Fyodor Tertitskiy, a young and prolific academic specialist on North Korean affairs working in Seoul, has written a biography of the first North Korean leader that is both highly readable and extensively researched.
Modern Korean history, extending from the dying Choson dynasty of the late nineteenth century to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea (ROK) of today, is in large part a record of Korean conflicts and alliances within the peninsula and with foreign powers: China, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Historians, ideally, would exploit archival materials and publications from the various Koreas (Choson; Imperial Japan’s Korean colony, known as Chosen; the DPRK; and the ROK) and the four foreign powers. Few writers on Korean history, however, can conduct research in the five relevant languages. Tertitskiy can, and does.
The author cites sources from all the major countries contending for power on the Korean Peninsula to argue that Kim Il Sung’s rise to power and his shaping of a family dynasty that has outlasted the Soviet Union and predates the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was accidental and, even, unlikely.
Kim proved adept at winning over key Russian officials.
Tertitskiy begins his book with Kim’s birth outside Pyongyang, his childhood and limited Chinese education (ending in middle school) following his family’s migration in 1919 to Manchuria, and his several years of fighting there under Communist Chinese command against Imperial Japan before his flight in 1940 from Japanese forces across the border into the Soviet Far East. The author then recounts the return by Soviet ship of Kim, by then a captain in the Red Army, to Korea in September 1945 after Imperial Japan’s surrender in the Second World War.
Kim proved adept at winning over key Russian officials above him in the years of his rise in the Soviet Far East, Occupied Korea, and the newborn DPRK, cultivating among others his close friend and partner at the card table, Colonel-General Terentiy Shtykov, Moscow’s first ambassador to Pyongyang.
The author points repeatedly to Kim’s skill at political maneuvering. Failing in the face of Washington’s massive military intervention in support of its client state in the south to re-unite Korea by force, Kim nevertheless succeeded from around the time of the 1953 armistice to purge his rivals. In the following years, he promoted those who had served with him in Manchuria and eliminated top men from the various rival factions: domestic Korean communists, Soviet Koreans who had come to power with Moscow’s occupation of northern Korea between 1945 and 1948, and Korean veterans of the Chinese Civil War. Kim also showed skill in international politics by exploiting the rift between Moscow and Beijing in the Cold War to maneuver between them as an independent actor and win aid from both sides.
Although the balance of power on the peninsula shifted over the decades from Pyongyang to Seoul as the ROK industrial economy came to eclipse that of an impoverished DPRK, Kim Il Sung devised an enduring political system. Observing the collapse of Stalinism in Moscow following the Soviet dictator’s death in 1953 and the turmoil in Beijing with the fall in 1971 of Marshal Lin Biao as the man picked to succeed Mao Zedong, Kim made his son Jong Il his successor as a way to establish a durable foundation for his system after his death.
Kim Il Sung’s legacy endures. Following his death in 1994 and his son’s death in 2011, grandson Kim Jong Un has led the DPRK to this day.
It is indeed an unlikely story. Tertitskiy at various recounts key events that could have ended Kim Il Sung’s rule.
It is indeed an unlikely story. Tertitskiy at various recounts key events that could have ended Kim Il Sung’s rule. Imperial Japan drove Kim from Manchuria. He failed at great cost in the Korean War to re-unite the peninsula. Domestic rivals, then Moscow and Beijing, made moves in the latter half of the 1950s to remove Kim from power. He beat the odds.
The author raises alternate scenarios. Kim’s career would conceivably have taken a different course, Tertitskiy suggests, had Moscow and Washington agreed to unite their zones of occupation or had an assassination attempt against Kim in March 1946 succeeded. He also imagines that, had Mao “stuck to his original idea of not interfering in the Korean War,” Kim’s rule would have ended in Pyongyang’s utter defeat in General MacArthur’s march to the Yalu River in late 1950. I regret that the author omits conjecture on the different course that Korea would have taken had Washington adhered to its earlier exclusion of the Korean Peninsula from its defensive perimeter in Asia. Kim, whose forces had overrun Seoul in a mere three days, would have re-united Korea at minimal cost in lives lost. Perhaps Korea today would resemble Vietnam: united, without nuclear weapons, an increasingly important link in the US industrial supply chain in an era of rising tensions between Beijing and Washington.
In the end, the author argues convincingly that Kim was an “accidental tyrant”. Such is history. One can also ponder the “accidental” rise of Yi Sung Man (better known in the West as Syngman Rhee), the Princeton PhD and independence activist who returned by US military aircraft to Korea in 1945 after an absence of 32 years to rule as the authoritarian first president of South Korea until his American exile in 1960.
Fyodor Tertitskiy has joined the exclusive club of polyglot academics who have conducted comprehensive research to write important works of modern Korean history.
This is an enjoyable book. Apart from the book’s chapters, I read with relish the author’s extensive endnotes. Some point to such institutions as the ROK’s National Institute of Korean History and the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History. Also a pleasure was seeing among the notes such Pyongyang sources as Rodong Sinmun (newspaper of the Workers’ Party of Korea) and the Choson Chungang Nyongam (the Korean Central Encyclopedia); such publishers of the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (better known by its Korean name, Chongryon) as Choson Sinbosa and Hagu Sobang; and various Chinese publications with information on Kim’s early years.
In exploiting sources from the Koreas and the relevant foreign powers, Fyodor Tertitskiy has joined the exclusive club of polyglot academics, whose members include Oberlin College’s Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Tokyo University’s Wada Haruki, who have conducted comprehensive research to write important works of modern Korean history.