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

by Bradley K. Martin

  47. I am grateful to Prof. Youngok Seo-Kim for pointing out this information.

  48. Grain dealers had been eliminated in 1954. See Lee, “Land Reform,” p. 78.

  49. Baik II, pp. 555–556. Baik adds (p. 556), “On the contrary, the workers and peasants who could not live well are now satisfied and never complain, because their livelihood has been improved.”

  50. Byoung-Lo Philo Kim, Two Koreas (see chap. 1, n. 2), p. 66.

  51. Ambassador Walter P. McConaughy “Telegram from the Embassy in Korea to the Department of State,” April 11, 1961, Document No. 210 in Foreign Relations of the United States 1961–1963, vol. XXII (Washington, D.C: Department of State, 1996), http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/frusXXII/201to240.html.

  52. Karl Mener, “Seeing Is Believing,” in Impressions of Korea (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 23.

  53. Joan Robinson, “Korean Miracle,” Monthly Review (January 1965): pp. 545–548, quoted in Chung, North Korean Economy, p. 151. Chung comments, “Calling the North Korean feat a miracle perhaps overstates the case but nevertheless dramatizes her achievements as evidenced by various indicators: rapid growth and the absolute level (total and per capita) of national income and of strategic industrial products (per capita output of 1,184 kilowatt hours of electricity 1,975 kilograms of coal, and 158 kilograms of steel in 1970); a long-term change in the composition of national income in favor of industry; change in the structure within the industrial sector in favor of heavy industry, especially the machinery sector; change in the commodity composition of foreign trade and evidence of significant import substitution as well as impressive growth in exports; shifts in the occupational distribution of population in favor of secondary industry at the expense of the primary; increasing urbanization of population; and so on.”

  Another scholar’s summary: “[E]ven if one makes allowances for Communist propaganda and window-dressing … it appears indisputable to this author that North Korea has made greater economic strides during the post-war period as a whole than has South Korea. In the industrial sector there is good reason to take at face value the Communist claim that ‘in 1959 the North produced ten times as much steel as South Korea and five times more cement.’ … It remains to be seen, however, whether the Communists can surpass Japan’s per capita industrial production in ten years as the ambitious premier, Kim Il-song, prophesied in 1959. … In a nutshell, the recent economic offensive of the Communist North, with the usual dazzle of unconfirmable statistics, may have a grave impact upon the people of South Korea in their current plight. For there is no better bait to poverty-stricken people than economic advance” (Kuark, “Industrial Development,” pp. 63, 64).

  54. Baik II, pp. 28, 29. This book was published in the 1960s but the characterization of Kim and his destiny is not unlike what could be heard in the ’50s.

  55. Ibid., p. 138.

  Dae-Sook Suh observes, “The fundamental reason for the North Korean endeavor to build up the image of Kim Il-song as the father of the Korean revolution is, primarily, his non-Korean revolutionary past. He fought under a Communist army and became a Communist, but it was with the Chinese, and possibly the Russians, not with the Korean Communists. In the Korean Communist movement and among Korean Communist leaders, Kim Il-song is an alien who advanced through the ranks of the Chinese Communist revolutionaries in .Manchuria and was educated and trained by the Chinese Communists as one of their own, not as a delegate or a representative of Korean Communists among the Chinese. Kim’s revolutionary past is a remarkable one, considering that he was only thirty-three in 1945—even if it was in the Chinese army. He was a Korean, a Communist, and he fought against the Japanese, scoring some important victories in .Manchuria against them. It is his effort to build the image of a towering mountain from a molehill past that brings the perplexities, denunciations and doubts of his Communist revolutionary past” (Suh, Korean Communist Movement [see chap. 2, n. 56], p. 293).

  56. Kim Il-sung Square opened in 1954 (Baik II, p. 457). Kim Chaek, who had died during the Korean War, was one of the few leaders besides Kim Il-sung whose names were carried on institutionally. Kim Chaek had a steel works and the city in which it was situated named after him, as well as the leading technical college, in Pyongyang.

  57. Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Sung (see chap. 4, note 45), pp. 154–193. (Some extended quotations are from an earlier, manuscript version of that chapter.) Evaluating the outcome of this open challenge to Kim Il-sung s power, Lankov says (p. 193) that it “determined the direction of North Korean development over the following decades. Before 1956 the country had been a typical ‘people’s democracy’ in many respects not unlike the regimes of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, but after 1956 it began to transform itself into a much more idiosyncratic Communist state: thoroughly controlled, extremely militarized, devoted to a fanatical personality cult and a particular type of ideology, and far removed from ‘orthodox’ Marxism-Leninism. The very term for this ideology, ‘chuch’e [juche], was coined on the eve of the 1956 crisis, in December 1955.”

  58. Hankuk Ilbo, November 18 and November 20, 1990.

  59. Kim, With the Century, vol. 1, preface.

  Bruce Cumings (Origins II [see chap. 3, n. 43], p. 292) criticizes use of the terms “Stalinist” and “oriental despot” to describe Kim Il-sung when “there is no evidence in the North Korean experience of the mass violence against whole classes of people or the classic, wholesale purge’ that characterized Stalinism, and that has been particularly noteworthy in the land reform campaigns in China and North Vietnam and the purges of the Cultural Revolution.”

  Hungarian scholar Balazs Szalontai (“The Dynamic of Repression: The Global Impact of the Stalinist .Model, 1944–1953” [see chap. 4, n. 45]) says that Kim’s purges during this period ’were “comparable to the attack Stalin had launched on the intra-party opposition in 1926–1928, and even to the Great Terror of 1937, 1938, but its methods proved rather different. First of all, the number of party members expelled between July 1957 and July 1958 did not exceed 4,000, i.e., less than one per cent of the total membership. By contrast, the Soviet proverka of 1935 had resulted in the expulsion of 9.1 per cent of party members. On the other hand, the enforced participation of the whole membership in the screening process certainly filled each KWP member with fear and a sense of insecurity. … [P]arty members, assembled in groups, had to practise criticism and self-criticism. If a person proved unable to name two witnesses testifying that he had not been involved in any anti-regime activity since the outbreak of the Korean War, his self-criticism would not be accepted. Since one was prohibited from naming relatives, friends, or acquaintances as his witnesses, the psychological pressure thus created became extremely intense. In the second half of 1958 the regime purged the provincial party committees and People’s Committees, replacing most of their chairmen, and at the end of the year it organized a public trial in each province. The courts usually meted out death sentences (executions ’were also public), and in some cases the incited audience beat the accused unconscious. The methods … had more in common with .Maoist practices than with Soviet Stalinism. Nevertheless, the events that happened in North Korea between 1957 and 1969 had a logic somewhat similar to that of the Soviet purges of 1926–1938.”

  60. Kim’s official biographer obviously had Khrushchev and company in mind when he wrote scathingly of those communists who “baulked at the struggle against imperialism, and putting principles aside, entered into compromises with it. Spreading illusions about the nature of imperialism, in particular U.S. imperialism, they did everything within their power to dampen the revolution ary struggles of the peoples seeking social and national liberation” (Baik II, p. 485).

  61. See van Ree, Socialism in One Zone, pp. 121–122. This sort of attitude can be seen throughout Lim Un’s book, The Founding of a Dynasty in North Korea—An Authen tic Biography of Kim Il-song, which is one of the reasons for doubting Bruce Cumings’s suggestion that it is act
ually a South Korean–produced work.

  Suh observes (Kim Il Sung, p. 108) that “Soviet-Koreans lost much when the Soviet Union withdrew and did not return to fight for [North] Korea during the Korean War.”

  62. Cumings (Origins I [see chap. 2, n. 25], p. xxv) says that Soviet policy in North Korea “failed to create a docile satellite state . . . because the Soviets sponsored a group of radical nationalists who had cut their teeth in anti-Japanese conflict and who chafed under Soviet controls.”

  63. Kim complained in his memoirs that misguided North Koreans even referred to Ri Su-bok, a communist hero of the Korean War battle to retake Heartbreak Ridge, as “the Korean Matrosov,” a reference to a Soviet war hero (Kim, With the Century, vol. 3, p. 333).

  In China, Mao Zedong had reached a similar stage of dissatisfaction with the tendency of many of his colleagues to imitate Soviet practice. As his personal physician writes, “[institutional and organizational arrangements were being copied without regard to the special circumstances of China. … It was this disaffection with his own party that would fester for years and grow, leading finally to the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution” (Dr. Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician [New York: Random House, 1994], pp. 118–119).

  64. October 13, 1945, speech to Five Province Conference, cited by Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 330. Judging from pp. 253–254, there may be some question whether the “Comrade Kim” who was speaking was Kim Il-sung, but on p. 330 Scalapino and Lee say this speech is found in a different version in Kim’s selected works, published in 1963. In any case, this was not an isolated example. Scalapino and Lee refer on p. 347 to Kim’s “lengthy and obsequious eulogies of the Russians.”

  65. Van Ree, Socialism in One Zone, p. 159.

  66. Nodong Shinmun, July 2, 1950, as cited by Cumings, Origins II, p. 633.

  67. Kim, With the Century, vol. 3, p. 333.

  68. Van Ree, Socialism in One Zone, p. 165. The author adds, “In the 1945–50 period Soviet radio broadcasts ’were relayed at least three times a day to North Korea. Soviet news was distributed through the North Korean news agency. In 1947 English was discontinued in all senior middle schools; Russian became a compulsory subject. There was a large influx of Soviet literature and films. From 1946–8 a total of ten million books ’were published in North Korea. In one of his 1948 speeches Kim Il Sung revealed that after the merger of the parties the Central Committee of the North Korean Workers’ Party published nearly three million books of propaganda and on .Marxism-Leninism, including the translation of Stalin’s notorious history of the Soviet communist party. We can safely assume that of these three million political books a substantial portion ’were translations from Russian.” Besides, “Moscow had a strong—an unfriendly observer would say strangling—economic leverage in the form of its quasi-monopoly on Pyongyang’s foreign trade.”

  69. Van Ree, Socialism in One Zone, p. 168.

  70. A typical account in a 1976 Nodong Shinmun (Workers’ Daily) article by Yi Chan-gol says, “The great leader Comrade Kim Il-sung issued orders to all commanders and soldiers of the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army to defeat the Japanese imperialists.” This force then “delivered the decisive blow to the Japanese Kwantung Army” in Manchuria before moving to Korea, where it “finally defeated the Japanese completely and liberated the whole country” (quoted in Lim Un, Founding of a Dynasty, p. 109).

  An official biography is slightly more generous to the Russians: “On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union finally declared war on Japan. General Kim Il-sung, who had already completed his operational plan for the final decisive offensives against Japan, immediately ordered the mobilization of all units under the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army. … In the face of the strong attack by the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army and the Soviet Army Japan’s ‘impregnable defense line’ guarding the border collapsed like a wall of clay and the main forces of the Kwantung Army so proud of its might, ’were completely crushed” (Baik I [see chap. 4, n. 25], pp. 529–530).

  71. Seiler (p. 46) cites an August 26, 1991, interview article in JoongAng Ilbo, a leading Seoul daily, in which the Soviet occupation chief, Maj. Gen. Nikolai Lebe-dev, recalled that Kim had asked him directly, “Commander, sir, please make it so that it appears as though the anti-Japanese partisans participated in the war of liberation.” Lebedev declined.

  72. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (1) (see chap. 2, n. 1).

  73. Suh, Kim Il Sung, p. 104. He adds, “They claim that it was Kim who returned triumphantly and founded the Communist republic of the North. These assertions deserve no refutation.”

  74. “If, in North Korea, one ’were to say that ‘Korea was liberated from the yoke of Japanese imperialism by the Soviet Russian army’ the reaction would be most curious to observe,” Lim Un ’wrote in his 1982 book. “Those between their teens and 30s in age will give a confident answer that it is propaganda of imperialists and the domineering class. It is a malicious lie … . Korea was liberated by the People’s Revolutionary Army led by comrade Kim Il-song. Those Koreans in their 40’s and 50s will say that from the memory of our childhood, we think the Soviet army liberated Korea. But in looking back upon those days, they will say meekly that they thought the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army liberated the fatherland. Those above the age of 50 would not give any answer. For them silence is the only answer, as if to agree with the statement that Korea was liberated by the Soviet army” (Lim Un, Founding of a Dynasty, p. 265).

  75. Suh reports that Pyongyang museum curators literally cropped the likeness of Kim’s Chinese superior from a photograph showing Kim with guerrillas (Kim Il Sung, pp. 8–10).

  76. Hankuk Ilbo, November 4, 1990.

  77. Hankuk Ilbo, November 20 and 26, 1990.

  78. Hankuk Ilbo, November 29, 1990.

  79. Kim Il-sung, “On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work,” December 28, 1955, quoted in Baik II, p. 479. According to the scholar who served as Kim’s ideology secretary from 1958 to 1965, before the Korean War the ’word juche “did not even exist. The North Korean leaders started using that word during the purging of pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese people from the party, and ‘Juche ideology’ became an established phrase only in the 1960s” (Hwang Jang-yop, The Problems of Human Rights [1]).

  80. Kim Il Sung. Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 36, quoted in Bruce G. Cumings, “Kim’s Korean Communism,” Problems of Communism (March-April 1974), p. 36, cited in Foster-Carter, “Development and Self Reliance,” p. 75.

  81. “In postwar economic construction we must follow the line of giving priority to the rehabilitation and development of heavy industry, while simultaneously developing light industry and agriculture,” as Kim put it (Baik II, p. 431). Baik says (pp. 432–433) that it was possible to carry out this “bold and original basic line” because of “the revolutionary ideas and seasoned guidance of Comrade Kim Il Sung, the great Leader of the 40 million Korean people, peerless patriot, national hero, ever-victorious, iron-willed brilliant commander.”

  82. Quoted in Baik II, p. 558.

  83. Ibid., pp. 554–555.

  84. I interviewed Shin and Ahn, separately, in Seoul in August 1996.

  85. Baik II, p. 560.

  86. Ibid., pp. 477–481, 517–523.

  87. Some foreign analysts believed for a time that Kim had made the right choice. For example, Aidan Foster-Carter (“Development and Self Reliance,” pp. 77–78) praised Kim for “a difficult decision to chart a course not previously mapped out by any other country. In that sense his far-sightedness can be said to be a major cause of the DPRK’s subsequent remarkable development.” As evidence piled up that Pyongyang’s economic policies had become counterproductive, Foster-Carter revised his opinion drastically to become a leading critic of those policies. He acknowledged the error of his former ways far more forth-rightly than was the case with some other analysts who had started out in the same
camp. A blurb introducing his contributions to the Web site Asia Times Online (www.atimes.com/atimes/about.html) noted with a touch of self-deprecating humor that Foster-Carter had “followed Korean affairs for over 30 years, starting (embarrassingly) as a young fan of Kim Il-sung.”

  (Full disclosure: Although I would not by any means have described myself as a fan of Kim’s, I acknowledge having been pretty impressed [see chap. 9] by what the Great Leader, to a 1979 first-time North Korea visitor, appeared to have wrought with the economy.)

  88. Kim Jong-min, a former high-ranking official of North Korea’s .Ministry of Public Security, said when interviewed by a South Korean magazine in 1991 that he still considered it “quite an impressive accomplishment that Kim Il-sung has been able to silence the mouths of the North Korean people, people who ordinarily would have much to say.” Emphasizing juche was the key to this, since “even among Orientals the pride of the Korean people is extraordinary ” he said. “Kim used this psychology in his politics in creating juche. Kim Il-sung skillfully uses the nationalistic self-reliant consciousness of the Korean people” (Cho Gap-jae, “Interview of Former High-level Official of DPRK Ministry of Public Security Who Defected to South Korea,” Wolgan Choson [July 1991]: pp. 290–303; translation courtesy of Sydney A. Seiler). The article referred to the former official using a pseudonym, Choe Sang-kyu. In a later interview with me, Kim Jong-min confirmed that he was “Choe” and said that he had been quoted correctly in the Wolgan Choson interview. He gave me permission to attribute that material to him using his real name. I also have permission from Wolgan Choson interviewer Cho to identify his interview subject as Kim Jong-min.

  89. “The defeated U.S. imperialists continue to squat in South Korea, sharpening their tusks. But the heroic Korean people under the leadership of Comrade Kim Il Sung, the ever-victorious iron-willed brilliant commander, will not let them live on. It is complete defeat that is waiting for U.S. imperialism in Korea” (Baik II, p. 417).