The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [7]
Among the Koreans who took the podium that day was Kim Il Sung, a Pyongyang-born thirty-three-year-old who had attained the rank of captain in the Red Army. Although Kim had sat out the Pacific War in the USSR, he had earlier fought against the Japanese as a commander in Mao Zedong’s army, acquiring brief renown in 1937 for an attack on an imperial outpost just south of the Yalu River.6 For better or worse Kim was the closest thing to a resistance fighter the Koreans had. He is said to have wanted a military career, but the Soviets, finding no more appropriate person to work with, persuaded him to assume leadership of the new state. Yet Kim was by far the least educated of all the leaders in the socialist world. His spotty schooling had ended at seventeen, and although he had spent a year at an infantry officer school in the USSR, it is unlikely that he understood enough Russian to grasp anything theoretical. None of his writings evinces an understanding of Marx.† Equally ignorant of communist ideology were the guerilla comrades who comprised the core of Kim’s power base. Andrei Lankov, a prominent Korea researcher, has written that “with the exception of the Soviet Koreans, no top cadres had undergone training in … Marxism-Leninism.”7 It is no wonder that instead of guiding the cultural scene in ideological matters the party allowed itself to be guided by it.
Kim Il Sung
Contrary to South Korean left-wing myth, which the American historian Bruce Cumings has done much to nurture, almost all intellectuals who moved to Pyongyang after liberation had collaborated with the Japanese to some degree. Several who had done so with special enthusiasm, like the novelist Kim Sa-ryang, had been virtually run out of Seoul. The North was more and not less hospitable to such collaborators. As a history book published in the DPRK in 1981 puts it, “the Great Leader Kim Il Sung refuted the mistaken tendency to doubt or ostracize people just because they … had worked for Japanese institutions in the past.”8 Kim’s own brother, it is worth remembering, had interpreted for Japanese troops in China.9
From one Great Marshal on a white horse to another; Hirohito (above) and Kim Il Sung (below) atop their respective purity symbols. Kim Jong Il, here on his father’s arm, has been filmed and photographed on white horses of his own.
But retaining the emperor’s administrators and technocrats was one thing, and retaining his propagandists another—or so one would have thought. According to Marxism-Leninism, a communist party’s main task lies in infusing the masses with revolutionary consciousness.10 It is remarkable, therefore, that when the North Korean Federation of Literature and Art was established in March 1946, most of the top posts went to well-known veterans of the wartime cultural apparatus, like the playwright Song Yǒng and the choreographer Ch’oi Sǔng-hǔi.11 No writer was excluded from the party or its cultural organizations due to pro-Japanese activities, let alone imprisoned for them (as Yi Kwang-su and Ch’oi Nam-sǒn were in Seoul).
The Workers’ Party had to wait until 1948 to receive its own crash course in Marxism-Leninism and was therefore unable to provide much guidance to writers and artists.12 Reading out a speech crudely plagiarized from Mao, Kim Il Sung told them to study Marxism and “communicate with the masses in words they understand.”13 A Soviet-Korean poet took it upon himself to regale admiring fellow writers with a list of socialist realist classics not yet translated into Korean.14 Other than that, the party simply doled out themes, starting in early 1946 with that of land reform. None of the literati wanted to make the first move. “How was one to write a novel or poem on land reform? … All put their heads to one side, finally concluding it was an impossible task.”15 Only when the party responded angrily to an anthology of love poems in January 1947 did North Korean writers begin propagandizing in earnest.16
Not surprisingly, their