The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [90]
Besides obtaining military and economic assistance, another top-priority aim of Kim Il Sung's 1984 trip was to persuade the Soviet Union to forswear relations or even contacts with the South. Having failed to unify the country through military means in the Korean War, Kim was passionately opposed to the development of "two Koreas," which implied a long-lasting division of the country. He was particularly allergic to any dealings with or recognition of South Korea by the Soviet Union or China-but his own dealings with the South sapped the force of his argument. If he could deal with Seoul, his allies reasoned, why couldn't they? Moreover, the South's rapid economic growth and growing international stature made contacts with Seoul increasingly attractive to members of the communist bloc. South Korea fought hard to undertake and improve these relationships, step by step. And in zero-sum fashion, North Korea fought hard against them, each step of the way.
For a long time, the Soviet Union rejected all relations with South Korea. But in 1973, following the North-South joint statement and President Park's drive for normal relations with communist countries, the Soviet Union began to permit South Korean citizens to participate in international conferences and sports events in the USSR. Pyongyang immediately protested, but Moscow responded that if it barred South Koreans from legitimate international activities, its own participants could be barred, and "there is even a danger that the Soviet Union would be expelled from important organizations."
Around the same time, North Koreans protested sharply after spotting a Soviet correspondent dining in a fashionable Paris cafe with two South Korean diplomats. The Soviet Foreign Ministry denied any wrongdoing but cabled its overseas posts that "unauthorized, reckless encounters with South Koreans harm our national interests and undermine trust in the integrity of Soviet foreign policy by the DPRK leadership." On another occasion, eagle-eyed North Korean diplomats detected a few South Korean stamps in an international postal exhibition in Moscow, prompting a high-level complaint and hurried removal of the offensive stamps from the display cases.
With South Korea's growing stature and strength in the 1980s, however, a more realistic assessment was beginning to permeate academic and governmental ranks in Moscow. Following Kim Il Sung's 1984 trip, the Korean-born deputy director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, Georgi Kim, said at a closed meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee that the Soviet Union should stop looking at Seoul through Pyongyang's biased eyes. He declared, "It is obvious that South Korea is a successful and respected country which is genuinely interested in being our friend. To respond positively to Seoul's overtures correlates with the U.S.S.R. national interest." This viewpoint was becoming increasingly influential in Moscow.
The slowly emerging Soviet relationship with South Korea was one of the principal issues on Kim Il Sung's mind in October 1986, when he flew to Moscow to meet Mikhail Gorbachev, who had taken power the previous year after the death of Chernenko.* Kim also sought to persuade the new Soviet leader to press the United States to remove its nuclear weapons and troops from South Korea, suggesting that the Seoul regime would be in trouble if its U.S. props were removed. Kim told Gorbachev with considerable exaggeration, "There is a big movement in favor of socialism in the South, and work is underway to create a national front. One third of South Korean parliamentarians support the North. Unlike the recent past when Americans were perceived as liberators and supporters, now many, not to mention the students, speak against the American presence." According to Vadim Medvedev, a senior aide to Gorbachev who participated in the talks, Kim was openly concerned that the interests of North Korea might be ignored