The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [118]
Looking back on the Korean developments, Gorbachev wrote in his memoirs, "Our interest in South Korea, one of the East Asian dragons which had succeeded in creating an economic miracle, grew in relation to the worsening of the economic situation in the USSR." In an interview for this book, the former Soviet leader also pointed out other factors, noting that he took up relations with Seoul "after a serious change in U.S.-Soviet relations and after the concept of New Thinking began to materialize, after the important process of change got under way in Eastern Europe, and after we abandoned the socalled Brezhnev doctrine."
In Seoul, President Roh was closely watching the signs of a developing Soviet shift, particularly Gorbachev's two policy speeches on Asian affairs in July 1986 in Vladivostok and September 1988 in Krasnoyarsk. As Roh interpreted their cautious phrases, Gorbachev was saying that the Soviet Union wanted cooperation with South Korea, especially economic cooperation. "I took this as an indication that the time was right, the opportunity had come to make ourselves available for the realization of this goal [of establishing relations]," Roh told me in 1993. "I would say I started smelling their real intention."
At the end of 1988, Moscow lifted restrictions on entry to the Soviet Union by South Koreans, giving them for the first time the same treatment as citizens of other capitalist and developing countries. Shortly thereafter, the two nations opened postal, telegraph, telephone, and telex links. In January 1989, Korea's most senior business figure, Chung Ju Yung of Hyundai, Korea's largest conglomerate, visited Moscow and reached a joint agreement on business cooperation with the Soviet Chamber of Commerce. Two weeks later the deputy chairman of the Soviet chamber, Vladimir Golanov, traveled to Seoul and agreed on the exchange of unofficial trade offices in the two capitals. When the South Korean office in Moscow opened, it was immediately mobbed by hundreds of Soviet entrepreneurs and government officers proposing deals.
Many Korean industrialists flocked to Moscow, where they were feted by Soviet officials and presented with requests to undertake a wide variety of enterprises, ranging from the construction of factories to produce consumer goods to help in the conversion of Soviet military industries to civilian uses. Trade between the two nations increased rapidly.
In early 1989 North Korea, in response, put on a spirited campaign to persuade Gorbachev to visit Pyongyang, hoping that this could reverse or at least halt the drift toward Seoul. It was widely known that Gorbachev planned to visit China in the spring, which would provide a convenient occasion for a stopover in Pyongyang. High-ranking North Korean leaders and their ambassador in Moscow used every possible tactic to get Gorbachev to add Pyongyang to his itinerary, including begging, demanding, and threatening. "It was very hard for us to invent new reasons all the time why he couldn't come," said a Gorbachev aide who prepared his trip to Beijing. Gor bachev's national security assistant, Anatoly Chernyayev, said Gorbachev feared his reformist reputation would suffer in Pyongyang because "he realized that once he went [to Pyongyang] and they staged a performance of hugging and kissing, everyone would accept it as a double standard."
Gorbachev's refusal to visit during his trip to Beijing in May 1989 was difficult for Pyongyang to swallow. This was especially so because the resolution of the Sino-Soviet dispute-which the Gorbachev journey symbolized-created a new situation in which neither major communist power would be fearful about pushing Kim Il Sung's regime into the arms of the other. Kim was worried about losing leverage with them both.
In Beijing, Gorbachev spoke of his fast-developing friendship with South Korea in a frank manner that would have been