(253) Southern Biases About North Korea

Last year 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.

Late North Korean founder
Kim Il-sung

By Andrei Lankov

Last year 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 such: 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 1948-1950 included too many landlords to be enthusiastic about land redistribution.

But there was something in the story that made me smile (sarcastically, I admit). The textbook authors fail to mention that from the very start the land reform program in North Korea was planned by the Soviet military authorities, and Kim Il-sung simply signed the documents, which had been prepared for him by the Russian officers.

This fact is well-known, since Russian papers on the land reform issue were declassified and published in South Korea almost a decade ago. But these facts do not accord with the authors' preconceptions and hence are not mentioned. A good example of manipulation, of course, but a fairly typical one. The ``progressive'' (that is, left-wing) academics, who increasingly dominate the South Korean intellectual world, want to play down the Soviet impact on the North.

Why? Because this serves their own political agenda. The modern South Korean Left was formed during the struggle against the right-wing military regimes of the 1960s and 1970s, and came to perceive them as an embodiment of evil (actually, as far as dictatorships go, the South Korean strongmen were mild, and exceptionally efficient with respect to economic management ― but do not tell this to a young Korean ``progressive!''). Thus, the Left wants to demonstrate the illegitimacy of their old enemy, insisting that the South Korean state was, from its inception, not authentically national. It was compromised by its widespread employment of former pro-Japanese collaborators and perhaps by a too close cooperation with the U.S. military administration. But to emphasize this idea even further, the leftists need a good example, and they tend to believe that the North Korean state was the complete opposite of the allegedly corrupt and dependent Seoul government. Facts, which show 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 the available documents clearly indicates: in 1945-1950, the North Korean regime operated under the complete control of the Soviet supervisors. Who drafted the above-mentioned land reform law? The Soviet advisers. Who edited and, after some deliberation, confirmed the North Korean Constitution? Stalin himself. Who arrested all the major opponents of 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 leave no doubt that even the relatively mundane actions of the North Korean government needed approval from Moscow. The Soviet Politburo, the supreme council of the state, approved the agenda of the North Korean rubber-stamping parliament and even ``gave permission'' to stage a parade in 1948. The much-trumpeted conference of the politicians from the North and South in the spring of 1948 was another Soviet idea, even if the 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 pre-read and approved in the Soviet Embassy.

My favorite story in this regard happened in December 1946, when the first elections for the North were being prepared. On Dec. 16, the 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 various parties, decided how many women would become members, and 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.

If all these do not give us a right to describe the North as a ``puppet regime'' ― well, I do not know what would. But such facts do not coincide with the agenda of many young historians who have a strong allergy to the anti-Communist propaganda of the past (even if this propaganda was much closer to the truth than they are ready to admit). Hence, such uncomfortable facts are downplayed.

But I cannot help but wonder: what will happen when the North Korean regime collapses and the scale of its brutality becomes all too obvious? What will these people say? I suspect that many of them will change their mind and start blaming the regime's exceptional cruelty on the malevolent foreign influences, on those same scheming Russians whose involvement is now denied or barely mentioned.

But where is the truth? Somewhere in-between, I suspect. While initially created as a product of Stalinist social engineering, the North Korean regime still enjoyed remarkable support from below. This support influenced the trajectory of the regime, too: since for better or worse North Korean Stalinism acquired some very specific and very national features.