Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (60 page)

In Czechoslovakia Kim Young-song was placed under special “ideological monitoring” as his brother’s case progressed. In 1958 North Korea-wanted to call all foreign exchange students home to keep from exposing them further to ideas that might be dangerous to the regime. “They told me, ‘You’re studying construction. You should see the work on Chollima Street.’” But a North Korean official in need of an interpreter went to Czechoslovakia that year and the student was kept on to help him. “The next year there was a lot of conflict. Some questioned my ideology, but others said I was smart and my knowledge should be put to use. They didn’t want to irritate the Czech government.”

When he finally returned to Pyongyang at the beginning of 1960, Kim Young-song was “attacked on ideological grounds,” he said. “First they-wanted to send me to a construction project in a rural area. That year they had a special session of ideological criticism of students who had returned from abroad. That time, luckily, I was not kicked out. There was still a case backlog of people with ideas unpalatable to the regime—religious believers, families of people who had defected to South Korea, the old elite class, people involved in trade and commerce. During the late 1950s the regime started getting rid of them. I had a couple of advantages. First, one brother had been killed in the Korean War. Second, I was part of the new elite, educated under the Kim Il-sung regime. Those assets helped drag my case out for fourteen years.”

Kim Young-song’s work in Pyongyang “involved pre-cast concrete and the standardization of buildings. If you plan a few buildings at once, you can standardize materials use. I was in charge of saying which materials went where. From 1969, I was involved in planning and building the buildings on one side of Chollima Street next to the Potong River: the Choson Arts and Culture Center, Choson Documentary Movie Center and Pyongyang City Stadium. Chollima Street was built for the fifth Party meeting [in 1970]. Just for that meeting they made us construct thirty buildings of ten stories each. We built them in ten days. That epitomized construction in North Korea. But Ididn’t think that much about it. It was the peak of construction activity. After that, it was downhill all the way”

Kim Jong-il had not fully taken over the construction industry at that time. “He didn’t start running all construction until 1975, by which time I had been kicked out,” Kim Young-song told me. “But he was involved in the Pyongyang Arts and Culture Center as something like the owner. He had to OK the construction plans. Ididn’t meet him. Whenever Kim Jong-il was on
his way, we had to leave the place. They never said, ‘Kim Jong-il is coming.’ They just said, ‘We have some foreign films.’ So everyone would go in and watch them. While we were inside he would come and go.” Those who didn’t get to see the Dear Leader were excluded “for security, basically and protocol,” Kim Young-song said. “Only the highest officials and the most beautiful actresses would greet him.”

All through his fourteen years in Pyongyang authorities watched the architect-engineer closely because he had worked abroad and, mainly, because his family during and after the war had shown divided loyalties. “My first and second brothers had socialist ideals, but the eldest nonetheless was executed. The third committed suicide during the Korean War. The fourth and fifth defected because of their capitalist ideals. So even though I was a member of the new-era elite, they didn’t really trust me. That was the period of what I call the quiet cultural revolution in North Korea. If your background was not good enough, you would be banished to a remote area. I believe the North Korean version was more brutal than the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was just much less publicized. By the late 1970s, everyone who might seem to be a threat to the Kim regime had been purged.”

In all the purges, “the basic principle was survival of one-man rule,” Kim Young-song told me. “From the mid-’50s to the mid-’60s Kim Il-sung was getting rid of other factions. After that he worked on forming a base for his one-man rule. Kim Jong-il started getting power, and a new group of his fanatic loyalists appeared. They were not well educated, but rather people who had gotten honors in the military and for otherwise sacrificing themselves for the Kim regime. In this period there was little or no regard for education. The really harsh period started in 1967, the year they sought one-man, totalitarian rule in earnest and set the foundation for Kim Jong-il’s succession to power.”

Kim Young-song rattled off a brief history of the later purges. “From 1967 for a decade or so, new groupings opposed to Kim Jong-il’s succession appeared. The first consisted of people who had helped Kim Il-sung establish his own one-man rule. When Kim Jong-il appeared on the scene in 1967 or so, they were angry: ‘How dare that young boy take the second position in power?’ Then someone would report them and they would be purged. O Jin-u was one of those who ratted. Kim Yong-ju had to be sent to a highly securi-tized mansion—under virtual house arrest—because Kim Jong-il was chosen over him as successor. Kim Jong-il’s stepmother, too, Kim Song-ae, and her children—relatives perceived as posing a threat were put under house arrest. Nonrelatives were sent to their deaths along with their families. Kim Dong-kyu of the party political bureau and Kim Chang-bong, a minister, fell into the latter category. They and their families were sent to concentration camps, where they were expected to die within two or three years. That was the procedure for higher-ranking people; ordinary people would be sent to the mines. By the late 1970s, all opposition to Kim Jong-il was removed.”

I asked Kim Young-song how an architect-engineer would know all those details of the palace intrigues. “It was common knowledge,” he replied. “Everybody in the country knew it. That’s how the Kim regime survives: everyone hears of such things and is frightened for his life. In the case of my older brother who was executed, all four of his children and his wife were sent to political prison. There has been no word from them for forty years. They probably died there. There is never an instance where families are not punished also.”

The regime finally got around to punishing Kim Young-song.

“If you have experience overseas, or enough intelligence to think about the regime, or you’re part of the old elite, you’re put under surveillance of a very active sort,” he told me. “They keep making you talk so you’ll slip up and make a mistake. Many times I made little mistakes. Such minor slips of the tongue aren’t too big a problem. Lots of people were watching me, but there were also a lot of people trying to help me because I was hard-working and good at my job. I was probably forgiven five or six times more than the usual person would have been. I never did anything wrong. It’s just that for ten years they were purging people, and they finally got to me. When they did, it was for old reasons—my bad family background. Up until then I had taken on very important construction jobs. But they started giving me less and less important work. I figured my time was coming. One day State Security called me in and told me, ‘A train leaves tomorrow for the mines. Get your things together and be on it with your family’”

The moment Kim Young-song had dreaded came on August 26, 1974. “I went with my wife and three daughters. We were sent to a mine near the Tu-men River. I worked as a janitor in the area. My wife worked in food service. State Security gave me no explanation at all. Once each spring and once each autumn they would send about 4,500 people out of Pyongyang without explanation. The place we were banished to wasn’t a political prison. They didn’t expect me to die from being sent there, but just to stay in that limited area and lead a very passive life. When I went to a city in the area, I met a lot of political exiles who had been sent there more than twenty years earlier from places like Pyongyang, Kaesong and Haeju.”

After about five years, Kim Young-song told me, he “got very lucky.” A technocrat colleague from Pyongyang was sent to North Hamgyong Province as governor. “He worked things out and got me a job in the construction engineering department of Chongjin District. There was in fact no construction going on in Chongjin. Most of the construction money was spent in Pyongyang. There was no need to build anything in Chongjin. The country had barely enough construction materials, fuel and vehicles to keep building things in Pyongyang. I was based in Chongjin until 1989 and kept my family there, but I also went around the country—mostly to Pyongyang—helping at construction sites.” Villas for the leaders Great and Dear (see chapter 10)
were the main exception to the Pyongyang-only pattern of construction work.

The construction industry to which Kim Young-song returned was now under Kim Jong-il’s supervision. The architect-engineer found that things had changed. “Up until then, all the buildings were plain, boxy structures. Kim Jong-il asked for more intricate buildings. That led to problems not only with construction but with materials.” One building that Kim Young-song worked on in Pyongyang adjoined a 105-story structure Kim Jong-il ordered built in an effort to boast of the world’s tallest hostelry. “That project shows the limitation of Kim Jong-il’s involvement in the construction business,” he said. “Until now, whatever Kim Jong-il ordered was done. But I believe that 105-story hotel will never be completed.”

I had heard that workers, piling up masonry story by story (the building had no steel frame), had not built the hotel straight enough vertically for elevators to be installed—that it was out of plumb, in builders’ terminology. But Kim Young-song said that wasn’t the problem. “They can put in elevators. If it’s a bit off plumb we just bend the equipment a little,” he said with a grin. “The problem is the shortage of funds. They don’t have the foreign currency to import the air conditioners, windows, lights, fixtures, etc. North Korea has the natural resources to build the frame-work of such a structure, but it must import everything else.”

I asked him: Do North Koreans laugh at Kim Jong-il over this failure?

“No,” he replied. “They just say, ‘That’s the way life is here.’ There are so many laughable things. If you laughed at them all, you’d be tired.”

Iasked architect Kim what percentage of construction work was for show as opposed to being useful for people’s lives. “There is construction work only in Pyongyang, and the purpose of Pyongyang is showing off,” he said. “After things are built for show, though, they often are useful.” For the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students, an extravagant North Korean attempt to outshine the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Kim Young-song “worked on a thirty-story round building on Kwangbok Avenue and a department store, also on Kwang-bok Avenue, plus the table tennis gymnasium for the festival.” By the time the festival opened, the new housing wasn’t ready to be used as such in many cases—“only the exterior structures were in place.” And even after the high-rise apartment buildings were completed, “because of the electrical shortage the elevators operate two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, two hours at night. At other times, you just walk up and down. A special man is in charge of elevators.” (After this interview the electrical shortage worsened and elevator service reportedly ceased entirely in many buildings.)

Kim Young-song got one more chance to go abroad for the regime. “In 1989 the North Korean government was sending students to East Germany to learn computers. They needed an interpreter. I knew German very well. They made me a party member and sent me to Germany. I was there three years. I didn’t have much change in my mentality. I was just leading my life
as I had done in Czechoslovakia thirty years before. Nothing had changed. There were just more cars.

“But I committed a slip of the tongue and found myself fleeing for my life. In North Korea if you tell 100 percent truth you have to die. The one big slip of the tongue I committed was to say ‘East Germany is a basic example of a true communist nation, but look how poorly off they are. Probably the capitalist nations are better off than this.’ I said it to trustworthy colleagues and friends while in North Korea on my annual two months’ vacation leave. Trust-worthy colleagues told their trustworthy colleagues, word spread and the police started investigating.

“I realized my treatment by friends was different. They started turning their backs on me. Really close friends said, ‘Why vacation so long? Go back and do your work.’ They didn’t want me to slip up again. But on two different vacation trips I slipped up and said something wrong, and my surveillance was increased. I think when I got back to Germany the last time there was an order to return me to North Korea. The attitude of the man in charge of North Koreans in East Germany changed. He had been very lenient. But, after a while, whenever I went anywhere he went with me—even to the grocery store. In Germany when I watched TV he would be outside listening, then he would just open the door and come in. My next vacation was due in three months, but this supervisor said, ‘Let’s go earlier. Let’s go now.’”

I asked Kim Young-song why he had been so concerned. I had heard that the punishment for saying that things might be better in capitalist countries was minor, only a month or two in prison. “Maybe sons of prominent high officials get small punishments,” he replied. “But with my family background and history of trouble, a big slip would finish me. The people who were able to tell you about the lighter punishment are probably part of the family of Kim or close to State Security officials. The biggest difference between me and other defectors is that they made little mistakes, got scared and defected, while I was under surveillance for thirty years. This mistake would have been the end of me. I would have gone to prison and died there. Take the case of one of the students who studied overseas, returned to North Korea, went to a store, looked at the underwear made in North Korea and said, ‘A person should wear
this
as underwear?’ He was sent to political prison.”