(Korean War) The Division of Korea, 1945-1948. Post # 8

by Prof. Kathryn Weathersby

Once General Shtykov established the Soviet Civil Administration and brought over experienced Soviet-Korean bureaucrats from Central Asia as well as Korean partisans who had served in the Red Army in Siberia, he turned to the more difficult task of managing the Korean Communist Party. The problem was that as soon as Japan surrendered and the party was at last able to function openly, it naturally focused its efforts on political activities in Seoul. Moreover, the longstanding leader of the Korean Communist Party, Pak Hon-Yong, had operated without direction from Moscow while the party struggled to survive under Japanese rule. Consequently, if the Soviets were to transform their occupation zone in Korea into a reliable buffer, they had to create a separate party organization in the North that was reliably loyal to Moscow.

Communist cadres in the North, however, were suspicious of the plan to establish a separate party organization because it implied that Moscow intended to solidify the division of Korea. Another problem was that they remained loyal to Pak Hon-Yong. It is true that in the first weeks of Red Army occupation, party leaders in the north had not resisted when the Soviet elder brothers instructed them to speak favorably about cooperation with the United States. This new demand, however, was of a different order, and Soviet authorities moved carefully.

They began their campaign by sending supporters of Kim Il Sung to every important center of party activity in the north to persuade local cadres to recognize Kim as head of a northern branch of the party. General Romanenko also reportedly introduced Kim Il Sung to a gathering of communist and nationalist leaders in Pyongyang, extolling him as a great patriot who had fought against Japanese imperialism. Most importantly, Romanenko brought Pak Hon-Yong to a meeting with Kim Il Sung at the 25th Army headquarters and persuaded the venerable leader to support the creation of a separate party organization for the north. Pak insisted, however, that the new organization would be formally subordinate to the party center in Seoul. Having won Pak’s cooperation, Shtykov convened a meeting on October 10 at which party leaders from the five northern provinces approved the creation of a North Korean Organizational Bureau (Orgburo) subordinate to the party headquarters in Seoul.

Shtykov’s men brought the Korean communist party into line in carefully choreographed stages, but they quickly completed the simpler job of suppressing non-communist parties in the Soviet zone. On October 12 Chistiakov issued an order declaring that the Soviet command would permit “a democratic system of government to overthrow the imperialist rule of Japan.” In order to create such a government, all “anti-Japanese parties and social organizations” were required to register their members, submitting for each individual a detailed vita with information on family background for two generations and a biography from age eight. Soviet authorities then screened the membership lists according to their usual criteria of social class and political activities, disqualifying or arresting those whose backgrounds defined them as anti-communist or pro-American.

This registry was a highly effective tactic. Within a few weeks, most of the numerous political parties and organizations that had emerged after liberation had disappeared. The Soviets allowed only two non-communist parties to remain – the Chondogyo religious party and the Korean Democratic Party led by the prominent nationalist Cho Man-sik. Since Moscow continued to cooperate with the Americans – needing their help on many occupation issues worldwide and hoping to get economic aid to recover from wartime devastation – the Soviet command in Korea maintained the posture of cooperating with Cho Man-sik.

Already at this early stage the Soviet occupation in the North was far better managed and more successful than the chaotic American rule in the South. In the next post we will examine the Soviet’s next step – establishing a Korean-led provisional government in the North.

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(Sources used in posts 1-8 include three volumes of the US State Department document collection Foreign Relations of the United States: Potsdam Volume II, 1945 Volumes II and VI, and 1969 Volume VI; the official document collection from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Correspondence Between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Presidents of the USA and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945, Volume II; The Dmitrii Volkogonov Papers Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington DC; Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University Press, 2006); A document from the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation titled “Notes on the Question of Former Japanese Colonies and Mandated Territories; Chong-sik Lee, Materials on Korean Communism, 1945-1947 (University of Hawaii Press, 1977); Robert Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee, Communism in Korea, Part I, The Movement (University of California Press, 1972); the Ph.D. dissertation by Jeon Hyun Soo, “Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie preobrazovaniia v severnoi Koree v pervye gody posle osvobozhdeniia, 1945-1948” Moscow State University, 1997; the Ph.D. dissertation by Hak S. Paik, “North Korean State Formation, 1945-1950,” Part I, University of Pennsylvania; Suh Dae Sook, The Korean Communist Movement, 1918-1948 (Princeton University Press, 1967); Lim Un, The Founding of a Dynasty in North Korea (Tokyo: Jiyu-sha, 1982); and Fifteen Year History of North Korea (Washington DC, 1965).