Who is North Korea?

Part 1: Kim Il-sung up to the Sino-Soviet schism.

Perhaps before examining what is to be done with North Korea it might be valuable to explore the characters who have shaped the Hermit Kingdom from its earliest days to the present and to appreciate their influences.

A quick question for all and sundry. Who is the President of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea? Kim Jong-il? No, he is only the Supreme Leader. The post of President is reserved for his father, Kim Il-sung. There is nothing wrong with that as such until one realises that Kim Il-sung died in 1994! But by constitutional revision in 1998 Kim the elder was enshrined as Eternal President.

This one snippet from North Korea surely gives even the most casual of observers the basis to wonder what goes on in the corridors of power in Pyongyang.

To understand the DPRK it is first essential to understand the cult of personality that was built up so thoroughly around Kim Il-sung that it seemed more expedient after his death to let it perpetuate rather than transfer it wholesale onto someone else’s shoulders.

Kim Il-sung was born in 1912 and at a very early age his family moved to Manchuria. Whilst at school he developed an interest in Communism progressing from membership in a Marxist cell to joining an anti-Japanese guerrilla army led by the Communist Party of China (CPC). Kim was a political commissar and coincidentally ended up associating with a number of senior party members who were close to Mao.

Kim became leader of a division (only a few hundred men in reality) and he skirmished with the Japanese in North Eastern China and across the border into Korea until he was eventually forced to flee with his remaining men across the border into the Soviet Union in late 1940. At this point he was sent to a camp to be retrained by the Soviets along with other Korean Communist fighters and was awarded the rank of Captain in the Red Army. His political development was now in the hands of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

When the Soviet Union declared war on Japan in the summer of 1945 the Red Army’s progress to Pyongyang was surprisingly easy and the need for someone to head a puppet regime became acute. Stalin had Lavrenti Beria handle this task and it was Kim who Beria settled on. There were undoubtedly better qualified candidates but Kim had no connection with the indigenous Communist movement and that was ideal for Soviet needs. There is also much speculation that Kim was something of a blank canvas who was capable of being manipulated by his handlers.

Whatever the truth in this there is no escaping that Kim had spent only his very formative years in Korea and the eight years of formal education he had undergone were in China before receiving indoctrination in China and Siberia. He was described by one of his MVD handlers as essentially “created from zero” and furthermore his Korean language was poor. The MVD had to coach him through speeches and he was far from the ideal figurehead from this point of view but a very rosy picture of his anti-Japanese war record preceded him and for this reason he was popular with the population.

There are rumours and counter-rumours about who the real Kim was. Some Soviet sources later suggested that the Kim who reached Pyongyang was a replacement for the “real Kim” who had been killed in action earlier. Whatever the truth of that might be the reality is that the man we know as Kim Il-sung was installed as the head of the apparatus in the fledgling Soviet satellite by Stalin’s MVD and by September 1949 when the DPRK was proclaimed he was unassailable.

The Korean War came and went and Kim Il-sung survived to be the Great Leader of his people who had repelled an anti-communist attack from the south when in actual fact it was Kim who attacked the south but was then driven back right to the Chinese border before China saved his bacon by invading to drive back the UN forces as they feared invasion of their own territory. But why let a little thing like the truth get in the way of the cult of the personality?

This fraternal saving of Kim’s bacon gave him a new and endearing appreciation of China and the CPC. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s purges to the CPSU in 1956 several of the less mainstream and more idiosyncratic Communist regimes around the world felt less inclined towards the Soviet leader and saw Mao as a better role model. Kim was unimpressed by Khrushchev and turned increasingly towards China in much the same way as Enver Hoxha did in Albania. Curiously Kim only had contempt for Hoxha but the two men and their regimes were so much closer than either might have been willing to admit.