The Korean War in World History

2. The Soviet Role in the Korean War: The State of Historical Knowledge

Chapter 2 The Soviet Role in the Horean War The State of Historical Knowledge KATHRYN WEATHERSBY The release of a substantial body of Russian archival documents on the Korean War, a gradual and halting process begun in late 1991, has brought a sea change in our knowledge of the Soviet role in that pivotal conflict. Until this evidence became available, the discussion of Moscow's part in the war focused almost exclusively on the question of the extent of Soviet involvement in the outbreak of the war on 25 June 1950. Most early accounts of the war assumed that North Korea could not have mounted the attack on South Korea without Moscow's support, but revisionist literature of the 1970s and 1980s challenged that assumption, drawing on American and British documents released in the 1970s. Since the trend of later scholarship was to depreciate the significance of the Soviet role in the war, the release of a large body of Russian records showing the centrality and the breadth of that role has caused a sharp change of course in the historical literature. The new sources first became available in November 1991, when the archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation began to grant access to a large portion of its records on Soviet relations with North Korea. In September 1992, the Archive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet 61 62 The Soviet Role in the Korean War Union opened its files on Korea, and in late 1992 President Boris Yeltsin furthered the process by ordering the relevant archives in Moscow to catalog and declassify their documents on the war in order to present a portion of them as a gift to South Korean President Kim Young Sam. As a result of Yeltsin's order, in the summer of 1994 the Archive of the Ministry of Defense released some of its vast holdings on the war. In December 1994, after President Yeltsin had presented to President Kim a collection of documents revealing high-level decision making on the war, largely from the Presidential Archive, the Foreign Ministry Archive granted access to photocopies of that collection. In 1995 a larger collection of approximately twice as many documents that were declassified from the Presidential Archive became available to researchers through an agreement between the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Korea Research Center of Columbia University, and the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry. In 1999, the director of the Diplomatic Academy published additional documents from the Presidential Archive that filled in key gaps left by the original collection . Other gaps were filled with the release in January 2000 of a collection of Presidential Archive documents on the war found in the Dmitri Volkogonov Papers held in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In addition to the archival documents, a number of Russians and North Koreans who played military or political roles in the war have published their memoirs or granted extensive interviews. This wealth of new material has shed much light on the central question of the extent of Soviet involvement in the outbreak of the war, in the process providing substantial documentation of the decision making behind the offensive and the chronology of its preparation . The Russian sources have also broadened the range of inquiry into the Soviet role. The extensive record of Moscow's relations with Pyongyang prior to the war, along with memoirs and interviews published over the last decade, makes it possible to examine in some detail the evolution of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's aims regarding the Korean peninsula from 1945 to 1950. These documents also reveal the nature of the relationship between the North Korean leadership and the Soviet officials in Pyongyang and Moscow , laying the groundwork for an analysis of the Moscow/ PyongyanglBeijing alliance during the war. Kathryn Weathersby 63 For the wartime period, the Russian sources illuminate Stalin's response to the American intervention, to the early North Korean success and to its sudden reversal following the Inchon landing. Particularly when combined with Chinese sources, these new materials make possible a much more detailed analysis of the intrabloc dynamics that shaped the Chinese intervention. The Russian sources also provide important evidence of Stalin's approach to the armistice negotiations, the Soviet Air Force participation in the war, and the role of the...