A History of Korea (83 page)

KIM IL SUNG’S “JUCHE” SPEECH, 1955

To an audience of propaganda officials of the North Korean Communist Party in late December of 1955, Kim Il Sung delivered a historic speech that introduced the concept of “Juche” (
Chuch’e
), the ideal of
self-reliance that would become the country’s ruling ideology. Kim’s emphasis, as it would be for the
Juche
concept itself, lay in forging a distinctively Korean path to socialism through a focus on national history and customs. The mistakes made thus far in North Korea, he claimed, stemmed from an excessive dependence on external models, particularly those of the Soviet Union. Not coincidentally, this speech came amidst a purge of Kim’s political rivals, targeting especially those Soviet-Korean communists who had come to the country as Soviet occupation advisors. Indeed, despite the outward appeals for achieving “peaceful reunification” by presenting a stellar model of Korean socialism in the north, this historic speech and its political context pointed directly to the solidification of Kim’s political power. It encapsulated the core elements in the politics, economy, and culture of the early northern system and launched the dominion of
Juche
as North Korea’s ideological justification for Kim’s absolute rule.

North Korea’s comprehensive transformation in the first two decades of its existence, beginning in 1945, laid the groundwork for its more familiar late-twentieth century form. By the early 1960s, Kim Il Sung stood as the undisputed source of political authority, and the country had embarked on a heavy industrialization campaign that would speed the North past its southern counterpart in economic development. Furthermore, the reordering of society into categories that reflected this political and economic collectivization, a process that had begun in the post-liberation period, was by now well in place. Kim’s speech in 1955 outlining the basic principals of
Juche
, which nourished the idea of self-reliance with a fierce nativism and wariness of the outside world, also demonstrated his regime’s preoccupation with history—history as knowledge, but also as an ideological tool. As it turned out, this obsession with historical orthodoxy constituted a cover as well as a corrective for dependence.

LIBERATION SPACE NORTH KOREA

There remains considerable debate about the Soviet impact on northern Korea during the liberation period from 1945 to 1950. The more that previously classified Soviet documents have become accessible, however, the more it appears that Soviet influence was paramount and indeed decisive in determining the
political outcome in the northern occupation zone. This should be expected, but such a revelation goes completely against the North Korean historical orthodoxy as well as substantial scholarship that has forwarded a dominant role played by domestic forces in shaping the northern system. The stakes are as high as they are for South Korea (
Chapter 20
), for this issue gets to the heart of North Korea’s historical legitimacy and purported independence, touted by
Juche
ideology as the foundation of North Korean existence.

The Soviet occupation, however, faced almost as much difficulty in bringing about its desired outcome in North Korea as the Americans did in the southern occupation zone. Like the Americans, the Soviets, who entered Korea as combatants a week before the end of the Pacific War on August 15, 1945, were unprepared to administer the country and utterly ignorant of their new territory. The Soviet Central Administration (SCA), the makeshift governing organization of the Red Army in Korea, stumbled onto a complex scene, with a diverse population characterized by ideological differences that overlapped with socioeconomic, religious, and regional ones. The regional characteristics of northern Korea, deeply rooted in history and shaped considerably by the colonial experience, showed that while the northeastern region had conditions conducive to communist growth, the northwestern part of the country—where Pyongyang lay—was a stronghold of Korean nationalism.

The nationalists in this area tended to be landed, with strong business influences, and Christian. All of these strains were embodied in the most respected and well-known figure in the north, Cho Mansik, a Presbyterian elder who had steadfastly resisted colonial assimilation and mobilization efforts. He was, in this sense, the northern zone’s counterpart to Y
Unhy
ng, the left-moderate who commanded a great following in the south before his assassination in 1947. Cho was not killed until 1950, but the SCA, after turning originally to him in September of 1945 to head a Soviet-friendly coalitional governing body, found him recalcitrant in opposing communism and any hint of national division. He was arrested by 1946, but the Soviet occupation’s difficulties with him reflected the bitter divisions in northern
Korea that had developed between Protestant nationalists and Soviet or communist elements. The largest outbreak of violence in this struggle took place in November of 1945 in the border city of Sin
iju, on the Yalu River, when a Christian protest against the Soviet occupation sparked a massacre of dozens.

One of the great ironies of North Korea is that Kim Il Sung, this country’s dominant communist figure, came from a typical Protestant household in Pyongyang. The Soviet occupation officials’ fateful decision, in October of 1945, to promote Kim as the prospective Korean leader came only after their failure to win over Cho Mansik, whose anti-communism stemmed from his religiously-inspired nationalism. Unlike Cho, Kim wielded little influence over the populace, despite his being known to some as a famed guerilla leader from the 1930s who had managed to escape the Japanese hunt for him. After four years of living quietly in the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945, the period when his son, Kim Jong Il, was born in Siberia, Kim accompanied the Soviet army’s entrance into his home city in late September, 1945. In a large mid-October rally in Pyongyang staged to celebrate the Soviet occupation, Kim was introduced to a cheering crowd as one of several featured Korean leaders, including even Cho Mansik. But through cunning, ruthlessness, charisma, considerable political skill, and a lot of luck, Kim gradually won enough confidence from the Soviet authorities to take, step-by-step, the reigns of the native political system in northern Korea.

Henceforth it became difficult to separate Kim Il Sung from the fate of the northern communist party, for the two grew together in stature and authority under Soviet auspices. Beginning at the end of 1945, the Soviets gradually placed Kim in the leading party positions and provisional governing structures, which took increasing responsibility over administration in the north. And the northern communist party eventually superseded the Seoul-based party in the southern zone—acting, in fact, like a typical Soviet government. The election for an interim northern legislature in November of 1946 was a classic Soviet-style, single-candidate ballot. By late 1947, a separate northern regime, backed by a powerful People’s Army, was effectively in place, along with the
usual accoutrements of a Stalinist state. Even the personality cult surrounding Kim was on early display in the enormous celebrations in Pyongyang on August 15, 1947, the second anniversary of liberation. In a scene that would become familiar later, film footage of this event shows Kim, firmly entrenched on his perch and flanked by Soviet officials, overlooking the adulatory spectacle, much of which is devoted to hailing him (along with Stalin). Large portraits and statues of Kim also appeared around the country well before the Korean War.

We should be careful, however, before dismissing Kim Il Sung and the communist party as creatures solely of Soviet favor. By most indications, there was substantial popular support for the actions taken by the northern political authorities, and Koreans themselves directed key components of what became a quick and true social revolution—systematic, indeed totalizing, in scope and ambition. By the first half of 1946, a comprehensive land reform stripped large landowners and others deemed social enemies, such as colonial period officials, of their property and redistributed it to the peasantry. The intensive reorientation of the economy and culture followed suit, making life in the north uncomfortable, if not dangerous, for landlords, businessmen, professionals, and colonial-era bureaucrats. To the northern leaders, the mass exodus of these former social elites southward to the American occupation zone represented good riddance, allowing the northern regime to consolidate power with relatively little competition (and bloodshed). What remained was a northern society and culture primed for shaping by a determined communist party controlling an ambitious, and in many ways typical, communist state. The strength and military prowess of this state, in particular, was on full display in June of 1950, when it launched the Korean War.

THE FORMATIVE FIFTIES

North Korea’s recovery from the complete devastation of the Korean War began immediately, and with a flourish: An intensified effort not only to rebuild, but to reconstruct society from the
ground up, quite literally, through political integration, ideological discipline, cultural uniformity, and accelerated industrialization. However, while the post-Korean War 1950s represented the most formative period of North Korean history, this process did not start from scratch, despite the decimated landscape. A strong foundation for the developments of the 1950s had been laid in the post-liberation period, the most critical element of which was Kim Il Sung’s political ascendance.

Kim had garnered the Soviet and Chinese go-ahead to launch the Korean War, for which he acted as the North’s chief military commander. As was the case in South Korea with Syngman Rhee, the Korean War served ultimately to solidify Kim Il Sung’s grip on political power. But also like Rhee, Kim found himself still facing challenges to his absolute rule, which the December 1955 address to the communist party’s propaganda officials attempted to overcome. This so-called
Juche
Speech indeed emphasized self-reliance, autonomy, nativism, and absolute national unity—the pillars of the comprehensive
Juche
ideology that later came to be identified with North Korea. In a tacit rebuke of the war effort, Kim claimed that the overt dependence on foreign models and ideas, including even the international communist movement itself, had hindered North Korea’s progress. And hence the party workers must turn to a focus on Korean customs and conditions, in particular Korea’s distinctive historical experience. “Only when we educate our people in the history of their own struggle and traditions can we stimulate their national pride and arouse the broad masses to revolutionary struggle,” he exhorted. This is what constitutes the spirit of
Juche
, he noted—an overarching approach, more than a term, that considered Korean realities before “mechanically copying” external forms.

The flip side of this Korea-first theme was a diatribe against some internal political forces, whom he accused of toadyism. Indeed Kim called out the guilty parties by name, including Pak H
ny
ng, who had been executed just a few days earlier on charges of being an American spy. Pak had been the leader of the domestic Korean communist movement at the time of liberation, but he soon found himself in the wrong occupation zone, that of the
south. Following his move to the northern sector in 1947, he gained some appointments to high posts, but ultimately his fate mirrored that of the domestic communists themselves—that is, he lost out in the intra-communist struggle for power. By the mid-1950s, Kim Il Sung actually found the greatest challengers to his own faction, the former guerillas from Manchuria, to be not the domestic communists but rather the Soviet-Koreans, who stood as embarrassing reminders of his own dependence on the Soviet Union. These Soviet-Koreans attempted, in fact, to oust Kim in 1956 through a targeted campaign of open criticism and appeals to the Soviet Union, but Kim, thanks partly to the groundwork laid by the 1955 speech, outmaneuvered and eliminated them from the scene. This might have been a signal moment in North Korean history, a potential turning point that was not to be. The last rival group remaining toward the end of the 1950s, the Chinese-based Korean communists, also met their fate, though not without considerable struggle.