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

by Bradley K. Martin

  To some extent, Kim Il-sung as a young independence fighter deserves to be evaluated on his own terms. Brave and tough, surviving and thriving as an exile, he never gave in. Mean-while, the Japanese pacification campaigns achieved such success that most other Koreans in his situation, if they were not killed, ultimately accommodated themselves to a future in which Japanese rule seemed impregnable. But Kim did not. “It is his persistence and obstinate will, characteristics of many successful revolutionaries, that deserve recognition,” observes biographer Suh.78

  Kim comes across as a young man who matured fast to become an effective and shrewd leader. If he was not the unfailingly benevolent, all-wise figure he later cast himself to be, at least he showed considerable intelligence and common sense. In many or even most cases, the ideological and policy stands he claimed to have taken in his guerrilla years represented rational— even inspired—choices, given his communist and anti-Japanese orientation.

  As his personality cult expanded in later decades, Kim claimed that he had been recognized as the heart of the Korean resistance movement even as early as 1935. (Never mind that he still had been commanding at the battalion level then, with not only Chinese but also Korean generals above him.) “The enemy believed,” he wrote, “that without Kim Il-sung the Korean communist army and its resistance to Manchukuo and Japan would collapse.”79 His own men had the same belief, he said. Typical of his recollections was a 1935 scene when he said he awoke from a raging fever to find a tearful subordinate crying, “Comrade Commander, if you die, Korea-will be hopeless.”

  The difficulty of sifting through the many extravagant claims that he and his followers put forth over the decades, to discover what is true and what is false, constitutes the main impediment to reading Kim Il-sung’s true character. That very problem, however, gives us a fix on one basic in Kim’s personality: his enormous self-regard. Large egos were the rule among the young revolutionaries of his time, by Kim’s own account: “Everyone was his own master. Everyone thought of himself as a genius, a hero and a great man.”80 Although he affected an ironic tone in writing those words, the man who bore the proud name Kim Il-sung developed very early a preference for the company of people who acknowledged him as a genius, hero and great man.

  Of one guerrilla subordinate he tellingly wrote: “Just as Ko Po-bae followed and respected me unconditionally, so I trusted and loved him absolutely”81 He related fond memories of Jo Taek-ju, one of those ubiquitous old men who were forever saving him. Jo’s family hid Kim from the enemy in 1935 and nursed him through his fever. Kim wrote that when he finally came to, he thanked the old man for having saved his life. “Don’t mention it,” he quoted Jo as having replied. “God gave birth to you, General Kim, and you have been saved in this log cabin by God’s will.” Kim claimed he then protested that this was laying it on a bit too thick—but the old man merely chided him for being “too modest.”82

  FOUR

  Heaven and Earth the Wise Leader Tamed

  Somewhat paradoxically having made of himself in the 1930s a genuine Korean national hero under Chinese Communist command, Kim Il-sung in the 1940s added another sponsor. He survived the Japanese campaign against him by living in the Soviet Union under Soviet protection. He wore a Soviet Army uniform. After Japan’s 1945 defeat, he went on to gain political power with backing from many fellow Koreans but also—a more important factor— from the Soviet generals in charge of the occupation of northern Korea.

  It was a profitable bargain for both sides. In the process, however, Kim compromised his nationalist credentials to some extent, in his own mind and in the minds of some fellow Koreans. Rather than nationalism, Kim preferred to describe his stance as “socialist patriotism.” Regardless of the terminology, taking Moscow’s orders required him to subordinate strictly Korean interests to communist internationalism whether he liked it or not. Especially hard for him to swallow was the fact that the triumph over Japanese colonialism was not of his own doing. By no means were all of his official positions and actions his own, even after he had been installed as the most powerful Korean in the northern half of the peninsula.

  Kim saw any flaw in his Korea-first image as a threat to his power. He grew determined to redeem his damaged nationalist credentials. Thus, he reworked his life story to suppress the truth about his life in the Soviet Union during the first half of the 1940s. Then, even while carrying out the Soviet program for North Korea, he watched for opportunities to prove that no other Korean was his peer as a patriot. His determination in that regard formed a major strand in the tangled history that led him to plan the invasion of the South, an action that he hoped—based on serious misjudgments, which may have arisen partly from excessive enthusiasm and self-confidence— would reunify Korea and turn it into a powerful country able to withstand the incursions of larger neighbors.1

  Some time after they fled across the border into the Soviet Union, Kim and his men were inducted into the Soviet Army and sent to a camp at the village of Boyazk, about fifty miles north-west of Khabarovsk in the Soviet Maritime Province. There they joined a secret international reconnaissance unit of the Soviet Army. Officially named the Eighty-eighth Special Independent Sniper Brigade, its mission was reconnaissance rather than fighting. The commander of the Eighty-eighth was Zhou Baozhong, a Chinese guerrilla general from the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army who had been commissioned as a Soviet Army senior colonel. Kim Il-sung, who had worked with Zhou in Manchuria, became a Soviet Army captain commanding the Eighty-eighth’s First Battalion. The approximately two hundred soldiers in Kim’s battalion included Chinese and Koreans as well as Soviet citizens of Korean ancestry.2

  One of Kim’s first assignments after he went to the Soviet Union was to write a history of the NEAJUAs First Route Army—of-whose top command he was the only surviving member who had not been captured. His Chinese-language chronicle has survived in Beijing’s archives.3

  According to Kim, since his youth in Manchuria he had scoffed at those Koreans who believed foreign powers held the key to their country’s liberation. The young Kim’s subordination to the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party, and then to the Soviet Army, may raise doubts about the strength of any such early belief. But if the sentiment was in part an afterthought, inspired by the tactical requirements of his later struggles with political rivals in Korea, it had resonance for Kim nonetheless. He demonstrated that with his longtime refusal to level with the North Korean people about his Soviet sojourn; instead he developed, and stuck to, a claim that he had continued his struggle in Manchuria and Korea until he succeeded in liberating his homeland in 1945.4

  In fact Kim’s escape to the USSR permitted him to wait—-wisely as it turned out—-while the Allies dealt with Japan. Mean-while he could enjoy the comforts of settled life while recovering from health problems that had plagued him during his years of living on the run. Most important, he remained alive, a viable player, in position to take advantage of the Allied victory whenever it might occur.

  Focused on defending itself against Hitler, the USSR-was still more than three years away from declaring war on Japan—but it already had begun its preparations. The immediate mission of the Soviet Army’s Eighty-eighth Brigade was to infiltrate soldiers into Manchuria and Korea to spy on Japanese troops. Training emphasized marksmanship, radio communications and parachuting. A longer-term role of the men of the Eighty-eighth Brigade was to help set up communist regimes in Korea and China following the Japanese empire’s collapse. To this end, they underwent heavy communist political indoctrination.5

  Kim Il-sung quickly impressed his Soviet mentors—thanks to brains, not brawn. Some reports say he was sent on trips to Moscow in 1943 and 1944, probably in the company of his commander, Zhou6. Yu Song-chol, a third-generation Soviet citizen of Korean ancestry, was assigned as Kim’s Russian-language interpreter in September of 1943. Yu recalled that period in interviews with South Korean researcher Chay Pyung-gil nearly five decades later. Kim was “lean and weak, and h
is mouth was always open,” perhaps due to blockage in his nasal passages, said Yu. Kim led troops back across the border on only one actual reconnaissance mission that Yu knew of. Even during ski training he became so exhausted that he had to tie himself to a subordinate with ropes in order to move. Despite his physical shortcomings, Kim “was regarded as being exceptionally smart and possessive of leadership qualities,” Yu said. “I believe this is why he was liked by the Soviets.”7

  As for Kim’s subordinates in the Eighty-eighth, their relationship with their commander depended to a great extent on whether they had fought alongside him earlier. He already held considerable authority among the two dozen Korean guerrillas from Manchuria who joined him in the Eighty-eighth Brigade. The ex-partisans “were united with one another based on affection and comradeship that only they themselves shared,” according to Yu’s recollections. Unlike them, Yu and other ethnic Koreans in the Eighty-eighth who had been reared in the Soviet Union “could only face Kim Il-sung with unemotional, calm, feelings.”8 Perhaps partly for that reason, Yu did not see in Kim the unfailingly benevolent figure portrayed in the North Korean regime’s subsequent propaganda. Kim was “stern and cold” to subordinates and he expected unquestioning obedience, Yu remembered.

  On the other hand, Kim was “obedient and ardent toward Brigade Commander Zhou Baozhong and the Soviet officers,”9 said Yu. That characterization rings true. Kim’s memoirs make clear that the fatherless young revolutionary, from the beginning of his middle-school days in Huadian, appealed to the paternal instincts of elders and superiors who were eager to help him on his way up. For more than a decade after liberation, Kim was to play for his Russian mentors the role of the consummate company man, flattering them and carrying out their instructions as they re-warded him by granting him more and more power and autonomy.

  ***

  The Americans, meanwhile, were working on two plans for the final defeat of the Japanese. The atomic bomb would be the ace in the hole—if the top-secret project could reach fruition in time. Otherwise, a massive invasion of Japan’s home islands could cost as many as a million American lives. At a strategy conference at Yalta in the Russian Crimea in February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pressed Stalin to enter the war. A Soviet attack on Manchuria would keep the Japanese from shifting their troops from China and Manchuria back to the home islands to join the defense. That second front would reduce the invaders’ casualties by an estimated two hundred thousand. Moscow agreed to make such an attack, within two or three months following Germany’s surrender, in exchange for some Japanese territory— southern Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands—and a grant of post-war “preeminence” in Manchuria. The Russians were thus committed to “share the cost in blood of defeating Japan.”10

  The A-bombing of Hiroshima of August 6 showed that there would be no need to invade Japan with infantry and, thus, no military need for Soviet intervention. Nevertheless, sticking to the letter of its agreement, Moscow entered the war two days later. In the less than one week remaining before Tokyo’s surrender, Soviet troops attacked the dispirited Japanese in Manchuria and Korea and routed them, suffering fewer than five thousand casualties in the process. In Korea the only real battle may have been the struggle for the northeastern port of Chongjin, where naval units carried the major burden of attack.11

  The Soviet military occupied the portion of Korea north of the 38th parallel, under a hastily reached agreement that called for the United States to occupy the more populous southern part of the peninsula. Although both victorious allies wanted to maximize their respective spheres of influence in the post-war world, the Americans did not have troops available to go to Korea immediately. Fearing that Soviet troops would press on all the way to the southern tip of the peninsula and present a fait accompli, Washington proposed the demarcation line. Two colonels in the War Department, Dean Rusk (-who would become secretary of state during the Vietnam War period) and Charles Bonesteel, took a quick look at a map to come up with the proposed placement of the line. Dividing the country at the 38th parallel left in the southern zone the current capital, Seoul, as well as an ancient capital, Kaesong, which was still an important city. The USSR got control of the northern Korean ports of Chongjin and Wonsan. Moscow had wanted the war to last longer so it could grab more of Japan’s territory—but figured this division was the best bargain it could drive, under the circumstances of the unexpectedly quick Japanese collapse.12

  While carving up the peninsula, neither Washington nor Moscow gave thought to the fact that the line would slice though Korea’s major veins and arteries. Once the military occupations began, though, the Americans quickly realized that both halves of Korea were now crippled in terms of resources. Cutting off trade at the artificial demarcation line deprived the South of the coal and electricity that were produced in the North, even as it kept from the relatively infertile North the rice produced in abundance by the South. The realization came too late. The American occupation chief, Gen. John R. Hodge, tried fruitlessly to negotiate a system that would restore the pre-liberation economic flow across the 38th parallel. Balking at even discussing the matter for a time, the Soviet occupation authorities began enforcing North Korea’s isolation from South Korea and the capitalist world.13 The administrative line soon became a fortified barrier.

  Some Soviet officials evidently thought of Kim Il-sung as a promising candidate for an important position in a new Korean regime. They could expect to make use of the fame he had achieved among Koreans during his guerrilla-fighting days. But they gave him no chance to polish his reputation further by taking an actual military role in the final defeat of the Japanese. Although Koreans of the Eighty-eighth Brigade expected to join in the fighting to liberate their homeland, it was all over before they could see action.14 The Soviet Army disbanded the Eighty-eighth and, a month after the surrender, sent its Korean and Soviet-Korean members to North Korea under Kim’s command.15

  By the time the contingent arrived on Korean soil, more than a month had passed since the surrender. The band of returnees first tried to enter Korea via Manchuria and the border city of Sinuiju. Hearing that the Russian invaders had blown up the Yalu River bridges, they returned to Soviet territory and tried again, the second time by ship. They disembarked from the Soviet naval ship Pugachov at the Korean east-coast port of Wonsan on September 19, 1945. Reportedly, Kim when he landed still wore the uniform of a Soviet Army captain.

  Judging from Yu Song-chol’s account, even at that moment Kim was attempting to revise history. Privately, he instructed his comrades that, if anyone should ask, they must say that Kim Il-sung was not among the party that had landed at Wonsan but had traveled separately. Yu figured that Kim, thinking of his reputation as a fighter, “wanted to hide the truth of his shabby, humble return to Korea.”16

  In the division of Korea the American occupation zone got not only the capital but most of the prominent Korean politicians, as well. In the Soviet zone, the scarcity of high-visibility Korean leaders boosted Kim Il-sung’s prospects. The commander of the military government in North Korea, Gen. Ivan M. Chistiakov, showed the Soviets’ deep interest in Kim by traveling from Pyongyang to meet him after his arrival at Wonsan.

  The occupation leaders assigned members of Kim’s group to key public-security posts or, in the case of some Soviet-born ethnic Koreans, jobs as interpreters for the Soviet generals. According to Yu’s account, they gave Kim no immediate assignment; they were reserving him for something even bigger than the job of Pyongyang police chief, which they had tentatively mentioned in discussions back in the Eighty-eighth Brigade’s camp. (Yu said that job went instead to O Jin-u, who eventually became the top military man in North Korea and held that post until his death in February 1995.17 O had followed Kim around as an admiring teenager in the Manchurian guerrilla zones, toying with the Mauser pistol in the older man’s holster before being permitted to join the guerrilla unit in the mid-’30s.)18

  In his early days in Pyongyang, Kim conferred
frequently with Soviet generals as they puzzled over their choice of an indigenous leadership that would carry out occupation policies for governing the Northern zone. For the time being the Soviet authorities wanted to work through a coalition that would include Northern noncommunist nationalist elements. As their first choice for nominal leader they settled upon the widely respected nationalist Cho Man-sik.

  Before liberation Cho had been a leader of the nonviolent reformist movement, influenced by Gandhi and Tolstoy. Instead of attempting fruitlessly to overthrow the iron rule of the Japanese, those reformists had argued, Koreans should focus their energies on education and the development of a self-sufficient economy to prepare for eventual independence. For many years the Presbyterian deacon Cho had costumed himself for his role, dressing in hanbok, the traditional Korean cotton suit, and in a Korean overcoat and shoes. Even Cho’s name cards, Kim Il-sung himself noted, were printed on homemade paper as “a symbol of his patronage of Korean products.”19

  As the leader of North Korean communists who had served in the Soviet Union under Soviet military orders, the newly arrived Kim Il-sung conferred with Soviet officers over lavish dinners in kisaeng —Korean geisha— houses (with Cho M.an-sik also present on one such occasion). Soon Kim emerged as an obvious candidate for a high-profile role of his own.20 On October 14, 1945, less than a month after his arrival in North Korea, the people of Pyongyang were invited to a Soviet-organized rally billed as a “reception for the triumphant return of General Kim Il-sung.” Preceded both by his reputation and by an introductory speech that Soviet officers had persuaded a reluctant Cho to deliver, Kim took the rostrum to the crowd’s roars of “Long live General Kim Il-sung!”