THE MYSTERY OF NORTH KOREA

For approximately two millennia, from the early centuries of the Christian era, Korea was part of the East Asian civilization. In this context, ‘East Asia’ is not a geographical but a cultural-historical term, referring to a civilization stretching from the Japanese islands to the Mekong Delta, shaped significantly by traditional Chinese culture.

This civilization, encompassing present-day countries like Japan, Korea, China (including Taiwan), and Vietnam, has consistently aligned itself with classical Chinese culture and governance traditions. The predominant ideology in these nations, though simplified somewhat, was Confucianism. Until the nineteenth century, the ancient Chinese language functioned as the state language and the language of high culture in these regions. Essentially, it was the language spoken in China in the mid-first millennium BCE and the one employed to write the Confucian canon.

While the question of whether Confucianism qualifies as a religion remains up for debate, it's evident that Confucianism played a role in the region that is similar to Islam in the Middle East and Christianity in Europe. Politically, all the countries in the region, to varying degrees, emulated the political and social structures of early Chinese empires, particularly the Tang Empire (seventh to ninth centuries).

East Asian civilization boasted distinctive features that continue to greatly influence the countries that were once part of it before it began to disintegrate in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of its most distinctive features was its economy, which was centered around rice cultivation. Rice, a unique crop, provides a high-calorie yield per unit of cultivated land but is extremely labor-intensive. Essentially, a flooded rice field acts as a complex hydraulic system. To grow rice, fields must be meticulously leveled as they are uniformly flooded every spring. Additionally, a sophisticated system of reservoirs, channels, and dams needs to be constructed and maintained to supply water to the fields before planting rice seedlings. Unlike most grains, rice isn't sown but transplanted as pre-grown seedlings directly into submerged fields. From dawn until dusk, farm workers must plant each individual rice seedling by hand, bending over in the muddy water under the scorching sun.

Undoubtedly, such a lifestyle had a profound impact on the way the people of East Asia envisioned the ideal societal structure. This economic model cultivates both a collective spirit and, simultaneously, a tendency toward conformity, a disposition to act within the collective and not defy the will of the majority or the directives of authority.

In addition, the creation and maintenance of a new flooded rice field are, in principle, impossible tasks for a single family and, in many cases, even for an entire village. Complex irrigation systems, vital to a successful harvest, were constructed through the collaborative efforts of many thousands of able-bodied men, with the coordination of such work inevitably falling under the purview of the state.

This explains the distinctive regard for the state in East Asian countries, where it played an essential economic role. Officials, in particular, were responsible for establishing and ensuring that irrigation systems functioned properly. Additionally, officials were tasked with creating grain reserves in the event there were poor harvests, which was a crucial function given the inherently unstable nature of traditional rural agriculture and the notably high population density.

Unsurprisingly, East Asian countries developed an extremely respectful and reverential attitude toward the state and bureaucracy. In this cultural context, the bureaucrat became the beloved hero of folklore and literature, a role reminiscent of the knight in European folklore. Conversely, warriors in East Asia were not viewed with any special reverence, keeping in line with a Chinese proverbial principle: ‘Good iron is not used to make nails, and good men do not become soldiers.’

East Asia became the target of Western colonial expansion relatively late in the mid-nineteenth century. Before this, the strong, centralized states in the region were capable of resisting colonizers, who, consequently, preferred not to engage with them during that period. It is noteworthy that after the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nearly all East Asian countries had adopted a policy of self-isolation, prohibiting or severely restricting both trade and other private contacts with the outside world. The borders in the region were essentially closed at a time when such a concept was hardly imaginable elsewhere.

After the Industrial Revolution began in Europe, the balance of power shifted, and not in the favor of East Asian countries. Western expansion in the region began in earnest in 1839, when Britain (specifically the British East India Company) initiated the First Opium War. This clash ended in complete defeat for China, which was forced, among other things, to abandon its centuries-old policy of self-isolation. Soon after, in 1853–54, a raid by an American squadron under the command of Commodore Perry led to the opening up of Japan, which also reluctantly emerged from self-isolation. By the 1870s, the only East Asian country that remained isolated from the outside world and kept its old political and social system intact was Korea, but its turn would soon come.

The process of ‘opening up’ Korea and its forced integration into the modern world, which, during that period, was dominated by various colonial powers, paradoxically occurred under Japanese influence. Only a couple of decades earlier, Japan itself seemed on the way to becoming another Asian colony. However, after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, radical Western-leaning modernizers came to power in Japan and gained widespread support. As a result, Japan underwent radical modernization and Westernization, emerging as the only modern and developed country in East Asia by the end of the nineteenth century. In 1876, under pressure from Japan, the Korean government signed the Treaty of Ganghwa. This was the first in a series of agreements that, among other things, allowed foreigners to live, trade, and engage in missionary activities in the country.

The next three decades in Korean history marked a period when several major imperialist powers vied to convert Korea into either a colony or, at the very least, a protectorate. Driven by its geographic proximity to Korea and the significant role it had quickly assumed in Korean foreign trade, Japan assumed the most active and aggressive role. Initially, China, and later Russia, arrived as rivals to Japan. However, both China and Russia suffered defeat (to the surprise of the entire world) in military conflicts with Japan. Following the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Korea's fate was sealed, and in 1910, it definitively became a Japanese colony.

A distinctive feature of the Japanese imperialist policy in Korea was its proactive approach to investing in industrial production within the new colony, including high-tech industries, which were particularly advanced by the standards of the 1920s and 1930s. Several circumstances contributed to this approach. The primary one was the Japanese government’s belief that sooner or later, Korea would be fully assimilated by Japan, and Koreans would eventually become Japanese. In most European colonies, this was not an issue partly due to racism and partly due to the unfavorable population ratio for colonizers. For example, with a population of 40 million in 1930, Britain could not seriously expect assimilation in India, whose population markedly differed from the English in appearance, religion, and, most importantly, numbers, reaching approximately 300 million at that time.

However, there were other reasons for Japan's industrialization of Korea. Unlike Japan's own territory, which was practically devoid of valuable minerals, the Korean Peninsula boasted significant reserves of coal, iron ore, lead, copper, and other non-ferrous metals. Importantly, these resources were situated in the northern part of the peninsula, exclusively within the territory that became North Korea after the division of the country in 1945, whereas the southern regions were generally resource-poor. Hence, Japanese companies preferred to build new factories closer to the primary raw material sources, especially considering that the Japanese government had no concerns about the future, being confident that Korea had become a permanent part of the Japanese Empire.

However, Japanese colonial policy in Korea bore some resemblance to apartheid in certain aspects. Despite the ideal of Korean Japanization, the differences between them and the Japanese not only persisted but were also enshrined in legislation. In practice, the Japanese approach to the situation was quite paranoid. The Japanese administration demanded that Koreans become Japanese, yet even those who Japanized themselves to the fullest extent (including abandoning the Korean language) were still not perceived as fully and truly equal ‘Japanese’ subjects of the emperor. To illustrate the point, despite the significant number of Japanese settlers in Korea, there were almost no mixed marriages between Koreans and Japanese until the end of the 1930s. Around 900,000 Japanese, constituting approximately 3 per cent of the population, resided in Korea in 1944.

At the same time, the late nineteenth century saw the rapid development of modern education in Korea. Notably, Christian missionaries played a significant role in this process. Christianity appeared in Korea in the late eighteenth century, spreading out from China. Initially, it was primarily disseminated through the written word, almost without the involvement of missionaries, and made large inroads even under these conditions. From the late 1880s, missionaries gained the right to work legally in the country, and from the beginning, Christian (mainly Protestant) missionaries, predominantly Americans, devoted considerable attention to establishing a modern education system in the country.

Western missionaries were the founders of the first modern Korean schools. Virtually all of the first generation of Korean intellectuals had passed through these Christian schools. For a Korean in the early twentieth century, missionary schools were where one could learn to solve integral equations, design bridges, and understand how steam engines and (later) internal combustion engines functioned. It turned out that since its appearance in the country, Christianity had become, in the eyes of the Koreans, a religion of modernization, the religion of the heliocentric system, Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian physics. It's not surprising that Christians, constituting a small part of the population at that time (around 1 per cent in the early twentieth century), began to play a noticeable role in Korean society.

However, after the establishment of the colonial regime, the Japanese actively implemented their own education system in Korea. By the end of colonial rule, nearly half of all Korean children attended primary (six-year) school—an extremely high figure by the standards of most colonies at that time. This was associated with the Japanese intention to use schools, especially primary schools, as a tool for Japanization, with education being primarily conducted in Japanese. The necessity for a qualified workforce, crucial to the functionality of the industries established by the Japanese in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, also played a role.

Nevertheless, around the 1920s, a young, modern-minded intelligentsia oriented toward modernization became a noticeable social stratum in some Korean cities, primarily in Seoul. It was within this environment that a new ideology gained traction—the ideology of Marxism. To understand why Marxism became so popular in this milieu, it is essential to grasp the challenges faced by young Koreans in the 1920s. They were predominantly raised in the spirit of progress and held an unequivocally negative view of the very recent past of traditional Korea, which was still vivid in their memories.

An interesting feature of Korea (as in most East Asian countries) is that it never developed fundamentalist doctrines. Many intellectuals in the Middle East, for example, while searching for an independent path for their recently colonized countries, turned their attention to early Islamic traditions. Such perspectives were scarcely observed in Korea. By 1910, no Koreans, except perhaps a few elderly individuals belonging to the rapidly disappearing traditional Confucian intelligentsia, advocated building a society according to the tenets of Confucius and Mencius. No one spoke of the need to return to the lost ideals of the fifth century BCE. By 1920, everyone in Korea agreed that they needed to move forward. All young intellectuals dreamed that in the future Korea would become a country of modern industry, with swift steam locomotives, airships, and steel mills. Of course, it was also implied that, ideally, the country would regain its independence—most Koreans were dissatisfied with being treated as second-class citizens in their own land.

Thus, the majority of educated urban youth in Korea aspired to build a modern society. However, serious disagreements arose among them about how to construct this society and what it should specifically entail. Everyone agreed on airships and steel mills, but there were significant differences on how to manage all of this. At this time, right-wing nationalists played a significant role; they primarily looked to the United States and were mainly associated with Protestant activists. It is worth noting that by the standards of the colonial world at that time, these nationalists were unequivocal progressives and modernizers. Their ideal was a national state that would be a republic with a market-oriented economy.

However, not everyone agreed with this vision of the future. Many young Koreans were repelled by the ideas of Western liberalism because these ideas were too closely associated with the imperialist and colonial policies conducted by Western countries (and, of course, Japan). Additionally, many believed that there was a way to achieve rapid development for the country, and breach the gap separating Korea from the world's developed countries at that time, not through small steps but rather several rapid leaps. Marxism, with its growing popularity in 1920s Korea, began to captivate these individuals.

It is essential to note a crucial aspect of our subsequent history. Marxism in Korea, as well as in most other East Asian countries, from its inception, bore a profoundly national character. Traditionally, Marxists in European countries and beyond, at that time, were committed to international or, as we might say now, globalist ideas. They saw themselves as part of a global movement whose task was to restructure not a specific country but the entire world. In 1920, a young French, Russian, or, let's say, Brazilian, would join the communist party to bring happiness to the whole world, ‘give the land in Grenada to the peasants’, and end social injustice on a planetary scale.

Motivated by similar reasons, young Chinese, Vietnamese, and Koreans, in general, were not entirely unfamiliar with communist parties in the 1920s. However, for many of them, the tasks of national salvation were much more understandable and relatable than the goal of global restructuring. For them, communism was primarily a means to compress time, to rapidly lift their country out of economic and social backwardness and political dependence—in other words, to ‘make China (Korea, Vietnam) great again’. This nationalist flavor was always present in East Asian Marxism and only intensified over time. However, to be fair, it should be noted that in other countries, Marxist parties, upon coming to power, quickly began to view the world through a different lens, transforming into statists and even nationalists.

Thus, in 1920s Korea, many young intellectuals, often from Christian families, initially oriented toward modernization, began to increasingly appreciate Marxist texts arriving in the country, mainly from the Soviet Union, as well as from Japan and China. These three neighboring states became incubators in which the Korean communist movement was shaped.

Of course, Russia (later the Soviet Union) played a significant role in Korea, being the first country where the communists seized political power. By 1917, around 100,000 ethnic Koreans were living in Russia and were mainly concentrated in the Primorye regions near the border with Korea. In the border Posyet district, ethnic Koreans comprised more than 90 per cent of the population, and the migration of Koreans to the land of Russia’s Primorsky Krai began in the mid-nineteenth century. The vast majority were impoverished peasants enticed by the prospect of gaining access to vast swathes of fertile land by Korean standards (albeit not through private ownership as most of these plots were rented). After 1905–10, political migrants also began to appear in Russia, leaving their country once it became a Japanese colony.

With the onset of the Civil War, the Koreans in Russia overwhelmingly supported the Reds. This was because the Bolsheviks promised to implement land reform, and the majority of Koreans were then tenant farmers. The Bolshevik commitment to building a society without national discrimination, which Koreans had faced in Tsarist Russia, also played a significant role. Finally, the old and eternal principle of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my ally’ came into play. The Bolsheviks’ main opponent in the Far East was Japan, and a significant portion of the Korean population in the Russian Far East (specifically, a substantial part of the elite of the Korean ethnic community in Russia) had left Korea precisely because they did not want to live under Japanese rule.

During the Russian Civil War, many young Koreans capable of bearing arms joined the Red Army. In some instances, former partisan groups who had fought against the Japanese colonial regime in the 1910s, when Korean patriots attempted armed resistance against the colonial power, joined the army and moved to Russia after their defeat. By the conclusion of the Civil War, a significant segment of the Korean youth within the Red Army had embraced communist beliefs and, naturally, aspired to introduce the new ‘right’ ideology to their homeland.

Japan became another center for the formation of the Korean communist movement. Paradoxically, in the 1920s, the political regime in Japan was much more liberal than the one in colonial Korea. Many things that could lead to imprisonment on political charges in Korea were entirely ordinary and legal in Japan. The Japanese colonial authorities actively sabotaged any attempts to establish a separate higher education system in Korea. During colonial times, there was only one small university in Korea, and Koreans made up just over a third of its students, despite making up 97 per cent of their country’s population at that time. However, colonial authorities facilitated the departure of Koreans for educational purposes in Japan. Young Koreans in Japan had significant opportunities to familiarize themselves with the communist ideology and often returned home as communists.

In these circumstances, the Communist International (Comintern), an international organization advocating communism and led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, began efforts to establish the Korean Communist Party. Creating communist parties worldwide was a crucial goal for the Comintern in the 1920s. However, accomplishing this in Korea was challenging due to the numerous internal disputes among Marxist circles and groups within the country and among Korean migrants. These groups, to be direct, were notably prone to internal conflicts. Continuous struggles unfolded among these groups, and their many leaders sought recognition from Moscow as the foundation for establishing the future Communist Party of Korea. The conflicts were also accompanied by intrigues and denunciations, often overwhelming even seasoned Comintern personnel.

Nevertheless, after persistent efforts, the Communist Party of Korea was formed in 1925 during an illegal congress held in Seoul. The party's existence, however, was short-lived. The Japanese police quickly exposed its leadership, leading to the imprisonment of most leaders, but some managed to escape to the Soviet Union and China. Further, the ongoing internal conflicts continued to impact the party's ability to engage in practical political work and its standing at the Comintern headquarters. In December 1928, the Comintern formally dissolved the party. However, the dissolution didn't mark the end of the Korean communist movement. Koreans continued to participate in communist organizations in China and the USSR. Additionally, within Korea, individual communist activists and small groups endured, often linked to the trade unions and workers' movement. This movement experienced significant growth with the industrialization of the northern part of the country around 1930.

A portion of Korean communists, primarily from Seoul's intelligentsia, found themselves in China, specifically in Shanghai, where an International Settlement provided a certain (and notably high by regional standards) level of political freedoms. Over time, after a series of disturbances, these leftist intellectuals relocated to the city of Yan'an, which had been the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party since 1937.

Meanwhile, in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a significant portion of Soviet Korean youth became committed communists. Many of them forged successful careers, partly due to the widespread practice of positive discrimination (that is, they were granted special privileges and quotas) toward ethnic minorities in the USSR during the 1920s. However, in 1937, Soviet Koreans were forcibly deported from the Far East to Central Asia, marking a historic instance of mass repression based on nationality. During this period, a considerable number of intellectuals, military personnel, and party workers of Korean descent faced repression. In those years, the chances of an ethnic Korean ending up in the grinder were several times higher than those of their Russian or, let's say, Tatar colleagues. Nevertheless, these tragic events did not significantly alter the political orientations of the majority of educated Soviet Koreans. They had received their education under Soviet rule and considered themselves loyal fighters, devoted citizens of the USSR, and members of the Communist Party.

The events unfolding in Manchuria during this time, where the Korean community was rapidly growing, were crucial to subsequent developments. In many cases, Koreans migrated to Manchuria in search of a better life, but there were often political motives behind this resettlement. Interestingly, the Japanese administration generally viewed this departure of Koreans positively. While formally subjects of the Japanese Empire, ethnic Koreans in Manchuria provided numerous pretexts for Japanese intervention in Manchurian and, more broadly, Chinese politics.