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2 If the North had won the Korean War
... By Andrei Lankov
Kim Il-sung or by any other
communist strongman, would have been as sad as was
actually the case in the northern part of divided
Korea.
The Sino-Soviet split would have
been a boon for every rational Korean communist
government. It would have given unified Korea room
for complicated diplomatic maneuvers. In real
history, Kim Il-sung's government did what any
decent government would and
should
do - it exploited to the fullest the ambitions and
phobias of quarreling giants while quietly milking
both of them. Any other Korean government would
have attempted to do the same, with less or
greater success.
But what would have been
different? Would it mean that a unified Korea
would have become just another version of Kim
Il-sung's North? To an extent, yes. The 1960s
would have been a time of frantic mobilization
drives, mass brainwashing and political
persecution on a grand scale. However, two things
would have been different.
First, without
bitter war experience, without an ample supply of
the battle-hardened zealots and without daily
confrontation with the rival (and also
increasingly successful and free) South, the
all-Korean communist regime might have been
somewhat less murderous, although this might not
have been the case in the 1960s, when insanely
radical plans were in vogue across East Asia.
If simultaneous Chinese experience is a
guide, I would suspect that those times would have
added another few tens of thousands or so dead
people to the regime's body count. Without the
South across the border, the Pyongyang leaders
would have behaved a lot more recklessly in the
1960s, as China did in the bloody decade of the
Cultural Revolution. But in the course of time,
liberalization would have come easier - as
happened in China.
Second, without a
powerful South sitting just across the border, the
North would have been more willing to experiment
and reform. Perhaps it would have started
Chinese-style reforms at an early stage - maybe
even earlier than China itself. In real history,
the North has been afraid that its populace would
learn too much about South Korean prosperity and
that this would result in the regime's collapse.
Without the South hanging around and being so
provocatively prosperous and free, bolder domestic
policies would have become possible.
In
the long run, it is a big question whether the
regime would have collapsed around 1990, or would
have survived, like those of China and Vietnam. I
suspect that the second option would have been
more likely.
What would Seoul have looked
like? Pretty much as Shenyang or Hanoi looks now
(or as Seoul looked in real history back in the
1970s): crowds of cyclists on dirty streets, a few
highrise buildings, an occasional slogan about the
greatness of "socialism with Korean
characteristics", and an occasional chauffeured
car of a local cadre-turn-capitalist: light-years
behind the current South Korean prosperity,
light-years ahead of the current North Korean
destitution.
The intellectuals would be
unhappy, of course, and I imagine them secretly
talking about the horrors of torture chambers of
the 1960s and mass executions of the 1950s -
pretty much as dissenting intellectuals in Moscow
did in the 1970s and Chinese intellectuals do
right now. Some dissenting writers would even
secretly collect materials about the dirty linen
of the regime, to be later smuggled overseas and
broadcast by the Voice of America.
For
them it would mean real but not certain risk of
imprisonment, of an involuntarily trip to the
mines somewhere in North Hamgyong province, but
moderate dissent would probably be tacitly
tolerated, much as it was tolerated in post-Stalin
Russia or present-day China.
The actual
number of political prisoners would be far smaller
than in present-day North Korea, but far greater
than at any period of South Korean history (do not
tell this to a young South Korean intellectual,
but as dictators go, Park Chung-hee and Chun
Doo-hwan, South Korean strongmen of the 1960s and
1970s, were very moderate dictators with really
impressive economic records). And, of course,
there would be none of those countless dead of the
Great North Korean Famine.
In a nutshell,
"a great victory in the autumn of 1950" would
probably have made life for the North Korean
minority (one-third of the peninsular population)
much more agreeable, but only at the expense of
the lives of South Korean majority. The entire
country would have been pretty much like Vietnam
nowadays: a combination of a still poor but
fast-growing economy, with an authoritarian but
relatively permissive political regime.
The North Korean military victory in 1950
would probably have put many millions of South
Koreans through very tough times, killing a
significant part of them in the process. But it
also would have saved many North Koreans and
probably have made their lives much better.
Well, we should not be surprised too much:
it is increasingly clear that the interests of two
Korean peoples are not necessarily congruent, as
the more than real events of the past decade
clearly demonstrate.
Dr Andrei
Lankov is an associate professor in Kookmin
University, Seoul, and adjunct research fellow at
the Research School of Pacifica and Asian Studies,
Australian National University. He graduated from
Leningrad State University with a PhD in Far
Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea.
He has published books and articles on Korea and
North Asia.
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