Authors: Andrei Lankov
B00BY4HXME EBOK (6 page)
Remittances began to dry up in the 1990s, with predictably grave results for the second- and third-generation returnees. The main reason for this was the generational shift. The immediate relatives of the returnees began to die out, and the next generation had no inclination to send money to people they had never met. Around the same time, Chongryon membership began to dwindle, too, with the younger generations of ethnic Koreans either accepting Japanese citizenship or switching to a South Korean passport. Nonetheless, until the early 1990s money transfers from Japan were a major source of income for Pyongyang.
W
OMEN’S
W
ORK
?
Soviet Communism, as well as its local variants, had a strictly male face. The top Communist bureaucrats of the 1960s and 1970s are remembered as aging males in badly tailored suits. Indeed, women were remarkably underrepresented at the apex of Communist power.
This was not always the case. In the early 1900s, revolutionary Marxism was arguably the most feminist of all major ideologies of the era. It did not limit itself to demands for legal gender equality, but went one step further by demanding full economic and social equality for men and women.
In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, there was, for all intents and purposes, an affirmative action program. The exploits of female pilots, engineers, and military officers were much extolled by the media.
However, this was to change in the late 1930s, when the government of Stalin’s Russia discovered the political usefulness of the traditional family and the values associated with it. From then on, while the importance of female labor in the workplace was not disputed (and, indeed, continued to be encouraged), the primary social function of women was to be wives and mothers.
When Soviet troops brought Communism to Korea in 1945, it was in its most nationalist and antifeminist stage. Some measures to bring about gender equality were enforced, however, including the 1946 Gender Equality Law, which abolished concubinage, eased restrictions (mainly social in nature) on divorce, and enshrined female property rights in law.
That said, North Korean female participation in higher-level politics remained low. Out of some 260 cabinet ministers between 1945 and 2000, a mere six were women. It was a common assumption in the Kim Il Sung—era North Korea that women should not aspire to have careers in politics or administration. The common wisdom was that a girl should look for a proper husband and, if possible, for a job that would leave her enough time to fulfill her primary duties as a mother, wife, and daughter-in-law.
Actually, work was not seen as a necessity. Unlike other Communist nations, the North Korean state was quite positive in its attitude toward women who wanted to become housewives. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe of the 1970s, a full-time housewife was a very rare creature, while in the North Korea of the same time, maybe up to one-third of all married urban women stayed at home (no exact statistics are available).
Unsurprisingly, there were few female faces among the top leadership. In the 1940s and 1950s, North Korea had a small number of female
politicians who were essentially left over from the earlier period of heroic (and feminist) revolutionary Marxism. The most remarkable of them was Pak Ch
ŏ
ng-ae (born Vera Ch’oe), once a Soviet intelligence operative and later a Politburo member and ardent supporter of Kim Il Sung. The latter did not save her from being purged in the 1960s, however.
Another example was Ho Ch
ŏ
ng-suk, daughter of prominent leftist lawyer H
ŏ
H
ŏ
n. She herself fought in the Chinese Civil War, even becoming a political military commissar of a regiment. In North Korea, she rose to the position of justice minister, and in this capacity oversaw the initial stages of North Korea’s Great Purge. In the 1960s, however, Ho Ch
ŏ
ng-suk was pushed out of top-tier politics and relegated to ceremonial positions.
From around 1960, virtually all women in top political positions in the North got their power as a result of being members of the ruling Kim family. For instance, there is Kim S
ŏ
ng-ae, the second wife of Kim Il Sung. She obviously had some political aspirations in the 1970s, but her ambitions were cut short by the rise of her stepson Kim Jong Il, who had her sidelined. Another important woman of the Kim family is Kim Ky
ŏ
ng-h
ŭ
i, Kim Jong Il’s younger sister—one of the regents assisting Kim Jong Un in the first months of his rule.
In North Korean society at large, the relative power of women increased dramatically after the collapse of the state Socialist economy. In the 1990s males were expected to continue attending to their nonfunctioning plants, while women, who were—or could easily become—housewives, were free to engage in the manifold activities of the nonofficial economy. As a result, women became the major breadwinners in the majority of North Korean families.
The increase in income predictably produced a remarkable change in the gendered division of labor as well as in gender relations in general (hence, for example, a rise in the number of divorces initiated by women). In the countries of Eastern Europe, the collapse of state Socialism generally led to a massive decline in gender equality. Conversely, in North Korea, the years of crisis led to the empowerment of women—at least the ones who did not perish in the famine.
The Korean War did not end in a peace treaty. Only an armistice—a ceasefire—was signed in 1953. Tellingly enough, the ROK government refused to become a signatory of the document. The actual reasons were complicated, but officially they reasoned that the ceasefire was tantamount to the semi-recognition of the North Korean state.
Until the late 1960s, any foreign government had to choose which Korean state it should maintain diplomatic relations with. If a foreign nation granted diplomatic recognition to Pyongyang, it meant the immediate and automatic severance of diplomatic ties with Seoul (and vice versa). This principle was quietly revoked in 1969, and since then it has become possible for a foreign government to maintain diplomatic relations with the two Korean states simultaneously.
19
However, the conflicts between these two states remained frozen and unresolved.
For the first few years after the armistice of 1953, North Korea’s government did not show much interest in South Korean issues. Kim Il Sung was too busy rebuilding the economy and eliminating real and potential rivals within the top leadership. It was also assumed that no revolution was likely to break out in South Korea, where leftist forces were wiped out by police terror and self-imposed exile (the majority of prominent North Korean leftists fled to the North, just to be exterminated there in the purges of the 1950s). Apart from that, Kim Il Sung understood that the Soviet Union was not going to approve of any major attack on South Korea—and with a large US presence in the South, such an attack would be suicidal at any rate.
However, the events of the early 1960s made Pyongyang reconsider its passive approach to the unification issue. For one thing, the sudden outbreak of the April Revolution in 1960 led to a collapse of the Syngman Rhee regime in Seoul. The April Revolution produced an unstable democratic regime that was soon overthrown by the military. Kim Il Sung saw these events as proof that a revolution in South Korea was possible. Indeed, the 1960s and 1970s outbreaks of mass opposition movements occurred in South Korea frequently, and huge rallies on the streets of Seoul encouraged optimism in Pyongyang.
The decline of Soviet influence in Pyongyang also encouraged hopes of unification. In the new situation, Kim Il Sung could hope that he would be able to take advantage of a favorable turn of events in the South without worrying excessively about Moscow’s position.
Another event that had significant impact on North Korean thinking was the steady escalation of the war in Vietnam. Indeed, Vietnam and Korea had a lot in common. Their histories and cultures have remarkable similarities and after the Second World War both countries were divided into a Communist North and capitalist South. Like their North Korean comrades, Vietnamese Communists once reluctantly accepted a ceasefire under pressure from Moscow and Beijing. However, unlike the North Koreans, the Vietnamese Communists did not keep the promises they made under duress, and began to increase their support for Communist guerrillas in the South Vietnamese countryside. Eventually this led to a full-scale US intervention, but by the late 1960s it became obvious that this intervention was failing. For Pyongyang leaders, Vietnam increasingly looked like an encouraging example.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that these expectations were unfounded, since South Korea was no South Vietnam. In the 1960s the South Korean government became remarkably efficient in promoting economic growth, while the South Vietnamese government was the embodiment of corruption, inefficiency, and factional strife. The brutal experiences of the North Korean occupation of 1950–1951 made the majority of South Koreans staunchly anti-Communist. Whatever they secretly thought about the then current government in Seoul, they saw Kim Il Sung as the greater evil. Last but not least, South Korean terrain made guerrilla operations difficult. At the time, before the successful reforestation program of the 1970s, most of South Korea’s land was treeless and hilly, so guerrillas would be sitting ducks for choppers and light planes.
Nonetheless, all of this became clear only later. In the late 1960s the North Korean government made another bid for unification—so intense, actually, that it is sometimes described as the “Second Korean War.”
20
The North Korean plan for unification generally followed a well-established Communist pattern, known as the “United Front” strategy. At
first, North Korea hoped to create a broad left-leaning opposition movement that would be led and manipulated by clandestine organizations of the South Korean Communists (or rather, Jucheists). It was assumed that a broad coalition would first topple a pro-American military regime. After this, the clandestine pro-Pyongyang core would discard and, if necessary, destroy their temporary allies and eventually emerge as the driving force of a truly Communist revolution.
Kim Il Sung and his people, being former guerrillas themselves, also pinned great hope on the emergence of armed guerrilla resistance within South Korea. Obviously in emulation of Vietnamese experience, they expected that a small number of North Korean commandos, often of South Korean extraction, would serve as a nucleus for a future South Korean guerrilla army.
In the 1960s, encouraged by the signs of the leftward drift of some South Korean intellectuals, Pyongyang undertook a few attempts to establish an underground party in Seoul. The most successful of these attempts was the “Revolutionary Party of Unification” established in 1964. The party, however, never managed to reach prominence and was finally destroyed by the South Korean authorities. Some of its leaders were executed while others were sent to jail for years.
There have been subsequent attempts to reestablish the pro-Pyongyang underground and recruit some promising young leftists to its ranks. The present author personally knows people who once used to commute to Pyongyang via submarine (the usual way of ejecting and infiltrating agents or full-time activists out of and into South Korea). In three cases that I am personally aware of, these trips and a short exposure to Pyongyang life led to an immediate disillusionment with North Korea.
The South Korean Left was revived around 1980, as we’ll see later. Indeed, it is hard to deny that the Korean leftists, self-proclaimed “defenders of the human rights and enemies of authoritarianism,” have demonstrated a surprisingly high level of sympathy—or, at least, toleration—for a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship in Pyongyang. It is not impossible that some of the prominent leftist activists have been occasionally sponsored by Pyongyang and in one instance the existence of such subsidies was
eventually proven (I am referring to the case of Professor Song Du-yul, a prominent leftist/nationalist ideologue who admitted that he received such subsidies). However, one should not believe in the conspiracy theories that are so popular within the South Korean Right. Both the revival of the South Korean Left and the remarkable popularity of Generalissimo Kim among its followers have few if any relation to the efforts of Pyongyang’s spies, but rather reflect the peculiarities of South Korean capitalism and the South Korean political structure. On balance, North Korea’s United Front strategy has been unsuccessful.
Military operations have also ended in failure. On January 21, 1968, 31 North Korean commandos infiltrated Seoul. Their goal was to storm the presidential palace and slaughter everybody inside. Obviously, Kim Il Sung believed that this bold attack, to be attributed to the local guerrillas, would be good for revolution and perhaps would spark a mass armed resistance. The raiding party was intercepted at the last minute, so an intense firefight took place in downtown Seoul. One commando escaped North, where he received a hero’s welcome and eventually became a general; another was captured alive to become a Protestant pastor in South Korea; and all others were killed in action.
In late 1968 some 120 North Korean commandos landed on the East Coast, where they hoped to establish a Vietnamese-style guerrilla base. They took over a few villages and herded villagers into ideological indoctrination sessions where the farmers were harangued about the greatness of the Great Leader, the happiness of their northern brethren, and the assorted wonders of the soon-to-come Communist paradise. But inflexible, doctrinaire North Korean propagandists were no match for their North Vietnamese comrades, and failed to impress the villagers. Thus, the expected uprising didn’t happen, and the commandos were hunted down by the South Korean military.
At the same time, the North Koreans began to escalate tensions on the DMZ, often attacking South Korean and American border patrols. In January 1968, almost immediately after the Blue House Raid, the North Korean Navy captured the US naval intelligence ship
Pueblo
and kept the ship and its crew in captivity for more than a year. After it occurred, the episode was
seen as part of a grand Communist strategy. Actually, though, the oral tradition of the Soviet diplomatic service holds that on the night after the seizure, Soviet experts spent sleepless hours looking for an excuse that would allow the Soviet Union to avoid entering a potential war between the United States and North Korea. Finally, they found one: the 1961 treaty between the USSR and the DPRK stated that the Soviet Union had a duty to defend its ally against acts of military aggression, but because the
Pueblo
seizure was an act of aggression by North Korea, the Soviet Union had no duty to intervene.