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On Oct. 10, North Korea is going to hold a major celebration. All North Korean citizens have been issued bonuses equaling their monthly salary, and massive festivities are expected.
If you ask the average North Korean what happened on Oct. 10 to warrant such celebrations, they are likely to reply with little hesitation: "On that day, Oct. 10, 1945, the Great Leader Kim Il-sung established the North Korean Communist Party." Perhaps, 99.9 percent of North Koreans believe this statement. However, not a single word of it is true ― with the possible exception of the verb "to establish" and some pronouns.
Interestingly, one does not need any access to classified archival material to find out the truth. All relevant documents were published decades ago, in North Korea, quite officially. However, then the political situation changed, so the history was re-written completely, to serve new political demands. The North Korean elite, nevertheless, has no need to worry that inconvenient facts will surface: to need to rewrite the past is the reason why North Korea implements an unusual policy of banning access to the old periodicals and many old books, even though these books and periodicals were once published quite officially.
So, what did happen in North Korea in mid-October 1945? In mid-October, North Korean leftists and the Soviet military administration realized that they needed to organize the communist activists and sympathizers who operated across the then Soviet-controlled northern part of the Korean Peninsula. In order to do so, the Political Department of the Soviet 25th Army held a series of meetings which were attended by prominent local communists. The first meeting, on Oct. 10, failed to produce results, but it was followed by another discussion, on Oct. 13, where the participants agreed to establish an agency to manage the communist groups of the North.
So, until the late 1950s, the North Korean publications mentioned not Oct. 10 but Oct. 13 as the day when the North Korean communism began to take shape. However, in the late 1950s, the date was suddenly and without explanation changed to Oct. 10. One can only guess about the reasons for this change: perhaps, Kim Il-sung just believed that Oct. 10 (or 10.10 for short) sounds better as a date to celebrate?
The second case of rewriting is far more serious. The meeting participants did not proclaim the establishment of the North Korean Communist Party Foundation Committee, as all North Korean books claim and nearly all North Koreans now believe. It was simply impossible at the time.
A strict rule of the communist movement held that one country could have only one communist party. However, by October 1945 Korea already had a Communist Party, established in Seoul by Pak Hon-yong and other prominent members of the colonial-era communist underground. Furthermore, the Soviet representatives in Seoul, both diplomats and undercover intelligence agents recognized the party and established good working contacts with Pak and his people.
What they needed in North Korea was merely a local branch, and this was indeed established on Oct. 13. The body was called ‘the North Korean bureau of the Korean Communist party,' and it clearly positioned itself as subordinate to the Seoul headquarters. To make things clear, they even sent an appropriate telegram to Pak. Only in early summer 1946 the North Korean communist organizations were restructured again, to become a separate Communist Party of North Korea.
However, in the mid-1950s Pak suffered a typical fate of a first-generation communist leader. He was arrested, tortured and executed by his own comrades (in this particular case, as an American spy). Hence, the North Korean propagandists/historians could not accept that this traitor ever was Kim's boss, and in the late 1950s this part of history was rewritten too.
Finally, it was not Kim who became the leader of the North Korean bureau. Rather, it was an underground activist and Soviet intelligence operative named Kim Yong-bom. Only in December 1945, Kim Il-sung replaced Kim Yong-bom at the helm of the North Korean bureau. However, when Kim Il-sung became a god-like figure in North Korean society, it became impossible to admit that there were times when he was not the leader, so the history had to be rewritten again.
But for the average North Korean, all this is a mystery. The old newspapers and books are kept safely out of sight, so only official historians with security clearances can access them. Information control indeed does wonders.
Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. You can reach him at anlankov@yahoo.com.
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