B00BY4HXME EBOK (4 page)

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

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.

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.