A History of Korea (88 page)

The wartime experience greatly diluted the Soviet influence in North Korea, because, in North Korean eyes, it was the Chinese who had saved the state from extinction. Moreover, Kim Il-sung, who followed Stalin’s example in encouraging a personality cult to bolster his power, was estranged by Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization. Further, in the course of power struggles after the Korean War, Kim Il-sung severely criticized the Yan’an and Soviet Korean factions for slavishly following the prescriptions of Marxism-Leninism. Instead, he insisted on developing and adopting a unique Korean version of Marxism-Leninism
that supposedly harmonized with the realities of the Korean situation. Kim elevated the concept of
juche
, commonly referred to as self-reliance, to a philosophical dogma to be strictly followed. This North Korean ideology was a combination of socialist and nationalist ideas and has often been compared to a state religion.

On 28 December 1955 Kim Il-sung formally enunciated the juche ideology for the first time. Thereafter, it has been North Korea’s ruling ideology, dominating all sectors of society, ranging from foreign policy to everyday life. Juche has been declared the sole ideological system in the communist nation, and no other system or way of thinking has been deemed acceptable. In fact, all other ideological systems are considered heretical, and anyone espousing them have been severely punished.

Juche, which emanated from North Korea’s militant nationalism, comprises four main concepts related to ideology, politics, the economy, and military affairs; these include, respectively,
chagy
ŏ
l,
or self-determination;
chaju,
or independence;
charip,
or self-reliance; and
chawi,
or self-defense. Using an explicit analogy to the human body, the juche ideology likened Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader, to the brain that made decisions and commanded action; the Korean Workers Party was the nervous system that mediated and maintained equilibrium between the brain and the body; and the people were the body (bone and muscle) that implemented decisions and channeled feedback to the Great Leader. Juche was also a declaration meant to exhibit political independence from North Korea’s two communist sponsors—the Soviet Union and China. The juche philosophy became synonymous with North Korea’s famous autarchy called “Our Style Socialism.”

Later, the juche ideology evolved into a political philosophy. The
KWP
replaced references to Marxism-Leninism in the North Korean constitution with juche in 1977. Then, as approved by the North Korean Supreme People’s Assembly on 9 April 1992, the revised constitution substituted juche for Marxism-Leninism as a guiding principle of politics.

Kim Il-sung and his son and successor, Kim Jong-il, used the juche ideology as a political tool to justify the North Korean political system, government structure, and personality cult of father and son, and it has played a key role in solidifying the North Korean political power structure and preventing the collapse of the country, especially in the lean times beginning in the late 1980s. Moreover, the juche ideology was used as a tool to prepare the nation for Kim’s familial and ideological heir. Originally the communist state in North Korea
had been founded on the orthodox communist principle that placed the party above all else, but the juche ideology converted the country into a unique communist state with the Leader reigning supreme over the party and the people.

As anti-Kim factions were completely eliminated from the North Korean leadership, the communist nation was virtually transformed into Kim Il-sung’s “kingdom.” In North Korea Kim’s instructions became the absolute laws of the country. Public debate on policy and ideology vanished, and the Korean Workers Party was reduced to an instrument only for carrying out Kim Il-sung’s instructions. North Koreans were forced to live by the slogan “Learn from the glorious revolutionary tradition founded by Comrade Kim Il-sung and his anti-Japanese partisans,” which, to the North Korean people, was more than a mere slogan; it guided every aspect of North Korean life, public or private.

From the late 1950s, in accordance with Kim Il-sung’s mandate, North Korea increasingly isolated itself from the communist bloc where the Stalinist legacy was generally denied. In North Korea, however, Stalinism was still alive, transformed into so-called Kimilsungism, and exerted profound influence on North Korean life, with the mass media, art, literature, and music all pressed into service to produce and praise Kimilsungism.

The most striking feature of Kimilsungism, as in the Stalinist practice, was Kim’s forged imagery as the “fatherly leader.” Like other totalitarian regimes, the North Korean government attempted to disassemble individual families and clans, replacing them with the notion that the entire society was one family and the head of state was the father figure. According to North Korea’s official explanation, human beings received their natural life from their biological parents, but their lives as social beings derived from a parent-type figure, the “Great Leader.” This parental “Great Leader” deserved the veneration and devotion of the people, his “children.” As the benevolent parent of the North Korean people, the fatherly Great Leader was committed to the needs of his “children”; the people, in return, gave their loyalty, obedience, and gratitude not to their biological parents but to the Great Leader. Kim Il-sung was promoted as the father not only of North Koreans but of ethnic Koreans anywhere outside North Korea. The Korean Workers Party was referred to as the “mother party.” To strengthen “blood ties’ with his “children,” Kim Il-sung frequently made “on-the-spot-guidance” tours, visiting collective farms, factories, and other sites of economic production throughout the country. The visits transformed
Kim from a distant impersonal authority to a close, benign parental figure. The national territory became a harmonious household where the fatherly Great Leader gave benevolent instruction, inspected conditions, and suggested corrections for his “children.” In this way, the Great Leader reached out to physically touch and embrace all the nation’s people.

Kim Il-sung’s political apparatus also portrayed him as a person with godlike qualities. His persona as a demigod was reinforced through the North Star, the Big Dipper, the pine tree, the contour of Paektu-san, and a red hybrid “Kimilsungia” begonia. Although the personality cult of Kim resembled the Stalin cult in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and the 1940s, old Confucian values in North Korea, particularly filial piety, required the people, as the “children,” to discharge their duties, loyalty, and devotion to the “fatherly leader” in return for him gracing them with new life as social beings.

According to North Korea’s theory of the “Great Leader,” the fidelity pledged to him does not end with his generation but is transferred to the new leader. In other words, the fidelity devoted to Kim Il-sung was automatically transferred to Kim Jong-il, his heir and successor. Actually, after Kim Il-sung’s death on 8 July 1994, North Korea officially adopted the slogan “Kim Il-sung is Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-il is Kim Il-sung.”

Culture and art in North Korea served only to spread monolithic Kimist ideology through didactic media. Cultural expression was just an instrument for inculcating the juche ideology and the need to continue the struggle to revolutionize and reunify the “fatherland.” “Foreign imperialists,” specifically Americans and the Japanese, were depicted as heartless monsters; North Korea’s revolutionary heroes and heroines were seen as saintly figures who acted from the purest motives. The three most consistent themes of literature and art were martyrdom during the revolutionary struggle, the happiness of the present society, and the genius of the Great Leader.

Kim Il-sung’s absolutist state might be compared to a fanatical religious sect, because the state allowed no dissent from or criticism of Kim Il-sung, his tenets or his decisions. In fact, Kim Il-sung (and his son) established a state that actually practiced a peculiar brand of oriental despotism rather than communism. Even after his death, Kim Il-sung has been designated in the constitution as the country’s “Eternal President” and the government went so far as to declare that their nation is a new Korean state founded on 15 April 1912, Kim Il-sung’s birthday, with Kim as its progenitor, thereby denying the existence of earlier Korean nations.

In the North, as in southern Korea, the sudden withdrawal of the Japanese and the subsequent partition of the peninsula after World War II created economic chaos. Separation of the agricultural south from the industrial north and the absence of Japan meant that northern Korea lost its traditional markets for raw material exports and semi-finished goods as well as its sources of food and manufactured goods. Making matters worse, the withdrawal of Japanese entrepreneurs and engineers negatively affected the economic base. Thus the urgent task facing the fledgling communist regime in North Korea was to develop a viable economy, which it would soon reorient mainly around other communist countries. The economic problems faced by North Korea would be greatly compounded, however, by the destruction of industrial plants during the Korean War. Therefore North Korea’s economic development did not begin to tread a new path until after the war ended in 1953.

Because of massive bombing during the Korean War, North Korea suffered much heavier war damage than South Korea. For most of the 1950s, the communist country was absorbed with the urgent tasks of national reconstruction. The tightly centralized system of North Korea brought political and social conformity to the state and enabled a more rapid recovery than did South Korea’s decentralized system, at least for the short run. North Korea’s economy became one of the world’s most highly centralized and planned economies. As in other Soviet-type or command economies, all economic decisions concerning the selection of output, output targets, allocation of raw materials, prices, distribution of national income, investment, and economic development were implemented through the economic plan devised by the Korean Workers Party and the central government. Complete socialization of the economy, including collectivization of agriculture, was accomplished by 1958, when private ownership of the means of production, land, and commercial enterprises had been entirely replaced by state or cooperative (collective) ownership and control.

North Korea’s socialist command economy began with the three-year plan for 1954–1956, officially named the Three-Year Postwar Reconstruction Plan of 1954–1956, followed by a five-year plan for 1957–1961, to consolidate the foundation for further industrialization. This First Five-Year Plan for economic development was completed a year ahead of schedule, in 1960 rather than 1961.

To achieve economic development, North Korea employed a military-like mobilization of its people. Beginning with the
Ch’
ŏ
llima,
meaning Thousand-League Horse, movement in 1958, North Korea mounted a series of production campaigns. The Ch’
ŏ
llima movement, the North Korean version of China’s Great Leap Forward, was launched to accelerate the pace of collectivization of agriculture and mobilize agriculture in support of further industrialization. Subsequently Kim Il-sung, and later Kim Jong-il, continued to implement various “speed campaigns.”

With the benefit of foreign aid, North Korea, for the first few years after the Korean War, made impressive economic gains, far outstripping those of South Korea. By 1961 North Korea had achieved an industrial miracle. For a time annual economic growth reached as high as 20 percent, and the country was already the most industrial economy in the developing world and a model for other emerging nations. Through this rapid economic reconstruction, North Korea was able to improve its international standing, especially in the Third World. North Korea’s speedy economic growth caused South Korea to withdraw the argument of “reunification through marching north” and instead to advocate “peaceful reunification.” Even, in the late 1950s North Korea had developed a campaign to “help the poor South Korean brethren.” But these gains did not necessarily produce a corresponding improvement in general living standards, because the communist economic doctrine placed first priority on heavy industry and neglected consumer benefits. In North Korea, from the beginning, the emphasis was never on meeting basic individual needs.

From the early 1960s on, the North Korean economy began to encounter difficulties. The First Seven-Year Plan (1961–1967) had to be extended three additional years to 1970, as a result of the burden of a massive defense buildup. To build military strength, North Korea increasingly allocated economic resources to military production. In the 1960s, military expenditures rose to 30 percent of the
GNP
. This new economic policy dramatically transformed the North Korean economy and the nature of the state itself. While the civilian economy gradually stalled, North Korea increasingly became an armed camp. Clearly the continuing economic decline and the economic catastrophe of the 1990s and the 2000s originated in the policies of the 1960s.
¹⁷

Foreign aid in this period declined sharply, both from the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev in the late 1950s and from China during the chaos of the
Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. In addition, North Korea always had to contend with a labor shortage arising from wartime losses and defection, as well as the high proportion of men in arms.

In the mid-1960s, with the economy severely strained, the North Korean leadership split over policy issues. The hard-liners, represented by Kim Il-sung and the military, supported a continuing military buildup, whereas the moderates, mainly technocrats and economic managers, wanted to restrain the buildup. The division finally ended at a Party Conference in October 1966, when Kim Il-sung purged Kapsan faction members including Pak K
ŭ
m-ch’
ŏ
l and Yi Hyo-sun, who had doubted the wisdom of a military buildup. They were replaced in the
KWP
by Kim’s devoted loyalists and kinsmen, including his wife Kim S
ŏ
ng-ae, his younger brother Kim Y
ŏ
ng-ju, and a nephew-in-law, Hwang Chang-y
ŏ
p. This was the last significant leadership purge within the
KWP
, which thereafter unconditionally followed Kim’s teachings and guidelines.