The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (review)

Although a few scholars writing in English, such as Kathryn Weathersby, Andrei Lankov, and Alexandre Manssourov, have used newly available archival materials from the former Soviet Union to make significant contributions to the scholarship on the formative years of North Korea (1945–1948), Charles Armstrong's The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 marks the first time that a Western scholar has drawn on North Korean documents to provide a comprehensive account of the North Korean experience in regime building. Armstrong has produced a detailed examination of the major aspects of this experience—political, economic, military, cultural, ideological, and educational—from a bottom-up perspective, showing how the North Korean authorities both reacted to and participated in the regime-building process under the Soviet occupation.

In a richly-textured analysis of how North Korea was transformed in the span of just three years (1945–1948) from a colonial appendage of Japan into a revolutionary Communist state, Armstrong argues that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, the official name of North Korea) as it emerged in 1948 was not simply a Soviet creation of a pliant satellite state. Instead, he argues, it was a distinctively Korean experiment in nation building in which Korean actors, above all Kim Il Sung and his band of anti-Japanese Manchurian guerrillas, "Koreanized" Soviet Communism more than the Soviet Union Communized North Korea (p. 241). In making this point, Armstrong emphasizes the legacy of pre-1945 Korean history—in particular Confucian familism, Japanese colonialism, and the experiences of Kim's guerrilla band in Manchuria—the importance of Korean nationalism, and the Communists' victory in the civil war in China as crucial factors shaping the character of the North Korean regime and national identity. Indeed, Armstrong posits, the DPRK's survival long after the end of the Cold War must be attributed to these indigenous Korean elements of the North Korean revolution, which endowed the North Korean regime with a legitimacy and a degree of popular support that were lacking in the East European Communist states such as Poland and East Germany (p. 4). In discussing the process of North Korean regime building, Armstrong supplies a wealth of valuable information about how this process was carried out both at the center in Pyongyang and in the provinces of North Korea. Overall, Armstrong's analytical framework is original, his writing eminently lucid, and his conclusion courageous. For making this important contribution to the scholarship on North Korea, he must be congratulated.

Nevertheless, despite the originality of Armstrong's analysis, several aspects of his book seem problematic and call for further research. In his quest to emphasize the indigenous nature of the North Korean revolution, he has overdrawn the picture of Kim Il Sung and the North Korean actors as the driving force behind much of this revolution. No doubt, this is at least partly because of the sources on which Armstrong has relied, namely, the North Korean documents captured by the U.S. military during the Korean War that are now housed in the U.S. National Archives. Armstrong describes these documents as vast in quantity and invaluable for understanding North Korean history in 1945–1950. This description may be correct, but unfortunately it is not borne out by the book. Armstrong fails to discuss the important methodological issues involved in using these documents, such as their potential built-in biases and the many crucial things that are omitted, whether deliberately or otherwise. Moreover, the documents he has chosen from this supposedly vast collection to support his main thesis do not amount to convincing evidence. Through much of the book, Armstrong depicts Kim and the North Koreans as more or less their own men and as the engine behind all changes in North Korea, with the Soviet Union reduced to a mere advisory role. However, as Andrei Lankov and Alexandre Manssourov have demonstrated through the use of declassified Soviet documents, the real architect of the key changes in North Korea in 1945–1948 was the Soviet Union...