Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (20 page)

The Northern regime allied itself with elements in the South Korean National Assembly. Some of those had been bested in factional struggles and
so might have felt they had little to lose. Others, however, were moderates who had beaten the Rhee forces in an election shortly before the invasion and had taken control of the assembly. Many such moderates decided to stay on in Seoul after the communists arrived.
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Having taken over the rice stocks, the occupation authorities tried to win friends by giving special rationing treatment to Southern families whose members joined communist youth orgainizations and labor unions. Offsetting the scheme’s successes was the guaranteed alienation of all those who did
not
get the special rations—many of-whom, having taken names, would be around after the communists’ departure. In yet another bid for popular support, the occupiers set up supposedly democratic “people’s committees” to govern localities—but they staffed them with mayors and other officials brought from the North, along with Southern communists.

Farmland hastily redistributed to tenant farmers came burdened with onerous quotas for delivery of crops to the government; as a result, Higgins found, the decrees “aroused little enthusiasm.” After the Allies retook Seoul, the American correspondent also found a big change in the views of South Korean journalists she had known in the capital. Just before the war, they had been responsive and somewhat sympathetic to communist propaganda. But now she found that their earlier fervor to see the country unified, even if it should come under communist domination, had been transformed quickly into a panicked determination to flee the communist-occupied zone.
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For decades afterward, it was an article of faith among commentators in and out of South Korea that the war had left most Southerners implacably anti-communist.
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Evidence advanced for that proposition included enormous refugee flows from north to south, the numbers not even approached by a flow in the opposite direction. Those fleeing the North had included many farmers who “abandoned their own land to become propertyless refugees in South Korea,” Higgins reported. “The pitiful swarms of refugees who fled south in the wake of our retreating army were irrefutable evidence of how much the people feared the Reds.
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Is it possible, though, that many who moved South were not truly voluntary refugees but people who simply feared being bombed if they should remain in the North? That is the argument of scholars Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings. “There is evidence that people in the North genuinely feared that they might be hit” with atomic weapons, they write—and “anyone who has seen pictures of the North as it was in the winter of 1950–51 and the destruction of Hungnam (or Inchon), with temperatures falling to minus forty degrees centigrade, with food stocks burned, animals slaughtered and entire villages razed to the ground, might reconsider why people moved.”
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Halliday and Cumings also say that no “important” Workers’ Party officials defected to the South.
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The South had already passed the legislation for a land reform of its own before the invasion. Redistribution, limiting any family to three
chongbo
or about 7.5 acres, was supposed to take place after the 1950 autumn rice harvest. Once he regained control of the South, Rhee sought to postpone the reform, but he ended up carrying it out. Halliday and Cumings believe that the Northern occupiers’ brief land-reform effort, whatever its shortcomings, had been enough of a success to pressure the Rhee regime into going ahead despite the objections of the landlord class.
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Still, one key to the intensity of Southern anti-communism in succeeding years no doubt is the fact that Southerners with obvious leanings toward the North had either gone north or died. Like Kim Il-sung in the North, Rhee used the war to purge his half of Korea of ideological diversity. Gregory Henderson, a U.S. diplomat in Seoul in the pre-war period, wrote four decades later that people occupying an ideological middle ground had been much in evidence there as the war approached, and some of them had gone to the North during the war. But “one searches in vain for them in the North they went to. Perhaps they are hidden in northern niches where we cannot yet find them. They-were stamped out also in the South.”
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The escalation of hatred had, of course, been mutual. After the war, while the Southerners remembered Northern atrocities, there had been far more indiscriminate killing by the other side for North Koreans to remember if the victims of aerial bombings and napalm attacks are taken into account. The regime had little difficulty fanning popular hatred against both South Korea and the United States for deeds both real and imagined: “The U.S. imperialists and their bootlickers trampled underfoot and burnt everything in all quarters. They butchered innocent people en masse. They kicked children and pregnant women into the flames and buried old folks alive.”
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Even if many of the refugees were simply fleeing the bombing, the additional migration further reduced the numbers of malcontents in the North who might resist Kim’s policies. On top of about 3.5 million North Koreans who had migrated to the South between 1945 and the outbreak of the war, another million or so refugees fled during the Korean War. Many (including such people as those villagers who had thrown a communist official’s family down a mine shaft) joined the retreat of the UN forces from the North in the winter of 1950 after the Chinese joined the conflict.
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Although the war with which he had sought to reunite Koreans had divided them further instead, nevertheless Kim’s regime remained unrelenting in repeating the lie of a great victory in a war begun by U.S. imperialists. During
the brief occupation by UN and South Korean forces, some North Koreans had heard the truth about who had invaded whom. For the most part, though, people remained “willing to believe the regime’s version.
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Eventually the official version would also leave out references to Chinese help. The supposed grand victory would become a purely North Korean victory. That piece of historical falsification could not be accomplished immediately since the Chinese “volunteer” army stayed on until 1958 to protect North Korea against any renewal of hostilities with the United States. North Koreans retained vivid memories of generous Chinese assistance—even as some of them criticized the Soviet Union and their own Korean Workers’ Party for not having done enough.
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By the 1960s, however, Kim’s official biographer would have not a single word to say about Chinese help, right up through his description of the “enthusiastic cheers of Korea and the world” on July 28, 1953. That was the day the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly conferred the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the National Flag First Class and the Medal of the Golden Star on Marshal Kim Il-sung, who had “organized and led the Korean people and the People’s Army to a shining victory in the Fatherland Liberation War, with his outstanding strategy and tactics.”
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The account leaves out the small detail that the Hero of the DPRK title was awarded also to Gen. Peng Dehuai, commander of the Chinese force.
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For public consumption in North Korea, the war was pronounced a success. The North Korean people continued to be told that the South Koreans and Americans had started the war to destroy the North. To have thwarted their evil plan was a glorious victory, affirming the system and the revolutionary tradition of Kim’s republic. “The spirit of the heroic soldiers who held out against the American invaders on Height 1211 [known to the UN troops as Heartbreak Ridge] was derived from the spirit of the guerrilla zones in the 1930s,” Kim wrote in his memoirs. “We still maintain this spirit as we advance along the straight road of our own style of socialism within imperialist encirclement.”
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Snatching a proclaimed “victory” from the jaws of defeat with the help of the Chinese, much as he had been able to do in 1945 thanks to the Allies, Kim could well imagine that the fates were with him. We may doubt that the Korean War failure seriously dented his confidence in himself, any more than had his ultimate failure in anti-Japanese warfare.

Throughout his career, starting with the skits he produced in Jilin as a student organizer, Kim Il-sung displayed a showman’s sense. Thus it was that when Workers’ Party officials gathered in Pyongyang for a plenary session of the Central Committee on August 5, 1953, they met in a nicely appointed meeting hall equipped to seat a thousand.

How could that be, just a few days after the armistice had been signed, in a city where the American bombing had flattened nearly every building? The story goes that Kim had ordered the building’s foundation and walls constructed even before the armistice—on the theory that walls were more likely than roofs to withstand any further United Nations bombing attacks. The roofless structure had indeed survived. With the armistice, Kim had ordered an all-out effort to roof the building and finish its interior in time for the meeting.

Kim viewed the post–Korean War period not as a time to relax after the horrors of the war but as a contest, in which the two opposing systems would position themselves for further struggle. The North must build a strong and attractive economy—not just for its own people but to back up a continuing push to bring the South under communist rule. The instant meeting hall was intended as a vivid symbol of his determination. The speech he gave the party officials who assembled there was entitled, “Everything for the Postwar Rehabilitation and Development of the National Economy”
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In the several years following the armistice North Korea did rebuild its
shattered economy, with a lot of help from its friends. The country—especially its capital, Pyongyang—became something of a socialist showcase. Meanwhile Kim consolidated power through continued purges against his rivals at home. His concern to limit the country’s dependence on its larger communist neighbors inspired him to begin developing a self-reliant brand of communist economics.

Although Kim would not acknowledge the failure of the war, the country was in ruins and someone had to take some sort of responsibility. He moved to defuse the situation by blaming mid-level and low-level bureaucrats for foul-ups.
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That was not enough, though, and he sacrificed some of the leadership.

Even as the Korean War fighting raged, Kim parceled out blame among high officials. On December 21, 1950, he addressed a meeting of the central committee of his Workers’ Party, attacking named individuals for mistakes. Some of those errors were substantive snafus, but others were “defeatism” and other attitude problems. The offense of one high official who lost all his official posts was to have remarked that it would be hard to fight without more airplanes—a comment whose truth should have been evident in view of the devastation wrought when the Americans unleashed their air power.

Kim called for a purge of the party, asserting that the war had shown certain members to be disloyal.
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His approach was to pick off potential enemies, one group at a time, before they could build enough political support to use his failure in the war to push him out. Removed from their official and party positions in the course of a long series of purges—and in many cases exiled, imprisoned at hard labor or killed—-were most of the members of rival factions plus some old comrades from Manchuria belonging to his own faction. Those purged eventually included an astonishingly high proportion of the KPA generals who had been involved in the war—about nine out of ten, according to Yu Song-chol.
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Kim’s skill at cutthroat, divide-and-conquer maneuvering can be seen in the purge of Ho Ka-i. A vice-chairman of the party Central Committee and vice-premier, Ho was also the leader of Soviet-born ethnic Koreans, including Yu Song-chol, who had come in with the Soviet occupation troops. Ho and Kim clashed over whether to make the Workers’ Party an elite organization, as in the USSR, or the mass party that Kim wanted.
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Yu said that another Soviet-Korean, Pak Chang-ok, one day took Ho a copy of a party draft document full of flowery praise of Kim Il-sung—the sort of tribute that was to become de rigueur. Ho criticized the language as excessive, whereupon Pak invited him to edit the document. Taking the bait, the unsuspecting Ho underlined the offending passages in red ink. The other man took the marked-up document straight to Kim. Later Ho visited the premier’s office. Armed
now with proof of Ho’s disloyalty, Kim “pulled the draft out of his drawer, his face flushed.”