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2 If the North had won the Korean War
... By Andrei Lankov
I
feel I should start this piece with a disclaimer.
I am a historian, and hence I am fully aware that
my colleagues are skeptical of what is known as
"alternative history" or "what-if history".
Perhaps they are correct. Political scientists
have had an abysmally bad track record when they
have tried to predict what will happen, so
why should we take seriously the predictions of
what would have happened? Indeed, we
probably shouldn't. But I will try to make
such
reversed prophecies - in this piece, at least.
Actually, this piece is based on a long
and informal talk I once had with Konstantin
Asmolov, a prominent Russian historian of Korea. A
few years ago we spent much time discussing
assorted "what-if" possibilities of North Korean
history, the "roads not taken".
Of all
those possibilities, by far the most probable was
a North Korean victory in autumn 1950. Indeed, it
was a close call. The US decision to save the
South from near-certain annihilation was made at
the last moment and was, in essence, in
contradiction to some earlier US plans and
strategies.
The Korean War began on June
25, 1950, and by late August the North Korean
armies controlled some 95% of the Korean
Peninsula. The North Koreans were pushing toward
Busan, the last refuge of the badly outnumbered
and demoralized South Korean forces. Had the
Americans chosen not to join the fighting, the
collapse of the Southern defenses was only a
question of time, and not a long time at that.
Thus we can imagine how on some day in
October or November 1950 the North Korean tanks
would have fought their way to the streets of
Busan. President Syngman Rhee and the luckier (or
better connected) people from his entourage would
have been flown to Japan and then to the US, to
create an increasingly impotent
government-in-exile while the less fortunate would
have fought for a space on board the last crowded
ships hastily leaving the Busan harbor under the
heavy fire of the Reds' artillery.
And
then what? All of Korea would have been united
under the auspices of a Stalinist regime,
initially led by Kim Il-sung. Severe waves of
terror were certain to follow: the like-minded
regimes in Europe were killing people in the tens
of thousands, and in Korea a recent war with all
its atrocities would have made the winners even
more inclined to settle scores. I would say that
100,000 killed in action or dead in prison camps
would appear to be a relatively small number for
the early 1950s.
Kim Il-sung would have
remained the leader of the unified country, at
least for the first few years, but his grasp on
power would have been precarious. In real history,
the Korean War helped him a lot. First, it led to
Chinese involvement, so the Chinese could be
manipulated to neutralize the Russians, who once
were masters of the North.
Second, the
permanent division of Korea, which is what
happened in reality, also meant that domestic
communists lost their power base south of the 38th
Parallel, and thus could be easily slaughtered
from 1953-55. And, last but not least, the war
experience produced a number of people who were
dedicated personal followers of Kim Il-sung and
his system. The combat experience, the desire to
avenge fallen comrades, and intense ideological
indoctrination made many a former soldier into the
"steel warriors of the Great Leader".
In
our hypothetical case, things would be slightly
different. The South Korean communists, the major
group of internal opposition within the party
leadership, would get a significant boost from
such a victory, re-establishing control over their
power base in the South with its far greater
population. In real history, the Southerners were
mercilessly slaughtered just after the war.
In our counter-factual story, Kim Il-sung
would still do his best to undermine their
influence, and the Russians (for a while more
powerful in post-1950 Korean affairs than was the
case in real history) would probably side with him
- as they sided with the established regimes in
Eastern Europe when the East European leaders
began to hunt down and kill all their potential
rivals among the communist leaders.
Still,
this would be a difficult power struggle with a
rather uncertain outcome. There were some real
chances that Kim Il-sung himself would end up
being executed as an "unmasked spy" on the US
Central Intelligence Agency payroll from 1940
(never mind that there was no CIA in 1940), and a
"Japanese agent in colonial times".
Does
this sound absurd? Well, perhaps, but definitely
not more absurd than accusations Kim Il-sung
himself leveled against purged communist leaders
in real history.
How would a unified
communist Korea have dealt with the two major
challenges of the late 1950s - de-Stalinization
and the split between China and Russia? Most
likely, the reaction would have been very similar
to what really happened. De-Stalinization and
associated hopes about "socialism with a human
face" won remarkably weak support in communist
East Asia, then drunk with dreams about an
egalitarian paradise and national greatness.
The milieu of East Asian communism of that
era produced tyrants, not reformers: in other
words, Maos and Pol Pots, but not Khrushchevs or
Dubceks. The time of Deng Xiaoping came later,
when the utter failure of utopian dreams became
very easy for everybody to see.
None of
the communist countries of the region chose to
liberalize themselves along Soviet lines in the
1950s (Mongolia was an exception but, frankly, in
those times it was a Soviet republic in everything
but name). In all countries of East Asia the
supporters of mild democratic reforms were crushed
and sent to prison camps, and a cannibalistic
version of communism reigned supreme until the
late 1970s.
I do not have much doubt that
the fate of democracy-minded dissenters in a
unified Korea of the 1960s, be this state led by
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