By Andrei Lankov
Recently I was reading a textbook on North Korean history, issued by a group of South Korean scholars. This was a good read, not so much because it provided new data, but because it was a wonderful testimony to the biases now so fashionable in Korean academia.
Just one example of these: the textbook dedicates many pages to the 1946 land reform in the North, and favorably contrasts its radicalism with the sluggishness of similar measures in South Korea. Basically, it’s true: the South Korean government of 1948-50 included too many landlords to be enthusiastic about redistribution.
But there was something in the story which made me smile (sarcastically, I admit). The textbook’s authors fail to mention that from beginning to end, land reform in North Korea was planned by the Soviet military authorities, and Kim Il-sung simply signed documents, which had been prepared for him by Russian officers.
This fact is well-known, since Russian papers on the land reform have been declassified and published in South Korea a decade ago. But these facts do not fit in the authors’ concept and hence are not mentioned. This is a good example of manipulation, of course, and a fairly typical one. “Progressive” (that is, left-wing) academics want to play down the Soviet impact on the North.
Why? The answer is obvious ― this serves their political agenda. The modern South Korean left developed in the struggle against the right-wing military regimes of the 1960s and 1970s, and came to perceive the military strongmen as an embodiment of evil itself (actually, as dictatorships go, the South Korean generals were rather mild and exceptionally efficient in their economic management of South Korea ― but do not tell this to a South Korean “progressive”!).
Thus, the left wants to show the illegitimacy of their old enemy, insisting that South Korean state from its inception was not authentically national, being compromised by the wide employment of former pro-Japanese collaborators and perhaps by a close cooperation with the U.S. military administration.
But to emphasize this idea even further, the leftists need a good contrast, and they tend to believe that the North Korean state was the complete opposite to the allegedly corrupt and dependent Seoul government. The facts which demonstrate that for all practical purposes the North Korean state was a Soviet puppet do not fit into such picture, and hence should not be mentioned.
But even a cursory look through available documents clearly indicates: from 1945 to 1950, the North Korean regime operated under the complete control of Soviet supervisors. Who drafted the above mentioned land reform law? Soviet “advisers.” Who edited and, after some deliberation, confirmed the North Korean Constitution? Stalin himself. Who arrested all the major opponents to the emerging Communist regime? The Soviet military police. Where were they sent to do their time? To prison camps in Siberia, of course!
The available papers do not leave doubt that even relatively mundane actions of the North Korean government needed approval from Moscow. The Soviet Politburo, the supreme council of state, approved the agenda of the North Korean rubber-stamp parliament and even “gave permission” to stage a parade in 1948.
The much-trumpeted conference of the politicians from the North and South in spring 1948 was another Soviet idea, even if leftist historians now love to depict it as yet another expression of Pyongyang’s will to negotiate based on its alleged national feelings. The most important speeches to be delivered by the North Korean leaders had to be read and approved by the Soviet Embassy.
My favorite story in this regard occurred in December 1946 when the first elections in the North were being prepared. On Dec. 15 Soviet Colonel-General Terentii Shtykov discussed the composition of the North Korean proto-parliament with two other Soviet generals.
The generals (no Koreans were present) decided that the Assembly would consist of 231 members. They did not forget to distribute the places among the parties, decided how many women would become members and what would be the social composition of the legislature. If we have a look at the actual composition of the Assembly, we can see that these instructions were followed with only minor deviations.
However, such facts do not fit well into agenda of many young historians who have strong allergy to the anti-Communist propaganda of the past. Hence, such uncomfortable facts are played down.
But I cannot help but wonder: what will happen when the North Korean regime collapses and when the scale of its brutality will become too obvious? What will these people say? I suspect that many of them will change their mind and will start blaming the regime’s exceptional cruelty on malevolent foreign influences, on these scheming Russians whose involvement is now denied or played down.
But where is the truth? Somewhere between, I suspect. While initially created as a product of Stalinist social engineering, the North Korean regime still initially enjoyed strong support from below. But this admission might be too complicated for some historians who prefer simple explanations.
Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com. The views expressed in the above article are the author’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of The Korea Times.