The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (33 page)

Until the Gorbachev era, very little information about South Korea had appeared in the Soviet press, and nearly all of that negative. However, in the Olympic year of 1988, there were 195 stories in leading Soviet newspapers and magazines, most of them firsthand accounts by Soviet correspondents. In addition to sports news, the correspondents covered Korean economic achievements, culture, and lifestyle, with authentic impressions of Korean reality.

Remarks by Soviet reporters illustrate the overnight change in attitudes toward South Korea. Vitaly Ignatenko, who served as leader of the Soviet press at the Seoul Games and later became Gorbachev’s press secretary and director general of Tass, the Soviet news agency, said his first visit to Seoul was “a shock” to him. “Everything I had read before turned out to be outdated; I arrived into the 21st century.” Correspondent Vitaly Umashev of the influential weekly
Ogonyok
said, “My vision of South Korea as a Third World country disappeared.” The Communist Party newspaper
Pravda
, which had previously depicted South Korea mainly as a bastion of American militarism, summed up its impression after the close of the Games: “The sports facilities in Seoul are the best in the world, and the values of the Korean traditional smile and etiquette have been greatly underestimated.”

Even more powerful was the impact of television. Almost 200 million Soviet viewers watched the ceremonial opening of the Games, with
attention also directed outside the stadium to scenes of Seoul. Many Russians were stunned and delighted to see Korean spectators rooting for Soviet teams in the Games, even against American competitors. An aide to Gorbachev told the Soviet leader, “There is definitely no other place on earth where people so heartily welcome Soviets.”

Even before the Games, South Korea had engaged in a series of probes with Moscow. In the summer of 1988, Park Chul Un, the Blue House point man for northern politics, traveled to Moscow with a letter from President Roh to Gorbachev. The letter praised the very perestroika policies being damned in Pyongyang and called for establishing Soviet-South Korean diplomatic relations as a step toward peace and stability in Asia. A few weeks later, Gorbachev sent a return letter.

As Park prepared to leave Moscow, he was informed that the Soviet Union intended to improve its unofficial ties with Seoul and was advised pay attention to a speech to be delivered by Gorbachev in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia on September 16, the day before the opening of the Olympics. In that speech, Gorbachev addressed himself for the first time in public to the potential thaw, declaring that “within the context of a general improvement in the situation on the Korean peninsula, opportunities can open up for forging economic ties with South Korea.” He also proposed a multinational initiative to limit and reduce military forces and activities “in the areas where the coasts of the USSR, PRC, Japan, DPRK and South Korea merge close.” Roh responded in his October address to the UN General Assembly, calling for “a consultative conference for peace” involving the five powers mentioned by Gorbachev plus the United States. The Soviet UN ambassador and other officials noted the resemblance between the two proposals.

Quite apart from politics, the South’s growing economic dominance on the peninsula made the country difficult to ignore. Although in the first decades after the Korean War the economy of the North was considerably ahead, by 1988 South Korea’s GNP was at least seven times larger than the North’s, and the gap was growing rapidly.

Up to 1984, the Soviet Union had provided more than $2 billion in foreign aid and credits to North Korea, much of it in the form of whole factories financed by soft loans that were never repaid. Following the trips to Moscow by Kim Il Sung in 1984 and 1986, the Soviet Union had provided increasing quantities of oil and gas, weapons, and a variety of other goods on easy credit and concessional terms. In 1984, however, Pyongyang stopped paying even interest on its smaller debt to Western creditors, and three years later it was officially declared in default, making it ineligible for further commercial loans. By 1988 Moscow was shipping $1.9 billion in goods to North Korea while receiving less than $0.9 billion in return. This heavily subsidized Moscow-Pyongyang trade made up nearly three-fifths of North Korea’s total trade turnover.

The vibrant economy of South Korea, on the other hand, was booming, with economic growth rates over 10 percent annually and a large global trade surplus, as its automobiles, ships, television sets, and computer chips made their mark on the international economy. No longer the recipient of foreign aid, Seoul in mid-1987 had become an aid-dispensing nation by establishing an Economic Development Cooperation Fund to assist developing countries. In their contacts with Moscow, leaders of South Korea’s highly successful
chaebols
were expressing intense interest in investment and trade in Siberia, a high priority in Soviet economic plans for which massive foreign investment was needed. Moscow initially had hoped for major Japanese funds, but the unresolved dispute over the Soviet-held Northern Islands interfered with this prospect. The ROK was the logical substitute.

Even before the Politburo decision to move toward ties with the South, North Korea demanded an explanation from its Soviet ally for its growing trade relations with Seoul. In a memorandum in late-September 1988, the International Department of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee responded in astonishingly frank terms:

The USSR, to solve its economic problems, is interested in new partners. South Korea possesses technology and products that can be of use, especially in the Far Eastern regions of our state. As is well known, South Korea maintains commercial links with almost all countries in the world, including such socialist states as the People’s Republic of China. The opening up of direct economic contacts between the Soviet Union and South Korea will also benefit peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region. We don’t want to rush developing these ties. We’ll move gradually, measuring progress in the economic field with the political trend in the region.

The memo added, “At the same time the USSR remains loyal to obligations to the DPRK. We don’t intend to start political relations with South Korea.”

In December 1988, a month after the Politburo decision on improving ties with South Korea, Seoul passed word that it would favorably consider Moscow’s request for a $300 million commercial loan and also study a possible $40 million project to build a trade center in the Soviet Far East.

As Gorbachev had directed in the Politburo meeting, Shevardnadze traveled to Pyongyang that month to inform the North Korean leadership directly of Moscow’s decision. The North Korean capital struck members of the Soviet traveling party as depressingly cold and gray with unsmiling people and little clouds of dust in the streets. Kim Il Sung, however, did
his best to stay on the good side of his visitors, and in an internal report the Soviet foreign minister described the discussions as “especially cordial.”

It was left to Foreign Minister Kim Yong Nam, the official who often performed the job of presenting Pyongyang’s most intractable positions, to fiercely attack Moscow’s shift in policy. According to Shevardnadze’s report, his counterpart “rather sharply accused the socialist countries of not evaluating the situation in South Korea correctly, of deepening the division of the country and hindering inter-Korean dialogue and [charged that] some socialist countries are betraying socialism for the sake of money.” Shevardnadze reported that “these fabricated accusations were firmly rejected by us.” The Soviet foreign minister assured the North Koreans that Moscow’s relations with Seoul would continue to be unofficial, and he included this commitment in the formal communiqué issued at the end of the talks.

Shevardnadze did not repeat in public or in his internal report his most emphatic statement in Pyongyang. At the height of the argument with his North Korean counterpart, he declared heatedly that “I am a communist, and I give you my word as a party member: the USSR leadership does not have any intention and will not establish diplomatic relations with South Korea.” This would be thrown back in his face later by North Korea—and sooner than anyone guessed.

GORBACHEV MEETS ROH

In 1989, a year of dramatic change in the external relations of the Soviet Union, ideology gave way to pragmatism and internationally accepted standards. The last Soviet troops left Afghanistan in February, ending an occupation that had severely damaged Moscow’s standing abroad. In May Mikhail Gorbachev traveled to Beijing to terminate once and for all the decades-long dispute between the two giants of communism. In August, with Gorbachev’s approval, the Polish Communist Party gave up power to a coalition headed by the noncommunist trade-union movement Solidarity. This spelled the end of the Brezhnev doctrine, under which Soviet military power enforced the loyalty of its peripheral satellite states. A series of spectacular events in Eastern Europe followed, in which the communist governments of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were ousted or their leaders forced to reverse their political direction. In November the crossing points in the Berlin Wall were flung open, bringing the symbolic end of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War II and leading in time to the absorption of communist East Germany by the West. At a windblown, sea-tossed summit meeting with President George Bush in Malta in December 1989, Gorbachev gratefully accepted American economic aid and declared that the United States and the Soviet Union were no longer enemies.

While his foreign policy was winning praise abroad, Gorbachev was under growing criticism at home. The Soviet Union was in the first stages of a painful economic transition, with consumer-goods shortages causing longer and longer lines and the budgetary deficit soaring to 12 percent of GNP, at that point considered abnormally high. Public confidence in the Soviet leadership was sharply declining, just when loosening controls on expression made it possible for the public to declare its views.

In these circumstances, Gorbachev saw better relations with Seoul as a promising new source of economic help for the embattled Soviet leadership. Moreover, by forging visibly close ties with South Korea, Moscow was poking a finger in the eye of the standoffish Japanese, who were refusing to provide economic assistance because of the Northern Islands issue. Gorbachev had diminished concern about North Korea, which was seen as a holdover from the Stalinist era and the epitome of the Cold War states that were rapidly passing from the scene in Europe.

Looking back on the Korean developments, Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs, “Our interest in South Korea, one of the East Asian dragons which had succeeded in creating an economic miracle, grew in relation to the worsening of the economic situation in the USSR.” In an interview for this book, the former Soviet leader also pointed out other factors, noting that he took up relations with Seoul “after a serious change in US-Soviet relations and after the concept of New Thinking began to materialize, after the important process of change got under way in Eastern Europe, and after we abandoned the so-called Brezhnev doctrine.”

In Seoul President Roh watched the signs of a developing Soviet shift, particularly Gorbachev’s two policy speeches on Asian affairs in July 1986 in Vladivostok and September 1988 in Krasnoyarsk. “I took this as an indication that the time was right, the opportunity had come to make ourselves available” for realizing the goal of establishing relations, Roh told me in 1993. “I would say I started smelling their real intention.”

At the end of 1988, Moscow lifted entry restrictions to the USSR by South Koreans, giving them for the first time the same treatment as citizens of other capitalist and developing countries. Shortly thereafter, the two nations opened postal, telegraph, telephone, and telex links. In January 1989, Korea’s most senior business figure, Chung Ju Yung of Hyundai, Korea’s largest conglomerate, visited Moscow and reached an agreement on business cooperation with the Soviet Chamber of Commerce. Soon after, the deputy chairman of the Soviet chamber traveled to Seoul and agreed on the exchange of unofficial trade offices in the two capitals. When the South Korean office in Moscow opened, it was immediately mobbed by hundreds of Soviet entrepreneurs and government officers proposing deals.

Korean industrialists flocked to Moscow, where they were feted by Soviet officials and presented with requests to help in a wide variety of
enterprises, ranging from building consumer-goods factories to converting Soviet military industries to civilian uses. Trade between the two nations increased rapidly.

Trying to respond, in early 1989 North Korea launched a spirited campaign to persuade Gorbachev to visit Pyongyang, hoping that this could reverse or at least halt the drift toward Seoul. It was widely known that Gorbachev planned to visit China in the spring, which would provide a convenient occasion for a stopover in Pyongyang. High-ranking North Korean leaders and their ambassador in Moscow used every possible tactic to get Gorbachev to add Pyongyang to his itinerary, including begging, demanding, and threatening. “It was very hard for us to invent new reasons all the time why he couldn’t come,” said a Gorbachev aide who prepared his trip to Beijing. Gorbachev’s national security assistant, Anatoly Chernyayev, said Gorbachev feared his reformist reputation would suffer in Pyongyang because “he realized that once he went [there] and they staged a performance of hugging and kissing, everyone would accept it as a double standard.”

Gorbachev’s refusal to visit was difficult for Pyongyang to swallow. This was especially so because the resolution of the Sino-Soviet dispute—which the Gorbachev journey to Beijing symbolized—created a new situation in which neither major communist power would be fearful about pushing Kim Il Sung’s regime into the arms of the other. Kim was worried about losing leverage with them both, and worse, the potential threat to the North either might pose.