(21) Park Heon-young: symbol of Korean communism

By Andrei Lankov

The first-generation Korean communists had a strange fate. In the 1940s, they were influential but in the 1950s most of them met violent deaths and their names were erased from official history in both North and South Korea. In the South, it became possible to talk of them recently, while in the North, where most of them perished at the hands of their own comrades, their names are still rarely mentioned and with the most unfavorable epithets.

Park Heon-young was once the most remarkable of all the first-generation communist leaders and his fate is quite typical of this group.

He was born in May 1900, the son of a rich landowner and his concubine. Like many other children of affluent landowning families, he went to a modern, Western-type school ― the first generation of affluent Koreans who had such an opportunity.

Park’s youth coincided with a great upsurge in anti-colonial sentiment. A massive outburst of anti-colonial rage in 1919 known as the March 1st Movement had a great impact on the minds of young Koreans. They began to wonder what had to be done about the sorry state of their country.

Few, if any, Koreans of Park’s generation thought that the nation’s problems could be solved by a return to some idealized past. There was almost no fundamentalism in the Korea of the early 1900s. What the young intellectuals wanted to achieve was modernity. They dreamed of a Korea of railways, airships, power stations and steel mills. The central issue became how to achieve this goal.

In the early 1920s a number of Korean intellectuals decided that the perfect solution might be found in communism. Communist theory marketed itself as rational and scientific, claiming both the ability to predict the future and to design a perfect society.

Park was among the pioneers of the Korean communist movement. In 1920, he moved to Shanghai and soon became a prominent leader of Korean communists. When in 1925 the assorted Korean communist groups merged into the Communist Party of Korea, Park, then merely 25 years old, became the head of its youth branch.

From the very beginning the Communist Party was illegal in colonial Korea, and a communist activist could not expect to stay outside of prison for too long. In 1927, Park was arrested. In order to get out of prison he feigned a psychiatric disorder, and on being released, he soon left for Moscow, the Mecca of the communist movement worldwide.

In the Soviet Union he spent a few years learning the fine specifics of the communist doctrine and in 1931 he moved back to East Asia.

He left his family in the Soviet Union in the relative safety of Moscow. He was never reunited with his wife, a fellow Korean communist who outlived him by a few years and died in the U.S.S.R. in the 1950s. Much later, already a prominent North Korean dignitary, he married a young beauty with whom he had another child. Both his second wife and his infant child perished in North Korean prisons in the late 1950s. His elder daughter became a prominent dancer in the Soviet Union where she married a Russian scientist, so all surviving decedents of Park live in Russia nowadays.

Park spent 1931-1945 in China and Korea, where he ran underground circles of intellectuals and workers and spent time in Japanese prisons. Subsequent events demonstrated that he was well known in the small world of Korean communism. When in August 1945 the Korean Communist Party was officially reestablished, he became its new leader almost effortlessly.

The established traditions of the communist movement held that there must be only one communist party in every country. Since Korea was not divided yet, Park’s headquarters controlled both the communists north and south of the 38th Parallel. Theoretically, Kim Il-sung, the emerging strongman in Pyongyang was initially considered to be Park’s subordinate.

In real life things were quite different. The Soviet military, then in full control of Korea’s north chose to promote Kim, a former Soviet army officer. Soviet decision makers wanted a Korean leader they could understand and whom they could control and they believed (wrongly, perhaps) that Kim would meet these conditions better than Park.

In late 1946, the Communist Party was outlawed in the South and Park moved to the North. He became Kim’s deputy in the party and was appointed to the prestigious (but not especially important) position of the North’s foreign minister. His main job was to run the communist underground in the South.

At the time Korean communists believed that the Syngman Rhee regime in Seoul was on the verge of collapse. They launched a guerilla war against the regime, on the assumption that instability would bring about a revolution. Their operations were subsidized by North Koreans and the Soviets, but it was Park who was in charge of the “South Korean uprising.” When in 1949 the guerilla movement began to wane, Park began to push for permission to attack the South in order to “liberate the suffering mass of workers and peasants.” Declassified Soviet documents seem to indicate that Park ― together with his rival Kim ― was one of the most zealous backers of a “military solution” or to be blunt, he was one of the people who made a decisive contribution to initiating the Korean War.

Needless to say, he didn’t see it as a war of aggression. Rather he believed North Korean tanks would bring eternal happiness to the ‘toiling masses’ in the South. Less lofty reasons might have been involved as well. As Soviet intelligence reports testify, relations between Park and Kim were never particularly cordial. Park knew that he was worshiped by the South Korean left (and the South had twice as many people as Kim’s North), so unification would greatly increase his powerbase.

But things took a different turn, and by 1951 few would have doubted that the liberation of the South would have to be postponed into the indefinite future.

Kim saw Park as a major threat. For the communist veterans, Kim and his guerilla comrades from the Manchurian wilderness were ill-educated rustics from a political and strategic backwater whilst Park had the distinction of being the only major communist leader who spent most of his time doing the underground work in colonial Korea.

The end of the war also made Park politically expendable: there was no more need to worry about the fate of the South Korean underground which was under Park’s control. So Kim delivered the first strike in 1953. In that year, the top Korean communist leaders of South Korean origin (nearly all first-generation communists still alive at the time) were arrested. They were accused of planning a coup ― a highly improbable claim since they did not control any significant military units whilst for all practical purposes the country was under Chinese military administration and China would never tolerate such an act. They were also accused of being Japanese and American spies ― the usual fate of communist leaders unlucky enough to find themselves purged in a Stalinist country.

In a show trial staged in August 1953 a selection of them were given their sentences, Park was not among them but from then his fate was sealed. His trial took place in December 1955 and ended in a predictable death sentence. Nothing was ever heard about him again, even though some recently discovered Soviet documents indicate he was still alive in May 1956.

What should we make of Park and his fate? For the South Korean left, he remains an important symbol. The South Korean leftists, many whom are not excessively critical of North Korea, usually tend to gloss over the circumstances of Park’s death. In some relatively rare cases they even hint that Park and other Seoul-based communist leaders might indeed have been American spies ― but these opinions are usually expressed by die-hard Kim Il-sungists on the South Korea’s left-flank. In the opinion of the majority of South Korea’s left, Park remains the symbol of an alleged democratic alternative to Kim’s dictatorship, a person who would have gotten it right.

The present author is skeptical about these ideology-driven claims. Had Park, not Kim, become the North Korean dictator, things would hardly be much different. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that Park was a remarkable and gifted man, whose name will be remembered ― often with admiration ― by generations of Koreans to come.

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.