Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (147 page)

18.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 3, p. 22.

19.
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 293–302.

20.
Yu Song-chol’s testimony,
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 7, 1990. (See Seiler,
Kim Il-song 1941–1948,
p. 55, for an account of the meeting based on additional testimony.)

21.
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 7, 1990.

22.
O Yong-jin, “An Eyewitness Report,” Pusan, 1952, p. 143, cited in Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea
(see chap. 2, n. 28), p. 324. O is identified as personal secretary to Cho Man-shik.

23.
Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
p. 338.

24.
Baik Bong,
Kim Il Sung Biography (II): From Building Democratic Korea to Chullima Flight
(Tokyo: Miraisha, 1970; hereinafter cited as Baik II), p. 53.

Once he had taken office as premier, the regime arranged photo opportunities, including one in which the youthful leader, in shirtsleeves, wielded a shovel alongside a work team. “Let us work hard and complete the work as early as possible, so that someday we may have a good time together,” he said to the workers. In another photo op, Kim, wearing traditional Korean garb, bent to join peasants transplanting rice plants. See Baik II, pp. 162, 203.

It was made known that Kim lived fairly simply and rejected elaborate special treatment: “Ryu Woon-hyung, invited to Kim Il Sung’s private residence, looked at the furnishings and furniture with a look of disbelief. It was far removed from what he had imagined. It was clean but the furniture was too simple for the leader of a country. Presently, dinner was served. There
’were
no special dishes on table, an ordinary table without mother-of-pearl inlay” (Baik II, pp. 150–151).

“[A]s he was about to enter [a coal-mining] village he suddenly stopped and his eyes followed the road ahead where there lay a long piece of white cloth, about 300 meters long. … He was supposed to walk on the cloth, of course, but having declined all honours offered while going through hardships, he could not do it. He said to the Chairman of the Kangdong County Committee of the North Korean Workers’ Party, who was on hand to greet him: ‘Why do you do such a thing? This is no good. The cloth is to be worn by the people. It is not a thing on which I should walk. Please remove it quickly’ .Moved deeply by his words, the
villagers hung their heads. As the cotton cloth was removed, he started walking. The people, still feeling somewhat abashed, praised his lofty moral virtue and then gave him even more enthusiastic cheers” (Baik II, pp. 178–179).

25.
Seoul Shinmun,
January 10, 1946, p. 2, as cited and translated in Baik Bong,
Kim Il Sung Biography (I): From Birth to Triumphant Return to Homeland
(Tokyo: Mi-raisha, 1969; hereinafter cited as Baik I), pp. 543–544. Besides that on-the-scene reporter’s guess of five-feet-six, the only other estimate of Kim Il-sung’s height that I recall having seen is a description of him (Bruce Cumings,
North Korea: Another Country
[New York: New Press, 2003], p. 155) as “standing over six feet.” I would have to call that quite a stretch unless perhaps the Caucasians with whom Kim often stood to pose for photographs after liberation were not Russian officials, after all, but NBA basketball players.

26.
Van Ree,
Socialism in One Zone,
p. 117.

27.
Ibid., pp. 117–121.

28.
Ibid., pp. 129–130.

29.
See Suh,
Korean Communist Movement
(see chap. 2, n. 56), p. 306.

30.
Van Ree,
Socialism in One Zone,
pp. 130–140. In the conclusion to his book the author adds (p. 276), “In terms of responsibility for the continuation of Korea’s division in the two years after the Second World War, the Russians carry undoubtedly most of the blame, though the logical counterpart of this is that they were much less a threat to the other’s zone than the Americans.”

Kathryn Weathersby argues that, in the short run, publicly supporting trusteeship “was a perfect solution to .Moscow’s dilemma regarding Korea. It allowed the Soviet Union to meet its security needs by maintaining control over the northern half of the peninsula and at the same time protect its position politically by posing as the true defender of the agreement on Korean unification. In the long run, however, this crude solution to the Korean question, which completely disregarded the strong desire of the Korean people for unity and independence, created such a volatile situation on the peninsula that .Moscow was eventually persuaded to risk supporting an attempt at reunification by military means—an outcome that had profoundly negative consequences for Soviet security interests” (Kathryn Weathersby, “Limits to Revisionist Interpretations: New Russian Archival Materials and Old American Debates”; for permission to cite her paper I am grateful to Dr. Weathersby, who, at the time she presented the paper, was with the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies of Washington’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she was involved in the Cold War History Project).

31.
Weathersby, ibid., argues that Korean division was “the product of American and Soviet strategies toward Korea that were unworkable and that ignored the fundamental aspirations of the Korean people. President Roosevelt’s proposal for a joint trusteeship ignored Korean national sovereignty, the American occupation command’s focus on thwarting leftists in Korea ignored the political desires of Koreans, and the Soviet Union’s decision to protect its borders by maintaining the division of Korea ignored the most basic desire of the Korean people for national unity.”

32.
Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
p. 340; Cumings,
Origins
II (see chap. 3, n. 16), p. 488. A North Korean account says vaguely but chillingly that Cho and other “alien and accidental elements in the people’s committees … were completely eliminated” (Baik II, p. 102).

33.
The Soviet authorities had helped Kim by disarming this pro-China group upon its return to Korea, observes Suh
(Kim Il Sung,
p. 101). “Furthermore, any reference to their military hero Mu Chong as a leader in the North was immediately denounced as promotion of individual heroism by the Soviet-Koreans and the occupation forces.”

34.
See van Ree,
Socialism in One Zone,
pp. 76–81. “A Seoul-based People’s Republic promised to make Syngman Rhee president over ‘Russian’ North Korea, from a comfortable position in ‘American’ South Korea,” van Ree says on p. 81. “This plan from Pak Hon-yong was something which Stalin could never accept. Moscow was not, in any circumstances, prepared to sacrifice its northern zone, not even in favour of a united front initiative which might provide the southern communists with a more secure position in the political life of the capital.” Van Ree adds (p. 131) that .Moscow “gave priority to northern consolidation over penetration of the South.”

35.
Speech at the November 15, 1945, second meeting of the North Korean Bureau of the Korean Communist Party, quoted in van Ree,
Socialism in One Zone,
p. 132.

36.
From a speech published in the 1963 edition of Kim’s selected works and cited in Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea,
p. 339.

37.
Wayne Patterson and Hilary Conroy observe that “Wilsonian idealism, missionary support and American public opinion [favoring Korea against Japanese imperialism] stood in sharp contrast to government policy, which did not ‘come around’ until Pearl Harbor. The fact that it was not until World War II that the United States supported Korea lends credence to the view that this support came only because it coincided with the interests of the United States. While the United States was a Johnny-come-lately to the cause of Korean nationalism, the Soviets and the Chinese supported the Koreans and Korean nationalists to a greater extent than the United States had. This led, at least in part, to divided loyalties among Koreans when liberation came, after thirty-five years of colonial rule. The United States, which had not opposed Japan in Korea, began by relying on the Japanese in Korea during the early months of the occupation. By contrast, the Soviet Union (in the north) did not. It is hardly surprising, then, that many Koreans, perhaps still hoping to depend on a stronger foreign power, began to look to the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc for support after the war” (“Duality and Dominance: A Century of Korean-American Relations,” in Lee and Patterson,
One Hundred Years of Korean-American Relations, 1882–1982
[see chap. 2, n. 6], pp. 7–8).

38.
Yu Song-chol’s testimony,
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 7, 1990.

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.”