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By Root 724 0

have been for the regime to re-conceive ethnic virtues so as to include the qualities of strength, discipline and wisdom. Attempting to do just that, the Soviet-Korean poet Cho Ki-ch’ˇon—one of the few intellectuals in Pyongyang who had not received a Japanese schooling—depicted Kim as a brilliant strategist who read Soviet history between battles.24 Han Sǒr-ya and other homegrown writers and artists, however, acclaimed a nurturing, maternal leader, one whose success derived more from his naivety and innocence than anything else. He had mastered Marxism-Leninism with his heart, not his brain, and his best ideas came to him in his sleep.25 It was this latter image that took hold, though the Soviet-Koreans are said to have found it as bizarre and comical as we in the West do today.26

Needless to say, no mention was made of the fact that “the General” had spent the Pacific War years in a rural Soviet town. Instead he and his guerillas were said to have fought the occupying power from a secret base on Mount Paektu. This clever lie put the heroic troops just inside the homeland during the national ordeal while offering a plausible explanation as to why no one could remember seeing them. No less importantly, it linked Kim to Tan’gun’s alleged birthplace.27

North Korea’s personality cult quickly surpassed its Eastern European counterparts in extravagance. By the end of the 1940s the leading university had been named after the leader, his home village of Man’gyǒngdae had become a national shrine, and his statue had gone up in several cities. Unlike Stalin and Mao, Kim tolerated no sub-cults of the second or third in command; there was no one to compare with Beria or Lin Biao. By today’s standards, however, the cult was still rather modest, conceding both the “great” Stalin’s primacy and the Red Army’s decisive role in liberating the peninsula. Nor were Kim’s name and image quite as ubiquitous as they would later become.

Like the blood-based Japanese nationalism of the colonial era, the new Korean nationalism went hand in hand with the slavish imitation of foreign models and an often contemptuous indifference to indigenous traditions. In his speechifying Kim declared servile tribute to the USSR’s “superior” culture.28 Literary critics tossed around Soviet catchwords—“typicality,” and so on—in an effort to cut down their rivals on the cultural scene. University students scrambled to learn Russian, the new linguistic ticket to social status. Meanwhile the Soviet Civil Administration rapidly expanded the fascist command economy of the Pacific War era into a communist one.29

To outside observers, therefore, North Korea gave every appearance of being another Soviet satellite in the making. But a closer look at the official culture would have revealed a different truth. Where East Bloc propagandists dwelled on the dialectical struggle between the old and the new, their North Korean counterparts presented their half of the peninsula as an already classless gemeinschaft, unanimously supportive of Kim Il Sung, under whose protective rule the child race could finally indulge its wholesome instincts. As in imperial Japanese propaganda, the dominant dualism was one of purity versus impurity, cleanliness versus filth.30 Protagonists in official narratives were boyish young men and blushing, virginal girls. One novel of the period broke with convention by depicting the romance between a widower and the former concubine of a landowner. Kim Il Sung himself was quick to complain, saying that the widower should have been hitched up to a virgin instead. “Even an old maid would do,” he grumbled. “Everyone wants pure water.”31

A portion of a mosaic in Pyongyang commemorating the triumphant homecoming.

One searches these early works in vain for a sense of fraternity with the world proletariat. The North Koreans saw no contradiction between regarding the USSR as developmentally superior on the one hand and morally inferior on the other. (The parallel to how South Koreans have always viewed the United States is obvious.) Efforts to keep this contempt