revolutionaries was still to overthrow “the U.S. imperialist aggressive forces” and liberate the South Korean people. The DPRK must build up its economy in order to play its role as “strategic base of the Korean revolution.24

  While moderating the recklessness that had pushed him to invade in 1950, Kim gave up none of his determination. Not even the enmity his troops had aroused during their periods of occupation of the South deterred him. There was another factor, however, that weighed heavily in Kim’s calculations: Thanks to a new U.S.–South Korean mutual security treaty, it was clear now that the Southerners did not stand alone. For the decades that followed, the North lived with the danger that the United States would rejoin the Korean War—perhaps with the gloves off the American nuclear capability—if Kim should renew his attempt at reunification via invasion.

  The regime’s propaganda emphasized readiness to take on the United States again. Further, it used the Americans as bugbears to inspire passionate efforts to rebuild the country—as when workers at the Hwanghae steel works supposedly pledged to Kim: “We will now build open hearths and blast furnaces and surely burn up the U.S. imperialists, the enemy in their flames!25

  But Kim preferred to avoid confronting the Americans directly—unless they should happen to be so busy in wars elsewhere that he could see a chance of victory. Forceful unification would be an option in case of the outbreak of global war, he said in 1955. “It would be rather difficult for us to fight all alone against American imperialism,” he explained. However, “under conditions where they must disperse their forces on a global scale it would be comparatively easy for us to defeat them.”26

  Besides preparing for such a chance to unify via war, Kim developed another interventionist policy aimed at bringing the South under communist rule even in peacetime. That strategy was based on subversion. It represented a return to the approach of the late 1940s, before Pyongyang had shifted to planning for the 1950 invasion. While working to get American forces out of the South and out of the picture, North Korea would break down the anti-communism of South Koreans and incite them to revolt against their leaders. For this, Pyongyang would train agents and infiltrate them into the South. The revolution would communize the South and permit unification under a single system.

  Kim still saw himself as Korea’s Ho Chi Minh. Girding up its military defenses, the North would become a launching pad—and a fortified, inviolable sanctuary—for forces waging guerrilla warfare or other military actions in support of a Southern revolution.27 Although Kim called this process “peaceful unification,” the Pyongyang regime quickly started preparing for the violence implicit in an approach that amounted to a Mao-style “people’s war.” And violent it was. Among the reported casualties was a South Korean woman named Park Bu-ryon, wife of Koje Island anchovy fisherman Kim Hong-jo. A pair of local South Koreans allegedly working as agitators for Pyongyang broke into her house in 1960. When she discovered them and shouted for help, they killed her and stole a boat to attempt an escape. Mourning her was the victim’s eldest son: an ambitious young politician named Kim Young-sam, later to become president of South Korea.28

  After the war the North had a vast military force—estimated at almost 600,000 men. But Kim needed to divert as much manpower and wealth as possible to economic development, and it was also in his interest to try to weaken the South’s military defenses. Thus, he developed a huge “territorial militia,” led by discharged soldiers working in the civilian economy and armed with automatic weapons and armored vehicles. Mean-while he proposed to South Korea a mutual reduction so that the active-duty forces of each would number fewer than 100,000 men. Although that disarmament proposal went nowhere, Pyongyang unilaterally reduced military service periods for draftees and began gradual demobilization—sending many of the mustered-out soldiers, as well as new graduates of junior and senior high schools, to work on the farms. The military component of the state budget dropped from 15.2 percent in 1953 to 4.8 percent in 1958.29

  Despite the many claims that the war had made anti-communists of most Southerners, it was clear that the impoverished, war-devastated South remained vulnerable to communist infiltration and subversion. A few weeks before the armistice was signed, when Washington policymakers considered whether to press for the option of a neutral, unified Korea, one official worried aloud that neutralization might provide the opening for rapid commu-nization of the South Koreans.30 The next day, June 17, 1953, Rhee’s prime minister met Secretary of State Dulles to argue against an armistice. Prime Minister Paek Tu-chin argued that the time was right to “get the communists out of Korea, unite the country and liberate the people in North Korea.” Otherwise, he warned, “the communists would rebuild their air fields, create strong military forces and soon infiltrate South Korea.” The South Korean government and people “very much” feared communist infiltration and attack, Paek said.

  Trying to sell an armistice, Dulles argued (prophetically, but jumping the gun by decades) that communism was a force in decline: It was possible, he said, that in the next five or ten years Russian power would have “pulled back to its historic boundaries” and the Cold War divisions of Germany and Korea ended. To help this process along, Dulles urged, “infiltration should work just the other way—that is, from the South to the North,” and “the economy of South Korea should be rapidly built up so that South Korea would soon become a strong attraction” to North Koreans. Dulles also cited as protection for South Korea a proposed security treaty with the United States, plus a “Greater Sanction Statement” comprising commitments by other members of the UN Command. “The communists”—including Moscow and Beijing—would be on notice that both commitments “would mean instant retaliation if they again attack Korea, and they know that this retaliation could mean atomic attacks on Vladivostok and Port
Arthur.” Thus, “the communists might be reluctant to use what resources they have, which are relatively meager, to rebuild their military position in North Korea and risk continuing the expansion of South Korean and American power on the peninsula.”31

  Less than three weeks later,on July 7,1953,the U.S. National Security Council adopted a top-secret policy statement covering the period between the signing of the armistice and the negotiation of a peace treaty—an “interim” period that even a half century later had yet to end,according to that definition. Among other measures,the United States was to “continue a program of covert operations designed to assist in the achievement of U.S. objectives vis-à-vis Communist China and Korea.”32 As for what those objectives might be,another top-secret NSC report issued that same day said that Washington could choose one of two mutually exclusive objectives in Korea. One was to continue the division of the country, with South Korea to be brought into the U.S. security system as a military ally. The other choice was to ensure that united Korea would be neutral but governed by the regime already in place in the South. The second option,of course, was available only if North and South could be unified. The policymakers decided after due debate that a reunified and neutral but noncommunist Korea was the preferred option.33 However,a subsequent international conference at Geneva did not reach agreement on a peace treaty—much less on the reunification-with-neutralization option.

  As we have seen, part of Kim Il-sung’s strategy to subvert the South was to restore the pre-war North Korean economy and build on it to demonstrate the superiority of the socialist system—the mirror image of-what Dulles envisioned for the South. The difference was that Kim managed to show some quick successes while the Rhee regime in Seoul faltered politically and turned in a dismal economic performance.