Crisis in North Korea

10. The Inception of the "Guerrilla State"

202 10 The Inception of the “Guerrilla State” in the late 1950s the interpretations of North Korea’s recent past underwent drastic changes. The new versions of the country’s history, widely promoted from late 1957, began to give special prominence to the guerrilla exploits of Kim Il Song and his Manchurian ¤ghters. In earlier periods, Kim had been portrayed as a major Korean Communist leader of the pre-1945 period, but from the late 1950s he was presented as the only true Communist leader of the 1930s. All other Korean Communists were depicted as either Kim’s loyal followers or outright traitors . At that stage the North Korean propaganda machine had not yet made absurd claims of a crucial role that the Great Leader (then ¤fteen to eighteen years old) had allegedly played in Korean politics during the late 1920s, but that was not far ahead. The new myth was promulgated through a torrent of publications on the Manchurian guerrillas and their alleged victories. In 1958 Kûnloja, the KWP of¤cial monthly, published eleven articles on history-related topics, and in 1959 it published ten. However, in 1958 only two of the articles dealt with the guerrillas, whereas in 1959 seven articles were dedicated to the (largely invented or at least grossly exaggerated) exploits of Kim’s Manchurian ¤ghters. This new approach to history was designed to ¤t two important requirements : ¤rst, to stress a special role allegedly played by Kim Il Song, who was to be represented as the only true leader of the Korean Communist movement from its beginning; and second, to depict the history of Korean Communism in a more “nationalized” way, in order to stretch The Inception of the “Guerrilla State” 203 out the embarrassingly short history of the Korean Workers’ Party. As Yi Song-un noted in his Kûnloja article: “Although the history of our party is short, its roots are deep.”1 One of the ¤rst articles on the subject, published in the May 1957 issue of Kûnloja, stated much the same, but with an added emphasis on Kim Il Song’s personal role: “In Korea under the Japanese imperial rule the united Marxist-Leninist party was not reestablished , but the organizational and ideological base for the [eventual] founding of the Marxist-Leninist party was created by the true Communists , loyal to Comrade Kim Il Song.”2 For us, familiar with the almost unbelievable dei¤cation of Kim in the 1970s and 1980s, this remark about “loyalty to Kim Il Song” seems somewhat innocuous, but in 1957 it was yet another important indication of the special role that of¤cial mythmakers began to ascribe to the future Great Leader. The of¤cial publications arrived at a predictable conclusion: “Major historic roots of all these [achievements by the DPRK] lay in the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle conducted from the 1930s under the leadership of true Communists led by Comrade Kim Il Song.”3 In December 1957, Hwang Chang-yôp published in Kûnloja a highly critical review of Yi Ch’ông-won’s recently published monograph Struggle for the Proletariat Hegemony in Korea.4 This publication was remarkable in several ways. First, it contained a harsh political critique of Yi Ch’ông-won, the founding father of North Korean Marxist historiography . Unlike a majority of his colleagues, Yi never collaborated with the colonial administration. He was disgraced in the summer of 1957; the main accusation leveled against him by Hwang was that in his book on the history of North Korean Communism, Yi mentioned the Domestic Communists favorably. In the new mythology they were depicted as unreliable factionalists, if not traitors. In addition, Yi had ignored the role of Kim’s guerrillas, who had come to be portrayed as the only real Korean Communists of the 1930s. It would be a mistake to believe that Yi Ch’ông-won’s much criticized book was an act of hidden dissent. Despite his remarkable integrity in the pre-1945 period, Yi himself was not above praising Kim Il Song, and his book, like many books of his rivals and future accusers, faithfully re¶ected the pre-1957 of¤cial vision of Korean contemporary history. However, because of his lifelong connections with older Communists, Yi unluckily became a victim of the 204 Crisis in North Korea purges. He and his writings became an easy target for denunciation, once the of¤cial...