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The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950
The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950
The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950
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The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950

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North Korea, despite a shattered economy and a populace suffering from widespread hunger, has outlived repeated forecasts of its imminent demise. Charles K. Armstrong contends that a major source of North Korea's strength and resiliency, as well as of its flaws and shortcomings, lies in the poorly understood origins of its system of government. He examines the genesis of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely studied example of a communist state and as part of modern Korean history.

North Korea is one of the last redoubts of "unreformed" Marxism-Leninism in the world. Yet it is not a Soviet satellite in the East European manner, nor is its government the result of a local revolution, as in Cuba and Vietnam. Instead, the DPRK represents a unique "indigenization" of Soviet Stalinism, Armstrong finds. The system that formed under the umbrella of the Soviet occupation quickly developed into a nationalist regime as programs initiated from above merged with distinctive local conditions.

Armstrong's account is based on long-classified documents captured by U.S. forces during the Korean War. This enormous archive of over 1.6 million pages provides unprecedented insight into the making of the Pyongyang regime and fuels the author's argument that the North Korean state is likely to remain viable for some years to come.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 15, 2013
ISBN9780801468797
The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950
Author

Charles K. Armstrong

Charles K. Armstrong is the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences, Department of History, at Columbia University. He is the author of Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992andThe North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950, both from Cornell, and The Koreas, editor of Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy and the State, and coeditor of Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia.

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    The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 - Charles K. Armstrong

    The North Korean

    Revolution, 1945–1950

    CHARLES K. ARMSTRONG

    Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON

    For Elia

    Contents

    List of Illustrations

    Acknowledgments

    List of Abbreviations

    Introduction

    1.    Revolution on the Margins

    2.    Liberation, Occupation, and the Emerging New Order

    3.    Remaking the People

    4.    Coalition Politics and the United Front

    5.    Planning the Economy

    6.    Constructing Culture

    7.    A Regime of Surveillance

    8.    The People’s State

    Conclusion

    Appendix A: A Note on Sources

    Appendix B: Statements of General Chistiakov on the Soviet

    Occupation of North Korea, Fall 1945

    Selected Bibliography

    Illustrations

    Villagers on the way to a rally

    Folk dancing at a political rally

    Look! Young comrades burning with patriotism!

    Patients at a Workers’ Rest Center

    Collecting the agricultural tax

    Russian female doctor and Korean patient

    Factory workers

    Korean and Soviet students at a New Year’s party in the USSR

    Accepting a prize as a model farmer

    May Day, 1948: students of the School for Bereaved Families of Revolutionaries

    May Day, 1948: physical education teams on parade

    The children of North Korea are so free

    Local self-defense forces

    Cover of the illustrated magazine Hwalsal

    Acknowledgments

    I thank the many people responsible for the book’s completion, particularly Bruce Cumings, without whose advice, encouragement, and example this project could never even have been imagined, much less carried out. Other scholars at the University of Chicago also did a great deal to inspire and guide me, especially Harry Harootunian, Prasenjit Duara, Tetsuo Najita, and Michael Geyer. They, along with my fellow students Henry Em, Namhee Lee, Suk-jun Han, and many others, made Chicago an exciting and challenging place for the study of modern history in general and modern East Asia in particular.

    Friends and fellow scholars in Japan, China, the Republic of Korea, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have been gracious and helpful during my visits to their countries. At Korea University in Seoul, where I spent the 1991–92 academic year as a Fulbright researcher, Choi Jang Jip was an inspiring mentor, Kang Man’gil a towering source of information, and Pak Myŏngnim an invaluable guide. Over the last ten years I have been privileged to observe a new generation of bright, brave, and diligent South Korean scholars changing the face of contemporary Korean history. I am indebted to Ryu Kilchae, Yi Chongsŏk, Kim Sŏngbo, Kim Chaeyong, and Paik Hak Soon for advice and help, and for their fine scholarship from which I have learned so much.

    At the National Archives, the indefatigable Pang Sun-ju showed me around the North Korean captured document collection on each of my visits. Professor Pang knows this archive better than anyone else. Rich Boylen and other archivists in Suitland and College Park patiently assisted me in my search for relevant documentary sources.

    James Palais of the University of Washington, where I spent a year as a lecturer in the Jackson School of International Studies, read the manuscript and offered many valuable suggestions for improvement. Professor Dae-Sook Suh of the University of Hawaii also gave many useful and erudite comments. A year as a visiting assistant professor at Princeton University in 1995–96 offered me the good fortune of working with and getting much useful feedback from Stephen Kotkin, Gilbert Rozman, David Wolff, David Howell, and other scholars of modern Northeast Asia. At Columbia University, where I have taught since 1996, I have found my work greatly stimulated and enriched by my colleagues in the history department and in the East Asian Institute, especially Carol Gluck, Gari Ledyard, Anders Stephanson, Madeleine Zelin, and Samuel Kim. Under the auspices of Columbia’s Center for Korean Research, Alexandre Mansourov, then a graduate student at Columbia, worked assiduously to obtain and translate many useful Soviet documents relating to the Korean War. Madge Huntington of the East Asian Institute’s publications department did much to help improve the manuscript for publication in the Institute’s series, and Roger Haydon of Cornell University Press has been a superbly helpful and insightfully critical editor. I also thank Wada Haruki, Lim Chul, Carter Eckert, Michael Robinson, and other Korea scholars for their advice and criticism at various stages in this project.

    Funding for my research was provided by numerous grants and fellowships along the way, including a Foreign Language and Area Studies grant at the University of Chicago, a University of Chicago East Asia Center grant, a Fulbright student research grant, a MacArthur Research and Training Grant, two travel grants from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, and two junior faculty development grants from Columbia University’s Humanities and Social Sciences Council. The Center for Korean Research at Columbia University financed a visit to the DPRK in 1997 that, although not directly research-related, did a great deal to enhance my understanding of contemporary North Korea. I thank Stephen Linton of the Eugene Bell Foundation for organizing that trip and for the rich insights into North Korean life that he has shared with me on numerous occasions.

    Final revisions on the manuscript were made during my visit to Seoul on a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant in 2000. I thank Young-ick Lew, director of the Institute for Modern Korean Studies at Yonsei University, for offering me a home base and many valuable resources and contacts during my second Ful-bright stay. I also thank Dr. Horace H. Underwood, executive director of Fulbright in Korea, for his flexibility and generosity during this period of research, and Pang Ki-chung of Yonsei University and the students in his contemporary Korean history seminar for many enriching hours of discussion on recent Korean historiography. An earlier version of chapter 6 was published in Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 3, no. 3 (winter 1996). I thank the editors of Positions for their kind permission to reproduce it here.

    My parents, David and Lea Armstrong, and my entire extended family have shown great patience and understanding during the seemingly interminable process of research, writing, and publication of this book. My work has been greatly inspired by my older daughter, Mira, who has grown up with this book, and her younger sister, Sara, who was born shortly before its completion. Finally, my most important thanks are for Elia, who has been with me throughout the years it took to complete this book and encouraged my work while helping me to put it into proper perspective.

    Abbreviations

    Map of Korea in 1945, with the 38th parallel dividing the peninsula between North and South.

    Introduction

    On September 9, 1948, a little more than three years after Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule and just three weeks after the Republic of Korea had been founded in Seoul, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) was established in Pyongyang. Fifty years later, after the Soviet Union that had helped create the DPRK and the East European People’s Democracies had fallen into the dustbin of history, after China and Vietnam had moved their economies well down the road of market reform, and after South Korea had eclipsed the North in economic development and international recognition, the DPRK remained—along with Cuba—the last outpost of unreformed Marxism-Leninism. Having once presented itself as part of the wave of the future, North Korea was now a sad or dangerous curiosity, a historic relic with a shattered economy and a society suffering from widespread hunger. Yet the DPRK had outlived forecasts of its imminent demise that had been predicted since at least the late 1980s. A major source of the DPRK’s strength and resiliency, as well as many of its serious flaws and shortcomings, I contend, lies in the poorly understood origins of the North Korean system.

    This book examines the origins of the DPRK both as an important yet rarely examined example of Marxist-Leninist state socialism and as part of modern Korean history. North Korea is an ideal microcosm for understanding the phenomenon of Marxist-Leninist state socialism, a form of political, economic, and social organization and control that began with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and, by the middle of the twentieth century, seemed relentlessly on the march throughout Eurasia.¹ The Soviet Union was, of course, a major influence on the DPRK, and many of North Korea’s early leaders had spent a considerable amount of time in the USSR. Like eastern Germany, Poland, and other East European countries, North Korea was occupied by the Soviet Army immediately after World War II. But the DPRK leadership was also intimately linked to the Chinese revolution, and many of the key political figures in North Korea, including Kim Il Sung, had been members of the Chinese Communist Party. The core of the DPRK army was composed of ethnic Korean veterans of the Chinese revolution. Korea, like Vietnam, was a country recently released from colonial rule, and in both of these countries the communist movement had been closely associated with anticolonial nationalism. No other state socialist regime combined close ties with the USSR and China, Soviet occupation, and postcolonial environment as did the DPRK.

    The North Korean regime must also be seen in the context of several decades of radical nationalism in Korea, in which socialism and association with international communism and the USSR were seen by some as the best solution to the linked problems of colonial subjection and backwardness.² What was attractive to such radical nationalists was the Soviet model of successful and independent industrialization, combined with a more just and equitable distribution of economic benefit: a controlled, rationally planned, anticapitalist and anticolonial modernity. From the perspective of those who brought the DPRK into being, Marxist-Leninist state socialism represented an attempt to link Korea to the dynamic trajectory of world history, to make Korea modern. This was of course equally true for communists and their supporters who came to power in China, North Vietnam, and parts of Eastern Europe. As Milovan Djilas would later recall, in the aftermath of global depression and World War II, Soviet-style communism was an immensely inviting vehicle for those who desired to skip over centuries of slavery and backwardness.³ For the proponents and founders of this system, the DPRK was supposed to take Korea on a path of modernity modeled on the Soviet Union, in the postcolonial context of a newly independent country: a specifically noncapitalist, anticolonial modernity that would propel Korea from the status of a backward, subjugated nation into the forefront of social, cultural, and technological progress.

    For the first two or three decades of its existence North Korea seemed even for its critics to be a success, in economic development if not in political rights;⁴ since then, North Korea has been viewed increasingly as one of the worst examples of a failed experiment in social engineering in the twentieth century. Yet few have examined how this system worked from the inside to determine the causes and effects of this success or failure.

    This book is a study of political, cultural, economic, and social change in North Korea in the formative period of the socialist regime, between liberation from Japanese rule and the beginning of Soviet occupation in August 1945 to the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. As research on DPRK history within North Korea itself remains largely closed to foreign scholars, I base much of this book on a vast and relatively untapped collection of North Korean documents captured by American forces during the Korean War and currently housed in the U.S. National Archives.⁵ During 1945-50, North Korea was the site of a rapid, widespread, and sometimes violent social and political upheaval that by most common definitions would be considered a revolution.⁶ Several key elements of this experience constitute my four main themes. First, despite the high degree of Soviet influence and support in constructing a communist-oriented regime in their zone of occupation, communism in North Korea almost immediately became indigenized, and the distinctively Korean elements of the North Korean system were evident from the very beginning of the regime. This indigenization was not always noticed by outside observers at the time, especially Americans, who tended to view all developments in North Korea as the product of absolute Soviet control. Of course, the context for the North Korean revolution was a Soviet occupation. It is now clear that much of the direction of central policies came either from the Soviet Civil Administration in Pyongyang or directly from Moscow.⁷ But Soviet involvement tells only half the story. The environment of the Soviet occupation of northern Korea, unlike that in Eastern Europe, was an East Asian agrarian society recently emerged from colonial rule. Certain policies, such as land reform, were immensely popular regardless of whether Russians or Koreans drafted the laws. Moreover, the Korean input into these policies, whether that of the regime in Pyongyang or in the process of ground-level implementation, was greater than a reading of Soviet sources alone would suggest.

    In the area of ideology, for example, one of the most distinctively Korean elements of communism in North Korea was its emphasis on ideas over material conditions. Koreans shared this Marxist heresy with their counterparts in China and Vietnam, but this humanistic and voluntaristic emphasis was even more pronounced in Korea than in the other two East Asian communist revolutions, which may reflect the fact that Korea had long been more orthodox in its Confucianism than Vietnam or China. Korean communists tended to turn Marx on his head, as it were, valorizing human will over socioeconomic structures in a manner more reminiscent of traditional Confucianism than classic Marxism-Leninism. In short, the social and cultural context of the communist revolution in North Korea resulted in a society that looked less like Poland, a country occupied by the Red Army, than Vietnam, a country that was not. North Korea simply cannot be seen as a typical post-World War II Soviet satellite along the lines of East Germany or Poland, where leaders with longstanding ties to the USSR and long periods of residence in the Soviet Union were implanted by the Soviet occupation forces, where the Soviet Army remained the authority of last resort for decades afterward, and where the withdrawal of Soviet support quickly led to these regimes’ demise. The North Korean revolution may not have been entirely autonomous, but its indigenous elements allowed it to endure.

    Among the most important elements of this indigenization was Korean nationalism, which at the beginning was partially hidden under a veneer of fulsome praise for the USSR and for Stalin. But nationalism and pro-Soviet orientation were not mutually exclusive in East Asia at the time. For Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean radical nationalists, state socialism was a compelling route to national liberation and modernity, especially when the USSR had been the only major country to give material assistance to their struggles against colonialism. When such nationalists came to power in their respective countries, they did not see close ties to the USSR and public veneration for Stalin as contradictory to national independence; indeed, in their eyes, these were the very prerequisites for genuine independence. In any case, the distinction between authentic and imposed communist regimes, with the DPRK almost always in the latter category in taxonomies of socialist states,⁸ is not an altogether viable distinction. As Janos Kornai has pointed out, all socialist states except for the USSR itself resulted from combinations of internal forces and external support in varying proportions.⁹ Despite its origins under Soviet occupation, the DPRK subsequently followed the pattern of the People’s Republic of China and socialist Vietnam in building on a core of nationalist sentiment, filling a socialist form borrowed from the USSR with a highly nationalist content. And like China and Vietnam, North Korea managed to maintain its political viability even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, including the one genuine Soviet satellite in eastern Asia, the Mongolian People’s Republic. The nationalist elements in the formation of the North Korean system, even during the period of Soviet occupation, have long been ignored but are clearly apparent in any close examination of the DPRK.

    Second, and related to the first theme, is the importance of history and political culture predating the 1945 liberation. North Korea, despite what both its supporters and detractors insisted, did not wipe out Korea’s past and start from scratch. We cannot understand what developed in North Korea before 1950 or since without taking into consideration the background of Japanese colonialism as well as the deeper patterns of culture and behavior carried over from Korea’s past. The most immediate historical legacy for liberated Korea was the political vacuum, social dislocation, and cultural humiliation created by thirty-five years of Japanese rule, and the sudden end of that rule after a period of wrenching wartime mobilization in 1937–45. The Japanese, through their relatively brief but intense colonial occupation, left behind a powerful state apparatus that was used in differing ways by the Americans in the South and the Soviets in the North.¹⁰ They also left behind the basis of an industrial economy, especially in the northern part of the peninsula; a highly fragmented nationalist movement, decimated by years of heavy-handed repression; a relatively small and weakening Korean landlord class (particularly in the North) and a mass of disenfranchised farmers. The socialist regime in North Korea attempted to address, and was in turn shaped by, each of these legacies.

    At a deeper level is the more elusive question of Korean tradition and its influence on the North Korean system. As this system evolved, elements such as the ideological emphasis on humanism over materialism and voluntarism over historical determinacy, hereditary rule, the re-creation of rigid social hierarchies, and other divergences from Soviet communism have struck a number of observers as strongly reminiscent of traditional Korean politics and culture, especially the Confucian traditions of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910).¹¹ Consciously or not, the North Korean system has worked through symbols and power structures that have combined modern forms and traditional ones in distinctive ways. Reverence for family, the leader, and social distinction, for example, were not abolished in North Korea but transferred and reshaped. The humanistic idealism of Korean Confucian thought was at least one important element of what would become juche (self-reliance) philosophy, the official ideology of the DPRK from the 1960s onward, which would ultimately supplant Marxism-Leninism. This was indeed turning Marx on his head—or in Korean terms, back on his feet.

    In their monumental study of communism in Korea, Robert Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee assert that Korea in 1945 lacked requisites generally considered necessary for a successful Communist revolution, whatever these may be; the authors do not elaborate, nor give any examples of where such requisites did exist.¹² What such observations neglect is the manner in which communism in Korea was absorbed and transformed by the very hierarchical structure and Confucian social values of Korea’s deeply conservative society.¹³ Communism took root in North Korea in part because Korean society was so conservative—the possibility of breaking down old hierarchies was deeply attractive to many at the bottom of the social ladder, but the revolution created new hierarchical structures even more rigid than the old, and just as resistant to change.¹⁴ This was a modern revolutionary project, not an atavistic reassertion of tradition. But it resulted in a kind of modernization without modernity, that is, without the self-reflective, pluralistic elements associated with modern society in many other parts of the world, a system in which Western liberal ideas were for the most part simply irrelevant. North Korea developed with less exposure to Western liberal versions of modernity than any other society in Asia, moving directly from neo-Confucian monarchy to Japanese colonialism to Stalinism virtually without a break.

    Third, this book emphasizes the totalizing ambitions of the North Korean revolution. The formation of the DPRK, like the creation of Marxist-Leninist states in China, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, was more than the imposition of a political system: it entailed a new ordering of society, culture, language, and everyday practices. Bolshevism, as one early observer of the Soviet Union noted, had to be understood in terms of its living reality, in its daily life, festivals, works of art; in short as a civilization as whole.¹⁵ This was a deliberately planned, all-encompassing new civilization that was intended to replace the historically bankrupt civilization of Western (and Japanese) capitalism and imperialism. Its goal was the creation of a new society, manifest in property relations, social structure, the organization of the economy, political practice, and language ... a specifically socialist civilization based on the rejection of capitalism.¹⁶ Social relationships, culture and the arts, and everyday life in North Korea were the targets of intense transformative energies in this tumultuous five-year period.

    In this respect the adaptation of communism in North Korea may be somewhat analogous to the Confucianization of Korean society in early Chosŏn.¹⁷ Like the dynastic founder Yi Sŏnggye and his merit subjects, Kim Il Sung and other North Korean leaders attempted a wholesale transformation of society from the top down—but unlike their Chosŏn predecessors, they were also keenly sensitive to incorporating ideas and input from the lower elements of society as well. This was a new political system as well as a reordering of society, economic activity, culture, and everyday life, justified by a new official ideology imported from abroad—Neo-Confucianism in the earlier case, Marxism-Leninism in the latter. And in both cases, Korean elites insisted on ideological purity even after that ideology had collapsed in its place of origin. Like Chosŏn after the Ming dynasty China had fallen to the Manchus in the seventeenth century, when Korean literati refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of barbarians ruling China and insisted that only Korea maintained the true Confucian way, North Korean communism outlasted the Soviet Union itself, sticking to the path of pure socialism despite the collapse of Marxist-Leninist regimes in Eastern Europe and the radical transformation of the socialist economy in China.¹⁸ This metaphor should not be taken too far; the speed, extent, and goals of the communist transformation of North Korea were far different than the Confucianization of Chosŏn. Nor were the communists in North Korea in any way deliberately emulating their Chosŏn predecessors—on the contrary, their goal was the elimination of all feudal vestiges as quickly as possible. But the patterns of top-down implementation, comprehensiveness, and insistence on ideological purity bear some suggestive similarities.

    My fourth and final theme is the DPRK’s attempt to create new collective identities among the North Korean people. Through the agency of the mobilizing state, North Korean society was reconceptualized along new lines of division, categories which were in turn brought together as a unified whole in the single narrative of the nation. A process of ideological construction created not only individual subjects, but also collective subjects, categories such as worker, poor peasant, woman, and youth, as well as the nation itself. These new imagined communities were imagined not only by intellectuals and political leaders, but also by the people whose lives were most affected by this change, especially those who were identified as objects of liberation. The poor peasant majority seems to have been largely in favor of many of these social changes in the beginning. Those identified as workers probably benefited the most, materially and socially. North Korean women, at least temporarily, experienced a genuine liberation greater than women in any East Asian society of the time. And young people were an invaluable source and target of political mobilization, as well as a source of resistance and opposition. Most studies of the DPRK have focused on the makers of these radical political, economic, and social policies; my concern here is more with the effects of these policies on the people it was specifically targeted to liberate and transform: the rural poor, laborers, women, and youth.

    The new regime also cultivated intellectuals. Many of the best and most creative thinkers in Korea supported the project of political and cultural construction in the DPRK, including the writers Hong Myŏnghŭi and Im Hwa, the historian Paek Nam’un, and the linguist Kim Tubong, to name only a few. The creative input and political fate of such intellectuals has received very little attention in the English-language literature on North Korea, and will be the focus of one chapter.

    Given these four themes, let me emphasize that this book is not primarily about leadership politics in the DPRK. The intrigues and power struggles among members of various communist factions in the formative years of the DPRK have been well covered already, especially in the work of Dae-Sook Suh.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the composition of the emerging North Korean state and the background of its leadership had a critical impact on the policies that were implemented, and must be carefully taken into consideration in a study of this period. The DPRK leadership, many but by no means all having communist backgrounds, was a diverse and dynamic group in the late 1940s. There was considerable dispute and conflict on political programs, ideology, and practical policy. This was not merely factionalism, but had also to do with different views of socialism and how it should be implemented in North Korea. Within the Korean communist movement were those affiliated with the USSR (including second-generation Soviet Koreans), others with closer ties to Chinese communism, and still others who had spent the colonial period working underground in Korea or Japan. Such people, who now had the chance to take leading roles in the political system under Soviet occupation, had divergent political perspectives and group identifications, which affected the new state and the creation of the new society in important ways.

    In particular, I concentrate on Korean communists active in the anti-Japanese guerrilla conflict in Manchuria in the 1930s who came to play key roles in the North Korean regime, especially Kim Il Sung and his close comrades. By 1950 such people had left a deep imprint on the North Korean system, though they did not monopolize the center of power until the 1960s. The Manchurian guerrilla experience fundamentally shaped the worldview of Kim Il Sung and his comrades, and this experience became a kind of mythical point of origin for the DPRK almost as soon as the regime was founded, promoted in books, pamphlets, songs, and films. It is important to understand the history of the guerrilla struggle in Manchuria in order to make sense of the DPRK in 1950, or even in 2000. A new state and society for Korea had been imagined at the interstices of colonial control and unregulated frontier, at the meeting point of rootless intellectuals, political exiles, foreign influence, and a poor but mobile and relatively independent peasantry. Such elements were thrown together out of the unprecedented dislocation and mobility of the Japanese imperial project in Korea, a project extended into Manchuria with the creation of the Japanese-controlled state of Manchukuo in 1932. Kim Il Sung and other core leaders of the DPRK emerged out of an unyielding resistance to that project, a fact which—for better or for worse—has profoundly effected the DPRK ever since.²⁰

    Korean communism as a whole has received relatively little scholarly attention compared to its Vietnamese and Chinese counterparts. During the colonial period, Koreans formed one of the earliest and most active communist movements in Asia. Koreans comprised more than one-third of the delegates at the first Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, held in Moscow in January and February 1922. The former Chosŏn military officer and anti-Japanese guerrilla leader Yi Tonghwi established Korea’s first communist-oriented party, the Korean Socialist Party (Hanin sahoedang), among Korean exiles in the Russian Far East in 1918, three years before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was formed. By 1922, Yi’s party had nearly seven thousand members, in comparison to the CCP, which had less than one thousand members as late as 1925.²¹ To be sure, these early Korean activists were less concerned with communism as an ideology than with Leninist political organization and Russian assistance for the sake of liberating Korea from colonial rule. But by the early 1920s, communism had become an important part of the political discourse of anticolonial resistance in Korea.²²

    After the construction and dissolution of a number of Marxist and labor-oriented groups in the early 1920s, the first domestic Korean Communist Party (Chosŏn Kongsandang) was established in Seoul in April 1925. Under close Japanese surveillance and constant fear of suppression, the party was destroyed and reconstructed three times, until the fourth and final party was dissolved for good in 1928. But the ending of formal organization did not mean the end of communist activity in Korea, nor of communist-organized anti-Japanese resistance. Communists remained active in labor, peasant, and anticolonial movements within Korea, and worked in communist parties abroad in the Soviet Union and China; in some areas, especially along the border with China in Korea’s northeastern Hamgyŏng region, domestic and exile activities remained closely linked.

    Due to their active and outspoken resistance to colonial rule, which resulted in hundreds of executions and arrests, the left—including the communists—would have inevitably played an important role in Korean politics after liberation, especially because many of the conservative nationalists had become highly visible collaborators by the early 1940s. It is impossible to say how the politics of a unified Korea would have played out had it not been for the joint U.S.-Soviet occupation and the division of the peninsula. Given the experiences of China and Vietnam after World War II, a communist state over the whole peninsula is certainly one possible outcome. But in the event, the communists were guaranteed political dominance in one half of Korea and excluded entirely in the other. The socialist regime in North Korea was certainly shaped by its formation under foreign occupation in half of a divided nation, and the failure to resolve Korea’s division—attempted by force in 1950—has affected the DPRK ever since.

    My argument therefore is that the DPRK was more than a revolution from abroad,²³ imposed by fiat of the Soviet occupation, but was shaped by local circumstances and recent historical legacies. What emerged in North Korea was a fusion of communist programs initiated from above and local conditions encountered through implementation on the ground. By way of background, chapter 1 looks at northern Korea and the Sino-Korean border regions before liberation in 1945, paying particular attention to the activities and programs of the Chinese Communist Party’s Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (NEA-JUA) in the 1930s, which included Kim Il Sung and other Korean expatriates who came to positions of power in the North Korean regime.²⁴ Veterans of this movement came to dominate politics in North Korea after 1945, and consequently the Manchurian partisan experience profoundly shaped the DPRK for decades thereafter.

    The second chapter looks at the immediate aftermath of the Japanese surrender, the brief period of local Korean autonomy, and the emergence of a de facto North Korean regime under Soviet administration in the fall and winter of 1945-1946. Chapter 3 concerns the implementation of far-reaching social reforms in the spring and summer of 1946, the creation of new forms of social classification and identity, and the problematic liberation of peasants, workers, women, and young people as newly empowered social agents mobilized by the party and the state. Departing from our chronological narrative, the next four chapters are a more or less synchronous examination of different aspects of the new system that are crucial to understanding how the whole worked. These are the key elements of the total system, culminating in the state and the military. Chapter 4 deals with political organization at the center and in the provinces, including the local-level People’s Committees, interaction among the three main political parties (Korean Workers’ Party, Korean Democratic Party, and Ch’ŏndogyo Young Friends’ Party), and local political participation and elections. Chapter 5 examines economic planning and production under the new regime. Chapter 6 deals with intellectuals and the production of culture. Chapter 7 looks closely at local-level policing and the creation of a regime of surveillance that sought to bring every aspect of daily life under the watchful eye of the political authorities. Chapter 8 then moves forward to the creation of the Democratic People’s Republic in 1948, and the militarization of North Korean society leading up to the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950.

    It is easy enough in retrospect to see this revolutionary process in North Korea as a dead end, leading by the 1960s to a politically inflexible, economically stagnant, and culturally stultifying society.²⁵ By the 1990s, changing outside circumstances and the inability of the DPRK to respond positively to them had led to conditions of ever-increasing poverty and hunger. But none of this could have been foreseen in 1950. The brief space between liberation from colonial rule and the brutal North-South war was a time of unprecedented possibility, energy, chaos, terror, and enforced discipline. According to their own rhetoric, proponents and sympathizers of the new Democratic People’s Republic took North Korea on the path of Soviet-style state socialism not merely for the sake of extending Soviet interests, but as the answer to economic backwardness, social inequity, political disempowerment, and national subjugation. For them, this was a compelling solution to postcolonial Korea’s problems; for many others, such a program was misguided, dangerous, and reprehensible. This book is a study of how North Korea began on this path.


    1. Along with sociologists such as Michael Burawoy and David Lane, I prefer the term state socialism, which suggests the implementation of a particular vision of socialism primarily through the vehicle of the state, for regimes that have been variously called communist, Leninist, or Marxist-Leninist. See Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London: Verso, 1985), 158, and David Lane, The Rise and Fall of State Socialism (Cambridge, U. K.: Polity Press, 1996). Lane defines state socialism as a society distinguished by a state-owned, more or less centrally administered economy, controlled by a dominant communist party which seeks, on the basis of Marxism-Leninism and through the agency of the state, to mobilize the population to reach a classless society (p. 1). I find

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