By Andrei Lankov
North Korea is a country of mysteries. Precious little is known about the people who were the key players in the country’s history and whose decisions determined the fate of many millions who have lived there.
One of the most important and arguably most mysterious personalities in its history was Pang Hak-se, the founding father of North Korea’s security police.
To be the head of a political police organization under a Stalinist regime seems to be one of the world’s most dangerous jobs ― few of these people have ever died natural deaths.
It is sufficient to look at the sorry fates of Stalin’s own secret police chiefs. Genrikh Yagoda was ousted in 1936 and shot in 1938 (accused of being a foreign spy, of course). He was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, who did not outlast him by much, being shot in 1939. Yezhov’s successor Laventy Beria fared somewhat better, and even managed to outlive Stalin, but was shot by Stalin’s successors in 1953 (as a British spy, no less). Abakumov, who replaced his mentor Beria at the top of the security bureaucracy when Stalin was still alive, was executed in 1954. Secret police chiefs in other communist regimes did not fare much better.
Against such a backdrop, Pang seems truly exceptional: he survived all challenges and died a natural death in 1992. This achievement is even more remarkable as he was born a Soviet Korean and hence, by definition, was an outsider in the faction-ridden world of North Korean politics.
When, in 1945, the Soviet military acquired control of the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, they knew almost nothing about the country and people whom they were supposed to be governing. Things became more complicated in early 1946, when the Soviet leadership concluded that they should build a controllable and dependable state there. Under the circumstances, such a state necessarily had to be communist but there was a severe shortage of educated communists in North Korea.
Hence, the Soviet government decided to select a few hundred educated Soviet Koreans in the ethnic Korean communities in the then Soviet Central Asia. These people were educationists, engineers and party bureaucrats. They were sent to work as advisors to the emerging North Korean state agencies. But, soon instead of being merely advisors they took over branches of the nascent nation.
As my own archival research indicates, Pang Hak-se was born Nikolai Pang in the U.S.S.R. and arrived in Korea in September 1946. He was one of a few hundred ethnic Koreans form the then Soviet Union who were dispatched to Pyongyang to act as interpreters, advisers and, also controllers of the emerging regime.
Available documentary evidence does not tell us what Pang did before 1946. According to some rumors, in the Soviet Union he was a police investigator or some other police official. Others believe that he was an operative in Soviet intelligence. Both rumors could be true because in the late 1930s and early 1940s a number of Soviet Koreans with reliable political credentials were recruited to work as intelligence analysts and operatives.
Indeed, it seems likely that Pang was related to police operations before his arrival, since by 1947 he was already a high-level official in the North Korean police bureaucracy. By 1947, he was head of the department for state protection (that is, political police). It seems likely that he was the first head of North Korean state security.
In the late 1940s, the North Korean state was not particularly repressive ― at least if compared with Mao’s China and, for that matter, Soviet Russia. It helped that people who did not like the new system had a relatively easy exit option: The 38th parallel remained porous so in the years 1945-53, an estimated 1.5 million North Koreans fled to the South.
Nonetheless, the emerging dictatorship was not toothless. In the late 1950s, Pang told a high level Soviet diplomat, that throughout the years 1948-59 only 100,000 North Koreans were prosecuted for political crimes. This means that roughly 0.9% of the North Korean population went to prison, were exiled or executed for their real or alleged political misbehavior. As “normal” authoritarian regimes go, this is a high percentage, but by the standards of a Stalinist dictatorship, this indicator seems to be somewhat below the norm.
But things began to get worse in the late 1950s. Pang was still head of the political police, which sometimes was an independent agency and sometimes subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior. A large scale purge of “hostile elements” was launched only in the late 1950s. To a very large extent, it targeted not the former elite but fellow communist activists whose major crime was to have a real or alleged disagreement with Marshall Kim Il-sung.
North Korean politics was fractious from the very beginning. In the 1940s and 1950s, the elite there consisted of four major factions, each with its own history and its own set of political loyalties. There was the above-mentioned Soviet faction, which included former Soviet Koreans ― well educated, experienced but also thoroughly Russified. The Yanan sect consisted of former communist activists who had spent their formative years in China, being members of the Chinese Communist Party. The domestic group included activists from the colonial Korean communist underground, who were based out of Seoul and other Korean cities (mainly in the South). Finally there was the guerilla faction, which included Kim Il-sung and former anti-Japanese guerillas who had fought Japan’s colonial armies in Manchuria in the 1930s.
Initially, Kim’s faction was the weakest. But it would eventually emerge victorious, in the process, it had to rid the state of all other factions, and in this dog-eat-dog situation this usually meant the complete slaughter of everybody who was somebody in one of these opposing groups. Of course, it was claimed that these people were imperialist spies, responsible for all imaginable and unimaginable acts of sabotage. By the nature of his job, Pang was responsible for this “Great Purge.”
In August 1953, a dozen top communist leaders of the colonial era faced a show trial. Having been broken by investigators, they duly admitted to a number of highly improbable crimes and even described themselves publicly as the “pitiful running dogs of American imperialism” (of course it was claimed that they were all American spies). In 1955, the next show trial took place, this time there was only one victim ― Pak Hon-yong, the most prominent communist leader of the 1920s and ‘30s and briefly the head of the Korean Communist Party (in 1945-6, Kim Il-sung was technically his subordinate).
From 1956, Pang and his bureaucracy changed its techniques. Show trials ceased to be staged and victims began to disappear without trace and explanation. Many a North Korean vice minister or even humble district party secretary left their homes to never be heard of again. In a few days or weeks after the disappearances, their families were told to pack essentials and move to a remote part of the country or a prison camp.
The terror would reach its heights in the late 1950s. In the above mentioned conversation with the Soviet diplomat, Pang said that “in 1959 alone, another 100,000 people were punished for political crimes” ― as many as for the entire previous decade, which was marked by civil war, land reform and remarkable political transformation.
There is little doubt that Pang obediently followed instructions that came from the very top of the state hierarchy. He was merely an obedient hammer in the hands of Kim, who systematically destroyed all actual or potential opposition. That said, he must have been a very good hammer since his own life was uncharacteristically spared.
In the late 1950s, Kim began to purge officials with Soviet and Chinese connections. Nearly all Soviet Koreans perished or fled back to the Soviet Union. Pang survived, even though for a while he obviously lost some of Kim’s trust. However, in the late 1960s, he made a come-back.
He was never allowed to control the political police again but he remained a high-level dignitary and at the time of his death, he was the chairman of North Korea’s supreme court. Taking into account his biography, one can easily guess what kind of judicial philosophy he followed.
Pang, often called the “Korean Beria,” is buried in a prestigious memorial cemetery. His family has done extremely well, still working for the political police (frankly, they are like their ancestor: efficient but tough people to deal with, as the present author happens to know from personal experience).
Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.