Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (23 page)

A student-led uprising in the South in 1960 kicked Rhee out and installed a democratically elected government. But that failed to alter the equation, as the new South Korean government of Prime Minister Chang Myon proved weak and corrupt. In April 1961—seven years after Dulles had talked about making the South attractive through an economic buildup—the
U.S. ambassador in Seoul sent a classified cable to Washington. In it he lamented that the “stark, bleak facts of economic life,” along with frustrations over the peninsula’s continued division, were behind Southerners’ “widespread feelings of hopelessness.” Add to that mix “continuing mutual recriminations among Koreans,” the ambassador wrote, “and all this creates an atmosphere wide open to exploitation by enemies of a free Korea.”
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Commentators friendly to Pyongyang seized upon the real differences and exaggerated them. “The South was literally a desolate land,” wrote an East German who visited North Korea in the early 1960s and essayed a comparison. “Only helmets of the American soldiers were shining. But to the north of the demarcation line as far as the eye can reach there were fields of golden grain.”
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A Western academic’s 1965 article entitled “Korean Miracle” referred not to the South Korean but to the
North
Korean economy.
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Kim Il-sung’s personality cult was gathering momentum. The theory, earlier worked out in the Soviet Union on behalf of Stalin, was that the people, defined by communist doctrine as all-powerful, nevertheless could not function properly without becoming united under the leadership of a superior being, one without the limitations that afflict other people. Thus, an official biographer shortly would wriate that Kim Il-sung from the time of liberation had been the country’s obvious and true leader:

But it is not a gift that everyone has, this ability for correct insight into such a complex situation, looking far into the future to hammer out the only correct line for the Korean revolution. Ahead of the Korean revolution on this morrow of the liberation lay countless complex problems, including the people’s inherent backwardness due to their history, the complex intertwined political forces and social and class relations, the occupation of South Korea by U.S. imperialism and the forced division of Korea into North and South.

To correctly analyze all these issues and to chart the correct way for the revolution—this was a task to which only Comrade Kim Il-sung was equal, outstanding Leader of revolution as he is, who had gained unique and rich experience through his long-drawn revolutionary struggles, and who burned with patriotism and was armed with Marxist-Leninist convictions.

This was the reason why immediately after liberation, the Korean people looked to Comrade Kim Il-sung to take the lead in the revolution as quickly as possible, in order to overcome the confusion. Political leaders of both North and South Korea, too, realizing their own limitations, earnestly wished him to lead them to the fulfillment of the long-cherished desire of the people as soon as possible.”
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Kim Il-sung and the party “became the brain, heart, wisdom and conscience of all the Korean people.”
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While other high-level leaders had to wait until they were dead before anything would be named after them, the huge Kim Il-sung Square had been one of the first features completed in the new Pyongyang.
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Kim’s purges continued as he moved to consolidate his rule. Soon it became the turn of the Yenan faction, made up of Korean returnees from China proper who had fought against the Japanese as members of Mao Zedong’s communist forces. They showed their potential for challenging Kim in the years following Stalin’s 1953 death. At a 1956 meeting in Moscow, Khrushchev criticized the Stalin personality cult and proposed collective leadership in the Soviet Union to replace the dead leader’s one-man rule. Clearly, other communist countries were expected to follow that lead.

After watching Khrushchev’s treatment of Stalin several North Korean officials (mostly members of the Yenan faction, although some Soviet-Koreans got involved also) were bold enough to question Kim’s personality cult, management style and economic policies. They plotted to topple him. Scholar Andrei N. Lankov demonstrates their deep differences with Kim by citing memoranda of conversations between Soviet officials and the plotters, documents he found in the Soviet archives in the 1990s. “I am becoming more and more convinced that Kim Il-sung does not understand how harmful his behavior is,” one plotter complained to a Soviet Embassy official. “He paralyzes the initiative of members of the Standing Committee and other executives of the Party and the State. He intimidates everyone. Nobody can voice an opinion on any question. People are subjected to repression for the slightest criticism. He has gathered around himself sycophants and mediocrities.” Another man dissected Kim’s economic policies: “Farmers compose 80 percent of the population. … After Liberation they were offered a good opportunity for a better life but they remain very poor. The government’s taxation policy is incorrect. Instead of 25 to 27 percent tax they took more than 50 percent from the farmers. Such a policy continues to this day. It is not necessary to recount the methods used in 1954–1955 to gather taxes. Tax gathering was accompanied by beatings, murders and arrests. The party’s activities are based on violence, not persuasion. The [agricultural] co-operative movement is based on violence.” What to do? “A group of executives considers it necessary to undertake certain actions against Kim Il-sung and his closest associates at the earliest possible opportunity. The group sets itself the task of putting new persons in charge of the [Korean Workers’ Party] Central Committee and government.”
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At a Central Committee meeting where they hoped to win support for his ouster, Kim was ready for them. Those who stood to speak against Kim’s
idolization were “pushed back by abusive insults and shouting,” according to Yu Song-chol. The atmosphere was so threatening that four of the Yenan faction members “fled to China immediately after the morning session, fearing for their lives.” The vicissitudes of the Yenan faction continued until it was wiped out. Its leader, Kim Tu-bong, lost his party membership in 1958 and was sent off to a collective farm, where he died. Yenan faction members in the military were charged with plotting a revolt. The “military revolt plan” that was used in evidence against them was in reality merely a plan for suppressing anti-government uprisings, a plan they had been assigned to draw up, according to Yu.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Attacks on “flunkeys” who viewed everything Russian as superior, things Korean as inferior, became a major theme in his post–Korean War utterances.
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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.
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In a February 1947 speech Kim praised the Soviet Union as “the most advanced democratic state,” and suggested its structure was worth copying.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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The streets of North Korean cities were festooned “with Soviet propaganda posters and portraits of Lenin and Stalin, in addition to Kim Il-sung.
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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.
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The Russians’ cooperation with this deception had definite limits.
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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.
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Pyongyang became stingier in giving the USSR credit for its liberation role, dropping all mention of it by the late 1960s.
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(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.
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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.
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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.