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Interpreting North Korean
history
By Andrei Lankov
There is a new textbook out on North
Korean history, written by a group of young South
Korean scholars. The book is meant for those high
school students and college undergraduates who for
some reason want to learn more about the North
(not a very common desire among the Seoul
youngsters, one would think).
The textbook
dedicates quite a few pages to the 1946 land
reform in the North, whose radicalism is favorably
contrasted 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 one laugh: the book failed to
mention that from beginning to end, land reform in
North Korea was planned by Soviet military
authorities.
Land reform was promulgated
in the name of nascent North Korean authorities,
but Kim Il-sung simply signed the documents that
had been prepared for him by Russian officers.
This is evident from Russian papers on land
reform, which were declassified and published in
South Korea years ago. But these facts do not fit
the authors' concept and hence are not mentioned
in the textbook.
A couple of weeks ago
this author met a Westerner who studied in Korea
late last year. His young professor suggested to
him and other students that it was unlikely the
Soviet Union had approved Kim Il-sung's war plans
in 1950, and Moscow had actually been caught by
surprise when the war started. The Korean War,
according to this logic, was initiated by the
North without any involvement of foreigners, and
hence could be seen as a civil war.
Once
again, all relevant materials have been published
over the past decade or so, and thanks to the
efforts of many scholars, the inside story of the
Korean War is now known to the smallest detail.
Most publications are English, and Korean
professors are not well known for good knowledge
of the language. Still, some important papers have
been translated into Korean and are widely used by
many Korean academics. Nonetheless, this young
professor behaved as if these papers did not
exist.
Wartime atrocities are widely
discussed by the South Korean media. Indeed, the
end of official bans has made it possible to tell
about mass killings committed by South Korean
forces during the anti-guerilla warfare of the
late 1940s and 1950s (the 1948-54 massacre on Jeju
Island, in which US-supported troops rooted out
communists and their sympathizers, is the most
notorious example). However, there are fewer
publications and far less research dealing with
the slaughters committed by the communist
guerrillas and North Korean forces. The picture of
the early 1950s as presented by the increasingly
dominant nationalist left consists of idealistic
guerrillas fighting the blood-thirsty and corrupt
police.
There are few doubts that the
communist guerrillas of 1946-1955 were idealistic,
but idealism is perfectly compatible with cruelty,
as the deeds of Pol Pot and his followers
demonstrated with extreme clarity in Cambodia. But
this is not how the recent past is presented in
the South - at least, not in the fashionable
circles of politically active intellectuals.
South Korea was once the domain of
knee-jerk anti-communism, but nowadays
"progressive" (left-wing) academics increasingly
have come to dominate the South Korean
intellectual world. And these people badly want to
play down the impact the Soviet Union once had on
the North. They want it so badly that they
sometimes even pretend to be ignorant of new
material that clearly contradicts the version of
history they want to have.
At the same
time, they are ready to repeat all accusations
against the US - such as by an author of another
book who mentioned the "biological warfare"
allegations of the 1950s as if there must be some
truth in these old statements. Once again, Soviet
documents indicate how the entire biological
warfare affair was fabricated by over-zealous
North Korean officials. And once again, many
people in South Korea behave as if those papers
have never been published.
A 1998 New York
Times report quoted Cold War historians as saying
they then knew more about how and why the Soviet
Union and China fabricated a campaign in the 1950s
to persuade the world that the United States used
germ and chemical warfare in the Korean War.
Documentary evidence from Moscow's secret archives
suggested that the charge was instigated by
Chinese field advisers to the North Koreans. With
many Koreans dying of cholera, the Chinese
advisers decided US chemical and biological
warfare must have been the cause, the report said.
As well, the story suggested that to make the
charge stick, the communists went to extraordinary
measures - infecting North Koreans awaiting
execution with plague and cholera so their bodies
could be shown to outside investigators, and
forcing 25 captured American pilots to sign
confessions.
On the other hand, the book
The United States and Biological Warfare:
Secrets From the Early Cold War and Korea by
Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman and published
the same year, sees the authors accuse US and
Canadian forces of having waged offensive
biological warfare by using artificially infected
insects as vectors during the Korean campaign.
They concede that all major powers have
experimented with biological warfare agents.
Subsequent scholarly articles based on documents
from the former Soviet Union also suggest the use
of biological warfare.
So, why do some choose
to ignore the evidence that disproves the
allegations of use of biological warfare? They do
so because this distortion nicely serves their own
political agenda, which has little to do with
North Korea or its history. The modern South
Korean left was borne of struggle against the
right-wing military regimes of the 1960s and 1970s
and came to perceive them as an embodiment of
evil. Actually, as dictatorships go, the South
Korean strongmen were relatively mild and
exceptionally efficient in the economic
management.
Thus, the left wants to show
the illegitimacy of its opponents, insisting that
the South Korean state from its inception was not
"authentically national", instead it was
compromised by the wide employment of former
pro-Japanese collaborators and by close
cooperation with the US military. Needless to say,
such collaboration is always emphasized.
But to advance their ideas even further,
those political intellectuals also need a positive
example, which would be able to stand for
everything good in their picture of national
history. Hence, they chose to believe that the
early North Korean state was a complete opposite
to the allegedly corrupt and dependent Seoul
government of the era. There are hard facts that
demonstrate that until 1950 for all practical
purposes the North Korean state was a Soviet
puppet, but these facts do not fit into their
world picture nicely, and hence are not mentioned.
Even a cursory look through now-available
historical documents clearly indicates: In
1945-1950, the North Korean regime operated under
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 of 1948? Joseph Stalin himself. Who
arrested all major opponents to the emerging
communist regime? The Soviet military police.
Where were the dissidents sent to do their time?
To Siberia, of course.
The available
papers leave no doubt that even relatively mundane
actions of the North Korean government needed
approval from Moscow. The Soviet politburo, a
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 politicians from
the North and South in spring 1948 was another
Soviet idea, even if the leftist historians now
love to depict it as yet another expression of
Pyongyang's willingness 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 in the Soviet
Embassy.
If all these do not give us a
right to describe the North of 1945-1950 as a
"puppet regime", what further evidence is needed.
But such facts do not fit the agenda of many South
Korean intellectuals who are allergic to the
anti-communist propaganda of their youth.
This does not necessarily mean that they
are admirers of the present-day North (some of
them are but most aren't). But they want to
believe in a myth of some pure, truly national
state that was created by the spontaneous outburst
of the masses' revolutionary zeal and had nothing
to do with any corrupting influence by foreign
powers. This vision is not quite compatible with
Soviet colonels writing North Korean leader Kim
Il-sung's speeches (imagine an American military
officer writing a speech for South Korea's first
president, Syngman Rhee, some time in 1947).
One cannot help but wonder: what will
happen when the North Korean regime collapses and
when the scale of its brutality becomes blatantly
obvious? What will these intellectuals then say? I
suspect that many of them will change their minds
and will start blaming the regime's exceptional
cruelty on malevolent foreign influences, on these
scheming brutal Russians whose involvement is now
denied or played down.
However until then,
with the true scale of atrocities still remaining
unknown (at least denied by those who are
oblivious to the obvious), every "progressive"
intellectual in South Korea is still supposed to
believe in the authentically Korean regime that
once flourished north of the 38th parallel.
Dr Andrei Lankov is a lecturer
in the faculty of Asian Studies, China and Korea
Center, Australian National University. He
graduated from Leningrad State University with a
PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with
emphasis on Korea, and his thesis focused on
factionalism in the Yi Dynasty. He has published
books and articles on Korea and North Asia. He is
currently on leave, teaching at Kookmin
University, Seoul.
(Copyright 2005
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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