Authors: Andrei Lankov
B00BY4HXME EBOK (7 page)
However, between 1971 and 1972 it became clear that all these adventurous and sometimes bloody efforts had come to naught. South Korean “toiling masses” were not going to take up arms and go to the mountains. The average South Korean remained anti-Communist or, at least, deeply suspicious of North Korea.
In this situation, the North Korean leaders made a U-turn and began secret negotiations with the South, on assumption that some kind of provisional coexistence (until the forthcoming revolution) would be necessary. In July 1972 the South and North issued a North-South Joint Communiqué that theoretically committed them to the goal of eventual peaceful unification of the country. It was rhetoric pure and simple, but it created a framework within which the two Korean states began to talk and interact when they considered it necessary. The policy of mutual nonrecognition continues to this day (and is likely to endure into the foreseeable future), but since 1972 Pyongyang and Seoul have always maintained direct contacts of various kinds.
There were, however, some occasional relapses into revolutionary adventurism. In 1983 North Korean intelligence operatives planted a powerful bomb in Rangoon, Burma, where the South Korean president was on a state visit at the time. The device was detonated too early, so the president survived the explosion, but a number of dignitaries were killed. The three North Korean operatives, none of whom spoke Burmese, could not escape. Two were taken alive after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, and another was killed after a firefight with the Burmese soldiers. Not only the Burmese (never staunch opponents of Pyongyang) but even the Chinese were annoyed by this adventurism.
Another act of open violence was the bombing of a South Korean passenger jet in November 1987 by two North Korean intelligence officers. Obviously this was done in order to create the impression that Seoul would be an unsafe place for the coming Olympic Games of 1988. The bombing killed 115 crew members and passengers (many of whom were construction workers on their way back from the Middle East). One of the two agents was captured, another committed suicide, but the overall political impact of the operation was close to zero.
There might have been other undisclosed or aborted operations of a similar kind, but on balance from the mid-1970s the North Korean leadership came to the conclusion that a South Korean revolution was unlikely to happen any time soon. The support for the South Korean “revolutionary forces” was never completely dropped from the Pyongyang agenda, but as time went on its significance steadily diminished. From the early 1990s, when the economy began to fall apart, Pyongyang’s agenda was dominated by the necessity of defense, not offense.
I
CONS
The personality cult of the Kim family has long been a peculiar and often bizarre feature of North Korean society—and like any cult, it has iconography. Normally, four members of the Kim family are considered worthy of depiction—Generalissimo Kim Il Sung, Marshal (from 2012, posthumously, also Generalissimo) Kim Jong Il, General Kim Jong Un, and General Kim Jong Suk (the latter being Kim Il Sung’s first official wife and Kim Jong Il’s mother). Some other members of the family are occasionally depicted as well, but the images of those four are virtually omnipresent and come in many forms.
North Korea is a country of portraits. From the 1940s, depictions of Kim Il Sung were common, but from the 1970s, it was decreed that every house should have a portrait of the Great Leader. The state bestowed people with portraits and directed them to put them in their living rooms. They were to be placed on a wall devoid of any other adornments and cleaned regularly.
From 1972, Kim Il Sung’s portrait was also placed at the entrances of all factories, railway stations, and airports. A portrait of Kim Il Sung (from the mid-1980s) was to be present in all railway and subway carriages, but for some unknown reason not in buses or trams. In the late 1970s, North Koreans were directed to place standardized portraits of Kim Jong Il alongside those of his father.
A further layer of complexity was added in the 1990s. From then on, every single Korean house was to have three portraits: one of Kim Il Sung, one of Kim Jong Il, and yet another of the two great men talking about some highly important matters of statecraft. Privileged officials, however, were lucky enough to be issued with a different third picture, the visage of Kim Jong Suk. Due to reasons unknown, many offices still have portraits of the Dear Leader and Great Leader only.
Another important icon of the personality cult is the badge that all adult North Koreans have been required to wear permanently since the early 1970s. This badge usually depicts Kim Il Sung. (In some rare cases badges feature a portrait of Kim Jong Il alongside the visage of Kim Il Sung.) There are a great number of badges, and an experienced observer can learn a lot from the type of badge a North Korean wears. Officials of some important government agencies are issued their own particular type of badges.
Of course, we should not forget statues. The first statues of Kim Il Sung appeared in the late 1940s, but the vast majority of them were constructed in the 1970s and 1980s. Most counties and cities have their own statue of Kim Il Sung, located in the central part of the area. If such a statue is absent, the symbolic center will house a large mural depicting one of the Kims. Similar murals can be found on major crossroads in the cities and occasionally in the countryside.
During every major official holiday, all North Koreans are expected to pay a visit to a local statue and, after a respectful bow, to leave flowers honoring the Generalissimo (usually Kim Il Sung, but in some cities other members of the Kim family can be commemorated as well). The largest and most important statue(s) is located on Mansu Hill in downtown Pyongyang. Initially the
22-meter-high statue was gilded, but in 1977, for some reason, the gold was removed and replaced with gold paint. Recently, in April 2012, the statue got company. The likeness of Marshal (now Generalissimo) Kim Jong Il was placed next to his father. The original statue of his father had a face-lift: a broad smile and pair of glasses were added to his face, which had been up until then very austere and stern looking. Interestingly, in Kim Jong Il’s lifetime, very few statues of Kim Jong Il were constructed.
In an emergency, statues and portraits are to be protected whatever the cost, as any sacred object should be—and North Koreans are reminded that they must safeguard the images. For example, in 2007 the official media widely reported an incident that allegedly occurred in August of that year.
During a severe flooding, Kang Hyong-kwon, a factory worker from the city of Ich’on, was trying to make his way to safety through a dangerous stream. While leaving his flooded house, he took the two most precious things in his life—his five-year-old daughter and portraits of Leaders Generalissimo Kim Il Sung and Marshal Kim Jong Il. Suddenly overwhelmed by the current, he lost grip of his daughter, who fell into the swollen waters, but still managed to keep hold of the sacred images. The media extolled North Koreans to emulate Kang Hyong-kwon, a real-life hero.
In the decades during Kim Il Sung’s rule, North Korea became a society where the level of state control over the average citizen’s public and private life reached heights that would be almost unthinkable in any other country, including Stalin’s Russia, which in many cases served as a prototype for Kim Il Sung’s social experiments. In a sense, Kim Il Sung and his supporters managed to out-Stalin Stalin himself.
Private initiative was almost completely eliminated from North Korea’s economic life, and the role of money diminished greatly. Few items could be freely bought and sold in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. In 1957 the private trade in rice and other grains was banned, so that grains (by far the
most important source of calories in the diet of the average North Korean) could be distributed by the state alone. From that time and until around 1990 grains could be acquired almost exclusively through the public distribution system (PDS). Every North Korean was made eligible for a fixed daily grain ration, which was provided for a token price.
The exact size of the ration depended on one’s job; the average working adult received a grain ration of 700 grams a day, a housewife would be given merely 300 grams, while a person doing heavy physical work (a miner or, say, a jet fighter pilot) was eligible for the highest daily ration of 900 grams. The ratio of rice to other (less nutritious) grains in a ration depended largely on one’s place of residence. During the affluent 1970s, the privileged inhabitants of Pyongyang received more than half of their grain rations in rice, while in the countryside nearly the entire ration came as corn and wheat flour, with rice being a luxury food reserved for special occasions.
In 1973, when the economic situation began to deteriorate, rations were cut for the first time. For example, a typical adult’s ration of 700g was reduced to 607g. The next cut came in 1987, when the same standard daily ration went down to 547g. Officially, these cuts were considered to be “voluntary donations,” but nobody asked the North Koreans whether they were willing to “donate” their food to the state.
Rationing was not about the grain alone. Other foodstuffs were rationed as well: people were issued rations of soy sauce, eggs, cabbage, and other basic ingredients of the traditional Korean diet. Meat was distributed irregularly, a few times a year, usually before major official holidays, but fish and other types of seafood were more readily available. In autumn there might have been occasional distribution of apples, melons, and other fruits.
21
Basic consumer goods were also rationed, even though the mechanism of their distribution could be different. Items like wrist watches and black-and-white TV sets—the major symbols of consumerism during the 1960s and 1970s—were usually distributed through people’s work units. In some cases, especially valuable items were given to distinguished individuals as “presents of the Great Leader.” This particular form of distribution
clearly was good also for the ideological health of the nation, since it reminded the North Koreans whose wisdom and hard work kept them fed and well-provided with daily necessities.
Contrary to what has often been claimed, private markets were never banned in North Korea. They operated under manifold restrictions and were small in scale, but they existed nonetheless. However, the average North Korean of Kim Il Sung’s era seldom shopped at the market. Items on sale at the marketplace were overpriced and usually seen as unnecessary luxuries. The average North Korean was seldom prepared to pay above half of his/her monthly wage for a chicken, and this was a normal market price for a chicken in the early 1980s. In most cases, the North Korean consumers were quite content with what they got through the PDS.
Every able-bodied North Korean male was required to work for the state, and this requirement was enforced with great efficiency. Between 1956 and 1958 small private workshops were nationalized, while all farmers were pressed to join agricultural cooperatives. These “cooperatives” were essentially state-run, state-owned farms in all but name. Farmers worked for the same standard 700g daily ration, the only difference being that in their case rations were distributed not twice a month, as was the case in the cities, but rather once a year, soon after harvesting.
The forced switch to state farms was a common feature of nearly all Communist states, but the North Korean state farms had some peculiarities. Most significantly, farmers were allowed only tiny private kitchen gardens. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, a farmer usually had a private plot whose size might exceed 1,000 m
2
, but in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea private plots could not exceed 100 m
2
, and not all farmers were allowed to have plots even of such a small size. The assumption was that farmers, being deprived of any additional source of income and calories, would have no choice but to devote all their time and energy to toiling in the fields of the state.
This is very different from the Soviet prototype. Soon after the forced collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, Soviet farmers’ individual plots still provided more than half the country’s total production of potatoes (a major source of calories in Russia in those days) and a significant share of other vegetables. Nor did this situation change much in subsequent
decades: in the early 1970s Soviet consumers obtained more than 60 percent of their potatoes and eggs from the private agricultural sector, which also produced 40 percent of their fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy products.
22
A similar situation could be observed in Communist Vietnam, where farmers were allocated merely 5 percent of the total land to be used as their private plots. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, farmers in North Vietnam earned between 60 and 75 percent of their income from the private cultivation of these “5-percent plots,” even though the plots were not officially allocated fertilizer or other state-supplied resources.
23
Farmers of North Korea were deprived of this option from the very beginning: obviously, the policy planners believed that the farmers would be more productive on the state fields if they were not distracted by the temptations of working their own land.
Unlike the USSR where people were usually expected to look for jobs themselves, the North Korean system didn’t tolerate such dangerously liberal behavior. After graduation from high school, all North Koreans were assigned to their jobs. Those who were seen as both academically smart and politically reliable would be allowed to sit for college entrance exams. Changing one’s job was possible, but had to be approved beforehand by the authorities and required much paperwork (the only exception being women, who often became full-time housewives after marriage).
One of the most striking peculiarities of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was the extent to which the daily lives of its citizens were monitored by the authorities. Even Stalin’s Russia appears to be a relatively liberal place if compared to the North Korea of the 1960–1990 period. The government strove to control every facet of an individual’s life, and these efforts were remarkably successful.