North Korea Undercover (16 page)

It is a serious error that Comrade Kim Il Sung is surrounded by bootlickers and careerists... What ever is said by the leader, they [other high-ups in the KoreanWorkers’ Party] accept it without any dispute. Thus the mistakes are not revealed openly, only in private and belatedly... The personality cult has not changed at all, and it is a primary and decisive factor in every mistake.
⁴

So by the time of his tenth anniversary in power, Kim Il Sung’s Soviet mentors were bemoaning both the extreme nature of his personality cult and the fact that it was not changing. Szalontai’s detective work is a great piece of historical research because it challenges an excessively sentimental nostalgia that shrouds our view of the first Kim, indulged by many North Korean defectors and consequently some Western analysts, who write with syrupy regard for the ‘Great Leader’. The nostalgists argue that Kim Il Sung was, whatever else you say about him, dedicated to the cause, and that it was his son, Kim Jong Il, who built up the personality
cult from the 1970s onwards. At the time the Soviet Counsellor wrote that memo about Kim Il Sung’s personality cult, Kim Jong Il was nine years old.

The Soviet memo signals, too, a fundamental change in the relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang. In 1945, Kim was little more than the Kremlin’s puppet ona string. While Stalin was alive, Kim, more or less, did the bidding of the Vozhd. From the death of Stalin onwards, Kim Il Sung increasingly became the master of his destiny. And something of a show-off.

Enver Hoxha, the one leader of a Communist nation possibly even more peculiar and vain than Kim Il Sung, visited Pyongyang in September 1956. The guerrilla leader-turned-dictator littered Albania with concrete pillboxes, wrecked its economy, locked the country up from the outside world and was, according to the Tirana rumour mill, a closet homosexual who had his lovers murdered after sex. Reporting for the
Observer
in 1991, after Hoxha was dead but before the Albanian revolution when they knocked over his statue in Skanderbeg Square, I put the gay sex murderer point to President Ramiz Alia, his successor. Alia was Hoxha’s lickspittle, a smooth-fleshed nonentity who inherited the tyrant’s machine of repression, but could not control it. The interview had been extraordinarily boring and halfway through I decided to follow an
Observer
tradition of being rude to princes, remembering the example of the late Patrick Donovan, who had once interviewed the King of Greece. (At the end of the interview, the king asked to inspect Donovan’s notebook. On it was only one thing, a doodle of a large black cat.) I asked the president the following: was it true that Hoxha was a homosexual who had the secret police murder his lovers after he had finished with them? Alia had replied: ‘No, he was a family man,’ and closed the interview.

In 1997 I met the deputy prisons director, Bedri Choku, who had been in the worst prison in Hoxha’s gulag, Spac. When I told Bedri this he shook his head:‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s wrong. With me in Spac in 1969 was one of Enver’s lovers, a man of about sixty. He was very discreet about it, but if you were a friend he could trust, he would talk about it. They had sexual relations. Enver did not have him killed, because he had saved Enver’s life during the war. He sent him to Spac instead.’
⁵

Dictators, they’re so fucking weird.

Enver wrote up his trip to the DPRK as follows:‘On September 7, 1956, we arrived in Pyongyang. They put on a splendid welcome, with people, with gongs, with flowers, and with portraits of Kim Il Sung every where. You had to look hard to find some portrait of Lenin, tucked away insome obscure corner. The revisionist wasp had begun to implant its poisonous sting there, too.’
⁶
Later, Hoxha, who had a sharp tongue, was even more dismissive: ‘Kim Il Sung is a pseudo-Marxist, vacillant, megalomaniac, revisionist.’

Kim Il Sung never quite made it to Albania.

The Great Leader was in a strong position, but that doesnot mean he was totally secure. Earlier that summer of 1956, Kim had gone to Moscow on his armoured train to discuss Khrushchev’s new policy of stepping away from full-throated Stalinism. While the cat was away, the mice plotted. Choe Chang Ik was his greatest danger, the leader of the Yanan group, Koreans who had spent time in China and were mentored by the Chinese Communist Party. He and his supporters were alarmed about the personality cultand angered by the forced collectivization of agriculture – the
so-called co-operative movement. One complained:‘Tax gathering was accompanied by beatings, murders and arrests. The Party’s activities are based on violence, not persuasion. The co-operative movement is based on violence.’
⁷
The moment Kimcame back, he smelt trouble. Kim felt something was amiss, it was reported, when on his return at Pyongyang airport he saw Choe turn pale.
⁸
All his life Kim Il Sung hated flying and preferred to go by train. It seems on this one occasion he made an exception. Perhaps he was tipped off about the plot, and overcame his fear of flying to hurry home before the plotters became too powerful.

The conspirators planned to topple Caesar at the Party plenum by getting delegates to criticize him openly, but the nerve of the ‘August plotters’broke, and their dagger missed its target. Two or three attacking speeches were made, but they fell on deaf ears. Kim Il Sung’s secret police were on to them, and very soon the plot crumbled. He was not so strong that he could have Choe killed immediately; instead, the regime’s public enemy number one was made the manager of a pig farm.
⁹
Lankov points out that this ploy was a direct steal from Stalin’s playbook: humiliating demotion first, then torture, then the firing squad. That’s what happened to Bukharin; all we know for certain was that Choe was purged and died in 1957, probably not of old age.

By the Workers’ Party plenum in 1958, Kim Il Sung had wiped out all possible heads of internal opposition: first, Communists from South Korea, then Soviet Communists, then those who had close links to the Chinese. Left standing at the end of the game were a small handful of guerrillas who had been with Kim in
Manchuria, and a larger mass of slavishly loyal robots, who did his bidding. What is remarkable is that Kim managed to play off the Soviet Union and the Chinese against each other, tilting to one side, then the other, but always looking after number one. He played this game deftly, probing Soviet and Chinese Korean clients and friends when the moment was right, exiling some, demoting others, executing opponents when he could get away with it.

The vendetta against enemies of Kim was dressed up in there gimes ideology. One old comrade, Yu Song Choi, had been Kim’s interpreter in the Soviet Union, and had twice snubbed the guerrilla boss, along the lines of: ‘I’m your interpreter, not your servant.’ In 1958, he returned from studying in the Soviet Union to Pyongyang where he was placed in the care of the Thought Examination Committee. It’s hard to imagine a more Orwellian title. The attack on his mind was so painful he begged to be killed, but eventually they let him escape back to the Soviet Union in what Martin rightly describes as an outcome ‘at the lower end of the horror curve’.
¹⁰

From 1958 on wards, Kim Il Sung was safe to repudiate the Soviet Union’s new policy of demonizing Stalin as once he had been worshipped. The moment in 1961 when Stalin’s waxwork was taken out of its glass box and buried in a grave – albeit in the Kremlin walls – was a breaking point. While Stalin’s personality cult became a thing of disgrace across the Soviet empire, in Pyongyang the cult of Kim grew like Topsy. As far as the DPRK was concerned: ‘Stalin is dead. Long live the Korean Stalin!’

Veneration for the leader; the ordinary people of North Korea could go hang. The regime continued to treat its people as if their
standard of living – even their ability to stay alive – was a matter of no importance. The Russians, in particular, were sceptical of Kim’s relentless pressure to get on with heavy industry while bleeding agriculture dry. After the end of the Korean war, the economy in the North was all but dead. The leadership sent out their subordinates to bring in more food, in some cases half of a peasant’s crop. The regime forbade private grain trade and forced villagers into collective farms. The result was not overnight economic success but famine. Szalontai uses his Hungarian sources to tell the story of 1955: people on the move from the always under-nourished north-east, many starving to death along the way. The victims were not just peasants in the sticks but also residents of Pyongyang, reduced to eating grass. No one knows how many people died in the North in 1955; nobody counted. But the evidence of famine is real and castsa big shadow on the claims that the North was economically more successful than the South until the late 1970s. People in a thriving economy do not eat grass.

Peter Valyi was a Hungarian government delegate, who was shocked by the poverty and disease he found in post-war North Korea:

The people had no place to live, so they build small wooden huts for themselves. One part of the city is composed entirely of such [dwellings]... The flats are unhealthy. Tuberculosis is spreading... Another disease is intestinal worms, which is terribly widespread, for there is no animal breeding; human excrement is practically the only thing they use for manure...
¹¹

To counter the lack of food, the dynasty came up with sillier and sillier solutions: in 1959, Kim Il Sung urged that everybody grow rabbits; in 1999, his son’s ‘on-the-spot guidance’ was for people to breed ostriches. The simplest solution of all – a free market, effectively regulated – was not to be considered.

As ever is the case with North Korea, the regime survived by getting out the begging bowl. The Chinese and the Soviets injected the country with masses of food aid; other Soviet satellites like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania helped out with doctors and materiel. By 1957, the famine was over. Szalontai’s Hungarian diplomats note the rebuilding of Pyongyang, but even as late as 1977 they warn: ‘Shops are empty. People are hungry.’
¹²

After our spell by the Kim Il Sung statue sending text messages by piggy-backing off the South Korean mobile phone system, we went to the Koryo Museum, which has been made a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Hoe-Yeong, a man of high culture, found this exhibition of North Korean antiquities no different than the rest of the dodgy nonsense we’d been shown: ‘Some of the mostfake-looking ancient artifacts I’ve ever seen any where in the world. ’ To be fair, it is acknowledged in guide books that many of the exhibits are copies, the originals held in another museum in Pyongyang, also open to visitors.

That night we ended up in Daedonggang Diplomatic Club restaurant and karaoke bar. As we poured over the menus, the power failed, and I had to mull beef stroganoff versuschicken kiev by a thin prick of torchlight. It was like camping at the Drones Club. While we ate, some of our partywent on a trawl of Westerners who might have gobbets of information. They met one
man, working for an international NGO, who didn’t want to talk. He was giving out medical aid but he did let on that, in two years in Pyongyang, he had been allowed out of the capital to monitor how his aid was being distributed just four times.

The karaoke bar was no less dire than any other karaoke bar in the world. Many of the songs were in Chinese, and for the second time that day Dylan pulled a blinder. Looking at one particularly impossible-to-decipher set of Chinese ideograms, he said: ‘I know that song!’, stood up and rattled it out in what to my ears sounded perfect Chinese. As well as studying International Relations at the LSE, Dylan had been learning Chinese at school in the States. He sounded pitch-perfect.

Having been to the place that may yet end the earth, the theme from
Titanic
was the only song for me. (There is a certain poignancy to my choice which eluded meat the time of karaoke song selection. The date the great ship sank with so many lives lost was 15 April 1912 and also Kim Il Sung’s birthday: twin disasters that day, some say.) I sang dreadfully. The German and Swiss women plumped for ‘Barbie Girl’, perhaps the most Swiftian satire on the emptiness of Western materialism ever written. I did Ken’s lines, so deep-voiced it hurt my larynx. We looked at Mr Hyun. He did notlet the honour of the People’s Republic down. His song of choice? ‘My Way’.

Mr Hyun had a powerful baritone. When he stopped, we gave him a standing ovation. Christopher Hitchens noted that Frank Sinatra’s ‘My Way’was a big hit in the karaoke bar during his trip back in 2000: ‘There’s a special plangency to the line about facing the final curtain.’ Regrets? Forget about it. On the way home on the coach, Miss Jun had alullaby for us – the nation’s reunification song. And so ended the most surreal day of my entire life.

¹
Lankov,
From Stalin to Kim Il Sung
, p95.

²
Suh,
Kim Il Sung
, p133.

³
Lankov,
From Stalin to Kim Il Sung
, p97.

⁴
Balazs Szalontai:
Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet –DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953–1964
, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005, p73.

⁵
John Sweeney: ‘Travels in Absurdia’,
Observer
, 16 March 1997.

⁶
Enver Hoxha,
The Khrushchevists
, Tirana, 1980, edition in English.

⁷
Lankov,
From Stalin to Kim Il Sung
, p182.

⁸
Suh, pl50.

⁹
Lankov,
From Stalin to Kim Il Sung
, p175.

¹⁰
Martin, ppl09-110.

¹¹
Springer, Szalontai:
North Korea Caught In Time
, pxxi.

¹²
Springer, Szalontai, pxxv.

9

Cruel Christs of Pus

To the soundtrack of the Beatles’ hit song‘All You Need Is Love’, in 1967 the Western world rocked to ‘The Summer of Love’. At roughly the same time a train from Chairman Mao’s China was shunted across the Yalu river over the Friendship Bridge into North Korea, carrying ethnic Korean passengers wearing placards around their necks: ‘Look, this will be also your fate, you tiny revisionists!’
¹