Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (24 page)

Eventually the purges of Soviet-Koreans got to Yu Song-chol. Yu believed there was a personal element added to the mix in his case. “Kim had an intolerant side to him that caused him to remember anyone with whom he had a negative experience and eventually seek revenge without fail,” he said. While serving as Kim’s interpreter back in the Soviet Union, Yu had crossed his boss. He had refused to run a private errand for Kim, citing Soviet Army regulations that forbade such use of enlisted men. As time passed, Yu had forgotten about that and like-wise had forgotten another occasion on which words had passed with Kim. He lived to regret both. A decade and a half later, when Yu had risen to the rank of lieutenant general, a friend warned him that Kim still harbored ill will toward him because of those two incidents.
Yu figured that the old grudge had something to do with his being purged a bit later.
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Yu’s recollections of his personal downfall afford an inside view of the experience of being purged—at the lower end of the horror curve, since he was not killed.

Koreans generally are sticklers for formality and “face.” Returning to Pyongyang in 1958 from two years of study in the Soviet Union, Yu knew something must be amiss when no one came to the airport to meet him—a three-star general, at least nominally heading the operations bureau of the Korean People’s Army. Three days after his return, Yu was summoned to a meeting of the defense ministry’s “Thought Examination Committee.” The meeting chairman pointed to him and said: “You have committed four mistakes. Conduct self-criticism.” Charges against Yu included describing the people’s “loyalty” to Kim Il-sung as a personality cult; speaking as though Kim had started the Korean War; and spying for the Soviet Union. He admitted that he had said, in a chat with two other senior officers, that a drive for peaceful reunification would have been better than starting the Korean War. He denied the other charges. The most serious, the spying charge, he figured had been trumped up as Kim’s way of showing that he was offended by Yu’s close relations with Soviet officials: Soviet military advisors had intervened concerning Yu’s assignments several times since 1945.

Removed from his job, Yu had to spend all day in an otherwise empty room writing letters of “self-reflection.” At night he returned to sessions of the Thought Examination Committee, which met from 7 P.M. to midnight or 1 A.M. The committee members harassed and berated him until he conducted self-criticism to their satisfaction. Whenever he opened his mouth to speak they shouted abuse at him. “After a few days, I agreed with all their criticisms out of a feeling of hopelessness. However, they continued to torment me every night, repeating the same process over and over.” It got to be too much for Yu. He begged a former subordinate, who by then was sitting on the Thought Examination Committee, to kill him—“rather than bleeding me slowly like this.” Finally, though, the sessions ended-with Thought Examination Committee members ripping off Yu’s rank insignia. Expelled from the People’s Army and the party, he became a nonperson. “As word spread that I had undergone thought examination, relatives stopped visiting and even my old friends ostracized me.”

Worried about where their next meal would come from and evicted from their home, he and his family moved in the freezing January of 1959 into a former stable. Soon they were ordered to leave even that shelter. Eventually Yu was told that he was in the third category on Kim’s list of purge targets— those who need not be killed or put to hard labor but might simply leave the country if they wished. Cursing Kim Il-sung, Yu left in December of 1959— one of some four hundred officials and their family members whom Kim’s purges drove into exile in the Soviet Union.
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In reality Yu’s “crimes” must have been not too terrible—considering the fact that in 1990 the Pyongyang regime, seeking to let bygones be bygones, invited him and a number of the other exiles in the USSR to visit North Korea. It was Yu’s first time back since his forced departure three decades earlier. When he got to Pyongyang, he was dismayed to find in the “Fatherland Liberation War Museum” no record of the Korean War efforts of himself and other high-ranking cadre who had been purged. Even his name was missing from the list of Operations Bureau commanders. Compounding the insult, one North Korean host (as had long been customary with visitors) “asked me to write down a few words praising Kim Il-sung.”
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As he accused his domestic rivals of flunkeyism, Kim Il-sung also glorified the opposite quality, or state of mind, which he came to term
juche
—often translated simply as national self-reliance but having the broader meaning of putting Korea first.
Juche
was to be the antidote to the tendency of Koreans, like citizens of other small communist countries, to subject themselves to the wishes of Moscow or Beijing. “What are we doing?” Kim asked in an appearance before party propagandists and agitators in 1955. “We are not engaged in the revolution of another country but in our Korean revolution.”
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Although it was in that 1955 speech that Kim gave full voice to his arguments for
juche,
he had been talking along similar lines as early as 1948. It was better, he said, to produce finished goods at home and develop the economy independently instead of sending raw materials to be processed abroad.
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The theme became important in a debate over what to emphasize in the reconstruction of the post–Korean War economy. Kim had chosen to go all-out with investments in building heavy industry, including armaments.
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That meant postponing major improvements in popular living standards.

Criticism of Kim’s economic policies came from Korean “factionalists and dogmatists,” as Kim called them. Besides questioning the priority on heavy industrial development, they also complained that agricultural collectivization was moving too fast. And some believed he should be encouraging the country’s remaining capitalists and traders through the sort of state capitalism that other socialist countries had employed at a comparably early stage.

In a sense such critics played into Kim’s hands. He always needed enemies at home or abroad, or both, to make the most of his skills at negative motivation. If the “factionalists and dogmatists” had not come along he might have had to invent them (as of course he did, to the extent that he trumped up cases against them). Visiting the Kangson steel mill complex in 1956, he told its workers and managers that the country faced a situation in which “people in some country try to impose their factionalism upon us. People in
another country try to get control of us in cooperation with those people. The factionalists in our country depend on their masters for support.” Meanwhile, South Korea’s Rhee “attempts to attack us, with help of the United States. Then, whom shall we trust? There is none other than you whom we can trust.
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Kim cranked up an “all-party ideological struggle” to root out his domestic critics and their subversive notions. “Wherever he went,” his official biographer claims, “Comrade Kim Il-sung learned clearly that the entire party and people had strong revolutionary zeal running high, and were filled with an intense fighting spirit against both internal and external enemies. He lost no time in translating their passion and strength into action … to produce a big leap forward in the socialist revolution and construction and thereby completely overwhelm the factionalists.”
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In practice, that struggle involved wholesale population relocation. Shin Myung-chul, a former member of the State Security secret police apparatus who defected to the South, told me that his family had been relocated in 1956, four years before he was born, from the major city of Hamhung to a small city, Cheongdan-eup. His parents were socialist enthusiasts, and their relocation was part of Kim Il-sung’s scheme to resettle such exemplars where they could teach less ideologically advanced people. Ahn Choong-hak, a logger who defected to the South, told me that his family in 1961, the year he turned three, had been part of a mass relocation of households of “good family background” to the old capital of Kaesong.
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Recall that Kaesong, below the 38th parallel, had been captured by the North during the Korean War and incorporated into its post-armistice territory. The ideological correctness of many remaining local people left much to be desired.

By taking “ten steps where others need only take one,”
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Kim enthused, the country would soon move from socialism to the ultimate communist utopia. Then everyone would work voluntarily and receive goods according to need—not according to effort, as in the socialist stage. “I will take you on to communist society,” he vowed in a 1959 visit to workers—formerly independent craftsmen—in the Wonsan Iron-works Producers’ Cooperative. “I will take all your sons to communist society.” An official biographer reports that “unity in ideology and will” grew out of the campaign. “All functionaries and working people came to take the firm
juche
position of knowing no other ideas than the revolutionary ideas of Comrade Kim. …”
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But attacks on Kim’s policies had come not only at home but also from communists abroad. No less a figure than future Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, as a delegate to a 1956 party conference, urged his North Korean hosts to import Soviet consumer goods instead of machines. Such disagreements continued into the 1960s as Kim criticized the Soviet-backed notion that socialist countries should form an “integrated” economy, each specializing rather than trying to produce a full range of products domestically.
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The ongoing
Soviet campaign of de-Stalinization—whose implications were so dangerous for Kim Il-sung himself—-was one important factor making him hesitate to put his full trust in Moscow’s guidance on other matters.

Starting in the late 1950s, a bitter competition between China and the Soviet Union became a big factor in North Korean foreign policy. Pyongyang at first sought to avoid getting caught up in the struggle between its two key foreign backers. Kim’s resultant need to keep his political distance from both countries reinforced his policy of economic independence and self-reliance.
Juche
was to become a huge success in domestic propaganda, playing to Koreans’ strong but battered pride and to the xenophobia that had come to characterize them over a long history often marred by foreign invasions.
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The United States had withdrawn most of its own troops after 1953, but had retained enough to serve as a “trip-wire.” In case the North should invade again, American troops would be bloodied and the United States would be at war again—automatically. The American who served as UN commander also had “operational control” of South Korean troops, which meant that in time of war those troops would serve under the joint command structure.

The North Koreans talked contemptuously of the Americans,
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but in reality the GIs’ presence was a serious obstacle. The Korean War had taught Kim Il-sung caution. After the war, furthermore, Washington had adopted the policy of what Dulles termed “massive retaliation” in case the armistice should fail to hold.
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A formerly classified April 17, 1954, memorandum by the secretary of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff spells it out: “If hordes of Chinese should attack again, U.S. air support operations, including use of atomic weapons, will be employed to inflict maximum destruction of enemy forces.”
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Thus did Washington raise over South Korea what came to be called the “nuclear umbrella”: the prospect of American nuclear retaliation for even a conventional attack.
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From the late 1950s Kim watched as the United States introduced into South Korea tactical nuclear weapons, under the control of U.S. forces.
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Declassified U.S. documents show Washington’s expectation that those new weapons would make Southern leaders feel secure enough to reduce the size of their own bloated, 677,000-man military by about one-tenth. Supporting South Korean troops with aid funds keyed to their numbers, Washington viewed the substitution of nukes for men as a budgetary economy measure. American officials also did not want the South to spend any more of its own
scarce funds on defense. They were concerned because defense spending accounted for 71 percent of the entire South Korean budget. They hoped that percentage would decline in favor of spending on badly needed economic development initiatives. U.S. officials succeeded in negotiating a troop reduction—but it took months to overcome the obstinate opposition of President Rhee, who by then was senile but continued to cling tenaciously to power.
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While preparations were under way early in 1958 for transferring a nuclear-capable missile unit to South Korea, Pyongyang issued proposals similar to those it had pushed at the failed 1954 Geneva conference. They included simultaneous withdrawal of all foreign troops from the peninsula, to be followed by a “free, all-Korean election … under neutral nation supervision with democratic rights and freedom of activity guaranteed for all political parties and social organizations.” North and South would negotiate the terms of the election as well as “economic and cultural contacts, and freedom of movement.” The two Koreas’ armed forces would be reduced “to minimum.”

The Chinese endorsed the proposals. Both Beijing and Pyongyang pointed to the U.S. introduction of nuclear weapons to portray themselves as the champions of peaceful reunification, the South Koreans and Americans as its opponents. China claimed the United States had been the aggressor in the Korean War. North Korea repeated that the U.S. military “occupation” of South Korea was the “fundamental reason” why unification had not come.
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A few weeks later, on February 28, 1958, Kim Il-sung and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai jointly announced that the Chinese “volunteer” troops, which had stayed on to protect North Korea against American–South Korean invasion, would be withdrawn by the end of the year. The Soviet Union quickly endorsed the move—and added a call for de-nuclearizing the Korean peninsula, Japan and Taiwan.