Chapter 2. THE NATURE, ORIGINS, AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE NORTH KOREAN STATE

Charles K. Armstrong

Adopting a resolution in the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in June 1956, the revisionists branded loyalty to Stalin as a personal idolatry, established a fait accompli to abuse him freely within the Party, and they ostracized him completely. The counter-revolutionary maneuvers perpetrated by those traitors, who debased Stalin who had fostered the younger Soviet Union into a great power, blotting out all of his prestige and achievements, were the meanest act of betrayal which is beyond imagination.

Rodong Sinmun, November 3, 1996

Introduction

Forty years after Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the

Soviet Communist Party in 1956, the Korean Worker’s Party daily Rodong Sinmun still

felt the need to denounce Stalin’s denouncers. In the North Korea of the late 1990s,

Stalin and Stalinism were clearly not distant historical issues, but something directly

relevant to North Korea’s current situation. In this chapter, I argue that the North Korean

state represents the most successful example of the indigenization of Stalinism in the

communist world. This explains both its longevity and general stability as well as its

serious shortcomings.

The essential features of Stalinism as adapted by the DPRK will be explained

below. By “indigenization” I mean the adaptation of this imported model of politics,

economic development, and social organization according to local circumstances; the

creation of a self-perpetuating political system based on this model; and the acceptance

of the regime’s political legitimacy (or at least lack of serious resistance) on the part of

the masses. But the term “successful” might seem surprising. How can we call North

Korea a success? Nicholas Eberstadt argues that the DPRK has “failed” in two of its

main goals: maintaining and if possible increasing the material well-being of its

population at a reasonable level of comfort - enough to eat, adequate housing - and

reunifying the Korean peninsula on its own terms.1 But despite its failure to achieve these

two goals, the North Korean regime has accomplished the most fundamental task of any

state, that of its own self-maintenance, without any substantial change in internal system

- despite economic crisis within and the transformation of the world without. In is in this

sense that we can call the Stalinist state in North Korea a success.

The DPRK is perhaps the example par excellence of the autonomous state,

shielded as much as possible from economic crisis, domestic challenge, and external

pressure. It demands, and apparently receives, popular support but is not responsible to

popular criticism - North Korea’s version of the Maoist “mass line”. As in other

modern societies, the state in North Korea is both a “place” (a site of struggle among

competing interests) and an “actor” in its own right,2 but because of the highly

concentrated and top-down nature of decision-making in the DPRK, the North Korean

state is an arena among a very narrow range of actors and interests. The state, in other

words, it is not simply instrumental but has its own raison d’être, and its first priority is

its own self-maintenance. In this the DPRK has succeeded against great odds.

Given its adverse economic circumstances and the hostile environment - both

regional and global - in which North Korea now finds itself, the DPRK’s most

remarkable accomplishment over the last couple of decades is its sheer survival into the

21st century, something many close observers of North Korea since 1990 or so have

1

predicted could not happen. If economic performance and acceptance by the mainstream

of the international community are important criteria of success, the DPRK has not dealt

well with the problems of adjustment to the outside world; but in terms of its own system

maintenance, it has adjusted successfully to both internal and external challenges.

Because of the primacy of politics in the DPRK and other state socialist regimes,

the “state” in North Korea encompasses a wider range of actors and institutions than is

the case in pluralist democracies. Kaminski’s definition of the state in his study of

communist Poland is equally valid for the DPRK: “the state broadly defined as

encompassing all political institutions, including the Communist party,” which control

the economy, the society, and the cultural apparatuses.3 The “state”, then, plays a

determinant role in the four subsystems (political, ideological, economic, and cultural)

and is to a considerable degree synonymous with the North Korean “system” as a

whole.4

In the first part of this paper, I will examine a number of theoretical perspectives

on the DPRK in recent scholarship, primarily from the United States, South Korea, and

Japan. Most of these interpretations have been borrowed from the literature on other

Marxist-Leninist states, especially the USSR and China. The four theories which I will

briefly explore are totalitarianism, Stalinism, corporatism, and what is variously called

“neo-Feudalism,” the “Suryông system,” or what I refer to as “neo-traditionalism”.

Arguing that each of these theoretical frameworks helps to explain some features of the

DPRK, I suggest that North Korea is unique less as a “type” of state than in its distinctive

combination of features, most of which it shares with other (present and former) socialist

regimes. The second part of the paper outlines the development of the North Korean state

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through successive phases of political evolution from its origins in the late 1940s to the

present.

Here, two important points need to be stressed. First, phases of political change in

the DPRK represent shifts in dominant themes, not exclusive stages. All the major

characteristics that I will outline have existed, in varying degrees, from the beginning of

the DPRK. Second, within this 50-year process of evolutionary change, there have been

several constant elements in the DPRK: a political system based on a centralized party-

state with a single supreme leader at its apex, with a relatively (compared to other

communist states) inclusive mass party; an economic system stressing extensive

economic development with a priority on heavy industry; a foreign policy emphasizing 1 Nicholas Eberstadt, The End of North Korea (Washington, DC: The AEI Press, 1999),

p. 4.

2 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume II: The Rise of Classes and

Nation-States, 1760-1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 96.

See also idem, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and

Rsults,” European Journal of Sociology XXV (1984), and Charles Tilly, ed. The

Formation of National States in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

3 Barlomiej Kaminski, The Collapse of State Socialism: The Case of Poland (Princeton:

Prinecton University Press, 1991), p. 5.

4 See Samuel S. Kim’s introduction to this volume. One can imagine the North Korean

state continuing under a different system - say, a military-authoritarian system that had

rejected Kim Il Sung-ist juche ideology - but the system could hardly continue without

the state. In practice, however, the state and system are so intertwined in the DPRK that

neither could easily exist without the other.

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economic and political autonomy while practicing a selective interaction with the outside

world; and an ideology centered on the unchallengeable dominance of the ruling party

and its Supreme Leader, Korean nationalism, anti-imperialism (especially anti-US

imperialism), and North Korea’s “own style” of socialism. The North Korean state was

constructed in the late 1940s based on a Soviet, and more specifically Stalinist, model,

with strong influences of anti-colonial nationalism and the Chinese revolutionary

experience. Over time, under the consistent leadership of Kim Il Sung, his family, and

his guerrilla cohort from the anti-Japanese struggle in Manchuria, the DPRK has evolved

from this base into its own unique system.

Approaching North Korea

Although there is an influential school of thought in South Korean scholarship

arguing that the DPRK can only be understood on its own terms, the so-called “intrinsic

approach”,5 by and large the DPRK is seen as one example of a type of state, called

variously communist, Marxist-Leninist, Leninist, or state socialist, among other terms.

Theories used to interpret such regimes can be and have been those also applied, mutatis

mutandis, to the DPRK. The one exception is the theory of the so-called “Suryông

(Great Leader) system” developed recently by Japanese and South Korean scholars as a

5 Kim Nam-sik, "Rethinking Pre- and Post-liberation North Korea," Haebang chônhusa ûi

insik [Understanding Pre- and Post-Liberation History], volume five (Seoul: Han’gilsa,

1989), pp. 10-31; Song Tu-yul, “How to View North Korean Society,” Sahoe wa sasang

(December 1988).

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“unique” explanation for understanding the DPRK. The “Suryông system” as it stands is

not much of a theory, but does offer some insight into the North Korean system.

Totalitarianism

The concept of “totalitarianism,” coined by critics of Mussolini’s Fascism and

then applied positively by the pro-Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile (uno stato

totalitario, “a total state”) in the 1920s, elaborated as an explanation for the rise of

Nazism by Hannah Arendt in the 1940s, and finally systematized as a critique of the

Soviet Union by Carl Friedrich and Zbigniev Brzezinsky during the Cold War, is often

the de facto lens through which the DPRK is viewed.6 Taking the DPRK’s own rhetoric

of “monolithic ideology” ( yuil sasang) at face value, the totalitarian perspective rarely

digs below the surface of the DPRK’s claim to have totally fused state and society in

5

North Korea. Gavan McCormack has even suggested a kind of “neo-totalitarian”

interpretation of Kim Il Sung/Kim Jong Il’s North Korea.7

There are many problems with the totalitarian perspective, as Sovietologists have

pointed out for more than two decades.8 First, totalitarian theory overgeneralizes the

degree of power the state actually wields based on the image the state represents of itself

- ironically, it becomes a mirror-image of communist propaganda, with the values

reversed. Second, the theory doesn’t allow for the gap between rhetoric and practice, the

numerous ways in which citizens avoid, manipulate, and negotiate with state power at the

6 For an overview and history of the concept of totalitarianism, see Abbott Gleason,

Totliatarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford, 1995), and

Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, volume two of A Contemporary

Critique of Historical Materialism (University of California Press, 1987), pp. 295-301.

Friedrich and Brzezinski’s canonical definition of totalitarianism includes the following

six characteristics: 1)a single dominant ideology, 2) a single party committed to that

ideology, often led by a single dictator, 3) systematic use of terror, and state monopoly of

4) mass communication, 5) military power, 6) social and economic organizations.

Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York: Praeger,

1967).

7 Gavan McCormack, “Kim Country: Hard Times in North Korea,” New Left Review no.

198 (1993).

8 For a good summary of the “revisionist” critique of totalitarian theory in Soviet studies,

see Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

6

local level. Third, it doesn’t account for the degree of genuine popular support and

pressure from below, especially in the early stages of regime formation, that effect the

development of these states. Fourth, totalitarianism doesn’t account for change that

occurs as these states evolve. Finally, totalitarian theory puts great emphasis on the

arbitrary terror of Soviet-type regimes, when in fact “functioning” totalitarianism should

not require the widespread practice of terror, and such terror is clearly dysfunctional for

the operation of an effective state; perhaps terror is a necessary component in the

formation of such regimes, but any state that relied extensively on terror for maintaining

control would eventually self-destruct.9

If totalitarianism is too “total” a concept to be of much use in understanding the

DPRK, T.H. Rigby’s more limited concept of “mono-organizational society” might be

helpful.10 In “Soviet-type” regimes, the party-state allows only one channel of legitimate

organization, but other forms of non-state association continue. There are always spaces,

albeit limited, for individual and group action outside of state purview. “Totalitarianism”

then is a kind of horizon toward which the state aspires but can never reach, and the state

comes closest to this horizon not in times of terror and disruption such as the Stalinist

1930s, but in times of stability such as the Brezhnevian 1970s. As will be explained 9 One can argue that this was the fate of Democratic Kampuchea, the most clearly terror-

dependent of all Marxist-Leninist regimes. Although strictly speaking the Khmer Rouge

regime was overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion, the invasion itself was provoked by

the increasingly irrational and self-destructive behavior of the regime.

10 T.H. Rigby, “Politics in the Mono-Organizational Society, “ in Authoritarian Politics

in Communist Europe: Uniformity and Diversity in One-Party States (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1976).

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below, North Korea best approximates the model of a smoothly functioning mono-

organizational society in the late 1950s and early 1960s, between the completion of post-

war reconstruction and the renewed militarization of the state and economy and the

elevation of the cult of Kim Il Sung and his family that began around 1967.

Stalinism

The term perhaps most often used in Western media coverage of the DPRK is

“Stalinist,” usually preceded by an adjective such as “hard-line”, “isolated,”

“impoverished”, “unpredictable,” or a combination of these. Established under a Soviet

occupation during the period of high Stalinism in the USSR, the DPRK definitely

reflects the Stalinist model in its political, economic, and social structures.

Unlike Kim Il Sung, Stalin never named the system he directed in his own

country after himself.11 It was Trotsky who applied the pejorative “Stalinism” to what

he saw as the system of terror, coercion, and atavistic nationalism that Stalin had put in

place, distorting the Bolshevik revolution and the Leninist tradition beyond recognition.

Western scholars, on the other hand, often saw Stalinism as a logical outgrowth of

Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet variant of totalitarianism whose antagonistic twin was

Nazism in Germany.12

For the communist regimes that came to power under the influence, and in several

cases direct supervision, of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II, Stalin’s

USSR of the 1930s and early 1940s offered an effective and “ready-to-wear pattern” (in

Wlodzimierz Brus’s term) of political, economic, and social organization. Brus suggested

8

that the “People’s Democracies” of Eastern Europe applied Stalinism “in concentrated

form, almost at a single stroke, and with all its basic properties appearing

simultaneously.”13 This pattern covered, in the political field, a centralized party-state

with a maximum leader at its apex; in the economic field, a state-directed economy with

multi-year plans emphasizing heavy industry and the rapid collectivization of agriculture;

and in the social field, a wide range of large-scale social organizations targeted at specific

groups such as farmers, industrial workers, women, and young people, linked to the

ruling party and ultimately subservient to it. Nationalism and a relatively self-contained

economy (“socialism in one country”) were also important elements of the Stalinist

system.

North Korea from 1947 onward self-consciously adopted the Stalinist pattern and

followed it more closely than its fellow revolutionary Asian states, the People’s Republic

of China and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In this respect, the DPRK resembled

11 “Mao Zedong Thought” was (and ostensibly remains) part of the ruling ideology of

China, adding Mao to create the socialist trinity of “Marx-Lenin-Mao Zedong Thought”.

Maoism, however, was a neologism coined by Western Sinologists, in particular Stuart

Schram. See Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung [ ]

12 Robert C. Tucker, “Introduction: Stalinism and Comparative Communism,” in Tucker,

ed. Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton, 1977), p. vii; Ian

Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, “Introduction: The Regimes and their Dictators:

Perspectives in Comparison,” in Kershaw and Lewin, eds. Stalinism and Nazism:

Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.

10.

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the “People’s Democracies” of Eastern Europe, but unlike many of the latter, North

Korea did not follow the Soviet Union’s lead in “de-Stalinization” under Khrushchev in

the late 1950s. Rather, the DPRK built its “Korean-style socialism” on a Stalinist

foundation.

Corporatism

Bruce Cumings has applied the concept of corporatism, or more specifically

“neo-socialist corporatism,” in his analysis of North Korea under Kim Il Sung.14

Postulating four varieties of corporatism - conservative, pathological (Fascism), neo-

socialist, and Asian - Cumings suggests that the DPRK represents an Asian version of

neo-socialist coporatism, which had been first articulated in interwar Eastern Europe,

especially Romania. Departing from its Marxist-Leninist roots, neo-socialist corporatism

substituted nation for class as the primary subject of revolution, and the struggle between

rich (bourgeois) and poor (proletarian) nations for class struggle as the key antagonism in

the contemporary world.

Traditionally, corporatism stressed three themes - hierarchy, organic connection,

and the family - with three corresponding images - the “Great Chain”, the body politic,

and political fatherhood. Cumings locates all of these themes and images in the ideology 13 Wlodzimierz Brus, “Stalinism and the ‘People’s Democracies’,” in Tucker, Stalinism,

p. 239.

14 Bruce Cumings, “Corporatism in North Korea,” Journal of Korean Studies 4 (1982-

83), and idem, “The Corporate State in North Korea,” State and Society in

Contemporary Korea, ed. Hagen Koo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).

10

of the DPRK, but articulated with Marxist-Leninist theory and practice. North Korea, in

other words, is not “Fascist”, nor is it in practice like interwar Japan, which in superficial

respects it also resembles, especially in its rhetoric of the fatherly leader and the family

(substituting Kim Il Sung for the Showa Emperor and, of course, the Koreans for the

Japanese). North Korean corporatism combines Marxism-Leninism, in both its Russian

and Chinese variants, with Korean political culture to create an organic image of society.

These themes and images, Cumings argues, were present from the time the regime was

established in the late 1940s.15

DPRK ideology, especially from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, was indeed

resonant with corporatism as Cumings describes it. But North Korea was not unique

among socialist states in adopting corporatist themes and images at this time. Indeed, the

state it most closely resembled in the 1970s was contemporary Romania under

Ceauscescu, rather than Romania in the 1920s, which is Cumings’ point of comparison .

Both Romania and the DPRK were examples of corporatism growing out of, rather than

substituting for, Stalinism.

Neo-traditionalism

The term “neo-traditional” was developed in the 1980s to by Ken Jowitt and

Andrew Walder as a concept for understanding political and socio-economic organization

in the Soviet Union and China, respectively.16 Neo-traditionalism attempts to explain the

functioning of a “mature” (post-revolutionary) communist society, in which authority 15 Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, volume two: The Roaring of the

Cataract, 1947-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), chapter nine.

11

does not neatly fit into Weber’s tripartite taxonomy of charisma, tradition, and legality.17

Unable to rely on the impersonal procedural legality of a capitalist society, the

communist system falls back on networks and relationships that are highly personalized,

reminiscent of “traditional” society, but directed toward “modern” goals such as

industrialization. Thus, communist society combines modern and traditional features, the

Party becoming an “amalgam of [modern] bureaucratic discipline and [traditional]

charismatic correctness.”18

There is another, more readily apparent sense in which the DPRK seems “neo-

traditional”. The political scientist Suzuki Masayuki has noted the features of North

Korea’s ideology and political practice, constituting what he calls the DPRK’s “Suryông

(Great Leader) System,” which he sees as “resonant” with Korean traditional (and

Japanese imperial) political culture.19 According to Suzuki, personalized rule, absolute

loyalty of the masses, and filial devotion to Kim Il Sung are not merely Stalinist imports

but patterns of control and behavior deeply embedded in Korea’s Confucian tradition, 16 Ken Jowitt, “Soviet Neotraditionalism: The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime,”

Soviet Studies 35, no. 3 (July 1983): 275-97; Andrew Walder, Communist Neo-

Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1986).

17 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1978), pp. 65-211.

18 Ken Jowitt, “Neotraditionalism,” in Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist

Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 125.

19 Suzuki Masayuki, Kita chôsen shakaishugi to dentô no kyômei [North Korean

socialism and the resonance with tradition], (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1993).

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filtered through the experience of Japanese colonialism and the anti-colonial resistance

that shaped North Korea’s post-liberation leadership. Suzuki’s neologism of “Suryông

System” (Suryôngche) has gained considerable popularity in South Korea, with a number

of recent South Korean Ph.D. dissertations and articles on the DPRK relying on this

concept.20 Though often densely researched, by and large these recent studies offer little

in the way of novel explanations for how North Korea works.21 Basically, most South

Korean interpretations of the DPRK that utilize the concept of the “Suryông system” say

that North Korea is an absolute dictatorship. This is hardly news. Suzuki himself, who

has also written about the Japanese emperor cult, suggests that North Korea’s cult of the

20 Kim Yôn-chôl, “Pukhanûi sanôphwa kwajông kwa kongjang kwalliûi chôngch’i (1953-

70): `Suryôngche’ chôngch’i chejeûi sahoegyôngjejôk kiwôn” [The Politics of

Industrialization and Factory Management in North Korea: Socioeconomic Origins of the

Suryông System], Ph.D. dissertation, Sônggyun’gwan University, 1996; Kim Kwangyôl,

“Pukhanûi Suryôngche surip kwajông kwa tûkjing” [The Formation and Characteristics

of North Korea’s Suryông System], Ph.D. dissertation, Hanyang University, 1995; Ch’oe

Sông, “Suryông chejeûi hyôngsông kwajông kwa kujojôk chajdong mek’anijûme

kwanhan yôn’gu” [The Operational Mechanism of Formation and Construction of the

Suryông System], Ph.D. dissertation, Koryô University, 1993.

21 An exception is Kim Yônch’ôl, who suggests that the Suryông system was not only

imposed from above but grew from below due to the demands of the factory work

system, where responsibility was pushed up to higher and higher levels. In this sense,

Kim’s use of the Suryông system is actually more like Walder’s neo-traditionalism than

Suzuki’s. See Kim, “Suryôngche”.

13

Great Leader resonates with Japanese imperial ideology as well as traditional Korean

concepts of political leadership going back to the Koguryô kingdom, when the term

suryông was apparently first used as an appellation for the leader.

The idea that aspects of communist political practice, especially autocratic rule,

are atavistic holdovers from traditional society and the ancien regime goes back to the

criticism of Stalin in the USSR, especially as articulated by Trotsky, and usually

associates the despotic elements of communist autocracy with embedded “Oriental”

traditions.22 “Lim Un”, the pseudonym of a North Korean exile in the Soviet Union,

argued along lines similar to Trotsky that Kim Il Sung “betrayed” Korean communism

through his atavistic despotism.23 More recently, Hwang Chang-yôp, the top DPRK

ideologue and leading spokesman for North Korean juche (“self-reliance”) philosophy

who defected spectacularly to South Korea in early 1997, has expounded on juche’s

transformation into “feudal thinking” under Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.24 Although as

a scholar trained in European philosophy Hwang should know better, he uses the word

“feudal” to mean something utterly different from what Marx (and other students of

European history) meant by the term. For Marx, feudalism referred to a specific mode of

production emerging in medieval Europe and associated with parcellized sovereignty,

vassal-lord relationships, and a peasantry tied to land owned by the manor lord.

According to this schema, traditional Asian societies such as China and India were not

characterized by feudalism, but rather by what Marx called the “Asiatic Mode of 22 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1937).

23 Lim Un. The Founding of a Dynasty in North Korea (Tokyo: Jiyu-sha, 1982).

24 Hwang Chang-yôp, Nanûn yôksaûi chilli poattda [I Have Seen the Truth of History]

(Seoul: Hanul, 1999), pp. 369-393.

14

Production”. Hwang, however, follows the terminological usage of East Asian

modernizers who, since the late 19th century, have used “feudalism” as a code for the

corruption, tyranny, and economic backwardness of the old regime. “Feudalism”, in

other words, is the Asiatic Mode of Production, or in political terms, Oriental

Despotism.25

Although North Korea’s political economy, like that of China and the former

USSR and every other state socialist regime, undoubtedly has features of “neo-

traditional” practice in Jowitt’s and Walder’s sense, it is in the second sense - the

existence and manipulation by the state of elements “resonant” with pre-communist

traditions - that neo-traditionalism is a useful way of understanding the North Korean

system. Over time, and especially after the collapse of fraternal socialist regimes in the

late 1980s and early 1990s, these neo-traditional features have become more prominent.

The Historical Evolution of the DPRK

Is the North Korean state totalitarian, Stalinist, corporatist, or neo-traditional? While

rejecting the term “totalitarian” as an unsatisfactory analytical category, I will argue that

the DPRK is in fact “all of the above”. Each of the interpretations (substituting Rigby’s

“mono-organizational” for “totalitarian”) brings to light some important elements of the

North Korean system. While the basic framework of the DPRK political system has

remained relatively stable since 1948, different modes of power, organization, and 25 Hwang is more insightful when he refers to the DPRK system as “Great Leader

Absolutism” (Suryông chôldaejuûi), which seems to be what he really means by

“feudalism”. Hwang, Truth of History, p. 373.

15

mobilization have dominated at different times in the DPRK’s history. One can trace

several stages in the evolution of the North Korean state since liberation from Japanese

colonial rule in August 1945: a democratic coalition stage, a Stalinist stage, a “normal”

mono-organizational stage, a corporatist stage, a neo-traditional stage, and, since the late

1990s, the signs of a potential new transition.

Democratic Coalition Stage, 1945-1947

In 1955, North Korean historians looked back on the ten years since liberation from

Japanese colonial rule and characterized the 1945-47 period as the stage of “anti-

imperialist, anti-feudal democratic revolution” preceding the stage of “true socialist

revolution” that began in 1947.26 Revolutionary rhetoric aside, a North Korean state as

such - a bureaucratic administrative apparatus located in Pyongyang, with jurisdiction

over the area north of the 38th parallel - can be said to have been established in February

1946, when the North Korean Provisional People’s Committee (NKPPC) was formed.

Prior to this, since August 1945, the functional equivalent of a North Korean state had

been the Soviet military occupation authority, organized in October 1945 as the Soviet

Civil Administration in Korea.27 The North Korean state emerged at this time through a

distinctive conjuncture of forces: Soviet advice and direction; a political leadership

26 Ch’oe Yông-hwan, “The Northern Democratic Base in the Post-Liberation Korean

Revolution,” Yôksa kwahak no. 10 (!955).

27 Eric Van Ree, Socialism in One Zone: Stalin’s Policy in Korea, 1945-1947 (Oxford:

Berg, 1989).

16

alliance dominated by, but not exclusively limited to, the Left -institutionalized as the

Korean Worker’s Party in 1946 - in coalition with two other parties; and grass-roots

participation and input, especially in the countryside.28 Until 1947, then, the state in

North Korea was clearly left-dominated but not yet Stalinist, with a relatively inclusive

political class and an evidently high degree of popular support.

The “Sovietization” of North Korea, the creation of a pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninist

state on the Korean peninsula, was not planned by the Soviets in advance of their

occupation. But once in North Korea, the Soviet occupation authorities worked closely

with Korean communists and others perceived to be friendly towards the USSR to

establish a regime both sympathetic toward, and in many important respects modeled

after, the Soviet Union. The People’s Committees established as local governing bodies

by Koreans at the time of the Japanese surrender were stacked with communists, under

Soviet orders, in the fall of 1945; Cho Man-sik, the leading non-communist nationalist in

North Korea, was put under house arrest in January 1946, and was replaced as leader of

the Korean Democratic Party by Ch’oe Yong-gôn, a crony of Kim Il Sung from his

Manchuria guerrilla days; and Soviet advisors occupied positions of authority in the ten

bureaus of the NKPPC.

Even without the Soviet occupation, left-wing forces in Korea would have made a

prominent showing after liberation, being among the few politically active groups with a

strong organizational base and, compared to many of the conservative nationalists,

generally untainted by collaboration with the Japanese. But because of the Soviet 28 For a detailed analysis of the formation of the DPRK, see Charles K. Armstrong, The

North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (forthcoming), from which much of the following

account is drawn.

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presence, North Korea adhered more closely to the Soviet model than might otherwise

have been the case; the left came to power with relatively little bloodshed; and Kim Il

Sung, whose domestic support base was virtually non-existent, rose to political

leadership with Soviet backing. Nevertheless, the speed with which left-wing forces

coalesced into a single party in North Korea, occurring in less than one year, is striking.

The North Korean Workers’ Party (NKWP) was established in late July 1946 as a merger

of the Korean Communist Party- Northern Branch and the Korean New People’s Party,

the latter dominated by ethnic Korean veterans of the Chinese Civil War returned from

Yan’an. The chairman of the NKWP was Kim Tu-bong, a Yan’an veteran, and the vice-

chairman was Kim Il Sung. The NKWP dominated the central People’s Committee, in

collaboration with two other recognized political parties, the conservative Korean

Democratic Party, whose main support base was among middle-class and Christian

elements, and the Young Friends’ Party, the political arm of the indigenous Ch’ôndogyo

religion. On paper at least, the NKPPC was a broad coalition of political forces that

excluded only the far right and former Japanese collaborators.

In the spring and summer of 1946, the NKPPC initiated a series of far-reaching

social reforms that would draw millions of North Koreans into the political system. The

most important of these initiatives was land reform, which was neither distribution for

payment as in later South Korean land reform, nor all-out collectivization of the kind

which had sparked so much violence in the early USSR. Rather, it was a “land to the

tiller” program of free distribution of land to those who farmed it, implemented by

thousands of local Peasant Committees. Land was confiscated from former Japanese

holdings, “national traitors” or known collaborators, landlords with over five chongbo

18

(one chongbo being approximately 2.45 acres), absentee landlords and religious

organizations, and distributed to agricultural laborers, landless tenants and peasants with

less than five chongbo. Families received land on the basis of “work ability”

(nodongnyôk), with adults receiving one full “labor point”, and youth, children, and the

elderly receiving declining fractions of a point.29 In all, slightly over one million chongbo

was confiscated and some 700,000 peasant households received land.30 As Americans

observed at the time, “By this one stroke, half the population of north Korea was given a

tangible stake in the regime and at the same time the north Korean government gained an

important propaganda weapon in its campaign against the south.”31

Other social reforms included a law on labor reform banning child labor,

stipulating eight-hour work days, and the like; a law on equality between the sexes; and

the nationalization of major industries, which put more than 90% of Korea’s factories,

banks, and other economic concerns under the control of the NKPPC. At the same time,

North Korea-wide social organizations were formed with close connections to the state

29 National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 242, “National Archives

Collection of Foreign Records Seized, 1941-, Records Seized by U.S. Military Forces in

Korea,” shipping advice 2009, item 1/95. Pukchosôn pômnyôngjip [Collection of North

Korean Laws], 1947, p. 59; United States Army Military Government in Korea, Record

Group 319, G-2 Weekly Report no. 30 (10 April 1946), p. 4.

30 Minjujuûi minjok chônsôn, Chosôn haebang nyônbo [Yearbook of Korean Liberation]

(Seoul: Munu insôgwan, 1946), p. 393.

31 United States Department of State, North Korea: A Case Study in the Techniques of

Takeover (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961 [1951]), p. 57.

19

and the NKWP. These included, in order of their establishment, the Democratic

Women’s League, the Democratic Youth League, the Peasant League, and the Workers’

League. Membership in these groups was often overlapping, so that by the fall of 1946,

nearly every resident of North Korea over the age of 15 belonged to one or more of these

social organizations. In late July 1946, the political parties and social organizations were

drawn together into a Democratic National United Front, with its slogan of “all-out

mobilization for national construction.”32 It was this social inclusiveness that made the

North Korean system, from the perspective of its leadership, “democratic”. Once these

reforms and mass organizations were in place, the NKPPC held elections at the

provincial, county, and city level for a new permanent People’s Committee that would

reflect politics from the bottom up as well as from the top down.

Stalinist Stage, 1947-1958

What would become the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was for all practical

purposes formed in February 1947, when the North Korean (no longer Provisional)

People’s Committee (NKPC) was established in Pyongyang on the basis of the

November 1946 local elections. With the exception of the Korean People’s Army,

inaugurated in February 1948, all the major institutional features of the DPRK were put

into place at this time. The contemporary Soviet Union was both the initiator and the

model of many of the features of the early DPRK from this point onward: centralized 32 Kim Nam-sik, “Trends in Understanding North Korea,” in Kang Man-gil et al, ed.

Hanguk yoksa [Korean History], volume 21: North Korean Politics and Society I (Seoul:

Han’gilsa, 1994), p. 65.

20

government, heavy-industry-biased industrialization expressed in multi-year economic

plans, and the cult of the Supreme Leader (vozhd’ or “Chief” as Stalin was called, quite

accurately translated as suryông, which originally meant “chieftain”), among others. It is

reasonable to consider North Korea between the formation of the NKPC and the

DPRK’s distancing of itself from the Soviet Union in the late 1950s as “Stalinist”, in the

same sense as several countries in post-war Eastern Europe, or for that matter the

People’s Republic of China (at least in the industrial Northeast) from 1949 until the mid-

1950s.

The political, economic, and ideological imprint of Stalinism in the NKPC and its

successor, the Democratic People’s Republic established in September 1948, was

unmistakable. Although the 1948 DPRK Constitution acknowledged neither the Korean

Workers’ Party as the ruling party nor Marxism-Leninism as the ruling ideology,33 in

most substantive areas the Constitution was closely patterned on the USSR’s 1936

“Stalin” Constitution, which proclaimed that socialism had been achieved in the Soviet

Union.34 The DPRK, like the USSR, was a dual party-state, with most political leaders

also occupying high positions in the ruling party. When the DPRK was launched, Kim Il

Sung was head of both party and state structures. A budding Stalinesque “cult of

21

personality” was already emerging around Kim by the late 1940s, and from 1948 DPRK

hagiographers began to refer to Kim as suryông, a term used previously only for Stalin.35

Stalinism was above all a blueprint for rapid industrialization, effected through a

centralized state planning system. The NKPC adopted the first of two one-year plans for

“National Economic Rehabilitation and Development” in February 1947. Kim Il Sung

announced that only under a single state plan “can the economy be restored and

developed really fast and the people’s standard of living raised.” The plan called for a

92% growth in industrial production over the previous year, concentrating on

construction, steel, coal, chemicals, power, and transportation, especially railroads.36

In 1948, Kim Il Sung claimed that the 1947 plan had been “splendidly

overfulfilled in every way” and had laid the foundations for an “independent national

economy.”37 Outside observers were not so sanguine; U.S. intelligence estimated that no

33 Sung Chul Yang, The North and South Korean Political Systems: A Comparative

Analysis (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), p. 238.

34 For one of the earliest published versions of the constitution, see the DPRK Justice

Ministry's Sabôp sibo [Legal Times], no. 2, 1948, pp. 1-17. The Stalin constitution is

translated and reproduced in William E. Butler, The Soviet Legal System: Selected

Contemporary Legislation and Documents (New York: Oceana, 1978), pp. 61-79.

35 Han Chae-dôk, Kim Il-sông changgun kaesôn’gi [Record of the Triumphant Return of

General Kim Il Sung] (Pyongyang: Minju Chosônsa, 1948), p. 10.

36 Kim Il Sung, "On the 1947 Plan for the Development of the National Economy," Works

vol. 3 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1980), pp. 79, 82.

22

more than 40% of the planned goals would be met, although reviving most of the

Japanese industrial facilities, even at reduced capacity, was in itself an impressive feat.38

Productivity was low, but nevertheless the living standards of most people in North

Korea had improved significantly by the end of the 1940s, helped by a strict rationing of

food and consumer goods.39 Internal documents attest to the problems of labor shortage,

which has continued to distinguish North Korea from other Asian socialist states, as well

as poor productivity. A top secret report from the early months of the first economic

plan criticized the widespread shortage of personnel and low output of leading industries,

for which “all cadres must engage in self-criticism (chapip’an).”40 Nevertheless, the

DPRK would remain committed to economic planning, along Stalinist lines, until the

effective collapse of the North Korean economy in the 1990s.

In the cultural realm, North Korea began to place strict ideological boundaries

around artistic production in early 1947, in terms similar to Soviet “Zhdanovism,” then at

its height in the USSR. In March 1947, the KWP Central Committee announced in its

37 Kim Il Sung, Works vol. 4 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1980), p.

60.

38 United States Army Forces in Korea, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2. Record Group 332,

Box 57, "North Korea Today" (1947), pp. 21-23.

39 United States Central Intelligence Agency. "Current Capabilities of the North Korean

Regime," ORE 18-50, June 19, 1950, p. 10.

40 RG 242, SA 2005 10/22. Cadre Section, Local Industry Bureau, "Report Concerning

Leading Industries," November 1947 ("top secret").

23

“Establishment of Democratic National Culture in North Korea” that literature and the

arts “must educate the people in socialism and serve the nation and people.”41 The

foundation for a socialist society had been laid with the success of land reform, labor

reform, and other democratic reforms of the spring and summer of 1946. Nevertheless,

the people’s consciousness had not changed in step with the changes in objective

circumstances. Therefore, a “cultural revolution”, an “all-round thought movement for

nation-building” (kôn’guk sasang ch’ongdongwôn undong), was the next urgent task.

What this meant, in practice, was that all literature had to promote Party policy.42 At the

end of 1949, Kim Il Sung chastised writers and artists for seeking “merely to entertain”,

for their “frivolous” activity, and for their lack of revolutionary spirit. He called on them

to “be warriors who educate the people and defend the Republic”, and most importantly

to portray the “heroic struggle” of the working people.43 Socialist realism, with a high

dose of patriotic content, was the order of the day, and would remain so throughout the

history of the DPRK. Kim repeated many of the same themes at the height of the Korean

War, in a speech drafted by Yan’an returnee Kim Ch’angman and perhaps consciously

modeled on Mao’s 1942 “Talk on Arts and Literature” at Yan’an.44

The influence of the Chinese communist thought, particularly through the

medium of Korean veterans of the Chinese Communist Party’s struggles in Manchuria

and Yan’an, was an important element in the formation of the DPRK. The voluntarism

and “human-centered” elements of juche thought were strongly influenced by Maoism, as

was North Korea’s concept of the “mass line”, and Kim Il Sung was known to quote Mao

directly in the early days of the DPRK.45 Nevertheless, it was clearly the USSR, and

Stalin as a leader, which made the greater impression on Kim. However, one element

24

often seen as central to Stalinism in the USSR seems to have been relatively muted in

North Korea, at least until the post-Korean War period: the systematic and widespread

use of terror. In this respect North Korea’s Stalinism was relatively “benign.”46 Arrests

and purges did take place, of course, and surveillance and denunciation were common

practice, but peer pressure and “thought reform” were preferred to deportation and

execution as methods of social control. Until 1953, discontented individuals could also

flee to South Korea. Population movement from North to South before and during the

Korean War acted as a kind of safety valve for disaffected elements to be removed from

the North Korean body politic before they could cause trouble. This is another factor

explaining the stability and lack of overt domestic criticism in the DPRK.

The war also solidified Kim’s rule in the DPRK and provided a convenient

excuse for eliminating Kim’s rivals and potential enemies. A purge of “domestic” Korean

communists had already begun during the war itself, and in 1955 Pak Hôn-yông, leader

41 Kwôn Yông-min, "Literature and Art in North Korea: Theory and Policy," Korea Journal

vol. 31, no. 6 (Summer 1991), p. 59.

42 Kim Chae-yong, Pukhan munhagûi yôksajôk ihae [Historical Understanding of North

Korean Literature] (Seoul: Munhak kwa chisôngsa, 1994), p. 21.

43 Kim Il Sung, "Some Tasks Before Writers and Artists at the Present Time", Works vol. 5,

p. 283.

44 ? Kim Il Sung, "Talk With Writers and Artists," June 31, 1951, Selected Works vol. 1

(Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1971), pp. 305-312.

25

of the “domestic” group, was arrested and put before a Stalinist “show trial” very much

like those of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary in the

1950s. In late 1955 and 1956, the “Soviet-Koreans” and the “Yan’an” group were targets

of criticism and purges. The top organs of the North Korean state became increasingly

dominated by Kim’s cronies from his Manchurian guerrilla days. In the KWP Centeral

Committee elected in the spring of 1956, five of the eleven member were former

guerrillas.47

The late 1950s were a key a moment in North Korea’s indigenization of

Stalinism. The emerging Kim Il Sung “group” - Kim and his former guerrilla allies -

were actively hostile to Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinization” campaign, launched at the 20th

Congress of the CPSU in 1956. The members of the “Soviet” and “Yan’an” groups, who 45 Yi Chong-sôk, Hyôndae Pukhan ihae [Understanding Contemporary North Korea]

(Seoul: Yôksa pip’yôngsa, 2000), p. 172, citing one of Kim’s 1945 speeches.

46 This is not to deny that the DPRK has a poor record on human rights and reputedly

holds a large number of political prisoners living in appalling conditions, according to

numerous defectors’ testimonies - see Chul Hwang Kang, et al, “Voices from the Korean

Gulag,” Journal of Democracy (July 1998). But neither the self-destructive terror at the

highest levels of the military and bureaucracy of the USSR in the 1930s, or the mob

violence sanctioned by Mao during the Chinese Cultural revolution in the late 1960s,

have been visible in the DPRK after the late 1950s. Indeed, nothing like the madness of

the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has ever been a part of the North Korean

system.

47 Andrei Lankov, “Kim Il Sung’s Campaign against the Soviet Faction in late 1955 and

the Birth of Chuch’e,” Korean Studies no. 23 (1999), p. 60.

26

advocated collective leadership and a reduction of Kim’s own power and cult of

personality, ended up purged, exiled, or dead. North Korea thus never “de-Stalinized,”

but it managed the remarkable feat of declaring its independence from Soviet influence at

the very peak of Soviet and “fraternal socialist” economic assistance to the DPRK.48 In

December 1955, Kim gave his subsequently famous “Juche speech”, ostensibly to

promote greater awareness of Korean culture on the part of ideological workers, but

specifically attacking prominent individuals who happened to be “Soviet-Koreans” and

criticizing the undue influence of Soviet/Russian culture in the DPRK. Juche thus

articulated was Stalinism with a Korean face, the DPRK’s adaptation of Stalinist

political-economic form with a Korean nationalist content. With some modifications, this

is what juche would signify for the next four decades.49

Mono-organizational Stage, 1958-1967

48 Recently uncovered East German sources reveal the following breakdown in socialist

bloc assistance to the DPRK as of 1956: USSR - 300 million rubles; China - 250-300

million rubles; other countries, 200-300 million rubles. Ruediger Frank, “Ein Kapitel

deutsch-koreanischer Beziehungen: Die Hilfe der DDR beim Aufbau der Stadt Hamhung

in Nordkorea von 1945-1962,” M.A. thesis, Humboldt University, 1996, p. 17.

49 A scholar of Romanian politics has coined the term “national Stalinism” to define

Ceasescu’s Romania, a term which might also be suggestive for understanding the

DPRK. Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Understanding National Stalinism: Reflections on

Ceausescu’s Socialism,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 32 (1999).

27

After the purges of the mid- to late-1950s, and the completion of agricultural

collectivization and industrial nationalization in 1958, the DPRK declared itself fully on

the socialist road. Like China, Albania, and Romania, North Korea did reject Stalinism.

Rather, North Korean Stalinism became routinized and stable. While maintaining good

official relations with the USSR, the DPRK also drew politically closer to China. From

1956 North Korea pursued a campaign for rapid economic advancement similar to

China’s Great Leap Forward, embodied in the Chôllima or “Thousand-Li Flying Horse”

Movement.50 The decade between the late 1950s and the late 1960s was a period of

internal stability, economic progress, and diplomatic balance between the rival

communist Great Powers, China and the Soviet Union.

By the second half of the 1960s, however, strains could be discerned in all three

areas. Internally, the state carried its last major purge in 1967-68, this time eliminating

the members of Kim’s own Manchurian guerrilla group who were apparently not deemed

sufficiently loyal to the Great Leader.51 Loss of external assistance and a decision to

forego consumer goods production and concentrate economic resources on heavy

industry and defense contributed to a slowdown in the North Korea economy, and for the 50 The Chôllima movement actually preceded the Great Leap Forward, and was not

merely an imitation of the latter, as some Western analysts have previously suggested.

See Glenn D. Paige, “North Korea and the Emulation of Russian and Chinese Behavior,”

in A. Doak Barnett, ed. Communist Strategies in Asia: A Comparative Analysis of

Governments and Parties (New York: Praeger, 1963).

51 Yi Chong-sôk, Understanding Contemporary North Korea, p. 428. For a more

detailed description of the 1967-68 purge, see idem, Chosôn nodongdang yôn’gu [The

Korean Worker’s Party] (Seoul: Yôksa pip’yôngsa, 1995), pp. 303-311.

28

first time an economic plan was delayed: the 1960-67 seven-year plan became a de facto

ten-year plan, and DPRK economic plans would never again be completed on schedule.52

And as the Sino-Soviet split became increasingly hostile, the DPRK’s balancing act grew

more and more difficult; after 1966, when PRC publications were criticizing Kim himself

as a “revisionist”, DPRK-PRC relations were strained almost to the breaking point.

It was these and other factors, including the escalation of the war in Vietnam and

the militarization and economic growth of South Korea under Park Chung Hee, that seem

to have led the DPRK leadership to decide to push North Korea further in the direction of

political centralization, a militarized economy, and a “monolithic ideology”. In the 1960s

the North Korean state entered a new stage of political-ideological evolution which by

the early 1970s the DPRK was calling “Kim Il Sung-ism.”

Corporatist Stage, 1967-1991

The period from the late 1960s to the early 1990s was the time of the full

development of the “Kim Il Sung system”, when the DPRK best exhibited the features

which Cumings identifies as “corporatist”. North Korea’s purge of Kim’s old guerrilla

comrades left the DPRK leadership more than ever in the hands of Kim himself and

those closest to him, either through family ties or bonds of friendship formed in the 52 Karoly Fendler argues that the drop in Eastern Bloc aid after 1958 “created a crisis

from which North Korea never recovered.” Fendler, “Economic Assistance from

Socialist Countries to North Korea in the Postwar Years, 1953-1963,” in Han S. Park, ed.

North Korea: Ideology, Politics, Economy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996),

p. 164.

29

Manchurian anti-Japanese struggle. The family, under the putatively benevolent

leadership of Kim Il Sung as pater familias, was the ubiquitous image of the state as

portrayed to the North Korean people and the outside world. Not only was the cult of

Kim Il Sung himself raised to new heights, but for the first time his mother, his first wife,

uncles, grandparents, and great-grandfather also received large-scale hagiographical

treatment. Official North Korean publications explicitly referred to Kim as father and the

Worker’s Party as mother (ômôni dang, “Mother Party”); the masses were, by

implication, children. With the fatherly Great Leader at its center, political power

radiated outward in ever-expanding circles to encompass the whole of the North Korean

people, and even beyond. Finally, of course, this was the period when Kim Jong Il

emerged as heir apparent, entering the KWP Central Committee in 1974, and attaining

political positions second only to his father a decade later.

Although Cumings’ corporatist interpretation considers North Korea in the 1970s

in light of Romania in the 1920s, it might also be useful to compare North Korea in the

1970s to Romania in the 1970s. This coterminous comparison reveals striking similarities

as well as important differences between the two states. Ceausescu’s Romania and Kim Il

Sung’s North Korea were very similar in population size (around 23 million), with

similar proportions of Party membership, about 15% for both countries. Both states,

existing on the fringes of large empires, had had to overcome an inherited sense of

political and cultural inferiority vis-a-vis their more powerful neighbors, and seemed to

attempt to overcome this inferiority complex by monument-building and other feats of

“gigantism” that were excessive even by Stalinist standards.53 Both were under the 53 It may be only a coincidence, but if so a telling one, that Kim and Ceausescu both built

copies of Paris’ Arch de Triomph in their respective capitals.

30

profound influence of the Soviet Union after World War II but distanced themselves

from the USSR in the 1960s, Romania somewhat later than North Korea. Ceausescu

himself visited the DPRK a number of times and was apparently on good terms with Kim

Il Sung.54 And while the parallels between Kim Il Sung-ism and interwar Romanian

corporatism can be seen by analogy, Ceasescu’s Romania may have reflected its own

corporatist past - at least in part - by conscious design.55

But the differences between the two suggest that corporatism under Kim Il Sung

may have had deeper roots and longer staying power. Ceausecu’s Romanian nationalism

was explicitly directed against Romania’s ethnic minorities and created internal

hostilities that would not be possible in mono-ethnic Korea. DPRK economic policies,

however misguided, did give the North Korean people increasingly higher living

standards until the 1980s or so, whereas Ceausecu’s brutal extraction for export (often to

the West) had been creating increasing misery for Romanians long before Ceausescu was

ousted and executed in 1989. Kim Il Sung’s came to power twenty years earlier than

Ceausescu, with a genuine (if greatly exaggerated) anti-colonial revolutionary

background that gave his leadership greater legitimacy. Finally, Kim took much more

care and time in cultivating the succession of power, and father-son succession would

have greater cultural resonance in a Confucian society such as Korea than the husband-

wife succession that Ceausescu attempted to foist on the Romanians.

54 Trond Gilberg, National Communism in Romania: The Rise and Fall of Ceausescu’s

Personal Dictatorship (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), p. 51.

55 See Katherine Verdery, National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural

Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

31

Wada Haruki has applied the term “guerrilla-band state” (yugekittai kôkka) to the

DPRK, especially after the mid-1960s when Kim and his closest guerrilla comrades were

unquestionably at the center of power.56 Wada’s interpretation suggests that because of

the shared guerrilla background of North Korea’s leaders, the DPRK under Kim Il Sung

dealt with the world as if it were carrying on a guerrilla war, stressing tight internal unity

and a political system centered on a network of deep personal loyalties in the core

leadership.57 The “guerrilla-band state” is coterminous with what I am calling North

Korea’s corporatist phase, and can be seen as one of its most important themes. While the

anti-Japanese “partisan” struggle of the 1930s was part of North Korea’s myth of origin

from the very beginning of the regime, in the late 1960s emphasis on this struggle

became central to the ruling ideology as never before. But the image of the 1930s

guerrilla movement would become even more prominent in the 1990s, in the midst of

the collapse of state socialism in Europe and economic implosion in the DPRK

Neo-traditional Stage, 1991-2000

The 1990s represent not so much a sharp break in the ruling political structure

and ideology of the DPRK but an intensification of the corporatist system with greater

56 Wada Haruki, Kin Nichisei to Manshû kônichi sensô [Kim Il Sung and the Anti-

Japanese War in Manchuria] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1992).

57 Adrian Buzo also sees the guerrilla experience, refracted through Stalinism, as the deep

basis of North Korean political culture. Adrian Buzo, The Guerrilla Dynasty: Politics

and Leadership in North Korea (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999).

32

emphasis on “tradition”. This is partly a reaction to the catastrophic loss of the DPRK’s

fellow state socialist regimes and the deepening crisis in its domestic economy, and

partly the continuation of ideological trends leading up to the father-son succession to

Kim Jong Il, finally made official in 1997 - three years after Kim Il Sung’s death- with

Kim Jong Il’s designation as Party Secretary.58 Ideology in the DPRK emphasized the

bedrock themes of historical continuity, revolutionary tradition, and ethnic nationalism.

Thus, the skeletal remains of Tangun, mythical ancestor of the Korean people, were

“discovered” near Pyongyang in 1993 and Kim Jong Il designed an imposing pyramidal

structure to house and display them; the 1930s guerrilla struggle, especially Kim Il

Sung’s “Arduous March” of 1937-38, became the key metaphor for survival through the

famine years of 1996-98; and minjokchuûi (ethnic nationalism), a term previously little

used in the DPRK, became a central part of ideological discourse.59

One area of change in the North Korean system since the early 1990s is the rise of

the military. After his father’s death, Kim Jong Il’s main title was head of the National

Defense Commission, a body whose subordinate status had been elevated in the early 58 This three-year gap coincided with the customary three-year mourning period for

departed parents rooted in Korea’s Confucian traditions, another “neo-traditional”

element of North Korea in the 1990s. However, the leadership transition was not fully

consolidated until 1998, when Kim Jong Il was elected chairman of the National Defense

Commission (now his main public post) and the DPRK adopted a new “Kim Il Sung

Constitution,” declaring the late Great Leader to be President “for eternity”.

59 See Charles K. Armstrong, "A Socialism of Our Style: North Korean Ideology in a Post-

Communist Era," in Samuel S. Kim, ed. North Korean Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold

War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

33

1990s,60 and Kim Jong Il’s publicly displayed photographs and television images were

mostly taken with military personnel. The DPRK’s public image, leadership structure

and internal propaganda have all shifted their emphases from the Workers’ Party to the

military. Kim Jong Il has articulated a “military-first politics” (sôn’gun chôngch’i) under

his leadership.61 But regardless of the relative shift in power between the Party and the

military, the Great Leader is still symbolically, and as far as anyone call tell effectively,

at the apex of the system. The North Korean state remains the tightly bound party-

government-military organism cultivated by Kim Il Sung over the years, now with the

channels of power radiating outward from Kim Jong Il rather than his father.

Conclusion

While it is still too early to tell for sure, the DPRK at the turn of the millennium

appears to be moving into a new, more outward-looking phase in its development. At the

end of 1998, the “Arduous March” was declared to be finished, and kangsông taeguk

(“powerful and prosperous state”) became the DPRK’s new slogan. By the end of 1999,

the DPRK showed signs of reversing a decade of economic contraction and the

possibility of economic growth for the first time since the collapse of East European

communism. In the spring of 2000, the DPRK suddenly went on the diplomatic

offensive, announcing that it would establish relations with Italy and Australia, engaging

60 Cheong Seong-chang, “North Korea’s Power Structure under Kim Jong-il’s

Leadership,” Vantage Point vol. 22, no. 11 (November 1999), p. 43.

61 Editorial in Rodong Sinmun, January 1, 2000.

34

with new diplomatic talks with Japan and the United States, and - to almost everyone’s

surprise - agreeing to a summit meeting with South Korean president Kim Dae Jung.

This was all done without North Korea agreeing to, in fact categorically denying

the possibility of, change in its internal political, economic, or social system. Adapting its

indigenized Stalinism to the brave new world of twenty-first century capitalism may be

the biggest challenge of the DPRK’s existence. But the DPRK has consistently, for better

or worse, taken a path quite independent of others, including its fellow socialist states.

North Korea has never been as self-sufficient as it would like to appear, but it has been

consistently self-referential, even solopsistic. Since Kim Il Sung’s death the DPRK has

even adopted its own unique juche calendar, dating the years from Kim Il Sung’s birth.

The North Korean system has been, up to now, highly resistant to outside pressure for

change. Such resistance is not, as this analysis has suggested, mere willfulness but a

product of a system that has evolved to meet internal challenges and maintain itself

without fundamental systemic adjustments, despite a vastly changed external

environment and severe economic crisis. North Korea is, in effect, a victim of its own

“success”. Change in the DPRK will have to emerge from within a highly integrated

system in which politics, economics, culture and ideology have been deeply intertwined,

indeed virtually inseparable. The interconnectedness of all these sub-systems make

change in any one of them - say, an opening in the ideological area, or reform in the

economy - impact significantly the other sub-systems. The greatest challenge for the

DPRK in the twenty-first century, therefore, will be how to move from system-

maintenance to system-reform without triggering a systemic collapse.

35

The most seemingly logical path for the DPRK to follow is that of its fellow East

Asian socialist states, China and Vietnam. These two have, so far, evolved into

economically expansive socialist market societies without any serious challenges to the

dominance of the communist party-state, Tianmen notwithstanding. The DPRK may

hope to follow a similar, albeit necessarily more cautious, path of gradual opening and

internal reform, ever wary of the legitimacy threat of South Korea. A “reformist” DPRK

would indeed mean “the end of North Korea” as we know it, but this does not necessarily

mean the end of the DPRK as a state, the end of the dominance of the Korean Worker’s

Party, or even the end of the Kim Jong Il leadership. It could simply mean another stage

in the ongoing evolution of the North Korean system.

ENDNOTES

36