The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (26 page)

Kim’s trip to the Soviet Union marked a major effort to restore relations with Moscow after two decades of cool ties. The Soviet Union had played a powerful role in North Korea, in its creation, in the selection of Kim Il Sung as its leader, and in the conduct of the disastrous 1950–1953 war. Materials from Soviet archives depict a central role for Stalin in the war, suggesting that he personally insisted on continuing the conflict for well over a year after Kim was ready to seek a negotiated way out. Then, two weeks after Stalin’s death, the Soviet leadership reversed his position and issued secret orders to communist negotiators to end the fighting.

Following the Korean War armistice in 1953, Kim remained heavily dependent on the Soviet Union economically and militarily, and he visited Moscow often before the full onslaught, in the early 1960s, of the great schism between the Soviet Union and China. The split between the two giants of international communism, which were also his most important patrons, created enormous problems for Kim, who struggled to keep on good terms with both of them even while being denounced for his internal policies and independent stance. Kim reacted bitterly to Nikita Khrushchev’s reformist policies and his denunciations of Stalin’s “cult of personality” that Kim emulated. He was even more offended when the Chinese attacked him as a counterrevolutionary revisionist, aristocrat, and capitalist during the radical phase of the Cultural Revolution. Eventually, Kim found the silver lining, that the Sino-Soviet dispute gave him space to maneuver between the two great powers of communism, each of which was forced to tolerate his independence for fear of pushing him decisively to the opposite camp.

Vadim Tkachenko, a leading Korea expert on the staff of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party from 1962 to 1991, said Moscow was concerned about Pyongyang’s often surprising and uncontrollable policies: “North Korea was an independent country which took the kind of actions that were difficult to explain. They would down a plane, capture a ship, join the nonaligned countries, and we would only learn of it from the newspapers.” According to Tkachenko, “We didn’t know [KCIA director] Lee Hu Rak was in Pyongyang in 1972; the Americans told us. We didn’t know about the negotiations when the [US spy ship]
Pueblo
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was seized [in 1968]; the Americans told us. You’d make a mistake to think that Kim Il Sung was Moscow’s man.”

However much the Russians privately distrusted Kim and his regime, they saw North Korea as a strategic ally in Asia. A Central Committee official put it well at a closed conference in Moscow in 1984: “North Korea, for all the peculiarities of Kim Il Sung, is the most important bastion in the Far East in our struggle against American and Japanese imperialism and Chinese revisionism.” For this reason, the Soviet Union continued to fuel North Korea’s economy and military machine throughout the Cold War, although the nature and extent of the support varied over time.

In early 1984, China’s relations with the United States were improving rapidly, with President Reagan planning a trip to Beijing in late April, and Kim was once again worried about the direction of Chinese policy. As soon as Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982, the North had begun signaling interest in improving ties with Moscow. Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov, died in February 1984, before much could be accomplished, and so Kim moved quickly to get an invitation to pay an official visit in May to meet Konstantin Chernenko, Andropov’s successor.

When the Chinese learned of Kim’s planned trip, they hurried to pay court to him. In their Beijing talks with Reagan, Chinese leaders stressed their backing for the North’s recent three-way-talks proposal, and Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang urged Reagan to withdraw US troops from Korea, saying “they could return in a day” if hostilities should start again. On May 4, three days after Reagan flew home, Hu arrived in Pyongyang for an eight-day official visit. Two million people turned out to greet him in what North Korea called “the greatest welcome in Korean history.” For Kim, Hu’s visit was an important part of his delicate balancing act between his two communist sponsors and a useful prelude to his Moscow trip.

In the Kremlin talks with Chernenko and other officials, Kim’s central purpose was to reconnoiter the likely course of Soviet politics, according to Oleg Rakhmanin, longtime Asia expert of the Communist Party Central Committee, who took part in the talks. “Kim understood the position of Chernenko perfectly” as a transitional leader, Rakhmanin recalled. Among those on hand for the talks and related social occasions was Politburo member Mikhail Gorbachev, who received his first personal exposure to this “socialist monarchy” in Asia, as he later referred to North Korea. Kim told his Soviet interlocutors, according to a confidential report on the talks furnished to Eastern European communist officials, that he expected this to be his last foreign journey—that thenceforth his son and heir, Kim Jong Il, who this time remained behind to run the country, or Prime Minister Kang Song San would visit foreign countries on his behalf.

Sitting with Soviet leaders in the Kremlin, Kim volunteered to discuss his relations with China and declared them to be good. Yes, it was true that China was flirting with the Americans and Japanese, but Kim declared that this was because “China is a poor country with a population of one billion people and its leadership is seeking help with modernization from the United States and Japan.” At another point in his tour, Kim said that despite his confrontation with the United States and Japan, his greatest fear was “of socialism not being maintained in China.” With Deng Xiaoping moving rapidly into market economics and hosting Reagan, “we must all insure that they follow a socialist way and none other,” Kim told an Eastern European communist leader.

In the Kremlin, Kim told Chernenko that North Korea had no intention of attacking the South and spoke of his recent proposal for three-way talks with the United States and South Korea. While Washington was insisting on bringing in the Chinese to make a four-party negotiation, Kim said that “China is against such an arrangement.” Kremlin officials responded that “the Americans are urging the Chinese toward a solution that suits them and their allies, but which creates the danger of the Korean problem being solved behind the backs of the Koreans themselves.” Not surprisingly in view of the acute Korean sensitivity to outside interference, “we got the impression that the approach of China to solving the Korea problem was also causing some anxiety in Pyongyang,” wrote a Soviet official who made notes on the Kremlin talks.

Kim assured Chernenko that in the future, North Korea would give closer study to “the experience of the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union.” Then, having refurbished high-level Communist Party and government ties between the two countries, Kim asked for more Soviet economic and military assistance. He was remarkably successful.

The Soviet Union had been North Korea’s main source of external economic support since the creation of the DPRK, regardless of the ups and downs of political relations. By 1983, however, Soviet trade had fallen to less than 40 percent of Pyongyang’s exports to all countries and about 25 percent of its imports. After Kim’s 1984 visit, the flow of goods to and especially from the Soviet Union increased rapidly. Due initially to an extensive aid package approved as a result of Kim’s visit, imports from the USSR jumped from $471 million in 1984 to $1,186 million in 1986 and $1,909 million in 1988, when they accounted for roughly two-thirds of North Korea’s imports from all countries. Moscow not only financed a growing trade deficit with Pyongyang but also provided Soviet coal and oil at cut-rate prices, well below those of the world market. Kim also achieved a long-term North Korean goal, an agreement from Moscow to supply light-water nuclear power reactors.

On the military side, Chernenko was equally forthcoming. Since the early 1970s, Moscow had refused to provide sophisticated warplanes to North Korea despite supplying them to such nations as Egypt, Libya, and Syria, because of a Soviet fear that Kim might use the planes rashly. However, on the basis of the newly improved USSR-DPRK relationship and because the Reagan administration was supplying the South with high-performance F-16s, Chernenko promised to supply North Korea with sixty MiG-25 fighters—probably no match for the F-16s but a quantum jump beyond the DPRK’s previous weapons. The planes began showing up in North Korean skies the following spring. The Kremlin’s military aid package also included SAM-3 surface-to-air missiles and Soviet surface-to-surface SCUD missiles with a fifty-mile range.

In return, in a remarkable breach of its neutral stance in the Sino-Soviet split, the North permitted Soviet military aircraft to begin regular overflights of its airspace. By the end of 1985, they had flown twenty-one missions over North Korea. Soviet warships also began making port calls in North Korea. Even before this flowering of Moscow-Pyongyang military cooperation, the US Command in South Korea was sufficiently concerned that it notified American forces whenever Soviet satellites were expected overhead, in order to implement “avoidance techniques” to mask American activities from overhead spying.

Besides obtaining military and economic assistance, another top-priority aim of Kim Il Sung’s 1984 trip was to persuade the Soviet Union to forswear relations or even contacts with the South. Having failed to unify the country through military means in the Korean War, Kim was passionately opposed to the development of “two Koreas,” which implied along-lasting division of the country. He was particularly allergic to any dealings with or recognition of South Korea by the Soviet Union or China—but his own dealings with the South sapped the force of his argument. If he could deal with Seoul, his allies reasoned, why couldn’t they? Moreover, the South’s rapid economic strides and growing international stature made contacts with Seoul increasingly attractive to members of the communist bloc. South Korea fought hard to undertake and improve these relationships, step by step. And in zero-sum fashion, North Korea fought hard against them, each step of the way.

For a long time, the Soviet Union rejected all relations with South Korea. But in 1973, following the North-South joint statement and President Park’s drive for normal relations with communist countries, the Soviet Union began to permit South Korean citizens to participate in international conferences and sports events in the USSR. Pyongyang immediately protested, but Moscow responded that if it barred South Koreans from legitimate international activities, its own participants could be barred, and “there is even a danger that the Soviet Union would be expelled from important organizations.”

Around the same time, North Koreans protested sharply after spotting a Soviet correspondent dining in a fashionable Paris café with two South Korean diplomats. The Soviet Foreign Ministry denied any wrongdoing but cabled its overseas posts that “unauthorized, reckless encounters with South Koreans harm our national interests and undermine trust in the integrity of Soviet foreign policy by the DPRK leadership.” On another occasion, eagle-eyed North Korean diplomats detected a few South Korean stamps in an international postal exhibition in Moscow, prompting a high-level complaint and hurried removal of the offensive stamps from the display cases.

With South Korea’s growing stature and strength in the 1980s, however, a more realistic assessment was beginning to permeate academic and
governmental ranks in Moscow. Following Kim Il Sung’s 1984 trip, the Korean-born deputy director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Georgi Kim, said at a closed meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee that the Soviet Union should stop looking at Seoul through Pyongyang’s biased eyes. He declared, “It is obvious that South Korea is a successful and respected country which is genuinely interested in being our friend. To respond positively to Seoul’s overtures correlates with the U.S.S.R. national interest.” This viewpoint was becoming increasingly influential in Moscow.

The emerging Soviet relationship with South Korea was one of the principal issues on Kim Il Sung’s mind in October 1986, when he flew to Moscow to meet Mikhail Gorbachev, who had taken power the previous year after the death of Chernenko.
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Kim also sought to persuade the new Soviet leader to press the United States to remove its nuclear weapons and troops from South Korea, suggesting that the Seoul regime would be in trouble if its US props were removed. Kim told Gorbachev with considerable exaggeration, “There is a big movement in favor of socialism in the South, and work is underway to create a national front. One third of South Korean parliamentarians support the North. Unlike the recent past when Americans were perceived as liberators and supporters, now many, not to mention the students, speak against the American presence.” According to Vadim Medvedev, a senior aide to Gorbachev who participated in the talks, Kim was openly concerned that the interests of North Korea might be ignored in the heightened Soviet-American dialogue, just as he believed was happening in the Sino-American dialogue.

Several months before Kim Il Sung arrived, the Soviet Politburo had decided to shift to a more conciliatory economic and political posture toward South Korea that, a May 1986 Politburo document acknowledged, “was becoming a factor [in the] global, military-strategic balance.” Trade with South Korean firms through third countries was encouraged and began to increase rapidly. Exchanges were permitted with South Korea in art, sports, and culture. Nevertheless, in his meeting with Kim in the Kremlin, Gorbachev unexpectedly excoriated China for doing business with South Koreans and declared flatly, “The Soviet Union won’t engage with them.” Vadim Tkachenko, the Korea expert on the Central Committee, was thunderstruck by Gorbachev’s declaration, which contradicted the policy decisions that had been recently made with Gorbachev’s participation. When Tkachenko asked higher-ups the next day what policy to follow, he was told to ignore Gorbachev’s surprising declaration and “work as before.”