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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Charles K. Armstrong. The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2004)
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| THIS IS an excellent book that helps to explain why any isolated North Korea continues against all odds to survive in its corner of Northeast Asia. It does so by revealing in detail the origins and foundations of the North Korean revolution — its aims, its programs, and its basis of popular support — thus challenging some of the Cold War stereotypes promoted in the West. |
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According to many Western analysts, the government headed by Kim Jong II lacks any substantial popular support or political legitimacy and clings to power by virtue of strong-arm policing and the bare-faced propaganda bluster of a pathetic dictator. According to this view North Korea was a Soviet-type regime imposed by Stalin that lacked any national roots, was not really Korean, and, like the Soviet-sponsored governments of Eastern European countries, it should have disappeared after the USSR collapsed in 1991. Instead it has somehow lingered on as a kind of communist freak show waiting to be blown away. |
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Charles Armstrong argues that the "source of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) strength and resiliency, as well as many of its serious flaws and shortcoming" (1) lie in the poorly understood origins of the North Korean system. He probes these origins mainly by relying on a large body of documents captured by the American army when it occupied North Korea for 52 days during the Korean War (1950–1953). These documents were stored for many years in a Federal Records Center in Virginia, and then transferred to the US National Archives where they are available for scholarly study. Since the documents were not prepared for external propaganda purposes they provide a unique window into the process of "building socialism" from the ground up: minutes of official meetings and speeches of Kim II Sung, soldiers' diaries, photograph albums, employment records, women's magazines, sheet music, trial proceedings, lists of people under surveillance and their alleged crimes, "and a host of other items left behind in the flight from invading UN forces." (249) In all there are 1,600,000 pages, "often fragmentary, diffuse, and unsystematic" (249) but enough to glimpse a "real society composed of real people going through a period of tremendous change." (249) |
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According to Armstrong's reading, the economic system in North Korea was not simply imposed by the Soviet occupation forces after the defeat of Japan in 1945. Nor was Kim II Sung a puppet leader appointed by Stalin. Rather, the new system was the result of a combination of forces that included the Soviet army of occupation as well as various Korean communist forces that emerged from underground after the liberation from Japan's colonial rule, or that returned from China where they had been in exile and had provided part of the guerilla forces taking part in the Chinese revolution. The North Korean army, for example, eventually included 200,000 Korean veterans of the struggle in China; they had participated with the large Korean ethnic minority population of Manchuria in the land reforms, united front politics, and social reforms that later would be replicated in North Korea. Kim II Sung was one of those who returned from such experience in anti-Japanese guerilla bases in China and the Soviet Union and then had to compete with others before emerging with his faction as supreme leader in 1946. Armstrong demonstrates in convincing fashion that post-1945 North Korea was more a product of anticolonial struggle, national feeling, and demands for economic and social justice "than Soviet manipulation." (33) When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, North Korea did not follow suit because it had its own legs to stand on. Armstrong's analysis includes second-hand reference to the new archival materials released in the former Soviet Union as analysed by other scholars such as Kathryn Weathersby in "Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945–1950: New Evidence from the Russian Archives," Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 8 (Washington, DC, November 1993), and Andrei Lankov, From Stalin to Kim II Sung: The Formation of North Korea, 1945–1950 (London 2002). |
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After the North Korean land reform of 1946, "which was one of the most rapid and thoroughgoing land redistribution efforts in history," (77) and with very little violence, even official observers of the American government noted its popularity and the legitimacy it conferred on the North Korean government. "By this one stroke," they commented, "half the population of north Korea was given a tangible stake in the regime and at the same time the north ... gained an important propaganda weapon in its campaign against the south." (75) |
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Armstrong comments that the North Korea system does not rank high by any measure of liberal democratic freedoms and that it created many internal critics and opponents as it emerged after 1945. But in at least one respect it delivered what it promised by giving the poor majority at the bottom of the social ladder a privileged position at the top. Ironically this bedrock of popular support for the ruling Korean Workers' Party has led to a new inflexible social hierarchy where the offspring of the workers and poor peasants lord it over the descendants of the landlords, Japanese collaborators, and capitalists. This new social hierarchy, Armstrong says, is one of the most distinctive and long-lasting elements of what he describes as "North Korea's 'conservative' communism." (106) |
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Armstrong argues that North Korean communism was greatly influenced by conservative Korean Confucian traditions including the emperor system. This helps to account for the widespread acceptance of the cult of leadership that developed around Kim II Sung and continues under his successor Kim Jong II. Another influence was the long and difficult struggle that the guerillas waged against Japanese colonialism with its intrusive system of secret police control. This helped to shape the mass mobilization campaigns so characteristic of North Korean politics as well as the nation-wide system of political surveillance and repression of dissidence. The style and example of Stalin's autocratic rule is demonstrated as another influential factor in the political evolution of North Korea. |
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For some reason Armstrong wants to emphasize that the North Korean communists disobeyed Marx. This is a recurring theme in his book. Perhaps it is to make them more acceptable. Their emphasis on ideology over material circumstances, he argues, "was a complete reversal of Marxist orthodoxy." (242) Korean communists, he says, always tended to "stand Marx on his feet" (91) with "correct thought" leading to political and economic changes rather than the other way around. This attempted foray into Marxist dialectics is one of a very few examples of superficiality in a book that deserves to be widely read for the insights it provides into one of the most isolated, misunderstood, and vilified corners of the world. It is a handsome, well-written volume, including archival photographs and an informed discussion on sources, which will likely become a classic work in the field. The bibliography would have been more helpful if it had included a listing of the secondary sources consulted. |
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Stephen Endicott
York University |
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