That night, Young-min and I shared our deepest secrets with each other like lovers. Our first crushes, recollections from childhood, the family we had left behind; as if painting the sky above with the colours of our memories, even the smallest recollection held significance. As the conversation turned to our loved ones, Young-min and I could do nothing but be there in silent solidarity, each for the other. Even after swallowing a fistful of snow, my throat burned with raw emotion.
The conversation turned to the North Korean regime. Ours was a system that would rather have us convicted as murderers and killed than permit us to abandon it, let alone stand in its way. The taste of bile from the pit of my stomach that made me realise, until now, I had not merely spent my life living within the borders of North Korea, but been imprisoned behind them.
ANNALS OF THE
KIM DYNASTY
3
IN THE AUTUMN of 1999, I was appointed to work on the compilation of the Annals of the Kim Dynasty as a state historian. Following my composition of the epic poem to Kim Jong-il that had so pleased him in May, and my subsequent elevation as one of his Admitted, I had become a rising star in the UFD and received an urgent summons to the office of First Deputy Director Im Tong-ok. There I found myself in the company of seven colleagues I knew from various sections within the UFD.
I’d barely taken a seat when Director Im said, ‘Please stand up.’ He looked down at the sheets of paper in front of him on his desk. ‘I am instructed to deliver the General’s orders, as follows: “Even the ruinous five hundred years of the Lee dynasty during the Chosun period was recorded in the form of the Annals of the Lee Dynasty. It is a grave failing that we have no Annals of the Kim Dynasty to record the great rule of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. The UFD must therefore bring together the best minds in the country and urgently accomplish the completion of this work.”’
The Annals of the Lee Dynasty is a history of the Chosun era, spanning the half millennium between ad 1392 and 1893 on the Korean peninsula. However, it seemed paradoxical to emulate those ancient volumes when we lived in a Socialist system that was strongly critical of that feudal dynasty. And although my appointment to such a team was a great honour, I was even more surprised that the carefully selected members of the group were writers, not historians, a signal that history came second to the cultification of the Supreme Leader.
The eight of us lived and worked in the Munsu Guesthouse, inaccessible to any outsider. Such guesthouses were independently operated by Central Party departments to provide exclusive facilities where vetted cadres could work in strict secrecy. The premises were extremely well furnished and were smaller versions of the sort of guesthouses used as accommodation for state-level visitors to North Korea.
The UFD operates several guesthouses, such as Ui-Am and Soonan. Among these, the Munsu Guesthouse had previously been used for those defecting to the North. Situated as it was in the residential area of No. 3 Chungryu-dong in the wealthy Daedong River District of East Pyongyang, not even the local residents knew that this L-shaped building was used for classified UFD operations. The interior of the high-walled compound was extravagantly appointed and, in order to ease recent defectors into collaboration, it had been decorated with luxurious foreign furnishings and materials, including expensive pieces made by South Korea’s leading furniture companies. Until then, I had engaged in ‘Localisation’ only through reading materials and consumer goods, but when I entered an entire building that that had been Localised, it blew me away. In recent years, defections to North Korea had ceased, and the villa was now designated for internal UFD use. We were the first North Korean guests to live in the premises.
The task that had been entrusted to us was the brainchild of Kim Jong-il. The first step had been taken on the third anniversary of Kim Il-sung’s death, in July 1997, when Kim Jong-il used the date of his father’s birth (15 April 1912) to mark the beginning of a new Juche calendar. With the birth of Kim Il-sung at year zero, the history of Korea had begun anew. Kim Jong-il had defined the ethnic identity of North Koreans as ‘Kim Il-sung’s People’ and he now needed to legitimise this. His plan was to establish a history of Kim Il-sung that would consolidate and underpin the basis of Korean identity as an identification with the legacy of Kim Il-sung, rather than with a shared race, language or culture. In order to emphasise that North Korea was the legitimate Korea, he wanted to create a history that would include Koreans not only in the North, but also in the South and overseas. None of the relevant archival records could be released to anyone without a UFD clearance. But above all, Kim Jong-il could trust no one outside a handpicked circle with the Supreme Leader’s unvarnished secret history. We would need to master that secret history before we could reshape – or distort – it to achieve Kim Jong-il’s purpose.
North Korea asserts that Japan’s defeat in 1945 was the direct result of Kim Il-sung’s achievement as a guerrilla leader in the anti-Japanese resistance. The Korean War, which was actually suspended by an armistice, is declared to have been Kim Il-sung’s outright victory over US imperialism. Even the history of the Cold War is taught in North Korea as a Communist history that revolved around the efforts of Kim Il-sung. The international section of the Central Party became active in setting up Juche Research Institutes overseas, in an attempt to encourage foreigners to sympathise with North Korea’s worldview and version of history.
One reason why North Korea is unable to pursue reform and open itself more to the world is that this would risk exposing core dogmas of the state as mere fabrications. Kim Jong-il decided that under no circumstances should any potentially harmful source material relating to Kim Il-sung’s past be made available to the public. He had therefore assigned the task of creating the history to UFD cadres, who already held the highest security clearances in the nation owing to the sensitive nature of their policy and intelligence work.
Even so, there was a further level of atomisation built in, with each of us in the group responsible for a specific theme or decade in the history of North Korea. Before our work began, we signed a contract confirming that we would pay a severe penalty if we overstepped the limits of our remit in conducting our research. We carried out our work in separate studies. I was put in charge of the history of Kim Jong-il’s activities relating to and stemming from his role in the Propaganda and Agitation Department, including his artistic achievements, from the mid 1960s up to the present day.
We were not allowed to enter anyone else’s study. But since the eight of us – segregated in turn from the rest of North Korean society – lived communally at the Munsu Guesthouse for the period of our task, the boundaries of secrecy gradually eroded and we formed deep bonds with each other.
Of the eight of us, I thought that the writer in charge of Kim Il-sung’s early years had the most challenging task. He often chain-smoked after dinner.
‘How are things going?’ I asked cautiously, not long after we had begun our stay. Instead of responding, he lit another cigarette. But he eventually turned to ask me a question.
‘You’re the youngest here. Let me ask you something. Our Supreme Leader was born on 15 April 1912. It’s such a significant day that there’s plenty to say about it. But what did he do the next day? I could refer to his mother’s milk as a revolutionary nutrient. But what did the Supreme Leader himself do? In all honesty, what else could a baby at that age do but piss and shit? And how am I going to describe the two years after that? If you were in my position, how would you approach the problem?’
Another writer, who was working on the history of North Korea in the 1980s, shared his dilemma with me. He said he had found in one of our Supreme Leader’s personal memos a mention of his attending a performance in North Pyongan Province in 1972. He asked me to help with finding source materials on similar events, with which he was going to fill three days’ worth of history in the decade that he was supposed to be writing about. In this way, our contract of secrecy became nothing more than a piece of paper as the continuation of our
mutual safety came to depend on mutual trust. We spent increasing periods of time in conversation with one another rather than in our segregated studies. And as I encountered more and more historical records, I grew ever more disturbed at the picture that began to emerge from the source materials.
Our group had been entrusted with the originals of documents relating to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il from the archives. Compartmentalisation prevented any one person from seeing a comprehensive overview of the nation’s history, but when the pieces came together, the shape of the overall picture was clear and definite: Kim Jong-il’s authority had not, as the official narrative of hereditary succession stated, been passed on to him by Kim Il-sung, even though this was what he claimed as the basis of his legitimacy. Rather, the son had usurped the father.
The old saying that power cannot be shared between fathers and sons suggests some kind of universal and inevitable fate. The seeds of Kim Jong-il’s vicious struggle for power against his father Kim Il-sung were unintentionally sown when the boy was abandoned by his father at the age of eight, after the death of his natural mother, Kim Jong-suk. One year after her death, on 25 June 1950, Kim Il-sung invaded the South. Kim Jong-il spent three years separated from his father, as he was sent away from the fighting. After the armistice, he returned to Pyongyang, but father and son grew no closer. By 1954, he had gained a half-brother in Kim Pyong-il, whose mother was Kim Sung-ae, a secretary who had become inseparable from Kim Il-sung.
Kim Jong-il entered Kim Il-sung University for his studies, and graduated in 1964. As the eldest son of Kim Il-sung and the bearer of his father’s line, if there were to be a hereditary transfer of power at all, Kim Jong-il would have been expected to be awarded some responsibility or title, in line with Korean custom. But one year before Kim Jong-il’s graduation, in 1963, Kim Il-sung married Kim Sung-ae, and this served to cement the exclusion of Kim Jong-il from the prospect of leadership.
As the Cultural Revolution got under way in China, during which time Mao’s wife and first lady, Jiang Qing, held great sway, there was a parallel development in North Korea. Kim Sung-ae, as first lady, gained considerable authority at this time, with North Korea’s political elite lining up behind her as if she were a North Korean mirror of Jiang Qing. Because Kim Sung-ae’s son Kim Pyong-il – and not her stepson Kim Jong-il – was being prepared for succession by Kim Il-sung’s associates, Kim Jong-il now found himself in a situation where his father’s supporters had turned into his political enemies. To this day, the mere mention of Kim Pyong-il’s role in events leading to Kim Jong-il’s succession remains a blasphemously taboo subject in North Korea.
Although North Korea states officially that Kim Jong-il began his career in the Party’s Organisation and Guidance Department, this is not the case. It’s a deliberate distortion to provide a fitting start to the career of the future Dear Leader. At this stage, with North Korea’s power elite firmly behind Kim Sung-ae, and with even Kim Il-sung’s younger brother Kim Yong-ju pitted against him, Kim Jong-il had been placed well away from the centres of power, relegated to a post in the Propaganda and Agitation Department.
Kim Jong-il did not show signs of turning against his father at that time. In fact, in his work in the PAD, he contributed to the cultification of Kim Il-sung and the glorification of the anti-Japanese activities of his father’s guerrilla comrades. His activities were so expansive that a monthly magazine called Recollections of the Anti-Japanese Fighters, established under his direction, came to be considered as compulsory reading nationwide. Many statues of Kim Il-sung and anti-Japanese fighters appeared during this time too. Ultimately, Kim Jong-il’s early years in the PAD provided him with a crucial set of cultural and ideological tools that he would grow to depend on when he eventually came to rule through his dictatorship of the mind.
Even by the end of the 1960s, Kim Il-sung had not yet been established as a godhead. At the end of 1968, Minister of National Security Kim Chang-bong attempted an armed coup against Kim Il-sung. In January 1969, after Kim Il-sung had officially purged Kim Chang-bong and his faction, he appointed General Choi Hyon as a replacement. In gratitude, Choi Hyun pledged loyalty to the absolute rule of the Supreme Leader. But he was a strict conservative who believed in the hereditary transfer of power through an elder son, and it was he who secured for Kim Jong-il a place in the OGD through a closed Party meeting in the summer of 1969. In turn, Kim Jong-il kept Choi Hyon’s son, Choi Ryong-hae, as his right-hand man for the rest of his life.
Kim Sung-ae’s factional power, however, was not to be easily overcome. Her elder brother Kim Kwang-hop was the Vice Prime Minister, and enjoyed the support of Kim Il-sung’s younger brother, Kim Yong-ju. Among themselves, Kim Il-sung’s own supporters openly referred to his son Kim Pyong-il as the successor to the Supreme Leader.
However, Kim Jong-il found a way of ridding himself of these forces in the Three Great Revolutionary Goals, which imitated the structure of the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution. While China’s Red Guards aimed to eliminate Capitalist and revisionist elements, the three revolutionary goals for North Korea were ideology, industry and culture. In the manner of the Red Guards, units made up of youths about to finish their education were set up all over the country to implement the Three Revolutionary Goals. Their main enemy was the ‘abuse of power and corruption of provincial bureaucrats’. As Central Party cadres with ties to regional forces were eliminated one by one, Kim Jong-il’s power grew centrally, as well as through building on solid regional support.
His father Kim Il-sung’s authority at this time was channelled through the government, which had ruling powers. In this climate, Kim Jong-il was seen as no great threat to the power of his father and his supporters because he was merely an employee of the Workers’ Party, which was just one of many bureaucratic institutions. Apart from Choi Hyun, no other minister even considered him as a potential successor to Kim Il-sung. But as Kim Jong-il’s power base was the Workers’ Party, it was the only means at his command to expand his influence and confront the government. He found the pivot he needed in the philosophy of Juche.
Juche was based on a focus on the person, and as such was a humanist philosophy. Kim Jong-il oversaw a change to this philosophy, according to which a person now had to be part of an institution to progress, and those who were brought into such an institution could triumph only under the excellent guidance of a Supreme Leader (Suryong). Juche thus became a ‘Suryong-ist’ ideology centred not on the individual person, but on one individual alone: his father, Kim Il-sung. (The original author of Juche, Hwang Jang-yop, who was the Party’s international secretary, eventually fled from the creation he had spawned to seek exile in South Korea in 1997.)
By 1973, ‘Kimilsungism’, which asserted that the Supreme Leader guided the Party and the Party led the people, had become the omnipotent weapon of the Party. It was from this time that Kimilsungism became the people’s ideology, and loyal obedience to the cult of Kim became the moral conscience of every Party member. Anyone seen to be challenging this moral conscience, in however slight a way, would be sent with three generations of his or her family to a gulag where the family line would come to an end. It was also during this time that surveillance institutions, formerly under the remit of the Ministry of Social Security, were given independence in the form of the newly created Ministry of State Security, which reported directly to the OGD.
Kim Jong-il elevated the authority of the OGD and PAD, which were his bases of power, by emphasising society’s need for the Party’s organisation, guidance and propaganda if Kimilsungism was to be realised. In this way, he found a means to accommodate the cultification of Kim Il-sung within his Party-based powers, or rather, have the abstract cultification of the Supreme Leader support his own Party-based powers.
When Jiang Qing was purged in China in 1976, her fall reflected badly on her North Korean ‘mirror’, Kim Sung-ae, who became isolated and fell from favour. After his stepmother Kim Sung-ae lost her position as head of the
Women’s Committee and her key to outside relations, Kim Jong-il’s position was strengthened.
To consolidate the Party’s claim to ‘upholding’ the Supreme Leader’s guidance, powers to appoint personnel were removed from the government, and Kim Jong-il’s political enemies were vigilantly watched under the pretext of ideological surveillance by the OGD’s section for Party guidance. The North Korean state, previously founded on the twin powers of the Workers’ Party and the government, came to be entirely dependent on the Party. By Kim Jong-il’s time, the Party had replaced all the functions of government, which had become no more than a hollow shell and a historical remnant.
But why did Kim Il-sung stand by and do nothing about his son’s consolidation of Party-based power? The answer is: because he saw only the cultification of himself, as did the outside world. Kim Jong-il’s consolidation of Party power was clothed in a moral upholding of ‘Kimilsungism’ and advertised itself through the language and ideology of the Supreme Leader’s legacy. But while Kim Jong-il appeared to remain loyal to his father on the surface and in public perception, behind the scenes he was steadily reducing old guard powers, preparing the system for the time when one man – he himself – would have absolute and concentrated power to determine the future of North Korea.
In the beginning, it started innocently enough with the replacement of direct proposals to Kim Il-sung with cassette recordings, under the pretext of lightening his father’s duties. The recording of proposals on tape effectively routed all proposals for Kim Il-sung’s ratification through Kim Jong-il, who controlled the technology. Eventually, every single proposal was routed through the OGD, so that only the selected and redacted ones would be sent up for Kim Il-sung’s approval. By 1980, Kim Jong-il had already completed a system whereby all real powers were vested in one man, himself, as the OGD Party Secretary, while on the surface authority appeared to rest with Kim Il-sung as the Supreme Leader.
Dear Leader Page 15