A History of Korea

by Professor Kyung Moon Hwang

  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 And the northern communist party eventually superseded the Seoul-based party in the southern zone—acting, in fact, like a typical Soviet government.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 Hnyng, 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.

  These purges of Kim’s political rivals, then, required a shift in the North Korean system itself from a Soviet-sponsored state to one of greater autonomy. But in fact, aside from the ousted figures themselves, the Soviet ways of doing things were still preeminent; indeed the methods of eliminating political opponents—from the show trials to the trumped up accusations of espionage, anti-party activity, and “factionalism”—displayed Kim’s reliance on the Soviet template. Kim in fact was moving North Korea toward a firmer Stalinism just as many other communist states, led by the Soviet Union itself, began to repudiate it following Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech in early 1956 denouncing the Stalin personality cult. Kim also owed a considerable debt to Mao Zedong, the Chinese communist leader whose espousal of paternalistic, even Confucian, dictatorship as the way to gain maximum subservience provided Kim a blueprint for his own efforts. Kim even appropriated from Mao many ideas related to cultivating a blend of nationalism, communism, and personality cult.

  These strands of foreign influence were also on prominent display in the great effort, called “Ch’llima” (after a legendary flying horse of Korean folklore), to collectivize and industrialize the North Korean economy beginning in the late 1950s. The nationalization of industry, along with other economic measures such as currency reform, had begun in the years just preceding the Korean War by exploiting colonial period infrastructures, especially in hydroelectric generation and mining. The Ch’llima campaign completed this process and launched a mammoth effort focused on heavy industries, such as construction, steel, and agricultural and military machinery. It required—and gained, it appears—a tremendous mobilization of labor, which resulted in a substantial increase in North Korea’s economic output and living standards. The campaign was contemporaneous with and similar to the doomed agricultural collectivization effort in Mao’s China, the Great Leap Forward, but it avoided China’s mass starvation—mostly because North Korea’s agricultural mobilization was limited in scope. Still, the foreign connections continued to play a central role: the promulgation of Soviet-style fixed-period development plans; the contributions of Soviet-Korean experts; the major impact of the Chinese troops stationed in North Korea until 1958 in terms of security and reconstruction; and the ongoing economic aid coming from China and especially the Soviet Union that paid for many
spectacular North Korean gains. By all accounts, that is precisely what allowed North Korea’s economic growth to outpace that of South Korea from the late 1950s through the 1960s.

  Such a collective fervor for reconstruction manifested itself in cultural mobilization as well, as culture became thoroughly politicized into a form promoting nativism and the Kim Il Sung-led state. This process had already developed considerably in the post-liberation period, as music, theater, literature, paintings and sculptures, and cinema became immersed in revolutionary state-building. As in communist societies elsewhere—and ironically, given the Marxist emphasis on the material basis for historical development—ideological and cultural training was perceived as paramount in fortifying mass support for the sociopolitical system. Divergence into “frivolous” or “empty” expression, the coded terms for art that was not goal-oriented toward a display of “socialist realism,” came under attack in the 1950s. Aesthetics had to service ideology. Cultural practitioners who had originally

  moved to or stayed in North Korea as a haven for their leftist ideals soon found themselves at the mercy of political developments, none more potent than the ongoing solidification of Kim Il Sung’s authority. The novelist credited with devising the aura of Kim’s personality cult, Han Srya, became the most prominent and powerful figure in North Korean literary circles, himself leading many of the 1950s purges of suspect writers. But tellingly Han, too, eventually fell victim to the whims of politics and was purged in 1962, never to be heard from again.

  JUCHE, HISTORY, AND LEGITIMACY

  Perhaps the most dramatic and enduring ideological outcome of this intense political concentration and mass mobilization came in the shaping of a new historical perspective. As Kim indicated in his 1955 speech, the most urgent task for propaganda workers—and presumably for society at large—was to focus on the essential lessons of Korean history. As elaborated upon later but clearly present already in the 1950s, the self-reliance constituting the core of Juche ideology could not be divorced from a strong consciousness of Korea’s historical experience, in particular the suffering from foreign intervention. North Koreans were taught that, throughout the nation’s history, including the most recent experiences of colonization and the Korean War, the outside world had consistently brought harm. But under the revolutionary leadership of Kim Il Sung, Koreans could finally escape this destructive pattern. At the most simplistic but comprehensible level, this narrative made tremendous sense. One can understand, then, why the North Korean people could have found this message of confidence and optimism appealing, especially in tandem with real gains in their standard of living and with a redress of grievances grounded in the inequities of the recent past.

  The fabrication of historical details to shape this grand narrative began in the post-liberation period and gained momentum through the propaganda activities of intellectuals like Han Srya. All of Korean history eventually came to be seen as an unrelenting struggle against harmful external forces and exploitative internal elements, such as those Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese colonialists and American occupiers. In service to Kim’s political ascent, his colonial period struggles against the Japanese in Manchuria underwent transparent inflation, even gaining credit for having achieved Korea’s liberation in 1945. The Soviet Union’s precipitous fall in significance in the historical orthodoxy thus paralleled its descent in political influence in the 1950s. Indeed, in the 1950s, as the North Korean regime’s legitimacy became more firmly hitched to Kim’s credentials as an independence fighter, his official biography gave him another boost, this time hailing him for saving Korea from American imperialism as well. Kim lashed out at the US for having launched the Korean War, seeking world conquest, and desiring to “enslave” the Korean people. For evidence, he noted, one needed only to look at what had happened to South Korea since liberation. The strong implication behind this emerging North Korean historical orthodoxy was that only a great historical figure—namely, Kim Il Sung himself—could rally the people to learn from their experiences. This self-serving narrative sought to instill a dependency on Kim by equating him with the fate of Korean civilization itself.

  The Pueblo Incident

  To put a cap on the economic recovery, social stability, and political consolidation achieved by the mid-1960s, in the summer of 1966 North Korea’s national soccer team stunned the world by defeating heavily favored Italy in a World Cup match. As if this triumphant event emboldened the North Korean regime amidst the increasing volatility in northeast Asia at the time, over the next three years it aggressively challenged its sworn enemies, the US and South Korea, through a series of incidents that together appeared as resumption of unfinished business from the Korean War. The most notable such provocation was the so-called Pueblo Incident, in reference to the North’s capture of the American naval intelligence vessel USS Pueblo in early 1968.

  Just a couple of days before this event, on January 21, 1968, a group of thirty North Korean commandos had attempted a raid on the South Korean presidential compound, resulting in the deaths of nearly all the assassins and scores of South Koreans. Apparently, however, news of this event had not reached the Pueblo’s officers, who continued their surveillance off the peninsula’s east coast in what the US considered international waters. Speedy North Korean boats, claiming American infringement on North Korean territory, attacked the Pueblo, boarded the ship, and took into custody its crew of over eighty. Thereafter the crisis surrounding the fate of those sailors preoccupied a segment of the American government for the rest of the year. After months of negotiations behind the scenes that resulted in a formal apology from the US for having entered North Korean waters, the crew was released. Immediately thereafter, upon learning of the abuse and torture that the sailors had endured while held in captivity, the American government retracted its apology. But the damage had been done.

  The Pueblo Incident was followed by the hunt for a large group of North Korean soldiers who had landed off the east coast of South Korea in the fall of 1968. In the spring of 1969, North Korean fighter jets shot down an American naval surveillance plane, killing a crew of over thirty. To the US and South Korea, these incidents presented proof of the need to maintain vigilance; to North Korea, they reinforced the chronic sense of threat from American imperialism as well as from its South Korean “puppet.” Today the USS Pueblo, presented as a tourist attraction while docked on the banks of the Taedong River in Pyongyang, continues to serve the interests of the North Korean regime’s legitimation narrative, just as it had done in 1968.

  Image 22 The captured ship USS Pueblo on display on the banks of the Taedong River, Pyongyang, 2003. (Courtesy of Tae Gyun Park.)

  The historical irony was inescapable, compelling, and, given North Korean history as a whole, tragic: this narrative stemmed from efforts to hide Kim’s dependence on, as much as to tout his resistance to, outside forces. The Soviet occupation put him in power in the first place, and then China’s intervention in the Korean War preserved the nascent state itself. The lofty Juche rhetoric of fierce autonomy and nativism that accompanied the North’s increasing isolationism in the early years, then, compensated for the fact that North Korea the country, and Kim Il Sung the leader, began with and were sustained by external assistance.

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  1960s South Korea

  CHRONOLOGY

  1960 March 15 Rhee government rigs election for vice president; protests against Rhee in Masan

  1960 April 19 Outbreak of student demonstrations and violent crackdowns around the country

  1960 April 26 Resignation of Syngman Rhee

  1960 June Establishment of the Second Republic, a parliamentary system of government

  1961 May 16 Coup d’état engineered by Major General Park Chung Hee

  1961–3 Rule by the Supreme National Reconstruction Committee, headed by Park

  1962 Promulgation of the First Five-Year Economic Development Plan

  1963 September Elect
ion of Park Chung Hee in presidential election, start of Third Republic

  1964 March Student protests against prospective Normalization Treaty with Japan

  1965 May Dispatch of first contingent of Korean troops to Vietnam

  1965 June Signing of the Normalization Treaty with Japan

  1967 May Re-election of Park; establishment of Pohang Iron and Steel Company and Kuro Industrial Park

  1969 Mass opposition to constitutional amendment allowing a third presidential term for Park

  DEMONSTRATIONS AGAINST THE NORMALIZATION OF RELATIONS WITH JAPAN, SPRING 1964

  In the spring of 1964, as throngs of young people in Britain and the US were enraptured by Beatlemania, their counterparts in South Korea

  also filled the streets for mass gatherings, but for a far less joyous occasion. With news that the South Korean government was close to reaching an agreement to formally reestablish diplomatic ties with Japan, Korean students exploded in protest. To them, the shameful period of Japanese colonial occupation, especially the horrors of wartime mobilization, remained a contemporary event. They could not fathom why the South Korean government, under the direction of President Park Chung Hee, would even consider such a thing. Their demonstrations reached a crescendo in June of 1964, when tens of thousands of students disrupted campus life throughout the country and invited a government crackdown as well as the imposition of a state of emergency. Such a back-and-forth between students and state power would act as defining moments for much of the 1960s, just as they did in other parts of the world.