The Cleanest Race (4 page)

Needless to say, no mention was made of the fact that “the General” had spent the Pacific War years in a rural Soviet
town. Instead he and his guerillas were said to have fought the occupying power from a secret base on Mount Paektu. This clever lie put the heroic troops just inside the homeland during the national ordeal while offering a plausible explanation as to why no one could remember seeing them. No less importantly, it linked Kim to Tan’gun’s alleged birthplace.
²⁷

North Korea’s personality cult quickly surpassed its Eastern European counterparts in extravagance. By the end of the 1940s the leading university had been named after the leader, his home village of Man’gyǒngdae had become a national shrine, and his statue had gone up in several cities. Unlike Stalin and Mao, Kim tolerated no sub-cults of the second or third in command; there was no one to compare with Beria or Lin Biao. By today’s standards, however, the cult was still rather modest, conceding both the “great” Stalin’s primacy and the Red Army’s decisive role in liberating the peninsula. Nor were Kim’s name and image quite as ubiquitous as they would later become.

Like the blood-based Japanese nationalism of the colonial era, the new Korean nationalism went hand in hand with the slavish imitation of foreign models and an often contemptuous indifference to indigenous traditions. In his speechifying Kim declared servile tribute to the USSR’s “superior” culture.
²⁸
Literary critics tossed around Soviet catchwords—“typicality,” and so on—in an effort to cut down their rivals on the cultural scene. University students scrambled to learn Russian, the new linguistic ticket to social status. Meanwhile the Soviet Civil Administration rapidly expanded the fascist command economy of the Pacific War era into a communist one.
²⁹

To outside observers, therefore, North Korea gave every appearance of being another Soviet satellite in the making.
But a closer look at the official culture would have revealed a different truth. Where East Bloc propagandists dwelled on the dialectical struggle between the old and the new, their North Korean counterparts presented their half of the peninsula as an already classless
gemeinschaft
, unanimously supportive of Kim Il Sung, under whose protective rule the child race could finally indulge its wholesome instincts. As in imperial Japanese propaganda, the dominant dualism was one of purity versus impurity, cleanliness versus filth.
³⁰
Protagonists in official narratives were boyish young men and blushing, virginal girls. One novel of the period broke with convention by depicting the romance between a widower and the former concubine of a landowner. Kim Il Sung himself was quick to complain, saying that the widower should have been hitched up to a virgin instead. “Even an old maid would do,” he grumbled. “Everyone wants pure water.”
³¹

A portion of a mosaic in Pyongyang commemorating the triumphant homecoming.

One searches these early works in vain for a sense of fraternity with the world proletariat. The North Koreans saw no contradiction between regarding the USSR as developmentally superior on the one hand and morally inferior on the other. (The parallel to how South Koreans have always viewed the United States is obvious.) Efforts to keep this contempt a secret were undermined by over-confidence in the impenetrability of the Korean language and the inability of all nationalists to put themselves in a foreigner’s shoes. The Workers’ Party was taken by surprise, for example, when Red Army authorities objected to a story about a thuggish Soviet soldier who mends his ways after encountering a saintly Korean street urchin—another child character symbolizing the purity of the race.
³²

On August 13, 1948 Syngman Rhee announced the establishment of the Republic of Korea (ROK), whereupon Soviet officials in Pyongyang, abandoning hopes for a single state, relinquished power to Kim Il Sung. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was formally established on September 9. Having flown the same yin-yang symbol as the American zone for three years, the DPRK now hoisted a communist-style flag, with a red star as the focal point. At the end of 1948 Soviet troops withdrew from the peninsula. No sooner had they gone than Kim began enlisting Moscow’s support for a military re-unification of the country. Stalin agreed to send weapons, supplies, and advisers.
¹
Meanwhile the DPRK’s propaganda apparatus prepared the masses for the coming conflict. The South had gone from a Japanese colonial hell to an American one, with the same treasonous elite in charge; how long would the suffering brethren have to wait for
real
liberation? Yi T’ae-chun and other writers wrote short stories or poems demanding violent retribution against the Yankees and their lackeys.
²

On June 25, 1950 the Korean People’s Army launched what would later be called the “Homeland Liberation War” with a surprise advance across the 38th parallel.
^†
Capturing Seoul on June 28, KPA troops rolled as far south as the Nakdong River before MacArthur’s landing in September at Inch’ŏn, a harbor city on the west coast, reversed the course of the war. As UN soldiers neared Pyongyang, the cultural apparatus joined the party leadership in fleeing north. China entered the war in October, pushing the Americans and their allies back down
the peninsula. Seoul was recaptured by the communists only to fall once again to UN troops, in whose hands it remained. Kim’s writers and artists then hunkered down in a village near Pyongyang while the US Air Force embarked on a long and indiscriminate bombing campaign.

Such a war would have brought out the xenophobia in any nation, but in the DPRK, where most people had been steeped in blood-based nationalism since their colonial childhood, the mood was such that even the Chinese ally was regarded with hostility.
³
Writers depicted the Americans, including women and children, as an inherently depraved race.
⁴
There was none of the proletarian internationalism that had made Soviet propagandists draw a line between Nazis and average Germans. One writer jeered at the corpses of UN troops, while another celebrated the abuse of captured enemy pilots.
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Much sport was made of the Yankees’ Caucasian features, with a leading author asserting that they reflected an inner “idiotization.”
⁶
The same man also penned a short story named
Jackals
(Sŭngnyangi, 1951) in which US missionaries murder a Korean child with an injection of germs.
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The enormous popularity of this story may well have inspired the regime in late 1951 to make formal allegations of American germ warfare.

In 1952 a war-weary Kim Il Sung called on China to help bring about a ceasefire. Mao and Stalin both urged him to stand firm.
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After the generalissimo’s death in May 1953, Moscow at last permitted Kim to enter into negotiations with the enemy. The DPRK and China signed an armistice with the United States on July 27, 1953. Pyongyang would henceforth celebrate the date as marking the enemy’s surrender, making skilful use of photographs that showed the American negotiators in weary or exasperated moments.

Now more dependent on his patrons than ever, the dictator took pains to sound internationalist notes in high-profile speeches, even asserting in December 1955 that “to love the USSR is to love Korea.”
⁹
Domestic propaganda, however, dwelt increasingly on the virtues of Koreanness.
¹⁰
The translation of foreign works was reduced, and the performance of Soviet plays forbidden altogether.
¹¹
An East German diplomat reported home that all successes were “portrayed as accomplishments of the Korean workers ‘without foreign’ assistance.”
¹²
He also noted that the party’s educational activities were “not oriented toward studying the works of Marxism-Leninism.”
¹³
Instead the
purity of the Korean
bloodline was stressed. Women who married Eastern European aid workers were accused of “betraying the race”.
¹⁴
Anyone perceived to have emotional ties to the outside world became suspect. In 1956 Kim purged his party of its Yenan and Soviet-Korean factions, replacing these old communists with comrades-in-arms from his guerilla days.
¹⁵

Meanwhile the regime was pushing through a collectivization of agriculture that went too far even for Moscow’s liking. In 1958 the DPRK began emulating China’s Great Leap Forward campaign of radical industrialization with its own Ch’ǔllima or Thousand-League Horse Movement, the symbol of which was a Pegasus-style winged horse.
^†
Christians were rounded up and sent to prison camps. Such policies, executed at a time when Eastern Europe was “thawing,” conveyed to the West the misleading image of a hard-line Stalinist state. In fact they were perfectly compatible not only with North Korean nationalism, which perceives the child race as innately collectivist, but also with Kim Il Sung’s insatiable desire to maximize internal security. Whether the Soviet model would improve the nation’s
standard of living was never the issue; on the contrary, Kim appears to have been wary of feeding his people too well. In a meeting with East Germany’s Erich Honecker in 1977 he said that “ ‘the higher the standard of living climbs, the more ideologically lazy and the more careless the activity’ of the people is,” a statement that, as Berndt Schäfer has remarked, “no East German leader could have gotten away with making.”
¹⁶
Balazs Szalontai notes that Kim Il Sung “consistently preferred economic ‘corrections’ that did not loosen the regime’s control over society to those which did.”
¹⁷

Nikita Khrushchev and Kim Il Sung

The regime had other reasons for imitating Soviet models. It needed to distinguish itself from a
far more populous Korean
state which would otherwise have enjoyed a superior claim to legitimacy, and to ensure the continued inflow of economic, diplomatic and military support from abroad. East European diplomats had, however, already begun reporting home about the xenophobia in Pyongyang. Some were cursed and pelted with rocks by children on the street. Koreans who had married Europeans were pressured to divorce or banished from the capital. (Internally the East German embassy compared these practices to Nazi Germany.)
¹⁸
One Soviet wife of a Korean citizen was beaten unconscious by provincial police when she attempted to travel to Pyongyang.
¹⁹
In 1965, the Cuban ambassador
to the DPRK, a black man, was squiring his wife and some Cuban doctors around the city when locals surrounded their car, pounding it and shouting racial epithets.
²⁰
Police called to the scene had to beat the mob back with truncheons. “The level of training of the masses is extremely low,” a high-ranking official later told the shaken diplomat. “They cannot
distinguish between friends and foes.”
²¹
This was precisely the mindset that the regime sought to instil.

Relations between Beijing and Pyongyang worsened in 1966 when China’s leader launched the Cultural Revolution. Kim evidently worried that Mao fever might infect his own people, which in turn might encourage Beijing to attempt a coup or an invasion. This was no mere paranoia; Chinese troops did indeed make a few provocative incursions across the North Korean border.
¹
Kim’s
first response was to tighten internal security
even further. After a census in 1966, DPRK citizens were divided according to their family background or
sŏngbun
into a “core” class of high-ranking cadres and their families, a “wavering” class of average citizens, and a “hostile” class made up of former landowners and other potential subversives. People of all
sŏngbun
were organized into an exhausting regimen of social activities and study sessions, the latter devoted more to the fantasy biography of Kim than to his writings.