National Division in the 1940s
The crucible of the period of national division and opposing states in Korea was the decade from 1943 to 1953. The politics of contemporary Korea cannot be understood without comprehending the events of this decade. It was the breeding ground of the two Koreas, of war, and of a reordering of international politics in Northeast Asia.
From the time of the tsars, Korea was a concern of Russian security. The Russo–Japanese War was fought in part over the disposition of the Korean Peninsula. It was often surmised that the Russians saw Korea as a gateway to the Pacific, and especially to warm-water ports. Furthermore, Korea had one of Asia’s oldest communist movements.
Thus, it would appear that postwar Korea was of great interest to the Soviet Union; many have thought that its policy was a simple matter of Sovietizing northern Korea, setting up a puppet state, and then, in 1950, directing Kim Il Sung to unify Korea by force.
There was greater complexity than this in Soviet policy, however, as historian Andrei Lankov’s scholarship has demonstrated. The Soviets did not get a warm-water port out of their involvement in Korea, and they did not have an effective relationship with Korean communists. Communist Party of the Soviet Union general secretary Joseph V. Stalin purged and even shot many of the Koreans who had functioned in the Comintern, and he did not help Kim Il Sung and other guerrillas in their struggle against the Japanese.
The United States took the initiative in big-power deliberations on Korea during World War II, suggesting a multilateral trusteeship for postwar Korea to the British in March 1943, and to the Soviets at the end of the same year. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, worried about the disposition of enemy-held colonial territories and aware of colonial demands for independence, sought a gradualist, tutelary policy of preparing colonials (like the Koreans) for self-government and independence.
At the Cairo Conference in December 1943, the Allies, at the urging of the United States, declared that after Japan was defeated, Korea would become independent “in due course,” a phrase consistent with Roosevelt’s ideas. At about the same time, planners in the US Department of State drastically altered the traditional US policy of noninvolvement toward Korea by defining the security of the peninsula as important to the security of the postwar Pacific, which was, in turn, important to US national security.
At a midnight meeting in Washington on August 10–11, 1945, US War Department officials, including John J. McCloy and Dean Rusk, decided to make the thirty-eighth parallel—roughly the half-way point between the northern and southern extremities of Korea — the dividing line between Soviet and US zones in Korea. Neither the Soviets nor the Koreans were consulted. The day following Japan’s surrender — August 15, 1945—was designated as the date of Korean independence from Japan. Then, when 25,000 US soldiers occupied southern Korea in early September 1945, they found themselves up against a strong Korean impulse for independence and for thorough reform of colonial legacies. By and large, Koreans wished to solve their problems themselves and resented any implication that they were not ready for self-government.
During World War II, Stalin usually did not voice an opinion in his discussions with Roosevelt about Korea. From 1941 to 1945, Kim Il Sung and other guerrillas were given sanctuary in Sino–Soviet border towns near Khabarovsk, trained at a small school, and dispatched as agents into Japanese-held territory. Recent research by Japanese historian Wada Haruki suggests that Chinese communists controlled the border camps, not Russians.
Although the US Department of State suspected that as many as 30,000 Koreans were being trained as Soviet guerrilla agents, postwar North Korean documents, captured by forces led by General Douglas MacArthur, show that there could not have been more than a few hundred guerrilla agents. When the Soviets occupied Korea north of the thirty-eighth parallel in August 1945, they brought these Koreans (often termed Soviet–Koreans, even though most of them were not Soviet citizens) with them.
Although this group was not large, several of them became prominent in the regime, for example Ho Ka-i, an experienced party organizer, and Nam Il, whom Americans came to know during the Korean War when he led the North Korean delegation in peace talks. The Soviets acquiesced to the thirty-eighth parallel decision without saying a word about it and then accepted the US plan for a multilateral trusteeship at a foreign ministers’ meeting in December 1945. Over the succeeding two years, the two powers held so-called joint commission meetings trying to resolve their differences and establish a provisional government for Korea.
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