Crisis in North Korea

9. North Korea Changes Course

175 9 North Korea Changes Course by the summer of 1957 it was clear that the decisions of the September Plenum of 1956 were dead, and their death had come with the tacit approval of the very forces that had once imposed them. While many “little Stalins” of Eastern Europe were wiped out by popular protests and/or schemes of their fellow leaders, Kim Il Song was emerging from the crisis with nothing to be afraid of, either within or outside the party. His victory had profound consequences for the general situation in the country and greatly in¶uenced the everyday lives of all North Koreans . The late 1950s marked important changes in North Korean society. The North Korea of 1945–1956 was a rather typical Soviet-sponsored “people’s democracy,” and its domestic policies followed the prescribed universal set with only minor variations. The situation changed in the late 1950s, after North Korean leaders refused to follow the de-Stalinization trend. They chose to keep restrictive Stalinist policies (then abandoned by most other Communist countries) and indeed began to modify these policies. To some extent, these modi¤cations re¶ected the increasing impact of Mao’s China on Korea. Many new policies were obviously in¶uenced by the concurrent Chinese developments, but Mao’s ideas could not have taken root in North Korea without a fertile soil in which to thrive. The general trend was clear: a trend toward greater governmental control over both society and the economy; toward a harsher persecution of real, potential, and imagined dissent; toward a greater restriction 176 Crisis in North Korea of the already limited international exchanges (now deemed potentially subversive); toward a tightening of control over the arts and culture; and, last but not least, toward the dei¤cation of the godlike Great Leader. In short the trend was toward preserving and strengthening the Stalinist institutions, in an increasingly nationalized form. The mid-1950s had been a period of relative ideological relaxation in North Korea. Even Nodong sinmun could publish cartoons (albeit normally depicting “the U.S. imperialists and their South Korean puppets”), articles on foreign culture, and even verse in such an outrageously “feudal” and “reactionary ” language as classical Chinese. But the time for such frivolities was fast running out.1 At the same time, the “new” North Korean Stalinism was acquiring a distinct nationalist ¶avor. In this regard it was not so different from other Stalinisms, including the Soviet prototype. To be sure, until the early 1960s the Soviets had kept the nationalist tendencies of the dependent regimes at bay, for local nationalisms would unavoidably contradict and undermine the “major” (Soviet/Russian) one. Only certain elements of the nationalist heritages were allowed—namely, those that would not create problems for Moscow. They included things like stories of the great victories over foreign invaders if the invaders’ descendants happened to belong to the “imperialist” camp in the 1950s (Bulgarian campaigns against Turks, Polish con¶icts with Germans, and so on). North Korea was not an exception to this; such “controlled” nationalism had existed there since the late 1940s, and it had a strong antiJapanese ¶avor. However, from the early 1960s the situation in North Korea changed and the local nationalism began to liberate itself from its former restraints. In culture and politics the emphasis was to be on the indigenous traditions, often radically reinterpreted or simply invented, while all outside connections and in¶uences on the Korean culture began to be played down or denied. The regime—whose initial inception by a foreign power was still recent history, vividly remembered by a majority of its population—strove to “nationalize” itself. No doubt, these trends primarily served the interests of Kim Il Song and his close entourage and were often initiated and always encouraged by them. However, these policies could not have been successful without at least some support from below. We might assume that the new line re¶ected the ideals and values of a large number of middle- and North Korea Changes Course 177 low-level cadres and, perhaps, of the wider North Korean population. These people, mostly with a traditional peasant background, supported the regime because it was seen as an essentially national Korean system. Given that the Soviets were foreigners, and culturally very alien foreigners , the appeal of the Korean patriotism was very powerful. We can presume that many Koreans welcomed the new policy, which was...