| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Charles K. Armstrong. The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950. (Studies of the East Asian Institute.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2003. Pp. xv, 265. $39.95.

This is a timely book, as North Korea is very much in the news as a bizarre, menacing state. For historians it represents a problem: how can a regime that has suffered defeat in war and the loss of its principal financial patron, witnessed the collapse of most of its fellow communist governments, and undergone a severe, decade-long economic crisis endure? Finding an answer to this question is difficult because of the inaccessibly of North Korea to scholars. Charles K. Armstrong contributes considerably to our understanding of the peculiar and durable nature of the North Korean regime in his clearly written and convincingly argued study of the years between the liberation of northern Korea at the end of World War II and the start of the Korean War five years later. He does this primarily by analyzing a collection of documents captured by the U.S. Army during its brief occupation of North Korea in the Korean War. The author compares this cache to the Smolensk Archive so important for Soviet-era Western scholars of Stalinist Russia, only the "Records Seized by US Military Forces in Korea" are far more voluminous. These, along with G-2 intelligence reports from Seoul, CIA studies, and other North Korean documents, allow the author to establish a picture of the formative period of the North Korean state.

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