The Arrival of Kim Il Sung
Kim Il Sung did not appear in North Korea until late September 1945. What he did in the weeks after the Japanese surrender was not known. The Soviets presented Kim to the Korean people as a guerrilla hero. From August 1945 to January 1946, the Soviets worked with a coalition of communists and nationalists, the latter headed by a Protestant leader named Cho Man-sik. The coalition did not set up a central administration, nor did it establish an army. In retrospect, their policy was more tentative and reactive than US policy in South Korea, which moved forward with plans for a separate administration and army. Soviet power in East Asia was flexible and resulted in the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Manchuria in early 1946.
Whether in response to US initiatives or because most Koreans despised the trusteeship agreement that had been negotiated at the end of 1945, separate institutions began to emerge in North Korea in early 1946. In February 1946, an Interim People’s Committee led by Kim Il Sung became the first central government in the North. The next month, a revolutionary land reform ensued, dispossessing landlords without compensation. In August 1946, a powerful political party (called the Korean Workers’ Party—KWP) quickly filled the political vacuum and dominated politics; and in the fall, the first rudiments of a northern army appeared.
Central agencies nationalized major industries (previously mostly owned by the Japanese) and began a two-year economic program based on the Soviet model of central planning and the priority of heavy industry. Nationalists and Christian leaders were ousted from all but pro forma participation in politics, and Cho Man-sik was held under house arrest. Kim Il Sung and his allies dominated all the political parties, ousting people who resisted them.
Within a year of the liberation from Japan, North Korea had a powerful political party, a growing economy, and a single leader named Kim Il Sung. Although Kim had rivals, his emergence—and that of the Kim system—dated from mid-1946. By then he had placed close, loyal allies at the heart of power. His prime assets were his background, his skills at organization, and his ideology.
Although Kim was only 34 years old when he came to power, few other Koreans who were still alive could match his record of resistance to the Japanese. He was fortunate to emerge in the last decade of a 40-year resistance that had killed off many leaders of the older generation. North Korea absurdly claimed that Kim was the leader of all Korean resisters, when in fact there were many more besides him. But Kim was able to win the support and firm loyalty of several hundred people like him: young, tough, nationalistic guerrillas who had fought in Manchuria.
The prime test of legitimacy in postwar Korea was one’s record under the hated Japanese regime, and so Kim and his core allies possessed nationalist credentials that were superior to those of the South Korean leadership. Furthermore, Kim’s backers had military force at their disposal and used it to advantage against rivals with no military experience.
Kim’s organizational skills probably came from his experience in the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s. Unlike traditional Korean leaders—and many more intellectual or theoretical communists, such as Pak Hon-yong—Kim pursued a style of mass leadership, using his considerable charisma and the practice of visiting factories and farms for “on-the-spot guidance,” and he encouraged his allies to do the same. The North Koreans went against Soviet orthodoxy by including masses of poor peasants in the KWP, indeed terming it a “mass” rather than a class or vanguard party.
Since the 1940s, North Korea has enrolled 12 to 14 percent of the population in the dominant party, compared to 1 to 3 percent for most communist parties. The vast majority of party members were poor peasants with no previous political experience. Membership in the party gave them position, prestige, privileges, and a rudimentary form of political participation.
Kim’s ideology tended to be revolutionary-nationalist rather than communist. The chuch’e ideology had its beginnings in the late 1940s (although the term chuch’e was not used until 1955), a doctrine that stressed self-reliance and independence but also drew upon the Neo-Confucian emphasis on rectification of the mind prior to action in the real world. Soon after Kim took power, virtually all North Koreans were required to participate in study groups and “re-education” meetings, where regime ideology was inculcated.
In the 1940s, Kim faced factional power struggles among his group (those guerrillas who operated in Manchuria), communists who had remained in Korea during the colonial period (the domestic faction), Koreans associated with Chinese communism (the Yan’an faction), and Koreans from or close to the Soviet Union (the Soviet faction).
In the aftermath of the Korean War, amid much false scapegoating for the disasters of the war, Kim purged the domestic faction, many of whose leaders were from southern Korea; Pak Hon-yong and 12 of his associates were pilloried in show trials under ridiculous charges that they were American spies. Ten of them subsequently were executed. In the mid-1950s, Kim eliminated key leaders of the Soviet faction, including Ho Ka-i, and overcame an apparent coup attempt by members of the Yan’an faction—whereupon he purged many of them. Some, like the guerrilla hero Mu Chong, reportedly escaped to China. These power struggles ensued during only the first decade of the regime and were not repeated. There were of course conflicts within the leadership later on, but they were relatively minor and did not successfully challenge Kim’s power.
In the 1946–48 period, there was much evidence that the Soviets hoped to dominate North Korea. In particular, they sought to involve North Korea in a quasicolonial relationship in which Korean raw materials, such as tungsten and gold, were exchanged for Soviet manufactures. Although the Soviets also sought to keep Chinese communist influence out of Korea, in the late 1940s Maoism was quietly introduced into Korean newspapers and books by a Yan’an-trained Korean agent.
Soviet influence was especially strong in the media, where major organs were staffed by Koreans from the Soviet Union, and in the security bureaus. Nonetheless, the Korean guerrillas who fought in Manchuria were not easily molded and dominated. They were tough, highly nationalistic, and determined to have Korea for themselves. This was especially so for the Korean People’s Army (KPA), which was an important base for Kim Il Sung and which was led by another Manchurian guerrilla, Ch’oe Yong-gon, when it was founded on February 8, 1948. At the founding ceremony, Kim urged his soldiers to carry forward the tradition of the Manchurian guerrillas.
In 1949, Kim Il-sung secured his designation as Suryong, Supreme Leader. In order to eliminate any opposition to his rule, he established a system of governance built on an elaborate guiding ideology, a single mass party led by a single person, a centrally-planned economy, a monopoly on the means of communication, and a system of security that employed violence and a political police. As a matter of priority, the DPRK built up its state security apparatus. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, modelled on the Soviet security system, with 4,000 to 5,000 headquarters staff, was comprised of 12,000 regular police, 3,000 political police, and 45,000 employees within the Security Guard units, Border Constabulary and Railroad Brigade. The Political Security Bureau within the Ministry was responsible for ensuring loyalty to the regime by uncovering and stopping resistance to authority and subversive activities. The Political Security Bureau also provided operational guidance to the Political Defence Bureau within the Ministry of Defence, which carried out the same functions within the military. The security system also employed an informant network of 400,000 people, an estimated 5 per cent of the population at that time.
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