One cannot understand modern North Korea without having a look at its past. North Korea never experienced “reform,” that is, a government-initiated and government-controlled chain of systematic changes. But this by no means implies that North Korea has not changed. The North Korea of Kim Jong Il’s era was dramatically different from the North Korea of the 1953–1994 period. Nonetheless, what happened under Kim Il Sung has determined many of the features of modern North Korean society.
The North Korea of the Kim Il Sung era was a very peculiar place indeed—arguably, one of the most idiosyncratic places in the entire world. It was established as a Soviet client state but with a great deal of support, enthusiasm, and hope. Soon, it evolved into the archetypal National Stalinist regime, and in this form it managed to survive all outside challenges and exist without much change until the early 1990s. It was a time when the Kim family regime grew and matured, and it was also a time when it learned how to survive and manipulate an utterly hostile environment.
CAPTAIN KIM RETURNS HOME
On some autumn September day of 1945 (the exact date is still in dispute, but it seems to be the 19th of September) a group of Asian-looking men, all clad in Soviet military uniform, disembarked from the Soviet steamer Pugachev at the Korean port city of Wonsan, then recently taken over by the Soviet forces. Among the arrivals there was a slightly stout man in his early 30s, with the insignia of a Soviet Army captain. To his comrades he was known as Kim Il Sung, commander of the 1st (Korean) battalion of the 88th independent brigade of the Soviet Army.
This young Soviet captain was soon to become the supreme leader of the emerging North Korean state, but in 1945 he came back home after almost two decades spent overseas. In the 1930s Kim Il Sung was a guerrilla field commander in Northeastern China, and in the early 1940s he became a battalion commander in the 88th Brigade of the Soviet Army. Nonetheless, he was a native of the city of Pyongyang, which in late August became the headquarters of the Soviet forces in Korea.1
By late August 1945, after a short, intense, and successful military campaign, the Soviet Army found itself in full control of the northern part of the Korean peninsula. Had the Soviet generals only wished, they would have probably taken the southern part as well, but at that stage Moscow was still inclined to respect the agreements made with Washington. One such agreement envisioned a provisional division of the Korean peninsula into two zones of occupation. It took half an hour of deliberation by two US colonels (one of whom eventually became a US secretary of state) to draw what they saw as the provisional demarcation line between the Soviet and US zones of operations. Neatly divided by the 38th parallel, the two zones were almost equal in territory, but vastly different in population size and industrial potential: the South had twice as many people, but its industry was seriously underdeveloped (essentially, in the pre-independence days, southern Korea was an agricultural backwater).2
When the Soviets found themselves in control of northern Korea, they had only a dim understanding of the country’s political and social realities. Suffice to say that when the Soviet troops entered Korea in August 1945, they had no Korean-speaking interpreters, since they were prepared to fight the Japanese army and hence all their interpreters spoke Japanese. Only in late August did the first Korean-speaking officers (almost exclusively Soviet citizens of Korean extraction) arrive in the country.
Newly declassified Soviet documents seem to indicate that until early 1946, Moscow had no clear-cut plans about the future of Korea. However, the wartime alliance between the United States and Soviet Union proved to be short-lived, with the Cold War setting in. In this new era of hostile relations between the superpowers, neither side was willing to compromise. So by early 1946 the Soviet Union was increasingly inclined to establish a friendly and controllable regime in its own zone of occupation (arguably, the United States had similar plans in regard to the southern part of the peninsula). Under the circumstances of the era, such a regime could only be Communist. But there was one problem: there were no (well, almost no) Communists inside North Korea.
The native Korean Communist movement emerged in the early 1920s, and Marxism was much in vogue among the Korean intellectuals of the colonial era. Nonetheless, due to the harshness of the Japanese colonial regime, a majority of the prominent Korean Communists in 1945 operated outside the country. Those few Communists who in 1945 could be found in Korea proper, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly in Seoul, outside of the Soviet zone. Therefore, from late 1945, Soviet military headquarters began to bring the Communist activists to North Korea from elsewhere. Some of them were Soviet officials and technical experts of Korean extraction who were dispatched to North Korea by Moscow; others came from China, where a large number of ethnic Koreans were active in the Chinese Communist Party since the 1920s. A third group consisted of those Communist activists who fled the US-controlled South, where in 1945–1946 the Communist movement experienced a short-lived boom, only to be driven underground and suppressed in the subsequent years. There were also the people who came back with Kim Il Sung, the former guerrillas who spent the war years in the Soviet Union.3
It was the latter group that would have by far the greatest impact on Korea’s future, but initially it appeared to be the least significant. Those former guerrillas were survivors of a heroic but small-scale and ultimately futile armed resistance to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s. After the resistance collapsed around 1940, the survivors fled to the Soviet Union, where they were enlisted into the Soviet Army and retrained for a future war against Japan. Ironically, the victory against Japan was so swift that these people could not directly participate in the last decisive battle with the Japanese empire. Nonetheless, even after the sudden end of the hostilities, the Soviet military authorities found a good use for these men (and few women). The Chinese and Korean ex-guerrillas were sent home on the assumption that they would be useful advisers and intermediaries serving the Soviet occupation forces.
Kim Il Sung was one of these former guerrillas. Efforts of North Korean propaganda-mongers and the power of hindsight have combined to ensure that historians tend to exaggerate his political significance in the years prior to 1945. Nonetheless, by the time of Korea’s liberation, Kim Il Sung was probably already seen as an important leader—in spite of his young age and, admittedly, somewhat unheroic looks (a participant of the 1945 events described to the present author his first impression of the would-be Sun of the Nation and Ever-Victorious Generalissimo in less than flattering terms: “He reminded me of a fat delivery boy from a neighborhood Chinese food stall”).
The events of 1945–1946 are a convoluted story, but to simplify it a bit we can say that Kim Il Sung was finally chosen by the Soviet military as the person to head the Communist regime that was to be built in North Korea. The reasons behind this decision may never be known with complete certainty, but Kim Il Sung seemingly had a combination of biographical and personal traits that made him seem a perfect choice to Soviet officials. He was a reasonably good speaker of Russian and his military exploits, though grossly exaggerated by propaganda of later days, were nonetheless real and known to many Koreans. It also helped that Kim was a native of North Korea and was never related to the crowd of Comintern professional revolutionaries and ideologues whom Stalin despised and distrusted.
Kim Il Sung was born in 1912 (on the day the Titanic sank, April 15) under the name Kim Sǒng-ju—he adopted the nom de guerre Kim Il Sung much later, in the 1930s. In their attempts to create a perfect biography for the Ever-Victorious Generalissimo, Sun of the Nation, North Korean official historians tried to gloss over some inconvenient facts of his family background and to present him as the son of poor Korean farmers. This is not quite true: like the majority of the first-generation Communist leaders of East Asia (including, say, Mao Zedong), the future North Korean dictator was born into a moderately affluent family with above-average income as well as access to modern education. Kim’s father, a graduate of a Protestant school, made a modest living through teaching and practicing herbal medicine while remaining a prominent Christian activist.
Kim Il Sung himself graduated from high school—an impressive level of educational attainment for a Korean of his generation (only a small percentage could afford to take their education that far). Most of his childhood was spent in Northeast China, where his family moved in 1920.
With his good education, Kim Il Sung could have probably opted for a conventional career and become a well-paid clerk, businessman, or educator. He made another choice, however: in the early 1930s he joined the Communist guerillas who fought the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
The North Korean narrative always plays down the Great Leader’s foreign connections, so it remains silent on his decade-long membership in the Chinese Communist Party and his actual position as a junior officer in the essentially Chinese guerrilla force. Instead, the official narrative insists that the Dear Leader created a Korean guerrilla army at the age of 20 (we should not be surprised: if this narrative is to be believed, he became the supreme leader of all Korean Communists at the tender age of 14). Actually, until 1945 Kim Il Sung’s military career was spent entirely under Chinese and/or Soviet command, albeit usually in ethnic Korean units.4
What made young Kim Sǒng-ju choose the arduous and harsh life of a guerrilla, and what kept him in this dangerous pastime for over a decade? Obviously, he was an idealist, a fighter for (and believer in) a Great Cause—in his case, it was the cause of Communism. However, one should keep in mind how the ideology of Communism was understood in East Asia. While in Europe aspiring Communists were motivated, above all, by the desire to ameliorate social injustices, the East Asian version of Communism had both social and nationalist dimensions. In the 1920s and 1930s, in the era when Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh were young idealists, Communism in East Asia was widely seen as a shortcut to the national revival and modernity, a way not only to solve social problems but also to leapfrog past stages of backwardness and colonial dependency. In the last years of his life, Kim Il Sung would confess that he was both a Communist and a Nationalist. Frankly, the same could be said about a majority of East Asian Communists of his generation.
Even though initially installed in power by the Soviet military, Kim Il Sung had no desire to be Moscow’s puppet—or, for that matter, anybody’s puppet. In the 1940s the young ex-guerrilla probably still sincerely believed in the cause of international Communism but he, as well as a majority of his supporters, did not want to sacrifice Korea’s national interests in the name of other countries, however progressive or revolutionary these countries said they were. If judged from the Soviet perspective, the Soviet officers in 1945–1946 made a poor choice: they decided to promote a shrewd man who was probably more Nationalist than Communist in his worldview. In due time this made him a serious thorn in the side for the Moscow (and, for that matter, Beijing) diplomats. However, taking into account the situation of late 1940s Korea, had the Soviet officials chosen someone else the eventual outcome would have probably been quite similar. Subsequent events demonstrated that Korean Communist leaders (and, for that matter, other Communist leaders of East Asian countries) made bad puppets—not least because of their deeply ingrained Nationalist convictions. Surprisingly, the leaders’ stubborn adherence to the spirit of national independence was not always good news for their subjects: the post-Stalin version of the Soviet Communism that the East Asian strongmen so decisively refused to emulate in the late 1950s was remarkably softer on the common people than locally grown varieties of this revolutionary doctrine.
However, all these complexities became obvious only later. Whatever were Kim Il Sung’s secret thoughts, between 1945 and 1948 the nascent North Korean regime operated under the complete control of the Soviet supervisors. The Soviet advisers drafted the above-mentioned land reform law and Stalin himself edited the draft of the 1948 North Korean Constitution. The Soviet military police arrested all the major opponents of the emerging Communist regime, who were then sent to prison camps in Siberia—no North Korean penitentiary system existed as yet.
Even the relatively mundane actions of the North Korean government on that stage needed approval from Moscow. The most important speeches to be delivered by the North Korean leaders had to be first pre-read and approved in the Soviet Embassy. For more important decisions, an approval had to be received from higher reaches of authority. The Soviet Politburo, the supreme council of the state, approved the agenda of the North Korean rubber-stamping parliament and even formally “gave permission” to stage a military parade in February 1948, when the establishment of a North Korean army was formally announced.5
My favorite story in this regard occurred in December 1946, when the first elections in the North were being prepared. On December 15 Colonel General Terentii Shtykov, then responsible for the political operations in Korea, discussed the future composition of the North Korean proto-parliament with two other Soviet generals. The Soviet generals (not a single Korean was present) decided that the Assembly would consist of 231 members. They also decided the exact distribution of seats among the parties, the number of women members, and, more broadly, the precise social composition of the legislature. If we have a look at the actual composition of the Assembly, we can see that these instructions were followed with only minor deviations.6
Guided and assisted by the Soviet advisers, between 1946 and 1950 North Korea quickly went through a chain of reforms that were standard for nascent Communist regimes of the era. In the spring of 1946 radical land reform led to the redistribution of land among peasants, while also sending a majority of former landlords fleeing South. Around the same time, all industries were nationalized, even though small independent handicraftsmen would still be tolerated until the late 1950s. In politics the local incarnation of the Leninist Party, known as the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP), began to exercise increasingly thorough control over society.
In spite of the Christian family background of Kim Il Sung and many other Communist leaders, Christians were persecuted with great ferocity. Like landlords, many former entrepreneurs and Christian activists chose to flee South across the badly guarded demarcation line. Nobody bothered to collect exact statistics, but the number of North Koreans who had fled South between 1945 and 1951 was approximately 1.2 to 1.5 million, or some 10–15 percent of the entire North Korean population. Among other things, this exodus meant that the potential opposition exiled itself, inadvertently making the emerging regime more homogenous.
At first glance the North Korean state of the late 1940s appears to be a nearly perfect specimen of what the cold warriors once described as a “Soviet satellite regime.” But such a view, while not unfounded, is incomplete: North Korea might have been a puppet state, but this does not necessarily mean that the new regime was unpopular and lacked support from below.
In the late 1980s the Marxist and semi-Marxist Left reemerged in South Korea as a political and intellectual force, and soon afterward the nature of the early North Korean regime became a topic of hot (and largely ideology-driven) debate in Seoul intellectual and academic circles. The left-leaning historians and journalists usually present the events of 1945–1950 as a home grown popular revolution that might have been triggered and assisted by the Soviet presence, but generally developed spontaneously and independently. It is not surprising that South Korean leftist historians have demonstrated a remarkable ability to ignore newly published documentary evidence if it shows the true extent of Soviet control and hence undermines their cherished fantasies.
At the same time, the South Korean Right remains strangely obsessed with the desire to prove that Syngman Rhee’s regime in South Korea was the “sole legitimate government of the entire Korean peninsula.” Therefore, the right-leaning historians seem to be unwilling to pay attention to ample evidence for the genuine popularity enjoyed by Kim Il Sung’s government in its early days.7
This argument, being essentially ideological in nature, sometimes turns vitriolic and is likely to continue for years if not decades. Nonetheless, it seems to be based on a false dichotomy, since the events of the late 1940s were both a foreign occupation and a popular revolution. The Soviet authorities and the then accepted Communist orthodoxy to a very large extent determined the shape of the emerging North Korean society and its institutions. Nonetheless, the promise of the Communist project generally coincided with what many North Koreans sincerely wanted at the time. The dream of universal equality and affluence, enforced by the watchful but benevolent state, was difficult to resist—particularly when a blueprint of such a society was presented in the “modern” and “scientific” jargon of Marxism-Leninism and supported by the seemingly impressive success of the Soviet Union. After all, in those days, everybody knew that the USSR made good fighter jets and had the world’s best ballet while almost nobody knew that a few million Soviet farmers had starved to death in the 1930s. So, the government initiatives, even imposed by the Soviet advisers, often met with enthusiastic response from below.
WAY TO WAR
By late 1946 the division of the country had become a fact of life, and in 1948 two Korean states formally came into being: on the 15th of August, the Republic of Korea (ROK) was proclaimed in Seoul, and on the 9th of September, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was declared in Pyongyang. Neither state recognized the other; each government claimed itself to be the only legitimate authority on the entire Korean peninsula. This still remains technically the case now, six decades later.
Sometimes both sides went to slightly comical extremes to emphasize their fictional control over Korea in its entirety. For example, until 1972 Seoul (not Pyongyang!) was constitutionally the capital of the DPRK. Concurrently, the ROK government still appoints governors to the provinces of North Korea. Incidentally, the joint offices of these five governors are located not far from the university where this book was being written—and these offices are bustling with bureaucratic activity every time I visit. Both Korean states claimed—and still claim—that the national unification is their paramount political goal. Nowadays, as we will see below, such claims are increasingly shallow and disingenuous, but back in the late 1940s both Pyongyang and Seoul meant what they said.
Both Right and Left were willing to use force for the unification. The Seoul government, however, was engaging in bellicose rhetoric without doing much of substance to prepare for war. Meanwhile, the North Korean leadership kept petitioning Moscow for permission to invade the South and “liberate” its allegedly long-suffering population from the yoke of the US imperialists and their puppets. Kim Il Sung—and, for that matter, other Korean Communist leaders—assured Stalin that the victory would be quick, with America having neither time nor will to intervene. Kim Il Sung cited the reports of the South Korean Communists, who insisted that the entire people of South Korea would rise up against the hated pro-American clique of Syngman Rhee at the first news about the North Korean tanks rolling across the border.8
Stalin was initially unenthusiastic about the bellicose mood of his Korean appointees: he didn’t want to get plunged into a full-scale confrontation with the United States, then the world’s sole nuclear power, by the excessive nationalist zeal of some third-rate Communist leaders. However, by late 1949 things changed: in August, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear device and soon afterward, in October, Communists took power in China. Finally, the Soviet intelligence reports seemingly confirmed that the United States did not see Korea as vital for their own strategic interest. In this new situation, the Korean gamble looked less risky, and Kim Il Sung kept pressure on.
So, in early 1950, Stalin gave in. On January 30 Ambassador Shtykov met Kim Il Sung and told him of Stalin’s approval. As the ambassador’s cable to Stalin says, “Kim Il Sung received my report with great satisfaction … Kim Il Sung, apparently wishing once more to reassure himself, asked me if this means that it is possible to meet with Comrade Stalin on this question.” Indeed, it was possible: in April 1950 Kim rushed to Moscow, where he spent a few weeks discussing the operational plans. He repeated his assurances of swift victory. As a Soviet memo says, he pledged to Stalin: “The attack will be swift and the war will be won in three days: the guerrilla movement in the South has grown stronger and a major uprising is expected.” So, the Soviet generals were dispatched to Pyongyang to draw up the operational plans, and by June 1950 everything was ready for a liberation of the South.
The war began on June 25, 1950. Initially, everything went according to the optimistic expectations of the Pyongyang leaders. The anticipated mass uprising in the South never happened, but by early August 1950 the North controlled some 95 percent of the Korean peninsula. However, the United States finally decided to join the war, this decision turning the tide.
A massive American intervention began in September 1950. In a couple of weeks, the North Korean forces were all but annihilated and the North Korean leadership had to flee to the Chinese border. In turn, China decided to intervene and in late November of that year staged a massive counterstrike that probably became the most successful large-scale operation in China’s recent military history.
After much fighting and bloodshed, the front line hardened and stabilized by the spring of 1951, even though trench warfare and intensive bombing campaigns continued for another two years. The final front line ran almost exactly where the initial demarcation was drawn in 1945. In 1953 the Armistice Treaty was signed and the front line became the DMZ, a border between two Korean states. Millions died, but the war ended in a nearly perfect draw.
The Korean War greatly strengthened Kim Il Sung’s personal power. Before the war he was one of many North Korean Communist leaders, merely a primus inter pares in Pyongyang—one whose slightly special standing was largely, or even exclusively, derived from Soviet support. After the war, Kim emerged as the undisputed national leader; people who joined the Korean Workers’ Party during the war and who remained the core of the North Korean bureaucracy for decades to come were joining the Party of Kim Il Sung. He was the only leader they knew. Understandably, he also used this opportunity to promote his guerrilla friends to positions of power.
The Soviet decision not to get involved in land warfare in Korea was also of great help to Kim Il Sung. From that time, the influence of the Chinese could be relied on to counter the influence of the Soviets—more so since the relations between Beijing and Moscow were never as good as official rhetoric implied. The two Communist great powers began to drift toward open hostility in the late 1950s, and this shift gave the North Korean leadership ample opportunities to exploit the contradictions between its two major sponsors. Indeed, from 1953 the Soviet control, so omnipresent in the late 1940s, greatly weakened, and Kim Il Sung began to take cautious measures that were aimed at reducing the ability of the “great Soviet Union” to mingle in North Korea’s internal affairs. Some prominent pro-Soviet officials were ousted from their jobs, and the leader of the pro-Moscow group was first demoted and then found dead in his house (officially this was ruled a suicide).
However, on that stage the purges largely targeted the “domestic” Communists, those who had been involved with the Communist underground of the colonial era. In 1953–1955, a majority of these Communist zealots were purged, with some prominent leaders subjected to show trials and others shot or imprisoned without much attention to the legal niceties. The accusations were standard for the Stalinist regimes: the founders of the Korean Communist movement were asserted to be spies and saboteurs, on the payroll of the Americans and Japanese (as usual, the accusations were often comically inconsistent, but who cared?). In most cases, purge meant the death of the major culprits and permanent imprisonment of his/her family, including even distant relatives.
In 1956, however, Kim Il Sung faced a major and unexpected political challenge. His unabashedly Stalinist ways provoked dissatisfaction among the top officials, much influenced by the ongoing de-Stalinization in Moscow. Some of these high-ranking party dissenters obviously wanted to use this opportunity for their own career advancement while others might have felt genuine compassion about the plight of common people who bore the major burden of Stalinist policies. The pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions within the North Korean leadership conspired to move the country toward a more moderate political line, akin to the policy of the post-Stalin Soviet leadership (then briefly supported by China as well). To make this possible, they wanted to remove Kim Il Sung from power. The Soviet and Chinese governments were aware and mildly supportive of the scheme. In August 1956, during a Central Committee meeting, the opposition openly challenged Kim Il Sung and his policies.
This challenge was crushed, largely because the younger generation of the officials, deeply Nationalist, hardened by war and eager to see their country less dependent on Moscow, saw no need in the proposed liberalization and rallied around Kim. Having defeated the challengers, in 1957–1959 Kim launched a new, more thorough purge of party functionaries who had worked with the Soviets and Chinese by exposing their connections—whether real or alleged.9
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE …
One of the sad facts of Communist history is that most of the founding fathers of Communist states perished at the hands of their own comrades, becoming victims of the machine they had themselves created. North Korea was no exception. If anything, the founders of the North Korean state fared worse than their Chinese or, for instance, Hungarian counterparts.
To confirm this, one has to look at the subsequent fate of the members of the North Korean Politburo in 1949. In Communist countries the Politburo was the supreme executive committee of the party and state, superior to any other institution, including the Cabinet of Ministers. The 1949 North Korean Politburo was technically the first executive board of the unified party. Before that there had been two independent parties, one operating in the North and the other in the South.
The 1949 Politburo had ten full members. It was headed by Kim Il Sung, the Party chairman, who remained the North Korean dictator until his death in 1994. He had two vice chairmen, Pak Hǒn-yǒng and Hǒ Ka-i.
Pak Hǒn-yǒng, the leader of the Korean Communist underground in the colonial era, was for a long time the chairman of the South Korean Workers’ Party. After the merger of the two parties, he became second in command in the unified Party, and was also given the post of foreign minister in the DPRK government. However, in 1953 he was ousted from his position and soon arrested. In 1955 he faced a kangaroo court and was executed as an “American spy.”
The other vice chairman, Hǒ Ka-i, was a seasoned Soviet bureaucrat of Korean extraction who was dispatched to North Korea to develop the local government and party machinery. In 1949 he was also the Party’s first secretary. His close connection with Moscow made him the first target when Kim Il Sung decided to distance the North from its one-time Soviet sponsors. Hǒ Ka-i was accused of “political mistakes” in 1951, and in 1953 he was shot dead in his home. Official reports claim that Hǒ Ka-i committed suicide, but it is possible that he was assassinated on Kim Il Sung’s orders. We may never know.
Another member of the 1949 Politburo, Yi Sǔng-yǒp, a prominent leader of the South Korean Left, was, at that time, responsible for the guerrilla movement in the South. In 1953 he became a major defendant at the largest show trial in North Korean history. Yi Sǔng-yǒp was said to be an American spy who was planning to stage a coup in the North that would pave the way for a large-scale American landing in Wonsan. Broken, Yi Sǔng-yǒp delivered an expected penitence and was sentenced to death.
Only two of the ten members of that initial Politburo were killed by their enemies rather than by their comrades. Kim Sam-yong, a leader of the Communist underground in the South, was arrested by the South Korean police and hastily executed in the first days of the Korean War. Kim Ch’aek, once a guerrilla fighter in Manchuria, was killed in an American air raid in January 1951.
Of the four other members, Kim Tu-bong was probably most prominent. In 1949 he was the North Korean head of state. This was a largely ceremonial position that well suited the character of this outstanding scholar, a founder of modern Korean linguistics. He tried to distance himself from daily politics. This did not help: in 1957 Kim Tu-bong was purged, subjected to public humiliation, and disappeared from public view. We do not know whether he died in prison or was killed.
Another 1949 member, Pak Il-u, the then minister for the interior, suffered a similar fate. He was purged in 1955 and then disappeared. His fate remains unknown to this day.
Pak Chǒng-ae, the only female in the 1949 Politburo, survived longer than most of her fellows. She was purged in the late 1960s and spent the next decades exiled in the countryside. She resurfaced in the late 1980s, after two decades in the camps, but never regained her influence.
Apart from Kim Il Sung himself, only one 1949 Politburo member, Hǒ Hǒn, died of natural causes. In 1949 he was 63 years old, in bad health, and had only two years to live.
Thus, out of the ten people who ran the country in 1949, only two avoided persecution and died natural deaths. Of the others, two were killed by people whom they regarded as enemies. Of the remaining six, all were purged by their own comrades.
Should we see them as sincere idealists and tragic victims, or should we notice that many of these supposed victims, while in power, had sent a striking number of people to the execution grounds? Maybe it would be best to leave these questions unanswered ….
The purges of the 1950s led to a nearly complete reshuffle of the North Korean leadership. From the late 1950s onward nearly all top positions in the North Korean party-state were controlled by the former Manchurian guerrillas and other Kim Il Sung appointees (including a small but growing number of his family members). They stayed in control, more or less unchallenged, until their own physical demise in the 1980s and 1990s.
Only a few of them had graduated from high school and an absolute majority of them had no formal schooling whatsoever—being children of poor subsistence farmers, they could not attend even a primary school.10 Their earlier experience was also of little help in running a modern state. Nonetheless they were unconditionally loyal to Kim Il Sung and shared his vision of the country’s future. And this was the thing that really mattered.
BETWEEN MOSCOW AND BEIJING: THE FOREIGN POLICY OF KIM IL SUNG’S NORTH KOREA
As we have mentioned above, until the late 1950s, North Korea was essentially just another “People’s Democracy,” a term the newly established pro-Soviet regimes chose as a self-description. In the late 1950s things began to change. What emerged as a result was a unique state that had almost no equivalents in 20th-century history—a truly fascinating topic for any cultural anthropologist, historian, or sociologist.
There were many reasons behind the emergence of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. For example, the personal changes in the leadership were important: the Communist leaders of the first generation were largely university graduates who combined a measure of nationalism with a modern and relatively cosmopolitan worldview, but in the late 1950s they were replaced by the former guerrillas whose worldview largely reflected the dreams, values, and aspirations of the traditional East Asian peasantry. Like it or not, radical leaders like Mao or Pol Pot to a very large extent wanted to actualize the utopian dreams of premodern peasantry (which of course didn’t stop them from killing and starving peasants in droves). Another contributing factor was the impact of the Korean War, which led to a militarization of North Korean society and helped to transform the entire country into a nearly perfect garrison state (or as the North Korean official propaganda prefers to put it, “made the entire country an impregnable fortress”).
However, all these trends could develop only due to a massive geopolitical shift in the late 1950s—that is, the Sino-Soviet split. For nearly three decades the two major Communist states had fractious relations and sometimes came quite close to the brink of war. Each one was peddling its own version of Communism. The Soviet brand probably appeared more dull, and no longer attracted the starry-eyed radicals in Western university campuses, but it was also much more permissive and liberal, much less indifferent to the daily needs of the average citizen and marginally more efficient (or should we say “less inefficient”?) economically. The Chinese brand of Communism was all about the endless ideological mobilization, selfless dedication and sacrifice to the cause, and the omniscient leader.
The changes in the post-Stalin USSR were significant. In the decade that followed Stalin’s death in 1953, the number of political prisoners in the Soviet Union decreased nearly a thousandfold, from some 1.2 million to between one and two thousand. Restrictions on the domestic movement of collective farm workers were lifted (contrary to the assumptions of many Westerners, the short-term domestic trips of the urban population were never seriously restricted in the USSR), large-scale housing construction programs were launched, and consumption goods became more affordable to the average Soviet citizen. In China, the same decade was marked by the collectivization of agriculture (i.e., the abolition of individual ownership of land) and the insane millennialism of the Great Leap Forward. These experiments might have looked attractive to the denizens of Paris cafés who (like Sartre) instantly switched their enthusiasm from Stalin’s Russia to Mao’s China. To the Chinese themselves, however, this “bold social experimentation” brought the worst famine in modern history, leaving between 20 and 30 million people dead.
Initially North Korea was much attracted to the Chinese austere and autocratic notion of Communism. The Maoist ideal resonated well with Kim Il Sung’s own notion of the perfect Korea he hoped to build. In the vision of the North Korean leaders, their realm should become a country where all of the people would work hard on huge state-owned farms and factories, breaking the records of productivity while being motivated by unswerving ideological zeal and love for country. Everybody would be issued roughly the same ration of heavily subsidized food and basic consumption goods, and no selfish profiteering would be tolerated, so money would gradually be deemed useless. Such a society would be led by a small army of devout and selfless officials and presided over by the omniscient Great Leader, whose word would be the law. Obviously, at the time, many common North Koreans didn’t find this ideal unattractive (it is not incidental that peasant rebels across the globe frequently dreamt of similar things).
When they talked of future prosperity, Kim Il Sung’s promises were not too wild or too excessive. In the early 1960s he famously outlined his vision of coming affluence by saying that in the near future all North Koreans will “eat boiled rice and meat soup, dress in silk and live in houses with tile roofs.” This promise—repeated by the Great Leader a number of times—does not sound too ambitious, but we should remember that for centuries the Korean farmers could not afford to eat rice every day (barley or corn was their staple), that a meat soup was a meal reserved for a special holiday occasion, and that only landlords could afford a tile roof rather than the thatched roof of the majority. Thus, Kim Il Sung promised his subjects that his regime would eventually deliver the standards of life that had been seen as reasonably luxurious by premodern villagers—but not much more.
Kim Il Sung’s initial decision to side with China was only partially driven by ideological considerations. The pragmatic political calculations played a role, too: after the failed 1956 conspiracy, Kim Il Sung and his supporters began to see the Soviet Union as a source of dangerously liberal ideas. They soon grew frightened that the Soviet slogan of the “struggle against the personality cult” might be easily used against Kim Il Sung, whose own personality cult so obviously followed the Stalinist patterns.
After the 1956 crisis, the relations between North Korea and the Soviet Union began to deteriorate, reaching the point of almost open hostility between 1962 and 1963. References to the Soviet Union almost disappeared from the official media, and the Soviet advisers were sent home. The same was the fate of a few hundred Soviet and Eastern European wives of North Koreans who studied overseas and married women from other Communist countries. Their North Korean husbands were ordered to divorce foreign women, who were then summarily expelled from the country. By 1960, all North Korean students were recalled from the ideologically suspicious Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and only two decades later were these student exchanges restarted—albeit on a significantly smaller scale.
Pravda and Rodong Shinmun, the major official newspapers of the USSR and North Korea, respectively, were engaged in open polemics: Rodong Shinmun accused the Soviets of being exploitative and ready to take advantage of Korea’s weakness, while Pravda lamented the ingratitude of the North Korean leaders who suddenly became silent on the Soviets’ significant aid efforts (indeed, since around 1960 and until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, North Korean media seldom admitted the very existence of continuing economic aid from the Soviet Union). A North Korean ambassador to Moscow wrote a highly critical letter to Kim Il Sung and then asked Moscow for asylum. His request was granted by the Soviet government—a nearly unprecedented situation in the history of the Communist bloc.
Pyongyang’s relations with Moscow partially recovered after 1965. Changes in the Soviet leadership, specifically the replacement of impulsive and reform-minded Khrushchev with the more conservative Brezhnev, did play some part, but there were more important reasons. First, during the relations crisis, Soviet economic assistance declined, while China was proving to be neither willing nor able to compensate for this loss. Second, in 1966 China itself plunged into the bloody turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. For the North Korean elite, the Cultural Revolution was the embodiment of utter chaos; it might have been seen in Pyongyang as even more dangerous than Soviet liberalization (privately, when talking to Brezhnev in 1966, Kim Il Sung described the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as a “massive idiocy”).11
Actually, the late 1960s were a period of grave crisis in the relations between North Korea and China. Ambassadors were recalled and tensions on the border mounted—much later, in May 1984, Kim Il Sung recalled in his confidential talk with East German leaders how much patience was necessary to deal with Chinese soldiers intruding into the North Korean territory.12 In a telling sign, Kim Il Sung even asked Moscow to use Soviet air space for air travel by the North Korean official delegation, openly expressing fear that North Korean planes might be intercepted and forced to land by the Chinese.13 The Chinese Red Guard groups openly criticized Kim Il Sung, describing him as a “neo-feudal ruler” living a life of luxury and self-indulgence.14
In the early 1970s North Korea finally switched to the “equidistance” policy, which continued until the early 1990s. It was essentially a diplomacy of balancing between two mutually hostile sponsors, China and the Soviet Union. North Korean politicians and diplomats discovered that the new situation of Sino-Soviet rivalry, in spite of ingrained instability, gave them remarkable political opportunities as well. With a measure of guile, they could extract aid from both sponsors without giving much in return.
The aid was increasingly important: in spite of the frenzy of ideological campaigns, from the late 1960s the North Korean economy, once the most advanced in continental East Asia, was sliding toward stagnation. Without a constant influx of foreign aid, North Korea would probably become economically unviable.
Neither Moscow nor Beijing had illusions about North Korea. They knew perfectly well that they were being manipulated, but still saw no viable alternative to providing Pyongyang with aid. Partially, their policy was driven by the need to keep North Korea as a stable buffer zone protecting both China’s Northeast and Russia’s Far East against the US military presence in Japan and South Korea. However, to a larger extent, the rival Communist giants were paying North Korea for remaining neutral in their own quarrel. Of course, both Moscow and Beijing preferred to see Pyongyang join their side unconditionally, but since that was not going to happen, they were at least determined not to let North Korea join the opposite camp. Thus, with remarkable skill North Korean diplomats squeezed aid from their two quarreling benefactors without making excessive concessions to them.
In the early 1970s, North Korea tried to rid its economy of dependency on Moscow and Beijing, and began to borrow heavily on the international market. At that time, immediately after the oil crisis of 1973, Communist regimes were considered to be exemplary debtors while the international market was awash with newly arrived petro-dollars. Therefore, securing loans was not that hard. Probably, North Korean leaders hoped to use this additional income to overcome the slowdown that was taking hold of their economy. The scheme did not work: the loans were wasted on a number of prestige-boosting and/or ill-conceived projects, with Pyongyang soon refusing to pay interest. Between the years of 1979 and 1980, North Korea became the first Communist state to default. This left them with significant debt—in 2007, $600 million in principal plus $1.2 billion in accrued interest.15 Their foray into the world of high international finance ended in debacle and seriously damaged North Korea’s credit ratings.
Around the same time, during the mid-1970s, more unseemly incidents began to occur. With increasing frequency, North Korean diplomats and officials were discovered traveling with large amounts of expensive contraband, illicit drugs, and counterfeit money.
In late October 1976, the Norwegian police caught North Korean diplomats selling 4,000 bottles of smuggled liquor and a large quantity of smuggled cigarettes. In those days, the Scandinavian governments imposed exorbitant taxes on alcohol, which made the importation of tax-free liquor an extremely profitable business. Pyongyang officials transported large quantities of tax-free liquor and cigarettes inside diplomatic luggage. It was estimated that the DPRK Embassy in Norway sold liquor and cigarettes with a black market value of some one million dollars (in 2011 prices, this would be at least three times that amount).
After the incident involving Norway and Denmark, the same network was discovered in two other Nordic countries—Finland and Sweden. The scale of operations in Sweden was probably the largest, and the affair was widely discussed in the local press. One night, mischievous Swedish students put a sign reading “Wine and Spirits Co-op” on the entrance of the DPRK Embassy—to the great annoyance of its inhabitants.
Soon afterward, the North Korean authorities began to deal with far more dangerous substances. In May 1976 the Egyptian customs officials discovered the presence of hashish in luggage belonging to a group of North Korean diplomats—the first in the long chain of incidents of this type. The North Korean operatives even drew knives, but were overpowered by the Egyptian officers. Their diplomatic passports ended up saving them from prosecution. A similar incident then occurred in, of all places, Norway. In October 1976 the North Korean diplomats were caught handing a large amount of hashish to local drug dealers. In the subsequent decades, North Korean officials and diplomats were again occasionally found smuggling drugs in various parts of the world.
Apart from narcotics, North Korea also seemingly began to produce and disseminate high-quality counterfeit US dollar bills (the so-called supernotes), albeit in this case the evidence is largely circumstantial.16
It is often speculated that these smuggling operations were related to the new attitude toward the North Korean missions overseas: once the economic slowdown made its mark in the mid-1970s, the missions had to follow the self-reliance principle. In effect, North Korean embassy officials now had to pay for their own expenses from the funds its staff somehow earned.
It seems, however, that contrary to a popular misperception, these illegal activities never developed into major hard currency earners. Even from the regime’s point of view, smuggling and counterfeiting did more harm than good: these incidents made the North Korean government look odious without bringing in much income. In the early 2000s there were signs that these activities were finally downscaled, but one wonders why this did not happen earlier.
Another bizarre feature of North Korean foreign policy of the 1970s was their spy agencies’ strange taste for abductions. These operations began earlier: in the late 1950s, North Korean intelligence attempted the abduction of a number of dissenters from the USSR. Not all operations were successful; Ho Chin (Lim Un), a young poet and dissenter, managed to escape from his kidnappers and was granted asylum in the USSR, where he eventually became a prominent journalist and historian. But not all were so lucky. A young North Korean musician was kidnapped by North Korean agents from downtown Moscow and was never seen again. This led to a major crisis in relations between Moscow and Pyongyang, with the Soviet Union expelling the North Korean ambassador—another event with few parallels, if any, in the entire diplomatic history of the Communist bloc.
In the late 1970s the major targets of these operations were Japan and South Korea. Unlike earlier incidents, these kidnappings did not target dissenters or defectors. Abductees were average men and women off the street. In many cases it seems that the abductions were opportunistic, with North Korean commandos taking any person who was unlucky enough to stroll along some Japanese beach where the commandos were lying in wait. Indeed, these abductions were so bizarre that many reputable journalists and scholars (overwhelmingly—but not exclusively—of leftist inclinations) in the 1980s and 1990s wasted tons of ink insisting that North Korea had nothing to do with the strange disappearance of Japanese citizens in the 1970s.
These people were made to look foolish by Kim Jong Il himself. In 2002 Kim Jong Il admitted responsibility for the abductions and ordered the return of a number of survivors back to Japan. This was obviously done to improve relations with Japan, but produced a completely opposite outcome. Accusations that had been often perceived as the fantasies of the Right were suddenly proven to be completely correct, and the Japanese public exploded. The Japanese government demanded the immediate return of all abductees. In response, the North Korean authorities stated that all survivors had been returned home, with any additional abductees having already died (this was in 2002). Few believed this statement, and as a result the trade and exchanges with Japan, once quite important for the regime, were completely frozen.17
Thus, the North Korean leaders were paradoxically punished for their rare attempt to be honest and admit past wrongdoings. No doubt they have learned their lesson and from now on will probably think twice before admitting to more of their past misdeeds.
Obviously, the Japanese were abducted to take advantage of their native language skills and their knowledge of Japanese daily life in order to train the North Korean agents. For example, Yaeko Taguchi, a former hostess kidnapped in 1978 (she was then aged 22), trained Kim Hyǒn-hǔi, a North Korean intelligence agent whose cover was to be a Japanese national. This decision to rely on the abductees was rather strange since the North Korean authorities could count on the enthusiastic support of a number of people who spoke Japanese as their first language and had firsthand knowledge of modern Japan. Those people were members of Chongryon (Chosen Soren), a powerful pro-Pyongyang group of Koreans in Japan.
Some 700,000 ethnic Koreans lived in Japan in the early 1950s. Most of them arrived there in the 1930s and early 1940s, either in search of a better livelihood or forcibly relocated by the colonial authorities as providers of cheap labor. In 1951 ethnic Koreans were formally deprived of Japanese citizenship. In Japan the ethnic Koreans were subjected to considerable discrimination and were kept in unskilled or semi-legal occupations. This ensured their affinity with the Japanese Left, but eventually it was pro-Pyongyang leftist nationalists who succeeded in organizing them.
In the late 1950s a majority of ethnic Koreans in Japan opted for North Korean citizenship, even though only a tiny minority of them had come from what became North Korea after 1945. Those “overseas citizens of the DPRK” created the aforementioned Chongryon.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s pro-Pyongyang activists successfully persuaded many ethnic Koreans to “return” to the North. These returnees numbered an impressive 93,000, an overwhelming majority of whom had never previously lived in the country to which they now moved. They wanted to escape discrimination and contribute toward the building of a perfect new society in their native land. North Korean propaganda had lured the returnees, but, as the recent research shows, Japanese right-wing groups also promoted the migration in the hope of reducing the number of people they saw as a “fifth column” within Japan.18
Most of the returnees were gravely disappointed by the destitution they saw upon arrival. They soon realized, however, that there was no way back. Stuck in a destitute police state, they (and their children) now found themselves in a strange position: they were simultaneously privileged and discriminated against. On the one hand, the returnees were seen as ideologically unreliable. On the other hand, most of them received money transfers from Japanese family members who were wise enough not to go to the Socialist Paradise. This allowed them to enjoy a life that was affluent by North Korean standards. It was permissible for the returnees to ask relatives back in Japan for money as long as the letters included an obligatory eulogy to the Leader and his system.
Remittances began to dry up in the 1990s, with predictably grave results for the second- and third-generation returnees. The main reason for this was the generational shift. The immediate relatives of the returnees began to die out, and the next generation had no inclination to send money to people they had never met. Around the same time, Chongryon membership began to dwindle, too, with the younger generations of ethnic Koreans either accepting Japanese citizenship or switching to a South Korean passport. Nonetheless, until the early 1990s money transfers from Japan were a major source of income for Pyongyang.
WOMEN’S WORK?
Soviet Communism, as well as its local variants, had a strictly male face. The top Communist bureaucrats of the 1960s and 1970s are remembered as aging males in badly tailored suits. Indeed, women were remarkably underrepresented at the apex of Communist power.
This was not always the case. In the early 1900s, revolutionary Marxism was arguably the most feminist of all major ideologies of the era. It did not limit itself to demands for legal gender equality, but went one step further by demanding full economic and social equality for men and women.
In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, there was, for all intents and purposes, an affirmative action program. The exploits of female pilots, engineers, and military officers were much extolled by the media.
However, this was to change in the late 1930s, when the government of Stalin’s Russia discovered the political usefulness of the traditional family and the values associated with it. From then on, while the importance of female labor in the workplace was not disputed (and, indeed, continued to be encouraged), the primary social function of women was to be wives and mothers.
When Soviet troops brought Communism to Korea in 1945, it was in its most nationalist and antifeminist stage. Some measures to bring about gender equality were enforced, however, including the 1946 Gender Equality Law, which abolished concubinage, eased restrictions (mainly social in nature) on divorce, and enshrined female property rights in law.
That said, North Korean female participation in higher-level politics remained low. Out of some 260 cabinet ministers between 1945 and 2000, a mere six were women. It was a common assumption in the Kim Il Sung—era North Korea that women should not aspire to have careers in politics or administration. The common wisdom was that a girl should look for a proper husband and, if possible, for a job that would leave her enough time to fulfill her primary duties as a mother, wife, and daughter-in-law.
Actually, work was not seen as a necessity. Unlike other Communist nations, the North Korean state was quite positive in its attitude toward women who wanted to become housewives. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe of the 1970s, a full-time housewife was a very rare creature, while in the North Korea of the same time, maybe up to one-third of all married urban women stayed at home (no exact statistics are available).
Unsurprisingly, there were few female faces among the top leadership. In the 1940s and 1950s, North Korea had a small number of female politicians who were essentially left over from the earlier period of heroic (and feminist) revolutionary Marxism. The most remarkable of them was Pak Chŏng-ae (born Vera Ch’oe), once a Soviet intelligence operative and later a Politburo member and ardent supporter of Kim Il Sung. The latter did not save her from being purged in the 1960s, however.
Another example was Ho Chŏng-suk, daughter of prominent leftist lawyer Hŏ Hŏn. She herself fought in the Chinese Civil War, even becoming a political military commissar of a regiment. In North Korea, she rose to the position of justice minister, and in this capacity oversaw the initial stages of North Korea’s Great Purge. In the 1960s, however, Ho Chŏng-suk was pushed out of top-tier politics and relegated to ceremonial positions.
From around 1960, virtually all women in top political positions in the North got their power as a result of being members of the ruling Kim family. For instance, there is Kim Sŏng-ae, the second wife of Kim Il Sung. She obviously had some political aspirations in the 1970s, but her ambitions were cut short by the rise of her stepson Kim Jong Il, who had her sidelined. Another important woman of the Kim family is Kim Kyŏng-hŭi, Kim Jong Il’s younger sister—one of the regents assisting Kim Jong Un in the first months of his rule.
In North Korean society at large, the relative power of women increased dramatically after the collapse of the state Socialist economy. In the 1990s males were expected to continue attending to their nonfunctioning plants, while women, who were—or could easily become—housewives, were free to engage in the manifold activities of the nonofficial economy. As a result, women became the major breadwinners in the majority of North Korean families.
The increase in income predictably produced a remarkable change in the gendered division of labor as well as in gender relations in general (hence, for example, a rise in the number of divorces initiated by women). In the countries of Eastern Europe, the collapse of state Socialism generally led to a massive decline in gender equality. Conversely, in North Korea, the years of crisis led to the empowerment of women—at least the ones who did not perish in the famine.
DEALING WITH THE SOUTH
The Korean War did not end in a peace treaty. Only an armistice—a ceasefire—was signed in 1953. Tellingly enough, the ROK government refused to become a signatory of the document. The actual reasons were complicated, but officially they reasoned that the ceasefire was tantamount to the semi-recognition of the North Korean state.
Until the late 1960s, any foreign government had to choose which Korean state it should maintain diplomatic relations with. If a foreign nation granted diplomatic recognition to Pyongyang, it meant the immediate and automatic severance of diplomatic ties with Seoul (and vice versa). This principle was quietly revoked in 1969, and since then it has become possible for a foreign government to maintain diplomatic relations with the two Korean states simultaneously.19 However, the conflicts between these two states remained frozen and unresolved.
For the first few years after the armistice of 1953, North Korea’s government did not show much interest in South Korean issues. Kim Il Sung was too busy rebuilding the economy and eliminating real and potential rivals within the top leadership. It was also assumed that no revolution was likely to break out in South Korea, where leftist forces were wiped out by police terror and self-imposed exile (the majority of prominent North Korean leftists fled to the North, just to be exterminated there in the purges of the 1950s). Apart from that, Kim Il Sung understood that the Soviet Union was not going to approve of any major attack on South Korea—and with a large US presence in the South, such an attack would be suicidal at any rate.
However, the events of the early 1960s made Pyongyang reconsider its passive approach to the unification issue. For one thing, the sudden outbreak of the April Revolution in 1960 led to a collapse of the Syngman Rhee regime in Seoul. The April Revolution produced an unstable democratic regime that was soon overthrown by the military. Kim Il Sung saw these events as proof that a revolution in South Korea was possible. Indeed, the 1960s and 1970s outbreaks of mass opposition movements occurred in South Korea frequently, and huge rallies on the streets of Seoul encouraged optimism in Pyongyang.
The decline of Soviet influence in Pyongyang also encouraged hopes of unification. In the new situation, Kim Il Sung could hope that he would be able to take advantage of a favorable turn of events in the South without worrying excessively about Moscow’s position.
Another event that had significant impact on North Korean thinking was the steady escalation of the war in Vietnam. Indeed, Vietnam and Korea had a lot in common. Their histories and cultures have remarkable similarities and after the Second World War both countries were divided into a Communist North and capitalist South. Like their North Korean comrades, Vietnamese Communists once reluctantly accepted a ceasefire under pressure from Moscow and Beijing. However, unlike the North Koreans, the Vietnamese Communists did not keep the promises they made under duress, and began to increase their support for Communist guerrillas in the South Vietnamese countryside. Eventually this led to a full-scale US intervention, but by the late 1960s it became obvious that this intervention was failing. For Pyongyang leaders, Vietnam increasingly looked like an encouraging example.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that these expectations were unfounded, since South Korea was no South Vietnam. In the 1960s the South Korean government became remarkably efficient in promoting economic growth, while the South Vietnamese government was the embodiment of corruption, inefficiency, and factional strife. The brutal experiences of the North Korean occupation of 1950–1951 made the majority of South Koreans staunchly anti-Communist. Whatever they secretly thought about the then current government in Seoul, they saw Kim Il Sung as the greater evil. Last but not least, South Korean terrain made guerrilla operations difficult. At the time, before the successful reforestation program of the 1970s, most of South Korea’s land was treeless and hilly, so guerrillas would be sitting ducks for choppers and light planes.
Nonetheless, all of this became clear only later. In the late 1960s the North Korean government made another bid for unification—so intense, actually, that it is sometimes described as the “Second Korean War.”20
The North Korean plan for unification generally followed a well-established Communist pattern, known as the “United Front” strategy. At first, North Korea hoped to create a broad left-leaning opposition movement that would be led and manipulated by clandestine organizations of the South Korean Communists (or rather, Jucheists). It was assumed that a broad coalition would first topple a pro-American military regime. After this, the clandestine pro-Pyongyang core would discard and, if necessary, destroy their temporary allies and eventually emerge as the driving force of a truly Communist revolution.
Kim Il Sung and his people, being former guerrillas themselves, also pinned great hope on the emergence of armed guerrilla resistance within South Korea. Obviously in emulation of Vietnamese experience, they expected that a small number of North Korean commandos, often of South Korean extraction, would serve as a nucleus for a future South Korean guerrilla army.
In the 1960s, encouraged by the signs of the leftward drift of some South Korean intellectuals, Pyongyang undertook a few attempts to establish an underground party in Seoul. The most successful of these attempts was the “Revolutionary Party of Unification” established in 1964. The party, however, never managed to reach prominence and was finally destroyed by the South Korean authorities. Some of its leaders were executed while others were sent to jail for years.
There have been subsequent attempts to reestablish the pro-Pyongyang underground and recruit some promising young leftists to its ranks. The present author personally knows people who once used to commute to Pyongyang via submarine (the usual way of ejecting and infiltrating agents or full-time activists out of and into South Korea). In three cases that I am personally aware of, these trips and a short exposure to Pyongyang life led to an immediate disillusionment with North Korea.
The South Korean Left was revived around 1980, as we’ll see later. Indeed, it is hard to deny that the Korean leftists, self-proclaimed “defenders of the human rights and enemies of authoritarianism,” have demonstrated a surprisingly high level of sympathy—or, at least, toleration—for a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship in Pyongyang. It is not impossible that some of the prominent leftist activists have been occasionally sponsored by Pyongyang and in one instance the existence of such subsidies was eventually proven (I am referring to the case of Professor Song Du-yul, a prominent leftist/nationalist ideologue who admitted that he received such subsidies). However, one should not believe in the conspiracy theories that are so popular within the South Korean Right. Both the revival of the South Korean Left and the remarkable popularity of Generalissimo Kim among its followers have few if any relation to the efforts of Pyongyang’s spies, but rather reflect the peculiarities of South Korean capitalism and the South Korean political structure. On balance, North Korea’s United Front strategy has been unsuccessful.
Military operations have also ended in failure. On January 21, 1968, 31 North Korean commandos infiltrated Seoul. Their goal was to storm the presidential palace and slaughter everybody inside. Obviously, Kim Il Sung believed that this bold attack, to be attributed to the local guerrillas, would be good for revolution and perhaps would spark a mass armed resistance. The raiding party was intercepted at the last minute, so an intense firefight took place in downtown Seoul. One commando escaped North, where he received a hero’s welcome and eventually became a general; another was captured alive to become a Protestant pastor in South Korea; and all others were killed in action.
In late 1968 some 120 North Korean commandos landed on the East Coast, where they hoped to establish a Vietnamese-style guerrilla base. They took over a few villages and herded villagers into ideological indoctrination sessions where the farmers were harangued about the greatness of the Great Leader, the happiness of their northern brethren, and the assorted wonders of the soon-to-come Communist paradise. But inflexible, doctrinaire North Korean propagandists were no match for their North Vietnamese comrades, and failed to impress the villagers. Thus, the expected uprising didn’t happen, and the commandos were hunted down by the South Korean military.
At the same time, the North Koreans began to escalate tensions on the DMZ, often attacking South Korean and American border patrols. In January 1968, almost immediately after the Blue House Raid, the North Korean Navy captured the US naval intelligence ship Pueblo and kept the ship and its crew in captivity for more than a year. After it occurred, the episode was seen as part of a grand Communist strategy. Actually, though, the oral tradition of the Soviet diplomatic service holds that on the night after the seizure, Soviet experts spent sleepless hours looking for an excuse that would allow the Soviet Union to avoid entering a potential war between the United States and North Korea. Finally, they found one: the 1961 treaty between the USSR and the DPRK stated that the Soviet Union had a duty to defend its ally against acts of military aggression, but because the Pueblo seizure was an act of aggression by North Korea, the Soviet Union had no duty to intervene.
However, between 1971 and 1972 it became clear that all these adventurous and sometimes bloody efforts had come to naught. South Korean “toiling masses” were not going to take up arms and go to the mountains. The average South Korean remained anti-Communist or, at least, deeply suspicious of North Korea.
In this situation, the North Korean leaders made a U-turn and began secret negotiations with the South, on assumption that some kind of provisional coexistence (until the forthcoming revolution) would be necessary. In July 1972 the South and North issued a North-South Joint Communiqué that theoretically committed them to the goal of eventual peaceful unification of the country. It was rhetoric pure and simple, but it created a framework within which the two Korean states began to talk and interact when they considered it necessary. The policy of mutual nonrecognition continues to this day (and is likely to endure into the foreseeable future), but since 1972 Pyongyang and Seoul have always maintained direct contacts of various kinds.
There were, however, some occasional relapses into revolutionary adventurism. In 1983 North Korean intelligence operatives planted a powerful bomb in Rangoon, Burma, where the South Korean president was on a state visit at the time. The device was detonated too early, so the president survived the explosion, but a number of dignitaries were killed. The three North Korean operatives, none of whom spoke Burmese, could not escape. Two were taken alive after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, and another was killed after a firefight with the Burmese soldiers. Not only the Burmese (never staunch opponents of Pyongyang) but even the Chinese were annoyed by this adventurism.
Another act of open violence was the bombing of a South Korean passenger jet in November 1987 by two North Korean intelligence officers. Obviously this was done in order to create the impression that Seoul would be an unsafe place for the coming Olympic Games of 1988. The bombing killed 115 crew members and passengers (many of whom were construction workers on their way back from the Middle East). One of the two agents was captured, another committed suicide, but the overall political impact of the operation was close to zero.
There might have been other undisclosed or aborted operations of a similar kind, but on balance from the mid-1970s the North Korean leadership came to the conclusion that a South Korean revolution was unlikely to happen any time soon. The support for the South Korean “revolutionary forces” was never completely dropped from the Pyongyang agenda, but as time went on its significance steadily diminished. From the early 1990s, when the economy began to fall apart, Pyongyang’s agenda was dominated by the necessity of defense, not offense.
ICONS
The personality cult of the Kim family has long been a peculiar and often bizarre feature of North Korean society—and like any cult, it has iconography. Normally, four members of the Kim family are considered worthy of depiction—Generalissimo Kim Il Sung, Marshal (from 2012, posthumously, also Generalissimo) Kim Jong Il, General Kim Jong Un, and General Kim Jong Suk (the latter being Kim Il Sung’s first official wife and Kim Jong Il’s mother). Some other members of the family are occasionally depicted as well, but the images of those four are virtually omnipresent and come in many forms.
North Korea is a country of portraits. From the 1940s, depictions of Kim Il Sung were common, but from the 1970s, it was decreed that every house should have a portrait of the Great Leader. The state bestowed people with portraits and directed them to put them in their living rooms. They were to be placed on a wall devoid of any other adornments and cleaned regularly.
From 1972, Kim Il Sung’s portrait was also placed at the entrances of all factories, railway stations, and airports. A portrait of Kim Il Sung (from the mid-1980s) was to be present in all railway and subway carriages, but for some unknown reason not in buses or trams. In the late 1970s, North Koreans were directed to place standardized portraits of Kim Jong Il alongside those of his father.
A further layer of complexity was added in the 1990s. From then on, every single Korean house was to have three portraits: one of Kim Il Sung, one of Kim Jong Il, and yet another of the two great men talking about some highly important matters of statecraft. Privileged officials, however, were lucky enough to be issued with a different third picture, the visage of Kim Jong Suk. Due to reasons unknown, many offices still have portraits of the Dear Leader and Great Leader only.
Another important icon of the personality cult is the badge that all adult North Koreans have been required to wear permanently since the early 1970s. This badge usually depicts Kim Il Sung. (In some rare cases badges feature a portrait of Kim Jong Il alongside the visage of Kim Il Sung.) There are a great number of badges, and an experienced observer can learn a lot from the type of badge a North Korean wears. Officials of some important government agencies are issued their own particular type of badges.
Of course, we should not forget statues. The first statues of Kim Il Sung appeared in the late 1940s, but the vast majority of them were constructed in the 1970s and 1980s. Most counties and cities have their own statue of Kim Il Sung, located in the central part of the area. If such a statue is absent, the symbolic center will house a large mural depicting one of the Kims. Similar murals can be found on major crossroads in the cities and occasionally in the countryside.
During every major official holiday, all North Koreans are expected to pay a visit to a local statue and, after a respectful bow, to leave flowers honoring the Generalissimo (usually Kim Il Sung, but in some cities other members of the Kim family can be commemorated as well). The largest and most important statue(s) is located on Mansu Hill in downtown Pyongyang. Initially the 22-meter-high statue was gilded, but in 1977, for some reason, the gold was removed and replaced with gold paint. Recently, in April 2012, the statue got company. The likeness of Marshal (now Generalissimo) Kim Jong Il was placed next to his father. The original statue of his father had a face-lift: a broad smile and pair of glasses were added to his face, which had been up until then very austere and stern looking. Interestingly, in Kim Jong Il’s lifetime, very few statues of Kim Jong Il were constructed.
In an emergency, statues and portraits are to be protected whatever the cost, as any sacred object should be—and North Koreans are reminded that they must safeguard the images. For example, in 2007 the official media widely reported an incident that allegedly occurred in August of that year.
During a severe flooding, Kang Hyong-kwon, a factory worker from the city of Ich’on, was trying to make his way to safety through a dangerous stream. While leaving his flooded house, he took the two most precious things in his life—his five-year-old daughter and portraits of Leaders Generalissimo Kim Il Sung and Marshal Kim Jong Il. Suddenly overwhelmed by the current, he lost grip of his daughter, who fell into the swollen waters, but still managed to keep hold of the sacred images. The media extolled North Koreans to emulate Kang Hyong-kwon, a real-life hero.
THE COMMAND SOCIETY
In the decades during Kim Il Sung’s rule, North Korea became a society where the level of state control over the average citizen’s public and private life reached heights that would be almost unthinkable in any other country, including Stalin’s Russia, which in many cases served as a prototype for Kim Il Sung’s social experiments. In a sense, Kim Il Sung and his supporters managed to out-Stalin Stalin himself.
Private initiative was almost completely eliminated from North Korea’s economic life, and the role of money diminished greatly. Few items could be freely bought and sold in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. In 1957 the private trade in rice and other grains was banned, so that grains (by far the most important source of calories in the diet of the average North Korean) could be distributed by the state alone. From that time and until around 1990 grains could be acquired almost exclusively through the public distribution system (PDS). Every North Korean was made eligible for a fixed daily grain ration, which was provided for a token price.
The exact size of the ration depended on one’s job; the average working adult received a grain ration of 700 grams a day, a housewife would be given merely 300 grams, while a person doing heavy physical work (a miner or, say, a jet fighter pilot) was eligible for the highest daily ration of 900 grams. The ratio of rice to other (less nutritious) grains in a ration depended largely on one’s place of residence. During the affluent 1970s, the privileged inhabitants of Pyongyang received more than half of their grain rations in rice, while in the countryside nearly the entire ration came as corn and wheat flour, with rice being a luxury food reserved for special occasions.
In 1973, when the economic situation began to deteriorate, rations were cut for the first time. For example, a typical adult’s ration of 700g was reduced to 607g. The next cut came in 1987, when the same standard daily ration went down to 547g. Officially, these cuts were considered to be “voluntary donations,” but nobody asked the North Koreans whether they were willing to “donate” their food to the state.
Rationing was not about the grain alone. Other foodstuffs were rationed as well: people were issued rations of soy sauce, eggs, cabbage, and other basic ingredients of the traditional Korean diet. Meat was distributed irregularly, a few times a year, usually before major official holidays, but fish and other types of seafood were more readily available. In autumn there might have been occasional distribution of apples, melons, and other fruits.21
Basic consumer goods were also rationed, even though the mechanism of their distribution could be different. Items like wrist watches and black-and-white TV sets—the major symbols of consumerism during the 1960s and 1970s—were usually distributed through people’s work units. In some cases, especially valuable items were given to distinguished individuals as “presents of the Great Leader.” This particular form of distribution clearly was good also for the ideological health of the nation, since it reminded the North Koreans whose wisdom and hard work kept them fed and well-provided with daily necessities.
Contrary to what has often been claimed, private markets were never banned in North Korea. They operated under manifold restrictions and were small in scale, but they existed nonetheless. However, the average North Korean of Kim Il Sung’s era seldom shopped at the market. Items on sale at the marketplace were overpriced and usually seen as unnecessary luxuries. The average North Korean was seldom prepared to pay above half of his/her monthly wage for a chicken, and this was a normal market price for a chicken in the early 1980s. In most cases, the North Korean consumers were quite content with what they got through the PDS.
Every able-bodied North Korean male was required to work for the state, and this requirement was enforced with great efficiency. Between 1956 and 1958 small private workshops were nationalized, while all farmers were pressed to join agricultural cooperatives. These “cooperatives” were essentially state-run, state-owned farms in all but name. Farmers worked for the same standard 700g daily ration, the only difference being that in their case rations were distributed not twice a month, as was the case in the cities, but rather once a year, soon after harvesting.
The forced switch to state farms was a common feature of nearly all Communist states, but the North Korean state farms had some peculiarities. Most significantly, farmers were allowed only tiny private kitchen gardens. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, a farmer usually had a private plot whose size might exceed 1,000 m2, but in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea private plots could not exceed 100 m2, and not all farmers were allowed to have plots even of such a small size. The assumption was that farmers, being deprived of any additional source of income and calories, would have no choice but to devote all their time and energy to toiling in the fields of the state.
This is very different from the Soviet prototype. Soon after the forced collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, Soviet farmers’ individual plots still provided more than half the country’s total production of potatoes (a major source of calories in Russia in those days) and a significant share of other vegetables. Nor did this situation change much in subsequent decades: in the early 1970s Soviet consumers obtained more than 60 percent of their potatoes and eggs from the private agricultural sector, which also produced 40 percent of their fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy products.22 A similar situation could be observed in Communist Vietnam, where farmers were allocated merely 5 percent of the total land to be used as their private plots. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, farmers in North Vietnam earned between 60 and 75 percent of their income from the private cultivation of these “5-percent plots,” even though the plots were not officially allocated fertilizer or other state-supplied resources.23 Farmers of North Korea were deprived of this option from the very beginning: obviously, the policy planners believed that the farmers would be more productive on the state fields if they were not distracted by the temptations of working their own land.
Unlike the USSR where people were usually expected to look for jobs themselves, the North Korean system didn’t tolerate such dangerously liberal behavior. After graduation from high school, all North Koreans were assigned to their jobs. Those who were seen as both academically smart and politically reliable would be allowed to sit for college entrance exams. Changing one’s job was possible, but had to be approved beforehand by the authorities and required much paperwork (the only exception being women, who often became full-time housewives after marriage).
One of the most striking peculiarities of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was the extent to which the daily lives of its citizens were monitored by the authorities. Even Stalin’s Russia appears to be a relatively liberal place if compared to the North Korea of the 1960–1990 period. The government strove to control every facet of an individual’s life, and these efforts were remarkably successful.
The place of residence could be changed only with the approval of authorities, normally in cases when real or alleged needs of the national economy would require somebody to be allocated to a new job in a different place. Women were an exception since they were allowed and indeed were expected to move to the husband’s abode after marriage.
Not merely longtime residence but also short-term travel had to be approved by the authorities beforehand. A North Korean was not allowed to travel outside his or her native county or city without a special travel permit, to be issued by local authorities. The only exception was that a North Korean could visit counties/cities that had a common border with the county/city where he or she had official household registration. If found outside his or her native county without a proper travel permit, a North Korean was arrested and then “extradited” back home for an investigation and appropriate punishment.
There had to be valid reasons for issuing a travel permit, unless the person went on official business. Usually, the application was first authorized by the party secretary in one’s work unit and then by the so-called second department of a local government (these departments were staffed with police officers). A travel permit clearly specified the intended destination and period of travel, and it had to be produced when purchasing a ticket or when one stayed overnight either in an inn or with friends. A trip to some special areas, like the city of Pyongyang or districts near the DMZ, required a distinct type of travel permit that had to be confirmed by the Ministry for the Interior—and such “confirmed number permits” were exceedingly difficult to get.
Incidentally, the “travel permit” system set North Korea apart from other Communist countries. Being a native of the Soviet Union, the present author was surprised to discover the average Westerner’s belief that the Soviet citizen once needed official permits to travel domestically. This was not the case in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union (and for the vast majority of the urban people, it was not the case even under Stalin). There were areas within the Soviet Union that were closed to the average traveling person, but these areas were few and far between. The right to reside in a city of one’s choice was restricted indeed, but short-term domestic travel was essentially free in the former USSR.
In the enforcement of the domestic travel control, as well as in the general surveillance, a special role was played by a peculiar North Korean institution known as an inminban or “people’s group.” These groups still exist, even though their efficiency as surveillance institutions has declined since the early 1990s.
A typical inminban includes 20 to 40 families. In neighborhoods consisting of detached houses, that is, in the majority of North Korean neighborhoods, one inminban includes all inhabitants of a block, while in apartment buildings an inminban includes all families sharing a common staircase (or two to three adjacent staircases if the building is not so large). Inminban membership is, essentially, inescapable: every North Korean of any age or sex belongs to an inminban.
Each inminban is headed by an official, always a woman, usually middle-aged. Her duties are numerous. Some of these duties involve the neighborhood maintenance routine (garbage removal, for example) while many others are related to surveillance. The inminban heads are required to learn about the incomes, assets, and spending habits of all of their charges in their respective inminbans. The present author once interviewed a number of former inminban heads for a research project and was surprised to hear most of them cite a statement they probably heard often during their training sessions: “An inminban head should know how many chopsticks and how many spoons are in every household!”
The police supervise the inminban’s activites. Every inminban is assigned to a “resident police officer” who regularly meets its head (actually, her appointment must be confirmed by this officer). During such meetings an inminban head must report suspicious activities that have come to her attention.
The inminban also plays a major role in enforcing control over people’s movement. Every evening the inminban head is required to fill in a special register where she records all outside visitors who intend to spend the night in her inminban. If a relative or friend stays overnight, the household must report this to the inminban head, who then checks the person’s ID (if the overnight visitor comes from outside the city or county, his/her travel permit is checked as well). A few times a year, specially assigned police patrols, accompanied by an inminban head, conduct a midnight random check of households, just to make sure that all people spending the night there have registered themselves properly. Additionally, they check the seals on the radio sets, making sure the tuning system remains disabled, so that the set cannot be used for listening to foreign broadcasts.
Alongside the inminban system, there was (and still technically exists) another ubiquitous system of surveillance and ideological indoctrination—the “organizational life.” The underlying assumption of the “organizational life” is that every North Korean has to belong to some “organization” that both controls and directs his/her social activities. To simplify the picture, virtually all North Koreans are expected to join the Party Youth organization at the age of 14; a minority of them might then join the ruling Korean Workers’ Party. Contrary to rather widespread belief, party membership in itself is not a privilege: actually, the KWP rank and file is often subjected to even stricter demands than the general populace. However, during Kim Il Sung’s era, party membership was much coveted by the upwardly mobile and ambitious, since it was a necessary prerequisite for any social advancement (only KWP members were eligible for promotion in nearly all cases).
Those who were not lucky enough to join the KWP remained in the Party Youth organization until they turned 30 and then became members of the Trade Union organization at their workplace (farmers entered the Agricultural Union instead of the Trade Union). Even housewives are not left outside this ubiquitous web of surveillance and indoctrination: if a woman quits her job after marriage, she automatically becomes a member of the Women’s Union, where she would conduct her “organizational life.”
It was important that every single North Korean was a member of one of the above-mentioned five “organizations” at his/her workplace, and also a member of the inminban in his/her neighborhood. Technically, this is still the case, even though the significance of the system declined in the 1990s.
The “organizational life” usually consisted of frequent and soporifically long meetings. Typically there were three meetings every week, each lasting one or two hours. Two meetings would be dedicated to ideological indoctrination: their participants were lectured on the greatness of their Great Leader Kim Il Sung and his family, the glorious achievements of the Korean Workers’ Party, and the incomparable triumphs of the North Korean economy. The diabolical nature of US imperialism and sufferings of the destitute and oppressed South Korean population were also discussed frequently (as we’ll see below, however, in the recent decade the sufferings of South Koreans are being presented in a slightly different light).
One of the three weekly meetings is, however, quite different from the other two. It is known as a “Weekly Life Review Session” but better recognized under the descriptive translation as a “Self-Criticism and Mutual-Criticism Session.” Such a session usually meant that every participant (that is, every North Korean above the age of 14) was supposed to give a brief report about the misdeeds and unsound actions of him/herself in the week under review. Concurrently, another member of the same “organization” is expected to criticize the particular person for the same or different misdeeds. Of course, in real life these sessions are somewhat akin to theatrical performances, since people are street-smart enough to not admit anything that might lead to serious consequences. Typically, individuals would admit to being late for their shift or not being diligent enough in taking care of portraits of the Great Leader (surprisingly, the latter is seen as a minor deviation). Nonetheless, these self-criticism and mutual-criticism sessions help to keep the population in line and in some rare cases even lead to the exposure of significant ideological deviations.
One of the truly unique features of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was a reemergence of hereditary groups, each one having a clearly defined set of privileges and restrictions. In this regard, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was surprisingly reminiscent of a premodern society, with its order of fixed and hereditary castes (or “estates” as they were sometimes known in pre-modern Europe). Starting from 1957 the authorities began to conduct painstaking checks of the family background of every North Korean. This massive project was largely completed by the mid-1960s and led to the emergence of what is essentially a caste system.
This system is known to the North Koreans as sǒngbun. According to the sǒngbun system, every North Korean belongs to one of three strata: “loyal,” “wavering,” or “hostile.” In most cases people are classified in accordance to what the person or his/her direct male ancestors did in the 1940s and early 1950s.
Children and grandchildren of former landlords, Christian and Buddhist priests, private entrepreneurs, and clerks in the Japanese colonial administration, as well as descendants of other “suspicious elements” (like, say, courtesans or female shamans) are classified as part of the “hostile” strata. This involves a great deal of discrimination. For example, people born in the hostile caste cannot be accepted to prestigious colleges or reside in major cities—even if they are culprits’ great-grandchildren.
Conversely, people whose direct male ancestors greatly contributed to the establishment or defense of the Kim family regime are considered members of the “loyal” stratum. This privileged caste includes prominent officials, descendants of fallen heroes of the Korean War, and others whose deeds are lauded by the regime. As a rule, only members of this stratum are eligible for the most prestigious jobs.
Another rule is that one cannot change not only one’s own place in this hierarchical system but also the place of one’s children. Only in exceptional cases can a humble “bad sǒngbuner” be reclassified and promoted—for example, it would help if she or he saves a portrait of Kim Il Sung from a flooded house or does something equally heroic.
Sǒngbun is inherited through the male line; the present author knows one family whose wife is a descendant of revolutionary guerrillas and hence has an exceptionally good sǒngbun. Nonetheless, her husband is the progeny of a minor landlord, and hence children of the couple (incidentally, one of the most perfect, long-married couples I’ve seen in my life) were not eligible for admission to good colleges. Such unequal marriages were unusual: like any other stratified society, in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, the young and, especially, their parents were not enthusiastic about “marrying down.” Marriages, therefore, were usually concluded between the families of roughly equal social standing—and, indeed, countless times my North Korean interlocutors cited sǒngbun as an important, even decisive, factor in the choice of a marriage partner.
The sǒngbun system might appear blatantly unjust to somebody with modern (or postmodern) sensibilities, but it is surely an efficient way to keep people in line. In Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, every aspiring dissenter knew that it is not only he or she who would pay dearly for an attempt at resistance. Potential challengers were aware that their immediate family would remain the target of discrimination for generations. Needless to say, this made people even less willing to change the system.
All Communist regimes believed (and with good reason, one must admit) that their populace should be kept isolated from unauthorized knowledge of the outside world, but few if any of these regimes could rival North Korea in maintaining a self-imposed information blockade. This exceptional reclusiveness was a result of North Korea’s peculiar and vulnerable position as a divided state.
When the severe self-isolation policies were first introduced around 1960, the regime probably did this to make sure that the North Korean people would not be influenced by the dangerously liberal ideas emanating from the “revisionist” Soviet Union. However, it was the fabled “economic miracle” in the South that became the major source of political anxiety for North Korea’s leaders from around 1970. The ruling elite understood that the average North Korean should be kept unaware of the affluence enjoyed by his/her brethren under an alternative social and political system. As time went by, the gap between the two Koreas grew, as did the political importance of maintaining the strictest self-isolation regime.
North Korea was the only country that banned the use of tunable radios in peacetime. From around 1960 onward, all radios officially sold in North Korea had fixed tuning, so that only a small number of official North Korean channels could be listened to. If one bought a radio in a hard-currency shop or brought it from overseas (which was legal), the owner had to immediately submit the radio to police, where a technician would permanently disable its tuning mechanism. Since a technically savvy person can easily repair a radio that has been set to one station, all privately owned radio sets had to be sealed. During the above-mentioned random household checks, the inminban heads and police were required to make sure that these seals remained unbroken.
This presents a remarkable contrast with the Soviet Union, where, after Stalin’s death, listening to foreign broadcasts—even those deemed to be “subversive” in nature—became a perfectly legal activity. In the Soviet Union, the foreign stations were frequently jammed, but this jamming was ineffectual outside major cities, while high-quality shortwave radios could be freely purchased in the Soviet shops. A 1984 research project stated that in an average week some 14 to 18 percent of adult Soviet citizens listened to the Voice of America, 7 to 10 percent to the BBC, and 8 to 12 percent to Radio Liberty.24 Incidentally, such decadent permissiveness surprised North Koreans. I remember the shock of a minor North Korean official who learned from me (in the mid-1980s) that it was perfectly legal to listen to foreign broadcasts in the USSR. Stunned by such outrageous liberalism, he asked: “And what if the programming is not ideologically healthy?”
In the late 1960s, the authorities undertook a massive campaign aimed at the physical destruction of the foreign books (largely Soviet and Japanese) that were then privately owned by the North Koreans. In libraries, all foreign publications of a nontechnical nature were (and still are) to be kept in a special section, with only people possessing a proper security clearance allowed to peruse them. Remarkably, no exception was made for publications of the “fraternal” Communist countries: Moscow’s Pravda and Peking’s People’s Daily were deemed to be potentially as subversive as the Washington Post or Seoul’s Chosun Ilbo.
The North Korean authorities were aware that dangerous information could penetrate the country not only via media like radio or print but also through unsupervised personal interactions between the North Koreans and foreigners. They therefore took care to reduce such interaction to a bare minimum. North Koreans have always been aware that close contacts with foreigners outside one’s clearly defined official duties would be seen as dangerous.
When the present author lived in Pyongyang in the mid-1980s, we Soviet exchange students had to deal with an impressive array of restrictions placed on our daily lives. Sometimes these restrictions (like, say, a ban on visiting movie theaters) were hard to explain, but the overall underlying tendency was clear: authorities strove to eliminate possibilities for uncontrolled interactions between ideologically contaminated Soviet students and North Koreans. We were not allowed to attend classes together with North Korean students. We could not visit private homes, nor could we go to certain museums. In an interesting twist, foreigners were not allowed to enter into the catalog rooms of major libraries. Needless to say, most adult North Koreans would avoid personal contact with us.
Finally, in a truly Orwellian twist, the North Korean authorities took care to isolate the populace not only from the foreign media but also from the official publications of earlier years. All North Korean periodicals and a significant number of publications on social and political topics were regularly removed from common access libraries and could only be perused by people with special permissions. With periodicals the removal was done automatically, with all newspapers published more than 10 to 15 years ago being made inaccessible for the laity. This rule was obviously introduced to ensure that the changes in the policy line of the regime would remain unnoticeable to the populace. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s, the government did not want the average North Korean exposed to the paeans Kim Il Sung used to deliver to the great Soviet Army and Comrade Stalin during the 1940s. Nor did they want them aware of the harangues against “Soviet revisionism” that were common in the Korean press of the early 1960s.
A COUNTRY OF CAMPS
Kim Il Sung’s regime was brutal, but one of its most peculiar features was emphasis on the prevention of ideological deviation rather than open state terror. People who expressed ideologically unwholesome ideas were first dealt with through the institutions of “organizational life” and/or the inminban system. A majority of the people were fully aware that they could be the object of surveillance at any moment, so they knew better than to break the rules or express the slightest doubts about official ideology. Nonetheless, political persecution was still very much a part of life in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. After all, with all the advantages of unceasing surveillance and control, arbitrary arrest and the institutionalized use of violence were also important for maintaining internal stability.
As a result, North Korea had an extensive system of prison camps whose number of inmates was estimated to be some 150,000 in the early 1980s. Actually, the figure remained stable through a few decades: in 2011 the number was thought to be 154,000, though larger estimates have been suggested as well.25 The above-mentioned figures are estimates based on analysis of aerial photos and testimony from prison camp survivors and former guards, since the government of North Korea has—predictably—never admitted the existence of the prison camp system, let alone published official statistics about its scale.26
The above-mentioned figures indicate that during the late Kim Il Sung era, some 0.6 to 0.7 percent of the country’s population were political prisoners. To put things in the proper perspective, this is slightly higher than the ratio of political prisoners to the general population of the Soviet Union in the last years of Stalin’s rule. Indeed, the North Korean system of persecution owed much to Stalin’s model, but it also had some peculiarities that likely developed under the influence of Mao’s China.
To start with, the system is unusually secretive. The macabre tradition of show trials, so typical of Stalin’s Soviet Union, was discarded by North Korea’s policy makers long ago. The last show trial in North Korean history took place in December 1955, when Pak Hon-yǒng, founder of the Korean Communist Party and most prominent first-generation Communist, was sentenced to death as a spy of Japan and the United States. From then, Kim Il Sung’s victims began to disappear without a trace; the government simply did not bother informing the public that some prominent dignitary was found to be a lifelong South Korean saboteur or American spy (if such reports were issued at all, they were classified and targeted only lower reaches of the elite, not the population at large). In some cases, the disappearance did not mean death—years later, the person would make a sudden comeback, without any explanation of his/her long absence.
There are some indications that as a rule, a political criminal in North Korea is not even present at his/her own trial and does not know the term he/she is supposed to serve. The person is normally intercepted by the security agents at work or on a street, taken to an interrogation facility (they are not allowed to notify anybody at the time of arrest), and then shipped to the camp. This is a major difference with the USSR, where even in the worst times of Stalin-era purges, a mock trial—lasting 10 minutes or less—was deemed necessary to keep up appearances. When the condemned met an overworked execution team, the victim at least became aware of which political crime he or she had allegedly committed. David Hawk remarked that “forced disappearance” might be a more suitable way to describe what is normally referred to as “arrest” in North Korea, and he might be right.27 In North Korea only common criminals have the luxury of a formal trial, however biased and unfair.
Unlike the former USSR and most other countries, in North Korea there is a clear separation of the camps that handle the common criminals and the camps reserved exclusively for political prisoners. The latter are known as kwanliso, and currently there are six such camps in operation (in the past, there were about a dozen of them, but in the course of time some were closed while those remaining grew larger).
Another remarkable feature is the North Korean repressive system of family responsibility, created in Kim Il Sung’s era but much relaxed in the late 1990s when Kim Jong Il ascended to power. According to the system, if someone was arrested for a political crime, his entire family—technically speaking, all people who shared his household registration address and were his relatives—would be placed in a prison camp, but not with the criminal himself. This is another difference with Stalin’s justice: under Stalin, only family members of the most significant victims of the purge were sent to the camps, while under Kim Il Sung this was a standard procedure, routinely applied even to families of relatively minor political criminals.
Actually, the family responsibility principle might be counted among factors that contributed toward the regime’s stability. While the repressive system in North Korea remains very secretive, it has always been public knowledge that if somebody says or does something politically improper, not only the culprit but his entire family disappears. People who might risk their own life are understandably deterred by the realization that their entire family will pay a terrible price as well—including, perhaps, yet-tobe-born descendants.
A typical example of the family responsibility principle is the fate of Kang Ch’ǒl-hwan, arguably the best-known of all former inmates of the North Korean system. Kang was sent to Camp 15 together with his family in 1977, when he was only seven years old, and remained there for 10 years. The reason for his imprisonment was an old conflict between his grandmother, a former activist of Chongryon, and Han Tǒk-su, the notorious leader of ethnic Koreans in Japan, who enjoyed significant political clout in Pyongyang. The Kang family joined those Koreans who chose to return to the “Socialist Motherland,” and his grandfather, a successful businessman, contributed significant amounts of money to the construction of the Kim Il Sung mammoth statue on Mansudae Hill. However, as soon as the family entered North Korea, Han decided to settle old scores, and they were all sent to a camp—only Kang Ch’ǒl-hwan’s mother, being a daughter of a successful North Korean spy, was spared. Children are common in these camps, so schools are operated for them, with political police personnel acting as teachers (Kang Ch’ǒl-hwan, for instance, himself graduated from such a school).28
This story is interesting in another regard, too: while it was Kang’s grandmother whose nationalist-cum-revolutionary zeal placed the family in trouble, the major punishment was inflicted on Kang’s grandfather, a rather apolitical businessman. This is a remarkable, albeit paradoxical, reflection of the deeply patriarchal nature of North Korean society, where men might be held responsible for the serious misdeeds of “their” women—on the assumption that the man, being the natural boss of the household, must keep an eye on everything that happens there and stop any improper activities.
Inside the camps, there are zones with differing regimes: the softer “zones of revolutionization” and the stricter “zones of absolute control.” In the latter, prisoners are deprived of the right to live with their families and are subjected to prisonlike conditions. It is assumed they are never released.
On the other hand, “zones of revolutionization” are relatively mild by the standards of Gulag-style prison camps. Such zones are believed to exist only in two camps—Camp 18 and Camp 15. Inside these zones inmates are usually allowed to stay with their families and live in individual houses or family quarters. They go to work and then are free to move within the assigned zones, somewhat spared the regimented existence usually associated with a prison. Model prisoners might even be allowed to have children—of course, those children still remain with their parents inside prison fences. In exceptional cases prisoners might even be allowed to write letters home, but this is very rare (such leniency reportedly existed only in Camp 18). In most cases, however, the inmates are completely cut off from the outside world, so their friends and relations do not know what has happened to them—and, being conditioned by the experience of life in North Korea, they know better than to ask too many questions. The most important difference between the two zones of the North Korean prison camps is that people can be occasionally released from “zones of revolutionization”—and this is the reason why we know so much more about these zones than about the “zones of absolute control.”
It seems that as a rule, family members of a political criminal are released when the main culprit dies—but nobody knows this for sure. Normally, the main culprit is sent to a different place, ostensibly the “zone of absolute control” from which he has almost no chance of emerging alive.
The camp routine consists of 10 to 12 hours of backbreaking labor, followed by boring indoctrination sessions. There is one day of rest per month, and inability to meet quotas is punished by beatings as well as the reduction of food rations. Even full rations are barely sufficient for physical survival, however, and consist almost exclusively of poor-quality corn.
To make sure that no deviation, let alone dissent, will remain undetected, the North Korean political police, known as the Ministry for Protection of State Security (MPSS), have an extensive network of informers. Defecting officers of the MPSS, some of whom I know personally, claim that under normal circumstances there is supposed to be one informer for every 50 adults in the entire population. If this instruction is followed, it means that some 250 to 300,000 North Koreans are now paid police informers—and many more have had such experience at some point in their lives.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO KIM IL SUNG
So what was the worldview that common North Koreans were expected to hold? What were the ideas and assumptions that had to be protected from the corrosive influence of uncontrolled and uncensored information from the outside? A look at the North Korean ideology of Kim Il Sung’s era would reveal a peculiar mix of Leninism and Maoism, heavily spiced with rather extreme forms of nationalism and Confucian traditionalism.
Perhaps the most striking part of the North Korean “ideological landscape” from the late 1960s was a personality cult of Marshal (eventually Generalissimo) Great Leader Kim Il Sung, the Sun of the Nation, the Ever-Victorious General. Initially, his cult was patterned on the cults of Mao and Stalin, but by the early 1970s it took on dimensions that were unprecedented in the modern world.
Apart from its intensity, Kim’s cult had one peculiar feature that made it somewhat different from the cults of other Communist leaders. Mao and Stalin were presented officially as the successors of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as the best disciples of the dead Communist sages. In other words, they were just the most recent among the incarnations of Marxist wisdom and omniscience. The visual representation of, say, Stalin’s standing were oft-reproduced group portraits where Stalin’s profile was superimposed next to those of Marx, Engels, and Lenin—obviously, in order to demonstrate their equality in ideological terms. In China, another version of the same group portrait was also popular, with Chairman Mao superimposed on Stalin so that the image simultaneously depicted the five alleged founding fathers of Chinese-style Communism.
Kim Il Sung was never presented in such a way. North Korean propaganda of the early 1950s sometimes referred to Kim Il Sung as “Stalin’s loyal disciple,” but this was done in the times when the alleged primacy of the Soviet Union still remained a core element of the regime’s ideological discourse. Such references disappeared by the late 1950s.
In later eras, some ideological indebtedness to Marx and Lenin was begrudgingly admitted, so their portraits could sometimes be seen in North Korea as well (it seems that the last publicly displayed portrait of Marx was removed in April 2012, when the country celebrated the dynastic succession of Kim Jong Un). But these references were to a large extent intended for overseas consumption—devices used to placate visiting dignitaries from other Communist countries or to forge better ties with politically useful Western progressives. For domestic audiences, Kim Il Sung was not presented as an heir to, a disciple of, or the recipient of the guidance of any foreign leader, philosopher, or thinker. He was the founding father in his own right, the creator of the “Immortal Juche Idea” and the Greatest Man in the Five Thousand Years of Korean History. “National solipsism” (to borrow the words of Bruce Cumings), the tendency to see Korea as the decisive element of the entire world system, has always been an important feature of the North Korean worldview, so this later statement essentially implied that Kim Il Sung was the greatest human being to ever live.
Since 1972, all North Koreans above 16 years of age were required to sport a badge with Kim Il Sung’s visage when they left their homes. Kim Il Sung portraits needed to be placed at every office and every house; from around 1980 portraits of his son and successor Kim Jong Il were displayed alongside the father (in the 1990s, the portrait of Kim Chǒng-suk, Kim Il Sung’s wife and Kim Jong Il’s mother, was added). There were (and still are) complex regulations that prescribe how the pristine condition of the sacred images should be maintained. If the portraits were damaged, such an incident would be carefully investigated and the people responsible for the maintenance of the portraits would be punished if found guilty of neglect. The North Korean media was (and still is) full of stories about the heroic deeds of North Korean citizens who willingly sacrificed their lives to save portraits of the Great Leader and his son.
Kim Il Sung’s statues were erected across the country, with the largest statue being built on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang in 1972 (it is 22 meters high and initially was gilded with gold leaf). The statues were made centers of elaborate rituals. For example, on the Great Leader’s birthday and some other major official holidays, every North Korean was supposed to go to the nearest statue and after a deep bow lay flowers at the feet of the great man’s visage.
Names of Kim Il Sung and, eventually, Kim Jong Il are to be typed in bold script in North Korean publications (Kim Jong Un’s name began to be typed in bold in late December 2011, a few days after his father’s death). Every major article needs to start with a proper quote from either Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il. No exception is made for purely academic publications, including, say, works of liquid state physics or molecular biology. Fortunately for scientists, in his long life Kim Il Sung delivered many speeches and signed many articles, so a proper quote can always be found.
The list of titles of Kim Il Sung and his immediate family members was formalized in the 1970s. Thus, every North Korean knows how to distinguish between the “Great Leader” (Kim Il Sung) and “Dear Leader” (Kim Jong Il) and is also aware that “three Great Generals of the Paekdu Mountain” are Kim Il Sung, his wife Kim Jong Suk, and their son Kim Jong Il. After Kim Jong Il’s death and the ascendency of his son, Kim Jong Un, the latter was given the title of “Supreme Leader.”
Official propaganda established that the Kim family had played a major role in the last 150 years of Korean history. For example, in the 1970s schools began to teach North Korean students that the March 1st Uprising of 1919, the largest outbreak of anti-Japanese, pro-independence sentiment, started in Pyongyang (not in Seoul, as actually was the case) and that its major leader was, of course, Kim Il Sung’s father Kim Hyǒng-jik. They also claim that Kim Il Sung, then merely seven years old, took part in the March First rally. In real life Kim Hyǒng-jik, like a majority of the educated Koreans of the era, was indeed sympathetic toward the independence movement and was even briefly detained for participation in anti-Japanese activities. Nonetheless, he was by no means a prominent activist, let alone a leader, of the nationalist movement.
The official North Korean historiography didn’t admit the role played by the Korean Communist Party in spreading Marxism in Korea in the 1920s. This is not surprising since nearly all of the founders of this party were eventually purged by Kim Il Sung. According to the North Korean official narrative, the history of Korean Communism began when Kim Il Sung in 1926 founded the Anti-Imperialist Union. This means that Kim Il Sung single-handedly launched the Korean Communist movement at the age of 14—but nobody in Korea would dare not suspend one’s disbelief when it comes to claims of the superhuman qualities of Kim’s family.
One of the recurring features of this official narrative is an attempt to play down or conceal the foreign influences and connections of Kim Il Sung and his family.
As part of this systemic manipulation, the official narrative does not admit that Kim Jong Il was born in the Soviet Union on a military base in the vicinity of Khabarovsk. After all, the successor to the Juche Revolutionary Cause and future head of the ultra-nationalist state could not possibly have been born on foreign soil! North Korean propagandists therefore invented a secret guerrilla camp that allegedly existed on the slopes of Mount Paekdu in the early 1940s, claiming Kim Jong Il was born there.
In an interesting twist, in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union was safely dead and Soviet influence was no longer seen as a danger, North Korean official media finally admitted that Kim Il Sung did spend the early 1940s in the Soviet Union. However, this admission did not lead to disavowal of the Paekdu Camp story, which by that time had become a cornerstone of the official propaganda. Nowadays, a North Korean is supposed to believe that in the early 1940s, Kim Il Sung lived in Soviet exile but still personally led daring guerrilla raids into North Korea (Soviet documents indicate that this was not the case). Allegedly, he did so in the company of his pregnant wife and she thus gave birth to their first child on the sacral—and purely Korean—slopes of Mount Paekdu. To support these improbable claims the North Korean authorities built a “replica” of the Paekdu Secret Camp complete with a log cabin where Kim Jong Il was allegedly born, and made it a site of obligatory pilgrimage.
The complete control over information flows within society, combined with isolation from the outside world, gave North Korea’s propagandists opportunities their worldwide peers could not dream of. They could successfully hide from the populace even things that would be considered common knowledge in many other societies. At the same time, they could exaggerate or create nonevents with impunity.
In the media of Kim Il Sung’s era, North Korea was presented as a People’s Paradise, a place where the entire population continually lived in the state of unimaginable happiness. The North Korean cultural products of the period—unlike, for instance, the works of Soviet art of Stalin period—seldom if ever mentioned the existence of internal enemies. Rather, all North Koreans were presented as happy children living under the fatherly care of the omniscient Great Leader. In a remarkable gesture, North Korean banknotes bore the motto “We have nothing to envy,” thus reminding the North Koreans that they were, after all, the happiest nation under heaven.
THEIR MAJESTIES AND THEIR WOMEN
As is the case in any dynastic state, the personal and sexual lives of the rulers are by definition political. All candidates for the top job are chosen by their predecessors, and this means that family affairs are difficult to distinguish from the affairs of state.
The personal lives of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are quite convoluted and full of unexpected drama. TV producers should be happy about this since stories of passion and jealousy in Kim-era Pyongyang will likely achieve high ratings for the foreseeable future.
Kim Il Sung was married three times. Not much is known about his very first wife—even her existence is sometimes questioned. She is believed to have been another guerrilla, and most think that the first marriage was childless.
By the late 1930s, Kim Il Sung had entered his second union, with a girl named Kim Jong Suk. She was also a guerrilla, and she crossed the Soviet frontier in late 1940 together with Kim Il Sung. Barely literate, but kind to and popular with her comrades, she gave birth to three children. Their first son was Kim Jong Il, who would eventually become the North Korean leader.
Kim Jong Suk died in childbirth in 1949. Soon afterward, Kim Il Sung married Kim Song-ae, who worked at his office at the time. Kim Song-ae remained invisible in North Korean politics until the late 1960s, when she briefly made an attempt to position herself in public politics. She was soon eclipsed by the rise of her stepson, Kim Jong Il. Kim Song-ae bore three children. When Kim Jong Il was finally chosen as successor, they were sent to prestigious diplomatic jobs far away from Pyongyang—a move that provided them with an agreeable lifestyle while rendering them politically harmless (Kim Song-ae’s eldest son serves as North Korea’s ambassador to Poland).
In his youth, Kim Jong Il had the reputation of a playboy. Indeed, he was popular with girls—not only because he was a crown prince but also because he seems to have been charming (at least if available sources are to be believed). He had a good sense of humor, knew much about cinema and popular culture, and, in spite of being slightly overweight, loved riding motorbikes.
It seems that Kim Jong Il never formally registered a marriage, so the line between a proper wife and a live-in girlfriend was blurry. However, of all of Kim Jong Il’s women, only two have significance as far as dynastic policy is concerned.
Kim Jong Il’s first known partner was Song Hye-rim, a stunning movie star who had to divorce in order to move in with Kim Jong Il. In 1971 she gave birth to Kim Jong Nam, the Dear Leader’s first son. However, Song Hye-rim never managed to win the approval of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il’s mighty father—obviously because she was a daughter of South Korean Communists, whom Kim Il Sung never trusted. At any rate, Song Hye-rim’s relationship with Kim Jong Il collapsed in the early 1970s. Song Hye-rim was sent to a comfortable exile in Moscow, where she died in 2002.
Her son, Kim Jong Nam, also developed uneasy relations with the rest of the family. Since the early 2000s he has been living in Macao, and occasionally did not act to his father’s liking (including granting remarkably frank interviews to foreign journalists).
Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il would fall in love with another beauty, Ko Yǒng–hǔi, a dancer from a family of ethnic Koreans in Japan. She had two sons, Kim Jong Chol and Kim Jong Un. For a while in the late 1990s Ko acquired minor political clout, but like her predecessor she died at a relatively young age in 2004.
After Ko Yǒng–hǔi death, Kim Jong Il reputedly developed relations with the strong-minded and ambitious Kim Ok, his former secretary. Her somewhat special standing was confirmed when Kim Ok appeared at some funeral ceremonies after Kim Jong Il’s death in December 2011.
It was against such a backdrop that in late 2008, Kim Jong Il finally chose his third son, Kim Jong Un, as his successor. At the time of writing it appears that Kim Kyong Hee, Kim Jong Il’s younger sister, and her husband are expected to act as regents if the Dear Leader dies too soon. But such arrangements are always a murky business and the same can be said about dynastic politics in general.
Finally, Kim Jong Un broke with all conventions when in July 2012 he began to appear in public with his young and stunningly beautiful wife Ri Sol Ju, of whose background not much is known (it is, however, known that she loves expensive Dior handbags).
Much in line with this old approach, in 2011 the North Korean media published a worldwide rating of happiness. It stated that the happiest people live in China, with North Koreans coming in second (obviously, they were so moderate in their claims because by that time North Koreans became aware that China had much higher standards of living). Needless to say, the two lowest places in this curious rating were taken by the United States and South Korea.
Indeed, there was a striking contrast between Korea and the outside world. Predictably, the Communist nations were assumed to be relatively prosperous. Even so, the propaganda of Kim Il Sung’s era did not spend much time eulogizing the achievements of Soviet cosmonauts or Hungarian milkmaids. In this regard it was remarkably different from other nations of the Communist bloc: as we remember, Kim Il Sung’s leadership saw other Communist countries as dangerously liberal, a source of ideological corruption, and hence did not want to encourage excessive attention to their real or alleged achievements.
Propagandists also presented the countries of the Third World, especially those who styled themselves as Socialist, in a favorable light. When it covered the developing world, the North Korean media loved to dwell on the great popularity of the Juche Idea across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. If Nodong sinmun of the 1970s was to be believed, perusing works of Kim Il Sung was a favorite pastime of many an African villager.
For a brief while, attempts to create a worldwide Jucheist movement were an important part of North Korea’s internal and external propaganda. Nearly all of these propaganda operations took place in the Third World. In the developed West such an ideological offering would have few takers, while maintaining such a movement there would be costly. In the Communist bloc, Juche propaganda had an even lower chance of success than in London or Geneva. After all, the surveillance apparatus in these Communist countries was powerful enough to ensure obedience to the most correct brand of Communist ideology—that is, the brand currently accepted by the local leaders. Ordinary people in Communist countries also tended to be unsympathetic toward Juche, which they typically saw as a rude caricature of their own official ideologies.
Thus, North Korean diplomats and spies concentrated their efforts in the developing world. In the 1970s they created a network of study groups and research institutes there, dedicated to the propagation of Kim Il Sung’s ideology and heavily subsidized by Pyongyang. It soon became clear, however, that the scheme did not work as intended: many entrepreneurial activists were happy to receive cash, but their commitment to the Great Leader was doubtful, as was their ability to influence the politics of their home countries. Nonetheless, the subsidies for the worldwide Juche movement, while reduced around 1980, were never completely stopped since the movement was all too useful for domestic purposes. The North Korean leadership understood that it would be good to expose the North Koreans to the sight of exotic foreigners who allegedly come to Korea to lay flowers at the statues of the Dear Leader and confess their unwavering admiration for the Greatest Man on Earth. The government of North Korea had to pay for return air tickets and accommodation, but in domestic policy terms it might have been a good investment.
During the Kim Il Sung era, the media would report that inhabitants of the Communist bloc and Third World were doing relatively well, but remained inferior to the North Koreans. Things were different in the countries of the West—above all in the United States, the embodiment of all things evil. The United States was a country of aggressors who made a living by robbing the world of its resources, a nation of blood-thirsty warmongers and sadists. Since kindergarten, the North Koreans were exposed to endless tales about acts of sadistic brutality perpetrated by the disgusting Yankees during the Korean War. They were also reminded that the same acts were still committed in South Korea by these evil monsters (one of the most common sobriquets used for Americans in the North Korean media was “the American imperialists, the two-legged wolves”).
Indeed, the worst place on earth to live was South Korea, “a land without light, a land without air.” Until the late 1990s, South Korea was presented as a destitute American colony, whose population lived in abject poverty. In movies and paintings of that period, the South Korean cityscape looked positively hellish. People dressed in rags, lived in shacks, and looked for edible garbage at the dumping grounds near US military bases. Those disgusting “Yankees” were often present in the picture as well—fat American soldiers, with hugely protruding noses and ugly, caricatured features, riding in jeeps (if such a jeep hit a Korean girl, they would be laughing approvingly) or standing on the major crossroads with automatic rifles, always ready to kill innocent Koreans.
The Year One textbook presents North Korea’s children with an enlightening picture: “A school principal in South Korea beats and drives from school a child who cannot pay his monthly fee on time.”29 In high school they learn that “Nowadays, South Korea is swamped with seven million unemployed. Countless people stand in queues in front of employment centers, but not even a small number of jobs is forthcoming. The factories are closing one after another, and in such a situation even people who have work do not know when they will be ousted from their position.”30 Needless to say, these horror stories are pure fabrications—primary education is free in South Korea and even in the worst times of economic crisis there were never “seven million unemployed.”
Of course, there was resistance. Heroic South Koreans were secretly publishing works of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, holding revolutionary meetings in basement rooms adorned with portraits of the Great and Dear Leaders and, while imprisoned, professing their loyalties to the Juche Idea in spite of the unspeakable tortures inflicted upon them by the pro-American puppet police.
The explicit assumption was that an overwhelming majority of South Koreans envied their prosperous and happy brethren in the North and dreamt about a day when they too would enjoy life at the bosom of the Great Leader. Only a large US military presence and an iron-fist rule by a handful of shameless collaborators prevented this great dream from coming true.
To what extent did the average North Koreans of Kim Il Sung’s days believe these propaganda messages? By the late 1980s, a majority of the North Korean population had no personal memory of times when things were seriously different and had no access to alternative sources of information. There must have been some skeptics, especially among better-educated people or among those who had some exposure to overseas life. But, these people were wise enough to remain silent. In North Korea, the unusual intensity of propaganda was combined with the self-imposed information blockade and decades-long consistency of the ideological message. This ensured that the official worldview remained unquestioned by a majority. After all, the people had their own lives to live and were not that much concerned about how sincere in their statements Juche worshippers from Venezuela or Zimbabwe really were.
BE READY FOR BODY COUNT
Considering the North Korean regime’s habit of politicizing everything, one should not expect North Korean math textbooks to be free from politics.
Let’s have a brief look through the Year Two math textbook for North Korean primary schools, published in 2003 (or officially Year 91 of the Juche Era). This textbook is a masterpiece of politicized math and I would like to introduce some representative gems of this treasure chest.
Admittedly, the majority of the questions in the textbook are not political—indeed they have no backstory at all. Kids are required to deal with abstract numbers and areas. However, some 20 percent of all questions are different—they include a story, to make the math appear more interesting and relevant. Some of the stories are quite innocent—about a train’s timetable or kids’ games. But some are not.
For instance, take an engaging quiz from page 17: “During the Fatherland Liberation War [North Korea’s official name for the Korean War] the brave uncles of Korean People’s Army killed 265 American Imperial bastards in the first battle. In the second battle they killed 70 more bastards than they had in the first battle. How many bastards did they kill in the second battle? How many bastards did they kill all together?”
On page 24, the “American imperialist bastards” fared better and were lucky to survive the pious slaughter: “During the Fatherland Liberation War the brave uncles of the Korean People’s Army in one battle killed 374 American imperial bastards, who are brutal robbers. The number of prisoners taken was 133 more than the number of American imperial bastards killed. How many bastards were taken prisoner?”
The use of math for body counts is quite popular—there are four or five more questions like this in the textbook. As every North Korean child is supposed to believe, his South Korean peers also spend days and nights fighting the American imperialist bastards. Thus, this also creates a good opportunity to apply simple math.
On page 138 one can find the following question: “South Korean boys, who are fighting against the American imperialist wolves and their henchmen, handed out 45 bundles of leaflets with 150 leaflets in each bundle. They also stuck 50 bundles with 50 leaflets in each bundle. How many leaflets were used?”
Page 131 also provides kids with a revision question about leaflet dissemination: “Chadori lives in South Korea which is being suppressed by the American Imperial Wolves. In one day he handed out 5 bundles of leaflets, each bundle containing 185 leaflets. How many leaflets were handed out by boy Chadori?”
That said, North Korean children are not supposed to be too optimistic. Life in South Korea is not just composed of heroic struggle but also great suffering. On page 47 they can find the following question: “In one South Korean village which is suffering under the heel of the American imperialist wolf bastards, a flood destroyed 78 houses. The number of houses damaged was 15 more than the number destroyed. How many houses were damaged or destroyed in this South Korean village all together?”
These sufferings are nicely contrasted with the prosperity enjoyed by the happy North Koreans. On the same page, the question about destroyed South Korean houses is immediately followed by this question: “In the village where Yong-shik lives, they are building many new houses. 120 of these houses have 2 floors. The number of houses with 3 floors is 60 more than the number of houses with two floors. How many houses have been built in Yong-shik’s village?”
Indeed, feats of productive labor often become topics of North Korean questions, with robots, tractors, TV sets, and houses being mentioned most frequently. Interestingly, in some cases questions might produce results that were clearly not intended by the compilers. For example, on page 116 one can find the following question: “In one factory workers produced 27 washing machines in 3 days. Assuming that they produce the same number of washing machines every day, how many machines do they produce in one day?” One has to struggle hard to imagine a factory that manages to produce merely nine washing machines a day, but the irony clearly escapes the textbook’s authors (after all, a washing machine is a very rare luxury item in North Korea).
Activists love to say that everything is political. Whether this is true in general, I know not, but primary school math textbooks in North Korea clearly are.
THE SILVER LINING IN A SOCIAL DISASTER
This description of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea might appear extremely unappealing to an inhabitant of a developed liberal democracy, or even an aspiring liberal democracy; indeed it is fair to say that in the 1960s Kim Il Sung managed to create a society that was arguably the closest approximation to an Orwellian nightmare in world history—and then maintained this society for nearly 30 years.
Most people whose lifelong experiences are very different probably imagine that the average North Korean would constantly feel restive and dissatisfied when living under such a regime. However, this was not the case. When living in North Korea myself, I could not help but find it remarkable how “normal” the daily lives usually were. North Koreans of the Kim Il Sung era were not brainwashed automatons whose favorite pastime was goose-stepping and memorizing the lengthy speeches of their Leaders (although both these activities had to be a part of their lives). Nor were they closet dissenters who waited for the first opportunity to launch a pro-democracy struggle or studied subversive samizdat texts (and not only because samizdat simply could not possibly exist in such a thoroughly controlled system). Neither were they docile slaves who sheepishly followed any order from above.
Of course, there were zealots as well as dissenters and people broken by the system but, on balance, the vast majority of North Koreans did not belong to any of these categories. Like most people of all ages and all cultures, they did not normally pay too much attention to politics, even though the state-imposed rituals were performed and obligatory statements were delivered when necessary. People in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea were mainly concerned about much the same things people in other societies focused on. They thought about their families, they hoped to get a promotion, they wanted to educate their children, they were afraid of getting sick, they fell in love. They enjoyed romance, good food, and good books, and didn’t mind a glass of liquor. The political and ideological was more prominent in their lives than in the lives of the average person elsewhere, but it still did not color most of their experiences.
On top of this, in the 1950s and 1960s the promises of Kim Il Sung’s national Stalinism did look attractive to many North Koreans. Had they possessed the benefit of hindsight they would have probably had second thoughts about their initial enthusiasm for—or, at least, acceptance of—the system. The grave consequences, however, did not become apparent until it was too late.
Indeed, for the average North Korean living in the 1950s Kim Il Sung’s system did not look uninviting. It assured modernity and economic growth (first in industrial output and then in living standards). It vowed to maintain material equality while opening avenues of social advancement to people of humble origins. It promised to deliver justice to pro-Japanese collaborators whom the average Korean of the colonial period hated. This system was not democratic, to be sure, but its nondemocratic nature was probably seen only as a minor impediment by the majority.
We should not forget that Kim Il Sung was imposing his system on a country whose population overwhelmingly consisted of the sons and daughters of premodern subsistence farmers. These people had never been exposed to democracy even in theoretical terms, and Kim Il Sung’s system seemed to be better than what they had experienced before—being at the mercy of a feudal absolute monarchy and then a remarkably brutal colonial regime.
Information from the outside world did not hint at the existence of attractive alternatives elsewhere. The developed West had unsavory associations with colonialism and at any rate was too far removed and little known to be a viable object of emulation. South Korea until the late 1960s did not constitute a particularly attractive alternative, either. Contrary to what many ideologically biased historians claim nowadays, even at its lowest ebb the South Korean regime of Syngman Rhee was remarkably more permissive than its North Korean counterpart. Nonetheless, it was brutal—from available statistics, between the years 1945 and 1955 the number of people massacred for political reasons was actually larger in the South than in the North (a result of brutal anti-guerrilla campaigns). The South Korean regime also had a less equal distribution of wealth and to a large extent was dominated by former pro-Japanese collaborators. So until the late 1960s even a well-informed and unbiased observer would not have many reasons to see the South Korean system as vastly preferable to Kim Il Sung’s version of nationalist Stalinism.
At the time, even the material situation did not look so bad to the average North Korean. In the early 1960s tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans from China fled to North Korea to escape famine and chaos resulting from the Great Leap Forward and the other insane experiments of Chairman Mao. Those refugees were granted housing and assigned work by the North Korean authorities. A man who was part of this exodus recently recalled his surprise at walking into a North Korean shop for the first time and discovering plastic buckets of various shapes and sizes for sale. Everybody could buy these wonderful items without coupons, and there was not even a need to queue!
If compared with other countries of similar income levels, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea demonstrated a measure of success in such areas as secondary education and health care. Propaganda exaggerated these successes, but they were real nonetheless.
Just before the famine of the 1990s, life expectancy in the North peaked at 72, only marginally lower than the then life expectancy in the much more prosperous South. According to the 2008 census results, which are largely seen as plausible by the foreign experts, life expectancy at birth seems to be 69 years nowadays.31 This is some ten years shorter than in the South, but still impressive for such a poor country.
In 2008 child mortality in North Korea was estimated by the World Health Organization at 45 per 1,000 live births. This is a bit higher than China, but remarkably lower than in many developing countries of a comparable economic level. For example, in Chad the child mortality was 120 per 1,000, and, if the CIA estimates are to be believed, Chad and North Korea have roughly similar levels of per capita GDP (actually, there are good reasons to suspect that the CIA estimates of the North Korean GDP are inflated, so the actual contrast might be even more dramatic).
These achievements appear to be even more of a paradox if we take into account the serious and systematic underfunding of North Korean health-care facilities, even at the best of times. Most hospitals occupy derelict buildings with small crowded rooms, and their equipment is roughly the same as that used by Western doctors in the 1950s, if not the 1930s. Access to good drugs was also very limited. Doctors definitely did not constitute a privileged or well-paid group in North Korean society: medical professionals in the North were no different from average white-collar clerical staff in their social standing and income.
Surprisingly, the primary reason for these remarkable achievements might have been the very ability of the government to control everyone with little or no concern for privacy. These are the essentials for a police state, but they can be very conducive to maintaining public health through the use of preventative medicine.
The entire population of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea were subjected to regular health checks. The checks were simple and cheap—like, say, chest X-rays, but they helped to locate medical problems at the early stages. The checks were obligatory, and no North Korean could avoid an inspection, since the entire state machine saw to it. The same was the case with immunization. A Western doctor who frequently goes to North Korea with aid missions put it nicely in a private talk with the author: “For a health care professional, a police state is a paradise. I came with my medical van to a North Korean village, the local official blew a whistle, and in 10 minutes everyone in the village was waiting in front of our van. Every single person! No excuse was tolerated, and nobody dared to evade us. In other developing countries it was so different!”
Even the low salaries of doctors were not necessarily a bad thing. This allowed the rather poor state to support a large number of medical doctors—32.9 physicians per 10,000 persons, roughly the same rate as in France (35.0) and significantly above the US level (26.7).32 A relative shortage of nurses should be taken into account—North Korean doctors often have to perform tasks that in other countries are usually done by nurses. Nonetheless, the number of doctors is impressive.
This emphasis on cheap prophylactics and easy availability of basic—not to say primitive—health care is what made the North Korean achievements possible. After all, people of younger ages seldom die because of some chronic conditions that require expensive treatment: untreated appendicitis is much more likely to kill somebody in his or her 40s and 50s. Complicated diseases usually develop at an advanced age, while at earlier stages the majority of the threats to life come from seemingly minor ailments that can be easily treated if identified early enough, and if there is a doctor nearby.
Of course, even in the best of times there were serious problems with high-end medicine. The North Korean health-care system worked well when it dealt with fractured bones of tractor drivers or pneumonia among infantry soldiers, but it was poorly equipped to treat more complicated conditions. More sophisticated surgery was available only in the exclusive hospitals for the regime’s top brass (like Ponghwa clinic in Pyongyang). The lesser orders were (and still are) left to their sorry fate if they were unlucky to catch something serious, with the status of the physically and mentally handicapped being especially low.
Education—above all, primary and secondary education—was another area where a North Korean–style police state scored a remarkable success. Like basic medical care, primary education doesn’t cost that much—especially if one can afford large class sizes and doesn’t care about sophisticated equipment. After all, for running a village primary school one needs a building, a blackboard, and a reasonably qualified teacher; one also needs to make sure that more or less all children of school age will attend school. The North Korean state has managed to sort out these issues.
Not to a small extent the emphasis on education is driven by ideological concerns since intense ideological indoctrination is an integral part of schooling. Significantly, the most important school subjects of the North Korean curriculum are “the revolutionary history of the Great Leader” and “the revolutionary history of the Dear Leader.” However, one should not reduce the entire contents of North Korean education to the level of indoctrination and brainwashing: the average North Korean child acquires good skills in basic literacy and numeracy as well.
In regard to college-level education, the results are far more mixed. North Korean college students might be motivated, but the shortage of funds and excessive ideological controls are adversely influencing their performance (with a handful of military-related fields being an important exception). Some of the problems were structural, but many others were related to the persistent shortage of funds and resources. These shortages became progressively acute as time passed.
Indeed, the major problem of the North Korean state and North Korean society was a gradual economic slowdown. This became obvious around 1970. The official media kept insisting that the economy was growing by leaps and bounds, but the North Korean people could easily see from their own experiences that this was not the case. The system looked so attractive in theory and briefly seemed to work well, but in the early 1970s began its slow downhill slide.
THE BIRTH OF JUCHE, THE RISE OF THE SON, AND THE SLOW-MOTION DEMISE OF A HYPER-STALINIST ECONOMY
To solidify its newly acquired autonomy in regard to both China and Soviet Russia, the North Korean regime felt compelled to invent an ideology of its own. This ideology came to be known as Juche. The usual explanatory translation of the term is “self-reliance” but this is misleading. A better translation would be “self-importance” or “self-significance,” that is, the need to give primacy to one’s own national interests and peculiarities.
The Juche Idea was first mentioned by Kim Il Sung in a 1955 speech but remained marginal until the mid-1960s, when it was remodeled into the official ideology of the North Korean state. As a doctrine, it remained imprecise and vague, so one cannot help but agree with Brian Myers’s remark: “a farrago of Marxist and humanist banalities that is claimed to have been conceived by Kim himself, Juche Thought exists only to be praised.”33
The North Korean ideologues failed when in the 1970s they attempted to market the Juche Idea across the globe, but domestically it worked fine. The Juche Idea was presented as the highest and most up-to-date brand of progressive ideology worldwide. It justified the superiority of the North Korean leadership, who now could confront the Soviet and Chinese ideological pressures by stating (or, at least, hinting) that the Juche Idea was inherently superior to both Maoist and post-Stalinist versions of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. Actually, it was superior to Marxism itself. Kim Jong Il made things clear in an article first written in 1976:
Both in content and in composition, Kimilsungism is an original idea that cannot be explained within the framework of Marxism-Leninism. The Juche idea which constitutes the quintessence of Kimilsungism, is an idea newly discovered in the history of human thought. However, at present there is a tendency to interpret the Juche idea on the basis of the materialistic dialectic of Marxism. […] This shows that the originality of the Juche idea is not correctly understood.34
These statements might have massaged Kim Il Sung’s ego—he was surely pleased to fancy himself a great theoretician of the world significance, a person in the same league as Marx, Confucius, and Aristotle. However, these boastful claims served pragmatic functions as well. When North Korean propagandists marketed Juche as a philosophy superior to good old Leninism, they created a doctrinaire justification for Pyongyang’s political independence from Moscow and other self-proclaimed guardians of Marxism-Leninism.
In domestic politics, the most remarkable peculiarity of the period between 1965 and 1980 was the rise of Kim Jong Il, son of Kim Il Sung by his first wife, Kim Chǒng-suk. Kim Il Sung’s unprecedented decision to designate his son as a successor made North Korea the world’s first Communist monarchy. This was understandable: Kim Il Sung could see what happened in the Soviet Union, where immediately after Stalin’s death the late strongman came to be bitterly criticized by the people who were once seen as his most trusted lieutenants. Kim Il Sung also obviously took note of Chinese experience, where Chairman Mao’s designated successor, Lin Biao, could not even wait until the Chairman’s natural death and tried to hasten the process by staging a coup. Kim Il Sung, who in the early 1970s was rumored to be seriously ill, therefore needed to find a successor whose legitimacy would be dependent on that of Kim Il Sung himself and who hence would be unlikely to use his newly acquired power to destroy Kim Il Sung’s legacy. The choice came naturally: like countless powerful men in human history, Kim Il Sung decided that his son Kim Jong Il would become the perfect candidate for such an important job.
The rise of Kim Jong Il began in the late 1960s, when he was put in charge of the cultural sphere. Later, in 1974, he became a Politburo member and finally, in 1980, at the 6th Congress of the Korean Workers’ Party, he was officially pronounced successor of his father.
Young Kim Jong Il had a reputation as a playboy (not entirely undeserved) and initially was not taken seriously by foreign analysts, who often predicted that Kim Jong Il would not outlive his father for too long, at least politically. However, neither a string of stunning girlfriends (often dancers or movie stars) nor a well-known predisposition for vintage French wines and expensive Swiss cheese (not to mention first-rate sushi) prevented Kim Jong Il from becoming a charismatic politician and shrewd manipulator who eventually proved to be a match for his ruthless and street-smart father. He needed these skills, to be sure, since the time of the power transfer (which began in the mid-1970s) was also the time when the North Korean economy began its slow-motion decline.35
At the time of the Korean peninsula’s partition, the North effectively got a massive endowment. From approximately 1930 the Japanese Empire began to invest in Korea on a grand scale. At the time, Korea was seen as a natural rear base for the future advance of the Empire into China, and nobody in Tokyo dreamed that Korea could become an independent nation again. As a net result, by 1945 North Korea became the most industrially advanced region in East Asia outside of Japan. Meanwhile, the southern half of the Korean peninsula remained an underdeveloped agricultural region.
By 1940 what would soon become Kim Il Sung’s “People’s Paradise” produced 85 percent of metals, 88 percent of chemicals, and 85 percent of all electricity in Korea at that time.36 The Hamhǔng chemical plant was the world’s second largest and the power generators of the Yalu River hydro-power stations so impressed the Soviet experts in 1946 that they disassembled the machines for the purposes of reverse engineering. Needless to say, the massive US air raids during the Korean War destroyed a significant part of this sophisticated infrastructure. Nonetheless, many industrial facilities survived the war or were quickly repaired and put back into operation in the 1950s.
Making comparisons between a market economy and a centrally planned one is a notoriously tricky and imprecise business. In the particular case of the two Koreas the case is made even more complicated by the secretive nature of the Pyongyang regime: beginning around 1960, virtually all economic statistics were classified, and this remains the case at the time of writing. The only exception is population statistics and some data about food production that, since the 1990s, were occasionally provided to major international agencies. Everything else about the state of the North Korean economy is guesswork. Regardless, nobody doubts that until the mid-1960s (at the very least) in terms of basic macroeconomic indicators the Socialist North was ahead of the Capitalist South. Some scholars have argued that this superiority persisted well into the 1970s even though to the present author this statement seems to exaggerate the economic power of the North.
However, by the late 1960s the North Korean economy began to slow down. This fact could not be hidden from the population; they could see it at their shops. The number of items sold freely without rationing coupons was steadily diminishing, and in the early 1970s retail trade essentially ceased to exist. A state distribution system replaced it almost completely.
Nowadays a majority of elder North Koreans express their nostalgia for the late 1960s, which are still seen as a bygone era of great prosperity. This era was by no means a paradise of unlimited consumption, but in retrospect this nostalgic attitude is easy to understand: from the early 1970s on, the quality of life began to go downhill and never recovered again. This was especially unnerving for the North Korean leadership, who—unlike the common populace—knew perfectly well what was then happening in South Korea, which was experiencing one of the greatest economic success stories of the 20th century. From 1960 to 1985, South Korea enjoyed one of the world’s highest growth rates. Throughout this period, South Korea’s per capita GDP, measured in constant 1990 dollars, increased almost fivefold, from $1,200 to $5,700.37
As a result of the “Miracle on the Han River” (as this remarkable economic transformation is popularly known) by 1980 South Korea became the most advanced nation of all continental Asia. The speed of this transformation was incredible. Nowadays, South Korea has the world’s second largest number of high-rise residential buildings. It is rather difficult to believe that in 1963, when the first Korean apartment block was constructed, it was impossible to sell the flats since no one was willing to live above the second floor. South Korean television began to broadcast in color only in 1980, and the South Korean automobile industry, now the world’s fifth largest, virtually did not exist until 1974 (ditto the shipbuilding industry).
The tremendous economic success of the capitalist South coincided with the growing stagnation of the North. This was to have extremely important political consequences. In a sense this yawning gap in economic efficiency might be the single most important factor in determining the political situation in and around the Korean peninsula nowadays.
The reasons for the failure of the Leninist economic model have been studied thoroughly and in the case of North Korea they were essentially the same as elsewhere: distorted price information, lack of incentives for innovation and quality improvement, and an ingrained inability to handle data efficiently. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that many features of Leninist state Socialism were especially pronounced in North Korea, and hence one should not be surprised that the failure of this model was also especially spectacular there. North Korea first accepted an inherently inefficient system of economic management and then modified it in ways that further amplified its already remarkable inefficiencies.
To start, North Korea had an unusually high level of military spending. In the 1990s, this small country had a standing army of some 1.1 to 1.2 million people—the world’s highest ratio of military personnel to the general population (to put things in comparison, it was roughly the same ratio as in the United States of 1943). The military spending was also exceptionally high.38
Admittedly, there was some strategic logic behind this level of militarization. Until at least the early 1970s, if not longer, the North Korean government saw the forceful unification of Korea as a realistic political task, and even as its major long-term strategic aim. In order to outgun the army of South Korea, which had twice as many people, the state had to invest heavily in military hardware and also require an unusually long period of obligatory military service (North Korean males spend between seven and ten years of their lives under arms). Once South Korea began to pull ahead between 1965 and 1970, North Korea still strove to maintain its equality with the South by further increasing the already high share of the military spending. Burdened by this additional spending, the North Korean economy slowed down even further, and this slowdown in turn prompted North Korea’s leaders to increase military budget allocations. This was a classic example of a vicious circle and the sorry results were only too predictable.
Another specific factor that exacerbated North Korea’s economic woes was the policy of economic autarky. The slogan of “Self-Reliance” was borrowed verbatim from Mao’s China around 1960, even though few North Koreans were aware of its foreign origin. Indeed, the slogan was repeated ad nauseam in Kim Il Sung’s times and—unlike many other slogans—seems to have been taken seriously. Kim Il Sung and his guerrilla comrades were devoted nationalists, but their understanding of economics was remarkably patchy. They believed that Korea should make the economy as self-sustaining as possible in order to minimize the political leverage that foreign states could use over it.
It was officially assumed that North Korea can and should produce everything of economic significance within its own borders. The leadership thought that only imports of raw materials were ideologically permissible, but even they should be kept at a bare minimum. It was also believed that provinces, cities, and even individual factories should take care of their own logistical requirements whenever possible, expecting little from the central government.
Sometimes this insistence on self-reliance might have appeared comical to an outside observer. For example, while reading through a North Korean newspaper, I once came across an admiring report about workers at a Pyongyang granary who found a patriotic and politically correct solution for one of their logistics problems. They needed a diesel locomotive to move railway carriages filled with grain. Instead of ordering it from the state, they used the granary’s small workshop to manufacture the locomotive. Their “revolutionary spirit of self-reliance” was lauded by the report, but it said nothing about the quality and reliability of this curious hand-made contraption. This story reminds one of the notorious wooden trucks the Chinese villagers were ordered to make during the Great Leap Forward (and under virtually the same slogan of “self-reliance”). The North Korean media of Kim Il Sung’s era unceasingly published eulogies to such dubious triumphs.
Taking into consideration the small size of the North Korean economy, such deliberate rejection of economic specialization was a dangerous misjudgment. Among other things, this policy was aimed at reducing North Korea’s dependence on foreign powers and—above all—on its major sponsors, the USSR and China. However, it probably yielded the opposite result: by making the cumbersome North Korean economy even less efficient, this policy actually might have increased North Korea’s dependency on Soviet and Chinese assistance.
Indeed, Soviet and, to a lesser extent, Chinese aid was vital for the survival of the North Korean system. The scale of this support can never be estimated with real precision, since much of this aid was provided indirectly, through subsidized trade. For example, Soviet foreign trade organizations were frequently ordered by the Kremlin to accept substandard North Korean goods in lieu of payment for Soviet merchandise, which would have been much more expensive had the market mechanism been in operation. Most of the trade between North Korea and its sponsors was nonreciprocal—essentially it was aid, thinly disguised as trade. The Soviet Union was sending to North Korea spare parts for MiG jet fighters, crude oil, and Lada cars whilst being paid with canned pickles and bad tobacco that nobody wanted to smoke. The relations with other countries of the Communist bloc were not much different. It would be just a minor exaggeration to say that if we define “trade” as reciprocal exchange in goods, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea never conducted much trade as commonly understood, but rather swapped geopolitical concessions for economic subsidies.
As long as the Soviet Union and China, driven by their own geopolitical considerations, were willing to pump this aid in, the North Korean economy remained afloat, even though its growth rate was decelerating. Nonetheless, since the early 1960s the very existence of Soviet and Chinese aid was seldom if ever admitted openly. Perhaps not only the average North Korean but even the decision makers in Pyongyang did not fully appreciate how great their dependency on Soviet giveaways had become. The sudden termination of this aid in the early 1990s therefore delivered a mortal and sudden blow to Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. A new society grew out of the ruins of Kim Il Sung’s “national Stalinism” and—in spite of some superficial continuity from the previous era—this new North Korea was in fact very different.
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