North Korea Undercover (10 page)

The rest of his youth is a murky story. Kim’s activity as a young Communist was discovered by the Chinese police, and he was gaoled in the autumn of 1929, aged seventeen, in the city of Jilin. Kim was banged up in a cell in the cold, sunless side of the gaol, which in winter was wallpapered with frost. The police tortured him, breaking fingers, says the official version. Breen writes cynically that this allegation of torture is ‘unconvincingly written up’; I agree. There is no detail. After some friends bought him out, he left his family and joined the guerrillas. First, you had to adopt a nom de guerre. To begin with, they called him ‘Star of Korea’ but dropped that infavour of ‘Be The Sun’ or Il Sung. (So in English, his name would be Kim Be The Sun.)

The narrative now gets clogged with propaganda. Suh, whois always fair to young Kim, points out the Japanese military issued several reports on Kim and produced maps detailing the where abouts of Kim’s troops.
¹⁰
Korean newspapers – then, of course, under Japanese censorship – regularly reported on Kim’s banditry. Guerrilla wars are never fought according to Queensberry Rules. The crueller the government forces, the crueller the guerrillas become – inpart to survive. If the Japanese tortured and killed
captured guerrillas, so did Kim Il Sung and his men against people they suspected of being in league with the Japanese. Some South Korean anti-Communists have asserted that Kim stole the real Kim Il Sungs name, leaving the poor guerrilla leader a kind of ‘Man in the Iron Mask’. Suh states bluntly: ‘Kim is not a fake.’
¹¹

The start of 1935 saw a breakdown in relations between the Chinese Communists and their Korean brothers. Koreans were tortured into confessing they were secretly working for the Japanese. They weren’t, of course, but hundreds were executed. Kim survived this baptism of paranoia well, perhaps because his Chinese was so fluent, and his manner so steely self-confident. In 1937, Kim led a brief raid across the border into Japanese-occupied Korea at Pochonbo. Not a great battle, but enough to make a name for himself with the Japanese enemy, his Chinese Communist allies, and, observing development from not so far away, officers of the Red Army. Kim dynasty propaganda later airbrushes out the involvement of the Chinese – and, providing a rear base and supplies, the Soviets – and asserts that he was the effective leader of a stand-alone Korean Communist military operation in Manchuria. Lankov notesgrimly: ‘This version has nothing to do with reality. No Korean People’s Revolutionary Army ever existed.’
¹²

Officially, Kim Il Sung and his merry men fought like tigers against the Japanese from within Korea. In February 1942, the guerrilla band was holed up on the slopes of the sacred Mount Baekdu, on the Chinese/Korean border, when Kim’s heavily pregnant wife, Kim Jong Suk, gavebirth to a son, Kim Jong Il. The magical birth was heralded by signs in the heavens: a swallow, a double rainbow across the sky over the mountain and a new star in the firmament.

The official story is rubbish. By 1940, the Korean resistance in Manchuria was pretty much broken. In December 1940, Kim and his gang fled across the Amur river to the safety of the Soviet Union.
¹³
There, they camped out the rest of the war in the garrison town of Khabarovsk. Buzo writes that Kim Il Sung’s exposure to Stalinism happened at a pivotal time in his life, that it was his only positive experience of the outside world. Stalin’s portrait hung in every railway station, for example. Kim Il Sung liked what he saw, and he wanted it for himself.

Buzo makes a subtle point about Stalinism, that, as well as being about a command economy, the drive for heavy industry and the personality cult, it ‘embodied the traditionalism of old Russia’, borrowing enlightenment, if that is the right word, from the likes of Ivan the Terrible.
¹⁴
Kim’s version was never just Stalinism, pure and simple, but a blend of that and ultra-traditionalism. The Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt defined key elements of that as: ‘legitimation of the ruler in religious terms; the political role of the population embedded in their societalroles; limitation on the access of members of peripheral groups to the political centre’, and limitation of innovation.
¹⁵

Buzo, who sticks the boot into Kim Il Sung the hardest, defines the regime’s ideology as Kimism: a blend of Korean ultra-traditionalism, Stalinism and the criminality learnt when he was a guerrilla. That seems to be a fair assessment, and not so far from Myers’ sense of the regime’s ideology in the twenty-first century as being a xenophobic racism.

It was in Khabarovsk in 1941, according to reliable Soviet and
Korean sources, that Kim Il Sung and his wife, Kim Jong Suk, had a baby boy, known in Russian as Yura and in Korean as Jong Il. Kim Jong Suk, known in Russian as Vera, wasdescribed as being an attractive and smart peasant woman, with noticeably darker skin than other Koreans – a feature she passed on to her son, Kim Jong Il.

The power that eventually broke Japanese imperialism was neither Korean, Chinese nor Soviet. The American dropping of atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima ended the second world war, but came so fast that it caught the great powers unawares. Military facts on the ground and negotiations between Stalin, Truman and Churchill at Potsdam had divided up Europe into Western-and Eastern-controlled halves, but the division of Korea happened on the hoof. Two American colonels in the War Department – one of them Dean Rusk, subsequently a secretary of state under JFK and LBJ – studied a map, drew aline along the 38th parallel, and took over the South. They appointed an aged nationalist, Syngman Rhee, to run things south of the border. The Republic of Korea – ROK – the state Syngman Rhee created, was, to begin with, not much different from Franco’s Spain: neo-fascist and profoundly undemocratic, where enemies got tortured or murdered. But in 1987 civilian rule replaced the military there and from then on it has gone from strength to strength.

For Koreans, the division was brutal, uncalled for and undeserved. The schizophrenia between the South and the North had no Korean origin, but was a consequence of the new Cold War game. In time in Korea, the war would blow hot. What many Koreans feel is so unfair about their divided country is that Nazi Germany was broken into two because of Hitler’s folly. The Koreans had been the victims of fascist aggression by Japan, but
they, too, suffered division, which is continuing into the twenty-first century, two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But who was to be the face of the North? In 1945, Mao and the People’s Revolutionary Army were still fighting the Kuomintang, the inept, corrupt Chinese conservatives; the Communists who were calling all the shots were based in Moscow, not Beijing. To begin with, the Soviets ran North Korea pretty much as the Japanese had, as a colony, to be looted, the women raped, ordinary civilians walking along the road ‘bumped’ out of the way by drivers in their jeeps.
¹⁶
For the first three years, the supreme ruler of North Korea, according to Lankov, was General Terentii Fomich Shtykov, a political commissar who, in 1938, had presided over a committee investigating ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’. In plain English, he was one of Stalin’s most trusted mass-murderers.
¹⁷
But Stalin’s men knew that naked Soviet power could not last for long.

They needed a front man, someone they could use, but not so strong that they could not control him. To be the leader of the other, northern Korea, the Soviets looked around and could find no one who was perfect. The Korean Communists who had survived the Japanese occupation in Seouland Pyongyang were discounted as being unreliable. The obvious candidate was Cho Man Sik, Korea’s version of Mahatma Gandhi, who had preached nonviolent resistance against the Japanese, but now that they were gone wanted independence immediately. The more the Soviets studied Cho, the less suitable he became. And then they remembered Kim Il Sung, tucked away in their back pocket.

Kim surrounded himself with his old comrades, two hundred former guerrillas who had been with him in Manchuria. But, of course, they had never been the only Koreans to fight the Japanese. Brave Communists had faced torture and death inside Korea; others had fought the Japanese in Manchuria, alongside the Chinese or the Soviets. All of these factions had their leaders, who waited for Kim to make a mistake.

Kim Il Sung did not win power by popular assent. Far fromit. He was not well known inside Korea, and overtook other Communist claimants to the throne. But Kim’s Soviet backers already had plenty of experience at suppressing dissent. In North Korea, they rolled up opponents, gagged free speech, strangled free political parties at birth, rigged elections – and anyone who disagreed was entertained by the secret police. The job of suppression was markedly easier than in eastern Europe, because there had been no tradition whatsoever of free speech, parliamentary democracy or free newspapers. North Korea slipped from colonial occupation to authoritarian dictatorship relatively smoothly. Despotism was some way off yet.

The Soviets presented their new man to the people of Pyongyang at a mass rally in October 1945. Photographs in which Kim was seen to be sporting a Soviet sash were later airbrushed by North Korean propaganda, so as to remove the taint of him being a Soviet puppet – but that’s exactly what he was. Kim read out his prepared speech in his halting, thick-tongued Korean; some thought that this young man could not possibly be the famous guerrilla leader Kim Il Sung, and the myth of the Man in the Iron Mask had begun. Kim was a young-looking thirty-three-year-old in a blue suit that was too tight for him. Cho’s personal secretary, clearly a hostile witness, said he sported ‘a haircut like a
Chinese waiter’
¹⁸
and madelittle impact on the crowd, speaking in a ‘monotonous, plain and duck-like voice’.
¹⁹
Another witness to the events in that year said that Kim reminded him of a ‘fat delivery boy’.
²⁰
Some people in the 300,000 crowd started to whistle and yell abuse. It wasn’t a perfect reception, but if you’ve got the secret police on your side, that doesn’t matter.

Cho, Korea’s Mahatma Gandhi, was leaned on to support the Soviet fiction of ‘trusteeship’ – a shadow policy he recognized and rejected as effective colonization. Elbowed out of power, Cho was humiliated, then arrested by Soviet police and held in the Koryo Hotel for a time while they hoped he would become more accommodating to Soviet policy. He was accused of ‘secret co-operation with the Japanese police’ – but no evidence was put forward. This seems like a black lie. He did not bend, so his hotel room was downgraded to a prison cell and then he vanished. It’s most likely that in October 1950, when the civil war was going badly, with United Nations troops pushing north, and Pyongyang was evacuated, Cho was shot in the traditional Stalinist fashion, with 9 grams of lead to the back of the head.
²¹

¹
Julian Barnes:
The Porcupine,
Jonathan Cape, London, 1992.

²
Buzo, p10.

³
Buzo, p237.

⁴
Dae-Sook Suh's
Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader
, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, and Martin's
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader
are the authorities on young Kim Il Sung; Breen's
Kim Jong Il
has the better jokes.

⁵
Martin, p15.

⁶
Martin, p16.

⁷
Martin, p59.

⁸
Kim Il Sung:
With the Century
, vol. 1, Foreign Language Publishing House, Pyongyang, 1992, p62.

⁹
Martin, p26.

¹⁰
Suh, p345.

¹¹
Suh, p52.

¹²
Lankov,
From Stalin to Kim Il Sung
, p2.

¹³
Lankov, p55.

¹⁴
Buzo, p45.

¹⁵
Shmuel Eisenstadt,
Daedalus,
vol. 102, no.l, ppl-28.

¹⁶
Breen, p20.

¹⁷
Lankov,
From Stalin to Kim Il Sung
, p2.

¹⁸
Martin, p53.

¹⁹
Buzo, p251.

²⁰
Andrei Lankov:
The Real North Korea
, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, p4.

²¹
Lankov,
From Stalin to Kim Il Sung
, p24.

4

‘No photos, no photos’

After breakfast we left the hot spa hotel and headed to the West Sea Barrage, celebrated in the following poem:

O shine for all centuries to come;

Great monument of the 80s built

By our design, our technique, our strength;

The great creation made in our own way.

Only a great leader A great party can conceive the idea.

Only a great people can build you West Sea Barrage, the world’s greatest.

Rise high to symbolize the power of self-reliant Korea

And tell and retell the everlasting achievement

Of our Great Leader

Forever and ever and ever.

Shoot the poet. The West Sea Barrage is an aquatic Stalinist folly. It cost $4 billion, larger in scale but no different in kind than
my hotel door not fitting its frame. The dream was that by building a barrage five miles across the Taedong estuary where it flowed into the West or Yellow Sea, they would make more arable land, conserve more fresh water for irrigation and have a road and rail bridge to boot. On the day we visited, halfway across the thin thread of concrete rippling across the surface of the sea, our coachcame to a stop. An ancient lorry slowly reversed, then tipped its cargo of enormous rocks into the waters. Mother Nature is gobbling up the barrage, and the dream is in danger of falling back into the sea. Behold, Kim Il Sung was no less silly than King Canute, when he commanded the sea to obey him...

At a morose visitor centre, adorned with the usual what-nottery of photographs and tributes to Kims One and Two, we were invited to sit down and watch a movie. It turned out to be a comic masterpiece. The film opens with footage in black and white, the pictures juddery, of a long shot from a crane, of worker-ants beavering away on the causeway; flags rippling in the breeze; two big lorries dumping rocks into the sea. A commander with a chunky walkie-talkie gives orders to two flunkies, who shiver in the cold; rocks slide into the sea with an almighty splash. The film switches to colour and three red bulldozers moving like synchronized swimmers in too-perfect unison shove soil into the great splashes, all to a rousing-ish soundtrack of plinkety-plonk music. The finale is a cheesy colour snap of Bad Elvis grinning at the camera, in the foreground cherry blossom; in the background the estuary sliced in two by the ribbon of concrete. The film, especially the early sequences, looked so ancient I assumed the dam had been built in the 1950s, and only when writing this book did I realize that it was started in 1981 and completed five years later.