The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [91]
Several months before Kim Il Sung arrived, the Soviet Politburo had decided to shift to a more conciliatory economic and political posture toward South Korea that, a May 1986 Politburo document acknowledged, "was becoming a factor [in the] global, militarystrategic balance." Trade with South Korean firms through third countries was encouraged and began to increase rapidly. Exchanges were permitted with South Korea in art, sports, and culture. Nevertheless, in his meeting with Kim in the Kremlin, Gorbachev unexpectedly excoriated China for doing business with South Koreans and declared flatly that "the Soviet Union won't engage with them." Vadim Tkachenko, the Korea expert on the Central Committee, was thunderstruck by Gorbachev's declaration, which contradicted the policy decisions that had been recently made with Gorbachev's participation. When Tkachenko asked higher-ups the next day what policy to follow, he was told to ignore Gorbachev's surprising declaration and "work as before."
When Kim and Gorbachev met, the Soviet leader had been in power nineteen months but, as Gorbachev told me in a 1994 interview, "we ourselves by that time had not yet moved very far in developing and shaping the new Soviet line" in foreign and domestic affairs. Earlier in the month, Gorbachev had met Reagan in a highstakes bargaining match over nuclear weapons at the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik and had returned to Moscow without an agreement. The Soviet leader was coming under fire for the first time from conservatives and some of the military for giving away too much to the West; this criticism may have accounted for his surprising declaration of solidarity in the meeting with Kim. In private, "Gorbachev had an ironical attitude to the claims of the Great Leader and considered him as a burden he had from the past," recalled Anatoly Chernyayev, Gorbachev's national security assistant. As Gorbachev would write in his memoirs, despite his misgivings about Kim's unusual ideology and a personality cult unique in the world, "North Korea was seen as a privileged ally, close to us through the socialist family group and the treaties of mutual friendship and protection. For this reason, we fulfilled virtually all of Pyongyang's wishes for weapons deliveries and economic help."
During the talks with Gorbachev, Kim was able to reconfirm the pledges of economic and military aid that had been offered by Chernenko two years earlier. Specifically, he obtained promises of thirty MiG-29 fighters, supersonic warplanes more advanced than those he had received from Chernenko, plus SU-25 fighters, SAM-5 missiles, and an advanced radar system for early warning and control of ground forces. As the pledges became realities, Soviet military aid to North Korea reached its post-Korean War peak levels, even while Gorbachev was reducing tensions on other fronts and dissolving conflicts with the West.
As a result of Kim 11 Sung's diplomacy and the intensification of the cold war in the early years of the Reagan presidency, cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang flourished in many fields in the mid-1980s. In 1987, the year following Kim's meeting with Gorbachev, the Soviet Union sent forty-five delegations to North Korea, while North Korea sent sixty-two delegations to Moscow. Nonetheless, there is considerable evidence that Kim Il Sung did not trust the new Soviet leader, especially as his liberalizing reforms, glasnost and perestroika, began to take hold and his relations with the capitalist world improved. Word was circulating among Pyongyang's diplomatic elite that Kim considered Gorbachev even more of a revisionist than the dreaded Nikita Khrushchev had been. Pyongyang increasingly feared a turn for the worse in relations with Moscow.
7
THE BATTLE FOR DEMOCRACY
IN SEOUL
or nearly all its existence since the liberation from Japan and the division of the country in 1945, South Korea had been dominated by strong rulers exercising virtually