Crisis in North Korea

6. The August Plenum

121 6 The August Plenum after almost a month of delays, the plenum opened on August 30 and continued for two days. On the of¤cial agenda were two items: the results of Kim Il Song’s recent visit to the USSR and Eastern Europe, and the situation of the national health service. However, on this occasion as on many others, the of¤cial agenda was quite misleading. These two items, especially the second one, were of minor importance in comparison with the main event at the plenum: an opposition assault on Kim Il Song. The opposition mounted its attack and was immediately defeated—everything was over within just a few hours. The August Plenum has been described, at least brie¶y, in most books dealing with North Korean history. The data provided by North Korean of¤cial publications are remarkably nebulous. In 1957–1959 the North Korean press produced a barrage of publications on the alleged conspiracy by Ch’oe Ch’ang-ik, Pak Ch’ang-ok, and their “henchmen,” who were accused of a great—and ever increasing—variety of crimes and, eventually, of high treason. Nevertheless, these statements do not provide much factual information about the August confrontation. Instead they contain a standard set of high-pitched but vague accusations against the “counterrevolutionary, factionalist elements” and their “treachery.”1 From these publications it is impossible to learn what actually happened during the August Plenum, what “the splittist attack that the factionalists undertook” really means. The plenum is also mentioned in a number of research works on 122 Crisis in North Korea North Korean history. Among the more well-known examples are an early study by Koon Woo Nam, Suh Dae-sook’s classical political biography of Kim Il Song, and the more recently published general reviews of North Korean history by Kim Hak-jun and Ch’oe Sông,2 as well as earlier South Korean of¤cial and quasi-of¤cial publications, dating back to the late 1960s (though the latter are for the most part, as Suh Dae-sook pointed out, “highly unreliable”).3 The main source for these works was information obtained from defectors who in turn relied on everything from rumors to the party’s classi¤ed periodicals. There is also a brief description of the plenum (just one paragraph) in Hô Chin’s book.4 This description is based primarily on testimonies of North Korean exiles in the Soviet Union, collected by Hô in the late 1970s. Fortunately, some original and reliable, albeit brief, contemporary documents are now available, as well as the manuscript of Kang Sang-ho’s memoirs and records of interviews with him. These new materials shed some additional light on what happened on August 30, 1956, in the North Korean capital, although many questions remain that can be answered only when additional materials are declassi¤ed. At that time, Soviet of¤cials perceived the particular sensitivity of the situation, so most of the important Soviet materials relating to the plenum were classi¤ed as highly secret and remain so to this day. Hence most of¤cial contemporary Soviet accounts of the August Plenum are inaccessible. There is little doubt that such materials were once compiled by the Soviet Embassy, but they are beyond reach at the time of this writing and are likely to remain so in the foreseeable future . However, among the declassi¤ed documents is one extremely interesting account—an of¤cial record of a conversation between Ko Hûi-man and G. Ye. Samsonov that took place on August 31, the last day of the plenum. Ko Hûi-man—then a departmental head of the KWP Central Committee and a former Soviet Korean (yet a devotee of Kim Il Song’s)—met the Soviet diplomat by chance at the Moranbong Theater. Protocol had dictated that the diplomats attend a performance by a visiting Hungarian group.5 According to the record, Ko Hûi-man was rather agitated by the recent confrontation at the plenum and, on seeing the Soviet diplomat, rushed to tell him about it. Given that this is probably one of the earliest accounts of the “August The August Plenum 123 incident,” related by a witness just a few hours after the event, it is worth quoting at length: The main body of the plenum agenda was not these questions [the of¤cial agenda items] but the eradication of an...