While scholars generally agree that Soviet help played a major role in Kim’s rise, they disagree on just how great that role was. Suh says Col. Alexandre Ma-teevich Ignatiev “was the key person who maneuvered Kim Il Sung into power, sustained him there and supported him in the North” (Kim Il Sung, p. 62).
A similar view more forcefully stated is that of Scalapino and Lee (Communism in Korea, p. 381), who argue, “This obscure young man [Kim Il-sung] could not possibly have come to power without consistent Soviet support and backing. From this point of view, Kim was a puppet of a foreign power to an extent unmatched by any other individual’s relationship to a foreign power during this period.”
Cumings (Origins I [see chap. 2, n. 25], p. 426) credits the Soviets with “creating” the regime. But he observes (p. 401) that “Kim’s public emergence in the north … may have been his own doing as much as that of the Soviets. He was in a position to confront and face down Korean opponents on the following bases: (1) his anti-Japanese record was known to all the parties concerned with Korean liberation … ; (2) he had never been captured by the Japanese police and subjected to their methods of interrogation, and therefore, unlike most other Korean communists, there was no possibility of his apostasy or of his having turned in or named his comrades; (3) he had an armed force under his own control; and (4) more than most Korean leaders, he was vigorous and even charismatic and melded communism and nationalism in an appealing combination.”
Sydney A. Seiler splits the difference, arguing that it was Kim Il-sung’s “political adeptness and his usefulness to the Soviet Union, not his popularity as an anti-Japanese hero, his ability as a military strategist, or his charisma, that allowed him to consolidate and maintain power” (Seiler, Kim Il-song 1941-1948, p. 3).
Van Ree (Socialism in One Zone, p. 270) observes that “precisely those North Korean communists who were closest to the Russian authorities obtained predominant power in the party. This points at the essentially satellite status of North Korea from 1945 to 1948. The comparison of North Korea with Yugoslavia that some authors [Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings] have made seems inappropriate because the partisan group around Tito had liberated Yugoslavia on its own, while Kim Il Sung had changed his partisan status for a Red Army uniform and it was the Red Army which liberated North Korea as it had liberated other Eastern European countries. Soviet policy in the early postwar period (1945–1947) was, incidentally, more dictatorial in North Korea than it generally was in Eastern Europe.” (Cumings’s verdict on van Ree’s work based on a reading of the 1988 dissertation version: “a well-researched study that I believe overestimates Soviet influence in North Korea” [Origins II, p. 832, n. 1]).
Goncharov, Lewis and Xue (Uncertain Partners, p. 131) say simply, “Throughout the early postwar years, Kim was wholly dependent on .Moscow, and North Korea can be justly called a Soviet satellite.”
In one example of the Russian evidence that has come to the surface, former Soviet occupation leaders interviewed by the South Korean newspaper Joong-Ang Ilbo in 1992 reported that Kim Il-sung and Pak Hon-yong made a secret visit to .Moscow in August 1946, during which Stalin reviewed the Soviet generals’ elevation of Kim instead of Pak and gave Kim his personal stamp of approval. McCormack, “Kim Country,” cites the Japanese translation of the interview text, “Stalin ga Kim Il Sung o mensetsu tesuto” (Stalin’s interview test for Kim Il Sung), This Is Yomiuri (February 1992): pp. 84–87.
39. Suh, Kim Il Sung, p. xii.
40. Charles K Armstrong on p. 77 of The North Korean Revolution (see chap. 1, n. 8) says that “a careful reading of both North Korean and Soviet sources reveals a dynamic interaction among the Soviet government, the Soviet occupation authorities, the North Korean leadership, and grass-roots demands for reform.”
41. Baik II, p. 123.
42. See Van Ree, Socialism in One Zone, pp. 152–154; and Lee Wha Rang, “The March 1, 1946 Plot to Assassinate Kim Il Sung,” Korea Web Weekly, http://kim-soft.com/2002/kis-4631.htm. The latter account (based on articles in the Seoul daily JoongAng Ilbo) says that a key figure in plotting both attacks, Kim Yong-ji, had fought in China for Korean independence and considered Kim Il-sung a Soviet puppet who stood in the way of independence.
Baik II, p. 121, says Kim around that time sent propagandists to “crush the false rumors and counter-propaganda spread by landlords and other reactionaries. … He also took steps to remove vicious landlords from their villages in order to put an end to resistance on the part of landlords, and prevent their reactionary influence from spreading to the still unawakened peasants.”
43. Byoung-Lo Philo Kim, Two Koreas in Development (see chap. 1, n. 2), p. 168. Scalapino and Lee say a conservative estimate would be eight hundred thousand. They observe that South Korea’s population “increased by a phenomenal 22 percent between 1945 and 1947, and certainly a major factor in that increase was migration from North to South” (Communism in Korea, pt. I, p. 349 n.).
Cumings (Origins I, pp. 425, 437) cites U.S. government figures indicating that dissatisfied peasants originally from the southern part of Korea who had been farming in .Manchuria or working in factories in North Korea formed the largest part of the migration, returning home in the winter of 1945–1946. A little later came the dispossessed landlords. Both groups together he likens to a “Trojan horse.” He suggests they were loosed by the North “to polarize and radicalize southern politics.”
44. “Qualitative information on individual poor peasants demonstrates the extraordinary change in personal fortunes that came with Kim’s open-door [to party membership] policy, a kind of instant upward mobility that made most of them grateful for his ‘benevolence.’ … These cases delineate the microcosmic evidence of a thorough social revolution, a class structure stood on its head. At anytime before 1945 it was virtually inconceivable for uneducated poor peasants to become county-level officials or officers in the army. … Even something as fundamental as Korean marriage patterns began to change quickly It became important to marry a woman with the proper class background, meaning poor peasant or worker, because this was a ticket to better life chances” (Cumings, Origins II, pp. 302–303).
Because “the majority of Korean experts and intellectuals” were among those who fled south, Cumings adds (p. 336), “[t]he regime was one of worker-peasants, most of them illiterate before 1945. The absence of expertise required an open-door policy toward intellectuals, who have never been denigrated in the DPRK the way they were in Mao’s China.”
Cumings asserts that from this point class struggle was the dominant element in North-South struggle: “After these reforms, unification of the peninsula could only occur in two ways: through a similar revolution in the south, or through a war that would be fought both for unification and the domination of classes—that is, unification would occur through revolution or counterrevolution” (Origins I, p. 414).
45. North Korea was dependent on the Soviet Union for technical and administrative expertise. Japanese colonial policy had limited the number of Koreans who were allowed to gain a higher education or management experience, and the politics of the occupation from 194548 prompted most northerners who possessed such skills to flee to the South. Consequently, the DPRK in its early years desperately needed persons who could run factories, railroads, telegraph stations, hospitals, schools, etc. Because of autarkic Soviet policies, Pyongyang could only turn to the USSR for such personnel” (Weathersby, “Limits to Revisionist Interpretations”).
Seiler (Kim Il-song 1941–1948, p. 63) observes that for the Soviet occupiers “[a] blatantly obtrusive posture in the occupation of North Korea was not necessary. Soviet-Koreans, many of whom retained their Soviet citizenship and [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] membership, ’were able to execute Soviet policy objectives with the legitimacy and respect indigenous officials would have been afforded.” The term “Soviet-Koreans” here refers to ethnically Korean Soviet citizens who went (in most cases were sent) to North Korea. For an excellent account of their ex
perience and contributions see Andrei Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Sung: The Formation of North Korea 1945–1960 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. 110–135.
Balazs Szalontai of Central European University reports that Hungarian diplomats in Pyongyang found the North Korean judicial system quite similar to the one that had been established in Hungary after it became a Soviet satellite. But he argues: “Paradoxically, this dependence on Soviet expertise partly resulted from the nationalist stance of the Kim Il-sung regime. Although Pyongyang initially retained certain Japanese laws and many Japanese-trained judges, the purge of ‘pro-Japanese elements’ proved thorough enough. … Thus it was quite understandable that the regime turned to the Soviets for legal expertise, though Korean traditions also influenced North Korea’s constitution, criminal code, and legal system.” Balazs outlines a number of other compromises between the Soviet model and conflicting local needs in his paper, “The Dynamic of Repression: The Global Impact of the Stalinist .Model, 1944–1953,” originally published in Russian History/Histoire Russe, Nos. 2–4 (Summer-Fall-Winter 2002), pp. 415–442. A copy is posted on Korea Web Weekly at http://www. kimsoft.com/2003/balaz.htm.
46. Baik II, pp. 167–168.
47. Baik II, pp. 204–205; 198–199.
48. In 1945, “the North had heavy industrial complexes and energy sources that were quite formidable. Furthermore this complex was barely touched by American bombing in World War II; in the last stages of the war the North Korean economy was stronger than Japan’s, with [so] much more energy output (double that in Japan), that Japan’s atomic bomb project was moved to Korea to make use of these facilities” (Cumings, Origins II, p. 335).
49. See Philip Deane, I Was a Captive in Korea (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1953), p. 71.
50. Van Ree, Socialism in One Zone, p. 153.
51. Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 384.
52. According to Baik II, p. 127, the regime eschewed nationalization of the land in 1946 because Kim “clearly saw that the enthusiasm of the peasantry would reach a peak if their desire for land was met, so the thorough land reform was carried through on the principle that the land be distributed to the peasants.” Cumings (Origins II, p. 299) emphasizes that, while the regime followed the Soviet advisors’ views on the surface and “never spoke publicly of socialism as a goal in the 1940s … nonetheless the land could not be bought and sold, and village-level mutual aid and cooperation began quickly”
53. Against hangul’s very real advantages—relatively easy literacy campaigns, nationalistic appeal—must be weighed one severe disadvantage. Chinese characters remain the linguistic glue that binds other countries of East Asia—China, Japan and South Korea—together. Not knowing them has the effect of isolating North Koreans even further from what is happening around them—a plus in terms of the Kim regime’s control over its subjects, but surely a minus in terms of efforts, for example, to expand foreign trade and attract investment.
54. Baik II, pp. 216–219. Universal compulsory elementary education was fully in place by 1956. Ibid., p. 615.
55. Deane, I Was a Captive, pp. 68–69.
56. Baik II, p. 223.
57. Ibid., p. 128. On p. 118 Baik claims that the land reform bill was “drawn up by Comrade Kim Il Sung himself,” and on p. 134 that Kim “formulated” the labor law. Any role by Soviet occupation officials goes unmentioned.
58. Ibid., pp. 124–125.
59. Kim for his first couple of years in power was still “an affectionate and attractive person with normal thought,” says Lim Un in his critical biography. “It was later that he was infected with megalomania, transmogrification into a cruel dictator and an incurable person” (Founding of a Dynasty, p. 50). The pseudonymous Lim, whose controversial manuscript in Korean was published in a Japanese translation and a rather poor English translation, is identified as a former longtime colleague of Kim’s who had been “active at the core” of the Kim regime, but who had gone into exile in the Soviet Union. Since publication it has been reported that Lim Un is a pseudonym for Ho Jin, identified as vice-chairman of Moscow’s Association of Soviet Koreans. A “Soviet Korean” was an ethnic Korean who had been living in the Soviet Union at the time of Korean liberation and had been sent by the Soviet government to help its military occupation administration develop the new regime in North Korea. Kim eventually purged many such “Soviet Koreans,” and those purged generally returned to the Soviet Union.
Hoki Ishihara, president of the Tokyo publisher Jiyusha, explained in an interview with my associate Hideko Takayama (November 1994) that Ho Jin approached him in .Moscow after Ishihara had served for some years as chairman of a Japan-Soviet roundtable conference. “It seemed that Ho Jin had been watching us for some time,” Ishihara said. Ho Jin told Ishihara about his manuscript, invited the publisher to his Moscow home and asked him to take the manuscript out of the country. Ishihara accepted and enlisted the Moscow bureau of Mainichi Shimbun to get the sensitive document out via pouch. It went first to Denmark and then to Ishihara’s home in Tokyo, the publisher recalled. When he left Moscow, Ishihara carried out with him the photographs that illustrate the text in the published version. Once back in Tokyo, Ishihara said, he asked a friend at the South Korean embassy in Tokyo to introduce him to a translator.
The South Korean government took a hand in distributing the book after translation and publication, as is shown by the bookplate in the copy belonging to the library of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, which says the copy was donated by the [South] Korean Embassy.
Prof. Haruhisa Ogawa of Tokyo University visited Moscow in 1990 and saw Ho Jin, who was living there. Professor Ogawa said in an interview with Hideko Takayama (November 1994) that beyond Ho’s own direct knowledge, the book reflects experiences related to him by his seniors, such as Yu Song-chol and Yi Sang-jo. (Perhaps that was one reason for using a pseudonym and making the narrator and purported author a composite character.) He began writing it in 1973, in Korean, and spent nearly ten years on the project. Professor Ogawa said he also learned, in an interview with Ho’s brother in Tashkent, that the publication had embarrassed the .Moscow government, which in 1982 was competing with Beijing for influence in North Korea while not yet recognizing South Korea. The KGB questioned Ho, the brother told Professor Ogawa. As for the origin of Ho’s pen name, Lim Un is the site of the Ho family’s ancestral home in southern Korea, Professor Ogawa was told.
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.”
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