“In the night of our ignorance, North Korea
confirms all stereotypes.”
—Bruce Cumings1
Of the two superpowers, the United States and Russia, the latter was clearly favored by Koreans and the former clearly spurned. Koreans certainly weren’t going to look to the United States to determine their future, for the future Washington offered was one of perpetual Korean subordination to foreign rule within the US empire. Washington had assented to Japan’s colonization of Korea, in return for Japan accepting the United States’ colonization of the Philippines. Wilson had reneged on the promise (he never really made) to colonial peoples to usher in a new age of self-determination. And the United States, which hadn’t spilled a single drop of blood in the liberation of Korea, had marched onto the peninsula, declared a military dictatorship, and rejected Korea’s four decades-long struggle for independence. What’s more, Washington had intervened on behalf of the most reviled groups in the country, and brought the Japanese and their Korean collaborators back into administrative positions, reversing efforts Korean patriots had made to purge them. Washington, then, had a long and ignominious record of opposition to Korean independence.
On the other hand, Koreans looked to the Soviet Union as a model because the communists genuinely supported national liberation, were against the landlords, and promoted women’s rights. Hodge’s analysis that Koreans were inspired by communism was corroborated by Edwin Pauley, a friend and adviser to US president Harry S. Truman. After touring Korea, Pauley warned the US president that, “Communism in Korea could get off to a better start than practically anywhere else in the world.”2
“In 1945 Koreans would have worked out a new destiny,” wrote the historian Frank Baldwin in 1975. “That destiny almost certainly would have been a leftist, perhaps a communist, government.”3 Bruce Cumings echoed Baldwin’s (and Hodge’s and Pauley’s) view: a “leftist regime would have taken over quickly, and it would have been a revolutionary nationalist government.”4
Koreans in the US zone were also looking to the USSR because it was clear that in the Soviet zone, Koreans were allowed to build an independent Korea, emancipated from the exploitation of the indigenous landlord class, and liberated from the treachery of pro-Japanese collaborators. The Soviets, wrote Bruce Cumings, “stayed in the background and let Koreans run the government, they put anti-Japanese resistance leaders out front, and they supported radical reforms of the land system, labor conditions, and women’s rights.”5 To Kim Il-sung, who had returned to Korea on September 19, the Soviet people were “our liberator and helper.”6
In contrast to the US zone, where the Korean People’s Republic was abolished, in the Soviet zone people’s committees spread rapidly, developed into a network, and quickly evolved into a provisional government, which immediately undertook significant democratic reforms. Land was redistributed from the landlords to those who tilled it. Large enterprises, mainly Japanese owned, were nationalized. An eight-hour workday, an end to child labor, and a program of social insurance, were soon implemented. A law allowing Koreans to be educated in their own language, contrary to Japanese practice, which had discouraged it, was decreed. And Koreans, through their people’s committees, abolished the differential assignment of rights and privileges on the basis of gender.7
The provisional government was established on February 8, 1946, with Kim Il-sung as its president.8 On the eve of their return to Korea, the top Korean leaders of the Manchurian resistance had agreed that, owing to his reputation and charisma, Kim Il-sung would be promoted as the principal political leader of a liberated Korea.9 Kim had considerable charm10 and his organizational and leadership abilities, demonstrated through his leadership in the Chinese Communist Party and Communist Party-led armies,11 were nonpareil. His reputation and magnetism would allow him to command popular support, while his leadership and organizational skills made him the perfect candidate to oversee the administration of a new government.12
Kim’s ascension to power, then, was not a Soviet-orchestrated plan to impose a dictator on a resistant population, as anti-DPRK propaganda, disseminated by US intelligence services and ignorant Western journalists, would have it. The revolutionary situation was endogenous to Korea, and Kim’s elevation to the presidency of the provisional government was an expression of Koreans’ aspirations for independence. The autonomous development of the provisional government from the spontaneously developed people’s committees arose from Korean ambitions to overcome four decades of hardship and humiliation under Japanese rule, while Kim Il-sung’s ability to command the popular support of Koreans in the Soviet zone was attributable to his personal qualities, his undeniable patriotic credentials, and his outstanding commitment to the historical aspirations of Koreans.13 He was not imposed on Koreans by Moscow, and his revolution was not exogenous, imported from the USSR. He had the support of his compatriots, and the reforms his government implemented were demanded by Koreans themselves.
In some ways, the cult of Kim Il-sung that would grow up around the guerrilla leader obscured the role that Koreans en masse played north of the 38th parallel in collectively bringing about their liberation. True, the Soviets furnished Koreans space to work out new modalities of independent rule, free from the stifling hand of the United States. Without the Red Army’s presence from 1945 to 1948, Korea’s independence movement in the north would have been quashed by the US empire, as it was in the south; hence Kim Il-sung’s designation of the Soviets as our “liberator and helper.”
In North Korea, Kim is revered as a semi-deity, a god-like figure who, it might be supposed, single-handedly delivered his people to freedom. There is a parallel with Fidel Castro, another revolutionary nationalist, also of considerable personal magnetism, who is often portrayed as playing a larger-than-life role in his country’s liberation, overshadowing the significant contributions of countless others. When Castro died, historian Louis A. Perez Jr. wrote what might be called a historian’s elegy of a great figure. His remarks on the passing of Castro, however, apply equally to Kim. Replace Castro with Kim, and Perez’s requiem becomes:
[Kim Il-sung] was in many ways defined through his confrontation with the [Japanese]. His uncompromising defense of [Korean] claims to self-determination as a matter of a historically-determined mandate and a legacy to fulfil more than adequately validated his moral claim to leadership. To confront [Japan, and later the United States] in defense of national sovereignty was to make good on the internal logic of [Korean] history.
What resonated in [1946] and in the years that followed was the very phenomenon of the [Korean] revolution, of a people summoned to heroic purpose, to affirm the right of self-determination and national sovereignty. [Kim Il-sung] was the most visible representative of that people.
However large a role [Kim] played in shaping the course of [Korean] history, it bears emphasizing that the success of his appeal and the source of his authority were very much a function of the degree to which he represented the authenticity of [Korean] historical aspirations. [Kim Il-sung] was an actor, of course, but he was also acted upon. He shaped the history of his times in discharge of the history in which he was formed. The meaning of his life must be situated within that history, as it was lived and learned, as the circumstances that acted to forge self-knowledge and knowledge of the world at large, and served to inform the purpose of his presence.
To subsume outcomes of [decades] of [North Korean] programs and policies to the will of one man is facile. It is bad history. Worse still, it is to dismiss the efforts of countless hundreds of thousands of other men and women who—with ill-will or good intentions—played important roles in the decisions, deliberations and discharge of the purpose that has moved the history of [Korea].14
How, then, did the countless men and women of the Korean north move the history of Korea? Apart from forming people’s committees through which they consented to their own representatives, Koreans—peasants in the majority—demanded land reform. Six of every 10 members of the provisional government were peasants. Fittingly, on its very first day, the provisional government announced that redistributing land from parasitic landlords to the peasants who toiled it would be its first order of business.15 As president of the provisional government, Kim Il-sung reported:
Already in March this year [1946], the agrarian reform was carried out in the rural areas of north Korea, bringing about a radical change in production relations. The agrarian reform dealt a decisive blow to the landlord class, the most reactionary class in Korea, wiping out its economic base. The peasantry was freed from feudal exploitation and oppression and became the master of land, which had been their centuries-old aspiration. The peasants have not only come to work the land as their own land which was distributed free by the people’s committee, but also have got rid of the system of exorbitant forced delivery of farm produce plus all kinds of exacting taxes and levies extorted from them in the years of Japanese imperialism and have become free to dispose of their farm produce after delivering only 25 percent of the harvests as tax in kind.16
“The Land Reform Law was sweeping,” wrote Anna Louise Strong. “It confiscated all Japanese lands, whether public or private, all landlords’ lands, if the landlord owned more than twelve acres, or if, owning less, he systematically rented the land and did not work it himself, and all land of churches and monasteries that exceeded twelve acres.” The lands, recovered on behalf of the people, “were given to village committees to distribute on the basis of the number of people in each farm family, and also with reference to the number of adult workers. Landlords also might get land to till but not more than twelve acres, and this must be in another county where they would have no traditional influence. Of the 70,000 landlords” in the Soviet occupation zone “3,500 took advantage of this permission.”17
The remainder of the north’s landlords fled to the US occupation zone, where the governing authorities had a more tolerant—indeed, favorable—attitude to parasites. Korean landlords in the US occupation zone continued to oversee the production of rice for export to Japan, a continuation of the colonial regime.18 While completed by 1946 in the north, land reform wouldn’t be carried out in the south until 1950, and it was North Korean forces, advancing south of the 38th parallel, clearing away the landlord regime and their US patrons, that allowed Koreans of the south to implement the land reform their compatriots to the north had already completed. Hence, the advancing force of the DPRK military played the same role the Red Army had played from 1945 to 1948: it created the space Koreans needed to carry out democratic reforms.
In the north, the work day was set at eight hours for non-hazardous jobs and seven hours for hazardous ones. Workers were guaranteed annual two-week vacations with pay. Workers in hazardous jobs got a full month. This contrasted sharply with labor conditions under the Japanese, marked by work days of 15 hours or more and no paid vacations. Child labor was outlawed, as was discrimination against women in pay.19 Lee Mai-Hwa, a female gold miner, told Anna Louise Strong that during the colonial era she worked 13 hours or more per day, loading ore onto carts underground. In 1949, she was a pneumatic drill operator, working only seven hours per day.20 Kim Il-sung explained: the “Provisional People’s Committee of North Korea promulgated the Labour Law freeing factory and office workers from harsh, colonial-type exploitation and introducing the eight-hour working day and a social insurance system. And a law was passed to guarantee the women social rights equal to those of the men for the first time in the history of our country.”21
On the heels of the labor reforms, the provisional government nationalized all industry belonging to Japanese and quislings.22 The government, Kim said, had also “proclaimed the law on the nationalization of industrial, transport and communications facilities, and banks which had been owned by the Japanese imperialists, pro-Japanese elements, and traitors to the nation. With this we have brought under national ownership, ownership of the entire people, the backbone of the economy which constitutes the material basis for building a fully independent and democratic state.”23 The new law, Kim pointed out, had “wiped out the foundation of Japanese imperialist colonial rule and deprived the traitors to the nation who had collaborated with Japanese imperialism of their economic footholds.” The institution of paying rent to private landlords was eliminated. “Thus, all the forces that had oppressed and exploited the Korean people hand in glove with Japanese imperialism,” he explained, “were deprived of their economic footholds and politically liquidated.”24
Concurrently, Kim’s government introduced an economic plan to convert the economy, which had been tailored to meet the needs of Japanese, to meet the needs of Koreans.25
In 1965, Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist, visited the DPRK and declared that North Korea was an economic miracle. “There is a complete system of social security for workers and employees,” she wrote. “Pensions are at the level of 50 percent of wages. …The medical service is free.” North Korea, she concluded, is a “nation without poverty.”26
Reflecting the reforms Kim’s provisional government introduced in 1946, there existed, Robinson observed, in all enterprises “an eight-hour day, with an hour’s break for lunch; there is a six-hour day for heavy work and for occupations dangerous to health. Workers receive holidays with pay for fifteen days a year (a month for heavy and dangerous work).”27
“Women are 51 percent of the population and 49 percent of the labor force,” Robinson continued, “which means that few except the elderly are not employed.” Women could fully participate in the work force because paid maternity leave, day cares, nursery schools, and prepared meals, freed them from the childcare and domestic burdens they alone had once shouldered. Regarding income inequality, Robinson noted that the “spread of income is very narrow, both between town and country and within industry.”28
The Soviet zone was a living laboratory whose experiments showed the United States what would happen in their own zone if Koreans of the south were allowed to organize their own affairs. Decisions about public administration would be democratized, driven into the people’s committees, rather than held in the hands of a landlord class answerable to foreign patrons; landlords would be expropriated, and their land distributed to those who worked it; and industry would be nationalized. Since these outcomes would fail to comport with the US vision of a world organized as a hierarchy, with the titans of US finance, industry, and commerce at the top, Korea’s landed elite in the middle, and 98 percent of Koreans at the bottom, the latter group would have to be prevented from ever laying its hands on the levers of power. In order to accomplish this negative goal, the movement for Korean independence in the south would have to be crushed. After it was crushed, it would have to be forever repressed. This would be accomplished by building an anti-communist state, staffed by anti-communist zealots and former Japanese army officers whom Washington would hand pick to operate a police state, as viciously anti-Left as the Nazi’s anti-communist police state. Eventually, the citadel of the Korean independence movement in the north would have to be weakened, degraded, and ultimately destroyed (to borrow the words that a future US president, Barack Obama, would use in connection with ISIS.) But for the moment, the task at hand was to repress the homegrown movement for equality in the south. It was to this immediate task that US military governor General John Reed Hodge turned his attention in November of 1945.
1 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 204.
2 Ibid., 199.
3 Baldwin, 34.
4 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 199.
5 Ibid., 209.
6 Kim, “On eliminating dogmatism.”
7 Strong, 14.
8 Ibid., 18.
9 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 195.
10 Worden, p. 41.
11 Ibid.
12 Leffler, 97.
13 Baldwin, 9.
14 Louis A. Perez Jr, “Fidel Castro: A life—and death—in context,” TRTWorld, November 29, 2016. https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/fidel-castro-a-life-and-death-in-context-3925.
15 Strong, 29.
16 Kim Il Sung, “On the establishment of the Workers’ Party of north Korea and the question founding the Workers’ Party of South Korea,” Kim Il Sung: Selected Works I, September 26, 1946, pp. 102-120. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/1946/09/26.htm
17 Strong, pp. 30-31.
18 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 151.
19 Strong, 39.
20 Ibid., 40.
21 Kim, “On the establishment.”
22 Strong, p. 37.
23 Kim, “On the establishment.”
24 Ibid.
25 Strong, 37; Cumings, Korea’s Place, 228.
26 Joan Robinson, “Korean Miracle.” Monthly Review 16, no. 9, (1965): 541-549.
27 Robinson.
28 Robinson.