The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [88]
Vadim Tkachenko, a leading Korea expert on the staff of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party from 1962 to 1991, said Moscow was concerned about Pyongyang's often surprising and uncontrollable policies: "North Korea was an independent country which took the kind of actions that were difficult to explain. They would down a plane, capture a ship, join the nonaligned countries, and we would only learn of it from the newspapers." According to Tkachenko, "We didn't know [KCIA director] Lee Hu Rak was in Pyongyang in 1972; the Americans told us. We didn't know about the negotiations when the [U.S. spy ship] Pueblo was seized [in 1968]; the Americans told us. You'd make a mistake to think that Kim Il Sung was Moscow's man."
However much the Russians privately distrusted Kim and his regime, they saw North Korea as a strategic ally in Asia. A Central Committee official put it well at a closed conference in Moscow in 1984: "North Korea, for all the peculiarities of Kim Il Sung, is the most important bastion in the Far East in our struggle against American and Japanese imperialism and Chinese revisionism." For this reason, the Soviet Union continued to fuel North Korea's economy and military machine throughout the cold war, although the nature and extent of the support varied over time.
In early 1984, China's relations with the United States were improving rapidly, with President Reagan planning a trip to Beijing in late April, and Kim was once again worried about the direction of Chinese policy. At this juncture he decided to move toward closer ties with the Kremlin by asking for and receiving an invitation to pay an official visit to meet Konstantin Chemenko, who had become general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party on the death in February of his predecessor, Yuri Andropov.
When the Chinese learned of Kim's planned trip, they hurried to pay court to him. In their Beijing talks with Reagan, Chinese leaders stressed their backing for Kim's three-way-talks proposal, and Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang urged Reagan to withdraw U.S. troops from Korea, saying, "they could return in a day" if hostilities should start again. On May 4, three days after Reagan flew home, Hu traveled to Pyongyang for an eight-day official visit. Two million people turned out to greet him in what North Korea called "the greatest welcome in Korean history." For Kim, Hu's visit was an important part of his delicate balancing act between his two communist sponsors and an impressive prelude to his Moscow trip.
In the Kremlin talks with Chernenko and other officials, Kim's central purpose was to reconnoiter the likely course of Soviet politics, according to Oleg Rakhmanin, longtime Asia expert of the Communist Party Central Committee, who took part in the talks. "Kim understood the position of Chernenko perfectly" as a transitional leader, Rakhmanin recalled. Among those on hand for the talks and related social occasions was Politburo member Mikhail Gorbachev, who received his first personal exposure to this "socialist monarchy" in Asia, as he later referred to North Korea. Kim told his Soviet interlocutors, according to a confidential report on the talks furnished to Eastern European communist officials, that he expected this to be his last foreign journey-that henceforth his son and heir Kim Jong 11, who this time remained behind to run the country, or Prime Minister Kang Song