Recently journalists from The Guardian
newspaper reported an important change during
stays in Pyongyang: two large portraits of Karl
Marx and Vladimir Lenin - long a prominent feature
of Pyongyang's central Kim Il-sung square - were
nowhere to be seen. Instead, the images have been
replaced by a more dominating portrait of Kim
Il-sung.
This news was repeated by
countless outlets worldwide, but the reports were
slightly outdated. In fact, the portraits were
removed almost half a year ago, in early April
2012.
In a sense, the disappearance of the
portraits is yet another sign of the ongoing
ideological transformation in North Korea. Even
though it is routinely described as a 'communist
country' by
outsider observers, North
Korea has long ceased to label itself as a
Marxist-Leninist state.
Nonetheless, until
recently the North Korean ideological authorities
have occasionally expressed some indebtedness to
the Marxist tradition - but these expressions were
largely for foreigners' consumption.
The
North Korean state was created in the years
1945-48 by, essentially, an unequal alliance of
Korean Marxist revolutionaries and Soviet generals
(the latter being in nearly full control). It was
meant to be just another Marxist-Leninist regime
created according to the Soviet blueprints of the
period. Predictably, it described itself as a
state whose sole ideological foundation was 'the
universal truth of Marxism-Leninism'.
In
the mid-1950s there began a series of significant
changes in the North Korean leadership. Initially
a very important role in the North Korean
leadership was played by underground communist
activists from the pre-1945 era, most of whom were
well educated intellectuals, fluent in foreign
languages and well versed in the Leninist
orthodoxy of the period. In the early and
mid-1950s, though, they would begin to be purged
by Kim Il-sung and his supporters whose
backgrounds and worldview was rather different -
they were, in the main, poorly educated farmers
with little exposure to the outside world, but
with strong (red) nationalist convictions.
Kim Il-sung's supporters did not spend
their youth perusing works of Western classical
economists or arguing over the finer points of
Marx and Hegel - rather, they were waging a
courageous, some would say suicidal, guerilla war
against the Japanese colonial army in Manchuria.
Many of them were indeed committed communists, but
they were a rather different breed of communist
for whom nationalist goals and a strong Korean
state were of paramount importance. With their
ascent to power in the 1950s, parochial
nationalism, pervasive amongst Korean radical
leftists until now, began to take over from the
universalist abstractions of Marxism.
The
first sign of the changes to come was the Juche
Speech of Kim Il-sung in 1955. In this speech, Kim
Il-sung, the young North Korean dictator, used the
word Juche to mean something ideological -
and it would later go on to become the governing
ideology of his country. The word itself is often
misleadingly translated as 'self-reliance'; but
what it means is 'the main subject'. In a
nationalist Korean context, Juche basically
means: putting the nation first, ahead of other
nations, stressing that the nation is important
and should be protected.
In the speech,
Kim Il-sung lambasted the uncritical acceptance of
foreign (ie Soviet) culture and tradition, and
stated that Koreans - especially officials -
should never forget about their superior national
culture and roots. Soon after, Kim Il-sung began
to steer his country away from Soviet influence,
and by the early 1960s his relations with Moscow
had become very frosty (relations would partially
recover after 1965, but North Korea still was more
distant from Moscow than nearly all other
communist countries, save China).
It took
over a decade for Juche to be elevated to
the level of coherent ideology - or something
which could be passed for such. Until the early
1970s, North Korea claimed itself to be a
Marxist-Leninist state. When relations between the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe went sower, the
North Korean media claimed that much of the
communist world had been spoilt by revisionists.
It was also claimed that North Korean Marxism was
perfectly pure and thus superior to that of Moscow
or Warsaw, while Kim Il-sung was portrayed as the
world's best living Marxist theoretician.
Things began gradually to change in the
late 1960s. Around this time, the hitherto only
occasionally mentioned Juche began to be
transformed into North Korea's ideology. This was
politically necessary because, at the time, the
North Korean government was trying to maneuver
between quarreling Moscow and Beijing, trying as
best it good to remain out of the Sino-Soviet
split. Pyongyang would indeed claim that they had
their own ideology that was in fact superior to
those of its giant neighbors. Juche was to
become that ideology.
In 1972, the Juche
Idea was elevated to that of the state ideology,
and was enshrined in the constitution as such. It
was however described as "the creative application
of Marxism-Leninism to Korean realities". Around
this time it became impossible for the average
Korean to check how truthful this creative
application was. In the late 1960s, the works of
Marx, Lenin and, in fact, almost all non-Korean
Marxist authors' works became forbidden reading
for the average North Korean. These books were to
be kept in special sections of the major
libraries, being only accessible to a privileged
and trusted few. A few very harmless books were
exempted from this policy, and collections of
quotations from key Marxist authors were also made
available.
For a brief while, the North
Korean authorities even coined a new term
"Kimilsungism". It appears in fact that in the
late 1970s the North Korean leadership (including
the then young Kim Jong-il) toyed with the idea of
a complete break from Marxism. At least, in 1976,
Kim Jong-il wrote: "Both in content and in
composition, Kimilsungism is an original idea that
cannot be explained within the framework of
Marxism-Leninism. The Juche idea which constitutes
the quintessence of Kimilsungism, is an idea newly
discovered in the history of human thought.
However, at present there is a tendency to
interpret the Juche idea on the basis of
the materialistic dialectic of Marxism. (...) This
shows that the originality of the Juche idea is
not correctly understood".
In the
mid-1970s, North Korea's philosophers and
luminaries claimed that Kimilsungism would
eventually displace Marxism and Marxism-Leninism
as the leading scientific theory of the modern
world. They stated that Marxism was a progressive
ideology from the early capitalist period, while
Leninism was its latter day adaptation to the
period of high imperialism, but that Kimilsungism
was the idea for the contemporary era - an age
allegedly of collapsing imperialism and the spread
of revolution worldwide.
This meant that,
according to North Korea's agitprop, Kim Il-sung
was the most far-sighted sage of our era (a
distinction he probably did not mind), but also
allowed North Korean dignitaries to position their
country above both the Soviet Union and China.
After all, both the Soviets and the Chinese were
still following the vintage ideologies of another
age while the North Koreans were equipped with the
most cutting-edge progressive ideological
weaponry.
For some reason, from around
1980, North Korea's ideologues significantly pared
down their claims of Kimilsungism's independence
from Marxism. They basically returned to the
somewhat less ambitious definition of the North
Korea's ideology as a creative application of
Marxism-Leninism, and they stuck to this
definition until the 1990s. The reversal seems to
reflect the diplomatic need to improve relations
with the Soviet Union - which at the time was
becoming the major source of economic aid.
However, efforts to distance purely
national Juche/Kimilsungism from imported
Marxism-Leninism would again accelerate in the
1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and
disintegration of the Communist bloc, there was
little need to emphasize the common roots which
once united North Korea with other radical leftist
movements and governments. There were no more
useful foreigners to woo with such claims. On the
contrary, ethnic Korean nationalism became the
only conceivable tool to ideologically mobilize
people in support of the regime.
As a
result, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, all
references to Marx and Lenin gradually disappeared
from North Korean publications. An important step
was taken in 2009 when all references to the word
communism disappeared from the North Korean
constitution. As a result of earlier revisions to
the North Korean constitution, explicit references
to the Juche Idea's connection to Marxism were
edited out as well.
This ideological shift
to an indigenous and 'perfectly' Korean ideology
was completely earlier this year. The fourth
conference of the Korean Workers Party officially
stated that "Kimilsungism and Kimjongilism are
considered the sole ideologies of the party". And
so the circle is now complete.
In this new
ideological environment then, it is understandable
how the portraits of Marx and Lenin have become
anachronistic. And so on one morning in April
2012, the people of Pyongyang woke to discover
that these two portraits had disappeared without
trace. When a frequent visitor to Pyongyang asked
his minder where the portraits had gone, his
minder answered dryly and significantly: 'to a
museum'.
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.
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