Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Phony as much of the evidence may have been, Kim was becoming all-powerful at home through such maneuvers. As he was to write much later, in his memoirs, “While I made many friends and comrades on the path of my struggle, there were also many people who stood in my-way” Seeing potential rivals, he showed no hesitation in cutting them down in order to consolidate his own power.59

  While Kim’s praise of his role model, Stalin, had been largely sincere, Khrushchev was something else altogether. The new Soviet leader’s icono-clasm and his interest in limiting the anti-imperialist struggle to peaceful competition boded ill for the North Korean premier. Kim’s position depended on continuing to use real or imagined external threats to maintain his Stalinist, one-man rule.60 His goal of reunification through any combination of violent and nonviolent means required that North Korea—preferably-with allies’ support—confront American power in the South directly. Fortunately for Kim, Moscow’s efforts to export de-Stalinization soon proved dangerous to Soviet interests, inspiring Hungarians to rise against Soviet control in October of 1956. Khrushchev then backed off, declaring a policy of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other communist countries.

  With less danger now that Moscow would retaliate against him Kim Il-sung mounted a full-fledged offensive against the Soviet faction, which had retained influence in Pyongyang even after the purge of Ho Ka-i. Part of the problem with the Soviet-Koreans, from Kim’s viewpoint, was the very fact that they had been raised in the Soviet Union and had dual Soviet and North Korean citizenship—and divided loyalties, as well. There are reports that many of them mistrusted Kim and his guerrillas and looked down upon them as ignorant, backwoods types—viewing themselves as the genuine Bolshevik article.61

  Kim was growing restive in the face of Soviet efforts to influence his policies. He had been Number One almost from the beginning in Pyongyang after the Liberation, in large part thanks to Soviet support. But he had to share some of the decision-making process, and he did not yet feel secure enough for comfort.62 Attacks on “flunkeys” who viewed everything Russian as superior, things Korean as inferior, became a major theme in his post–Korean War utterances.63 It is safe to say that Kim himself-was tired of sucking up to the Russians.

  For a time after liberation, the North Korean leaders and media acknowledged the Soviet Union’s help and example. Kim himself noted in a speech shortly after his arrival in Pyongyang that the USSR (and the United States—this latter acknowledgment a rare one indeed) had liberated Korea.64 In a February 1947 speech Kim praised the Soviet Union as “the most advanced democratic state,” and suggested its structure was worth copying.65 As late as 1950, when Kim was looking for help in prosecuting the war against the Americans, the party newspaper still acknowledged that North Korea had been liberated “by Soviet armed strength.”66 But it was not long before he decided that others had carried praise of the USSR so far as to amount to flunkeyism—excessive dependence on and praise of foreign countries. He wanted the praise turned around and directed to Korean benefactors of the people—mainly himself, as it turned out.

  Kim later complained in his memoirs that the regime’s propagandists after liberation had not sufficiently publicized the anti-Japanese guerrilla movement. “The flunkeyist fever spread by these people developed to such an extreme that immediately after liberation our people were not even aware that there had been a heavy battle fought for the defense of Xiaowangqing during the anti-Japanese war—although they knew all about the battle of Stalingrad.”67

  He had a point. Besides its all-pervasive influence in politics, military affairs and economics, the USSR had deeply penetrated the molding of popular North Korean attitudes. Organized down to the village and street levels, a “Society for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union” promoted Soviet culture by showing films, maintaining libraries and halls and sponsoring lectures, theatrical events and exhibitions. A huge percentage of the population joined.68 The streets of North Korean cities were festooned “with Soviet propaganda posters and portraits of Lenin and Stalin, in addition to Kim Il-sung.69 In such circumstances it would have been little wonder if, as Kim Il-sung charged, some North Korean officials got carried away with seeing the world through Russian eyes.

  As noted, Kim himself had been an enthusiastic participant in the adulation of the Soviet Union. Further, his having found sanctuary in the USSR until 1945 could have opened him to the same charges of reliance on a great power that he was leveling against others. In those days, indeed, he had been a communist internationalist, taking help where he could get it, his Korean nationalism directed solely against the Japanese. The brand of nationalism he was beginning to find it in his interest to promote, however, was so exclusive of non-Korean influences as to be almost xenophobic. The regime’s “historians” placed him in the Manchurian region bordering Korea—and sometimes in Korea itself—right up into 1945, continuing the fight until he led his “Korean People’s Revolutionary Army” to victory over the Japanese.70 The Russians’ cooperation with this deception had definite limits.71 Never mind such annoying facts, though, for Kim’s own propagandists soon would see to it that his defeat by the Japanese at the beginning of the 1940s and his flight to the Soviet Union would disappear from history as North Koreans could read it. Hwang Jang-yop, following his 1997 defection to South Korea, reported that from 1958—the first year he served Kim as party secretary for ideology—it was the duty of himself and his colleagues to re-write Kim’s Selected Works, destroying any record in the ruler’s reports and speeches that “gave the impression of worshiping the Soviet Union.” Readers would find no “Long live Stalin” quotations in the republished volumes.72

  Pyongyang became stingier in giving the USSR credit for its liberation role, dropping all mention of it by the late 1960s.73 (The role of the United States and other allied countries had disappeared, of course, long before that.) Many North Koreans in 1945 had seen the Russian liberation forces with their own eyes. Nevertheless, for succeeding generations of schoolchildren reading the country’s “history” Kim Il-sung would become the liberator he wished he could have been.74 Although the Soviets (and Americans) might judge him an ingrate, he would in this fashion show that he was no flunkey or puppet.

  Similarly, it would have been inconvenient to admit that Kim during his guerrilla days had taken orders from the Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese commanders in the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. For his greater glory, Pyongyang downgraded or deleted the roles of not only Russians involved in the struggle but eventually Chinese as well.75 For good measure, they slighted the efforts even of Korean communists who had opposed the Japanese in the homeland or in China-based units other than Kim’s.

  Eventually the purges of Soviet-Koreans got to Yu Song-chol. Yu believed there was a personal element added to the mix in his case. “Kim had an intolerant side to him that caused him to remember anyone with whom he had a negative experience and eventually seek revenge without fail,” he said. While serving as Kim’s interpreter back in the Soviet Union, Yu had crossed his boss. He had refused to run a private errand for Kim, citing Soviet Army regulations that forbade such use of enlisted men. As time passed, Yu had forgotten about that and like-wise had forgotten another occasion on which words had passed with Kim. He lived to regret both. A decade and a half later, when Yu had risen to the rank of lieutenant general, a friend warned him that Kim still harbored ill will toward him because of those two incidents. Yu figured that the old grudge had something to do with his being purged a bit later.76 Yu’s recollections of his personal downfall afford an inside view of the experience of being purged—at the lower end of the horror curve, since he was not killed.

  Koreans generally are sticklers for formality and “face.” Returning to Pyongyang in 1958 from two years of study in the Soviet Union, Yu knew something must be amiss when no one came to the airport to meet him—a three-star general, at least nominally heading the operations bureau of the Korean People’s Army. Three days a
fter his return, Yu was summoned to a meeting of the defense ministry’s “Thought Examination Committee.” The meeting chairman pointed to him and said: “You have committed four mistakes. Conduct self-criticism.” Charges against Yu included describing the people’s “loyalty” to Kim Il-sung as a personality cult; speaking as though Kim had started the Korean War; and spying for the Soviet Union. He admitted that he had said, in a chat with two other senior officers, that a drive for peaceful reunification would have been better than starting the Korean War. He denied the other charges. The most serious, the spying charge, he figured had been trumped up as Kim’s way of showing that he was offended by Yu’s close relations with Soviet officials: Soviet military advisors had intervened concerning Yu’s assignments several times since 1945.

  Removed from his job, Yu had to spend all day in an otherwise empty room writing letters of “self-reflection.” At night he returned to sessions of the Thought Examination Committee, which met from 7 P.M. to midnight or 1 A.M. The committee members harassed and berated him until he conducted self-criticism to their satisfaction. Whenever he opened his mouth to speak they shouted abuse at him. “After a few days, I agreed with all their criticisms out of a feeling of hopelessness. However, they continued to torment me every night, repeating the same process over and over.” It got to be too much for Yu. He begged a former subordinate, who by then was sitting on the Thought Examination Committee, to kill him—“rather than bleeding me slowly like this.” Finally, though, the sessions ended-with Thought Examination Committee members ripping off Yu’s rank insignia. Expelled from the People’s Army and the party, he became a nonperson. “As word spread that I had undergone thought examination, relatives stopped visiting and even my old friends ostracized me.”

  Worried about where their next meal would come from and evicted from their home, he and his family moved in the freezing January of 1959 into a former stable. Soon they were ordered to leave even that shelter. Eventually Yu was told that he was in the third category on Kim’s list of purge targets— those who need not be killed or put to hard labor but might simply leave the country if they wished. Cursing Kim Il-sung, Yu left in December of 1959— one of some four hundred officials and their family members whom Kim’s purges drove into exile in the Soviet Union.77

  In reality Yu’s “crimes” must have been not too terrible—considering the fact that in 1990 the Pyongyang regime, seeking to let bygones be bygones, invited him and a number of the other exiles in the USSR to visit North Korea. It was Yu’s first time back since his forced departure three decades earlier. When he got to Pyongyang, he was dismayed to find in the “Fatherland Liberation War Museum” no record of the Korean War efforts of himself and other high-ranking cadre who had been purged. Even his name was missing from the list of Operations Bureau commanders. Compounding the insult, one North Korean host (as had long been customary with visitors) “asked me to write down a few words praising Kim Il-sung.”78

  As he accused his domestic rivals of flunkeyism, Kim Il-sung also glorified the opposite quality, or state of mind, which he came to term juche —often translated simply as national self-reliance but having the broader meaning of putting Korea first. Juche was to be the antidote to the tendency of Koreans, like citizens of other small communist countries, to subject themselves to the wishes of Moscow or Beijing. “What are we doing?” Kim asked in an appearance before party propagandists and agitators in 1955. “We are not engaged in the revolution of another country but in our Korean revolution.”79

  Although it was in that 1955 speech that Kim gave full voice to his arguments for juche, he had been talking along similar lines as early as 1948. It was better, he said, to produce finished goods at home and develop the economy independently instead of sending raw materials to be processed abroad.80 The theme became important in a debate over what to emphasize in the reconstruction of the post–Korean War economy. Kim had chosen to go all-out with investments in building heavy industry, including armaments.81 That meant postponing major improvements in popular living standards.

  Criticism of Kim’s economic policies came from Korean “factionalists and dogmatists,” as Kim called them. Besides questioning the priority on heavy industrial development, they also complained that agricultural collectivization was moving too fast. And some believed he should be encouraging the country’s remaining capitalists and traders through the sort of state capitalism that other socialist countries had employed at a comparably early stage.

  In a sense such critics played into Kim’s hands. He always needed enemies at home or abroad, or both, to make the most of his skills at negative motivation. If the “factionalists and dogmatists” had not come along he might have had to invent them (as of course he did, to the extent that he trumped up cases against them). Visiting the Kangson steel mill complex in 1956, he told its workers and managers that the country faced a situation in which “people in some country try to impose their factionalism upon us. People in another country try to get control of us in cooperation with those people. The factionalists in our country depend on their masters for support.” Meanwhile, South Korea’s Rhee “attempts to attack us, with help of the United States. Then, whom shall we trust? There is none other than you whom we can trust.82

  Kim cranked up an “all-party ideological struggle” to root out his domestic critics and their subversive notions. “Wherever he went,” his official biographer claims, “Comrade Kim Il-sung learned clearly that the entire party and people had strong revolutionary zeal running high, and were filled with an intense fighting spirit against both internal and external enemies. He lost no time in translating their passion and strength into action … to produce a big leap forward in the socialist revolution and construction and thereby completely overwhelm the factionalists.”83

  In practice, that struggle involved wholesale population relocation. Shin Myung-chul, a former member of the State Security secret police apparatus who defected to the South, told me that his family had been relocated in 1956, four years before he was born, from the major city of Hamhung to a small city, Cheongdan-eup. His parents were socialist enthusiasts, and their relocation was part of Kim Il-sung’s scheme to resettle such exemplars where they could teach less ideologically advanced people. Ahn Choong-hak, a logger who defected to the South, told me that his family in 1961, the year he turned three, had been part of a mass relocation of households of “good family background” to the old capital of Kaesong.84 Recall that Kaesong, below the 38th parallel, had been captured by the North during the Korean War and incorporated into its post-armistice territory. The ideological correctness of many remaining local people left much to be desired.

  By taking “ten steps where others need only take one,”85 Kim enthused, the country would soon move from socialism to the ultimate communist utopia. Then everyone would work voluntarily and receive goods according to need—not according to effort, as in the socialist stage. “I will take you on to communist society,” he vowed in a 1959 visit to workers—formerly independent craftsmen—in the Wonsan Iron-works Producers’ Cooperative. “I will take all your sons to communist society.” An official biographer reports that “unity in ideology and will” grew out of the campaign. “All functionaries and working people came to take the firm juche position of knowing no other ideas than the revolutionary ideas of Comrade Kim. …”86

  But attacks on Kim’s policies had come not only at home but also from communists abroad. No less a figure than future Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, as a delegate to a 1956 party conference, urged his North Korean hosts to import Soviet consumer goods instead of machines. Such disagreements continued into the 1960s as Kim criticized the Soviet-backed notion that socialist countries should form an “integrated” economy, each specializing rather than trying to produce a full range of products domestically.87 The ongoing Soviet campaign of de-Stalinization—whose implications were so dangerous for Kim Il-sung himself—-was one important factor making him hesitate to put his full trust in Moscow’s guidanc
e on other matters.

  Starting in the late 1950s, a bitter competition between China and the Soviet Union became a big factor in North Korean foreign policy. Pyongyang at first sought to avoid getting caught up in the struggle between its two key foreign backers. Kim’s resultant need to keep his political distance from both countries reinforced his policy of economic independence and self-reliance. Juche was to become a huge success in domestic propaganda, playing to Koreans’ strong but battered pride and to the xenophobia that had come to characterize them over a long history often marred by foreign invasions.88

  The United States had withdrawn most of its own troops after 1953, but had retained enough to serve as a “trip-wire.” In case the North should invade again, American troops would be bloodied and the United States would be at war again—automatically. The American who served as UN commander also had “operational control” of South Korean troops, which meant that in time of war those troops would serve under the joint command structure.

  The North Koreans talked contemptuously of the Americans,89 but in reality the GIs’ presence was a serious obstacle. The Korean War had taught Kim Il-sung caution. After the war, furthermore, Washington had adopted the policy of what Dulles termed “massive retaliation” in case the armistice should fail to hold.90 A formerly classified April 17, 1954, memorandum by the secretary of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff spells it out: “If hordes of Chinese should attack again, U.S. air support operations, including use of atomic weapons, will be employed to inflict maximum destruction of enemy forces.”91

  Thus did Washington raise over South Korea what came to be called the “nuclear umbrella”: the prospect of American nuclear retaliation for even a conventional attack.92 From the late 1950s Kim watched as the United States introduced into South Korea tactical nuclear weapons, under the control of U.S. forces.93