Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (146 page)

68.
Ibid., vol. 3, p. 282.

69.
Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 279–305.

70.
Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 369–370.

71.
Ibid., vol. 3, p. 394.

72.
Chung Dong-joo, “Testimony on Gen. Kim Il Sung’s Unit (3).”

73.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 3, pp. 402–403.

74.
Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 406–411.

75.
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 53.

76.
A resolution adopted by Korean partisans of the First Route Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army in .March 1940, at one of their last meetings, describes the situation as it was developing in the months before Kim’s flight to the USSR: “The concentration and movement of a big company, as in the past, now provides an easy target for the Japanese punitive force; therefore, as a policy of the army, in the future the army should be divided into small units and should be scattered. Because of the Japanese punitive force’s operation among the masses, the people in the guerrilla districts have since winter become distrustful of our army” See “Item 62: Resolution,” translated in Suh,
Documents of Korean Communism,
p. 471.

77.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, preface.

78.
Suh,
Kim Il Sung,
p. 54.

79.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 3, p. 394.

80.
Ibid., vol. 2, p. 451.

81.
Ibid., vol. 3, p. 356.

82.
Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 412–415.

4. Heaven and Earth the Wise Leader Tamed.

1.
Since 1970 the 1941–1953 period has been examined in whole or in part by many authors, including: Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee (
Communism in Korea
[see chap. 2, n. 28], and other works) and Dae-Sook Suh (
Kim Il Sung
[see chap. 2, n. 35], and other works), who are often categorized as taking an orthodox or traditional approach (or, in some critics’ terms, an anti-communist, Cold War approach; historians’ debates for decades have been fraught with ideology); Bruce Cumings (especially
Origins
I [see chap. 2, n. 25], and
Origins
II [see chap. 3, n. 43]) and several contributors to a volume edited by Frank Baldwin,
Without Parallel: The American-Korean Relationship Since 1945
(New York: Pantheon, 1973), scholars who have been labeled “left-revisionist” by some of their fellow historians; and Erik van Ree
(Socialism in One Zone: Stalin’s Policy in Korea, 1945-1947
[Oxford: Berg Publishers Ltd., 1989]), Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis and Xue Litai
(Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War
[Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993]) and Kathryn Weathersby (various papers published by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project), who have presented evidence made available from sources in the Soviet Union and China, and have taken stances that might be characterized variously as neo-orthodox or post-revisionist. The version presented in this chapter offers a brief, critical synthesis. For a fuller listing of contending historians and a useful effort to sort out their views, see James I. Matray’s 1998 review essay “Korea’s Partition: Soviet-American Pursuit of Reunification, 1945–1948,” http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intre/korpart.htm. Matray applies the label “right revisionism” to the neo-orthodox works, even as he argues that Korean War scholars should “abandon the outdated analytical dichotomy of traditionalism versus revisionism and use new communist archival materials to provide a better understanding of the reasons for Korea’s division and why two Koreas still exist today.”

2.
This and other details of Kim’s stay in the Soviet Union are taken from a remarkable nineteen-part series in the Seoul daily
Hanguk Ilbo
beginning November 1, 1990. The series presents the reminiscences of Yu Song-chol, a former colleague of Kim Il-sung’s who had been purged in 1959 and since then had lived in the Soviet Union, as told to Prof. Chay Pyung-gil of Yonsei University in Seoul.

Installments of the series
’were
translated by Sydney A. Seiler. They form an appendix to his book,
Kim Il-song 1941–1948
(see chap. 2, n. 18). Besides citing Yu’s testimony, the valuable Seiler book marshals an
array
of additional primary sources to establish beyond question that Kim Il-sung did indeed live in the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 and served there as a Soviet Army officer— a point that had been questioned by some Western historians and obfuscated by Kim Il-sung and other North Korean sources. I am greatly indebted to Mr. Seiler for having provided, before publication, a copy of his Yonsei University thesis of the same title, on which the book is based.

In addition to Yu’s recollections of the 1941–1948 period covered by the Seiler study, I make considerable use of the translated Yu testimony from the Seiler book’s appendix for my treatment, in the following two chapters, of the Korean War and the purges that followed.

3.
See McCormack, “Kim Country” (see chap. 3, n.
44).
Kim Il-sung’s unit history was eventually published as “Kanglian diyi lujun lueshi” (Brief History of the First Anti-Japanese United Army), in Zhongguo gongchandang lishi ziliaocungshu, ed.,
Dongbei kangri lianjun zilao
(Materials on the History of the North-Eastern Anti-Japanese Army), vol. 2 (Beijing, 1987), pp. 665–679. McCormackreports that “the revelation of the authorship of these materials was made in various Japanese sources in 1991.”

Sydney A. Seiler
(Kim Il-song 1941–1948,
p. 31) relates that Zhou had sought to keep the old Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army units intact under Chinese Communist Party command, even though operating from Soviet soil to launch actions against the Japanese across the border: “Yet the NEAJUA remnants
’were
essentially unable to survive, let alone operate, without Soviet assistance, and the Soviets
’were
reluctant to support such actions especially after entering a non-aggression treaty with Japan in April 1941. An eventual compromise in which former units of the NEAJUA were allowed to operate under CCP directives but had to receive approval from the Soviets for all operations placed those units veritably under the ‘domination and guidance of the Soviets.’” Seiler here cites Kim Chan-jong’s interviews for the South Korean magazine
Shindonga
(July 1992, p. 368) with Korean-Chinese who had been members of the Eighty-eighth Brigade.

4.
See Kim’s memoirs,
With the Century
(see chap. 2, n. 2), vol. 2, pp. 42–43, where Kim recalls criticizing, at a 1930 meeting, an anti-Japanese colleague’s argument that “if the great powers help us, we will win our independence.” Based on the historical record, Kim had a point. When Japan had moved to dominate and take over Korea, no other great power—most disappointingly at the time, not even the United States—had stood in the
’way,
even though Korea’s King Kojong sent a secret emissary to appeal to the nations assembled at the Second In ternational Peace Conference at The Hague in 1907.

In a later volume of memoirs, published posthumously, Kim did discuss having spent time at a “training base” in the Soviet Union, but in such a
’way
as to suggest he had been back and forth between there and a secret guerrilla base on .Mount Paektu in northern Korea. The Paektu “secret base” is where the official North Korean literature, since the 1980s, has claimed that Kim Jong-il was born. See Kim Il-sung,
With the Century,
vol. 23, “Alliance with International Anti-Imperialism Camps, January 1941–July 1942,” sec. 9, “Nurturing the Root of the Revolution” (translated by Lee Wha Rang for
Korea Web Weekly,
http://kimsoft.com/war/r-23-9.htm).

5.
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 1, 1990, translated in Seiler,
Kim Il-song 1941-1948.

6.
See Seiler,
Kim Il-song 1941–1948,
p. 40.

7.
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 1–3, 1990. Chay Pyung-gil, who compiled Yu’s testimony, adds, “From the aspects of both character and physical strength, Kim Il-sung was a political soldier more than a professional career soldier. He had more of an interest in organizational matters than in guerrilla or conventional warfare training” (“Following the Conclusion of the Serialization ‘Yu Song-ch’ol’s Testimony,
” Hankuk Ilbo,
December 1, 1990).

8.
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 3, 1990.

9.
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 4, 1990.

10.
The quotation is from a War Department cable paraphrasing the views of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific theater, cited in Joseph C Goulden,
Korea: The Untold Story of the War
(New York: .McGraw-Hill, 1982), p. 18.

11.
Van Ree,
Socialism in One Zone,
p. 65. The author asserts that a Korean report of heavy fighting at the port of Unggi is not borne out in the Soviet literature. He adds, “I did not come across information on how many of those [4,717] casualties were wounded or died in Korea (as opposed to Manchuria). Perhaps the Red Army lost only very few men in Korea, so few that the ‘heroics’ of its Korean
war are lost if the numbers become known. … It was truly a micro-war, barely scratching Korea.”

12.
Historian Kathryn Weathersby based on analysis of recently declassified Russian documents, says Stalin mainly wished to ensure that the Korean peninsula would not be used as a staging ground for future aggression against the USSR and that a “friendly” government would be established there. See Weathersby “Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945–1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives,” Working Paper No. 8, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C, November 1993.

13.
Van Ree acknowledges
(Socialism in One Zone,
pp. 125–128) that there were various reasons why it might have been difficult for the Soviet authorities to arrange deliveries, but asserts that it was their refusal even to discuss the matter that showed, as early as October of 1945, a conscious Soviet policy of “closing off the northern zone.” The Russians, he says, “wanted to put their zone into order and they did not want American lookers-on, or American interference in the economic process within their zone. In order to achieve that, they
’were
willing to give up … the delivery of rice from the South.”

14.
O Yong-jin, a defector cited by Suh
(Kim Il Sung,
p. 50), quoted Kim as having told him ruefully that the speedy Japanese surrender had spoiled a plan for his band of former guerrillas to parachute dramatically into Pyongyang. On the other hand, Seiler
(Kim Il-song 1941-1948,
p.
46)
says Stalin himself apparently refused to permit the Eighty-eighth to join in the fighting—perhaps thinking that having fought would entitle the Koreans to more say in the occupation government north of the 38th parallel than Soviet policy envisioned granting them. Seiler here cites Kim Chan-jong, “Bbalch’isan manga, kim il-song kwa 88 tong-nip yodan” [Funeral march of the partisans, Kim Il-song and the 88th Independent Brigade],
Shindonga
(Seoul, July 1992): p. 381. Van Ree
(Socialism in One Zone,
p.
66)
conjectures that .Moscow wanted to use Kim’s group to help administer the occupation zone, and on that account did not wish to risk their lives in battle. See footnote 83 on that page for van Ree’s summary of sources that assert, vaguely, that Kim’s men did participate in the fighting.

15.
“Other, better-known or older Korean guerrillas such as Kim Chaek and Choe Yong-Gun trusted him and chose him as their leader. Chinese, Soviet and Korean anti-Japanese forces at the Khabarovsk camp in the Soviet Union reached a common view in appointing Kim leader of the ‘Korean Task-force’
(Chaoxian gongzuotuan)
detachment sent in September 1945 to spearhead the process of takeover from Japan” (McCormack, “Kim Country,” citing Wada, pp. 330 ff).

Seiler reports
(Kim Il-song 1941–1948,
pp.
46–47),
based on testimony in
JoongAng Ilbo,
August 19, 1991, “The Soviet Far East Command did dispatch one officer to the 88th Brigade to interview a handful of potential leaders from among the Koreans there. Toward the end of August 1945, Lt. Col. Grigori Konovich Mekrail, then a political officer with the Soviet Far East Command who would later serve with the 25th Army that occupied North Korea, was suddenly ordered by his headquarters to go to Pyongyang. On the way, he stopped in Khabarovsk to visit the members of the 88th Brigade. There, Mekrail claims to have met Kim Il-song and three or four other leaders among the Korean partisans. He had received orders from his headquarters to evaluate the partisans and attempt to select one among them to be a leader. Mekrail, playing down the
significance of the meeting, emphasized, ‘Prior to the meeting in Khabarovsk, I had not received any special mention of Kim Il-song by name.’ ”

16.
Hanguk Ilbo,
November 6, 1990. Seiler notes
(Kim Il-song 1941–1948,
p. 58, n. 21) testimony by the Soviet-Korean interpreter for the Soviet officials who greeted the ship, Chong Sang-jin
(JoongAng Ilbo,
August 26, 1991), that Kim introduced himself by his birth name, Kim Song-ju, when he disembarked.

17.
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 7, 1990.

Lim Un says Kim’s preliminary appointment was not police or garrison chief, but a position equally high or one step higher: deputy commander of the Pyongyang
komendatura,
the chief political operative for the city (Lim Un,
Founding of a Dynasty
[see chap. 2, n. 59], pp. 124–128).
Komendatura,
or bureaus of local commanders, as van Ree explains
(Socialism in One Zone,
p. 85),
’were
organized throughout northern Korea right after the Soviet troops arrived: “They safeguarded local order and took possession of Japanese military property and armaments. … They
’were
headed by a commander. His deputy was the chief of the Political Department. Another important official was the garrison chief”