History of North Korea - Wikipedia - Post-war redevelopment (1953–1970s)

History of North Korea - Wikipedia

Post-war redevelopment (1953–1970s)[edit]

Internal politics[edit]

From left to right: Pak Chang-ok, Li Jishen, Kim Tu-bong, Zhu De, Kim Il Sung, Averky Aristov, Pak Chŏng Ae and Choe Yong-gon in 1955

Kim began gradually consolidating his power. Up to this time, North Korean politics were represented by four factions: 

• the Yan'an faction, made up of returnees from China; 
• the "Soviet Koreans" who were ethnic Koreans from the USSR; 
• native Korean communists led by Pak Hon-yong; and 
• Kim's Kapsan group who had fought guerrilla actions against Japan in the 1930s.^[52][53]

When the Workers' Party Central Committee plenum opened on 30 August 1953, Choe Chang-ik made a speech attacking Kim for concentrating the power of the party and the state in his own hands as well as criticising the party line on industrialisation which ignored widespread starvation among the North Korean people. 

However, Kim neutralised the attack on him by promising to moderate the regime, promises which were never kept. The majority in the Central Committee voted to support Kim and also voted in favor of expelling Choe and Pak Hon-yong from the Central Committee. Eleven of Kim's opponents were convicted in a show trial. It is believed that all were executed. A major purge of the KWP followed, with members originating from South Korea being expelled.^[54]

Pak Hon-yong, party vice chairman and Foreign Minister of the DPRK, was blamed for the failure of the southern population to support North Korea during the war, was dismissed from his positions in 1953, and was executed after a show trial in 1955.^[55][56]

The Party Congress in 1956 indicated the transformation that the party had undergone. Most members of other factions had lost their positions of influence. More than half the delegates had joined after 1950, most were under 40 years old, and most had limited formal education.^[52]

In February 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made a sweeping denunciation of Stalin, which sent shock waves throughout the Communist world. Encouraged by this, members of the party leadership in North Korea began to criticize Kim's dictatorial leadership, personality cult, and Stalinist economic policies. 

Kim consequently purged them in the August Faction Incident.^[57][58] 

By 1960, 70 per cent of the members of the 1956 Central Committee were no longer in politics.^[59]

Kim Il Sung had initially been criticized by the Soviets during a previous 1955 visit to Moscow for practicing Stalinism and a cult of personality, which was already growing enormous. The Korean ambassador to the USSR, Li Sangjo, a member of the Yan'an faction, reported that it had become a criminal offense to so much as write on Kim's picture in a newspaper and that he had been elevated to the status of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Stalin in the communist pantheon. 

He also charged Kim with rewriting history to appear as if his guerrilla faction had single-handedly liberated Korea from the Japanese, completely ignoring the assistance of the Chinese People's Volunteers. In addition, Li stated that in the process of agricultural collectivization, grain was being forcibly confiscated from the peasants, leading to "at least 300 suicides" and that Kim made nearly all major policy decisions and appointments himself. 

Li reported that over 30,000 people were in prison for completely unjust and arbitrary reasons as trivial as not printing Kim Il Sung's portrait on sufficient quality paper or using newspapers with his picture to wrap parcels. Grain confiscation and tax collection were also conducted forcibly with violence, beatings, and imprisonment.^[60]

In late 1968, known military opponents of North Korea's Juche (or self-reliance) ideology such as Kim Chang-bong (minister of National Security), Huh Bong-hak (chief of the Division for Southern Intelligence) and Lee Young-ho (commander in chief of the DPRK Navy) were purged as anti-party/counter-revolutionary elements, despite their credentials as anti-Japanese guerrilla fighters in the past.^[54]

Kim's personality cult was modeled on Stalinism and his regime originally acknowledged Stalin as the supreme leader. After Stalin's death in 1953, however, Kim was described as the "Great Leader" or "Suryong". As his personality cult grew, the doctrine of Juche began to displace Marxism–Leninism. At the same time the cult extended beyond Kim himself to include his family in a revolutionary blood line.^[61] In 1972, to celebrate Kim Il-sung's birthday, the Mansu Hill Grand Monument was unveiled, including a 22-meter bronze statue of him.^[62]

International relations[edit]

Kim Il Sung and Zhou Enlai tour Beijing in 1958

Like Mao in China, Kim Il Sung refused to accept Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and continued to model his regime on Stalinist norms.^[63][64] At the same time, he increasingly stressed Korean independence, as embodied in the concept of Juche.^[65] Kim told Alexei Kosygin in 1965 that he was not anyone's puppet and "We ... implement the purest Marxism and condemn as false both the Chinese admixtures and the errors of the CPSU".^[66]

Relations with China had worsened during the war. Mao Zedong criticized Kim for having started the whole "idiotic war" and for being an incompetent military commander who should have been removed from power. PLA commander Peng Dehuai was equally contemptuous of Kim's skills at waging war.^[67]

By some analysis, Kim Il Sung remained in power partially because the Soviets turned their attention to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 that fall.^[68] The Soviets and Chinese were unable to stop the inevitable purge of Kim's domestic opponents or his move towards a one-man Stalinist autocracy and relations with both countries deteriorated in the former's case because of the elimination of the pro-Soviet Koreans and the latter because of the regime's refusal to acknowledge Chinese assistance in either liberation from the Japanese or the war in 1950–1953.^[69]

Beginning in the late 1950s, North Korea and China began renegotiating their border, culminating in the 1962 Sino–North Korean Border Treaty and a 1964 companion that established the modern border between the two countries.

The captured USS Pueblo being visited by tourists in Pyongyang

Tensions between North and South escalated in the late 1960s with a series of low-level armed clashes known as the Korean DMZ Conflict. In 1966, Kim declared "liberation of the south" to be a "national duty".^[70] In 1968, North Korean commandos launched the Blue House Raid, an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the South Korean President Park Chung Hee. Shortly after, the US spy ship Pueblo was captured by the North Korean navy.^[71] The crew were held captive throughout the year despite American protests that the vessel was in international waters, and they were finally released in December after a formal US apology was issued.^[72] In April 1969 a North Korean fighter jet shot down an EC-121 aircraft, killing all 31 crewmen on board. The Nixon administration found itself unable to react at all, since the US was heavily committed in the Vietnam War and had no troops to spare if the situation in Korea escalated. However, the Pueblo capture and EC-121 shootdown did not find approval in Moscow, as the Soviet Union did not want a second major war to erupt in Asia. China's response to the USS Pueblo crisis is less clear.^[73]

After Khrushchev was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev as Soviet Leader in 1964, and with the incentive of Soviet aid, North Korea strengthened its ties with the USSR. Kim condemned China's Cultural Revolution as "unbelievable idiocy". In turn, China's Red Guards labelled him a "fat revisionist".^[74][75][76]

In 1972, the first formal summit meeting between Pyongyang and Seoul was held, but the cautious talks did not lead to a lasting change in the relationship.^[77]

With the fall of South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese on 30 April 1975, Kim Il Sung felt that the US had shown its weakness and that reunification of Korea under his regime was possible. Kim visited Beijing in May 1975^[78][79][80] in the hope of gaining political and military support for this plan to invade South Korea again, but Mao Zedong refused.^[81] Despite public proclamations of support, Mao privately told Kim that China would be unable to assist North Korea because of the lingering after-effects of the Cultural Revolution throughout China, and because Mao had recently decided to restore diplomatic relations with the US.^[82]

Meanwhile, North Korea emphasized its independent orientation by joining the Non-Aligned Movement in 1975.^[83] It promoted Juche as a model for developing countries to follow.^[84] It developed strong ties with the regimes of Bokassa in the Central African Republic, Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea, Idi Amin in Uganda, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Gaddafi in Libya, and Ceausescu in Romania.^[26]

====

39  Lone, Stewart; McCormack, Gavan (1993). Korea since 1850. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. p. 112.

1. ^ Lone, Stewart; McCormack, Gavan (1993). Korea since 1850. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. p. 111.
2. ^ Dean, William F Dean; Worden, William L (1954). General Dean's Story. Viking Press. p. 87.
3. ^ Cumings, Bruce (2005). Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 278–281. ISBN 978-0-393-32702-1.
4. ^ Cumings, Bruce (2005). Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 280. ISBN 978-0-393-32702-1.
5. ^ Cumings, Bruce (2005). Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 288. ISBN 978-0-393-32702-1.
6. ^ Cumings, Bruce (2005). Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 289, 296. ISBN 978-0-393-32702-1.
7. ^ Lone, Stewart; McCormack, Gavan (1993). Korea since 1850. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. p. 118.
8. ^ Lone, Stewart; McCormack, Gavan (1993). Korea since 1850. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. pp. 115–118.
9. ^ Cumings, Bruce (2005). Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 297–298. ISBN 978-0-393-32702-1.
10. ^ Jager, Sheila Miyoshi (2013). Brothers at War – The Unending Conflict in Korea. London: Profile Books. pp. 237–242. ISBN 978-1-84668-067-0.
11. ^ Cumings, Bruce (2005). Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 295–296. ISBN 978-0-393-32702-1.
12. ^ Lone, Stewart; McCormack, Gavan (1993). Korea since 1850. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. pp. 122–125.
13. ^ Jump up to:^a b Buzo, Adrian (2002). The Making of Modern Korea. London: Routledge. p. 95. ISBN 978-0-415-23749-9.
14. ^ Lone, Stewart; McCormack, Gavan (1993). Korea since 1850. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. p. 177.
15. ^ Jump up to:^a b Pike, John. "North Korean Purges".
16. ^ Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 133–136.
17. ^ Hoare, James. "Pak Heon-yeong". Modern Korean History Portal. Woodrow Wilson Center. Retrieved 5 March 2014.
18. ^ Person, James (August 2006). ""We Need Help from Outside": The North Korean Opposition Movement of 1956" (PDF). Cold War International History Project Working Paper (52). Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 July 2017. Retrieved 5 March 2014.
19. ^ Buzo, Adrian (2002). The Making of Modern Korea. London: Routledge. pp. 95–96. ISBN 978-0-415-23749-9.
20. ^ Buzo, Adrian (2002). The Making of Modern Korea. London: Routledge. p. 96. ISBN 978-0-415-23749-9.
21. ^ Ri, Sang-jo. "Letter from Ri Sang-jo to the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party". Woodrow Wilson Center. Retrieved 5 March 2014.
22. ^ Lone, Stewart; McCormack, Gavan (1993). Korea since 1850. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire. pp. 179–180.
23. ^ Oberdorfer, Don; Carlin, Robert (2014). The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History. Basic Books. p. 18. ISBN 9780465031238.
24. ^ Buzo, Adrian (2002). The Making of Modern Korea. London: Routledge. pp. 95–97. ISBN 978-0-415-23749-9.
25. ^ Robinson, Michael E (2007). Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. p. 152. ISBN 978-0-8248-3174-5.
26. ^ Buzo, Adrian (2002). The Making of Modern Korea. London: Routledge. pp. 95, 122. ISBN 978-0-415-23749-9.
27. ^ Radchenko, Sergey. "The Soviet Union and the North Korean Seizure of the USS Pueblo: Evidence from Russian Archives" (PDF). Cold War International History Project Working Paper (47): 8. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-08-17. Retrieved 2014-03-05.

69 ^ Jager, Sheila Miyoshi (2013). Brothers at War – The Unending Conflict in Korea. London: Profile Books. pp. 362–363. ISBN 978-1-84668-067-0.

1. ^ Jager, Sheila Miyoshi (2013). Brothers at War – The Unending Conflict in Korea. London: Profile Books. pp. 363–364. ISBN 978-1-84668-067-0.
2. ^ Jump up to:^a b James F. Person (2008). "New Evidence on North Korea in 1956" (PDF). Cold War International History Project. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 December 2012. Retrieved 3 May 2012.
3. ^ Jager, Sheila Miyoshi (2013). Brothers at War – The Unending Conflict in Korea. London: Profile Books. p. 366. ISBN 978-1-84668-067-0.
4. ^ Buzo, Adrian (2002). The Making of Modern Korea. London: Routledge. p. 99. ISBN 978-0-415-23749-9.
5. ^ Lerner, Mitchell (2002). The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 9780700611713.
6. ^ "New Romanian Evidence on the Blue House Raid and the USS Pueblo Incident." NKIDP e-Dossier No. 5. Retrieved 3 May 2012.
7. ^ Jager, Sheila Miyoshi (2013). Brothers at War – The Unending Conflict in Korea. London: Profile Books. p. 376. ISBN 978-1-84668-067-0.
8. ^ Radchenko, Sergey. "The Soviet Union and the North Korean Seizure of the USS Pueblo: Evidence from Russian Archives" (PDF). Cold War International History Project Working Paper (47): 11, 16. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-08-17. Retrieved 2014-03-05.
9. ^ "Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation". The China Quarterly (30): 195–249. April–June 1967. JSTOR 651878.
10. ^ Shin, Jong-Dae. "DPRK Perspectives on Korean Reunification after the July 4th Joint Communiqué". NKIDP e-Dossier no. 10. Woodrow Wilson Center. Retrieved 5 March 2014.
11. ^ Hook, Brian; Wilson, Dick; Yahuda, Michael (September 1975). "Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation". The China Quarterly (63): 572–610. JSTOR 652772.
12. ^ Zagoria, Donald S.; Kim, Young Kun (December 1975). "North Korea and the Major Powers". Asian Survey. 15 (12): 1017–1035. doi:10.2307/2643582. JSTOR 2643582.
13. ^ Kim, Young C. (January 1976). "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1975". Asian Survey. 16 (1): 82–94. doi:10.2307/2643284. JSTOR 2643284.