Kim found in Korean history some justification for the course he took. After Japan imposed on Korea a treaty of “protection” in 1905, a militant patriotic band calling itself the Righteous Volunteer Force tried to abrogate the treaty. The Righteous Volunteers were closing in on the capital when the commander, Li Rin-yong, received word that his father had died. Li turned over command to another man and went home, as Kim related the story. Combined with other reverses, Li’s departure demoralized the men and led to the collapse of the army. Kim said that while he was studying in Jilin, some of his fellow students spoke up to defend Li. “In those days, he who was devoted only to his parents was considered a dutiful son,” Kim explained. But he said he argued that Li should have fought first, fulfilling his duty to the nation, before going to pay homage at his father’s grave.22
Kim’s family members had suffered considerably for the cause of independence, and their suffering was far from over. Kim left his younger brothers behind to be looked after by neighbors or to fend for themselves. Then he joined the other Chinese and Korean troops in a retreat from Antu, where the Japanese were stepping up their countermeasures. The sixteen-year-old middle brother, Chol-ju, wanted to join the guerrillas and fight, but Kim told him to wait a few years. It was the last time they met. Chol-ju later did take up combat, as part of another Chinese-led unit, and was killed in battle three years later, Kim said23.
After Chol-ju’s death, Kim said, his youngest brother, Kim Yong-ju, wandered from place to place, eking out a living babysitting and running errands, eventually getting a job in a brewery. On a visit to Korea, Kim Il-sung wrote, Yong-ju “turned up in Mangyongdae wearing a black suit and white shoes. His appearance was so dashing that our grandfather even wondered if his youngest grandson had got a high public post and made his fortune.”24 That, however, was to come much later, when President Kim Il-sung promoted his kid brother to top-level positions in the North Korean leadership.
Kim’s hot-tempered uncle Hyong-gwon, the same young uncle who had smashed the gruel bowl with his head, had continued as an adult to vent his spleen—but learned to channel his anger against the Japanese. Kim Hyong-gwon and three accomplices shot and killed a Japanese policeman during a 1930 foray into Korea from Manchuria. Kim Il-sung related his surprise at learning that an erstwhile family friend, after hiding the men in his yard, had betrayed their hiding place to the authorities. It turned out that the informer had been serving as a secret agent of the Japanese. This was a lesson for Kim. “Even now I say that it is good to believe in people but that it is mistaken to harbor illusions about them,” he wrote.25
Hyong-gwon, “stubborn as a mule,” died in prison in 1936 at the age of thirty-one, Kim said. The Mangyongdae house, home to two such notorious outlaws as Kim Il-sung and his uncle, attracted considerable attention from the authorities, he recalled. Police sat in the shade of some ash trees in front of his grandparents’ home, watching the house and harassing the family. To deprive them of the shade, the older of his father’s brothers “went out with an axe and cut down one of the ash trees,” Kim wrote.26 Alone among all the households in the village, he claimed, his family held out against adopting Japanese names as the colonial authorities demanded in the 1930s, although police beat his elder uncle for his refusal to do so.27
“The misfortune and distress of our family is the epitome of the misfortune and distress that befell our people after they lost their country” Kim wrote in his memoirs. “Under the inhuman rule of Japanese imperialism millions of Koreans lost their lives—dying of starvation, of the cold, from burning or from flogging.”
The 1932 retreat from Antu eventually took Kim and his anti-Japanese fighters to the Manchurian-Soviet border area. Japanese pressure intensified. Chinese and Korean nationalist elements fled across the border or switched to banditry. Kim said that left him and his seventeen teenaged Korean communists isolated in a bleak, wild territory called Luozigou. All their provisions were exhausted, their clothes in tatters, he said. “In the sky airplanes were flying around, dropping leaflets urging us to surrender, and on the ground hordes of Japanese soldiers mobilized for a ‘punitive expedition’ were closing in on us from all directions.”
Choi Jin-sok, who joined the unit about that time, said he enlisted after the Japanese punitive forces had killed his two brothers. Choi’s formal induction occurred on a snow-covered ginseng field, where the hungry guerrillas were digging up ginseng roots to eat. “I asked Kim Il-sung to accept me in his unit, and he embraced me, holding my shoulders, and told me to do a good job,” Choi told a South Korean reporter more than six decades later.28
The Koreans considered abandoning their weapons and giving up guerrilla warfare. “Not only I but our whole group wavered,” Kim admitted. In a rare instance of public self-mockery he recalled that “when we were moving about in Jilin, writing leaflets and making speeches, we had all been heroes and great men. But here in this place we were all beginners.” Fortunately, an old man named Ma appeared and helped save the day. Ma hid the guerrillas in a mountain hut and fed them while they regained their strength and their will, according to Kim’s account. He added, though, that what really pulled them through this crisis was his sense of destiny. “If I had thought there would be people to save Korea after we had died, we would have been buried under the snow.29
Rested, the young warriors marched off in the spring of 1933 to mountainous Wangqing County in Manchuria’s Jiandao Province. Communism had been displacing nationalist ideology among local Koreans who worked as slash-and-burn farmers, lumberjacks and raftsmen. Moscow’s line, as transmitted through the Chinese Communist Party, was to establish guerrilla zones in Manchuria. Communists had killed or otherwise removed the local representatives of the ruling class and redistributed their land to the peasants.30 The revolutionary governments, Kim wrote later, were establishing ideal societies. Education and medical care were free. “For the first time in history, everyone enjoyed equality.” He waxed rhapsodic when recalling happy peasants who “danced to the beat of the gongs as they drove in the stakes to mark off their plots of the land distributed by the people’s revolutionary government.”31
Kim’s memories became less rosy as he described Japanese encirclement of the communist enclaves. While communist guerrilla warfare in Manchuria was but a sideshow compared with the struggle of the main Chinese communist forces to the south, led by Mao Zedong, Tokyo nevertheless sensed a significant threat to its plans and sent troops on “punitive operations” against the Manchuria guerrillas. The year before Kim’s arrival in the district, such a Japanese operation had “drowned the fields and mountains of Wangqing in a bloodbath,” Kim wrote. “The guts of dead people drifted down the rivers.” The Japanese “did not hesitate to destroy a whole village in order to kill one communist.” Their policy was “killing everyone, burning everything and plundering everything.” Survivors of those scorched-earth tactics had to move from their isolated villages to towns where the authorities could control them. (As Kim noted, the Americans later borrowed and refined this approach in Vietnam, where they took village people from Viet Cong areas and concentrated them in “strategic hamlets.”32)
Kim’s band joined communist guerrillas whose mission was to defend some one thousand of the Wangqing people, who had evaded the 1932 punitive campaign. They fled deeper into the mountains, to heavily forested Xiaowangqing. Feeding the refugees was the immediate problem. The small patches of arable land in the area could not grow enough for them. Guerrilla attacks on the enemy yielded only small amounts of supplies. The inhabitants ate gruel made of beans ground with a millstone. When even that was unavailable the revolutionaries had to forage for roots and herbs. In their desperation they made cakes of pine bark that had been boiled in caustic soda water and pounded.33
His time in the guerrilla zones was a major formative influence on Kim. In later life he was to recall incessantly those days and the lessons he had learned then. Several lessons arose from his dissatisfaction with the leaders of t
he guerrilla bases. Like the nationalist buffoons he had so despised in his student days, those communists postured instead of confronting problems directly. “The cadres busied themselves with nothing in particular, simply creating a lot of fuss and shouting ‘Revolution! Revolution!’ They seldom fought outside the guerrilla zone, but spent day after day mouthing empty slogans about establishing a proletarian dictatorship.”
When the guerrillas returned from victorious battles, “the people shouted hurrah, and-waved flags.” However, there were few major battles. Kim recalled arguing that too few soldiers and arms were available to defend such a large area and to undertake, at the same time, offensive operations. But “weak-kneed officials” rejected his argument. Those officials designated all the people living outside the area as reactionaries, needlessly minimizing the pool of people from whom converts and recruits could be drawn. For any would-be soldiers who met the residential requirements, they set unrealistic standards of class background and ideological development.34
Kim told of one young man whose father owned a little over three hectares (7.4 acres) of poor land on a hillside. Three hectares was the cutoff point. No member of a farming household owning more land could qualify as a “poor peasant.” Thus the young man flunked the guerrilla district’s strict class-background test for military recruits. Turned down several times, the young man finally arranged to sell the land—without his parents’ knowledge. He used the proceeds to buy a box of Browning pistols and presented the weapons to the district’s defense force. Now that he qualified as a poor peasant, he was accepted. “He was glad that he had become a guerrilla, but his family was at a loss, left without any means of livelihood,” Kim wrote.35
Kim and others of like mind moved to establish a buffer area surrounding the guerrilla zone. The communists would not fully control the buffer area as they did the heavily protected guerrilla zone. But they could draw from it material support and reserve forces. The buffer area “would be governed by the enemy during daylight, but would come under our control at night.” Although opponents attacked his group as “rightist deviationists,” Kim’s side turned out to be correct, as he recounted the story. By the mid-1930s the guerrilla zone itself proved too big a target. The communists had to disband it. However, the underground revolutionary organizations they had established in enemy-ruled buffer areas continued to function.36
Military weakness was not the worst of the problems afflicting the guerrilla districts when Kim arrived at Wangqing in 1933. Radical social changes, dictated from Moscow via the Chinese Communist Party, had disillusioned the people. Many had left in disgust.37 “Everything was communalized, from land and provisions to the farming tools and implements such as sickles, hoes and pitchforks that had belonged to individual peasants.” Life, labor and distribution were all communal. Kim had little problem with the measures themselves; more than a decade later, as leader of North Korea, he adopted many of them himself. Rather, he disagreed-with the timing: “This policy amounted to sending kindergarten children to university without giving them primary and secondary education.”
The revolutionaries’ term for the governing body of a Manchurian guerrilla zone was “soviet,” meaning an elected communist government. Local people, however, had no idea what the foreign term meant, as applied to their districts, and the communists had not taken the trouble to educate them. In various districts, as Kim eventually learned, the people had mistaken the term for soksaepo, the Korean word for an automatic gun, or soebochi, a tin pail. One villager advised people to look closely at the soviet and see whether it was large or small. “Some other villagers were said to have gone out with baskets to gather wild vegetables, because they had nothing special to offer the soviet, an important guest.” Even propagandists for the soviet had no clear idea of what it was. To cover their confusion they tossed around additional loan-words such as kommuna.
One old man, the father of a guerrilla commander, told Kim that the last straw for him had come when officials collected the people’s spoons and chopsticks for use in a new, communal dining hall. The old man spat at them. “If you are going to create a hell and call it a kommuna,” he told them, “do it yourselves, young men. We are already out of breath and can’t keep up with you any longer.” The old man like-wise was disgusted by mass meetings at which daughters-in-law criticized their husbands’ overbearing parents, who in traditional fashion ruled the extended-family households.
The authorities expropriated large and small landholdings alike, taking the owners’ cattle, horses and provisions. When a female baby was born in a Chinese household, it had been the custom for her family to prepare flower-patterned shoes for her future children and put them away in a chest. In purges of Chinese landowners the revolutionaries took even those shoes.
Although Kim in his memoirs related such affecting anecdotes, it was not sentiment that made him disapprove of the communalization campaign in the guerrilla zones. Rather, the campaign cut off valuable support the guerrilla armies had been receiving from landowners. The landowners were predominantly patriotic Chinese, opposed to the Japanese colonialists. Alienating them revived old antagonisms on the part of Manchuria’s Chinese inhabitants toward Koreans, who made up the vast majority of both Jiandao’s population as a whole and the province’s communists. The result was a split in the anti-Japanese movement.
Kim blamed the problems on higher-ups who, “in ignorance of specific circumstances, aped the ill-digested principles of the classics”—the Marxist-Leninist classics, that is. The people in charge locally had their orders, handed down from Moscow’s Comintern, and they refused to change the policy. Some revolutionaries could see that the directives had failed in practice—but they imagined that the way to correct the situation would be to go to the Soviet Union and study the way the revolution’s mother country carried them out.
The North Korean system that Kim constructed in his later life appears so extreme that it may be difficult to picture him as the scourge of overzealous communist radicals. Nevertheless he asserted that for six decades following those days in the guerrilla zones of the 1930s he tirelessly combated “leftist” evils and bureaucratic tendencies.
Some of his 1930s experiences seem to have reinforced a personal bent to authoritarianism. Kim devoted a lengthy section of his memoirs to decrying “ultra-democracy”—another “leftist” tendency—in the commands of some anti-Japanese guerrilla forces in Manchuria.38 The leftists “advocated absolute equality for every soldier, irrespective of his rank.” Officers had to do menial work just like the men. Still more damaging was a rule that, even in the heat of combat, everything had to be decided collectively through majority rule. In practice that meant endless series of meetings.
Kim told of one case in which Japanese surrounded thirteen guerrillas in a house at night. Experienced military men in the house could see that the best hope for escaping was to judge the enemy’s weak point, strike quickly and fight their way through the encircling force. However, the company commander had no right to make a decision, and a veteran guerrilla who knew what should be done was not entitled to any special respect merely on account of his seniority. The soldiers argued on and on about whether to try for a breakthrough or simply to stand and fight. They did not stop arguing and start fighting until the enemy commenced firing. All thirteen guerrillas were shot, most fatally. One wounded guerrilla managed to escape to tell the tale. “Ever since then I have shuddered at the mention of ultra-democracy in military affairs, and never tolerated the slightest tendency towards it in our ranks,” Kim said. An army in which subordinates speak impolitely to their superiors, dispute their orders and instructions or fail to salute them “is no longer an army. It is a rabble.”39
During his time in Manchuria’s Wangqing guerrilla zone, Kim claimed, people started to see him as a potential Korean version of Vietnam’s famed revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. A representative of the Comintern known as Inspector Pan came calling in April of 1933, the month Kim turned twenty-one. Kim
asked the visitor why Moscow did not permit Koreans to have their own communist party. The Indochinese, after all, had a party of their own despite their own history of factional abuses. Inspector Pan explained the real reason for the distinction: None other than Ho Chi Minh had been representing the Indochinese communists in the Comintern. The Korean communists, on the other hand, had no such outstanding leader who could compel respect from Moscow. Inspector Pan stayed and talked for some days, according to Kim’s account, and when he finally left, his parting words to his host were: “Please be Korea’s Ho Chi Minh.40
***
Whatever his disagreements with party policy, it was Kim’s job as a soldier to help defend the Xaiowangqing guerrilla district. He and his fellow communist insurgents in East Manchuria were more than an irritant to Tokyo. They limited Japanese control of that territory and may have impeded further imperial expansion into China proper. Japan assigned a division of its crack Kwantung Army and beefed up the police to rein in the guerrillas. The authorities sent armed Japanese reserve soldiers to establish themselves as colonists. They set up associations “for the maintenance of public peace” all over Manchuria. The associations had instructions to root out insurgents and pacify the populace. Spies for the Japanese infiltrated the commumist-held areas. Undercover agents had authority to execute rebels on the spot.41
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader Page 6