Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  One visitor to Jilin was a man who had been designated “minister of finance” in a Shanghai-based Korean “provisional government-in-exile.” When some of the youngsters criticized his group as composed of factional-ists and parasites, the man flew into a rage. In his choler, the eminent nationalist flung off his clothing and threatened to rush into the street naked. “Are you against me?” he shouted. “Well, let all of us, me and you, bring disgrace upon ourselves!” Fearing that he would indeed bring shame upon the independence movement and Koreans in general, Kim and the other youths “managed to soothe and dress him. On our way home that day, we determined never to deal with such people again.”71

  Someone Kim remained very happy to deal with was the Reverend Sohn Jong-do, a Methodist clergyman and Korean independence activist. Formerly pastor of the Jongdong Methodist Church in Seoul, he had been elected chairman of the assembly of the Shanghai Provisional Government before going to Jilin. Sohn was about ten years older than Kim’s father but had known Kim Hyong-jik as a fellow Sungsil Middle School alumnus and independence fighter.72 In Jilin, the pastor helped to pay Kim’s school fees and acted as a surrogate father. On holidays, Sohn’s wife invited the youngster to dine on such Korean delicacies as bean-curd-and-rabbit stew and herbed rice cakes.73

  Sohn’s youngest son, Won-tai, who grew up to become a pathologist practicing in Omaha, Nebraska, recalled the family’s frequent visitor as a tall lad who smiled a lot. Kim “said little of-what was unnecessary and light,” Dr. Sohn remembered, but “he was very enthusiastic on political and social problems.” Won-tai, small, slender and two years younger, followed Kim as he would an elder brother. “Though he was not much older than we, he always looked conspicuous,” Dr. Sohn wrote in a 1995 letter to me. “Of imposing stature, he had well-balanced features. He was a charmingly handsome man with a dimple on his left cheek. A future leader, he had able leadership already in those days. So, whenever he was among us children, he was prominent like a ‘crane in a flock of pheasants.’”74

  Kim frequented the chapel, overseeing skit rehearsals by what he later referred to as a propaganda troupe.75 He played the church’s pump organ “very-well,” said Dr. Sohn, who recalled that the Jilin Korean Children’s Association used the chapel for meetings. The association also “availed itself of the religious ceremonies held there.” Kim “offered prayer with many members of our Children’s Association who believed in religion,” said Dr. Sohn. “In those days he stressed that we children should not fall prey to religion with a blind faith, but fight for independence [but] for all that, he was not strongly opposed to the Christian faith, I think.” Of two plays that Kim and a youth group associated with him staged, Dr. Sohn remembered, one was a Christmas story and the other was about Korean patriots who captured a Korean traitor and set out to “make him a conscientious man.”76

  In telling of those days Kim described himself as taking a tougher stance against religion than Sohn remembered. Kim said he used the chapel for his political activities even though he had long since rejected religion. In what may have been a wishful attempt to square his admiration for Pastor Sohn with his own dim view of Christianity, he suggested that the clergyman’s religious work had been to some extent a “guise” to cover work for Korean independence.77 Sohn’s son disagreed, but acknowledged that his father had devoted more time to the independence movement than to religious work. With few other places available for gatherings, he recalled, “many independence fighters availed themselves of religious places and ceremonies.” The pastor was not a communist himself, and he was not fully aware of Kim’s communist leanings, but he supported “any organization actively working for independence.” Dr. Sohn said his father was disposed to support Kim in his activities because the patriotic youngster was his friend’s son and—more important—Kim “was expected for his intelligence to shoulder the future of Korea.”78

  While trying to radicalize Jilin’s young people, the group Kim belonged to campaigned against religious belief, according to his account. The goal was not so much to eradicate religion as to prevent turn-the-other-cheek nonviolence from leaving young Koreans “weak-minded and enervated.” The revolution needed “fighters who sang of decisive battles more than religious believers who sang psalms.”

  Many of the pupils in the children’s association came from Christian families. Kim said he was at pains to try to disabuse them of their religious beliefs. “However hard we explained to them that there was no God and that it was absurd to believe in one, it was useless because they were under such strong influence of their parents,” he wrote. Kim said a primary school teacher sympathetic to the movement took her pupils to church and had them pray for rice cakes and bread. When no food appeared, the teacher took them to a wheat field that had just been harvested. They gleaned the field and the teacher threshed the gleanings and made bread. Eating it, the pupils “learned that it was better to earn bread by working than by praying to God for it.”79

  While rejecting Christian beliefs and agreeing generally with Marx that religion is the opiate of the masses, Kim evidently retained some level of belief in or acknowledgment of the East Asian’s traditional duty to propitiate the restless spirits of the dead. Grieving as a teenager over the deaths both of his father and of Pastor Sohn, who died several years after his father, he “made a firm pledge to liberate the country, come what may, in order to safeguard their souls and take vengeance on the enemy. I believed that liberating the country would repay my benefactors’ kindness, relieve them of their suffering and break the people’s shackles.”80 And he ended the preface to his memoirs with the following words: “Praying for the souls of the departed revolutionaries.”

  As the decade of the 1920s neared its end, Kim was a junior founding member of a communist youth group. He wrote later that the league’s charter members, meeting secretly in the cellar of a shrine in Jilin’s Beishan Park, “sang the Internationale side by side.”81 During that period he directly involved himself in pro-Soviet activity. Anti-communist Chinese warlords angered Moscow by seizing Manchurian rail-ways that had been under joint Chinese and Soviet management. Kim and his friends distributed handbills supporting the Soviet position. “Some politically ignorant young Chinese gave us a wide berth, vilifying us as evil people who were helping the ‘trespassers,’” Kim recalled. For him, though, it seemed only natural that he and his friends viewed the world’s first socialist system as a “beacon of hope” and “considered it our solemn internationalist obligation as communists to fight in its defense.”

  Police got wind of the communist youth group and arrested and interrogated its members, including Kim. The authorities used finger-breaking torture to try to force them to testify about the group’s organization and activities in the city and about “the men behind the scenes,” according to Kim’s account. The young communists stone-walled, insisting that they had done nothing beyond reading some leftist books. Sent to Jilin prison in the autumn of 1929 pending disposition of his case, Kim occupied a cell on the sunless north side, cold and musty even in autumn and so cold when winter came that the walls were white with frost.82

  The family of Pastor Sohn looked after him, collecting food, clothing and bedding and sending it to him in the care of a daughter, Sohn In-sil, a member of the Jilin Korean Children’s Association. In turn, according to his account, Kim used kindness to win over the prison warders and gain better treatment for the jailed activists—even getting his friends outside to provide the items that one impoverished warder needed for his wedding. Still not convicted of any crime but facing the prospect the warlord authorities would turn them over to the Japanese, the young communist prisoners finally resorted to a hunger strike to win their release. Pastor Sohn supplemented this persuasion by offering a bribe to authorities. Kim was released in May of 1930, after what he later recalled as a time for thinking and planning. He walked out through the arched gate of the prison with a heart “full of confidence and enthusiasm.”83

  THREE

&nb
sp; On Long Marches Through Blizzards

  Much has been made of the fact that the man who became known as Kim Il-sung had been named Kim Song-ju at birth. Kim Il-sung was his nom de guerre, acquired in the 1930s. Some reports suggested that other anti-Japanese figures before him might have called themselves Kim Il-sung, and that something of a guerrilla legend had grown up around the name.1 On that basis, critics in South Korea and elsewhere charged that the man who ruled North Korea for just under half a century was a mere impostor who had never been a guerrilla hero at all. The skepticism thus engendered abroad tended to apply indiscriminately to all his achievements, real and imagined.

  Kim’s propagandists played into his critics’ hands when they embellished and falsified aspects of his life story to such an extreme that they invited disbelief and laughter. But Kim himself deserves the larger part of the blame. One aspect of his personality that comes through with absolute clarity is that he was ready to lie about matters big or small whenever he thought it might encourage other people to look up to him.

  The trait showed itself as early as his late teens, when Kim pretended to be considerably older. He had left school in the eighth grade, near the end of the middle-school course. He rejected friends’ urgings that he return and graduate. “I can teach myself,” he recalled asserting. He had chosen instead the path of the “career revolutionary”2 Several months after his release from prison, he said, he set out to revive some communist youth organizations. “In the daytime I dressed in Chinese clothes and spoke Chinese when calling on my comrades, and at night I restored the organizations clad in Korean dress and speaking Korean.”3 Although he was only eighteen at the time, he admitted, he told people he was twenty-three or twenty-four years old in order to get a little more respect from young and old alike.4

  The change from his birth name, Song-ju, seems to have served a similar purpose. Kim said he was still in his teens when his comrades nicknamed him Il-sung. Previously they had called him Han-byol, meaning “one star.” The first version of Il-sung used characters that also mean “one star,” but later the characters were changed to the present Il-sung, which means “become the sun.” Just before Kim’s release from prison, a press report in Manchuria had mentioned the death of someone named Kim Il-sung, a man connected with the communist movement there.5 Although Kim nowhere acknowledged any previous bearers of the name, he claimed to have felt unworthy nonetheless. He said he protested that comparing him to a star or the sun did not befit such a young man—“but my comrades would not listen to me, no matter how sternly I rebuked them.”6 Like those comrades, we may well brush aside Kim’s objections to their laying of the first building block in what was to become his personality cult.

  His tendency to self-promotion and prevarication aside, though, independent scholars have established beyond any doubt that Kim as a young man was, in the most important sense, the genuine article: a Korean patriot of unusual determination and resiliency7 Whether or not he borrowed the name Kim Il-sung is irrelevant to an assessment of his accomplishments, since it was he who went on to give the name the considerable luster it acquired in the 1930s. He rose quickly as a guerrilla fighter to become a partisan commander in a losing but gallant campaign against Japanese colonialism. While the charge that he was an impostor had a life of its own, appearing in Western news media with some frequency, the evidence to the contrary became clear enough that even South Korean government-sponsored studies granted Kim a role in the struggle for Korean independence.8

  No separate Korean communist party existed when Kim came of age, despite several attempts over a number of years to start one. The Japanese police had rooted out each fledgling Korean party so thoroughly and ruthlessly that few people remained inside Korea who were willing and able to carry on the communist cause, as Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee explain in their trailblazing work Communism in Korea.9 Furthermore, factionalism was and is a deeply rooted problem in the Korean political culture, all across the ideological spectrum.10 Factional conflicts had proven viciously destructive in Korean communist groupings both at home and abroad.

  Lenin in 1919 had established Moscow’s Third Communist International, called Comintern for short. Its word was law in the international communist movement. Finally fed up with the squabbling among Korean communists, the body made new rules that eliminated Korean communist parties outside Korea proper. Korean exiles—-who comprised the great majority of Koreans seeking to become communists in that period—-were directed to join local parties. For Koreans in Manchuria that meant the Moscow-backed Chinese Communist Party11

  Kim joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1931.12 According to his account, he soon won a Comintern appointment as a youth organizer in the heavily Korean eastern part of Manchuria’s Jilin Province. Traveling north to the Russian-influenced Manchurian city of Harbin to meet representatives of Moscow, he stayed in a luxury hotel. However, his expense allowance was so modest he had to dine on cornmeal pancakes bought from street vendors. “The first day I entered the hotel, a Russian female attendant accompanied me to my room and offered to attend to my nails,” he recalled. “I said I had already done it, for I had no money to pay her. Another attendant came in after her and asked what I wanted to order for my meal. I was obliged to say that I had already eaten at my friend’s house.”13

  In the spring of 1931 Kim moved for a time to Manchuria’s mountainous Antu County, where his mother and younger brothers lived.14 It was there, according to his memoirs, that he decided to join the guerrilla warfare against Japan, which that year had completed its occupation of Manchuria. At one meeting of activists late in 1931, skeptics asked how a mere partisan force could expect to beat a Japanese army of several million men armed with tanks, artillery and warplanes. They pointed out that Manchuria-based Korean guerrillas did not have even the advantage of fighting in their home country15 According to Kim, he won them over with a lengthy argument.

  By the time he was twenty the war games of Kim’s boyhood became deadly real as he took up arms in the guerrilla struggle. In his version, he formed with some comrades a Korean guerrilla unit of which he was the commander although he agreed to take orders from a Chinese nationalist commander operating in the area.16 While he mentioned no transition from ordinary soldier to battlefield leader, some historians say he actually followed various guerrilla bands for a time before qualifying to command his own unit.17

  In the spring of 1932, according to his account, Kim and his small unit engaged the enemy for the first time. The guerrillas ambushed a convoy of supplies and weapons guarded by soldiers of the puppet government that the Japanese had installed to run “Manchukuo,” as they had renamed Manchuria. “I was so tense and excited that I could feel my heart beating,” Kim remembered later. His inexperienced unit had planned a night ambush without realizing that darkness makes it difficult to tell friend from foe. Luckily there was a full moon. The guerrillas prevailed after about ten minutes’ firing and captured the goods, he said.18

  A little later came Kim’s first battle with an actual Japanese unit, made up of more professional and seasoned soldiers than those of the Manchukuo army. According to his claim, in that engagement his unit nearly wiped out the enemy but lost several of its own men: “After burying our dead comrades on the nameless hill, we held a funeral ceremony before their graves. As I looked at the sobbing soldiers, with their caps in their hands, I made a fare-well address in a trembling voice. I can’t remember what I said. I only remember that when I raised my head after my speech I saw the men’s shoulders heaving up and down violently”19

  Kim’s headquarters was in a different part of the county from the home of his mother, who was ill with an undiagnosed ailment that he later came to believe was stomach cancer. Kim said his mother rejected his attempts to help her around the house and urged him instead to stick to his revolutionary work. He took her at her word, and seldom visited her as her illness progressed. When he did visit, he carried grain for her and his younger brothers. Arriving for
one long-delayed visit, Kim felt uneasy to see no smoke rising from the chimney. Entering the house “feeling such fear and tension that the blood in my heart seemed to freeze,” Kim found his mother’s bed empty and his brothers sobbing.

  Kim related an affecting anecdote. As his bedridden mother’s death approached, it had been difficult to keep her hair clean. A neighbor woman who was caring for her had cut Kang Pan-sok’s hair to stop her scalp from itching. Hearing about that after his arrival was “tearing me apart inside,” Kim recalled. “I had nothing to say, even if I was to blame for being an un-dutiful son.”20 Kim confessed to confusion about his duty as a son (a confession that contrasted-with the self-assurance reflected in most of his reminiscences). Confucian notions of filial piety clearly retained a tenacious hold on his mind. On the other hand, “it was much in vogue among the young people who were my revolutionary companions to think that a man who had stepped out on the road to struggle should naturally forget his family,” he wrote. “It was my view of filial piety in those days that earnest devotion to the revolution represented the supreme love for one’s family.” Nonetheless, “I had no clear, established view of how a revolutionary devoted to the revolution should love his family”21