Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (11 page)

He also acknowledged that he and his men had some crucial help from others along the way “Old man Ma” at Luozigou had appeared and provided needed help in 1933 when his men were thinking of abandoning their struggle. Like-wise another old man, this one a timber mill employee named Kim, helped him and his men out-wit and escape their Japanese-led pursuers in 1935, he said. “It was strange that whenever my life was in danger benefactors such as old man Kim would appear before me and save me at the critical moment.” While some might call this luck, “others regard it as fate. They do not consider it luck when benefactors appear to help patriots who devote their all to the country and the people.”
⁷⁴

In his memoirs, Kim boasted: “We could defeat the strong enemy who was armed to the teeth, fighting against him in the severe cold of up to forty degrees below zero in Manchuria for over fifteen years,”
⁷⁵
Fifteen years would mean right up to the 1945 Japanese surrender, for which Kim claimed credit. In fact, though, he did not stay on in Manchuria until 1945. The weight of available evidence suggests he managed to continue fighting there only until the latter part of 1940 or early 1941. By then, the Japanese campaign had succeeded to the point that it was next to impossible for him and what remained of the guerrilla force to continue fighting in company-size units as before. Guerrillas had agreed to scatter and pursue “small-unit” action instead.
⁷⁶
Finally, for Kim, the better part of valor was to flee, taking refuge across the border in the Soviet Union to await more favorable circumstances for the struggle.

Regardless of the facts, perhaps Kim believed that Koreans deserved to achieve liberation on their own. Perhaps he eventually came to believe that they deserved to imagine that it had happened that way even though in the end the Allies had done it for them. It is possible that as the events of those years faded into history—and however much he knowingly exaggerated his part in those events—he really came to feel deeply that his patriotism, his determination and his many sacrifices earned him the role of father of the country. “My patriotic spirit made me as a teenager cry out against Japan on the streets of Jilin and carry on a risky underground struggle dodging the enemy’s pursuit. Under the banner of anti-Japanese struggle I had to endure hardships going hungry and sleeping outdoors in the deep forests of Mount Paektu, push my way through endless snowstorms and wage long bloody battles convinced of national liberation, fighting against the formidable enemy scores of times stronger than our forlorn force.”
⁷⁷

To some extent, Kim Il-sung as a young independence fighter deserves to be evaluated on his own terms. Brave and tough, surviving and thriving as an exile, he never gave in. Mean-while, the Japanese pacification campaigns achieved such success that most other Koreans in his situation, if they were not killed, ultimately accommodated themselves to a future in which Japanese rule seemed impregnable. But Kim did not. “It is his persistence and obstinate will, characteristics of many successful revolutionaries, that deserve recognition,” observes biographer Suh.
⁷⁸

Kim comes across as a young man who matured fast to become an effective and shrewd leader. If he was not the unfailingly benevolent, all-wise figure he later cast himself to be, at least he showed considerable intelligence and common sense. In many or even most cases, the ideological and policy stands he claimed to have taken in his guerrilla years represented rational— even inspired—choices, given his communist and anti-Japanese orientation.

As his personality cult expanded in later decades, Kim claimed that he had been recognized as the heart of the Korean resistance movement even as early as 1935. (Never mind that he still had been commanding at the battalion level then, with not only Chinese but also Korean generals above him.) “The enemy believed,” he wrote, “that without Kim Il-sung the Korean communist army and its resistance to Manchukuo and Japan would collapse.”
⁷⁹
His own men had the same belief, he said. Typical of his recollections was a 1935 scene when he said he awoke from a raging fever to find a tearful subordinate crying, “Comrade Commander, if you die, Korea-will be hopeless.”

The difficulty of sifting through the many extravagant claims that he and his followers put forth over the decades, to discover what is true and what is false, constitutes the main impediment to reading Kim Il-sung’s true character. That very problem, however, gives us a fix on one basic in Kim’s personality: his enormous self-regard. Large egos were the rule among the young revolutionaries of his time, by Kim’s own account: “Everyone was his own master. Everyone thought of himself as a genius, a hero and a great man.”
⁸⁰
Although he affected an ironic tone in writing those words, the man who bore the proud name Kim Il-sung developed very early a preference for the company of people who acknowledged him as a genius, hero and great man.

Of one guerrilla subordinate he tellingly wrote: “Just as Ko Po-bae followed and respected me unconditionally, so I trusted and loved him absolutely”
⁸¹
He related fond memories of Jo Taek-ju, one of those ubiquitous old men who were forever saving him. Jo’s family hid Kim from the enemy in 1935 and nursed him through his fever. Kim wrote that when he finally came to, he thanked the old man for having saved his life. “Don’t mention it,” he quoted Jo as having replied. “God gave birth to you, General Kim, and you have been saved in this log cabin by God’s will.” Kim claimed he then protested that this was laying it on a bit too thick—but the old man merely chided him for being “too modest.”
⁸²

Somewhat paradoxically having made of himself in the 1930s a genuine Korean national hero under Chinese Communist command, Kim Il-sung in the 1940s added another sponsor. He survived the Japanese campaign against him by living in the Soviet Union under Soviet protection. He wore a Soviet Army uniform. After Japan’s 1945 defeat, he went on to gain political power with backing from many fellow Koreans but also—a more important factor— from the Soviet generals in charge of the occupation of northern Korea.

It was a profitable bargain for both sides. In the process, however, Kim compromised his nationalist credentials to some extent, in his own mind and in the minds of some fellow Koreans. Rather than nationalism, Kim preferred to describe his stance as “socialist patriotism.” Regardless of the terminology, taking Moscow’s orders required him to subordinate strictly Korean interests to communist internationalism whether he liked it or not. Especially hard for him to swallow was the fact that the triumph over Japanese colonialism was not of his own doing. By no means were all of his official positions and actions his own, even after he had been installed as the most powerful Korean in the northern half of the peninsula.

Kim saw any flaw in his Korea-first image as a threat to his power. He grew determined to redeem his damaged nationalist credentials. Thus, he reworked his life story to suppress the truth about his life in the Soviet Union during the first half of the 1940s. Then, even while carrying out the Soviet program for North Korea, he watched for opportunities to prove that no
other Korean was his peer as a patriot. His determination in that regard formed a major strand in the tangled history that led him to plan the invasion of the South, an action that he hoped—based on serious misjudgments, which may have arisen partly from excessive enthusiasm and self-confidence— would reunify Korea and turn it into a powerful country able to withstand the incursions of larger neighbors.
¹

Some time after they fled across the border into the Soviet Union, Kim and his men were inducted into the Soviet Army and sent to a camp at the village of Boyazk, about fifty miles north-west of Khabarovsk in the Soviet Maritime Province. There they joined a secret international reconnaissance unit of the Soviet Army. Officially named the Eighty-eighth Special Independent Sniper Brigade, its mission was reconnaissance rather than fighting. The commander of the Eighty-eighth was Zhou Baozhong, a Chinese guerrilla general from the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army who had been commissioned as a Soviet Army senior colonel. Kim Il-sung, who had worked with Zhou in Manchuria, became a Soviet Army captain commanding the Eighty-eighth’s First Battalion. The approximately two hundred soldiers in Kim’s battalion included Chinese and Koreans as well as Soviet citizens of Korean ancestry.
²

One of Kim’s first assignments after he went to the Soviet Union was to write a history of the NEAJUAs First Route Army—of-whose top command he was the only surviving member who had not been captured. His Chinese-language chronicle has survived in Beijing’s archives.
³

According to Kim, since his youth in Manchuria he had scoffed at those Koreans who believed foreign powers held the key to their country’s liberation. The young Kim’s subordination to the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party, and then to the Soviet Army, may raise doubts about the strength of any such early belief. But if the sentiment was in part an afterthought, inspired by the tactical requirements of his later struggles with political rivals in Korea, it had resonance for Kim nonetheless. He demonstrated that with his longtime refusal to level with the North Korean people about his Soviet sojourn; instead he developed, and stuck to, a claim that he had continued his struggle in Manchuria and Korea until he succeeded in liberating his homeland in 1945.
⁴

In fact Kim’s escape to the USSR permitted him to wait—-wisely as it turned out—-while the Allies dealt with Japan. Mean-while he could enjoy the comforts of settled life while recovering from health problems that had plagued him during his years of living on the run. Most important, he remained alive, a viable player, in position to take advantage of the Allied victory whenever it might occur.

Focused on defending itself against Hitler, the USSR-was still more than
three years away from declaring war on Japan—but it already had begun its preparations. The immediate mission of the Soviet Army’s Eighty-eighth Brigade was to infiltrate soldiers into Manchuria and Korea to spy on Japanese troops. Training emphasized marksmanship, radio communications and parachuting. A longer-term role of the men of the Eighty-eighth Brigade was to help set up communist regimes in Korea and China following the Japanese empire’s collapse. To this end, they underwent heavy communist political indoctrination.
⁵

Kim Il-sung quickly impressed his Soviet mentors—thanks to brains, not brawn. Some reports say he was sent on trips to Moscow in 1943 and
1944,
probably in the company of his commander, Zhou
⁶
. Yu Song-chol, a third-generation Soviet citizen of Korean ancestry, was assigned as Kim’s Russian-language interpreter in September of 1943. Yu recalled that period in interviews with South Korean researcher Chay Pyung-gil nearly five decades later. Kim was “lean and weak, and his mouth was always open,” perhaps due to blockage in his nasal passages, said Yu. Kim led troops back across the border on only one actual reconnaissance mission that Yu knew of. Even during ski training he became so exhausted that he had to tie himself to a subordinate with ropes in order to move. Despite his physical shortcomings, Kim “was regarded as being exceptionally smart and possessive of leadership qualities,” Yu said. “I believe this is why he was liked by the Soviets.”
⁷

As for Kim’s subordinates in the Eighty-eighth, their relationship with their commander depended to a great extent on whether they had fought alongside him earlier. He already held considerable authority among the two dozen Korean guerrillas from Manchuria who joined him in the Eighty-eighth Brigade. The ex-partisans “were united with one another based on affection and comradeship that only they themselves shared,” according to Yu’s recollections. Unlike them, Yu and other ethnic Koreans in the Eighty-eighth who had been reared in the Soviet Union “could only face Kim Il-sung with unemotional, calm, feelings.”
⁸
Perhaps partly for that reason, Yu did not see in Kim the unfailingly benevolent figure portrayed in the North Korean regime’s subsequent propaganda. Kim was “stern and cold” to subordinates and he expected unquestioning obedience, Yu remembered.

On the other hand, Kim was “obedient and ardent toward Brigade Commander Zhou Baozhong and the Soviet officers,”
⁹
said Yu. That characterization rings true. Kim’s memoirs make clear that the fatherless young revolutionary, from the beginning of his middle-school days in Huadian, appealed to the paternal instincts of elders and superiors who were eager to help him on his way up. For more than a decade after liberation, Kim was to play for his Russian mentors the role of the consummate company man, flattering them and carrying out their instructions as they re-warded him by granting him more and more power and autonomy.