The Red Decades: Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919–1945 9780824896089

Citation preview

t he r e d d ­ e c a de s

h awa i ‘i st udie s on ­k or e a

The Red ­Decades Communism as Movement and Culture in Korea, 1919–1945

v l a di mir tik honov

University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu and Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawai‘i

​© 2023 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca First printed, 2023 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tikhonov, Vladimir, author. Title: The red decades : Communism as movement and culture in Korea, 1919–1945 / Vladimir Tikhonov. Other titles: Hawaiʻi studies on Korea. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press : Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawaiʻi, [2023] | Series: Hawaiʻi studies on Korea | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023024868 (print) | LCCN 2023024869 (ebook) | ISBN 9780824893576 (hardback) | ISBN 9780824896119 (paperback) | ISBN 9780824896096 (epub) | ISBN 9780824896102 (kindle edition) | ISBN 9780824896089 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Communism—Korea—History—20th century. | Communism and culture—Korea—History—20th century. | Communist leadership—Korea—History—20th century. | Korea—History—Japanese occupation, 1910-1945. Classification: LCC HX758.A3 T55 2023 (print) | LCC HX758.A3 (ebook) | DDC 335.4309519—dc23/eng/20230613 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024868 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023024869 The Center for Korean Studies was established in 1972 to coordinate and develop resources for the study of Korea at the University of Hawai‘i. Reflecting the diversity of the academic disciplines represented by affiliated members of the university faculty, the Center seeks especially to promote interdisciplinary and intercultural studies. Hawai‘i Studies on Korea, published jointly by the Center and the University of Hawai‘i Press, offers a forum for research in the social sciences and humanities pertaining to Korea and its ­people. Cover art: Chosŏn Ilbo’s article on the trial of the Communist suspects, September 13, 1927. Courtesy of Daily Chosŏn Ilbo. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

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(We Communists are all dead men on leave. Of this I am fully aware. I do not know if you will extend my leave or whether I shall have to join Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. In any case I await your verdict with composure and inner serenity. The events cannot be stopped.) —Eugen Leviné (1883–1919), speech in court (June 2, 1919), three days before his execution

c ont e nts

Acknowledgments ­

ix



Part I The O ­ rganization Chapter 1

Actors of the Korean Communist Movement

33

Chapter 2

Factions and the Meanings of the Factional Struggle

75

Chapter 3

The Communist Programs

102

Part II The Realm of New Knowledge Chapter 4

The Marxist Philosophy of Pak Ch’iu

131

Chapter 5

The Socialist Concepts of Nation and History

157

Chapter 6

Kim Saryang’s Observations of Liberated China, 1945

185

Chapter 7

The Red Capital of Moscow in the Eyes of Korean Travelers

207



viii C ontents

Notes

271

Bibliography

335

Index

383

ac k now l­e d g me nts

I have been researching the Korean Communist movement of the colonial era and its culture for the past six years. During that time, I have accumulated many debts, to both persons and institutions. No words would be sufficient to express my most sincere gratitude to all these who have been assisting me. To begin with the history of the field in question, the  groundbreaking work on Korean Communism published in the 1960s–1980s by such pioneers as the late Robert Scalapino (1919–2011, University of California at Berkeley), Chong-Sik Lee (1931–2021, University of Pennsylvania), Dae-Sook Suh (formerly with University of Hawai‘i, currently retired), and Han Honggu (Sungkonghoe [Sŏnggonghoe] University) was both an inspiration for me and a good starting point. In South Korean academia, I am enormously indebted to Im Kyŏngsŏk (Sungkyunkwan [Sŏnggyun’gwan] University), Chŏn Myŏnghyŏk (Dongguk [Tongguk] University), Sin Chubaek (Hallym [Hallim] University), Chŏn Sangsuk (Kwangwoon [Kwang’un] University), Yi Hyŏnju (Inha University), Pak Chongnin (Hannam University), and Pan Pyŏngnyul (HUFS: Han’guk University of Foreign Studies). Without the fundamentals laid by their tireless research, our research endeavors would have been impossible. In the Soviet and later Russian academia, the pioneer of research on the colonial-age Communism was the late Fanya Isaakovna Shabshina (1906–1998, Institute of Oriental Studies, Soviet Academy of Science), a close personal friend of one of the Korean Communist Party’s original founders, Pak Hŏnyŏng (1900–1956), and a precious witness to Korea’s history before and immediately after the 1945 Liberation. I never met Fanya Isaakovna, but I am deeply indebted to her works—the first-ever writing to tap the Comintern’s (1919–1943) rich archives, currently ix

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located in the RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History), to which I owe my own debt as well. In this connection, I have to mention, with deep gratitude, the kindness of Zhanna Grigorievna Son (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), who sent me several volumes of edited documents on Korean cadres of the Comintern murdered during Stalin’s notorious Great Purges of 1937–1938. Dr.  Tatiana Mikhailovna Simbirtseva (formerly with Russian State University of Humanities, currently retired) did me a great favor as well, sending me several volumes of published Comintern documents related to Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese Communist parties. And in 2020, I was enormously indebted to Yun Sangwŏn (Jeonbuk [Chŏnbuk] University), who provided me with a number of unpublished Comintern documents on such Communist personalities as Yang Myŏng (1902–?), Pak Mun’gyu (1906–?), Kang Chin (1905–1966), and a number of others, together with hundreds of scanned copies of rare 1930s Korean publications from Moscow and Khabarovsk. All these documents, together with Japanese police documents accessible now via the National ­ ​­ ​ ­ ​ ­ ​ were essential for Institute of Korean History (http://db.history.go.kr/), writing this book. Professor Yun was even kind enough to read an early version of this book and comment on it; his comments were invaluable for improving the factual accuracy of the text as long as the minutiae of historical events were concerned. Finding suitable illustrations for this book was a long saga, and I incurred a number of debts while searching for appropriate photographs and other images. I am indebted to many researchers at the National Institute of Korean History (especially Dr.  O Hyeyŏng), as well as the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs, Independence Hall of Korea, Saga University (Japan), and National Museum of Korean Contemporary History. I would have never been able to obtain high-resolution files of colonial-age police surveillance cards, prison sentences, and photos of Korean independence fighters and progressive literary figures without their kind assistance and cooperation. Alongside the researchers, curators, and librarians at the governmental institutions, a number of South Korean publishers—including Seoul-based Kip’ŭn Saem and Kyŏng’in Munhwasa—helped me to secure images or clarify the situation with image copyrights. Thankfully, Tong’a Ilbo and Chosŏn Ilbo, the two major South Korean newspapers with their history going back to the colonial



Acknowl­edgments

xi

days, agreed to supply me with high-resolution copies of the relevant articles on Korean Communism, which were used to illustrate this book. I deeply appreciate the help provided by the SSK research team Postcapitalism and the Innovation of Marxism (see below on its sponsorship of my research) in the process of purchasing the images from these two newspapers, and would like to particularly thank Koh Minzy [Ko Minji], the research assistant of the team, who did most of the practical work. I am also deeply grateful to these researchers and private individuals, inside and outside of South Korea, who granted me the right to use these images. Yun Kyŏngnam (grandniece of Yun Ch’iho, a major colonialperiod social figure), Im Kyŏngsŏk, Yun Taesŏk (Seoul National University), and Han Sang’ŏn (Hanyang University) are among the many people to whom I am specially obliged in this connection. Various grants and sponsorships made this work possible. The most essential one was the grant from the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF2021S1A3A2A02096299) given to the SSK research team Postcapitalism and the Innovation of Marxism (Gyeongsang [Kyŏngsang] National University, Republic of Korea), membership of which contributed enormously to my work. I am deeply grateful to our enthusiastic, passionate, and always supportive leader, Jeong Seongjin [Chŏng Sŏngjin], to whom I owe many of the insights on which my approach to my topic is based. Discussions and dialogues with other members of the research team were also a great inspiration. Together with this grant, my department, the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University, provided me with precious support for my research travels to Seoul and Moscow and for the purchase of the hundreds of books I used and cited in the current volume. Without the generous departmental sponsorship and support, this book would have never been written. Books are born in discussions and opinion exchanges, in the process of intellectual cross-fertilization, and this one is no exception. I owe a special debt to Lim Kyounghwa ([Im Kyŏnghwa], Chung-Ang [Chung’ang] University), who contributed in the process of writing the article that, in revised and augmented form, laid the foundation for Chapter 3 of this book (see below). Discussions with Owen Miller (SOAS, London) on the issues related to the “state capitalist” theorizing on the “really existing Socialism” were important for both the Introduction and the Conclusion

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of this book. Kim Kyŏng’il’s (formerly with the Academy of Korean Studies, currently retired) comments were essential for the revisions I did on the Postscript. The research by Kwak Hyŏngdŏk (Myongji [Myŏngji] University) and Kim Chaeyong (Wonkwang [Wŏn’gwang] University) shaped my understanding of Kim Saryang (1914–1950), the main protagonist of Chapter  6. Chapter  5 benefitted greatly from the dissertational work by Cho Hyŏngnyŏl (Dong-A [Tong’a] University) and the discussions with him on the issues of 1930s Marxist historiography in Korea. It was the research by Wi Sangbok (formerly with Chonnam [Chŏnnam] National University, currently retired) that first turned my attention to Pak Ch’iu (1909–1949), whose Marxist philosophy I discuss in Chapter  4. And the translations of the colonial-age “proletarian” prose by Yi Sanggyŏng (KAIST), Jin-Kyung Lee (UCSD), Theodore Hughes (Columbia University), and others were of tremendous importance for the general understanding of the zeitgeist of the period and the movement I have been writing about. Some of the chapters in this book are based on my oral presentations, which were then worked into articles. I am deeply grateful to Harvard’s Korea Institute and personally to Carter Eckert and Kim Sun Joo for organizing there my presentation, out of which Chapter 4 eventually grew. Chapter 6 is an outgrowth of my presentation for the AKSE (Association for Korean Studies in Europe) conference in Praha in 2017. I owe a debt of gratitude both to the conference’s organizers and my copanelists, including Kwak Hyŏngdŏk, Kim Chaeyong, and Nayoung Aimee Kwon (Duke University). And I am enormously indebted to Robert Winstanley-Chesters (University of Edinburgh), who was kind enough to edit my manuscript, correcting numerous grammatical errors and offering very helpful advice. The majority of the chapters in this book have been previously published, and they are republished here in a slightly augmented and rewritten form. The Introduction, in which I attempt to place the Korean socialist experiences of the 1920s–1930s into the contemporary international context, is a significantly rewritten version of my article “Worldwide ‘Red Age’ and Colonial-Era Korea: An Attempt at Meta-historical ­ ” published in Marŭk’ŭsŭchuŭi Yŏn’gu (17.2, 2020). Chapter 1, an Analysis, attempt at a sociological analysis of the 1920s–1930s Communist movement as a milieu, with its own habituses, unwritten rules, and accepted



Acknowl­edgments

xiii

hierarchies, is a previously unpublished work. Chapter 2, dealing with both negative and some counterintuitively positive effects of the factional strife among Korea’s Communists, is an amended version of my paper “The Issue of Factionalism in the Korean Communist Movement of the 1920s－Early 1930s,” published in Marŭk’ŭsŭchuŭi Yŏn’gu (15.2, 2018). Chapter 3, a chronologically arranged analysis of the Korean Communist programs, is based on the article coauthored with Lim Kyounghwa: “Communist Visions for Korea’s Future: The 1920–30s” (Review of Korean Studies 20.1, 2017). I would like to use this opportunity to deeply thank Professor Lim for her kind permission to republish this article here. In Part 2, all the chapters are rewritten versions of my previously published work. Chapter  4, an intellectual biography of a Marxist philosopher, Pak Ch’iu, is an amended version of my article “The Birth of Korean Academic Marxism: Pak Ch’iu (1909–1949) and his Philosophical Critique of Right-Wing Totalitarianism” (Oriens Extremus 57–58, 2020). Chapter 5, devoted to the pungent antinationalist critique by colonial-era Marxists, draws heavily on my article “Demystifying the Nation: The Communist Concept of Ethno-Nation in 1920s-1930s Korea” (Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 28, 2018). Chapter 6, on Kim Saryang’s travels through the Communist-controlled areas of China in 1945, is an augmented version of “Kim Saryang’s Ten Thousand Li of a Dull-Witted Horse: Remembering the Anti-Colonial ­ Struggle” (European Journal of Korean Studies 17.2, 2018). Chapter 7, dealing with mostly pre-1945 and partly past-1945 Moscow travels by Korean intellectuals, is a slightly modified version of “Red Capital, Colonial Eyes: Moscow as Seen by Korean Intellectuals in the 1920s–1930s” ­ (Korea Journal 57.3, 2017). Finally, the Postscript is based on my article “A Socialist Century? Socialism as the Main Counter-Hegemonic Ideol­ ogy of Contemporary Korea” (Korea Journal 60.3, 2020). I would like to express my deep appreciation to the editors of Marŭk’ŭsŭchuŭi Yŏn’gu, ­ ­European JourOriens Extremus, (sadly now defunct) Cross-Currents, ­ nal of Korean Studies, and Korea Journal for kindly permitting me to republish these writings here in revised form. The Conclusion to the book is an original, previously unpublished work. While of enormous importance for a holistic understanding of Korea’s tumultuous twentieth century, Korean Communist history is hardly among the trendiest subjects on today’s academic publishing

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market in the English-speaking parts of the world. In fact, finding a university press willing to publish a book on such a subject was far from easy, especially under the current crisis-ridden conditions of the scholarly publications market. It makes even bigger my debt to the colleagues at the University of Hawai‘i who thankfully accepted this book for publication. I am deeply indebted to Cheehyung Harrison Kim, who currently serves as chair of the Publication Committee of University of Hawai‘i’s Center for Korean Studies, and whose enthusiasm, kindness, and skillful editorship were crucial in the process through which this book was born. I would like also to thank the UHP director, Joel Cosseboom, who offered me a book contract, and all the staff members of the UHP who contributed to having this book edited and printed. In addition, I owe tremendously much to the two anonymous peer reviewers, whose criticisms, suggestions, and advice contributed vitally to improving the book manuscript. The biggest debt I owe is, however, to my family, who kindly tolerated the constant absences and foreign travels of a husband and father. I am grateful to my wife, Marina Myong Jong Baek, who has been doing much more than her rightful share of the house labor, and to my children, Yuri and Sarah. It was my privilege to watch them grow, and I deeply appreciate their patience and tolerance with their absent, busy, and overworked father. And last but not least, my ultimate debt is to all the colonial-era socialists of Korea, who sacrificed their labor, their blood, their health, and in some cases their lives for what they saw as the emancipation of not only Korea but also the whole of humanity. Even if their visions of a brighter tomorrow were marked by naiveté and wishful thinking, their sacrifices as well as the sheer audacity of their universalist thinking—the globality of their aspirations—changed Korea once and forever. We all owe a debt of gratitude to the heroes of Korean Communist resistance, so many of whom faced in the end repression and death. They were victimized not only in the hands of Japanese colonial police but also by Soviet as well as South and North Korean regimes (and, to a lesser degree, by the US occupation forces in South Korea in 1945–1948 and the Chinese Communist forces in Yan’an and Manchuria). To eternalize their memory and to help my contemporaries understand more deeply the world-historic significance of their undertakings and sacrifices are the main ambitions of this book.

t he r e d d ­ e c a de s

Introduction The Red Age Worldwide and Colonial Korea, 1919 to Late 1930s

w h at is s o c ial ism ? “Socialism” is a word with many meanings. In the contemporary parlance, it may refer to any attempt to socialize economy and make societies more equalitarian via redistributive mechanisms. In her recent brilliant treatment of the colonial-era Korean leftist literature, Sunyoung Park defined socialism as “any political theory that joins a critique of modern capitalist society to an egalitarian and communitarian vision.”1 This definition is inclusive enough to encompass diverse and often highly dissimilar versions of socialist theory and practice. Modest welfarism is a part of the semantical field of the term, just like the radical attempts to restructure the society—often in decisively violent ways—on the other edge of the spectrum. Known in English since the early nineteenth century, the word was quite literally translated into Japanese as shakaishugi (“society-ism”). The first usages of this term are recorded in the 1870s and 1880s. As early as in 1881, Kozaki Hiromichi (1856–1938), one of the most prominent early Protestant ministers in Meiji Japan, published an article dealing with Marxian teachings and used terms like “socialist party” (shakaitō) and “socialism” there.2 Very soon, both the term and general idea about what socialism was supposed to be found their way to Korea as well. Yi Horyong, a contemporary South Korean anarchism researcher, made painstaking efforts to trace how the term “socialism” eventually found its place in the conceptual paradigm of Korean modernity. As he found out, the French 1

2 Introdu c ti on

and German socialists (sahoedang, Korean rendering of Japanese shakaitō), alongside Russia’s nihilists (hǒmudang, the Korean version of ­Japanese kyomutō), were first mentioned by Korea’s earliest modern newspaper, Hansǒng Sunbo, in 1883–1884. The articles in question, mostly citing Japanese and Chinese sources, mentioned both European socialists’ quest for economic and social equality and often violent governmental suppression they were exposed to.3 Furthermore, similarly to China in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Kōtoku Shūsui’s (1871–1911) writings on socialism, including his famous 1902 essay collection, Chōkōzetsu (Long Discourses), made their impact onto these few Korean intellectuals who could access them in Japanese.4 However, before Korea’s 1910 colonization by Japan and in the first colonial years, this impact was still close to negligible. The First World War, the very symbol of the capitalist crisis of the first half of the twentieth century, was the game changer. After 1914, we find the first Korean intellectuals who start to identify different varieties of socialism as a solution to the painfully visible problems of the global capitalist system. Some of the Korean intellectuals who later earned fame for their socialist radicalism, both of political and a more artistic kind, already came into contact with the world of socialist thought during the First World War. For example, Hwang Sŏg’u (1895– 1959), later known as a symbolist poet in whose works natural tropes often stood for the creative potential of the exploited and downtrodden, was arrested by Japanese police as early as in 1916 when he, then a Waseda University student, attempted to distribute in Korea a journal he published in Tokyo, some articles of which were devoted to socialist ideas.5 Similarly to China’s case—the first Chinese anarchist organizations dated back to 1906–1907 and predated the introduction of Marxism by more than a decade—the first known Korean socialists of the mid1910s were anarchist converts among Tokyo-based students.6 One of them was Na Kyŏngsŏk (1890–1959), later known as a radical polemist and the first person to introduce Einstein’s relativity theory to Korea in 1922.7 While in the beginning both anarchism and Marxian socialism were seen as two interrelated varieties of a similar ideological current, they became more divorced from each other after the first Communist groups coalesced around 1921 (see Chapter 1). Still, a degree of interpenetration

Introduction

3

between Communist and anarchist thought was relatively high until circa 1922. Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), a Russian-born anarchist thinker who exerted the strongest influence on the whole East Asian anarchist milieu of the early twentieth century, remained for some time an inspiration for a number of Communist converts—some of whom were indeed originally anarchists and only gradually internalized the tenets of dialectical and historical materialism à la Marx.8 The first translations of Yamakawa Hitoshi’s (1880–1958) and Kawakami Hajime’s (1879–1946) popularized introductions to Marxism appeared in Korean only in the last half of 1922, accelerating the great divide between Marxian socialism and anarchism, mostly complete by late 1922 or early 1923.9 A 1923 article on Japanese intellectual life by Hwang Sŏg’u deals with Communism and anarchism as two mutually different, competing intellectual trends; the former, according to Hwang, stood significantly stronger.10 The exploration of Korean anarchist history is not the objective of this book. I chose to focus on the Marxian Communist thought and culture, primarily on account of them being greatly under-researched in the Anglophone academia. These who are interested in Korean anarchist tradition should turn to the superb monographic works and articles on the issue published recently, as interest in Korean anarchism has been steadily growing.11 It is important to mention that in certain respects, anarchists resembled their Communist rivals. Korean anarchism too represented a cross-class alliance of sorts (see Chapter 1 on the use of this concept), with better educated, multilingual leaders (often scions of privileged families) presiding over organizations with significant grassroots participation, both in Korea proper and in the Korean communities on Chinese territory and in Japan.12 Some of the militant trade unions, organizing both migrant Korean workers in Japan and Korea’s domestic laborers, were anarchist-led.13 Exiled Korean anarchists in China, not unlike Communist émigrés, networked widely with their Chinese comrades and often built joint organizations with them. It was only logical since, similarly to Communists, they wanted to build an alternative modern society rather than simply an independent Korean nation-state, and understood their project as universally valid.14 Anarchists’ aversion towards any centralized authority, prominently including its Soviet variety, was the biggest difference between the two and the main background for the heated rivalry between these

4 Introdu c ti on

two socialist tendencies—the rivalry which sometimes could result in violent physical confrontations.15 In Manchuria, where anarchists tended to ally themselves with nationalists (paralleling the incorporation of some Chinese anarchist groups and personalities into nationalist Guomin­ Communists dang in the mid- and late 1920s), the confrontation vis-à-vis could take especially violent forms in the prevalent atmosphere of general lawlessness.16 Kim Chwajin (1889–1930), a nationalist military leader (of aristocratic yangban background) known for his exploits in the armed anti-Japanese struggle, tilted towards anarchism in the late 1920s and was eventually assassinated by a young Communist militant.17 Their common roots and many other commonalities notwithstanding, Communists and anarchists were thoroughly inimical to each other since the mid-1920s, divided, among many other things, by blood already shed in the course of intense confrontation. Anarchists’ visceral anti-Communism actually helped some of the movement’s survivors to adjust and remain rather prominent in virulently anti-Communist South Korean mainstream society after the 1950–1953 Korean War—despite their advocacy of nonauthoritarian, autonomous forms of modernization so contrasting with police state regimes in South Korea under its pre-1990s dictatorial presidents.18 As was noted earlier, some anarchists eventually converted into Marxian socialism in the early 1920s. Korea’s more moderate socialists, in their turn, were mostly former Communists who decided at some point that Koreans had to first concentrate on creating a viable democratic state able and willing to proceed with social reforms. Yŏ Unhyǒng (1886–1947; see more on him below and in Chapter 1), initially one of the leaders in the Shanghai-based Korean Communist milieu and the first translator of the Communist Manifesto into Korean, came to espouse much more moderate beliefs later in the 1930s. By that point, it was a “progressive” national statehood he chose to focus on.19 While this agenda would appear broadly social democratic to us today, the term was eschewed in the Korean socialist milieus of the interwar era, partly on account of the Comintern’s hostility towards social democracy and partly due to the established association between social democracy and parliamentarism, absent in Japan’s Korean colony. To the colony’s antiimperialist radicals of any sort, the social democrats of Europe or Japan, with their visible participation in imperial parliaments and governments

Introduction

5

that did not hurry up to hasten the liberation of the colonies, looked distant and hostile. For example, Kim Myŏngsik (1891–1943), one of Korea’s pioneering Marxian socialists (see more on him in Chapter  1), fiercely criticized Britain’s Labour government of 1929–1931 for its allegedly “pro-capitalist” spending cuts, for its supposed “deception of Gandhi” and its reluctance to initiate the dismantling of the British Empire, and for its alleged anti-Soviet policies. Yet another point of his critique was the Labour government’s harsh attitude towards defeated Germany.20 That even Kim, who did not participate in the Communist Party reestablishment movement of the early 1930s (on this movement and its implications, see the Conclusion), was so scathingly critical about British Labourism (and its continental cousins as well) was hardly surprising. Korean socialism, after all, was born out of the popular rebellion’s crucible. It was the pan-national pro-independence demonstrations on March 1, 1919, and throughout that month that catalyzed the birth of socialism in Korea.

1919 : a ye ar o f g lo b a l r ebel l io n ­

­

­

6 Introdu c ti on

the established patterns of collaboration with the colonizers. The “people,” the quintessential actor of mass politics, were born, and “nation” and “nationalism” were transformed from elements of intellectual discourse into the lived reality of millions.23 Why did this happen in 1919? At that moment, the development of internal events overlapped with a gigantic global flow. Korea, a colonial backwater of the dynamically developing Japanese Empire, was, its relative obscurity notwithstanding, already a part of the globally synchronized events on the worldwide scene. Domestically, discontent had been accumulating since the colonization of Korea by Japan in 1910. It brought together other wise rather heterogeneous elements, a diverse array of social and religious groups. While the peasants had all the reasons to dislike the relative worsening of land tenancy conditions, even some landlords and richer merchants, interested in diversifying into industrial investments, were appalled by colonial restrictions on local commercial initiative.24 Fledgling urban middle classes were desperate over the tangible lack of progressive modern developments, Protestant Christians resented the restrictions on religious teaching at the private missionary schools, and the adepts of native Ch’ŏndogyo faith wanted their denomination to be recognized as a proper religion (something that the colonial authorities had been persistently refusing so far).25 In addition, everybody classified as “Korean” by the colonial administration had good grounds to resent the discrimination such a classification implied. Colonial discrimination was superbly instrumental in making a “people” into a selfconscious subject of history.26 On the other hand, globally 1919 was a year of global rebellion. It was even more so than 1968, when “rebellions” in the centers of the capitalist world-system symbolically attacked the logic of for-profit production, capital accumulation, and mass consumption in the public space but hardly threatened the existence of the capitalist system in earnest.27 In 1919, after the sacrifices of the Great War and subsequent Spanish flu pandemic, and amid the postwar economic depression, there was indeed a tangible, palpable feeling that the whole system was just a step away from final implosion. It imploded in Russia, the war-ravaged “weakest link” (Lenin) of world capitalism’s global chain, a country with great power ambitions and a peripheral, largely dependent, and underdeveloped industrial economy. The waves of radicalization, however, were

Introduction

7

engulfing even some core regions of the capitalist world-system in hitherto unprecedented ways. In defeated Germany—the state that had been emerging as the industrial powerhouse of Europe before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914—Saxony, Bremen, and, famously, Bavaria (Munich) saw attempts to create socialist (or workers’ councils-ruled) republics. Even after the radical outbreaks of 1918 and 1919 were crushed, workers’ uprisings continued in the most industrially developed parts of Germany, such as in the Ruhr region and Hamburg (1923).28 The radical wave in Germany was strong enough to make the German Communist Party the largest in 1920s Europe, with some degree of independence from increasingly Stalinist Soviet Union until the very end of the 1920s, and with vastly different organizational culture.29 Similar events were simultaneously taking place on Europe’s still predominantly agricultural periphery, from Limerick in Ireland to Budapest in Hungary.30 Both places witnessed attempts to establish Soviet republics, and the latter ended in large-scale violence that subsequently defined much of Hungary’s pre–Second World War history.31 Concurrently, hitherto unprecedented simultaneous turbulence appeared throughout the colonial and semi-colonial peripheries of the European ­ ­ ­ oikumene. The year 1919 saw revolutionary events shattering capitalist the British dominance in Egypt, challenging British colonial rule in India, and awakening popular anti-imperialist nationalism in China (e.g., the May 4 movement).32 It was the latter wave of postwar anticolonial risings that the seminal events of March 1919 in Korea may be justifiably considered a part of.33

t h e 1919 – 1923 “ r ed w av e”: t h e m ain c h ar ac t er ist ics If we attempt to go beyond the conventional and insufficiently analytical, stereotypical definitions of “socialist/communist risings” or “anticolonial struggle,” what were the main essential features of the post–First World War global Red Wave? First, the struggles were mostly led by coalitions of radical intelligentsia with what one can term the most advanced layers of the broader plebeian “masses.” For the societies with at least a rudimentary level of industrialization it usually meant urban, literate, organized,

8 Introdu c ti on

and not necessarily abjectly poor skilled factory workers. Typically for Europe’s predominantly agrarian periphery—the category into which Russia too could be included—the 1919 Hungarian Revolution had its center in Budapest’s giant factories: 50  percent of whatever industry Hungary had was concentrated there, and 37.7 percent of the total workforce was to be found in the large plants with more than five hundred workers. By contrast, the countryside remained mostly either neutral or even hostile towards the revolutionary events.34 In Austria, the relative radicalism of industrial “Red Vienna,” governed by a social democratic city council, contrasted with the staunch conservatism of much of the countryside.35 In Korea’s case, the most active participants in March 1919 events on the ground were Protestant layfolk. They were predominantly literate, well organized, and often better aware about the international events. Of the 7,835 Koreans detained by the Japanese police as major “sedition” suspects during the turbulent events of March through June 1919, 22  percent were Protestants, although at that point, Protestant believers constituted only about 1.3 percent of Korea’s population.36 Second, the events were supposed to herald both a shift of the elites in control and a shift in the mode of the industrial economy’s organization. “Proletarian dictatorship” and other slogans of similar kind in postwar Europe usually signified the shift of power from the entrenched, aristocratic, or/and patrician upper-middle class elites to the radical intellectuals as well as the cadres of labor militants, often with experience of political party or union organizational work. While the “proletariat” was hardly in a position to assume the “hegemonic” position that the radicals tended to assign to it, the relative “plebeization” of political power undoubtedly had a democratizing effect. It brought in its wake a huge wave of upward social mobility in such societies as postrevolutionary Russia, where the radicals managed to cling to power. ­

Introduction

9

nonalienated society of associated producers would emerge overnight after a successful revolution. On the eve of the October 1917 revolution, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), its leader, postulated that a special period of “proletarian dictatorship”—mentioned above—would be needed ­after a successful revolution and before the state per se would completely wither away, morphing into a truly socialist—or communist—association of free producers. The dictatorship was primarily needed to “smash” the former ruling classes and prepare the ground for a qualitatively new, fully egalitarian society.38 While this stated final aim could look desirable also to anarchists in Korea and elsewhere, “proletarian dictatorship” was what decisively divorced them from Leninism. Of course, this working scheme had to be constantly corrected on the way, following the contingencies of the revolutionary process. Having peaked in 1919, the revolutionary wave in Europe entered its downward phase, and Lenin’s own Soviet Russia had to switch to the “New Economic Policy” of de facto state-controlled capitalism in 1921. Lenin himself, always a realist, termed this new society “state capitalism.” However, he saw it as a transitional stage on the way towards the eventual socialist, or communist, goals.39 Even at the supposed transitional stage, the realm of the political was to take precedence over the realm of the economical. The revolutionaries aspired to take over much of the industrial economy and finance. This move looked natural and logical given the experience of state control over the economies of First World War belligerents in 1914–1918 (on the German case of wartime economic mobilization, for example, see Feldman 1976; see direct references to the German wartime experiences in Lenin 1965 [1921]). As a politically controlled, bureaucratically administrated economy was already a lived experience, the plebeian radicals wanted the shift to be completed, with ownership rights taken away from the industrialists despised for their recent war profiteering, labor de-commodified, and surplus value redistributed. The redistribution was supposed to happen in ways that would enable the factory “hands” to achieve the levels of cultural capital or health previously associated mostly with middle-class professionals. If implemented following the lines of the Russian revolution, the measures desired by the radicals of the Red Wave would have amounted to a major “class uplift” for previously underprivileged groups. They would also mean an essential recalibration of the industrial economy from competitive profit maximization

10 Introdu c ti on

to fulfillment of the political objectives dictated by the mass movement from below.40 In short, mass politics were to triumph over markets. On the colonized periphery, in Korea and elsewhere, the recovery of national sovereignty was the main demand. At the same time, it is important to remember that, unlike many independence movement groups of the 1910s that aimed for the restoration of the Korean monarchy (for example, the China-based New Korean Revolutionary League [Sinhan Hyŏngmyŏngdan], established in 1915; see Kang, Kim, and Chŏng 2008, 44–59), the Shanghai Provisional Government, organized in the wake of the March 1 movement in exile, proclaimed Korea a democratic republic.41 On the world-systemic periphery too, democratization was one of the most central demands of the Red Wave. Third, and very important, was the combined, complex nature of the democratization demands presented by the post–First World War Red Wave. Economic democratization, with mass-based politics conquering the corridors of power and taking over industrial production, was central. However, it was only a part of a huge stream of emancipatory demands from below. Women, who took a very active part in overthrowing Tsarist authorities in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in February 1917, were an object of special attention for the Bolshevik propagandists even before the October 1917 revolution and were given voting rights by the Bolshevik government.42 In the March 1919 events in Korea, women played a very visible part, breaking away from centuries-old patriarchal norms.43 In Seoul (Kyŏngsŏng), not only several hundred girl students ­ but also around eight hundred female entertainers (kisaeng)—traditionally treated as little more than eroticized playthings of upper-class males— went out demonstrating.44 The downtrodden, the minorities of all sorts were empowered, and not only ethnic minorities. In March 1919 Korea, the butchers (paekchǒng), previously a hereditary low-status group and still discriminated even under the supposedly “modernizing” colonial rule, were actively participating in the demonstrations and launched a liberation movement of their own soon thereafter.45 Conservative sexual norms were shaken to the ground, as the Bolsheviks decriminalized homosexuality and even allowed some of the first-ever gay marriages in Europe’s modern history.46 Early Soviet schools not only prohibited all forms of physical punishment but also introduced elements of self-rule for the pupils and

Introduction

11

eschewed evaluation through grades as inherently authoritarian and fostering competition instead of collaboration.47 Early Soviet education— coeducation of both genders, attempts at organizing schoolchildren’s self-rule, promotion of labor education, and attention paid to the issue of molding an altruistic personality—was a hot topic in 1920s Korean newspapers.48 The Soviet educational theories and practices, as well as the work done by the European theorists of emancipatory Communist education, such as Edwin Hoernle (1883–1952), constituted an important inspiration for the activists of proletarian youth culture in 1920s– 1930s Japan.49 They, in turn, influenced radical anti-authoritarian authors in Korea, typified by such classics of children’s literature as Yi Chuhong (1906–1987) and Yi Tonggyu (1911–1952).50 One can say that, in a global historical context, the Red Wave signaled the advent of the second wave of democratization—the first wave being represented by the democratic revolutions and liberal movements in late eighteenth–early nineteenthcentury Europe and North America.

t h e “ r e d ag e ,” 1923 t o th e l at e 1930s: t h e e s s e nt ial t r ait s By around 1923–1924—when groups of radicals, mostly former nationalists, were attempting to prepare what was necessary for establishing a proper underground Communist Party in Korea—the peak of worldwide rage was decidedly over. On the surface, global capitalism and the global inter-state system had stabilized, and the Red Wave transformed itself into the legendary Roaring Twenties. In Germany, the hoped-for potential “locomotive” of the European revolution and the country with the largest Communist Party in Europe, both ultra-right-wing putsch and Communist uprising attempts failed in 1923, ushering the Weimar Republic into a short period of relative calm afterwards.51 In India, the world’s most populous colony, the Non-cooperation Movement was suspended in 1922 following violent clashes (an “incident”) in Chauri Chaura: the anticolonial onslaught of the early 1920s was now over.52 China, the largest formally independent state of the world periphery, saw its nascent industrial economy booming amid political decentralization (“warlordism”). Industrial growth was helped both by wartime demands

12 Introdu c ti on

in 1914–1918 and by boycotts of foreign goods following the antiimperialist upsurge of 1919 (the aforementioned May 4 movement).53 Already by 1919, China had an estimated one-and-a-half-million industrial workers whose radicalism throughout the 1920s provided inspiration to neighboring Korea’s radicals.54 There was a feeling by the 1920s that the world managed to return to a semblance of pre-1914 prosperity. Indeed, in the core of the world system a noticeable progress was palpable. By 1929 France, for example, boasted per capita income a fifth higher than in 1914, and around a 50 percent increase in exports compared to the last prewar year.55 The stability, however, was highly deceptive. Neither the 1919 Versailles Peace nor postwar policies of major states did anything to solve the root causes of the 1919–1923 Red Wave. Except for a few cases, mostly in Europe (Iceland in 1918, Ireland in 1922, and a number of former possessions of Russia and the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire), colonies mostly remained colonies. Korea, for example, was allowed some space for economic and cultural development as well as social organization (the colonial administration’s “cultural policy”), but nothing more than that.56 The inter-state system remained strictly hierarchical even outside of the colonized parts of the world. The states on the losing side of the First World War, principally Germany, suffered from the burden of reparations, while China and some other peripheral states were still struggling for the removal of humiliating “unequal treaties.”57 Universal suffrage including even the most destitute categories of the workers (but still excluding women in many countries, notably France and Japan) was increasingly becoming an accepted international norm. However, even if the workers gained political citizenship in democratic or semi-democratic states, their social citizenship remained yet an elusive dream. Social housing programs in postwar Europe (“council houses” in Great Britain and similar programs in Germany or the Austrian capital of Vienna, then nicknamed Red Vienna) and unemployment insurance were making their first steps. Welfare-state development, however, was still at a rudimentary stage even in the core areas of the world system, not to mention the periphery or colonies, including Korea. With no significant steps towards any essential amelioration of national and social tensions, it was hardly possible to expect that the 1919–1923 Red Wave would disappear into thin air. Indeed, it rather transmogrified into a “Red Age,” which

Introduction

13

encompasses much of the interbellum period, all the way until the eruption of the new general war between 1937 and 1939. It was this Red Age that provided the backdrop for Korea’s socialist movement of the 1920s– 1930s and its cultural expressions, the topic of the present book. ­

Second, the Red Age was the golden age of Leninist “new type” parties. They were centralized organizations, membership of which implied not simply payment of duties, voting, and agreeing with the party’s platform, but, primarily, activism, even at possible risk of one’s own life. Indeed, given the basic impossibility of any legal anticolonial movement in colonial-era Korea, an underground Leninist party or an underground group aiming at building such a party were perhaps the best-suited vehicles for the anti-establishment radicalism on the Korean Peninsula in

14 Introdu c ti on

the 1920s–1930s. Just as the Comintern was hardly a “global monolith,” as imagined by some of its supporters and its antagonists, Leninist parties did not have to be dictatorial conspiracies of the type so often denounced in Cold War–era anti-Communist scholarship. As Chapters 2 and 3 will demonstrate, Korean Communism developed a vibrant culture of intra-party discussion and self-reflection: a critical attitude towards one’s own work and that of the others was as demanded from Korean Communists as the preparedness to sacrifice oneself for the common cause. The Communist Party, even an underground one, was an essentially public organization, with detailed and publicly announced programmatic documents, as well as a complex set of organizational rules and by-rules for internal use. At the same time, the culture of debates, self-reflection, and criticism was supposed, in the end, to strengthen cohesion and discipline rather than to weaken it. Intellectually, discipline was based on shared loyalty to the Comintern’s ideology and its instructions. The latter could be, and were, interpreted in different ways, but they were not supposed to be openly opposed. Organizationally, both the underground Korean party when it existed as a Comintern affiliate (1925 to 1928) and the Communist groups aiming at (re-)building the party were vertically structured, with internationally connected, multilingual, and better-educated activists of middle- or upper-class backgrounds on the top and “workers and peasants” supposed to be led and enlightened by their betters in the movements’ ranks placed under their leadership (see Chapter 1). Still, hierarchically structured as it was, the movement was of enormous importance to its rank-and-file participants, providing them with an opportunity to put their local struggles into the global context and to articulate their experience in a language of “theory,” however vulgarized this theory could be. Indeed, in Korea as elsewhere, the Red Age brought further democratization of the politics. Third, the “new type” parties of the Red Age started to create a qualitatively new type of the state—the party-states. The Leninist parties, as Eric Hobsbawm powerfully argues, belonged to the Jacobin tradition of belief in a disciplined organization of enlightened revolutionaries working on people’s behalf rather than the tradition of social democratic working-class organization in more liberal and democratic parts of pre1914 Europe, in which the organizational forms were much looser and more decentralized.61 The Jacobins, a cohesive group of middle-class rev-

Introduction

15

olutionaries who took over the sovereign power in its entirety in order to implement what amounted to a very radical agenda in their time (including both strictly centralized state and economic interventionism in the form of price controls), served, indeed, as an archetypic model of a consistent, throughgoing radical vanguard for Lenin since the very beginning of the twentieth century.62 A party-state of the kind that consolidated after Lenin’s passing, unlike mainstream Western European social democratic parties or unions, was not supposed to be a tool for working-class efforts for improving its socioeconomic position. Indeed, when it comes to the matters of per capita income per se in real, purchasing power-based terms, the average Soviet worker was hardly better off in the late 1930s than he or she were in the late 1920s.63 The partystate was, in principle, committed to providing basic subsistence to the “masses” it was to lead, but even this commitment could not always be honored amid the world-historical upheavals of the interbellum. However, even if it was divorced from any meaningful electoral procedures and not subject to any form of voters’ control (or any other checks on its power), the party-state was still committed to democratization in a broader social, economic, and cultural meaning of the world. Its plebeian support base as well as its activists, mostly workers and peasants themselves on their way to better positions to be secured by party membership card and the educational opportunities the party was providing, genuinely wanted the modern industrial economy to develop (and give themselves more opportunities to climb to managerial roles there), modern education to blossom (and give their former village neighbors, relatives, and friends some opportunities for status mobility), and modern culture to spread around to these who could hardly enjoy its fruits in the past.64 Indeed, the political practice of the worldwide Leninist parties that aspired to exit the capitalist crisis by building partystates in their respective countries was just as quintessentially modern as the literary endeavors of Korea’s colonial-age proletarian writers, who often successfully combined socialist critique of mass immiseration under prevailing socioeconomic conditions with highly developed feminist sensitivity, or insights into the issues of national subjectivity under adverse colonial conditions.65 As mass consumption was starting to change the societal landscape in the core areas of the world system during the 1920s, the Soviet-type party-state and the tangible improvements

16 Introdu c ti on

in the cultural or educational lives of former plebeians of the Tsarist empire were, in their turn, inspiring the revolutionaries of the periphery, Koreans included. In Chapter 7, I will demonstrate how these inspirations were reaching the Korean public. Concomitantly, the story of how a Chinese Communist attempt to build a statelet along broadly similar lines in the liberated areas during the War of Resistance against Japan, as seen by a leftist Korean observer, will be narrated in Chapter 6.

t h e r e d ag e : t h e “ s tat e o f e me r g e nc y” as a b as i c n o r m One point must be emphasized before we proceed any further. While radicalism as such is a long-term, persistent tradition that lives on in our own days, the basic system of coordinates inside which the Red Age radicals had to chart their way forward was as different from contemporary radicals’ lived experiences as interbellum capitalism or the inter-state system were different from today’s late-capitalist realities. At a very general level, it may be said that the interbellum world was more oppressive vis-à-vis the radical “subversives” and exhibited much less willingness to integrate the radical fringes into the societal mainstream compared to, say, postwar core regions of the capitalist world-system (North America, Western and Northern Europe, and Japan). Even supposedly democratic states where political radicalism was in principle legal often did not shun repression on the scale that would be uncharacteristic for postwar Western Europe or North America. It is mostly forgotten today due to the enormity of violence that engulfed Germany, Europe, and the whole world several years later. However, “Bloody May” (Blutmai) of 1929, when Berlin police—under social democratic leadership (!)—shot and killed around thirty unarmed civilians as part of its military-style suppression of the Communist May 1 marches was a hotly debated event in the world of the late 1920s and early 1930s. It made clear how powerful the position of deeply authoritarian instruments of state coercion was even in supposedly liberal-democratic Weimar Germany, and how far even a moderate labor party, social democrats, could go to smother radical dissent.66 When Sin Namch’ŏl (1907–1958), one of Korea’s pioneering academic Marxists, accused the great German social democratic econo-

Introduction

17

mist Rudolf Hilferding (1877–1941) of “social fascism” in 1932, he was, of course, parroting the Comintern’s—rather far-fetched—party line. But when we read Sin’s explanations for his criticism—Korean Marxists wondered how Hilferding’s and other German social democrats’ supposed commitment to democracy could be reconciled with their parliamentary support to the invocation of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, granting the president “emergency powers, “ by the likes of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning (1885–1970) and President Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934)—we understand that the question is far more complicated here than simply an issue with the Comintern’s ultra-radicalism.67 The limitations to interbellum democracy were only too visible to contemporaries, including the Korean ones. From the viewpoint of the 1920s–1930s Communists, their opponents were waging a relentless class war against them. As a book published by Elena Stasova (1873–1966), the head of International Red Help (1922–1941) and a prominent Comintern cadre, claimed, the “bourgeoisie of the capitalist countries” murdered without a trial 234,141 “Reds” in 1925–1928, while executing 35,786 “Red” activists and imprisoning 418,314. According to Stasova, the total casualties of the radical Left during these three years amounted to around 900,000, including those wounded and maimed by torture.68 Given that in China only, the nationalist Guomindang is known to have massacred somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Communists and other leftist opponents and critics in 1927–1928, the claim appears to have been possibly exaggerated but not entirely improbable.69 Killings were typically accompanied by torture. Nam Manch’un (Pavel Nikiforovich Nam, 1892–1938; see more on him in Chapters 1 and 2), one of Korea’s pioneering Communists, catalogued in his 1925 narrative on Japanese colonialism in Korea the tortures Korean radicals had to face in the Japanese police stations and prisons. The long list included needles inserted between the fingernails and flesh, water with added hot pepper poured into the nostrils, electric shocks, and an array of other assorted brutalities.70 As naked violence was visibly more prominent than systemic integration in many states’ responses to radicalism, the radicals, not only in China and other countries of the periphery but also in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe, had to militarize themselves. Typically, the German Communist Party kept its own paramilitary wing, Roter Frontkämpferbund (Alliance of

18 Introdu c ti on

Red Front Fighters), which numbered almost 130,000 by 1929. Aside from their own “army,” German Communists also ran their own intelligence service and terror units in 1923 when they were attempting—in vain, as it turned out—to organize a revolution in Germany.71 Confronting a violent state, the radicals had to build up an apparatus of quasistate violence of their own. This necessity was even more pronounced in more repressive states, in the protracted civil-war situations or under foreign military occupation, when any politics, by definition, had to be militarized. The only military wing of interbellum and wartime Korean Communism was the armed guerrilla groups operating on Chinese territory. No wonder a quintessential civilian urban radical, writer Kim Saryang (1914–1950), admired the Korean radical militants fighting in China so much, the legendary Kim Il Sung’s (1912–1994) guerrilla band included (see Chapter 6). These groups, however, are not dealt with in this book, as it focuses on the socialist movement inside Korea proper, or on its diasporic predecessors in the early 1920s. With the Schmittean “state of emergency” (Ausnahmezustand) being an essential element of politics on both the Right and Left, the interbellum radicals—especially outside the few states where the metropolitan (but not necessarily colonial) radicals were generally tolerated (Britain, France, Scandinavia excluding Finland, and very few others)—developed a ­ ­ ­ weltanschauung indeed more reminiscent of the 1793–1794 Japarticular cobins rather than pre-1914 Western European social democrats. In the battlefields without uniforms and clear lines between “us” and “enemy,” a paranoiac fear of “enemy spies” or (in the case of the Soviet Union, the beacon of interbellum radical hopes) “hidden counter-revolutionaries,” “wreckers” or “deviationists” was a fixture of everyday life. It is clear that Stalin’s political clan cleverly used the ubiquitous paranoia about enemy spies to consolidate and cement its hold on power. It eventually culminated in the (at that point, already physical rather than organizational) destruction of any potentially rivalling power loci (military command, heavy industry’s top managers, veteran revolutionaries with independent political weight, etc.) during the 1937–1938 Great Purges.72 It is also clear that the minorities, especially these who had either their statehood or their main body of population based outside the state boundaries, under the control of presumed inimical forces, were destined to be more vulnerable than the titular majorities surrounding them.

Introduction

19

Koreans were the case in point. Already in the early 1930s, there was a tendency among the Chinese Communist cadres in Manchuria to look askance at their Korean comrades—who often did not understand Chinese, while constituting more than 90 percent of the Communist Party members in Eastern Manchuria—as narrow, stubborn nationalists, distrustful and disdainful of their Chinese brethren-in-arms.73 As the Japanese suppression of the Communist guerrillas intensified, so too did the “spy” paranoia among Chinese Communist cadres, which eventually ended in a large-scale tragedy. The minority Korean militants were targeted by their Chinese comrades-in-arms during the witch hunt against the presumed pro-Japanese self-defense group Minsaengdan among the Manchurian Communist guerrillas in 1932–1936.74 In the following year, 1937, the almost two-hundred-thousand-strong Korean minority in the Soviet Union’s Maritime Province was collectively deported to Central Asia under the pretext of “Japanese espionage.” Overall, around four thousand ethnic Koreans, mostly cadres, guerrilla veterans, or people with (suspected) transborder connections, perished during the Soviet ­Great Purges.75 It must be remembered, however, that, tragically enough, the victims often shared the worldview of the victimizers. Moscowstationed Korean Communist exiles were denouncing each other in strikingly similar-sounding terms, with the Soviet secret police arresting, “trying,” and executing both denouncers and the denounced alike. A well-known example is Kim Tanya (1901–1938), one of the founders of the underground Korean Communist Party and the Korean Communist Youth League in April 1925, whose name is mentioned many times throughout this book. Kim, originally a stalwart of the orthodox Tuesday Society, was denounced by Yi Sŏngt’ae (aka Kim Chunsŏng, 1901–1938), previously a prominent journalist and a former member of the rival Seoul faction, in a report to the Secret Department (basically, a branch office of the Soviet secret police) of the Comintern Executive, dated September 28, 1937. Yi (correctly) mentioned that Kim’s natal family could be classified as “well-off landowners” (contrary to Kim’s selfpresentation as a scion of middling peasants) and then proceeded to allege that both Kim himself, his wife Ko Myŏngja (1904–?), and his Tuesday Society comrades Pak Hŏnyǒng (1900–1956) and Cho Pong’am (1898– 1959) were Japanese police spies. That was, according to Yi, the reason why Kim came back unscathed from a number of high-risk undercover

20 Introdu c ti on

missions to Korea proper while so many other Korean militants dispatched back to Korea ended up being apprehended and imprisoned.76 Yet another victim of Yi’s denunciations was Yang Myŏng (aka Li Kang, 1902–1936), a Communist militant and a prolific writer on Korean issues for Comintern publications (see Chapters 1 and 5). Yang’s chance 1930 encounter with a Japanese Asahi journalist in Shanghai who later wrote a short article on Yang’s activities was enough to raise the question of “political trust” towards Yang as early as in 1933.77 A couple of years later, denunciations of such sort could become an easy trigger for arrest and execution. While Yi’s denunciation was most likely false—neither extant Japanese police archives nor any other sources yield any evidences of Kim, Ko, Pak, and Cho, all prominent Communist leaders with training from Moscow, ever secretly collaborating with the Japanese police—Kim Tanya was hardly alien to the spy witch hunt himself. In a futile attempt to buttress his reputation with the Soviet authorities, he submitted to the Comintern Executive a longish description of his illegal—undertaken under assumed identity—voyage to Seoul in 1929, offering his explanations and the reasons why the Japanese police failed to apprehend him and boasting of his own record in denouncing “Japanese spies.” Among his own former Tuesday Society comrades whom Kim suspected of possible espionage now was Yŏ Unhyǒng (1886–1947), one of the movement’s veterans and the pioneering translator of the Communist Manifesto into Korean.78 In the end, both Yi and Kim were arrested and executed by Stalin’s secret police on uniform “Japanese espionage” charges. ­

Introduction

21

1950s, was also utilizing wartime spy paranoia for consolidating its power and purging all potential challengers.80 Yŏ Unhyǒng was assassinated in 1947, presumably by a violent right-wing extremist, whereas Cho Pong’am was executed in 1959 by the South Korean government on trumped-up “pro–North Korea espionage” charges, a grim reminder of the ubiquity and severity of both “spy” paranoia and political violence in twentieth-century Korea: neither phenomenon was the exclusive preserve of the political Left.81

the w o r ld d iv id e d b e t w een “u s” an d “ the m” : “ ine v it ab ilit y ” o f co er cio n , ra t io nalizat io ns of v iol en ce With the “state of emergency” being largely normalized and turned into a permanent condition, both political violence and belief in its inevitability tinged the Korean Left’s perception of the outer world. A liberal nationalist daily, Tong’a Ilbo, bemoaned the dictatorial practices of the Soviet state as early as in 1927, on the occasion of “revolutionary veteran” Trotsky’s shocking expulsion from the party that he co-led throughout the revolutionary years. Liberal nationalists suggested that the Soviet Union might need some elements of democracy at least at the stage of policy deliberations, even if the policy implementation was to be dictatorial, but these sentiments were hardly shared by the Korean Communist Left.82 There, the destruction of the Left opposition inside the Soviet Communist Party was barely recognized. Soviet collectivization was reported relatively widely in Korea, and the reporting was not always exclusively positive since richer Korean peasants in the Russian Maritime Province were moving since 1929 via the still-porous border with China, fleeing confiscations and coercive imposition of collective farming. The Left-leaning nationalist daily Chosŏn Ilbo felt pressed to ask a Soviet diplomat at the USSR consular office in Seoul for explanations. He duly obliged, telling the Korean readers that Soviet authorities did not discriminate against Koreans, that collectivization was supposed to eventually benefit the villagers, and that around oneand-a-half-thousand Koreans who left Russia and fled to China were most likely opium smugglers and other “criminal elements” so numerous

22 Introdu c ti on

in border areas. The newspaper broadcast his explanations without any significant criticisms.83 While the full extent of state violence inside Stalin’s USSR was hardly known to the Korean radicals in Korea proper, the 1936–1938 Moscow trials against some of the best-known Bolshevik leaders and the 1937 deportation of Soviet Koreans to Central Asia were covered in the media, both Japanese and Korean. Indeed, a popular monthly, Samch’ǒlli, published an extremely detailed report of the forced deportation of Soviet Koreans. The report mentioned, inter alia, the dissolution of the ethnic Korean military units in the Maritime Province and the imprisonment of many Soviet Korean Communist cadres, “whose use value is not considered high by the Soviet authorities any longer.” The report suggested that Soviet authorities might have feared that the presence of strongly nationalist, anti-Japanese ethnic Koreans on the Soviet-Japanese border could provoke Japan and concurrently wanted to remove Soviet Koreans far away from their compatriots in Korean proper in order to preempt any possibilities for organized ethnic unrest and strengthen control over the border areas.84 Han Yong’un (1879–1944), a famed Buddhist intellectual ­ not somebody who and self-proclaimed “Buddhist socialist”85—obviously could be suspected of anti-Communist or anti-Soviet bigotry—penned a longish piece on the intensification of antireligious persecutions in the USSR in 1937, suggesting its connection with the generally oppressive atmosphere of the witch hunts against supposed “Trotskyists,” “wreckers” (panghaeja), and “fascists.” As Han (correctly) understood, the witch-hunt victims were, in many cases, Stalin’s political antagonists, real, potential, or imagined, rather than authentic “fascists and wreckers.”86 So, the full extent of Stalinist brutality might be unknown to contemporaries inside Korea proper, but at least some information was readily available. The question was whether the Korean Communists and their sympathizers in the broader community were in a position to adequately register the information, which contradicted the basics of their worldview, and reflect on its implications, rather than writing the brutalities off as inescapable excesses or even “necessary measures” of self-defense. As we may easily find out, the latter was usually the case. The world of the 1930s was divided into inimical camps—the protagonists of the Red Age versus the assorted forces of the old order—and engulfed into a seemingly permanent “state of emergency” as the new global war was

Introduction

23

swiftly approaching while the Japanese army was brutalizing China (which it invaded in 1937, exactly when the Stalinist terror peaked in the USSR). Such a world was not exactly the right place for critical selfreflection about the inherent limitations of one’s own side. The news about, for example, Chinese Trotskyists’ attempts to contest the revolutionary movement’s leadership against “China’s Stalinists” (the Chinese Communist Party) using their propaganda outlets did reach late 1930s Korea, but neither this news from a neighboring country nor Trotsky’s criticisms of the Stalinist “betrayal” seemed to attract much attention.87 Of course, confirmation bias was hardly an exclusive prerogative of the Korean Left: in the divided world of the late 1930s, under the Damocles’ sword of the fascist threat, the figure of no less stature than Romain Rolland (1866–1944), one of Europe’s most prominent writers of the era, joined the ranks of Soviet Union’s—and personally Stalin’s—friends.88 In contrast to neighboring China, neither Trotskyist nor any other explicitly anti-Stalinist Communist movement developed in late 1930s–early 1940s Korea: Soviet Union, Stalinist, or whichever else, was, after all, presenting a realistic hope for liberation from the colonial yoke in case of a Soviet-Japanese conflict. Indeed, Comintern archives do not reveal any real, recognizable Trotskyist activity even among ethnic Korean Communists in 1920s Soviet Union, where Trotsky and other “Leftist Oppositionists” were conducting a legitimate political struggle against the increasingly conservative party mainstream in 1923–1927. Ch’oe Sŏng’u (1898–1937), an important Russian-Korean cadre (on his activities, see Chapters 1–3), was known to have translated Trotsky’s theses in 1923 on the instructions of his party superiors for the benefit of non-Russianspeaking Korean Communist Party members in Vladivostok, but neither he nor anybody else around ever attempted to side with the opposition.89 “National liberation” (minjok haebang) was the absolute priority, and to achieve it, siding with the mainstream faction was the only realistic option. The reports on outbursts of Stalinist state terror were sometimes cited by former Communists who decided to renounce their convictions. They often ended up applauding the Japanese “successes” in constructing a “new order in East Asia” instead. A good example is the “thought conversion” statement by In Chǒngsik (1907–?), wherein its author, originally a Communist activist and one of Korea’s most prominent Marxist

24 Introdu c ti on

agricultural economists, decries “Soviet imperialist moves” in Xinjiang and elsewhere while pronouncing the “guidance of our Japanese Empire” the best hope for China’s struggling peasants.90 Stalinist violence was duly mentioned in the Japanese Empire’s official proclamations carried by Korean media outlets. A 1941 appeal to “Kim Il Sung and other antistate ringleaders,” asking them to “emerge from the forests” and pledge their allegiance to the Imperial cause (in reality, Kim and the survivors of his guerrilla group had successfully crossed into Soviet territory already at the end of 1940), mentioned the sad fate that befell practically all the old Bolshevik leaders—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and others—in Stalin’s cruel hands.91 The use of the narrative of “Stalinist repressions” by Japanese state propaganda, however, had the opposite effect: these who wanted to continue the anticolonial struggle could easily discard the talks about the reign of political violence in the USSR as Japanese propagandist exaggeration. Many loyalists chose, in the end, to keep their faith: apparently, on their calculus, the structural violence of the existing worldwide order, or the national betrayal any “thought conversion” could imply under the prevailing circumstances of Japanese colonial rule, were incomparably more heinous than any excesses the Soviet antagonists of the Japanese Empire could have ever committed. Moreover, the challengers could also boast some authentic successes that, as I argue in Chapter 7, could well appear, at least on the surface, as sprouts of genuinely alternative modernity. Moscow, the “red capital,” demonstrated the patterns of gender or racial equality that the old capitals of Europe were decisively lacking. Despite all the visible traces of poverty and deprivation, it was giving the hitherto socially and culturally disenfranchised “masses” the sort of access to high-brow culture that they, as everybody in colonial-age Korea knew, never enjoyed in Korea or even Japan proper, the colonial metropolis. Radicalism’s purportedly antisystemic violence could, it seems, bring qualitative leaps in human development, democratizing society and its culture; at the same time, the ancien regime, in Korea, Japan, and elsewhere, was never hesitant to unleash deadly violence against any perceived challengers and, moreover, was responsible for the mind-boggling carnage of the First World War. Could Korea’s radicals, and a large proportion of the sympathetic public around them, allow their sympathy for the Soviet and other worldwide protagonists of the Red Age to be diminished by the reports—

Introduction

25

often printed in the pro-Japanese media, by definition less trustworthy to those opposed to colonialism—about paranoiac siege mentality or police terror in the USSR? The answer is self-evident.

t h e r e d ag e : lim i t at io n s and c o nt r ib u t io n s The limitations of the Red Age were, in the end, the limitations of the interbellum era itself. In the age when the modern nation-state arguably reached the pinnacle of its capacity to mobilize and control the society, the radicals were often just as staunchly statist as more mainstream thinkers—and Korean Communists were undoubtedly planning for a “progressive” national state of the future, the Soviet Union being the obvious ideal model (with all the unavoidable caveats about Korea’s “specificity” and “different stage of development”).92 Strong and interventionist state as the paramount tool for the betterment of human race, industry as inherently more “progressive” sector than any pre- or nonindustrial economical pursuits, and history’s unilineal progress from “primitivity” via “slave-owning” and “feudalism” to the heights of industrial modernity— all these crucially important coordinates of Korean radicals’ worldview were very quintessentially modernist, and indeed widely shared among modern urban intelligentsia across the whole political spectrum. Still, all the epochal limitations notwithstanding, the Red Age socialist radicalism also contributed something new and previously unseen to Korea’s modern culture. It is these contributions that this book focuses on. The most important contribution was perhaps the ability of Korea’s Communists to articulate the interests of the vast majority of Korea’s ordinary inhabitants. Communists saw themselves as the vanguard (chŏnwi) designed to “enlighten and lead” Korea’s masses (taejung) along the revolutionary road. It was a Jacobin rather than classical social democratic self-positioning that hardly bade well for the future of parliamentary democracy in the hypothetical postrevolutionary Korea: was the “enlightened vanguard” minority going to allow itself to be checked and balanced? However, it is impossible to deny that Communist programs, with radical land reform, gender equality, an eight-hour working day for urban workers, and universal welfare (from annual paid vacation to maternity

26 Introdu c ti on

leave), all duly mentioned there, offered the underprivileged majority at least a hope for a type of modernity that would benefit it rather than to simply exploit it for the sake of capital accumulation (see Chapter 3). While multilingual, well-travelled intellectuals dominated the ranks of the leadership, the middle- and lower-ranked cadres often represented the type of the Gramscian “organic intellectual.” They were workers and peasants, autodidacts or primary school graduates, for whom their political engagement was both an opportunity to struggle for the longcherished dreams of their communities and milieus and a chance to enter the realm of more sophisticated literary culture (intellectual polemics, political pamphlets, “proletarian” novels, etc.) hitherto denied to them (see Chapter 1). Just as the pre-1945 Japanese Communist Party was the only political party in Japan that, in its program, envisioned independence for Japan’s colonies, Korea and Taiwan, and supported the Chinese revolutionary cause, Korea’s Communists were the only political force in Korea that clearly articulated the demand for a radical agrarian reform in the countryside and for an essential improvement in urban workers’ conditions, as well as establishment of a generalized welfare system.93 Whatever the limitations of the interbellum radicals might be, in Korea, Japan, or elsewhere, they were, in many, ways, harbingers of the post-1945 world, with its agrarian restructuring, decolonization, gender equality, and welfare states. They were also anticipating the future of the post-1945 intellectual world. In the mid- and late 1930s, when totalitarian state ideologies were gaining popularity, both in many parts of Europe, in the Japanese Empire, and in nationalist China, Korea’s pioneering Marxists were offering their critical analyses of the intellectual, philosophical, and sociopolitical roots of fascism. They were among the few opponents of the conservative essentializations of “national culture” (J. minzoku bunka; Kor. minjok munhwa) in Japan and Korea’s own contemporary cultural nationalism that was being constructed largely along similar lines (see Chapter 4). They were first to take the issue with the essentialized construction of “nation” or “national history,” making it clear that nations are being born in the process of modern capitalist development and do not possess eternal, ahistorical, and unchanging traits, so often articulated into “national character” (minjoksŏng) in popular nationalist writings. They were among the few polemists of the 1930s who pointed out the dangers inherent in the

Introduction

27

uncritical fetishization of the supposed primeval, primordial “Koreanness” of Korean antiquity and the nationalist cult of Korea’s mythical progenitor, Tan’gun (see Chapter 5). They were prophetically mentioning the outburst of a “new imperialist war” in the Pacific as the most pressing danger of the day (see Chapter  2); Pak Ch’iu (1909–1949), a brilliant Marxist of the 1930s, also managed to accurately predict in the first postLiberation year the future ascendancy of the ultra-rightist, “blood-andsoil” type of nationalism on the Korean Peninsula (see Chapter 5). Whereas political interbellum radicalism in Korea was Jacobin in its aspiration to rebuild the society through the agency of an all-powerful postrevolutionary state, it was at the same time able to offer the most pointed criticism of the right-wing varieties of the nativist and statist nationalism colonial-age Korea ever saw. Such Marxist thinkers as activistturned-cultural critic Sŏ Insik (1905–?) confronted Nishida Kitarō’s (1870–1945) or Kōyama Iwao’s (1905–1993) articulations of “Eastern culture” as the direct opposition of what Europe and especially European modernity stood for, attempting instead to ground a more progressive understanding of Korea’s—or Asia’s—tradition in the universal, shared temporality and spatiality of constantly developing global history. While expressing his ideas in a conceptual language partly borrowed from the Kyoto School thinkers he critiqued, and being unable to refer openly and directly to Marxist literature, such thinkers as Sŏ continued to oppose the oppressive totalities and racialized hierarchies of the world controlled by then to a large degree by ultra-reactionary fascist and fascism-like dictatorships, well into the late 1930s.94 It is the political, social, cultural, historical, and philosophical critique produced by Korea’s pioneering Marxists that this book, especially in Part 2, focuses on. At the same time, it does not deal in the details of the phenomenon of colonial-age proletarian literature, which are already extensively dealt with in existing An95 ­ ­ ­ glophone academic literature.

n o r t h ­k o r e a: ant i-­i m p er ial ism , n a ti o nalis t and int er n at io n al ist It is indeed highly ironic that avowedly “socialist” North Korea proclaimed Tan’gun a “really existing historical figure” in 1993 and even

28 Introdu c ti on

“excavated” his presumed “relics”—effectively contradicting the previous official interpretation that clearly saw the Tan’gun narrative as a myth.96 North Korea’s relationship with the legacy of colonial-age Communism is tenuous and contradictory. Since the mid-1950s, parallel with the purges or marginalization of the colonial-age “domestic” Communists unrelated to Kim Il Sung’s (1912–1994) 1930s guerrilla activities in Manchuria, North Korean historiography started to treat the “factionridden and alienated from the working-class” domestic Communist movement of the colonial age as a sideshow incomparable to Kim Il Sung’s feats of armed struggle.97 Still, North Korea’s anti-imperialist nationalism, and its keen proclivity in the 1960s–1980s to support assorted nation-liberation movements and avowedly anti-imperialist regimes throughout the Third World and even some antisystemic radicals in the First World, obviously echoes the Comintern’s agility in recruiting anticolonial nationalists to its cause in the 1920s–1930s.98 It is undeniable that “nation” almost supplanted “class” as the focus of North Korea’s international revolutionary efforts of the 1960s–1980s, and that these efforts largely died out during and after the 1990s, with the decline and fragmentation of the erstwhile Third World movement and unprecedented economic crisis in North Korea itself. However, all the specificity of North Korean ideology and statehood notwithstanding, it is equally undeniable that a remote prototype of its state structures was the Soviet party-state of the interbellum period around which the Comintern radicals, Koreans included, coalesced.

pro -de m o c r ac y s t r u g g les an d t h e po st -1945 t r ans m o g r if i cat io n s o f so c ialis m in s o u t h k o r ea Korean Communists, as most other Comintern affiliates elsewhere in the “colonial and dependent world,” from China (Kataoka 1974, 183–187) to South Africa, espoused the theory of two-stage revolution.99 The first stage was to be national-democratic, focused on the struggle for the restoration of an independent Korean statehood in such a democratic form that would allow the masses, under the leadership of the “proletarian vanguard,” to further fight for the ensuing “socialist revolution”

Introduction

29

(see more details in Chapter 3). The limitations of “stageism” are too well known and too obvious to dwell on here. A “democratic national state” could easily switch into the direction of extreme right under the postDepression conditions (as is visible in the fate of Germany or Austria in the mid-1930s), or, under different conditions, consolidate to the degree that would make any further radicalization extremely problematic. The latter was indeed South Korea’s case since its institutional democratization in the late 1980s (see the Postscript). However, stageism, with all its obvious limitations, had one advantage: while Communists hardly approached the masses as their political or intellectual equals, they were, in principle, committed to the idea of political democracy as their first-stage objective, albeit not necessarily the ultimate one. In any case, with or without the Comintern’s theoretical underpinnings, it was practically clear to them that democratic—as opposed to right-wing authoritarian—statehood was conducive to the fulfillment of their aims, in both the provisional and ultimate sense of the word. This original, colonial-age commitment to political democracy as at least a highly useful tool for the further “socialist construction” was echoed in post-1945 South Korea by socialist radicals’ crucially important participation in pro-democracy struggles. It was perhaps ironic that inside the loose coalition of dissident student groups and illegal workers’ unions that were preparing the ground for the massive demonstrations and strikes of 1987, crucially important in turning South Korea into a “normal” parliamentary democracy, Leninism—which ultimately rejects conventional parliamentarism as bourgeois—was perhaps the most essential underlying intellectual ferment.100 Self-styled Leninists fighting for “bourgeois” democracy were a paradoxical phenomenon, which still may be explained in the historical terms by the prominence of stageism since the earliest stages of Korea’s history of socialist radicalism in the 1920s. The Leninism of South Korean radicals mostly faded away as the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites disappeared in the early 1990s. Mass conversion to social democracy followed, and the first large-scale attempt to organize a mass-based leftist party after formal democratization saw the creation of the Korean Democratic Labor Party, identifiable as a radical social democratic coalition, in 2000. The prodemocracy activism of the 1980s provided the Leninists-turned-socialdemocrats with “initial political capital,” the legitimacy that they needed

30 Introdu c ti on

in order to continuously struggle for a number of items on the progressive agenda, from a comprehensive welfare state to workers’ participation in workplace management (see the Postscript).101 Granted, welfare state or workers’ participation on management boards are nowhere as radical as the ultimate perspective of “socialist construction” that colonial-era Communists used to struggle for. However, there is an obvious common thread. As I have made clear earlier, the Red Age radicals wanted their dreamed-for party-states to thoroughly democratize their societies by allowing the hitherto socially disenfranchised masses the possibilities of large-scale upward mobility, up to the positions of the managers of the nationalized economies. Current South Korean heirs to the radicalism of previous decades, in most cases, no longer dream of nationalizing the economy. However, they do aim at reforms that would make for a more democratic society in the socioeconomic sense of the word. They wish free higher education to ensure the possibilities for upward mobility for the children of the underprivileged, and workplace democracy to strengthen the agency of the workers, making them less of the human extension of machines and more of masters over the production process and their own workplace affairs.102 While the degree of radicalism in South Korea’s leftist movement today—just as it is globally—is hardly anywhere close to that of the Red Age, both are essentially animated by similar or related inspirations. The struggle continues, albeit in different forms.

Part I

The Organization ­

c h a p te r   1

Actors of the Korean Communist Movement

A

typical picture of a radical leftist movement in late nineteenth-early twentieth century Europe would often be threefold. On the top, one finds radical intellectuals, mostly of solidly middle-class origins—the likes of Karl Marx (1818–1883) or Karl Kautsky (1854–1938)—serving the cause in the capacity of theoreticians and intellectual leaders. Together with them, both on the very top and in the middle layer of organizers and functionaries, one could also easily find self-taught leaders of genuinely proletarian origins who joined the cause as a continuation of their trade union activism. August Bebel (1840–1913) would perhaps be the most well-known representative of this type in European social democracy’s history. Finally yet importantly, the vast majority of the grassroots and middle-level cadres would be mostly workers, often deprived of educational opportunities by poverty and social barriers, visible and invisible. Generally, European social democratic and Communist parties were indeed workers’ parties in the most literal sense: most of their members and activists, around 80  percent in the case of 1920s German Communist Party’s Hamburg chapter, for example, were indeed the industrial workers.1 ­

33

34 c h ap ter 1

white-collar urban elements, with very few peasants.2 However, there were at least two important traits that distinguished them from their Western European prototypes from the very beginning. First, the type ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ represented by Kautsky—middle-class intellectual-turned-Marxist— completely dominated the Bolshevik leadership. Proletarian autodidacts typified by Bebel could be found too—experienced metalworker and the post-revolutionary leader of Workers’ Opposition to the fledgling partystate oligarchy, Alexander Shlyapnikov (1985–1937), was one of them— but they were indeed very rare at the top of the party hierarchy.3 ­After all, in Russia, a peripheral capitalist late-developer, radical intelligentsia consolidated itself as a self-conscious social stratum much earlier than any sizeable trade-union movement came into being. Second, ethnic minorities were quite prominent among the cadres, unsurprisingly in an empire where Jews were systematically discriminated against and areas like Georgia or Liflandia (today’s Latvia) were colonies without even rudimentary self-rule. At the Fifth Congress of the RSDRP, 22  percent of the Bolshevik delegates were the activists of minority origins, while a whopping 66 percent of the more moderate Menshevik faction delegates were ethnic non-Russians too (often Jews, Georgians, or Latvians).4 A déclassé intellectual with minority background—the social category to which the arch-rivals Trotsky (1879–1940) and Stalin (1878–1953) both belonged—was indeed one of the most widespread types of the Russian Communist functionary that Korean revolutionists encountered in their dealing with the Russian counterparts after the 1917 revolution. Colonial-era Korea differed even more than Russia from the sort of metropolitan industrial society that gave birth to modern social democracy and its radical Communist outgrowth. Industrialization made little progress by the end of the 1910s, as the Japanese at that point regarded their Korean colony primarily as a geopolitical and military asset and a rice producer. There were only circa forty-two thousand industrial workers in Korea by 1919, and little unionism to speak about.5 Workers’ organizations emerged simultaneously with the first Communist circles in the early 1920s, as we will see below. Korea was a colony without even basic forms of self-rule, so it was hardly surprising that the majority of the earlier Communist converts consisted of former nationalistic intellectuals. Whereas in Russia the intellectuals dominated the leadership of the otherwise mostly working-class-based Bolshevik Party, in Korea



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35

workers were indeed very few in 1920s Communist organizations. The latter primarily consisted of educated youth, often of middle-class origins. Moreover, since Communism as ideology was a foreign import, the intellectuals best positioned to come into contact and internalize this new system of views and beliefs were the transborder, migratory ones, both diasporic Korean intellectuals and Korean students abroad, primarily in Japan or China. Following chronological sequence, we should begin our familiarization with the personalities of Korean Communist movement with them.

mig r at o r y r e v o lu t io n ar ies The Diaspora One of the main factors that contributed to making 1920s–1930s Korea into a leftist hotbed was Korea’s territorial proximity to the Russian epicenter of the worldwide Red Age explosion and the existence of a sizeable Korean diaspora in Russia. Koreans started to move into the territory of the Maritime Province from circa 1863–1864, almost immediately after Russia wrested this area from the weakened Qing Empire in 1860. By 1917, there were around one hundred thousand Koreans in Russia, and among them, around eighty-five thousand lived in the Maritime Province. While an around 420,000-strong Korean population of Northeast China constituted at that time the largest Korean diaspora abroad, the Russian-based Korean diaspora was second-largest in size, and in many ways rather well-established.6 By the 1910s, a new social stratum, still small but rather influential, was making itself visible in the Korean society of the Maritime Province: the educated second-generation Korean migrants. These were the people who received Russian education on high-school (gymnasium) level or higher, were functionally bilingual (fluent in both Korean and Russian, often also able to read in major Western European languages), and, as subaltern minority intellectuals of the tsar’s oppressive empire, often developed a penchant for radicalism even before the momentous events of 1917. A number of these younger second-generation Koreans, who possessed Russian citizenship by birth, were drafted into the tsar’s army

36 c h ap ter 1

during the First World War, and experienced further radicalization as the old Russian army imploded in 1917. It was exactly this stratum that spearheaded the creation of the Irkutsk Communist Party in May 1921, following a string of Communist groups established in Siberia and the Maritime Province in 1919–1921. By the mid-1920s, the center of gravity of the Korean Communist movement shifted to Korea proper.7 RussoKorean diaspora leaders, increasingly estranged from developments in the movement inside Korea, mostly concentrated their efforts on working for the growing Korean population in Russia. Some of them, however, retained their influence inside the Comintern system and remained in position to make an impact upon the Communist movement in their historical homeland—which many of them never even visited. Nam Manch’un (Pavel Nikiforovich Nam, 1892–1938), whom I am going to amply mention in other chapters of this book as well, perhaps best typifies this Russo-Korean borderland milieu of bilingual RussoKorean revolutionaries. A scion of a relatively well-assimilated family of Koreans with Russian citizenship (his father worked at times as a RussoKorean interpreter), Nam studied at both Orthodox seminary and subsequently a Russian high school (gymnasium) in Chita, developing the taste for radical politics already there. Mobilized as a noncommissioned officer to the tsar’s army in 1916, he managed to gain popularity among the frontline soldiers and was elected into a regimental soviet after the overthrow of Tsarism in February  1917, thus entering the realm of radical politics in earnest. In January 1920, after the Reds took Irkutsk from their White opponents in the Russian Civil War, Nam, already seen as an experienced cadre, was promoted to the membership of the Korean Section in the city’s Bolshevik Party chapter and then to the position of the International Division’s (mostly composed of Koreans and Chinese) chief of staff.8 He was a part of a vast inflow of second-generation Koreans into the Bolshevik Party: by May 1921, the party boasted around five hundred members and one thousand membership candidates from among the ranks of the Siberian and Maritime Province Korean populace.9 In the early 1920s Nam was one of the key members of Orgburo, the Organisation Bureau, located in the Russian Far East, which was supposed to press the diverse Korean factional groups into one single Korean Communist Party. In this capacity, he may be regarded as one of the key personalities of the 1920s Communist movement in Korea.



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37

Nam’s own faction, the Irkutsk Communist Party—the name refers to its first inaugural congress held in Irkutsk in May 1921—included a number of leading personalities whose biographies in many aspects overlapped with Nam’s. Han Myŏngse (Andrei Abramovich Han, 1885– 1937), a scion of Chisinhe (Kor. Chisinhŏ), one of the oldest Korean villages in the Maritime Province, worked for the Russian army as a translator during the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, and later studied at Kazan Orthodox Seminary. Originally a member of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), he switched his affiliation to the Bolsheviks in 1920, the same year Nam joined the party. In the early 1920s, both were put by the Comintern in charge of building a unitary Korean Communist Party.10 Yet another Irkutsk faction stalwart, Kim Man’gyŏm (Ivan Stepanovich Serebryakov, 1886–1938), a Russo-Korean interpreter and teacher at a Vladivostok Korean school, famous for his 1911–1912 stint as a correspondent of a Vladivostok daily, Dalyokaya Okraina, in colonized Korea, accompanied the Comintern’s plenipotentiary, Grigory Voitinsky (1893–1953), to Shanghai in May 1920. He played an important role in introducing Korean and Chinese radicals to Voitinsky there (Voitinsky’s trip, as we know, constituted one step in the process that ended in the inauguration of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921). As we will see below in this chapter, he was also instrumental in converting a number of Shanghai-based Korean exiles into the more or less orthodox Bolshevik teachings of the Irkutsk Communist Party.11 A younger contemporary and close comrade of Nam, Han, and Kim, Ch’oe Sŏng’u (1898–1937), also a Russian school graduate and a fluent Russian speaker (and writer), was responsible for much of the Comintern’s Korearelated activities between 1929 and 1937. In 1937, the Great Terror engulfed both him and the majority of Korea diasporic revolutionaries present at that moment on the Soviet territory.12 His analyses of the situation in 1920s–1930s Korea will be extensively dealt with elsewhere in this book. Nam, Han, Kim, and Ch’oe were all executed in 1937–1938. Among them, only Kim briefly stayed in Korea proper as a Russian journalist in 1911–1912. The activities of the rest were completely confined to Russian or Chinese territory (Nam too traveled on Comintern missions to Beijing and Shanghai in the 1920s). It has to be mentioned, however, that not all the diasporic, bilingual second-generation activists were necessarily Irkutsk Communist Party

38 c h ap ter 1

­

It has, however, to be remembered that Irkutsk activists did not disregard the national agenda either. Nam and Ch’oe had to suffer accusations of “Korean nationalism”—mostly by the ethnic Russian cadres— because of their staunch support for the idea of building an autonomous Korean territorial unit, a Soviet Korean republic of sorts, inside the Russian Maritime Province.15 The Eastern Section of the Comintern submitted a proposal to this effect to the party authorities in 1924, and it was rejected after a serious debate. By 1925 the Soviets still felt too weak in the Russian Far East, and never fully trusted the pro-Soviet allegiance of the Korean immigrants, suspecting at least a part of them to hold proJapanese sympathies. Instead, one Korean national region and 171 Korean



Korean Communist Movement

39

townships were established, as a conciliatory gesture towards the Korean ethnic cadres.16 Of course, the “Soviet Korean republic” was supposed, first and foremost, to accelerate the revolutionary processes inside Korea proper, on which it was expected to border. Nevertheless, it was to become a Korean state in miniature, an inspiration for all the forces inside Korea proper who wanted to overthrow colonialism and regain independent statehood first and foremost. A number of anticolonial activists who ended up in exile in China or Russia turned to Communism after 1917, often being fascinated by both the vision of a more just alternative modernity and the possibility of concrete, tangible Soviet assistance for Korea’s independence struggle. I will turn to them below. The Exiles The advent of global modernity in the late nineteenth century gave Korea’s political actors one hitherto unknown option, namely going into exile abroad if staying in Korea proved no longer possible. The pioneers of self-chosen foreign exile were the masterminds of the failed 1884 Kapsin coup, who first fled to Japan; later, some of them went farther, to the United States.17 Indeed, Japan was the refuge of choice for the Korean courtier émigrés who found themselves in trouble with either their monarch or the currently dominant faction at the court. After the 1910 annexation, however, Korean nationalists who wanted to continue their independence struggles had, naturally enough, to seek asylum in other places. Vladivostok, the easternmost metropolis of Russia, the country against which Japan waged war as recently as in 1904–1905, looked like a logical choice. Indeed, the political emigrants would be joining the growing number of impoverished Korean peasants trying their luck in the adjacent Russian territory: the Korean population in Russia’s Far East grew from 54,076 in 1910 to 64,309 in 1914.18 It had, however, to be remembered that absolute majority of the Korean migrants in the Russian Far East hailed from the neighboring Hamgyŏng Province. The richer resident Koreans, whose sponsorship was crucial for the success of any initiatives inside the Korean milieu of Vladivostok, also predominantly belonged to the “Northern” faction of Hamgyŏng natives, mostly commoners (yangmin) or lowborn (ch’ŏnmin) by their original hereditary status. Their relationship with émigrés of

40 c h ap ter 1

predominantly aristocratic yangban background from Korea’s central areas were strained. The tensions even produced in 1910 a murder case involving these two factions.19 Still, despite the inhospitable environment, some nationalist luminaries moved to Vladivostok in the late 1900s and early 1910s, including Yi Tonghwi (1873–1935). A man of humble origins, Yi served as a major (ch’amnyŏng) in the old Korean royal army disbanded by the Japanese in 1907, and was active as a Protestant nationalist after that, moving first to northeastern China and then, in October  1913, to Vladivostok.20 As a native of Southern Hamgyŏng Province, he could relatively easily build a network of contacts in the local Korean milieu dominated by his fellow Hamgyŏng natives. In alliance with Pak Chinsun, whose Russian-language capacities were indispensable for Yi (proficient only in Korean and classical Chinese), the Protestant nationalist-turned-Communist founded the pioneering Korean Socialist Party (Han’in Sahoedang), the nucleus of the future Shanghai Communist Party, in May 1918.21 By that time, as his rivals from the Irkutsk Communist Party never tired of reminding, Yi still had only a very vague notion of what socialism was supposed to be.22 He sensed, however, that Soviet sponsorship might be crucial in the matter of restoring Korean independence, and that was more than enough for such a radical conversion. Some of Yi Tonghwi’s closest comrades in the Korean Socialist Party and later Shanghai Communist Party were fellow Vladivostok-based émigrés. Such was the case of Kim Rip (1880–1922), yet another Hamgyŏng native, who was originally active in late 1900s Korea as a progressive nationalist favoring a constitutional monarchy. A resident of Russia since the 1910 annexation of Korea and an early convert to the Communist cause, he was known for having received, via Pak Chinsun and his comrade Han Hyŏngkwŏn (?–?), two million (golden) rubles from the Soviet government for promoting the Korean socialist independence movement. The conflicts around this sum led to Kim being assassinated by four Korean right-wing nationalists in 1922.23 However, since the 1910s and throughout the 1920s, it was Shanghai rather than Vladivostok that had the reputation of an informal mecca for Korean political emigrants, including Communist (as well as anarchist or nationalist) radicals. It was in Shanghai in early 1920 that Yŏ Unhyŏng (1886– 1947), yet another former Protestant nationalist in exile radicalized by



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41

the world-historical upheavals of the late 1910s, met Yi Tonghwi and joined his group. It was also in Shanghai in May 1920 that he met Kim Man’gyŏm, afterwards eventually switching his allegiance to the Irkutsk Communist Party.24 The first Korean translator of the Communist Manifesto (printed in Shanghai in twenty thousand copies by the publishing bureau of the Shanghai Communist Party) and a participant in the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East in Moscow (where he met both Lenin and Trotsky; later, while meeting Soviet representatives in Pyongyang in 1946, he considered it wise to omit mentioning Trotsky, telling his interlocutors only about having met “Lenin and Kalinin”), Yŏ remained, however, more nationalist than Communist. He retained a vast network of contacts with Korean nationalist exiles in Shanghai.25 Arrested and taken to Korea by the Japanese consular police in 1929, he was released from prison in 1932 and since then, working as a newspaper editor, subscribed to a set of vaguely progressive beliefs one can characterize as social democratic.26 He was not the only Shanghai-based Korean radical émigré to switch from nationalism to Communism and later to some sort of softer social democratic self-positioning. Yet another case of this kind was Cho Pong’am (1898–1959), Yŏ’s younger friend and protégé of the 1920s. Cho’s life in exile in Shanghai in 1919–1932 was interspersed with stints in Japan and Soviet Union, where he studied, and in Korea proper, where he—initially a vaguely pro-independence nationalist and then an anar­ instruchist who eventually switched to Marxian socialism27—was mental in establishing the underground Korean Communist Party in April 1925. Increasingly estranged from the mainstream of the Korean Communist movement since the late 1920s, Cho almost ceased his Communist activities after the Japanese consular police arrested him in 1932, putting him in a prison in Korea and releasing him only in 1939. After officially parting ways with Communism in 1946, he, as we will see in the Postscript, pioneered social democratic politics in newborn South Korea and was eventually executed on trumped-up “espionage” charges in 1959.28 It must be remembered, however, that, while the older exiles of Yi’s and Yŏ’s generation had long experience of (often Protestant) nationalist struggle and retained immense network of connections with the émigré nationalists of all kinds, the younger ones often experimented with nationalism only briefly before being immersed into Communist

42 c h ap ter 1

orthodoxy. Such were the cases of Pak Hŏnyŏng (1900–1956), a former YMCA student of English in his high-school days, who stayed in Shanghai in 1920–1922, and Kim Tanya (1899–1938), a former pupil of a Protestant school in Taegu (and later a student of the famed Paejae School in Seoul), who sojourned in Shanghai in 1919–1922. After having encountered Kim Man’gyŏm there, both joined the Irkutsk Communist Party, de facto becoming its major representative in Korea proper as the leaders of the mainstream Tuesday Society (Hwayohoe, founded in 1924), Irkutsk grouping’s domestic branch-off.29 The Tuesday Society’s activities and viewpoints will be extensively dealt with throughout the text of this book. By 1932, a total of 1,352 Koreans were residing in Shanghai, and a significant portion of them were radicals of all persuasions, Communists included. In 1932, during the Japanese occupation of the city, a number of them was arrested and transferred to colonial Korea’s prisons (such was the case of Cho Pong’am, mentioned above). After 1932, the number of Koreans in Shanghai was actually on the rise, but an increasing number of the Korean newcomers were coming in search of economic opportunities and had nothing to do with radical politics.30 As the threat of Japanese consular police was becoming increasingly serious for Shanghai-based Korean radicals in the late 1920s and early 1930s, some of them were moving to Moscow, taking political asylum in the “homeland of the world proletariat” and assuming different jobs in the Comintern and other related institutions there. One such case was that of Yang Myŏng (who used to write for Comintern publications under his pseudonym, Li Kang; 1902–1936), an important cadre of the underground Korean Communist Party who was forced by the threat of arrest to move to Shanghai in 1928 and took asylum in Moscow in 1931. Before his arrest by Soviet secret police on October 19, 1935, he, together with Ch’oe Sŏng’u, was responsible for the Korean part of the teaching and research at the Comintern’s Communist University of Eastern Toilers (KUTV, 1921–1938).31 I will deal with Ch’oe’s and Yang’s publications on Korean affairs in the Comintern journals elsewhere in this book. After Yang’s arrest, Ch’oe had to submit four pages of lengthy explanations, detailing (by exact dates, and with the lists of topics discussed) all his recent interactions, official and unofficial, with the Korean revolutionary exiles in Moscow, Yang included;



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the document conveys the atmosphere of increasing paranoia surrounding Korean Communist émigrés at the Comintern’s various institutions.32 The majority of Korean Communist exiles in Moscow did not fare any better than Yang during the Great Purges of 1937–1938. Among many others, Kim Tanya was—as I mentioned in the Introduction—arrested and executed in 1938. He was a founder of the Tuesday Society who, threatened by the Japanese consular police, had to move from Shanghai to Moscow in 1931, then sojourned in Shanghai once again on a Comintern assignment, and then, after the eventual move back to Moscow, closely collaborated with Ch’oe Sŏng’u there while working for the Foreign Workers Publishing House (the predecessor of Progress Publishers).33 The execution list—signed by Stalin himself—which includes Kim’s name, features the names of other Comintern-affiliated Korean exiles as well. One of them was Cho Hun (1897–1938), a Chŏnju native who was in Russia since 1914 and who represented the Korean Communist Party at the Comintern’s central apparatus.34 Yet another was Pak Minyŏng (Nikifor Alexandrovich Pak, 1904–1938), a former Tuesday Society activist who lived in Moscow since 1930 and taught historical materialism to the Korean students of the Comintern-affiliated Communist University of the Eastern Toilers.35 Born in the same year as Pak and arrested and executed together with him, Kim Ch’ŏlsan (Kim Chersan, 1904–1938), a Korean translator at the Foreign Workers Publishing House, managed to have a son the year before his arrest: the son, Yuly Kim (b. 1936), grew up to be one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary poets.36 Ironically, Pak Hŏnyŏng, snatched by the Japanese consular police in Shanghai in 1933 and kept in a colonial prison until his release in 1939, was relatively safer in his prison cell in Korea than his Moscow-based comrades were in the “homeland of the world proletariat.” Yet another (relatively) safe haven for Korean Communists was the area of China controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and its military, with which Korean leftist radicals were closely collaborating. One fruit of such collaboration was the Korean Volunteer Army (KVA, Chosŏn Ŭiyonggun). The KVA was created in October 1938 by the Korean National Front Alliance (Chosŏn Minjok Chŏnsŏn Yŏnmaeng), a coalition of mostly leftist nationalist groups. This coalition was led by the Korean National Revolutionary Party (KNRP, Chosŏn Minjok Hyŏngmyŏngdang, founded in 1935). The KNRP was a relatively large

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(with initially around two thousand members) grouping of the left-wing, China-based Korean exiles; Kim Wŏnbong (1898–1958), an anarchist radical-turned-socialist, was its de facto leader. The Northern China Unit (Hwabuk Chidae) of the Korean Volunteer Army operated in the Chinese Communist-controlled liberated zone in Northern China’s Taihang Mountains since 1941. It was led by such seasoned émigré Communists as Ch’oe Ch’angik (1896–1957)—an experienced party cadre who was known for his rather critical attitude towards the orthodox Tuesday Society and his willingness to collaborate with nationalists, and a prominent North Korean official after 1945. He moved to Shanghai in 1935 and subsequently to Yan’an in 1938.37 In this book (see Chapter 6), I will analyze the description of the liberated zone and KVA activities left by one of the most important Korean writers of the 1940s, Kim Saryang (1914–1950). Some émigré Communists stayed in Yan’an. It was definitely safer than Moscow of the Great Purges time, but groundless suspicions in “pro-Japanese espionage” were dogging Korean Communist exiles there too. One of them, Chang Chirak (Kim San, 1905–1938), who posthumously acquired worldwide fame thanks to Nym Wales’ account of his life, was secretly executed there as a “Trotskyist and Japanese spy” in 1938, to be rehabilitated only in 1983.38 Multilingual cosmopolitans with broad international experience and far-reaching personal networks among both socialist and nationalist radicals, Korean revolutionary émigrés hardly could avoid suspicions of their Soviet and Chinese Communist hosts and patrons. Transnational by definition, they did not fit well into the rigid nation-state structures, even supposedly Communist ones. As we will see below, many of them studied outside of Korea proper, often in Japan—and such experiences could easily lead a political immigrant to be classified as “unreliable,” in Moscow and even in Yan’an. The Students Abroad-1: Japan and Beyond For the early 1920s, the age of nascent socialist developments in Korea, researchers know—from the Japanese police materials—around 520 Communist activists of some visibility. Eighty-two of them studied abroad, mostly in Japan or Soviet Russia, in the times when the total number of Korean students abroad was only around one thousand.



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Around 990 Koreans stayed in Japan for educational purposes in 1924 (the figure was only about 500–600 in 1918, indicating quick growth in student numbers after 1919), and several hundred individuals were studying in the US, Europe, and China.39 For one thing, given the rather strict censorship regime in Japan’s Korean colony, it was much easier to develop Marxist interests while staying and studying in Japan proper. There, in sync with the general progressive trends of the Taisho Democracy period, in the 1920s the availability of Marxist literature was on par with contemporaneous Weimar Germany.40 For another thing, quite naturally, the Koreans who already converted to the Communist cause tended to travel to Moscow for their study stints, either to the Communist University of Eastern Toilers, mentioned above, or to the International Lenin School (ILS, 1926–1938). Pak Hŏnyŏng and Kim Tanya, for example, were enrolled in 1929 at the latter.41 The academically sounding name notwithstanding, the ILS was supposed to train the global Communist leaders in both theoretical matters and organizational practices. The same applies to the Communist University of Eastern Toilers, the study course of which included also the most practical subject of all, namely military training.42 If the story of the Korean Communist movement is to be written in strictly chronological order, it must begin with a vaguely socialist—or rather progressive anti-imperialist—group that around fifteen to twenty Korean students in Tokyo organized in collaboration with their Chinese and Vietnamese comrades in spring 1916, the New Asian Alliance (Sin’a Tongmaengdan). Apparently inspired by the works of Japanese socialists and anarchists of the 1900s, the group was led, on the Korean side, by Kim Ch’ŏlsu (1893–1986), then a Waseda University student who later grew into one of the most important (and long-living) Korean Communist leaders—and a prominent rival of Pak Hŏnyŏng and his Tuesday Society. Yet another member of the group who later left a considerable footprint on colonial-age leftist discourses was Kim Myŏngsik (1891– 1943), a scion of a prominent family of Chejudo-based Confucian scholars. He already had some experience of participating in secret nationalist organizations before coming to Tokyo to do his stint at Waseda between 1915 and 1918. As we will see elsewhere in this book, Kim Myŏngsik figured prominently in the debates on the issues of nation and Korean national culture in 1920s–1930s Korean media.43

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In June 1920, in the wake of the general radicalization that engulfed Korea after the March 1 independence movement in 1919, core Korean members of the New Asian Alliance—in company with some newly recruited activists, altogether about thirty persons—reunited in Seoul and relaunched the Korean part of their original organization as the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Sahoe Hyŏngmyŏngdang). Kim Myŏngsik and Kim Ch’ŏlsu, as one could expect, were still among the leaders, but they were not the only prominent personages there. Indeed, some of the would-be leading figures of the colonial public space were among the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s cadres of former Korean students in Japan. Yu Chinhŭi (1893–1949), a medical doctor by profession who later served as the editor-in-chief of an important socialist monthly, Sinkyedan (New Stage), in 1932–1933, as well as Yi Pongsu (1892–?), a former Meiji University student who worked as Tong’a Ilbo’s economic section editor in the early 1920s, were there too. Chang Tŏksu (1894–1947), a former Waseda student who later was one of the most influential people in the moderate nationalist milieu that coalesced around Tong’a Ilbo, took part as well (he was accused of misappropriating Comintern funds in 1921 and left the movement thereafter, moving to moderate nationalist positions). The Socialist Revolutionary Party sent a representative delegation to the inaugural congress of the Shanghai Communist Party in May 1921 and subsequently acted as an out-branching of the Shanghai group inside Korea proper—in the same way as the rival Tuesday Society later functioned as representatives of the Irkutsk Communist Party inside ­Korea.44 The number of Korean students in Japan—predominantly in Tokyo— was steadily increasing throughout the 1920s. Japan, after all, had five imperial, three public, and eight private universities already by 1920, while the first-ever university in its Korean colony, Keijō Imperial University, was established only in 1924. While there were 453 Koreans at Japanese high schools and tertiary educational institutions in 1920, the figure rose to 1,969 persons in 1930. The total number, with the middleschool and professional-school students included, was as high as 3,793 persons in 1930.45 Police control over “dangerous thoughts” was still relatively lax compared to what it became later in the mid- and late 1930s, and Korean socialist groups, clubs, and unions proliferated in the atmosphere of general infatuation with alternative modernity projects. One



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such group was the Northern Star Society (Puksŏnghoe), the origins of which dated back to 1922. It was organized by Kim Yaksu (1890–1964), a politician whose eventful life, in a way, represents a concise summary of Korea’s modern developments. Born in a Confucian landowner family in the vicinities of Pusan, he studied both in Nanjing and later in Tokyo and founded a new Communist circle, the Northern Wind Society (Pukp’unghoe), in 1924 in Seoul with a group of like-minded Northern Star Society members who returned home. He was present at the inaugural congress of the underground Korean Communist Party in April 1925, unsuccessfully fought against the Tuesday Society’s hegemonic influence, and ended his days in North Korea, purged and sent away to countryside for “revolutionization.”46 Yet another successor to the defunct Northern Star Society was the January Society (Irwŏlhoe), founded in January 1925 by former Northern Star Society members in Tokyo with an explicit aim of bringing various groups and groupings together into one unitary party. Led by An Kwangch’ŏn (1897–?), a medical doctor by training, whose writings on Communist strategy and tactics I will extensively deal with in this book, the group also had Ch’oe Ikhan (1897–?) as its member. Ch’oe, a former neo-Confucian scholar turned nationalistically minded Waseda student, became in the 1930s and early 1940s one of the most important left-wing scholars of Korean Confucian history; I will dwell in detail on his writings.47 The Students Abroad-2: Koreans at Comintern Schools in Moscow Proliferation of the radical groups notwithstanding, most Korean students in Japan were there to obtain the cultural capital needed for upward mobility back in Korea. Graduation from economics, law, political science, or an administrative science department qualified Koreans for ­ junior-level (hanninkan level) appointment, while 134 ethnic Koreans, mostly prestigious imperial university graduates, managed to pass the exams for senior administrative appointments in 1923–1943.48 By contrast, one had to be already an activist, or show the intention to become one, to be recommended by the underground Communist Party or its affiliated Youth Party for study at the Communist University of Eastern Toilers. According to a 1933 internal document of the Comintern,

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between 1921 and 1933 the Communist University had a total of 201 Korean students. Around half of them were registered as having either worker or peasant origins. The rest obviously were the intellectuals, often born in propertied families, who largely dominated the movement in the 1920s. Forty-two percent of the graduates were dispatched for Communist work in Korea, while the rest were retained in the USSR, either for work assignments inside the Comintern system or party work among the ethnic Korean population of the Russian Far East.49 Koreans were a relatively numerically large group among the students. In 1922, they comprised 26 percent of all the students, and in 1928, their relative weight was 16 percent. In 1928, there were thirty-two Koreans enrolled at the Communist University of Eastern Toilers. Only Mongolians (thirty-four persons) were more numerous, whereas Japanese (seven persons) were much fewer.50 The Japanese police reports describe the life of Korean students as mostly confined to the dormitory but otherwise relatively comfortable: the students were supplied all necessities and given a generous stipend as well. The preparatory course lasted for a year, while the main study course was to take three years. The students were expected to learn Russian in a year and then follow the lecture course without a Russian-Korean interpreter. There were weekly opportunities for one-to-one tutorial sessions with the teachers and monthly discussion meetings. The students, their foreign citizenship notwithstanding, could join the Soviet Bolshevik Party (if deemed worth of this honor) and were also in a position to collectively demand improvements in teaching if there were grounds to regard the lectures as unsatisfactory.51 Interrogation protocols of Yi Hwayŏng (1905–?) who studied there in 1933–1934, name five Korean teachers (including Ch’oe Sŏng’u, mentioned above), two female Russian teachers, and three non-Russian “Westerners” who were educating Koreans enrolled at the preparatory course in natural science, Bolshevik history, and basics of Leninism.52 An extant grade certificate of a 1927–1931 student, Kim Yongbŏm (1906–1947; see below on his activities), demonstrates that in addition to Russian and political education, he was expected to learn both mathematics and natural science during his first two years: apparently, many students had a poor academic background and might need to complement their general education on the top of the specifically Communist training.53 Already by November 1921, the KUTV boasted around



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twelve hundred students and five hundred employees; the students came from several dozen Asian countries and territories, as well as nonEuropean areas of Soviet Russia itself.54 The opportunities for networking and exchange were huge. The students were to be prepared to risk their lives and freedom as Comintern agents in their countries of origin, Korea included, and were to be accorded a more collegial sort of treatment. Some risked more than others. These who had an intellectual background generally fared better than the workers-turned-activists in terms of their personal safety after their return to Korea. The latter risked long prison stints under harsh conditions if they continued their organizational work. The former could launch careers in the worlds of journalism or research (which were not strictly separated in colonial-era Korea). One good example is Kim Seyong (1907–1966), a medical doctor who returned from his studies in Moscow in 1926. His recollections about his days in the Soviet Union will be dealt with further in this book. He was employed as a journalist with Chosŏn Ilbo since 1930 and became famous after having produced, together with his wife’s brother, economist and historian Yi Yŏsŏng (1901–?), the five installments of statistics on Korea’s highly problematic “development” under the Japanese colonial rule, Study on Korea through Figures (Succha Chosŏn Yŏn’gu, 1931– 1935). The study, based on the Government General’s own statistics, was to document what Korean Marxists had been arguing for since the early 1920s: “modernization” under colonialism essentially boiled down to Korea being reduced to a market for Japanese goods and investment opportunity for Japanese businesses. An abridged and re-edited version of the book was published in Seoul recently, vividly demonstrating that it did not lose its value as a selection of statistics even after eight decades lapsed.55 After the 1945 liberation, Kim was one of the leaders of the People’s Party (Inmindang), which subsequently merged into the South Korean Workers’ Party (Namnodang) in 1946. He is mentioned in the US Occupation documents as one of the organizers of “Communist espionage” in South Korea (“Espionage against US and SK Government,” 1945–1948) and is presumed to have moved north where Yi Yŏsŏng was serving as Kim Il Sung University’s professor since the late 1940s (and until being purged in 1958).56 ­

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for reorganizing of the Korean Communist Party in a top-to-bottom fashion, on the basis of the factory-floor workers movement, often ended up in the grim, gloomy world of colonial prisons.57 A typical case of this kind would be that of Kwŏn Yŏngt’ae (1908-?), a worker turned labor union activist from Hongwŏn in Southern Hamgyŏng Province, who had been arrested for the first time in his hometown in November 1930 for 58 ­ Then he was released, beating up a scab union (ŏyong nojo) organizer. moved to Moscow, studied at the Communist University for only one year, in May 1931–May 1932, and subsequently was hurriedly dispatched to Korea, with the mission of organizing “red” unions, the basis for the subsequent reconstruction of the Communist Party there. After entering Korea illegally in January 1933, Kwŏn was able to navigate there using the existing network of underground radicals that survived repeated Japanese police crackdowns. He was initially helped by a certain Kim In’gŭk, a fellow Communist University alumnus, and then succeeded in establishing connection with Kang Mokku (1910–1935), one of the leaders of the Southern Hamgyŏng Communist Youth movement, and with the radical activists from both prestigious Seoul-based Posŏng College (which Kang once attended) and the pinnacle of the colonial educational system, Keijō Imperial University. His contact at the Imperial University, Chŏng T’aesik (1910–1953), a Marxist economics researcher, was later to play a key role in the continuous attempts to reconstruct the Communist underground in late colonial Korea. Kwŏn also managed to gather around himself a group of dedicated labor activists from the Seoul Rubber Factory, Kyŏngsŏng Textile Factory, Kawakami Electric Plant, and a number of other enterprises, lead a strike at Seoul Rubber Factory, and publish several pamphlets. However, he was arrested by the Japanese police in May 1934, and we currently have no data on what happened to him after that point.59 Had he stayed on in Moscow, where most of the Korean political exiles disappeared during the Great Purges, his chances for survival were even more meagre. Emigration and Homecoming: Complex Trajectories The categories above were neither fixed nor clear-cut. The boundaries between them were rather blurry. Some diaspora Koreans, on having received the needed training at the Communist University of Eastern



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Toilers together with the students dispatched from Korea proper, were sent to Korea for illegal work. Some were educated elsewhere but ended up penetrating into Korea as underground organizers. One rather famous case was that of a Soviet Korean woman, Vera Tsoi (aka Pak Chŏngae, 1907–1998), a graduate of a normal school in Ussuriysk and then a Moscow university, who was illegally dispatched to Korea in October 1932. She was a peasant by birth but moved into the city; in Moscow, she worked at one point at the famed Airplane Factory No. 39 and earned her Soviet Communist Party card in 1931, before leaving on her assignment to Korea.60 She was a North Korean Politburo member in 1946–1966, the Stalin Peace Prize recipient of 1950 (the first-ever Asian woman to be accorded such an honor), and ended up representing North Korea’s initially genuinely revolutionary gender policies on the international stage.61 Kim Yongbŏm, a native of Anju County in P’yŏngan Province, educated at the KUTV in 1927–1932 (see above on his grade certificate), is understood to have returned to Korea together with her. Born—just as his wife—to a poorer peasant family, he, in his own words, never learned to properly read and write even in his native Korean until he came to Moscow. He was a foot soldier in a Korean nationalist guerrilla group in Manchuria in 1920–1924, and subsequently switched to activist work at the newly established Communist Youth organization in Manchuria.62 Upon arrival in Korea, he was active in the Communist trade union movement in Pyongyang until being arrested by the Japanese in 1935 (according to the Soviet documents he was imprisoned until 1938, worked in Manchuria in 1941–1944, and was again imprisoned in March 1944 and until April 1945).63 Originally, he and Vera Tsoi were apparently disguised as partners to mislead the colonial police. With time, however, fictive partnership developed into real affection and marriage. Kim, as a veteran of the colonial-era underground and bona fide worker activist, was promoted by the Soviet authorities into the position of the first leader of the northern branch of the Korean Communist Party in October 1945, but, under the conditions of Soviet military occupation, his real powers appear to have been rather limited. Yet another interesting case of the blurred diaspora boundaries was that of Lavrenty Kang, aka Kang Chin (1905–1966), a Posyet-area native and Vladivostok-based Far Eastern University‘s engineering faculty dropout, who in 1925 went to Manchuria to conduct Communist Youth

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­

­ ­

Even more blurred was the boundary between the exiles and the students abroad. Such veterans as Yi Tonghwi, already forty-four years old by the time the October 1917 revolution took place in his country of residence, Russia, hardly could be expected to study together with their juniors. Younger exiles, however, tended to strive to acquire more cultural capital abroad and improve their command of Chinese, Japanese, Russian—and English as well. Yŏ Unhyŏng, who became an informal dean of the Shanghai-based Korean revolutionary exiles in the 1920s, studied in the English Department of the missionary-run University of Nanjing in 1914–1917. He never formally graduated, but he acquired a working knowledge of Chinese and English good enough to get employed



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by Mission Book Company in Shanghai in 1917.66 Ironically, it was his English learned at a missionary school that enabled Yŏ to find a common language with Lenin, whom he met in Kremlin on January 21, 1922, after having come to Moscow to participate in the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East in Moscow.67 Yŏ Unhyŏng’s academic enthusiasm was a good model for his younger colleagues and protégés. Cho Pong’am, a Shanghai-based exile since 1919, attended Seisōku Gakuen School of English and later Chūō University in Tokyo in 1921–1922, and then, briefly, the KUTV in Moscow in 1923.68 Cho’s juniors, Pak Hŏnyŏng and Kim Tanya, also attended different schools in Japan, China, and, ultimately, Moscow.69 In this book, I define the exiles as the people who left Korea primarily for the sake of the independence movement, often without realistic expectations of returning to Korea voluntarily in the foreseeable future. Students abroad, by contrast, were those whose intention was in most cases to return to Korea. Many exiles, however, were technically students as well in different moments of their expat lives. Multilingual activists either born abroad or enriched by their foreign experiences were an enormous asset for the Korean Communist movement. It was through them that the Communist theory, which Korea’s fledgling movement hardly was in a position to produce on itself, was being imported and digested. In Tokyo, Shanghai, and Moscow, they functioned as a part of a vast international revolutionary network. Yŏ Unhyŏng and Yi Tonghwi were known to have personally met Lenin; Yŏ had a working relationship with Sun Yat-sen while both Yŏ and Cho were in different points of their lives in contact with Qu Quibai (1899–1935), de facto Chinese Communist Party leader in 1927–1928 and 1930– 1931.70 Without several hundreds of foreign-based activists—migrants, exiles, and students included—Korean Communism would have swiftly withered away in isolation from outside developments. However, not un­ ­ ­ like the pre-1917 RSDRP where émigré leaders—Lenin and others—hardly could operate without a vast network of workers and, to a much lesser degree, student activists at home, Korean émigré activists harbored no doubts about the paramount importance of the domestic struggle.71 Unlike prerevolutionary Russia, however, the would-be intellectuals—the students of various schools inside Korea proper—played an important role comparable to that of workers and peasant groups.

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figure 1.1 A 1930 police surveillance card for Ch’a Chaejŏng (1902–1963), a leader of the socialist student movement. Ch’a, a Seoul-faction Communist, was elected secretary general of the radical Korean Students’ Vanguard League (Chosŏn Haksaeng Chŏnwi Tongmaeng) in April 1929. Arrested in December 1929, Ch’a was accused of producing and distributing leaflets that “glorified” students’ anticolonial demonstrations in Kwangju in November 1929 and “instigated” further “disturbances.” In April 1931 he was sentenced to two years in prison. Credit: National Institute of Korean History (Kuksa P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe)

do m e s t ic r e v o lu t ion ar ies As I mentioned above, few founders of Korean Communism belonged to the type exemplified by Bebel—an autodidact of authentically worker background. Even after the Comintern Executive’s December 19, 1928, resolution on the Korean question, which officially acknowledged the Korean Communist Party as de facto no longer functioning and tasked Korean Communists with rebuilding their part from below, from the shopfloor cells, on the basis of “red” trade unions, the majority of the activists who were to realize these instructions on the ground were



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educated cadres. Their revolutionary work at factories was depicted in a number of colonial-period literary works, typically by Yi Kiyŏng (1895–1984)—then a representative radical writer, and one of the leading figures in the North Korean world of letters in the future—in his 1930 Papermakers (Chohŭi Ttŭnŭn Saram tŭl). There, a (failed) strike is being led by a self-proletarized intellectual, skilled at using easy-tocomprehend, down-to-earth language while propagandizing among the workers. He predictably ends up in prison but does not lose his enthusiasm for radicalizing work.72 Students and Intellectuals The activists of the late 1920s and 1930s were typified by Yi Chaeyu (1905–1944), whose agitation materials I analyze in detail later in this book (see Chapter 3). Yi is considered to be one of the most successful labor organizers of 1930s Korea. However, similar to the strike leader in Yi Kiyŏng’s novel, he was not originally a worker himself. Born to a family of low-level clerks of modest means, Yi struggled during the time of his study in Japan in 1927–1928, doing odd jobs here and there and barely eking out his living. It was in Tokyo that he joined the Communist movement. Still, his official status was that of Nihon University student.73 Later, as a Communist militant in early 1930s Seoul, Yi, parallel with the work among the workers, paid special attention to organizing among the students at different schools. He saw the students as potential antiwar and anti-imperialist fighters, as the issues of anti-imperialist struggle became highly topical in the wake of Japan’s Manchuria invasion in September 1931. Yi’s strategy was to organize student reading clubs in different schools and then gradually lead them into becoming the centers of anti-imperialist agitation. Importantly, a number of schools on the work at which Yi and his team concentrated were schools for women (Yonggok, Sungmyŏng, Tongdŏk, etc.). Yi, and colonial-era Korean Communists in general, had a clear idea of women being subjected to gender discrimination in addition to colonial oppression and economic exploitation, and thus representing an important potential source of rebellion. All in all, he and his collaborators managed to organize and radicalize student societies in twelve schools, including such famous ones as Paejae and Posŏng (both are still in existence today). They also closely networked

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figure 1.2 A 1930 police surveillance card for Yi Hyŏnsang (1905–1953), a student Communist activist who later became a key comrade of Yi Chaeyu (1905–1944). After 1945, he ended up as one of the most prominent Communist guerrilla leaders. After he was hunted down and killed by South Korean troops on September 17, 1953, his body was for several weeks exhibited on streets of central Seoul. Credit: National Institute of Korean History (Kuksa P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe)

with the anti-imperialist organization of Keijō Imperial University students, which I will deal with in more detail in Chapter 4.74 One reason why Yi’s collaborators could relatively easily penetrate the school milieus was their own academic background. Many of them were either former or current students or even teachers. Kim Samnyong (1908–1950), Yi’s comrade who later played an important role in the Kyŏngsŏng Communist Group in 1939–1945 (I deal with this group elsewhere in this book), was a son of a poor tenant farmer, enrolled in Seoul’s School for Struggling Students (Kohaktang, 1923–1931), an evening school run by Christian nationalists. He ended up being radicalized there and then switching to the life of a full-time revolutionary activist.75 Yi Hyŏnsang (1905–1953), yet another key comrade of Yi, who was later



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active in the Kyŏngsŏng Communist Group and became a Communist guerrilla leader in South Korea after the 1945 Liberation, was, by contrast, a son of a rich landowner of yangban aristocratic background. However, he too was radicalized in Seoul in the late 1920s as a student, while studying law at the prestigious Posŏng College mentioned above.76 The third crucially important assistant of Yi Chaeyu, Yi Kwansul (1902–1950), a scion of a famed yangban lineage from Ulsan (Northern Kyŏngsang Province) and a Tokyo Higher Normal College graduate, taught at Tongdŏk Women’s School (today’s Tongdŏk Women’s High School in Seoul) in 1929–1933, and managed to organize there a reading society-turned-anti-imperialist group that consisted of both Japanese and Korean students.77 Three of his former students—his younger sister Yi Sun’gŭm (1912–?), yet another Northern Kyŏngsang native, Yi Hyojŏng (1913–2010), and an extremely gifted girl from a poor Northern Hamgyŏng Province peasant family, Pak Chinhong (1914–?)—later developed into key underground Communist cadres. Pak Chinhong, an experienced underground militant, originally was a lover of Yi Chaeyu, whose child she bore and later delivered while imprisoned (the child, entrusted to Pak’s mother, died in its infancy)78—creating a media sensation in the process.79 Afterwards, Pak fell in love with Kim T’aejun (1905–1949), a Korean literary scholar from Keijō Imperial University and a convert to the Communist cause in the late 1930s. In November 1944, the couple attempted a daring flight from wartime Korea over the Chinese frontlines to Mao’s Communist capital of Yan’an.80 This episode will be dealt with later in this monograph. Radicalization during one’s school time appears to be a widespread phenomenon. Kim Tanya, mentioned above in connection with his sojourn in Shanghai and subsequent study in Moscow (where he perished; see Introduction), first experienced what Communists habitually labelled “the contradictions of imperialism and colonialism” at Presbyterian Kyemyŏng School in Taegu, where he was enrolled in 1915– 1916. His protest against the physical punishments liberally used by a Japanese teacher against his Korean pupils, and against the American missionary schoolmaster uninterested in protecting Korean schoolchildren from the selective disciplinarian cruelty of the Japanese teacher in question, led to his expulsion from the school.81 Ten years later, in 1926, Yi Chaeyu was expelled from an upper middle school (J. kōtō

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futsu gakkō, Kor. kodŭng pot’ong hakkyo) in Kaesŏng for organizing a “social science” circle and leading a student strike. He ended up going instead to Tokyo, becoming a Nihon University student, and further radicalizing ­there.82 Five years after that, in 1931, Kim Saryang (1914– 1950), later a famous writer whose travels in Communist-controlled liberated areas of China in 1945 I discuss in Chapter 6, was expelled from Pyongyang Upper Middle School, again for organizing a student strike. His scholarly path ran further to Saga High School in Japan proper and Tokyo Imperial University’s German Department. Already a rebellious student in Pyongyang, Kim continued on his radical path in Japan. His graduation thesis at Tokyo Imperial University (1939), Heinrich Heine, der letze Romantiker (Heinrich Heine, the Last Romanticist), dealt with the German revolutionary romantic poet in whom Kim perceived a future role model for himself.83 Interestingly, Sin Namch’ŏl, a prominent academic Marxist of the 1930s (whom I mentioned in the Introduction), also devoted an article to Heine, praising the German revolutionary romanticist as a predecessor of socialist literature.84 The schools of the colonial age—where the likes of Kim Saryang, Sin Namch’ŏl, Yi Chaeyu or Kim Tanya were radicalized—originally were the vehicles for the reproduction of one’s social status and upwards social mobility. However, they were concurrently the sites of ethnic discrimination, teacher-to-students violence in the form of (technically illegal but widespread) corporal punishments, and students’ protest. Student circles were among the main conduits through which the “social science” literature circulated. Friendships established in the school years continued as a part of radical underground networks. Former students, graduates or (voluntary and involuntary) dropouts, continued further as activists, radicalized students abroad, or political exiles. The Workers Workers-based movement of the type represented by the German Communist Party was what the Comintern wanted to see in Korea—or Japan proper.85 The hoped-for “hegemons of the proletarian revolution” were, however, visibly underrepresented among the Korean Communist cadres of the 1920s. There were almost no factory workers among the initial activist cadres of both Irkutsk and Shanghai Com-



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figure 1.3 Kim Saryang as a Saga High School student, ca. 1933–1935. Credit: Saga Daigaku Tōgō 10 Shūnen Kinenshi Kankō Iinkai, ed., Saga no Monogatari (Saga’s Tale) (Saga: Shōwadō Saga Eigyōjo, 2014), 21.

munist parties. It did not mean, of course, that there were no urban workers among the Korean migrants to Russia or China, on which these two Communist groupings largely relied. To the contrary, especially in the case of the Russian Far East in the late 1910s and later, the gradual shift of the Korean populace to the nonagricultural sectors had already begun. In Russia’s Maritime Province, for example, 2,117 ethnic Korean workers were employed in gold mining by the beginning of the First World War.86 Indeed, few Koreans were among skilled factory proletarians, but both the proportion of the manual nonagricultural workers and their restiveness were on the increase. During the May  1 demonstration in

figure 1.4 Kim Saryang’s China travelogue, Ten Thousand Li of a DullWitted Horse ­ (Nomamalli) (Pyongyang: Yangsŏgak Publishers, 1948), front page. Credit: Han Sang’ŏn (Hanyang University)



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Vladivostok in 1917, for example, around five hundred Korean workers with red flags were reportedly singing Russian revolutionary songs.87 It would be strange if the Russian revolutionary events would not have inspired the ethnic Korean workers who found themselves there in 1917 and the tumultuous years afterwards—and they indeed did. By December 1918, the Petrograd (St. Petersburg before 1914 and Leningrad after 1924)-based Korean workers, numbering several hundred, established the Kungminhoe (National Association), which claimed to represent “twenty thousand Korean workers in Russia” and found considerable sympathy from the early Bolshevik government; it officially recognized the association as a Russia-based Korean workers’ representative organ.88 However, very few among the Irkutsk Communist leaders had a background from a workers’ organization of any sort. Practically all (a Chŏnju native, Cho Hun, mentioned above, was among the rare exceptions) were second-generation Russophone Korean intelligentsia, as noted earlier. When the Irkutsk faction-dominated Central Committee of Korean Communist Organizations was holding its meetings in 1920, the meeting protocols were kept in Russian rather than Korean.89 It allowed the bilingual revolutionary intellectuals to better communicate with their Russian peers. Communist newspapers and propaganda materials, by contrast, had to be published in Korean, since the Russian of the majority of Siberian Koreans was, at best, rudimentary.90 In the case of the Shanghai Communists, their émigré leadership was not Russian-speaking either and needed the services of an interpreter, a Russian-Korean called Afanasiy Kim (1900–1938), when Lenin granted them a Kremlin audience in November 1921. Lenin prophesized that in a couple of years, Korea’s railway and streetcar workers would enter the arena of the radical politics. To Afanasiy Kim, this remark revealed the Soviet leader’s foresight: indeed, the streetcar workers of Korea proper distinguished themselves with several strikes later in the 1920s.91 The situation in the early and mid-1920s Communist movement inside Korea proper was hardly drastically different. The Korean Communist Party was officially inaugurated at the April  17, 1925, meeting of nineteen major activists in Asŏwŏn, a Chinese restaurant in central Seoul. At that meeting, seven activists were elected to serve as Central Committee members. None of them—Kim Chaebong (1890–1944), Kim Yaksu (1890–1964), Yu Chinhŭi (1893–1949), Chu Chonggŏn (1895–1936), Cho

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Tongho (1892–1954), Chŏng Unhae (1893–1945), and Kim Ch’an ­ 92—could be described as a proper factory proletarian, although (1894–?) Kim Ch’an, a medical school dropout and a Meiji, and then Chūō University, student in late 1910s Tokyo, worked for about a year at a Tokyo textile plant to support his livelihood and tuition. That allowed his comrades to praise him as somebody whose Communism was a product of personal experience rather than simply book learning.93 Such praise, however, is per se indicative of how unusual Kim’s short-time factory experience was in his milieu. While Yu Chinhŭi was a Korea-educated educated medical doctor and Cho Tongho graduated from Nanjing University’s Chinese department and subsequently worked for Chinese newspapers, none of the Central Committee members of a supposedly proletarian party had any firsthand experience of proletarian life inside ­ Korea proper.94 Typically, the responsible (first) secretary of the new party, Kim Chaebong, a scion of a well-established Confucian scholarly family from Andong (Northern Kyōngsang Province), was a teacher following his graduation from Keijō Industrial School (which was supposed to train technicians). Following his return from Soviet Russia in 1923, he was employed by Chosŏn Ilbo as a journalist in 1924–1925, receiving a rather generous monthly salary of 60 yen—more than most workers in Korea ever earned at that time. However, it was of decisive importance that Kim, not being a worker himself, played a leading role in the nascent Korean workers’ movement. He was instrumental in creating Chosŏn Nonong Ch’ongdongmaeng (the General Association of Korean Workers and Peasants, 1924–1925), which claimed a fifty­ thousand-strong membership.95 Hardly workers themselves, 1920s Korean Communist activists did their best to establish their hegemony, both organizational and ideological, over the quickly developing labor movement. The situation was not, indeed, very different from that of Russia’s pre-1917 Bolsheviks. They too relied on the workers-dominated party cells on the ground and did their best to exert their influence on the nascent labor union movement, while the central leadership was decisively intelligentsia-dominated.96 Among the twenty-one members of the last pre-October 1917 Bolshevik Central Committee (elected at the Sixth Party Congress in July–August 1917), only two (Viktor Nogin and Fyodor Sergeev-Artyom) had their background in factory shopfloor labor militancy. The rest were intelligentsia



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activists, many of them with long-term experience of revolutionary exile in Western Europe.97 However, the Comintern wanted the Korean party leadership and cadres to be more proletarianized, and Korean Communists leaders themselves were from the very beginning keen on following labor militancy and promoting their colleagues with the required workers’ background. In 1925, Nam Manch’un, a distinguished diasporic Communist leader (see above), mentioned 40,148 ethnic Korean workers at the enterprises with more than ten waged laborers, some of them organized and capable of sophisticated strike actions: in 1925, for example, the striking Seoul streetcar workers were driving their cars pro bono, refusing to collect customers’ payment.98 In the end of the 1920s, Korea’s ethnic Korean factory workers population already amounted to 99,574 people and was rapidly growing, and the number of strikes was growing as well, from just 36 with 3,403 participants in 1921 to 160 with 18,972 participants in 1930, driven by starvation wages, brutal working conditions, and ethnic discrimination.99 Communist intelligentsia urgently needed to reach out to the increasingly militant workers, and the recruitment and promotion of the cadres with sure working-class credentials was one way towards this goal. Ch’a Kŭmbong (1898–1929), a bona fide worker (train depot laborer) and then a labor militant (and one of the Chosŏn Nonong Ch’ongdongmaeng leaders), served as the Korean Communist Party’s responsible (first) secretary in March–July 1928; he was later arrested and died in prison after cruel interrogation torture.100 The personages like him, workers-turned-Communist militants, were becoming increasingly common in the 1930s. I am not going to dwell on them in length here, since few of them will appear in this book, devoted to socialism as a mode of cultural, ideological, or philosophical expression. It is important, however, to be aware about the milieu of the workers-turned-militants, since the socialist intellectuals—whom we will mainly meet in the pages of this book—were highly cognizant of their existence. They were, after all, the most enthusiastic readers devouring radical writings—and not necessarily on politics only. There were also frequent cases of educated or semi-educated cadres proletarianizing themselves to organize the workers from the bottom, being assisted in their work by comrades from the ranks of more established intellectuals. Such was the case of Yi Chuha (1905–1950), a poor peasant’s

figure 1.5 Announcement of Ch’a Kŭmbong’s death in prison, published in Tong’a Ilbo, March 12, 1929. The article cites prison officials insisting that Ch’a died due to the consequences of typhoid fever, which he previously suffered. In reality, he died due to the consequences of torture. Credit: Tong’a Ilbo



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son originally from Northern Hamgyŏng Province and a Nihon University dropout, who, on his return to Korea in 1928, assumed the leadership in a Wŏnsan (Kangwŏn Province) Communist cell, found a job as a longshoreman, and started organizing a “red” union among his new colleagues (Moscow considered him a Communist since 1928).101 Initially Yi was linked to the Comintern via Kim Hoban (1902–?), a Kangwŏn native who grew up in Vladivostok, graduated from the Communist University of Eastern Toilers in 1925, and came to Korea in 1930 with Profintern (the Comintern’s trade-union arm), instructions on radical unions organizing. However, after a prison stint in 1931–1936, Yi, then again an important labor organizer among the railway workers, chemical industry laborers, metal workers, and longshoremen of Wŏnsan, was greatly assisted in his work by two prominent Communist intellectuals with a Keijō Imperial University background, Ch’oe Yongdal (1902–?), then a professor of Posŏng College, and Yi Kangguk (1906–1955), just fresh from his stay in Berlin (he returned in November 1935). While in Germany, Yi joined the German Communist Party’s Japanese Section, became personally acquainted with Wilhelm Pieck (1876–1960) and other German Communist leaders, and worked as a liaison for his German comrades visiting Paris and Denmark on secret missions for them.102 Yi Kangguk brought to Yi Chuha the materials of the Seventh Comintern Congress (July–August 1935), which he obtained in Europe on his way back to Korea. In line with the Comintern’s turn towards the united front tactics, he emphasized to Yi Chuha the need for a broader antiimperialist coalition. Via such self-proletarianized activists as Yi Chuha, Yi Kangguk’s interpretation of the Comintern’s new line could trickle further down, to the radicalized workers whom Yi Chuha led. And their numbers were significant: when the colonial police arrested Yi Kangguk for his role in Wŏnsan workers’ radicalization on October 18, 1938, another three hundred workers were arrested together with him. Ch’oe Yongdal was arrested too and kept in prison until 1942, a fact mentioned in a later (and rather positive) Soviet assessment of his personality and experiences.103 Yi Chuha managed to hide himself, reemerging after the 1945 Liberation as Korea’s major Communist politician.104 Ch’oe Yongdal, before being purged at some point in the early 1950s, was known for his legislative work in the North Korean Provisional People’s Committee in 1946–1947.105

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If there was a place where the Marxian dictum about the workers who had “nothing to lose aside from their chains” visibly held water, it was colonial-era Korea. Unlike Germany or even Russia (after a measure of parliamentary representation was introduced in the wake of the 1905 revolution, with workers too gaining vote), Korean workers were not citizens. They were ruled and taxed without being represented.106 The employment was in most cases insecure, the wages are significantly lower than the wages of the Japanese coworkers, while Japanese factory legislation was not applied to Japan’s Korean colony and the first-ever Department of Labor was established in the Government General apparatus only in 1941.107 Workers’ radicalism was spontaneous and strong, so the fusion between intelligentsia radicals’ visions of an alternative modernity and workers’ natural desires to reinvent themselves as the masters, rather than slaves, of the factory production process was to take place, sooner or later. It was the existence of the radical currents on the factories’ shop floors that was giving the intelligentsia radicals the hope and inspiration in their work on the development of Korea’s own version of socialist culture. The Peasants Most colonial-era Koreans lived in the countryside and worked in agriculture. With the arrival of colonial capitalism, agriculture was being increasingly commercialized, as rice was the main export product that Korea could specialize in. Korea’s rice exports to Japan had been steadily rising throughout the colonial era: by 1930, Korea was supplying 700,000 tons of rice annually to Japan, covering around 7.4  percent of the total Japanese rice consumption. The figure climbed up to 12.6  percent in 1938. The Korean countryside, on the other hand, saw gradual reduction in per capita rice consumption. The growth in export rice output was partly explainable by massive construction of the transport infrastructure (railroads, ports, etc.), either directly by the colonial authorities or by the politically well-connected Japanese conglomerates. At the same time, however, the export boom was grounded in the growth of large-scale Japanese commercial landholdings in Korea, to which impoverished small-time Korean cultivators were increasingly selling their land. Commercialization and growth in usury were also forcing the



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poorer peasants into tenancy to the native landowners, some of whom were gradually turning into large-scale rice exporters.108 Peasants’ plight was a common subject matter in 1920s–1930s Korean literature. Typically, Yi Kiyŏng—mentioned above in connection with his portrayal of a self-proletarized intellectual—described in his representative work of the 1920s, Commoners’ Village (other wise translated as Poor Village, the original title is Minch’on, 1925), the despair of the impoverished peasants who had to unwillingly sell their daughter as a concubine to a rich landlord in order to pay for treatment when the family’s father and its main breadwinner fell ill.109 Tenancy rates were growing throughout the colonial era. Small owner-cultivators constituted 21.8 percent of Korean peasantry in 1913 and only 19  percent in 1939, while the proportion of cultivators-cumtenants decreased from 38.8  percent in 1913 to 25.3  percent in 1939. By contrast, the proportion of pure tenants increased from 39.4  percent in 1913 to 55.7 percent in 1939. With the growth in pauperization and lowwage farm hands labor—on which the “success” of the Korean rice export industry was based—spontaneous resistance was growing as well. Twentyfour tenancy disputes with 2,539 peasants involved in 1922 developed by 1928 into 1,590 disputes with 4,863 peasants involved.110 Nam Manch’un, a pioneering diaspora Communist (see above), mentions in his 1925 account of colonial Korea’s sociopolitical conditions 200 incidents of tenants’ collective protests, with 24,000 participants, for 1924 only; some of the protests involved dozens of protesters being arrested and heated scuffles between the protesters and landlords’ agents and policemen.111 A left-liberal researcher, Yi Hun’gu (1896–1961), counted only 164 tenancy disputes with 6,929 participants for 1924, but even if Nam’s figures are somewhat inflated, the picture of peasant resistance involving both large-scale organizations of tenants and violent clashes with landlords’ agents and police is entirely realistic.112 Aside from organized resistance, rural pauperization was, expectedly, bringing an upsurge in everyday violence in the impoverished villages. Rural poverty and despair was a prominent theme in colonial-age prose. In the writings of such authors as Ch’oe Sŏhae (1901–1932)—who experienced the life of an itinerant laborer in Manchuria himself—we find a gallery of protagonists who resort to the acts of desperate resistance or sometimes sheer brutality out of long-term desperation, under the weight

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of undernourishment and want. We find a mother of a child who died because of a local doctor’s refusal to help the impecunious family. Halfmad, the mother was biting away pieces of the doctor’s flesh (Pak Tol ŭi Chugŭm: The Death of Pak Tol, 1925). We find an alcoholic husband who beats to death his wife and then cries in grief (P’okkun: Tyrant, 1926), and, conversely, a kind husband who commits an armed robbery in order to provide medical help for his ailing wife (K’ŭnmul Chin twi: After the Deluge, 1925).113 The unbearable suffering of Korean peasants, further aggravated by the onslaught of the Great Depression in 1929, served as the background of Chang Hyŏkchu’s (1905–1997) Japanese-language story, Gakidō (Hell of the Starving, 1932), which created a small sensation in the Japanese literary world, winning its author (at that point, an aspiring radical writer) second prize in the literary competition of Kaizo, one of Japan’s most prestigious journals.114 It was obvious that there was an ample space for Communist intervention into the rural situation: and indeed, the intervention was taking place throughout the 1920s and 1930s. While the “red” peasant associations (chŏksaek nongmin chohap) that mushroomed throughout rural Korea beginning in the early 1920s is not what this book focuses on, it has to be remembered that a large number of the Communist militants with foreign and domestic academic credentials as well as workers’ organizers and workers themselves had rural roots. Some were children of richer peasant families and managed to receive good educations due to their families’ sufficient economic capabilities. Yang Myŏng (see above and Chapter 5) was a son of a rich peasant (he presented himself in Russian as a descendant of a kulak clan)115 from Kŏje Island, something that was in the end used against him during the Stalinist Great Purges (his natal family was exaggerated into “big landlords”).116 Most peasants’ sons and daughters in the Communist movement were, however, from more disadvantaged rural families. It was only natural that they involved themselves actively in the radical peasant movement, often in their own native villages. Typically, the responsible (first) secretary of the newly formed Korean Communist Party in 1925, Kim Chaebong, a Moscow-educated scion of a Confucian scholar from the Andong area (on him, see previous discussion in this chapter), was directly involved in organizing a tenants’ association in P’ungsan, close to his home village. The association, formed and registered in 1923, included not only tenants but also a good number of



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owners-cultivators and even some small-time landlords attracted by the aura of the “new thought,” with all its anticolonial implications.117 Yet another prominent Andong Communist active in this association was Kwŏn Osŏl (1897–1930), later famed as one of the main organizers of the June 10, 1926, pro-independence demonstrations (on these demonstrations, see the next chapter). Kwŏn’s family was rather impoverished but belonged to the mighty Andong Kwŏn lineage, some richer members of which—as well as some richer neighbors from Kwŏn Osŏl’s native village—were, counterintuitively, aiding the tenants’ association. What basically constituted a form of rural class struggle was concurrently seen as a part of national revival, a movement in which the members of Kwŏn lineage felt honored to participate, since it was strengthening their nationalist credentials.118 “Red” peasant associations were continuously being organized, illegally or semi-legally (without making their radical character open), throughout the 1930s.119 Two sons of Ch’oe Ikhan (1897–?), a son of a minor rural Confucian scholar who ended up first becoming a Communist cadre and then, in the late 1930s, one of the most prolific Marxist authors writing on the traditional-period history of Korea (see Chapter 5), were among the organizers of yet another “red” peasant association in Ulchin County (North Kyŏngsang Province). The association was active between 1931 and 1934 and was suppressed in the end by the colonial police, with more than a hundred members being detained. The members of the association, which included a former rural teacher and such would-be intellectuals as Ch’oe’s sons (one was an upper middle school dropout, and another was a primary school-educated autodidact), rather than simply peasants only, were found to possess many Marxist and general knowledge books in both Korean and Japanese. The latter was needed for furthering one’s Marxist education and was among the subjects that the association members were expected to study at the association’s evening school. Rather than simply to defend members’ economic interests and develop their “class consciousness,” this association (as many other similar “red” peasant groups) was supposed to enlighten and educate the peasantry, giving it a venue for increasing what we today would call its cultural capital. It was also to allow the peasants to render themselves visible and reconstruct their relationship to the outer world. The association published a (handwritten) journal. To contribute to it

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was supposed to be among members’ essential duties. Two issues were compiled and apparently circulated among the members, with a view to further distribute more copies among the like-minded groups outside of Ulchin County in the future. This colonial-age samizdat (selfpublishing) was to render the nameless, unidentifiable peasants from a faraway village into actors in the cultural field, with cultural agency of their own. One of Ch’oe Ikhan’s sons, Ch’oe Hakso, contributed to the journal an (unfinished) novel that was to describe, in the spirit of Gorky’s seminal ­Mother (1906), the growth of a rural boy into a socialist activist. Ch’oe Hakso’s whereabouts after the 1950–1953 Korean War are unknown; his brother died young in the colonial prison due to consequences of torture.120 In a word, the Communists, many of them born in the countryside themselves, were struggling to empower the peasantry in a variety of meanings, socially as well as culturally. In a society where peasant illiteracy was a long-standing norm, leftists’ tireless efforts to spread literacy and, consequently, the culture of reading among these people in the countryside, whom they were attempting to radicalize, had profound emancipatory implications.121 Such classical works of 1920s–1930s leftist literature as Yi Kiyŏng’s celebrated Hometown (Kohyang, 1933–1934) portray organized peasants—led by radical students (some of them, ironically, being radicalized children of the exploitative landlords or their agents)—as empowered actors, able to conduct collective protest actions (strikes, etc.) and negotiate with local power holders from stronger positions.122 If Russian Bolsheviks had little political support in the villages (except for the poorest landless peasants) and often regarded the peasantry as a potential petit bourgeois enemy, their Korean counterparts were quite successfully building themselves a support basis in the countryside throughout the 1920s and 1930s.123 The Japanese police were, of course, busy destroying the network of “red” peasant organizations that the Communist underground was creating, but many low- and middlelevel cadres involved in countryside organization work—such as Ch’oe Hakso (mentioned above)—survived until the 1945 Liberation and then formed the backbone of the nationwide network of generally left-oriented people’s committees (see the Postscript).



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c onc lu s io n: k o r e an co m m u n ist mi l i e u as a c r o s s -c lass al l ian ce More than two decades of Korea Communism’s history before the 1945 Liberation of Korea involved perhaps tens of thousands of both core and marginal movement participants—if everybody, from highly educated and multilingual full-time militants (mostly from more privileged backgrounds) up to the rank-and-file members of the “red” unions and peasant associations and one-time participants in Communist-led reading societies or strikes are to be counted. Above, I attempted to categorize the movement participants and describe, in a general way, both the most essential traits and the most important contributions of each participant category. It has, however, to be remembered that the boundaries between these categories were very frequently blurred. As we could see in the case of Lavrenty Kang, aka Kang Chin (1905–1966), discussed above, a Soviet Korean could enter Korea proper with a Comintern-sponsored mission and reinvent himself or herself as a full-time domestic underground militant. A former student with domestic academic credentials, and an additional stint at Beijing University, Yang Myŏng (1902–1936) became a Moscow-based revolutionary exile and one of the main Comintern writers dealing with Korean issues (see Chapter 5). Just as diaspora Koreans could sometimes return to their motherland for revolutionary work and students abroad could continue their foreign sojourns as exiles, workers’ and peasants’ scions could sometimes acquire academic credentials and become radicalized while studying, returning to factories and villages for propaganda work in the end. Yi Chuha (1905–1950), a poor peasant’s son who grew into a major Communist leader, is a case in point. Still, all the patterns of class mobility notwithstanding, the differentiation between better-educated leaders and mostly less-educated masses—which the full-time militants were aspiring to lead and organize—was always salient. Communist movement as a whole was a multi-strata alliance across the class lines of the colonial society. It was an alliance that could involve, on one pole, Yi Kangguk (1906–1955), a child from a rich family with Keijō Imperial University academic credentials and even some experience of activism in the German Communist Party in 1932–1935, and, on the other pole, barely literate peasants of Ulchin County who were striving to express

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their indignation at the conditions of their existence and their passion for a better world in their handwritten contributions for the underground journal of their “red” peasant association. The life worlds that Yi Kangguk, a theoretician who could read Marx or Rudolf Hilferding (1877– 1941) in original, and the Ulchin peasants respectively inhabited were completely apart from each other. The Red Age movement for alternative modernity brought them together. ­

Their younger comrades, however, could as well be products of the modernized colonial schooling. Modernity opened potential not only for the new patterns of social mobility and cross-class social aggregations but also for increased special mobility; and Communists, too, were traveling, and traveling a lot. Many of the workers whom the Communistled unions, reading societies, evening schools, and cells were attempting to recruit to the cause were recent migrants from the countryside themselves, rural farm hands who traveled to Seoul or other booming industrial cities to gain employment there. Moreover, traveling to Japan proper, the colonial mother country, was a relatively usual occurrence in the Communist milieu. Even the militants from relatively impoverished rural backgrounds, like Yi Chuha (1905–1950) or Yi Chaeyu (1905– 1944), did their stints at Japanese universities. The front organization of the underground Korean Communist Party’s Tokyo branch, the New Sci-



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ence Research Society, formed in November 1926, numbered over fifty members: the majority were students, many from poorer backgrounds.125 Moving to Shanghai, either to study or to do revolutionary work, or to combine both pursuits, was a relatively common occurrence too until the 1932 Japanese military incursion into Shanghai made going there a significantly riskier option. Throughout the 1931–1945 period, however, the Korean Communist presence in different areas of China, from Manchuria to the Communist capital of Yan’an, remained significant. Further afield, until at least the early 1930s there was a constant flow of militants crossing the Soviet border both ways. More than two hundred Koreans from Korea proper went to study at the Communist University of Eastern Toilers in Moscow, and around a hundred of this university’s graduates and some Soviet Koreans with different academic backgrounds went to Korea to join the anticolonial struggle. Some of them, like Pak Chŏngae (Vera Tsoi, 1907–1998), launched the decades-long political careers after the 1945 Liberation. In a word, the Communist milieu was a highly mobile world, both spatially and socially. The milieu, to be sure, was not an easy place to navigate. People of diverse regional, educational, and social backgrounds, with divergent ideas about who should be their ally in the anticolonial fight, Korean Communists were notoriously factionalized (see Chapter 2). In the atmosphere of police repression, the penetration of police informers, imprisonment, and torture were real, tangible dangers for any militant. In such an atmosphere, the zealots from different factions were often going paranoid, accusing each other to the Comintern of being Japanese police agents (see the Introduction). The cooperation across the factional lines was becoming more pronounced in the 1930s, as the grassroots militants were struggling to reconstruct the defunct Korean Communist Party from below, starting at the level of grassroots “red” unions and local cells. Kwŏn Yŏngt’ae (1908–?), a graduate of the KUTV, was able to secure a pledge of cooperation from Yi Chaeyu after being dispatched to Korea despite the fact that they did not share a common belonging inside the movement and did not personally know each other (both were, however, natives of Hamgyŏng Province). Still, mutual suspiciousness was running high. The world of the Communist militants was a world of permanent war without any clear battle lines, a battlefield where the enemy could easily pretend to be a comrade. It hardly

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was an environment in which inclusiveness and tolerance were easy to practice. And still, as I will attempt to argue elsewhere in this book, the Communist milieu of the colonial era made enormous positive contributions into the making of modern Korea. In a time when women only started to enter the public scene, Communist movement—despite its mostly male leadership on the top levels (all the nineteen activists who inaugurated the Korean Communist Party on April 17, 1925, were, expectedly, highly educated males)—still included a few low- and middle-level female cadres. Such female activists as Pak Chinhong (1914–?) and Pak Chŏngae played—as I attempted to demonstrate above—rather prominent roles in the underground scene of the 1930s. It broadened the horizons of modernist imagination of Korean intelligentsia, bringing the militants into direct contact with the interbellum Red Age transborder world of global rebellion. Korean Communists entered the Russian Bolshevik Party (the cases of Nam Manch’un or Ch’oe Sŏng’u), fought inside the ranks of the Chinese Communist Party (the case of Chang Chirak, aka Kim San), or radicalized while studying in Tokyo (the case of Yi Chaeyu). In Moscow’s Comintern institutions, Koreans could encounter the rebels from the whole world, together with the representatives of dozens of Soviet nationalities. The Korean Communist programs included demands for gender equality and welfare development built on Soviet and Weimar German experiences (see Chapter  3), while the Marxist vision of a single global history implied a revision of the concept of nation inherited from the precolonial decade (see Chapter  5). In a word, Communism was bringing transnationalism and antisystemic globalism, as well as a number of radical social demands (including the economic, and not only legal gender equality) to the Korean colonial-age anti-imperialist underground. It was bringing the experiences that in the end were decisive for shaping modern and contemporary Korea (see the Postscript).

c h a p te r   2

Factions and the Meanings of the Factional Struggle

T

his chapter will focus on the widely debated issue of factionalism inside the Korean Communist movement in the 1920s. For the Comintern, factionalism was a major problem of its nascent Korean section. It was seen as a fruit of the petty-bourgeois class origins of most leading Communists of Korea and their unfortunate lack of organic connections to the incipient working class. South Korea’s veteran progressive historians since the 1970s tended to endorse this view. Song Kŏnho (1927–2001) regarded what he saw as the gradual weakening of factionalism by the end of the 1920s as a sign of Korean Communists’ organizational maturation. Along broadly similar lines, Kang Man’gil (b. 1933) in the chapter on Communist movement of the 1920s in his seminal history of twentieth-century Korea reiterated Comintern analysis that attributed factionalism to the weakness of Korea’s nascent working class and Communists’ mostly petty-bourgeois or intelligentsia origins.1 While this analysis is based on sociologically verifiable facts, it overlooks two important points. First, factional differences existed in most Communist parties of the 1920s, even the solidly workerbased ones (the German Communist Party could be a good example). In reality, these parties initially were amalgamations of different social layers, groups, and tendencies, united by their longing for an alternative modernity but often divided by differences in political culture, degrees of radicalism, and tactics.2 Second, the dismissal of factionalism as simply an “infantile disorder” carries a risk of overlooking a certain productive role that factional struggles played in the deepening of theoretical discussions among the emergent Korean Left. As is well known, factional strife had its origins in the divergent backgrounds of different 75

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Communist groups, as well as tactical differences.3 These differences, as well as the development of Korean factional organizations in the formative period of 1919–1921, have been explored in detail in the exist4 ­ ­ ­ In this chapter, building further on the basis of ing research literature. the preexisting research literature, I will attempt to demonstrate that the disputes over tactics were more than simply an obstacle on the way towards the Communist movement’s organizational unity. While certainly rendering the Communist’s work in Korea less effective, they were at the same time conducive to a deeper understanding of Communist theory and its implications for the Korean national and class liberation movements. They also offered an opportunity to train in articulating differences—often amounting to dissent on certain issues— while retaining loyalty to the basics of Marxist theory and Communist orthodoxy as well as the Comintern leadership. As one of Korea’s pioneering Communist leaders, Kim Tanya, 1899–1938 (see more on him in the Introduction), wrote in his overview of the Korean Communist movement’s history, factions did not differ from the very beginning on the most principal of political issues.5 Some South Korean political scientists attribute the persistent prominence of leader-centered factions in Korea’s modern politics—not necessarily even limited to the Communist movement only—to the lingering influence of Confucian clientelist norms.6 While the existence of such influences is undeniable, one should beware the traps of cultural essentialism. Indeed, factions and factionalism are more of a universal rather than culturally or regionally specific, Korean or/and East Asian phenomenon. Theorizing on the issues of factions and factionalism in modern Europe began, among others, with David Hume (1711–1776), a famed philosopher who had a chance to observe the workings of factional dynamics in British parliamentary parties. He famously divided the factions into “personal” (coalescing around personal friendships and animosities), and “real,” that is, those that are divided by such significant variables as “interests,” “principles,” or “affections.”7 Interestingly, he considered principle-driven factional rivalries more harmful than interests-based ones, on the understanding that interest conflicts may be natural and inescapable while ideological—and religious—animosities might end up in the violent extremes of hatred, bias, and persecution. Hume’s classification is important in that it emphasizes such decisive underpinnings



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of political factionalism as personal networks of connections and patronage, as well as ideological cleavages and down-to-earth interest conflicts. In many cases, however—Korean Communists of the 1920s included—all these elements overlap in a complex fashion. As I have described above, in Chapter 1, middle- and high-level Korean Communist cadres represented a relatively small and closed milieu, structured around personalities with academic credentials, foreign and domestic. As Comintern representatives had all rights to point out, these personalities were mostly of elite extraction. They were also relatively few, the educated elite per se being a comparatively thin layer in 1920s’ Korean society. Under such circumstances, factions necessarily functioned as personal networks, with easily identifiable leaders and their followers. Their competition around the issues of Comintern recognition and financing was intense. At the same time, as I will attempt to demonstrate in this chapter, this competition also had all the traits of ideologically driven rivalry. The differences in strategy and tactics, as well as general understanding of the Korean anticolonial movement’s nature, development stage and urgent tasks, were all “real,” in Hume’s terms, and concerned the key issues of Korean Communism.

f a c t io nalis m as a c on st r u ct iv e p r ac t ic e It was, however, not necessarily as destructive as Hume suggested. As Françoise Boucek argues in her summary of modern and contemporary factionalism research, ideologically underpinned factional disputes may play an important role in providing a channel for necessary political debates in the process of agenda-setting. Factionalism brings fragmentation and hampers the political effectiveness of a party or movement if not kept in check inside certain boundaries. However, allowing for the existence of factions may also help diverse ideological and interest groups to cooperate under the aegis of a unitary party organization, thus strengthening their political potential.8 I will argue that the cooperative aspects of factionalism, as well as its role in stimulating the process of ideological articulation on all the sides of the factional divides, were sufficiently important in the early history of the Korean Communist movement.

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Indeed, factionalism, in a way, was a price the Communist movement had to pay for bringing highly divergent nascent Communist groupings together as parts of one movement or party. Concurrently, it provided the framework for Communist political debates, in which diverse groupings could air their differences, formulating their disagreements in the terms of the imported Leninist ideology and party organizational theory. These discussions, acrimonious as they were, were at the same time conducive to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of both the ideology that Korea’s nascent Communists strove to appropriate, and the concrete situation in Korea in which they had to operate. It may be instructive to make some careful comparisons between the factional dynamics in the Communist movements of Korea and its closest geographical and cultural neighbor, China. Indeed, China was much more to the Korean Communists than simply a neighbor. In a solid theoretic piece on Korean revolution’s nature and prospects coauthored (most likely in the early or mid-1930s) by three Korean student radicals inside the Japanese Communist movement—Yi Ch’ŏngwŏn (also well-known later as a Marxist historian), Song Kunch’an, and Hwang Pyŏng’in—the progress of the Communist-led “national liberation movement” in China was named as one of the main factors potentially facilitating the hoped-for advancement of Korea’s own revolution from the generally democratic to the socialist stage.9 Kim Hail (most likely a pseudonym; the real identity is uncertain), the Korean Communists’ delegate to the Seventh Congress of the Comintern (July–August  1935), mentioned the “victories of the heroic Chinese Communist Party”— which at that point was at last reaching the end of its genuinely heroic Long March (1934–1935)—as a brilliant example of anti-imperialist ­ 10 The Chinese revolution was tremendously important for Kostruggle. rean Communists, but it at the same time followed a dissimilar trajectory as long as methods of organization and struggle were concerned. The Korean Communist movement was from the very beginning a conglomerate of highly divergent urban-based underground groups and their legal fronts, which easily developed into organizationally distinctive factions with different visions of the current situation and dissimilar tactical approaches. By contrast, the Chinese Communist movement had to operate from a number of countryside bases since the end of the



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1920s, after the 1927–1928 Guomindang (nationalist) coup made legal party work in the cities impossible. The leaders of each base had to build their own power bases in their locality, establishing trust-based personal relationship (guanxi) with sub-leaders and followers—that is, in a way, functioning as military and political patrons for their local clients.11 The factionalism with roots in such a modus operandi was to a certain degree checked by the common interests all the factions had in the success of the revolution.12 However, in the situation of postrevolutionary one-party rule, factions inside the only party in power became the only channels of group and sectoral interest articulation, as well as clientelist groups central for individuals’ careers inside the party.13 In this case too, factionalism emerges simultaneously as a background for rather destructive internal strife and an important venue of policy articulation and political competition, a source of political dynamism. Indeed, the destruction of the factions outside of Kim Il Sung’s dominant political lineage in 1950s North Korea might have deprived North Korean politics of a badly needed source of internal dynamism, leaving the country unable to correct its developmental trajectory in the 1970s and 1980s, in contrast with China and Vietnam.14

t h e o r ig ins o f c om m u n ist f ac t io nalis m in k o r ea As was mentioned above, factionalism was primarily rooted in the heterogeneous origins of different Korean Communist groups. While a number of the leading members of the Korean Socialist Party (Han’in Sahoedang, formed in April 1918) had their background as nationalist ­resistance activists,15 the leaders of the Irkutsk Korean Communist Party (formed in May 1921 at its inaugural congress in Irkutsk, hence the name) were mostly Russified Korean emigrants from the Maritime Province, better versed in socialist doctrine.16 While much of the strife between the two groups was in reality centered on down-to-earth interests, namely the distribution of the resources Moscow was going to use for supporting the Korean Communist movement, the competition had to be articulated ideologically. In this process, the issues of nation, nationalism,

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and the role of religion and religious organizations in the class and national struggle came to the forefront. The debates around these issues positively contributed to the further development of the Korean Communists’ positions on the complicated problems of interrelationship between socialist independence movements and nationalistic antiimperialism in the colonized societies. For example, Nam Manch’un’s (Pavel Nikiforovich Nam, 1892–1938) theses, adopted by the inaugural congress of the Irkutsk Communist Party, voiced support for the tactical alliances with the “authentic” liberation-oriented nationalists, but at the same time signaled strong antipathy towards the “opportunistic” nationalists attempting to disguise themselves as Communists, as well as the “mediaeval” influences of religious organizations. Concurrently, Irkutsk Communists—in full agreement with Comintern orthodoxy of the day— proclaimed their intention to maintain the organizational autonomy of the “proletarian” movement, so as to make possible a struggle against “bourgeois-democratic nationalism” for the acquisition of the hegemony inside the Korean anti-Japanese movement.17 However, a number of Russia-based Korean revolutionary émigrés sympathetic to the Korean Socialist Party—which reconstituted itself into Shanghai Korean Communist Party (formed in May 1921 at its inaugural congress in Shanghai, hence the name), wrote in June 1921 a longish letter to the leadership of the Comintern attempting to counter both the tactics and the strategy of the Irkutsk Communists. While being highly critical towards what they saw as antidemocratic, authoritarian pressure by the Irkutsk Communists (and the Russian Communists acting as their political patrons), the Shanghai Party sympathizers also mentioned what they regarded as the particular specificity of the Korean case. According to their vision of Korea’s modern history, the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat was less developed in Korea than the national contradictions vis-à-vis the Japanese colonizers, since Korea was colonized before the industrial capitalism had a chance to develop there. Therefore, a broad national anticolonial alliance was seen as the way to go for Korea’s Communist activists.18 The idea of such an alliance was not completely alien to Irkutsk Communists or their allies either, of course. Kim Kyusik (1881–1950), a nationalist luminary who was in the early 1920s allied with Irkutsk Commu-



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nists, famously proposed a unification of all revolutionary forces, even including the ultra-nationalist Taejonggyo cult, around Communists and the Comintern in his longish programmic speech to the Congress of the Toilers of the Far East in Moscow on January 24, 1922.19 However, this idea was much more pronounced in the Shanghai Communists’ tactics. It has to be noticed that the discussions between the adepts of pure class struggle as the main content of any progressive or revolutionary movement and the proponents of a broader pan-national alliance aimed at struggling primarily against foreign imperialism have been continuing in (South) Korea until the 1980s. After all, the asymmetric relationship vis-à-vis South Korea’s American patrons were easily seen as a form of neocolonialism, a contemporary substitute for the Japanese colonial yoke, while the growth of the industrial working class and its workplace movements in the 1970s–1980s provided good grounds for the arguments in favor of the primary importance of class conflicts. In the late 1980s, the discussions between left-nationalist opponents of American imperialism and those more interested in South Korea’s internal social contradictions constituted the gist of polemics between the NL (national liberation) and PD (people’s democracy) factions of the underground antisystemic movement.20 It is interesting that NL leaders, in their ideological battles against relatively weaker PD opponents, often referred to the latter as “factionalists” (chongp’ajuŭija), thus resuscitating Comintern parlance of the 1920s. Still, similar to the Communist factions of the 1920s, both groups often joined forces for larger campaigns and protests. Moreover, not unlike the Shanghai Communists, they were also proposing a broadly based national alliance with diverse “patriotic” (aeguk) and “nation-saving” (kuguk) forces, aimed at a coordinated blow against the main “American imperialist” enemy (Yi 2013). Of course, the discursive battles between NL leftist nationalists and PD Marxist orthodoxes were taking place against a qualitatively different backdrop of postcolonial (albeit dependent on the USA) and rapidly industrializing South Korea. However, certain ideological frames that resurfaced during these polemics indeed seemingly had their remote historical origins in the discussions between the adepts of Irkutsk and Shanghai parties more than a half-century earlier.

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orth o d o x v s . nat io nal ist — f a c t io nal s t r if e in k o r ean c o m m u nis t m o v e men t af t e r t h e m id - 19 2 0s Starting with the polemics between the mostly foreign-based Irkutsk and Shanghai parties of the early 1920s, the disputes putting the national versus class approach continued in the mid-1920s between different factions in the Communist movement inside Korea. The main protagonists were the (illegal) Tuesday Society (Hwayohoe) directly related to the Irkutsk Communists,21 the (legal) Sun and Moon Society (Irwŏlhoe) created by Korean students in Tokyo in 1925 on strictly Leninist ideological basis, the (illegal) Seoul faction with its Shanghai ties, and the (illegal) ML (Marxist-Leninist) faction.22 The latter was a loose network of militants who attempted to organize the unified, postfactional (“Third,” if one follows the accepted classification), Korean Communist Party on orthodox theoretical grounds at the end of 1926.23 All the factions were attempting to make their contribution into the grand enterprise of the introduction of Marxist basics into the Korean public space. Chŏng Paek (1899–1950), Yi Sŏngt’ae (1901–1938), and other Seoul and Shanghai faction activists ran in 1923–1925 a Marxist publishing house, Minjungsa, that printed, for example, the first-ever Korean translation of Karl Marx’s seminal 1849 Lohnarbeit und Kapital (Wage Labor and Capital, 1849), mostly based on preexisting Japanese translations.24 Their Sun and Moon Society competitors were also to gain prestige via Marxist originals’ introduction: their publisher, Tokyo-based Kwŏndoksa (1926–1927), printed the pioneering translation of Friedrich Engels’ Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, 1880) into Korean, again amply utilizing the existing Japanese renderings.25 Some elements of MarxismLeninism were indeed developing into facts of common knowledge among the better-educated urbanites. A Grand Dictionary of the New Words published in a popular Seoul journal listed Lenin’s “infantile disorder of left-wing [Communism]” (chwaik soabyŏng) as a common neologism, on par with “Comintern” and “pioner” (a “young pioneer,” a member of the Soviet Communist children organization).26 Basic Marxist



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theory per se was rather an object of assiduous study and diligent popularization than a subject matter for factional debates. The main bones of contention were still the issues of the alliances with the nationalist groupings, especially with the religious ones: the Seoul faction, following the tradition established by Shanghai Communists and acting on the Comintern’s advice, was cautiously welcoming such tactical alliances, while the other factions were more skeptical. The factional conflict sometimes escalated to the level of direct physical violence: fistfights and scuffles between Seoul faction Communists and their more orthodox opponents were graphically described, for example, in the autobiography of a Tuesday Society leader, Kim Tanya (1901–1938), which he wrote in 1937 while in Moscow, before being arrested (and then executed) by the Soviet political police.27 The official pretext for the arrest was, in fact, a denunciation of Kim as a “Japanese agent” written and submitted by yet another Korean Communist exile in Moscow, Yi Sŏngt’ae. Yi was originally a member of the rival Shanghai faction, mentioned above as an early, pioneering popularizer of basic Marxist texts.28 Of course, all Communists of Korea, regardless of factional allegiance, were primarily national independence activists in the sense that they wanted Korean sovereignty to be restored in the first place. As a rather orthodox Tuesday Society member, Kwŏn Osŏl (1897–1930), told his Japanese interrogators in 1927, Communism in Korea was to be implemented by Koreans’ own hands and under Korean governance, so separating Korea from the Japanese imperial realm was the first task.29 The same was told by his Tuesday Society co-member, Kim Ch’an (1894–?), to his Japanese investigator in 1931: “Down with Japanese imperialism” (T’ado Ilbon chegukchuŭi), “Down with all the feudal forces” (T’ado ilch’e ponggǒn seryǒk), “Long live Korea’s national liberation” (Chosǒn minjok haebang manse), and “Long live Comintern” (Kukche kongsandang manse) were all Communists’ main slogans.30 However, to which degree the Communists had to collaborate with non-socialists broadly sharing the same initial goal was yet another issue. The other important issues included the linkages between economic and political struggles, as well as the permissibility of the political participation inside the legal framework established by the Japanese colonial administrators—that is, the issue of the limits of acceptable compromise with the realities of the administratively managed, highly unfree public sphere. All these issues

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have retained their importance for Korean progressive movements until the recent days. It is interesting to notice that, due to the relative relaxation of colonial censorship in the 1920s, the tactical issues of the radical movement could be even debated in the open press. That such debate was finding its way to the pages of newspapers and journals implied that they were of interest to their readership. For example, as Japan was preparing to implement the extremely restrictive Public Security Preservation Law (Chian Iji Hō) in 1925, a popular magazine, Kaebyŏk, surveyed the opinions of influential Communist leaders on the potential impact of the new law and, concurrently, on the perspectives of the collaboration between the radical (“social”) and general national movement. That such collaboration was needed was obvious to all the leaders surveyed, including these from the more orthodox Tuesday Society. One of its major ­ standard-bearers, Kwŏn Osŏl, mentioned that both nationalists and “social movement” activists had to collaborate when subjected to the same pressures. Another central Tuesday Society militant, then fresh from his studies in Moscow, was Cho Pong’am (1898–1959; a driving force in the process of creating a unified Communist Party and a future leader of South Korea’s embattled social democratic opposition in the 1950s, eventually executed in 1959 by Syngman Rhee’s dictatorial regime; see Postscript). He agreed with Kwŏn in principle but with one caveat: “compromising” (moderate) nationalists were to be excluded. The Seoul faction expressed itself in a way more enthusiastic manner. One of its founders, Kim Saguk (alias: Kim Haegwang, 1892–1926), went as far as to say that originally, national and social movements have the same interests, so in the case (moderate) nationalists would end up converting to “neoJapanism” (pro-Imperial beliefs), “we” (Communists) should help to reconstruct the genuinely nationalist movement.31 While Seoul Communists were hardly different from more orthodox factions in distinguishing themselves very clearly from the nationalists (who were understood to be unable to “bring authentic liberation” to Korea), they put much clearer emphasis on perceiving the latter as partners and collaborators, albeit for a limited historical period. On the pages of the same Kaebyŏk, in the same year (1925), a well-known Communist publicist, Kim Kyŏngjae (1899–?), appealed to different “social movement” (Communist) factions for unity, maintaining that their differences were more tactical than



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strategic, and that unity would greatly benefit the movement as a whole.32 The topic of Communist factional discussions was obviously of interest to Korea’s educated readership of the 1920s.

po le m ic s ar o u nd sin ’gan h o e Pak Chinsun vs. Nam Manch’un The differences between the more nationalistically oriented and more orthodox Marxist Left were not limited to the issue of where the Korean Communist movement had to find allies and how. In less official messages intended for internal readers, the status of the Korean Communist movement was hotly debated as well. One of the arguments that the more nationalist Left used while proposing a broader alliance with diverse nationalist groupings was the “immaturity” of the Korean Communist movement, and, hence, its inability to connect to the masses and lead their struggles on its own. As Pak Chinsun (1897–1938), one of the main thinkers among the Shanghai Communists, argued in a letter to the Korean Commission of the Comintern Executive (February 16, 1926), Korea still possessed very few modern factory workers—only around forty thousand—to develop a viable Communist movement on the working-class basis. According to Pak, 95 percent, if not 99 percent, of all the Korean Communist activists had an intellectual, rather than working-class, background. While that could explain the ubiquity of the “infantile disease” of ultra-leftism, it also necessitated a broad alliance with mass organizations, including the native Ch’ŏndogyo religion. Interestingly, Pak artfully utilized particularly Russian historical vocabulary, obviously in order to universalize the short history of the Korean Communist movement in terms of what was considered in the Comintern circles the criterion of universality, namely Russia’s revolutionary history. Korea’s revolutionary intellectuals were defined as raznochintsy (literally, “people of miscellaneous ranks”)—that is, an analogue of the raznochinnyi (non-noble) revolutionaries of Russia’s own nineteenthcentury history, the heirs to noblemen revolutionaries (Decembrists) and the predecessors of the proletariat-based social democrats. Korean leftist intellectuals’ contemptuous attitude vis-à-vis the “spontaneous

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figure 2.1 Pak Chinsun (1897–1938) discussing colonial issues with Vladimir Il’ich Lenin (1870–1924) and other participants at the Second World Congress of the Comintern (meeting of the Committee on National and Colonial Issues), July 25, 1920. Credit: Im Kyŏngsŏk (Sungkyunkwan [Sŏnggyun’gwan] University)

movements of the masses” was characterized as komchvanstvo (literally, “Communist swagger”), a self-critical term rather popular in 1920s USSR.33 Korea was being represented as Russia of the past—long before the age when a successful “proletarian revolution” became feasible. In some months after Pak Chinsun gave his rather sobering account of the past and present of the Korean Communist movement, his perennial opponent, the Irkutsk faction’s Nam Manch’un, reported from Shanghai, where the Foreign Bureau of the underground Communist Party of Korea was located (May 17, 1926). In his interpretation, the proverbial “infantile disorders” of the past—when Communist intellectuals, devoid of direct linkage to the masses, dreamed of an immediate “proletarian revolution”—were now left behind. Korea’s underground Communist Party was becoming “mass-based and Bolshevik.” In Nam’s over-optimistic estimation, it was “to become one of the strongest sections of the



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Comintern in two–three years.” Nam was hoping that the party would be able to use the planned June 10, 1926, demonstrations timed to the funerals of the last Chosŏn king, Sunjong (r. 1907–1910) in order to “rise and educate the masses.” Since the seminal March 1, 1919, independence movement happened to take place during and after the stately funeral ceremonies for Sunjong’s father, Kojong (r. 1863–1907), Nam hoped to repeat the same success once again seven years later. While the mass demonstrations were to become “a rehearsal for the uprising,” the party’s support for urban strikes and tenants in disputes with landlords was to provide it with a popular basis. As “Korean businessmen tended to solidarize with the Japanese entrepreneurs” in case of the strikes, Nam emphasized “mass work” rather than the perspectives of an alliance with “bourgeois” nationalists, although he was somewhat supportive of an alliance with “Ch’ŏndogyo’s leftist group.” While his assessment was definitely more sanguine and his political line sounded significantly more radical than Pak’s, he too artfully employed the particularly Russian idioms to make his rhetoric universal enough for his Comintern interlocutors. He defined, for example, the inadequate leadership capability of early 1920s Communists as a form of khvostizm (literally, “tailing behind [the masses]”)— Lenin’s expression for “opportunism devoid of revolutionary leadership,” which was popular among Russian Communists of the 1920s. Otherwise, however, Korea, in his view, more and more resembled Russia on the eve of the 1917 revolution.34 Nam’s rather optimistic analysis was grounded in the generally upward trajectory of Korea’s Communist movement in the first half of 1926. As Han Wigŏn (1896–1937), a major ML theoretician, wrote in his 1930 analysis of the past “factional” errors (see more on this analysis below), 1926 began with great hopes. Labor and peasants’ movements were on the rise, and there was a great demand for the creation of a unified party on a nonfactional basis among the rank-and-file cadres and militants inside the Communist milieu (Han 1987 [1930]). The Comintern was attempting, on its side, to defuse the factional conflicts by agreeing, in its March  31, 1926, resolution, to regard the non-mainstream factions— which still did not enter the Korean Communist Party—as solidary (sochuvstvuyushchie) Communist groups, to be assisted and advised (RGASPI, F. 495, Op. 2, d. 67, pp. 72–73). In such an atmosphere, a number of prominent members of the most important non-mainstream

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faction—that is, the Seoul faction—calmly initiated behind-the-scenes talks with the key Tuesday Society member, Kim Ch’an (1894–?), seeking admission to the party, which was at that point still largely dominated by the Tuesday Society. Chŏng Paek (1899–1950), a Marxism popularizer mentioned above, was one of them. Soon, the Seoul faction split into the “new” Seoul faction favoring the idea of creating a unitary party together with the Tuesday Society members, and the “old” Seoul faction stubbornly clinging to its independent political course. The split signified a wider acceptance of a Tuesday Society–dominated party as the legitimate center of gravity of the Communist movement in Korea.35 Disagreements and heated debates, however, remained a fixture of party life, its leadership becoming increasingly heterogeneous and less and less resembling the Tuesday Society’s old boys club during the course of the turbulent year of 1926. June 10, 1926, and Beyond June 10, 1926, indeed turned out to be a landmark day in 1920s Korean history, demonstrating the extent to which the majority of Koreans saw Japanese rule as alien and forcibly imposed. The Tuesday Society represented Korea’s Communists as one of the major forces beyond the events and had to withstand the worst of the police onslaught before and after them. Many of its leading members found themselves in prisons or in exile; the vacant leading positions in the underground party apparatus were taken over by the members of other factions including nonmainstream ones. Kim Ch’ŏlsu (1893–1986), a veteran of the Shanghai faction (on his early career, see Chapter 1) who had been willingly cooperating with the Tuesday Society since the foundation of the party in April 1925, assumed in September the key position of chief secretary. An Kwangch’ŏn (1897–?), his ally from the Sun and Moon Society, was responsible for drafting the Chŏng’uhoe declaration discussed below. Whereas the members of the “old” Seoul faction mostly rejected the declaration, the “new” Seoul faction members were joining the party en masse. Despite police surveillance, Kim Ch’ŏlsu, assisted by An Kwangch’ŏn, managed to hold the Second Party Congress of the Korean Communist Party on December 6, 1926. The protocol of this Congress, which soon reached the Comintern’s headquarters in Moscow, revealed



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that, compared to the previous year, the party had doubled in size numerically. It numbered 535 persons now, among whom 95 were in prison.36 Obviously, active participation in national—rather than purely class-based—struggle meant both sacrifices on the part of the party, but also greatly increased its visibility. Indeed, the slogans in its June 10 agitation materials were largely nationalist: Communists agitated for “Korea free from Government General”, “Korean-centered education,” and abolition of Japanese migration to Korea; they also appealed to a popular boycott of Japanese-made goods.37 While this sort of popular nationalist posture was easy to adopt for strategic and tactical purposes, even for rather orthodox-minded Communists, the principal discrepancies in their factional views were still far from disappearance. Nam mentioned in his account that factionalism—of the kind that Hume might have labeled “personal”—was being overcome in Korea, internal strife being now much more of the matter of principal disagreements around the political line rather than simple group or personal squabbles. To a degree, it was not untrue. The faction did remain, but their mutual ideological disagreements, often focused on the practical issues in the relationship between the Communists and the rest of the anticolonial movement, were increasingly articulated in quite sophisticated language of Leninist theoretical debates. The factional struggles were the matter of mostly practical differences in the early 1920s, nationalistic and orthodox Communists disagreeing on the present status, tasks, and desirable allies of their nascent movement. The main arenas for disagreements remained the same in the late 1920s as well, but the mode of their articulation was becoming increasingly refined in theoretical terms, as Communist-driven work on the introduction of Marxist theory to Korea was now bringing its fruits. References to diverse Marxist-Leninist theories were now more comprehensible for Korea’s radical reading public. In this way, factional discussions simultaneously reflected and contributed to greater theoretic and rhetoric sophistication inside the Communist milieu. Chŏng’uhoe vs. Chŏnjinhoe One important example of the discussion culture that developed among Korea’s Communists already by the mid-1920s are polemics surrounding

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the formation of Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society, 1927–1931), the famed “unitary national party” supposed to be the analogue of China’s pre-1927 Guomindang-Communist alliance in colonial-era Korea. One of the salvos that opened the discussion that eventually led to Sin’ganhoe being formed, was the November 17, 1926, declaration by Chŏng’uhoe (Political Friends’ Society)—a legal front group created by more orthodox Tuesday and Sun and Moon Societies—which urged Korea’s Communists to overcome their factional divisions and join the ranks with the “uncompromising” nationalists, at least temporarily.38 The noteworthy part in the rhetoric of this declaration was the broad use of signifiers and ideological expressions that were supposed to be generally shared across the leftist political spectrum—and, indeed, by a major part of nationalists as well. For example, Chŏng’uhoe suggested “liberating masses from their ignorance . . . and organizing them through education”—something that not only leftists but also nationalists traditionally aspired to. Concomitantly, some important articles of radical leftist faith, such as “daily struggle,” “theoretical struggle,” and “class- and mass-based political struggle,” were mentioned too. The particular emphasis on “theoretical struggle” and the “turn from economic to political struggle” was seemingly an influence of Fukumotoism, a then popular radical current inside the Japanese Communist Party that was based on a rather exaggerated belief that Japanese capitalism was heading towards its ultimate destruction and the radicals needed to concentrate their efforts on the ­political contest.39 However, an invocation of the general Communist consensus concerning the importance of “struggle” and the desirability of its particular forms (“theory,” “masses,” “classes,” and “daily life” were all to be included), was the necessary prerequisite for advancing any novel practical proposal—in this case, a temporary alliance with “uncompromising” (and thus less unacceptable) nationalists.40 This alliance was eventually to develop into Sin’ganhoe, an important attempt to put Communists, in collaboration with more radical nationalist factions, into the controlling position in a pan-national—rather than purely ­ ­ class-based—movement. The reaction to this declaration from the more nationalist “old” Seoul faction came in little more than a month. Chŏnjinhoe (the Progress Society), “Seoul” faction stalwarts’ own legal front group, published a longish response to the declaration of their rivals in the same media outlet



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(the daily Chosŏn Ilbo). While Chŏng’uhoe, in good Leninist spirit (and in accordance with Fukumotoist tenets), defined the avoidance of “political struggle” as a “juvenile disease,” their rivals from Chŏnjinhoe charged them with yet another major sin in Leninist doctrine, namely “rightist deviation.” After all, in colonial-era Korea, “political struggle” could easily “degrade” to the level of petitions for self-rule or bestowal of suffrage upon the Korean subjects of the Japanese Empire. The use of highly morally charged language (“degradation”)—yet another rhetorical trait common to Communists and nationalists—is to be detected in both Chŏng’uhoe’s declaration and Chŏnjinhoe’s response. In a nutshell, both sides were following the rules of the same grammar of political rhetoric and appealing to the same set of common political values, while making clear their important differences. Chŏng’uhoe, for example, saw the Korean social movement as hitherto more economical—and thus underdeveloped (in the Leninist political values hierarchy shared by both factions, “political movement” was the evolutionary pinnacle of the social movement development). At the same time, more nationalist Chŏnjinhoe emphasized the inevitability of more nationally oriented social movement in a colony struggling for its liberation and defined the preexisting Korean social movement as mainly national in inspiration.41 Chŏng’uhoe deplored the “spontaneity” (chayŏn saengsansŏng) of the existing mass movement, while such Seoul faction theoreticians as Hong Yangmyŏng were keener to emphasize the importance of practical, rather than purely theoretical, struggle. At the same time, fellow orthodox Marxists, such as Ch’oe Ikhan (1897–?; see more on him and his family in Chapter 1), saw Chŏng’uhoe’s willingness to join ranks with some nationalists as unprincipled “eclecticism.” Other adepts of the orthodoxy wanted the “Marxist elements” inside both economic and eventual political movement to be strengthened before any tactical combinations with nationalists were made.42 Chŏng’uhoe declaration compilers—primarily, An Kwangch’ŏn and his comrades from the Sun and Moon Society—found themselves under fire from both sides. Sin’ganhoe and the “Proletarian Hegemony” As was mentioned above, one focal point of the heated discussions between nationalist and orthodox Communists was the issue of Sin’ganhoe,

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The mainstream viewpoint was articulated by An Kwangch’ŏn, the former founder of the more orthodox Sun and Moon Society and once the responsible secretary of the Communist Party. He published an article on Communists’ duties in relationship to Sin’ganhoe work, in which—following the current Comintern line—he posed the “acquisition of hegemony” over the “petty bourgeois elements” inside Sin’ganhoe as the chief task of the Communists working as a part of this united front organization. Following the spirit of successive Comintern resolutions and instructions, An demanded that Communists maintain their “proletarian character” inside the united front framework.45 One of his major theoretical opponents, the Seoul faction’s Hong Yangmyŏng, responded to this thesis in a longer treatise on the particularity of Korea’s sociopolitical movements, which he serialized in January  1928  in Chosŏn Ilbo. Hong saw any talks about “proletarian hegemony” as tactically erroneous since they were dividing the nascent and still weak united front movement. On a deeper plane, he regarded the Korean proletariat as too weak to exercise hegemony in the national movement, which, under the colonial conditions, had to put the priority on pan-national issues.46 Support for An’s thesis, which more moderate members of Sin’ganhoe’s Tokyo chapter, in their January  1928 declaration—signed by around 150 ­ ­ persons—termed “ultra-leftist, ”47 was relatively weak in the Communists’ ranks. In fact, some Seoul faction members, typically Sin Iryong ­ ­ another Chosŏn Ilbo journalist in Communist leadership— (1890–?)—yet



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even proposed to “liquidate” (that is, to dissolve) the party as such, “throw away the dogma that our movement has to be class-based,” and redefine Communism as just an element inside the national united front movement.48 With Sin, “liquidationism” (ch’ŏngsannon, calqued from ­ Russian likvidatorstvo) entered the lexicon of the Korean debates on the party organization theory. A youthful orthodox Marxist, Ko Kyŏnghŭm (1909–1963)—a protégé of Han Wigŏn (1896–1937), a leader of the ML faction—soon entered the polemics. He accused Hong and other Seoul faction members and sympathizers of a “Narodnik-like position” and a lack of understanding of the particular historical role of the working class and the “petit bourgeois nature” of the non-Communist national movement, of which Hong and his kindred spirits were supposedly not sufficiently critical.49 A year later, in May 1929, An Kwangch’ŏn—writing from the relative safety of his Beijing exile—proposed to induce more “workers and peasants” to enter Sin’ganhoe. The aims were to ensure that Sin’ganhoe is democratic enough to isolate and exclude its “right-wing and corrupt” leaders, and to push Sin’ganhoe to detail its “militant” platform and thus “maximize” its capacity to conduct anti-imperialist struggle. However, while needing Sin’ganhoe for the sake of mass mobilization, An made it sufficiently clear that only the “proletariat and its vanguard party” have the capacity to lead the Korean revolution, even in its anti-imperialist, ­ “bourgeois-democratic” stage.50 Interestingly, in his article on united front issue written in autumn 1929, Han Wigŏn mentioned that one reason why Communists indeed needed Sin’ganhoe was exactly the “vanguard party’s” relative weakness in Korea. The “vanguard party” was supposed to “lead the revolution,” but it simultaneously could not realize its aim of political mass mobilization without an intermediary in the form of a legal “national party.”51 By the spring of 1930, however, Ko, Han, and other ML leaders decided that Sin’ganhoe was outliving its usefulness for them. On the one hand, the Comintern, now armed with its new radical “class against class” strategy, was demanding that united fronts everywhere, Korea included, should either follow the Communist strategies and demands or be abandoned. One of the Comintern’s key Korea cadres, Ch’oe Sŏng’u (1898–1937; see more in Chapter 3 on his activities in the subsequent years), theorized, on Iranian, Turkish, Chinese, and Korean materials,

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that in “colonial and dependent societies” the bourgeoisie often overlaps with landlords, with landowners branching out into urban investment and urban capitalists purchasing rural land and leasing it to the tenants. It also easily “degenerates” into comprador intermediaries for “imperialist” foreign capitalists. That supposedly makes bourgeoisie incapable of leading a peasant agrarian revolution or anti-imperialist struggle; “proletarian hegemony” is, consequently, the only viable option.52 On the other hand, Sin’ganhoe’s nationalist leadership, headed by Kim Pyŏngno (1888–1964), was switching to more moderate tactics, despite the post–Great Depression radicalization of grassroots struggles. Consequently, the majority of Communists—this time even including a number of Seoul faction cadres—decided to campaign for Sin’ganhoe’s dissolution and concentrate on the work with peasant and workers’ unions instead. The unions could become “red,” whereas even more radical, noncompromising nationalists inside Sin’ganhoe ranks still remained nationalists, essentially alien to Communist vision.53 There were some dissenting voices, like a former Tuesday Society stalwart who was active as a journalist of general leftist persuasion in the early 1930s (and was suspected of secretly working for Japanese police), Kim Kyŏngjae (1899–?). He contended that the Korean proletariat was still in dire need of nonproletarian allies and that “bourgeois reformists,” lacking serious grassroots support, represented little danger to the Communists’ leadership in the national movement.54 But the voices like his were outnumbered on the Korean Left: the logic of ML militants, like Ko or Han, commanded much stronger influence. While dealing with the practical issue of the Communists’ tactics inside or vis-à-vis Sin’ganhoe, An, Hong, Sin, and Ko also had to outline their position on the broader problems, from the degree of maturity of Korean working-class consciousness as seen through the demands voiced during workers’ strikes and the potential of workers’ supposed “vanguard,” to the global question of the balance of various class forces and objective versus subjective factors in the making of a successful revolution. Their tone and style of their debates suggested a mode of deepening reflectiveness among the Communists of Korea. In the end of the first decade of the Korean Communist movement’s existence inside Korea proper, they had enough experience to posit the question of which class they represented and how to combine their struggle to construct



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workers’ identity as a class-for-itself with the demands of the broader anticolonial movement. The 1927–1931 debates on Sin’ganhoe had their continuation later: by 1934–1935, orthodox Korean Marxists working for the Comintern’s institutions in Moscow (such as Ch’oe Sŏng’u; see Chapters 1 and 3 on his activities), came to regard the Communists’ participation in such a “bourgeois” organization as Sin’ganhoe as a political error. From their vantage point, even arguing for dissolution of Sin’ganhoe was not enough, since its dissolution too ultimately served the interests of Korea’s hopelessly “pro-imperialist” bourgeoisie, which wished nothing more than limited self-rule inside the Japanese Empire; making any connection to Sin’ganhoe was erroneous in itself.55 From 1936, however, a new wind blew: the Comintern shifted to the united anti-fascist front strategy, and that presupposed friendlier attitudes towards the “national bourgeoisie.”56

h o w t o r e inv e nt t h e p ar t y : c o m m u nis t s r e f l ect o n t h e ir m o v e m en t ­

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­

Just as the criticism (in many cases, in the form of self-criticism) of factionalism was now commonplace, the expectations of an imminent radical upsurge were quite common among the Korean Communists of the late 1920s and early 1930s. However, in an article on the Korean political situation and Communists’ tasks published in the same 1929 as the Manifesto of Kim Kyuyŏl’s Preparatory Committee, An Kwangch’ŏn placed more positive emphasis on intellectuals’ role in the Korean Communist movement. While the basis for the popular movement was still in the process of being formed and the working class had just entered the arena of the political struggles, intelligentsia—here An uses this term, derived from Russian, with its specific connotations—had to play “an important role,” both in nationalist and in Communist movements. While An acknowledged its weaker side—constant organizational fractures and the tendency of more moderate intellectuals to “degrade into reformists and compromise with bourgeoisie”—he also accentuated its stronger sides. After all, unlike their counterparts in “advanced countries,” the intellectuals of industrially underdeveloped, colonial Korea had little direct relationship with the process of capitalist production and thus did not have to develop subservient attitudes to



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the capitalist masters. They, on the contrary, tended to “harbor relatively strong discontent about various social contradictions.” While agreeing that intellectuals’ domination was Korean Communism’s weakness, An saw certain inevitability in intellectuals’ exaggerated role. After all, workers’ organizations and their political involvement in Korea were still at their “juvenile stage,” despite the growth in the number of strikes and strikers.59 Not unlike Nam, An was somewhat upbeat about the potential of revolutionary intelligentsia in “leading the masses,” and, in a way similar to Chŏng’uhoe’s declaration, expressed little belief in the spontaneous movement from below. “Bourgeois nationalists,” even the more radical ones coalescing around Chosŏn Ilbo, were seen as having no revolutionary potential. Other adepts of the orthodox Leninist line were keen to put the criticism of their more nationalistic opponents into a global context. Han Wigŏn, a major theoretician of the ML faction uniting more orthodox militants (often with educational background from the Comintern schools in Moscow) and one of the authors of Chŏng’uhoe’s declaration in the past, published a lengthy treatise on the “specific features of Korea’s revolution and current tasks of the working-class vanguard” in 1929. At that point, he (like An Kwangch’ŏn) was in exile in China. Prophetically anticipating—two years before the Japanese occupation of Manchuria— the coming of a large-scale world war between the have and have-not powers, and even mentioning the Pacific as one of the future theatres of this war (which is clairvoyantly termed “future’s Pacific War” in the text), Han defines the most essential “duty of proletarian vanguard” as internationalist. Besides the struggle against the war crisis and for turning the imminent imperialist war into a revolutionary civil conflict, this duty included the “defense of world socialist homeland, the USSR” and “support for the workers’ and peasants’ revolution in China.” Han—who himself entered the Chinese Communist Party in 1930 and subsequently played an important role there—considered the latter the centerpiece of world revolution in the East. According to Han, it was precisely the failure to develop the internationalist outlook, attitudes, and propaganda work that was the biggest undoing of the “Korean proletarian movement” so far—obviously, nationalist factions’ lack of attention to the international context of the Korean Communist struggles is meant here. Han accuses the factional leaders of abusing the Comintern’s authority for

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their own partisan aims, and without dutifully following Comintern instructions. The connections to the Chinese and Japanese movement were to be strengthened, and “[Korean] national exclusiveness” opposed, “theoretically and in political struggle,” with renewed vigor. The leadership in the political struggles in Korea was to be exercised by the working class (with its peasant allies), which was, however, still “extremely young” and numerically small, numbering only approximately seventy thousand ethnic Korean workers (in addition to the ethnic Chinese and Japanese workers and technicians). Given its growing economic immiseration and lack of legal space for political self-expression, the Korean working class was unlikely to develop “social democratic and national reformist” deviations. Still, it needed intellectuals, whose “role in the Korean revolutionary movement” was “extremely important.” The top layers of the intelligentsia were too close to landlords—already being co-opted by the Japanese imperialism—to avoid “falling off ” from the revolutionary ranks; “a part of the intelligentsia,” however, was still expected “to fight for the interests of the working class to the very end.”60 While adhering to the Marxist thesis on “proletarian hegemony” in the revolution, Han’s treatise also emphasizes the role of the “vanguard”—in fact mostly composed of the intellectuals—in fulfilling the international tasks of the Korean Communist movement ,which, as more orthodox Communists saw it, were under-prioritized by their more nationalist opponents. As elimination of factionalism (p’abŏljuŭi ch’ŏngsan) was seen as a major precondition for the party’s successful reorganization from below, on the basis of a militant shop floor movement, the early 1930s saw some attempts at an in-depth, theory-based approach to the faction issue. One such attempt was yet another lengthy analysis by Han Wigŏn, which specifically focused on the “criticism of the theoretical and practical mistakes” made by Korea’s proletarian movement around 1926. That was the year when the Comintern demanded that Korean Communists “change the direction” and reinvent their party as a militant workingclass organization—rather than intellectuals’ gathering—able and willing to engage in broad alliance-building with anticolonial nationalists while preserving its organizational independence. The criticism was simultaneously self-criticism, since Han had to acknowledge the birth defects of the orthodox factions—responsible for forming the Korean Communist Party in April 1925—the legacy of which his own ML fac-



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tion had inherited. As Han, quite realistically, observed, the factions were intellectuals’ groupings unable and unwilling to even penetrate the masses on whose behalf they were going to struggle against the imperialist enemies. Factions’ ambitious leaders, with very limited grasp of Marxist theory, were often running their groupings in almost “feudal” style and always busy competing against each other for members and influence. On a deeper theoretical level, Han attributed the Korean movement’s problems to the “abnormality” of colonial-era Korea’s capitalist development imposed by the outside colonizers, as well as the fact that socialist theory had to be imported to Korea, rather than being developed locally, on the basis of the domestic class-struggle experiences. Still, Han considered the Korean Communist Party’s political line, despite all the mistakes it had supposedly committed, relatively more faithful to the “correct” MarxistLeninist route compared to the “opportunist” tendencies of the nationalist communist groups, which he accused of attempting to destroy the party, and its inability to overcome “non-Communist traditions.”61

co nc lu d ing o b s e r v at io n s: f a c t io nal p o le m ics an d t h e de e pe ning o f s o c ialist d isco u r se To summarize, in this chapter I dealt with both the content of the polemics between various factions of the Korean Communist movement of the 1920s and the forms and methods in which these polemics were articulated. My aim was to understand the context and significance of the issues that were the objects of the polemics, and at the same time to account for the ways in which legitimate disagreements could be voiced in the Communist milieu of the 1920s. The polemics, which laid the fundamentals for the theoretical and discursive development of Korea’s antisystemic movements for the coming decades, were an inevitable element in the development of the early Communist movement given the divergent ideological nuances and interests of the groupings involved, and greatly accelerated the ideological, political, and tactical maturation of the radical militancy. The polemists were indeed making broadly similar observations on the issues of Korea’s modern development in general, and the dynamics

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of different social forces involved in Korea’s liberational movements. Using the common Leninist methodology and lexicon, both more nationalist and more orthodox Communists identified colonialism as the main issue behind Korea’s backwardness in economic and social terms, and understood the “infantile” level of capitalist development, the underdevelopment of workers’ consciousness and movement, and the necessarily exaggerated role of intellectuals in what was supposed to be a workingclass militancy as consequences of this “colonial deformation.” The (“petit-bourgeois” or “bourgeois”) intellectuals were commonly defined in terms of what they, as nonworkers, lacked—from the ability to penetrate and organize masses to “feudal” mores and the consequent personalization of factional politicking. At the same time, both more nationalist and more orthodox Communists tended to find different sorts of positive aspects in the other wise excruciatingly difficult situation of Korea’s radical leftist movement. The former were emphasizing the prospects of mass anticolonial upsurges born out of national oppression while the latter were accentuating the lack of grounds for social democratic reformism among poor and politically oppressed Korean workers and the limits to the Korean bourgeoisie’s ability to co-opt and buy off the intellectuals of underdeveloped Korea given their lack of direct connections to the capitalist production process. For the lack of better alternatives, radicalized intelligentsia was still seen as the main tool of the working-class-based Communist Party building under the Korean conditions. Non-Communist nationalists and broad, mass-based organization, like Sin’ganhoe, which they were coleading together with Communists, were regarded as useful intermediaries for the task of mass mobilization under the conditions of Communists’ relative weakness. However, more nationalistic and more orthodox Communists disagreed on how the line vis-à-vis such broad, mass-based organizations was to be articulated. They also could not agree on what were the permissible limits of the alliance with non-Communist nationalist (including religious) forces. Given Korea’s particular circumstances, with its complicated overlap of nationalist animosity vis-à-vis the foreign colonial rule, radical intelligentsia’s quest for the alternative socialist modernity, and its struggles against the entrenched local and foreign elites and manifold conflicts around land and working conditions in the countryside and urban settings, there hardly existed any single correct answer to the



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questions the factional polemics of the 1920s have posted. In fact, further indigenization of Communism in Korea in the 1930s included both penetration into the factory masses of the sort the orthodox Communist argued for, and attempts to formulate the Marxist position on the issues of national language, literature, and culture. The debates of the 1920s were primarily important in that they provided venues through which the essential questions could be publicly asked, and honed the language of Communist self-reflection and theoretical analysis. In this way, they played a significant constructive role in the development of both vocabulary and grammar of the incipient socialist culture in Korea.

c h a p te r   3

The Communist Programs

C

ommunism, one of the defining sociopolitical movements of the interbellum Red Age, presents a historian with a serious problem of definition. What was Communism’s goal exactly? As I already mentioned in the Introduction, the answer heavily depends on where in the capitalist world-system the Communist movement in question happened to ­ ­­ be geographically situated.1 Even a brief overview of Communist programs and stated aims will clearly show that they tended to significantly vary from one world-systemic zone to another. The eventual attainment of Communism—a dialectic antithesis to industrial capitalist society in which society would democratically control its economic machinery (rather than being itself controlled by profit-driven economic forces)— was, of course, the common notional goal for all the Communist movements.2 Beyond that, however, the stated objectives tended to greatly vary, largely encompassing everything that the radicalized intellectuals, who usually formed the bulk of the top-tier Communist cadres (see Introduction and Chapter 1), saw as the masses’ progressive demands. And these demands could not but diverge, as both radicalized intellectuals and the subaltern majorities they wished to mobilize possessed and exhibited vastly different desires and demands in the diverse zones of the world economy.

c o m m u nis m in t h e co r e a nd o n t h e p e r ip her y Commonly, the Russian Bolsheviks—first a faction inside the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, or RSDRP (1903–1912) and then an independent political party (since 1912)—are considered the pioneer 102



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Communists who initiated the decisive break from more moderate social democracy following their successful revolution in October 1917.3 However, even a cursory overview of the Bolshevik programs prior to the October revolution will reveal a noticeable lack of attention to the concrete content of the Bolsheviks’ eventual aim: a classless socialistic, or communistic, society. Instead—as, for example, the Bolshevik draft for the resolutions of the Fifth RSDRP Congress (London, 1907) shows us—the Bolshevik faction wanted to concentrate its efforts on “finalizing the democratic revolution under proletariat’s hegemony” and with active participation of peasants. It wanted to establish a democratic republic in Russia, to achieve eight-hour working days and other workingclass demands inside the framework of such a republic, and to satisfy peasantry’s wish for equal redistribution of agrarian land. The struggle for further movement towards socialism was to take place only after radical democratization was achieved.4 The most heated debates between Bolsheviks and their more moderate Menshevik opponents took place around the agrarian program. Bolsheviks demanded nationalization of all the agrarian land as a precondition for the distribution of use rights to land to the peasant communities, whereas Mensheviks saw it as a return to pre-eighteenth-century “Asian” Muscovy with its nominal state title to all land, and supported “municipalization” instead.5 In Russia, a semi-peripheral country commonly referred to as “backward” in the contemporaneous parlance,6 the Communist movement could not but represent, first and foremost, the deepest plebeian aspirations and the most radical (democratic) modernizational tendencies. A significant portion of top-level Bolshevik cadres (according to Liliana Riga, around twothirds) belonged to various ethnic minorities excluded from and often oppressed by the mainstream society of the Russian Empire; democratic resolution of the “national question” thus figured prominently on the list of Bolshevik demands.7 In fact, early Bolsheviks’ attentiveness to minorities’ plight was later to play a significant role in heightening Communism’s popularity among colonial-era Korean intellectuals, themselves a minority in an oppressive multiethnic empire. The next postrevolutionary Bolshevik Party program, adopted in 1919 by the Eighth Party Congress, represented an interesting combination of socialist radicalism—including the declared task of substituting monetary exchange with the planned, statewide redistribution network

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based on existing cooperatives, as well as the appeal by trade unions to take over the job of managing the nationalized parts of the industrial economy—with developmentalist topics. The “utmost development of the productive forces,” rather than immediate attainment of socialism, constituted the core of the party’s economic program.8 Anything else could hardly be expected in a semi-peripheral country where the victorious Bolsheviks presided over a mostly agrarian economy largely destroyed by the world war, internal strife, and war mobilizations. By contrast, the initial program of the German Communist Party (1918) did not mention the development of productive forces at all, evidently on the understanding that it was already sufficiently accomplished. Instead, it focused on purely socialist economic propositions (confiscations of the large and middle-sized enterprises and their socialization with subsequent control over the production by workers’ councils, etc.).9 In the core regions of the world-system, Communism initially represented socialist radicalism in its pure form, with little traces of the general modernizational aspirations or developmentalist visions. As for the colonial possessions of the European powers, which formed much of the world-systemic periphery in the early twentiethcentury world, international Communist strategy uniformly emphasized national liberation first, often to the degree that the Communist movements in the colonial and other peripheral societies should be academically referred to as a sort of mass-based leftist nationalism. The Comintern (the Communist International, 1919–1943), the main guiding organ of the Communist movement in the interwar period, accentuated the united front strategy and tactics in the colonies and “semi-colonial” (noncolonized dependent) societies since its inception. The nascent Communist parties and movements were to prioritize the national liberation issue and ally themselves with nonsocialist radicals and even “bourgeois nationalists,” without, however, losing their organizational independence and a vision of ensuring the Communist hegemony in the national eman­ 10 Seen in this way, Chalmers Johnson’s (1962) famed cipatory struggle. thesis on Chinese Communism evolving into a political vehicle of peasant nationalism by the late 1930s simply states the obvious. Chinese Communism had to put square emphasis on national tasks from the very beginning. Although its programs and platforms, since the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, invariably mentioned “dictatorship



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of workers and peasants” as the party’s ultimate goal, it never failed to emphasize “the overthrow of warlord cliques” and liberation from “the oppression by international imperialists” as its immediate priorities.11 Pushed from the cities into the countryside by the Nationalist (Guomindang) repressions since 1928, the Chinese Communist Party was forced to rely more on the mobilization of peasants rather than the work among urban workers. Thus, it had, by necessity, to articulate peasants’ demands for a modicum of national sovereignty, stable order, and social justice—combining them, of course, with the developmentalist visions of Communist cadres.12 Existing scholarship well establishes that the pioneering Korean Communists—most of them originating from the ranks of nationalist intelligentsia themselves—were working in the 1920s on the premises of the Comintern’s united front strategy, constantly attempting to ally with radical nationalists in order to further their first priority, namely ­ ­ 13 The radical turn in the Korean Comthe national-liberation struggle. munist platform in the late 1920s—early 1930s was also extensively discussed in existing literature; it is commonly seen as being influenced by both external (changes in Comintern’s line) and domestic (grassroots radicalization, upsurge in strikes and riots, etc.) factors.14 A number of authors analyzed also the shift from the emphasis on the “bourgeoisdemocratic revolution” to the vision of a more Soviet-inspired statehood coming immediately after the national liberation, in the Communist programs, as well as the move towards acceptance of the antifascist united front tactics in the late 1930s.15 What, however, seems to be undervalued is the general modernizational impulse palpable in the Korean Communist programmatic and analytical documents of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the democratic aspirations—akin to the democratic emphasis of the prerevolutionary Bolshevik programs mentioned above—visible in these documents. In this chapter, I will argue that in these initial years, the Communists of Korea rather successfully attempted to build up a program of democratic, mass mobilization–based revolutionary struggle towards independence, modernization, and social welfare development, finely attuned to the existing discursive landscape of Korean society. Their programs, while undergoing important alterations following the changes in domestic and international situation, were still consistent in certain points. They were meant to articulate

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broad modern and democratic demands by diverse subaltern strata of the colonial-era society, harmonize national aspirations with a universalist, non-nationalist worldview, and maneuver towards a broad anticolonial alliance while steering clear of the more conservative elements of mainstream Korean society. They were alone in demanding a radical redistribution of land, while the efforts of more conservative “cultural nationalists” were, at best, focused on the “encouragement of Korean production,” cultural development, and piecemeal, extremely limited rural development and “village reconstruction.”16 The strength of the colonial police repression apparatus did, of course, prevent them from prosecuting a successful revolution on their own; however, their efforts represented the beginning of a movement for democratic and radical modernization by mass mobilization and for the masses’ benefit—and this movement was to exert a decisive influence on the Korean Peninsula’s history in the second half of the twentieth century.

ko re an c o m m u nis t p r o gr am s: b e t w e e n nat io nal r e v o l u t io n an d “­p e o p le ’ s d e m o c r acy ” The Early Optimism The programs of the earlier Korean Communist organizations give an impression of overzealous revolutionary optimism. As civil war was continuing in Russia and the great March 1, 1919, mass uprising was vivid in recent memory (see the Introduction), the national activists-turnedCommunists were filling their programs with maximal objectives, most radical demands, and fierce rhetoric. The Shanghai Communist Party— led jointly by national movement veterans-turned-Communists (such as Yi Tonghwi, 1873–1935) and some Russian-born Korean radicals (such as Pak Chinsun, 1897–1938)—put forward the demand for establishing a “Korean Soviet Government under the dictatorship of the proletariat” in Korea into the inaugural Manifesto it adopted at its May 1921 congress in Shanghai. There was, however, very little concrete detail on how this “Korean proletarian government” was to proceed further once it was established. The Platform of the Korean Communist Party mentioned



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“nationalization of all production facilities and transport,” as well as “compulsory and free primary education, labor duty for everybody, emancipation of women,” and so on, without further mention of how it was all to be achieved under the specifically Korean conditions. Korean independence, however, was mentioned as the main prerequisite to furthering socialist revolution in Korea.17 All in all, the Manifesto and Platform looked more declarative than practical. The rivals of the Shanghai Party, the Irkutsk Communist Party— mostly staffed by Russian-b orn and Russian-speaking Maritime Province–based Koreans with few ties to the preexisting nationalist movement—were just as zealously radical, but concurrently more attentive to the minute details of their plans for Korea’s socialist future. The Theses on the Agrarian Issues, adopted by the inaugural congress of the Irkutsk Communist Party (May 1921), mention building a “Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Republic” in independent Korea, to join the world federation of Soviet republics. In addition to confiscation and redistribution of all the landlords’ and ( Japanese) state land, it mentions a stateorganized supply of agricultural machinery to the peasants, as soon as such machinery would be shipped to Soviet Korea “from the Soviet republics of the West,” and beginning of the collectivization of the peasantry— so far, only with the use of the idle land. Poorer Japanese settlers in Korea were invited to join, too, and promised, in the best internationalist spirit, equal rights with Korean peasants. As for the workers, the Theses on the Labor Issues promised them full nationalization of all industries (excluding the smallest shops without wage labor), eight-hour working days, prohibition of female and children labor in the industries involving health dangers, free-of-charge medical services, state-managed pensions, free adult education, and industry-wide (rather than individ18 ­ ­ ­ These programmatic documents give ual factory-based) labor unions. an impression of rhetorical zeal rather than pragmatic planning. They may be compared to the Chinese Communist Party Program adopted by that party’s inaugural First Congress in July 1921. The party, which at that point organized a grand total of fifty-three members, envisioned nothing less than the Chinese nation-state restored on a working-class basis and capitalism, together with the class system, fully and completely abolished as its tasks in hand.19 Inspired by the Russian successes and the general atmosphere of post–First World War global rebellion (see

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the Introduction), East Asia’s pioneering Communists tended to be overzealous in the early 1920s. However, a number of points mentioned in the initial programs (elements of workers’ welfare, etc.) would continuously appear in the later programs of the Korean Communists as well, acquiring an aura of pragmatic actuality as industrial capitalism progressed in Korea, making it realistically possible to think about implementing some measure of redistributive justice. ­Towards a Two-­Staged Revolution By the time the (underground) Korean Communist Party was organized in Kyŏngsŏng (Seoul) in April 1925, however, the Communists of Korea (as well as their Chinese comrades) fully accepted the Comintern theory of two-stage revolution. According to this theory, the first stage of such revolution had to consist of national liberation combined with full-scale democratization, which would facilitate the further struggle for a genuinely socialist revolution.20 In fact, the Comintern tended to view even the coming revolution in Korea’s colonial metropole, Japan, as a “bourgeoisdemocratic” one aiming at abolishing “feudal-absolutist elements” of Japan’s post-Meiji structure such as the imperial system and “feudal land tenure in the countryside”—contrary to the views of some Japanese radicals (the so-called Rōnōha, or Labor and Peasants’ Faction), who were willing to opt for an immediate revolutionary transformation to socialism.21 In China, the 1925 decisions by the Comintern Executive envisioned Guomindang as a “populist revolutionary party” that was, with Communists as its junior partners, to bring “national independence and revolutionary democratic government” (rather than immediate socialist revolution) to China.22 By contrast, the German Communist Party’s 1924 Action Programme emphasized, with the Comintern’s blessing, the task of turning Germany into a Soviet-type state, to be accomplished through “politization of factories,” introduction of Workers’ Councils to control the process of production, formation of Red Guards, and “disarming the bourgeoisie.”23 Germany, however, was judged to be an advanced capitalist society ripe for the task of socialist revolution here and now, unlike both Japan and Korea. Thus, the newborn Korean Communist Party did not have to bother itself with the detailed descriptions of future life in



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the “Korean Soviet Republic,” concentrating itself instead on the details of the anticolonial revolution. Unfortunately, much of its plans remain unknown to us. The Korean Communist Party’s inaugural congress (April 17, 1925; see also Chapter 1) adopted no official program, entrusting instead its Central Executive Committee with undertaking this task.24 Its representative to Moscow, Cho Tongho (1892–1954), relayed to the Comintern in his report on the event that the resolution of the inaugural congress expressed Communists’ willingness to facilitate the pan-national anti-imperialist movement and to struggle against both Japanese and ethnic Korean capitalists. It also appealed to its supporters to gather under the Comintern’s banner, struggle for organizing workers and peasants for the independence cause and against Japanese capitalism, and fight against ­ ­ 26 This prothe hated Oriental Development Company25 and Christianity. gram was obviously underdeveloped and rather schematic, including the apparently untimely topic of antichurch struggle. It was hardly fitting to the Korean situation, where the colonizers were for the most part not Christians and where Christianity was one of the few religions not to be placed under direct control of the colonial powers.27 Indeed, in its September 21, 1925, resolution on Korea the Oriental Bureau of the Comintern implicitly disavowed the anti-Christian campaigning, demanding that Korean Communists instead penetrate religious organizations and agitate among their rank-and-file members against the opportunistic attitudes of religious leaders.28 As a result, the next programmatic document—the Declaration of Korean Communist Party, published by a group of émigré Korean Communists in Shanghai, in their journal, Pulkkot (The Flowers of Fire, No. 7, September 1926)—was much more coherent and richer on details. It envisioned Korean independence to be restored through a national revolution under the proletarian hegemony, which, however, even the Korean bourgeoisie was allowed to join. As the result of such a revolution, a democratic republic, which would additionally practice a “people’s militia” system in its military policy, was to be established to guarantee the equality of sexes, freedom of trade union organization and strikes, eighthour working days, and free education to all under age sixteen in the Korean (rather than Japanese) language. The newborn democratic Korea

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was to enter a friendly alliance with the USSR and redistribute the lands of larger landowners, as well as the land holdings of the Japanese state and quasi-state organizations (Oriental Development Company, etc.), to land-hungry Korean peasants. However, full land reform was to happen only after further revolutionary successes—for the period of “democratic revolution,” the tenants had to be content with the tenancy rate reduction to 30 percent of harvest, waiting for full and total land redistribution in the future. Obviously, rather moderate positions on the issues of industry nationalization and full land redistribution—neither was mentioned among the immediate revolutionary tasks—were meant to attract Korean propertied classes into the united anticolonial front with the Korean Communists.29 Nam Manch’un (1892–1938), a leader of the Irkutsk Communists who stayed in Shanghai in 1926 supervising Pulkkot, mentions his desire to attract more moderate national and even religious groups into such a front by somewhat toning down Communists’ rhetoric in his letter to Grigory Voitinsky (1893–1953), one of the Comintern’s key cadres dealing with East Asian issues.30 The year 1926 was still the age of the continuous alliance of the Chinese Communist Party with Guomindang in East Asia’s Communist movement, and the Comintern wanted its East Asian affiliates to practice moderation. A similar picture of the Communist vision for Korea’s immediate revolutionary future emerges from the seventeen original slogans of the Korean Communist Party mentioned by a ranking party cadre, Kim Ch’an (1894–?; on him, see Chapter  1), during his interrogation by Japanese police in 1931. These slogans include, of course, the appeal for Korea’s complete national liberation. At the same time, however, the Communists urged the peasants to refuse paying tenant fees to Japanese landowners only (by implication, the tenancy contracts among Koreans were still to be honored). On the social side, eight-hour working days (six hours for minors), minimum wage, unemployment benefits, maternity benefits, and paid maternity leaves for women were mentioned, together with compulsory and free public education and professional training. Nationalization of factories was omitted, however.31 One foreign source for the Korean Communist welfare aspirations was most likely the USSR, which was one of the pioneers in social welfare development in the 1920s. Soviet history saw the introduction in the 1920s of old-age pensions for urban workers (past the age of sixty for men and



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fifty-five for women), as well as unemployment benefits for the workers in the urban formal sector (amounting to around 95  percent of the average salary), and maternity leave (six weeks before and after delivery for women engaged in physical labor). The eight-hour working day and shortened working day for minors were among the proudest original achievements of postrevolutionary social policies.32 Soviet social policies, for example, the introduction of obligatory primary schooling and the efforts to “liquidate illiteracy” among the adults, as well as maternity protections laws, were routinely reported even in the colonial-era mainstream Korean dailies.33 Yet another foreign reference could have been Weimar Germany, the capitalist state where the Left, with its social demands, played a significant political role. Since 1927, Germany had twelve weeks of maternity leave, although it did not cover all the categories of the working women.34 The project of pan-national anticolonial revolution and rebuilding independent Korea into a democratic state with very prominent welfarist elements, given shape in the Communist programmatic documents of 1925–1926, continued to dominate the Communist visions of the future throughout the rest of the colonial period. The ultimate aim of the Communist movement, namely the socialist society, was mostly given only very general descriptions. By contrast, the first national-liberational and democratic stage of the Korean revolution was to be described beforehand in abundant details, to popularize Communists’ aims and establish Communist authority inside the ranks of the national movement in general. Indeed, as time elapsed and Communist work in mass organizations progressed, their descriptions of Korea’s postrevolutionary democratic future were becoming increasingly elaborate and popularly attractive. A New Radicalization One of such descriptions—in a way, a more radical one than the proof the party on ­ grammatic documents of 1925–1926—was the Theses the general political situation and the party’s imminent tasks in Korea, adopted by the Third Congress (held secretly in a private house in Koyang, near Seoul) on February 27–28, 1928. Supposed to be sent to Moscow as the party’s report to the Comintern, they can now only be found in Japanese police documents, in Japanese translation. The Theses ­ were ­

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advocating a popular anticolonial revolution in the close future and the struggle for a “people’s republic” in Korea, on the understanding that the preconditions needed for building a “Soviet republic” were so far absent. The “people’s republic” was to ensure the withdrawal of the Japanese army and police, as well as confiscation and redistribution (to the Korean peasants) of the land previously owned by the Japanese companies as well as Korean “aristocrats.” Significantly, the tenants were to hold indefinitely the land they used to lease, without having to pay tenant fees any longer.35 This radicalization was most likely related to the “lessons ­ of the Chinese revolution” mentioned in the analytical part of the Theses. As the Guomindang’s coup against its erstwhile Communist allies was in full swing,36 Korean Communists had to reassess the reliability of the ethnic Korean propertied classes as potential partners in anticolonial struggle and recalibrate their rhetoric towards their most natural support basis, that is, the land-hungry peasantry. It is noteworthy, however, that the more modern faction of the Korean ruling class received somewhat better treatment than the landowners. The document specifically mentions that national (owned by Korean capitalists) industry was to develop freely, without the impediments the Japanese colonial administrators used to put in its way. As for capitalists’ wage laborers, the welfarist promises were kept basically on the same level as in the 1925–1926 documents (eight-hour working day for adults, six hours for minors, sickness and unemployment insurance paid by the employer, etc.) while it was also specified that ethnic Japanese and Western workers in Korea were to enjoy the same labor rights—and receive salaries equal to those of their Korean colleagues. In addition, the generally democratic and human rights–related part of the program was further augmented. It was added, for example, that the party was in favor of abolishing all corporal punishments and all secret police surveillance, as well as all the discrimination against Koreans in the educational system.37 To be sure, the party’s interest in human rights guarantees for the colonized was quite widely shared across the political spectrum. The Tokyo branch of Sin’ganhoe—where Communists participated but which they did not fully control—declared itself, for example, in favor of abolishment of torture, legal processes fully open for the public, and full gender equality, in December 1927. Additionally, it wanted to stop sex trafficking and allow the inmates in prison the freedom of reading and



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communication. The demands related to workers’ conditions—the eighthour working day, minimal legal wage, and the right to strike—were broadly similar to these of the Communists, but perhaps somewhat less radical.38 By mid-1928, however, a string of arrests by the Japanese police nearly paralyzed centralized Communist activities in Korea, already divided by factional struggles. Only in July 1928, around 170 party members, including a good number of its leading cadres, were arrested.39 This, as well as the obvious inability of the existing Communist movement to perform its assumed role of the vanguard of mass anticolonial struggles, led the Comintern to rescind the acknowledgment of the Korean Communist Party as a local Comintern section. In its famed December 1928 Resolution, the Comintern instructed its Korean followers to better penetrate both the workers’ and peasant associations and the existing legal organizations (even including the religious ones) and perform an utmost act of political rope-walking: to collaborate with the nonsocialist national movements while at the same time keeping their organizational and ideological integrity and doing their best to reveal the baselessness of reformist and other “bourgeois-democratic” illusions spread by nationalist leaders. While the dialectics of “pan-national alliance-cum-class struggle” were the trademark of the Comintern’s line for the Communist struggle in the colonized countries since its very incipience, the December 1928 Resolution emphasizes the antibourgeois and antireformist militancy way stronger than the earlier Comintern instructions, most likely under the influence of the failure of the united front between Nationalists and Communists in China. Concurrently, agrarian revolution was to be put forward and placed into the center of Communist agitation. The Communists were to propagate the welfarist reforms in cities and promotion of tenants’ rights (legal restrictions on tenancy rates, etc.) in the countryside, while at the same time agitating for “full national independence and democratic dictatorship of proletariat and peasantry— workers’ and peasants’ Soviet government.”40 Thus, after having directed Korean Communists towards national and democratic revolution first throughout much of the 1920s, the Comintern—radicalized by its failures in China and by its general perception of the coming age of world capitalism’s destabilization and “proletarian revolutions” elsewhere41—foregrounded again the slogan

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of “Korean Soviet government,” not seen since the early 1920s. What was the reaction of the Korean Communists? It looks as if the new radicalization was rather eagerly accepted. After all, just a year later, by late 1929, the Great Depression set on, delivering a huge blow to Korea’s weak and dependent colonial economy, and bringing steep growth in the number and scale of workers’ strikes and tenancy disputes.42 In such an atmosphere, the most radical solutions could easily appear the most realistic ones. It must be noticed, however, that, while following the Comintern line in general, Korean Communists were always struggling to nuance it, in accordance with their own understanding of their needs and priorities. Korean Responses to the Comintern’s Radicalism Good examples are the articles on Korean revolution’s current situation and tasks published by An Kwangch’ŏn (1897–?), one of the leaders of the Sun and Moon Society (see Chapter 2) and later the ML (MarxistLeninist) group of Korean Communists—known for their increased theoretic sophistication and internationally oriented radicalism.43 In a longer article entitled The Current Duties of the Korean Communists,44 he followed the Comintern line in naming the overthrowing of Japanese imperialism and establishing not only a “fully independent, united national state” but also a “workers’ and peasants’ democratic regime” that would “confiscate large landholdings and distribute the land to the peasants” as the main revolutionary task. At the same time, An thought such development possible only under certain conditions (“wide revolutionary uprising of the workers’ and peasant masses,” etc.), and moreover, clearly distinguished between proletarian dictatorship that the revolutionaries would struggle to build in postrevolutionary, independent Korea, and full-blown socialism. The road to the latter remained still long enough, even after the “proletarian masses” take power. On a more practical level, An suggested the necessity of attracting intellectuals—many of them being of peasant origins—and petty bourgeoisie into the revolutionary camp, gathering the sympathies of the workers by foregrounding the practical demands (adoption of labor laws, introduction of workers’ welfare, eight-hour working days for adults, and six hours for minors), reshaping Sin’ganhoe on a “proletarian and peasant basis” (on



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this part, see Chapter 2), and struggling for tenancy rate reductions and tenancy right guarantees in the countryside.45 The article is striking with its combination of enthusiastic, Comintern-inspired radicalism and rather realistic attitudes concerning the necessity of broad anticolonial alliances and emphasis on pragmatic demands that, although hardly realizable in late 1920s’ Korea, could potentially attract the masses by the perspective of turning an impoverished colony into an advanced, democratic, and welfarist society. Han Wigŏn (1896–1937), a fellow ML militant, known as a MarxistLeninist theoretician and activist in both the Korean and (since 1930) Chinese Communist parties, summarized, in his turn, his vision of the imminent tasks of Korean Communists in an article on the Communists’ political program printed circa half a year after An’s article.46 The program makes it clear that Korea’s impending revolution would be a “bourgeois-democratic one” but equally emphasizes, at the same time, its main characteristic as an agrarian revolution. After all, the landhungry peasantry, together with the urban proletariat, was going to become its main driving force. Mostly postponed to the further, socialist stage of the Korean revolution in the Communist programs of the mid1920s, the great and thorough redistribution of land appeared forcefully in the programmatic Communist documents of 1929–1930. Since then, it continued to be the main Communist demand for the transitional period following the hoped-for restoration of Korea’s independence. Since, in Han’s analysis, the Korean bourgeoisie was extremely weak, mostly consisting of landlords diversifying themselves into urban investment, the power in postindependence Korea was to end up in the hands of “workers’ and peasants’ democratic dictatorship,” which was to progress further towards genuinely socialist revolution, helped by the “existence of countries with proletarian dictatorship” (the USSR is doubtlessly meant) and “the world proletarian revolutionary movement” in general. However, it must be pointed out that Han’s program envisioned the nationalization of only large, as well as Japanese-owned, industries. Even a middle-sized private Korean enterprise was evidently to be tolerated, as long as the revolution did not develop further to its socialist stage. In a similar vein, only large landowners were to have their holdings confiscated and redistributed. This streak of realism—after all, urban petty bourgeoisie and rural owners-cultivators were needed as (junior)

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allies on the national-democratic stage of the revolution—was further complemented by Han’s admonishment not to disregard workers’ economical struggles. Communism was to be “the only theory taught to the workers” by Communist activists infiltrating the unions, but the unions were to “acquire [the allegiance of the] masses” by fighting for very concrete economical, quotidian gains.47 This combination of a rather radical vision of postindependence future—with the agrarian reforms at its center—with meticulous attention towards the mundane life of the masses Communists had to recruit into the ranks of their followers, was to become a distinctive feature of the Communist programmatic documents throughout the early 1930s. Grassroots ­Organizers and Their Programs As the Korean Communist Party was to be rebuilt through workplace organization, workers’ recruitment, and establishment of primary, factory-based cells first, the typical domestic Korean Communist activist of the early and mid-1930s was a grassroots organizer, sometimes without any direct connections to Moscow, émigré Communist groups, or with the connections of a rather episodic kind (see Chapter 1). A typical example of such a homegrown militant was Yi Chaeyu (1905–1944), whose group succeeded in establishing several dozens of factory and school cells in Seoul and its vicinities (one of them in Keijō Imperial University, where Yi collaborated with a Japanese Communist, Professor Miyake Shikanosuke, 1898–1982), and in leading several important workers’ strikes and student protests between 1932 and 1936 (when Yi was arrested for the last time, to die incarcerated eight years after). While in prison, Yi wrote a very detailed article on Korea’s sociopolitical situation and Communist movement perspectives, The Particularities of the Communist Movement in Korea and the Question of its Development.48 A brilliant organizer and polemist, Yi justified his thesis—according to which the national-democratic revolution in Korea was to be led by a proletarian/peasant block, rather than the Korean bourgeoisie—by the experiences of the March 1 movement of 1919, when its propertied leaders did not manage to radicalize the movement by foregrounding the land reform slogans, did not even try to build a lasting grassroots anticolonial organization, and, in most cases, ended up

figure 3.1 A 1934 prison registration card of Yi Chaeyu (1905– 1944). Yi was arrested on January 22 of that year but managed to run away from a Japanese police station on April 13 with the help of a Japanese policeman who clandestinely sympathized with his radical ideas. Credit: National Institute of Korean History (Kuksa P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe)

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by eventually betraying the Korean nation and turning into pro-Japanese activists. In the end, “workers’ and peasants’ masses” were to achieve Korea’s independence, establish a Soviet government, and conduct the land reform and nationalization. They were, however, to confiscate only large estates and industrial facilities. Importantly, the new Korean Soviet government was to grant the workers a seven-hour working day (with one more extra hour presumably reserved for lunch) and other “improvements in their situation.” While this plan appears basically like a continuation of An Kwangch’ŏn and Han Wigŏn’s visions of 1929–1930, Yi’s article offers remarkably elaborate evidence of what he himself termed the “abnormalities” of colonial modernity. In Yi’s view, Korea was a source of surplus profits for mostly Japanese capitalists and a captive market for Japanese-made goods, artificially kept away from educational and ideological progress. Yi cites, for example, the Japanese support for Confucian establishments and colonial government-controlled shamanic associations as examples of deliberate obscurantist policy. Factory girls, often underage, contracted by their families for six to ten years of virtual indentured slavery at both Japanese- and Korean-owned textile factories, receiving 10 to 18 yen a month—a pittance hardly enough to subsist—for 18–19-hour working days, and regularly beaten in factories and prison-like dormitories, were the crowning example of “semi-feudal capitalism’s” evil that the “revolutionary masses” were to clean up.49 However, the abolition of indentured slavery and “feudal” mistreatment was only one of the many practical slogans Yi Chaeyu used in his propaganda work as an underground union organizer. Other slogans— known from Yi Chaeyu’s interrogation records by Japanese prosecutors (1937)—included not only the seven-hour working day (with one hour for lunch and forty-hour working weeks), minimum wage for married male workers, equal wage for the same labor and freedom of workers’ organization and action, including unionization by industry, but even the freedom of organizing workers’ factory committees for eventual control over the production process, and workers’ self-defense units. Such freedoms required a radical (“proletarian-peasant”) alliance, rather than an ordinary parliamentary government taking power—or, at least, exerting predominant political influence—in postindependence Korea. The slogans used by Yi and his associates in their work with students were even more detailed. They numbered more than sixty in total. Some of them—



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for example, the establishment of students’ self-defense units—would clearly be realizable only under a rather radical postrevolutionary regime, or as a part of a revolutionary process. Most of the demands, however, could be classified as generally democratic in nature. They included, for example, the disbandment of “militarist and statist nationalist organizations” (including the associations of retired servicemen and the Patriotic Women Association; noticeably, Girl and Boy Scouts were also defined as reactionary organizations, to be disbanded), as well as abolishment of mandatory class attendance and militarized calisthenics exercises; democratization of teachers’ appointment and dismissal process (with student deputies sitting together on the appointment and dismissal committees); liberalization of disciplinarian regimentation in the dormitories; improvements in dormitory dwellers’ diet; and, obviously quite importantly, prohibition on the use of “domineering, repressive, abusive, and bureaucratic language” by the teachers vis-à-vis their students. The schools were to be liberated from bureaucratic micromanagement by the educational bureaucrats on the outside and cleansed from the inside through “routine memorization-based educational methods.” While the Communist student activists supervised by Yi Chaeyu’s underground circle were to urge the students to develop solidarity with the Japanese student movement, as well as Chinese Soviets, “victims of special repression” in colonized Taiwan and even “Mongolian and Tibetan (?) partisans,” most of the slogans dealt with the problems Korean students encountered in their everyday life, and encompassed both the eventual aims of the radical democratization of educational sector and some of practical imminent demands (for example, 50  percent tuition fee reduction).50 While Yi Chaeyu’s program demands were extensive, elaborate, and unusually detailed, the strikers’ demands, which his underground Communist group was helping to articulate during the workers’ strikes it secretly led, were usually down-to-earth and extremely practical. The Comintern, in the ­Theses of the Twelfth Plenary Meeting of its Executive (August 27 to September 15, 1932), published in Korean as well, demanded from the world’s Communists to articulate the real and most acute needs of the workers in each and every locality or factory, and Korean Communists were doing their best to be up to this task.51 Communist activists evidently had good firsthand knowledge of what workers

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wanted: their rank-and-file cadres, after all, were worker activists from the shop floor. For example, when 320 female workers at Seoul’s Katakura Silk-Spinning Factory organized a strike in early June  1933—being secretly led by two underground Communist groups, Yi Chaeyu’s and Kim Hyŏngsŏn’s (1904–1950)—they demanded a reduction in working hours (from the current thirteen hours per day), a wage hike, abolition of the discrimination in lunch provisions between the Japanese and Korean workers, and the reform of the oppressive dormitory regulations that prohibited the workers from going out in the evenings.52 None of these demands was accepted by the employer—a well-known Japanese business—and the strike was suppressed by police, but the next strike at a Japanese-owned textile plant that Yi’s underground group was involved with, at Showa Silk-Spinning Factory in Seoul on August 22–23, 1933, ended with at least a partial success. The employer promised to improve dormitory food in accordance with workers’ demands, pay wages without delays, and force a brutal foreman to apologize to the workers.53 The Communists’ proven ability to keep their fingers on the pulse of shop floor demands and wishes makes it possible to look at their programs as an articulation of the plebeian dreams on the ground rather than simply a product of the Comintern’s doctrine. The doctrine, to be sure, was influencing the Korean Communist adepts, but they were concurrently trying their best to speak on behalf of those who they were successfully attempting to organize for down-to-earth, everyday struggles. The basic platform established by such Communist theoreticians as An Kwangch’ŏn and Han Wigŏn and used in practical organization and propaganda by such prominent Seoul-based militants as Yi Chaeyu was largely shared by regional grassroots Communist activists as well. Some of them, as a matter of fact, went even further in elaborating their practical—economic and social—demands, attempting to do their best to articulate the democratic visions potentially popular among their audiences. For example, the program worked out in 1933 by Yi Kit’aek (1904–?), an ML faction (see Chapter 2) Communist activist who participated in the Korean Communist movement in Japan in the late 1920s together with Yi Chaeyu and later led the South Chŏlla League for Korean Communist Party Re-establishment (he and his comrades were apprehended by the Japanese police in 1934), featured the “Soviet republic of Korean workers and peasants” coming out of the anti-imperialist



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revolution, as complete independence for Korea would be acquired. “Korean Soviet government” was to confiscate the industries and landholdings owned by “Japanese imperialists,” as well as the holdings by “other parasitic landowners.” However, the petty bourgeoisie, described as an ally of workers and peasants in the coming revolution, was obviously to be allowed to keep its property. At least, its confiscations were not mentioned. To lead the masses to the revolution, an array of practical demands was elaborated, which, in the case of the workers, included abolition of “semi-slave labor conditions,” the “slavery labor contract system,” the oppressive dormitory system, and the overexploitation of “women, youth, and Chinese workers.” In addition, Communists demanded eight-hour working days for adults, six hours for those between sixteen and eighteen, and four hours for those under sixteen, together with a two-week paid summer holiday per year, minimum wage for married workers, maternity benefits, and establishment of unemployment, sickness, and old-age insurance at the expense of factory owners, but under the control of the labor unions. The employers were also asked to provide their workers with housing and subsidized tap water and electricity. The welfarist model was supposed to spread further to the countryside as well: free, centralized distribution of farm fertilizer and seeds, together with free rental of all farm equipment—and even subsidies to the peasants affected by price slumps—were the next set of demands.54 In the neighboring province, North Chŏlla, a group of Communist militants, led by Kim Ch’ŏlch’u (1908–?), developed a similar platform for party reestablishment from below, also in the early 1930s (Kim received his prison sentence in 1934, to survive and reemerge as a leftist activist after the Liberation in 1945).55 Their program as well envisioned independent Korea with a “proletarian government” guaranteeing land for the peasants, eight-hour working days for the workers, social security for everybody, and all thinkable freedoms (speech, association, publication, etc.), as well as open courts and hearings in the judiciary. The workers were directed to struggle for—inter alia—special wage rates for night shifts, prohibition of night labor for youth, abolition of the labor of minors (under age sixteen) and senior citizens (above age forty-five), and, interestingly, full freedom for entering the Japanese labor market for all Korean workers. The North Chŏlla program distinguishes itself by having a special category of social policy demands, which included

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not only free medical treatment for all citizens, tuition-free compulsory education, state-run homes for the aged and orphanages, introduction of trials by popularly elected grand juries, and abolition of (state-licensed) prostitution and state confiscations (and forced purchases at administratively set prices) of private land, but even state guarantees of livelihood for released political prisoners!56 The demands were to paint an ideal picture of the sort of alternative modernity—with a thoroughly democratic and welfarist state in its center—the colonial underdogs could be interested in waging a protracted, bitter struggle for. Moscow-­Based Korean Communists and Their Program Yet another important addition to the typified Communist vision of postrevolutionary future is to be found in the Platform of Action of the Communist Party of Korea—a document published originally in English in a Comintern journal, International Press Correspondence, in 1934, and signed by an other wise largely obscure grouping, “the Initiatory Group,” which most likely consisted of a Korean Comintern cadre, Ch’oe Sŏng’u (1898–1937)—a Russified ethnic Korean from Maritime Province, who taught at the Communist University of Eastern Toilers in the early 1930s and was executed on November 22, 1937, amid Stalin’s Great Purges as a “Japanese spy” (see more on him in Chapter 1)57—and some of his Moscow-based Korean colleagues. In 1934–1935, Ch’oe wrote a number of articles in Russian for the Comintern press, interpreting the content of the Platform.58 As such, the Platform is perhaps the most inclusive programmatic document the Korean Communist movement of the 1920s–1930s ever produced, evidently written on the basis of the existing platforms (although the extent to which the domestic activists were familiar with this Platform is somewhat uncertain). The Platform features, expectedly, the “proletarian and peasant Soviet government,” land redistribution, and introduction of a fully developed welfare state in postrevolutionary Korea; however, it also promotes a set of exhaustive, well-articulated concrete demands that give an impression of a “scientific,” well-thought-over plan for a complete reconstruction of Korean life. For example, minimum wage and social insurance payments were to be calculated on the basis of minimal life cost statistics. In the present, the Korean workers were instructed to fight for the provision



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of clean dining rooms, free annual supply of overalls, and building of the factory housing for the workers under the control of the workers’ committees. As we saw above, factory housing and workplace food provisions figured prominently also in the demand lists compiled by Communists inside Korea. The novelty of the Platform was a special set of demands for urban petty bourgeoisie and handicraftsmen, who were promised full annulment of all moneylenders’ debts and streamlining of taxation into a single progressive tax.59 The Communists needed allies, and while richer capitalists were judged to be too thoroughly co-opted by the colonial administration, the smaller ones were supposed to eventually join the pan-national anticolonial struggle. Communists Hopes and Demands: W ­ artime and Liberation As is well known, the reestablishment of the Korean Communist Party— for which so many Communist militants had been struggling since 1928—never took place until 1945; by that time the Comintern (disbanded by Stalin’s decree in 1943) was history. Still, the visions of national revolution and postrevolutionary future, elaborated in the platforms produced by émigré activists (An Kwangch’ŏn, Han Wigŏn, and Ch’oe Sŏng’u) as well as domestic underground militants (Yi Chaeyu, Yi Kit’aek, Kim Ch’ŏlju, etc.), played a significant role for the future development of Korea’s political history. As is generally recognized by the scholars, the Kyŏngsŏng Communist Group (1939–1941)—one of the few underground Communist groups that succeeded in surviving for at least some years in the atmosphere of the wartime police terror—largely operated on the basis of the preexisting Communist programs and platforms of the 1930s. Its activists hoped to establish a “people’s democracy” (inmin minjujuŭi) after a successful revolution and then realize the peasants’ wish to acquire landowners’ land and urban workers’ desire for improved labor protection and establishment of welfare institutions.60 “People’s democracy” again became the main slogan of the reconstituted Korean Communist Party (in November  1946, its Southern branch merged with several other socialist parties into the Worker’s Party of South Korea), as well as its main political ally, the Pan-National Council of the Korean Trade Unions (Chŏnp’yŏng)—which was largely led by Communist worker militants from the colonial era. Its chairman, Hŏ

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Sŏngt’aek (1908–?), a labor organizer from North Hamgyŏng Province, studied in Moscow at the Comintern-run Communist University of Eastern Toilers and even attended the Comintern’s Seventh Congress in 1935.61 Postliberation Communists and their allies wanted workers, peasants, and their allies (including even some “conscientious capitalists”) to assume hegemony in the government of the hoped-for “new Korea,” so that labor unions at the workplace would have a stake in running the nationalized large industries, and peasants would acquire the land confiscated from the landlords. By the end of 1948, however, both Communists and Communist-allied unions were outlawed in the southern part of divided Korea.62 Nevertheless, many of the “democratic reforms” conducted by the pre–Korean War North Korean regime largely followed the scripts and scenarios developed by the colonial-era Communist movement. The March 1946 land reform was the most important one among them. It is true that the blueprint for it was produced by the Soviet patrons of the new government. However, as researchers persuasively argue,63 the development of such blueprints and their implementation on the ground were possible only as much as the idea of the radical land redistribution and other “democratic reforms” already struck roots inside the leftist political camp in Korea. Indeed, Russian historians also acknowledge that the Soviet military administration in North Korea made a radical land reform into its priority precisely because it was obvious that such a reform was strongly demanded by the activists on the ground and by the Soviet’s local collaborators, Kim Il Sung (Kim Ilsŏng, 1912–1994) included, inside the incipient governance organs of the Soviet occupation zone.64 Indeed, by March 1946, the Soviets prepared two different blueprints for the land reform in North Korea. One, which originated inside the Soviet Foreign Ministry and was presented by then vice foreign minister Solomon Lozovsky (1878–1952), to his patron, the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), was less radical in that it envisioned the peasant beneficiaries of the reform compensating the value of the landlords’ land they receive, during a longer period (fifteen to twenty-five years). Another, prepared by the Soviet military occupation authorities on the ground, included a more radical clause requiring full confiscation and redistribution of landlords’ excess land (over five hectares per household), without any compensation. In the end, it was pre-



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ferred under the weight of Korean activists’ demands and expectations,65 largely formed by the programmatic demands of the colonial-era Communist movement. The land redistribution benefitted 70  percent of all rural households and made the new authorities popular among the poorer peasant majority: the peasant membership in the Workers’ Party tripled in the two years following the reform.66 At the same time, the de facto provisional government for the northern, Soviet-occupied part of Korea, the Provisional People’s Committee for North Korea, reconfirmed by its decree in October 1946 that the private property of small- and middlescale Korean capitalists was to be secured from any confiscations for the time being.67 Thus, yet another programmatic demand from the colonial age, namely the development of productive capacities in a (temporary) alliance with small- and middle-scale local bourgeoisie, was fulfilled. Other “democratic reforms” were also of no negligible significance. The eight-hour working day, together with child labor prohibition and the rule of equal pay for equal work, were legalized in June 1946. Gender equality was established by law in July 1946; then followed the nationalization of main transport means, banks, and postal services in August of the same year. Importantly, mandatory primary school education was introduced in September 1949 (although it only came into practice in 1956, after the end of the 1950–1953 Korean War). A rapid and massive “illiteracy liquidation” campaign helped to teach around 98 percent of the formerly illiterate adult citizens to read and write by the end of 1948. Cheaper prices for medical services were legislated in 194768 as a prelude to the introduction of free medicine in 1952.69 The “democratic reforms”—made possible under the Soviet protection and influence— largely followed the visions of the future already proclaimed under the colonial rule by the Korean Communist movement pioneers. The legal implementation of these visions was an important factor in cementing the popular basis for the new regime in the northern part of Korea. It made possible the enactment of de facto conscription since 1949 and de jure conscription with the start of the Korean War in June 1950, as well as the giant wartime mobilizations of human and material resources.70 The visions of progressive democracy that were foregrounded in the immediate post-Liberation period largely disappeared into oblivion as North Korea developed a rigid and personalized hierarchy of power underpinned by the new chuch’e (self-reliance) ideology in the 1960s

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and 1970s. Still, the importance of the colonial-period Communist projects of the future for the post-Liberation Sovietization of Northern Korea was even remembered on the official level. Article 13 of the Socialist Labor Law of April 1978 made it clear that “the socialist labor policies of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea implement the revolutionary programmatic points on labor issues originally put forward during the glorious times of the revolutionary anti-Japanese resistance.”71 Despite all the political changes since the post-Liberation age, the memory of the colonial-era origins of the “democratic reforms” still lived on. Even today, at least on paper, both education and medical services are notionally free in North Korea, although in reality, of course, public hospitals suffer from severe lack of equipment and medicines and public schools and universities focus both on academic training and political indoctrination, concurrently discriminating against applicants with “suspicious” political backgrounds.72 Since the times of anticolonial leftist militancy and post-Liberation reforms, the idea of the welfare state became so deeply ingrained that even the de facto marketization of the North Korean economy since the mid-1990s did not lead to any reduction of the state’s notional welfare commitments.

c o nc lu s io n To conclude, the Korean Communist movement’s visions of the future evolved together with the movement itself throughout the 1920s–1930s. While the earliest articulations of these visions, dating back to the revolutionary Red Wave of the early 1920s (see the Introduction), saw the coming Korean revolution as a socialist one akin to the Russian October 1917 revolution, the Communist programs from the mid- and late 1920s specified that the first stage of the Korean revolution was to be national liberation coupled with a thorough democratization of the society. Appealing visions of a democratic, emancipatory modern society— something the colonial subjects living in a highly regimented police state without even rudimentary human rights protection could only dream about—were spelled out in detail in the platforms and slogans of the Communist militants, especially in the 1930s. They included, for example,



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something as unimaginable in the colonial settings as nonauthoritarian schools free from rote memorization and disciplinarian regime—a trait of emancipatory modernity neither South nor North Korea succeeded in achieving so far.73 To implement “democratic reforms” of such depth, all the Communist platforms since 1929 envisioned “people’s democracy,” or “workers’ and peasants’ government” power in post-Liberation Korea, in alliance with a number of potentially anticolonial forces including even small- and middle-scale Korean capitalists. The “people’s democratic government” was to nationalize large and/or Japaneseowned industries and redistribute large and/or Japanese-owned landholdings while sparing the possessions of small- or middle-sized Korean land owners. Then, it was to run an essentially market-based economy (a switch to a fully centrally planned economy was never mentioned in any of the Communist programs surveyed for this book), with strong elements of welfarist policies and benign labor laws, seemingly modelled upon the New Economic Policies in 1920s USSR. Communists played both nationalist and internationalist cards: on the one hand, it was presumed in their programs that both Chinese and Japanese (and even Western) workers were welcomed to stay on in “people’s Korea”; on the other hand, all programs emphasized the need to switch the language of official communications and education from Japanese to Korean immediately on having achieved independence.74 The Communist platform on national culture, adopted in post-Liberation Korea in March  1946, emphasized both “continuation of old culture’s strong points” together with “expression of our ethno-nation’s particularity” and “critical appropriation of the foreign progressive culture.”75 Communist programs represented a potentially winning combination of social radicalism (land reform, implementation of universal free medical care and pension system, etc.), politically inclusive attitudes (emphasis on alliance with petty bourgeois layers, etc.), economical pragmatism (the vision of a social market economy on the first stage of the development rather than central planning system, hardly suitable for a largely agrarian society), and democratic, emancipatory modernism (demands to democratize workplaces and schools, etc.), which was calculated to achieve maximal popular approval among Communists’ target audiences. Such a program—bold, extremely detailed, and fine-tuned to the modern and

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liberational expectations of broad layers of public—was one of the strengths of the Communist movement. Not unlike the prerevolutionary Bolshevik platform in Russia, it also assumedly played an important role in winning relatively strong popular allegiance to the leftist cause, both before and after 1945. The welfare system, a key fixture of both Communist programs and North Korean post-Liberation reforms, remains—albeit in de facto curtailed form—an important part of the general socioeconomic setup in North Korea.

Part II

The Realm of New Knowledge

c h a p te r   4

The Marxist Philosophy of Pak Ch’iu

T

he 1930s were times of contradictions in colonial Korea. On the one hand, the decade was already an age of war, although a full-scale Japanese invasion against China’s mainland (excluding the northeast) did not begin until 1937. The beginning of open Japanese aggression against the northeast of China (Manchuria) in 1931, however, was enough to influence colonial society in profound ways. The opening of the Manchurian market to Korea-produced goods and a degree of import substitution based on the investment of excess Japanese capital into the colony triggered a sharp growth in industrial production between 1933 and 1937. By 1937, Korea produced six times more industrial goods compared to 1914.1

the 1930 s —­int e lle c t u al p r o­gr ess am id r e p r e s sio n s However, as the wartime set in, the relative liberalism of the 1920s started to ebb. Persecutions against the radicals were gradually intensifying, reaching their peak in the atmosphere of wartime mobilization in 1937– 1945, after the start of Japan’s all-out aggression against China beyond its northeast in 1937. However, radicalized intellectuals could sense the advent of a more repressive regime even before the start of the SinoJapanese War. For example, KAPF (Korea Artista Proleta Federacio, Korean Federation of Proletarian Artists), the most representative organization of the art world’s radicals in the colony, had to declare its dissolution in May 1935 after several years of relentless police pressure. In fact, at the time of KAPF’s dissolution most of its members were in 131

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prison, charged with subversion after a provincial tour of KAPF’s theatrical group that presented Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929) in venues in a number of provincial and county seats. The book, banned in fascist Germany, was regarded as dangerous enough to justify large-scale repression against leftist intellectuals in contemporaneous colonial Korea.2 On the other hand, the 1930s were also the time of the development for Korea’s nascent Marxist philosophy. It is not, of course, that Marxism had not been present earlier in the Korean discursive space. Russia’s October 1917 revolution, expectedly, woke up interest in Marxian socialism and, by extension, in Marxism, in Korea as well. The interest developed further after the formation of the first underground protoCommunist groups (for example, Kim Myŏngsik and Kim Ch’ŏlsu’s Korean Socialist Revolutionary Party; see Chapter 1), in Seoul, soon to be linked to the China- and Russia-based émigré socialist groups, in summer 1920.3 The newborn and quickly expanding movement needed a set of clearly articulated ideological fundamentals, and the translation of the basic Marxist literature was to provide it. Already in September 1921, a small Seoul-based Communist circle ambitiously named the Korean Communist Party (Chosŏn Kongsandang), translated the Communist Manifesto into Korean (most likely, via the preexisting Japanese translation, as the Japan-educated younger intellectuals constituted the core of the circle) and illegally published eighty-five copies, the first such publication in Korea proper.4 Yŏ Unhyŏng (1886–1947), the informal dean of Shanghai-based Korean revolutionaries and an activist of the Irkutsk Korean Communist Party, in the eventful period of the early 1920s (see Chapter 1), was a member of the party’s translation committee and separately translated the Communist Manifesto a year earlier. All five hundred copies of this, however, were distributed in Manchuria rather than ­Korea proper.5 As was mentioned in Chapter 2, the seminal Lohnarbeit und Kapital (1849) by Karl Marx, which laid the basis for his surplus value theory, was translated into Korean and published legally in 1923.6 Again, the Korean version owed much to the existing Japanese translations.7 The translation efforts were accompanied by a campaign of Marxism popularization via newspaper media and magazine articles and easy-to-read pamphlets. By the late 1920s, Korea’s Communists managed even to go further than simple translation and introductory overviews,



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publishing some original small monographic works dealing with Marxist theory.8 Still, the Marxist works of the 1920s hardly represented more than very basic introductions of Marxist theories, mostly strongly influenced by Japanese translations and interpretations, especially those by Kawakami Hajime (1879–1946) and Sakai Toshihiko (1871–1933).9 The situation started to change radically in the early 1930s, mainly due to deeper engagement with academic Marxism by Korea’s younger intellectuals at the higher educational institutions in Korea and Japan proper. Especially important in this regard was Keijō Imperial University, the preparatory department of which was opened in Seoul in 1924, followed by the main university course in 1926. Most Keijō Imperial University students were ethnic Japanese. Koreans, who constituted hardly more than one-third of the students (and were almost absent among the teaching staff ), were for the most part scions of the colonial high and middle classes hoping for a governmental or, less often, business or academic career after their graduation.10 In the Philosophy Department, the majority of the professors were liberals, some of them highly regarded as scholars and thinkers in Japan proper. Abe Yoshishige (1883–1966), the postwar minister of education who oversaw the liberal education reforms of the US Occupation period, taught there, together with several other prominent researchers.11 Indeed, the relative liberalism of Keijō Imperial University’s Philosophy Department was not untypical of Japanese imperial universities of the interwar age. A few leading liberals and left-liberals were teaching at the imperial universities in Japan proper, and some of them deeply influenced the Korean students who attended their classes. For example, Yi Tonghwa (1907–1995), a patriarch of post1945 South Korean social democracy, also known as a co-organizer of the center-left Progressive Party in the 1950s (together with Cho Pong’am; see the Postscript), was a pupil of Kawaii Eijirō (1891–1944), a famous social democratic economist from Tokyo Imperial University.12 However, there was also a minority of more radical left-wing professors at the imperial universities, Keijō University included. The bestknown of them was Miyake Shikanosuke (1899–1982), a Marxist economist who taught at Keijō University as an assistant professor beginning in 1926 (promoted to full professorship in 1932). He was famed for the theoretically based predictions of capitalism’s inexplicable downfall he used to make during his lectures, often citing the Comintern’s economic

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figure 4.1 A 1934 police surveillance card for Miyake Shikanosuke (1899–1982). Arrested in 1934, he was released in 1936 after having renounced socialism during his trial. He was never able to recover his Keijō Imperial University professorship, however. His wife was running a second-hand bookshop while he was in prison. After his release, he returned to Japan and had to subsist on small-scale entrepreneurial activities there, under strict police surveillance. Credit: National Institute of Korean History (Kuksa P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe)

brain, Eugen Varga (1879–1964).13 Miyake served, since the beginning of his appointment, as the professorial advisor for the Economics Research Society (Kyŏngje Yŏn’guhoe), officially a harmless student club but in reality the front organization for Keijō University’s Marxist student circle. Yi Kangguk (1906–1955), Ch’oe Yongdal (1902–?), Pak Mun’gyu (1906–1971), Chŏng T’aesik (1901–1953), and a number of other scholarly Marxist militants who played various prominent roles at the early stage of North Korea’s state building (Ch’oe is even credited with having drafted North Korea’s first Constitution in 1948) were all Miyake’s pupils.14 Miyake was arrested in May 1934, after the Japanese leftist professor managed to keep safe for thirty-seven days in his residence’s underground cellar. Yi Chaeyu (1905–1944) was a Korean Com-



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munist leader wanted by the Japanese police (see Chapters 1 and 3 on Yi’s underground career). It was found out during the police interrogations that the materials on Korean colonial economy and society collected by the Economics Research Society were subsequently sent to the Comintern’s headquarters via Kunisaki Teidō (1894–1937) and other Berlinbased Japanese Communists with whom Miyake was closely connected since his days of research leave in Europe (1929–1931). This case sent shockwaves throughout the Japanese settler community in the colony.15 The Economics Research Society was disbanded by the university authorities, on police insistence, in 1930, as the grip on the radicals was being tightened. After that, Keijō University student radicals had to shift to underground work tactics. An Anti-Imperialist League, an illegal organization with aspirations to develop into the Korean chapter of the Berlin-based League Against Imperialism (Liga gegen Kolonialgreuel und Unterdrückung, formed under strong Comintern influence in 1927 and disbanded in 1937),16 was formed in March 1931 by Sin Hyŏnjung (1910–1980), then a law student (later to become a prominent South Korean educator). Sin worked under the guidance of experienced underground Communist cadres: Lavrenty Kang (Kang Chin, 1905–1966, a Russian-born Communist militant later known for his role in the political struggles on the early stage of North Korean history; see Chapter 1) and Yi Chongnim (1900–1977), an important member of the ML (MarxistLeninist) faction in the Communist movement,17 were his mentors. Interestingly enough, even some of Sin’s Japanese co-students joined the underground society, out of the Marxist convictions of their own. Not unlike the Korean student radicals, the ethnic Japanese student activists were mostly middle-class settler children. One (Ichikawa Asahiko) was the son of a teacher; another (Sakurai Saburō) had a lawyer father. One of the Japanese participants was even the son of a colonial jail warden! All of them were radicalized by the Great Depression and increasing sociopolitical instability in Japan.18 The student radicals managed to publish three issues of their journal, Red Square Cap (Pulgŭn Kangmo), in twenty copies, and spread some forty-eight hundred copies of antiwar hand bills after Japan’s September 19, 1931, Manchuria invasion before being apprehended by the police.19 Twenty-two young anti-imperialists were given their (generally, rather soft) sentences in November 1932,20 but the infatuation with Marxism on the part of some of Keijō University’s young

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intellectuals did not end there. As we will see from the account below on Pak Ch’iu’s philosophical and journalistic work in the 1930s and early 1940s, the passion for radical thought took more academic form in the atmosphere of hardening repression. A welcome consequence of this development was a deepening in the understanding of Marxism in Korea. What was imported as an ideological tool of a revolutionary movement in the 1920s was evolving into a complicated, nuanced system of thought in the 1930s. Pak Ch’iu, a brilliant graduate of Keijō University’s Philosophy Department, was one of the key personalities beyond this process.

pa k c h ’ iu — a ­ b io g r ap hic sk et ch Not unlike many other leftist radicals of modern Korea, Pak Ch’iu (1909– 1949) hailed from northeastern Hamgyŏng Province, close to the border with Russia and subsequently the Soviet Union. He was born on August 22, 1909, in Sŏngjin (today’s Kimch’aek), Northern Hamgyŏng, to the family of Pak Ch’angyŏng (1880–1940), a local Presbyterian pastor known for his missionary work among the Korean migrants in Russia’s Maritime Province.21 Having graduated from a public middle school (kōtō futsu gakkō) in Kyŏngsŏng in his home of Northern Hamgyŏng Province in March 1928, he entered the two-year-long preparatory course of Keijō University in the same month. On graduation from there, Pak entered the Philosophy Department, following a childhood wish possibly formed under the influence of his father’s religious pursuits. While Pak had a formidable reputation as a football (soccer) player during his preparatory course years, there are few indications that he participated in any of the semi-legal and illegal underground activities at the university described above.22 Moreover, during his days at the Philosophy Department, Pak’s advisor was Miyamoto Wakichi (1883–1972), certainly no radical, but a well-reputed Kantian scholar and the author of a popular introduction into philosophy written in a liberal neo-Kantian spirit.23 It was most likely Miyamoto who assigned then fashionable Nicolai Hartmann’s (1882–1950) philosophy as the theme of Park’s graduation thesis. After his graduation in April 1933 and until September 1934, Pak worked as Miyamoto’s academic assistant.24 Ironically enough, a fellow Korean pupil of Miyamoto was Pak Chonghong (1903–1976), an adept



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of neo-Kantianism deeply interested in Heideggerian existentialism in the 1930s and one of the main figures in South Korea’s conservative philosophical establishment in the 1950s–1970s.25 Rather than Miyamoto, it was most likely the contact with other students that led to the radicalization of Pak in his student years. A special role could have been played by a student-led philosophical journal, Sinhŭng (1929–1937), whose last issue Pak participated in as well.26 One of the journal’s editors was Yi Kangguk, Miyake’s star pupil who joined the German Communist Party while studying in Berlin in 1934 and acted as a liaison between the Comintern and Korea’s Communist underground; a number of other contributors espoused Marxist views as well.27 But most likely the strongest factor in Pak’s radicalization was the very crisis-ridden atmosphere of the 1930s: a deepening mode of repression in Japan’s Korean colony was overlapping with the growing sense of doom in Europe. The ascent of fascism in Germany especially could not but affect Pak, fluent (as most of his teachers and co-students) in German and educated in German philosophical classics. Painfully aware of the global crisis of liberal and individualist values, Pak adopted Marxism as the method of explaining this crisis in structural terms and suggesting a nontotalitarian way out of the worldwide civilizational catastrophe. As we will see below, a humanist interpretation of Marxism with strong emphasis on the dialectical historical method and the criticism of right-wing totalitarian ideas and concepts was the result of Pak’s agonizing philosophical quests. Pak’s philosophical inquiries were undoubtedly related also to Korea’s own realities, which the aspiring philosopher came to experience firsthand after having left the reasonably protective academic milieu in September 1934. His first job was a post of philosophy teacher at Pyongyangbased Sungsil College, a relatively liberal Presbyterian school built and run by American missionaries.28 This position, which he held until March 1938, obviously helped him a lot in a purely material sense: by the early 1930s, Pak’s natal family had slipped into poverty. In fact, Pak had been already suspended several times from his studies at the Keijō University due to repeated failures to pay the required tuition.29 A relatively impoverished intellectual, Pak evidently needed a job to provide for himself and his wife: he married in early 1936.30 His relatively happy professorial life gave him for some years the calm and stability needed to make his presence known on the Korean intellectual scene. However,

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it did not last long. The school was forcibly closed due to its reluctance to participate in the required Shinto observances.31 Then, in March 1938, Pak had to move back to Seoul and obtain there a completely different type of employment. He now became a journalist at the daily Chosŏn Ilbo, writing first for the social and then for the academic section. An early recipient of Chosŏn Ilbo’s scholarship, Pak had some experience at publishing his essays with the newspaper even before 1938, so the move did not come fully unexpected. As a Chosŏn Ilbo journalist, Pak covered an array of issues, from the perceived sexual promiscuousness of the colony’s educated youth—seen by the philosopher as an evidence of the general crisis conditions of the time—to problems with nationalist approaches to Korea’s history and culture. However, in August 1940 Chosŏn Ilbo ceased to publish, and Pak lost his job again.32 He enrolled as a graduate student at his alma mater, Keijō University’s Philosophy Department, possibly to evade conscription for the Pacific War as well as wartime labor mobilizations. In 1943, he went to Northern China, then occupied by the Japanese, for a long-term sojourn. Perhaps he did it in a vain hope to find a route across the frontline and reach the Korean independence activists fighting against the Japanese together with China’s Guomindang Nationalists or Communists. Only after Japan’s defeat in August 1945 did the philosopher return to Seoul,33 now to pursue a very different sort of career, as an intellectual-cum-politician, and ultimately an armed militant. While Pak was ideologically engaged but not necessarily politically active during the colonial days, he reinvented himself as a leftist political figure immediately after the Liberation. He possibly felt guilty about his failure to risk anything in practicing his Marxist beliefs during the colonial era, and very possibly hoped that political engagement would help him to contribute into what he, as a theoretician, regarded as a solution for capitalist modernity’s diverse problems as well as Korea’s own unhappy colonial legacy. He quickly developed close ties with Pak Hŏnyŏng (1900–1955), the leader of South Korea’s domestic communists (on Pak’s life trajectory during the colonial period, see Chapter 1), whose entourage included several other former Keijŏ University leftists (Yi Kangguk, Ch’oe Yongdal, Pak Mun’gyu, etc.). Indeed, Pak Hŏnyŏng’s partner in 1940–1941 was Chŏng Sunnyŏn (1922–2004), a distant relative to Chŏng T’aesik—a student of Miyake and a former Keijō University colleague of



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Pak Ch’iu.34 As Pak Hŏnyŏng’s secretary, Pak Ch’iu (secretly) visited Pyongyang several times with his boss, in December 1945 for the first time.35 In addition to this, Pak enjoyed the spotlight as one of the leading figures on the left flank of Korea’s intellectual spectrum. He participated in organizing the Democratic National Front (Minjujuŭi Minjok Chŏnsŏn), an umbrella association of the leftist groups, in January– February 1946, and was put in charge of the literary criticism section of the Korean Literature League (Chosŏn Munhak Tongmaeng), and even took part in organizing the Korean-Soviet Cultural Association (Chosso Munhwa Hyŏphoe), which subsequently played an important role in selectively introducing Soviet cultural achievements into North Korea.36 Pak’s most significant contribution, however, was his editorial job at Hyŏndae Ilbo, a prominent left-leaning daily founded on March 25, 1946. The paper, with famous novelist Yi T’aejun (1904–1970) as its editorial writer, was rather radically democratic than narrowly Communist in its aspirations, but its sharp invectives against the extreme nationalist rightwing made it the bête noire of the hardline rightist camp. According to the witness testimony of a fellow left-wing intellectual, Kim Namch’ŏn (1911–1953), right-wing extremists brutally beat Pak several times in his own office.37 Instead of protecting the left-wingers under attack, the US Occupation authorities stopped the publication of Pak’s newspaper in September  1946 (as critical towards the Occupation) and put Pak on their wanted list. As Fanya Isaakovna Shabshina (1906–1998), then a Soviet consular officer in Seoul who befriended Pak Hŏnyŏng, and later a prominent Soviet expert on Korean history, remembered, the summer and autumn of 1946 witnessed a clear upsurge in the pressures against the Left by the US military authorities and their de facto allies among the Korean far right.38 Similar to many other southern leftists, going north seemed now the only alternative for Pak. He moved north at some point in the end of 1946, while his newspaper was taken over and relaunched by the right-wingers.39 The beginning of the year 1947 saw Pak working tirelessly—together with a number of other first-rank leftist intellectuals, including Yi T’aejun and poet and critic Im Hwa (1908–1953)—in Haeju, a North Korean city close to the inter-Korean border, producing propaganda materials for illegal consumption in South Korea.40 At the same time, Pak’s first-ever— and only extant—collection of writings, originally published in Seoul in

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late 1946,41 was reprinted by the same publisher twice, in 1947 and 1948.42 It is hard to say whether repeated printing of a book by a leftist fugitive was more indicative of a certain remaining liberalism of the pre– Korean War era or of the chaotic circumstances of South Korea of the late 1940s. The increasingly anti-Communist mood there still evidently did not manage to fully translate into an all-pervasive, stringent censorship practice typical of later periods in South Korean history. In any case, it signaled the enduring popularity of Pak Ch’iu the philosopher inside the South Korean intellectual milieus. Even Pak Chonghong—who, as I mentioned above, was Pak Ch’iu’s alumnus and a conservative Heideggerian thinker (and who was to become one of South Korea’s leading philosophers and ideologists after the 1950s)—reviewed the book highly positively. He mentioned, inter alia, Pak Ch’iu’s reluctance to “dominate” the mind of the reader and his willingness to help the readers to draw independent conclusions, as opposed to the propagandist imposition of the ready-made judgments.43 Unfortunately, in just a year after these lines were written, Pak Ch’iu found himself in a position that required more ideological indoctrination than the nuance-rich style of reasoning the philosopher himself might have preferred. As both the rightist repression and the struggles of the leftist underground in the south intensified by the end of 1947, a special school raising guerrillas for subsequent infiltration over the interKorean border was established in the vicinity of Pyongyang. A Soviet Korean officer, Nikanor Pak (aka Pak Pyŏngnyul, 1906–1998, originally a schoolteacher),44 was put in charge of the newly founded Kangdong Political School. By September 1949, it was educating more than twelve hundred future militants.45 Pak Ch’iu was now to be responsible for the political education of the would-be guerrillas,46 hardly a position favoring a nonauthoritarian type of leftist thinking. The guerrilla struggle intensified in September 1949, due to a few overlapping circumstances. The Communist victory in the Chinese civil war and the Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons emboldened the North Korean leadership. At the same time, South Korea, from which the US troops were already withdrawn by May, remained highly unstable, in contrast to North Korea, with its rather smooth development of postcolonial statehood, a government enjoying a good measure of support among the poorer peasants and urban dwellers, and visible economic

figure 4.2 Pak Ch’iu’s only extant monographic collection of writings printed in his lifetime. It was published in Seoul by Paegyangsa Publishers on November 20, 1946. Credit: Yun Taesŏk and Yun Miran, eds., Pak Ch’iu Chŏnjip: Sasang kwa Hyŏnsil (The Complete Collection of Pak Ch’iu Works: Ideas and Realities) (Inch’ŏn: Inha Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2010), 3.

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successes. Between September 1948 and September 1949, 5,268 soldiers and officers deserted from the newly organized South Korean army, some of them heading straight to North Korea. Under such circumstances, North Korean leadership saw the possibility to induce the future disintegration of its rival, perhaps even mass uprisings, via intensified guer­ 47 In mid-September 1949, some 360 Kangdong Political rilla struggle. School students, under the command of Yi Hoje, a graduate of Seoul’s Posŏng College (today’s Korea University) and known leftist activist, formed the First Regiment of the People’s Guerrilla Army and successfully penetrated South Korean territory. Pak Ch’iu was appointed the political commissar of the regiment, which was active in the T’aebaek Mountain Massif of Kangwŏn Province until December.48 In November, however, Yi Hoje’s regiment was almost destroyed by the Americanarmed and numerically vastly superior South Korean military. Pak Ch’iu narrowly managed to escape death and briefly joined the Third Regiment of the guerrillas, led by Kim Talsam (1923–1950), a former schoolteacher and the legendary Communist leader of the Cheju Uprising (April 3, 1948, to May 1949) who was by then forced to retreat from Cheju to T’aebaek. However, by late November 1949, the Third Regiment too was annihilated. On December 4, 1949, South Korean newspapers published the communique of the military informing the public that the “enemy’s ringleader, Pak Ch’iu,” had been confirmed killed. Pak was considered important enough for his “annihilation” to be announced personally by Sin T’aeyŏng (1891–1959), the then chief of General Staff.49 In a word, Pak Ch’iu’s relatively short (forty years) and tragically ended life comprises several trajectories to the story of Korea’s modernity. Born and raised in a Protestant milieu in northeastern Korea, and a teacher at a Protestant school in Pyongyang in 1934–1938, Pak grew with a keen awareness of the world outside of Korea and was accustomed to thinking in universalist categories. This universalist streak in his life and career was further strengthened by his belonging to Keijō Imperial University’s philosophic academic milieu. While the university per se was a part of the colonial educational infrastructure underpinned by statist nationalist ideas, it belonged at the same time to modernity’s ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ transborder—and simultaneously inherently Eurocentric—academic world. Keijō University’s medical faculty members published their research results in the faculty’s own English journal (The Keizyo Journal of



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Medicine) while Pak’s own teachers, Miyamoto Wakichi and Abe Yoshishige were neo-Kantians. Reading German and English sources in original was a must for Keijō scholars.50 In such an atmosphere of cosmopolitan intellectual interests, in which the rise of extreme nationalism in Europe was treated just as seriously as deepening of ultranationalist mood in Korea’s colonial metropole, Japan, it was hardly a wonder that a number of bright young scholars, Pak among them, turned to Marxism rather than more particularistic, nationalist ways of articulating their dissent. Indeed, Marxist radicalization was happening with some Korean students of similar age at other Japanese imperial universities as well. A well-known example is Pak Yŏngch’ul (1907–1938), a Kyoto Imperial University economics graduate (1934) who ended up collaborating with Yi Chaeyu’s underground Communist group (see Chapter 1) on his return; there were, however, a number of similar cases at other imperial universities.51 In Pak Ch’iu’s case, Marxism, as I will attempt to demonstrate below, was a tool of universalizing the worldwide impasse that the liberal bourgeois civilization—to which he himself, a scion of a Protestant clerical family and a Keijō University scholar, in many ways belonged—was seemingly encountering. Concurrently, Marxism was suggesting alternatives to the right-wing totalitarian substitutes for the liberal capitalism that both Korea’s Japanese masters and a few European states were practicing in the 1930s. Indeed, Pak’s critical analyses of bourgeois modernity’s interbellum implosions read fascinatingly even today, owing to the depth and breadth of their author’s global vision as well as the rigorousness of his historically informed dissection of the contemporaneous philosophical developments and penchant for discerning the essential features in the kaleidoscopic panorama of historical events. Marxism, in the end, led Pak to choose the Northern side after Korea’s division in 1945. Indeed, he hardly would have had a chance to continue his Marxist intellectual inquires in the frontline anti-Communist state of South Korea of the subsequent decades. But as Pak Hŏnyŏng’s faction, to which Pak Ch’iu belonged, was purged in 1953–1956, Pak Ch’iu’s name was to disappear from the pages of North Korean publications as well.52 In a Korea divided between the two highly regimented, authoritarian regimes, independent, universalist, and critical Marxist thinking was, in the end, anathema to mainstream thought in both North and South Korea.

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pa k c h ’ iu ’s t h o u g h t : h i st o r icism , di a l e ct ic s , and t h e wo r l d an d ­h um ans ­af t e r lib e ral ism From the viewpoint of the international radicals of the 1930s—and Koreans or Japanese hardly differed from Europeans in this respect—the totalitarian nationalism characteristic for the post-Depression era was the primary danger. Leftist political leaders tended to see the danger primarily in sociopolitical terms. Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949), the Bulgarian Communist leader and the Comintern’s formal head, defined fascism as a qualitatively different type of capitalist statehood, a substitution of “normal” state with “terrorist dictatorship” that combined extra-legal and unrestricted violence with a strong (albeit, of course, “demagogic”) mass appeal. Such a dictatorship aimed at redividing and permanently enslaving the world and forever destroying the very possibility of class struggle and thus any hopes for historical progress.53 Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), the Comintern’s sharp critic from the left in the 1930s, saw the historically doomed petty bourgeoisie as the main driving force of the fascist movements. He regarded such movements as attempts by the ruling financial oligarchy to destroy the working class through the medium of unleashing the most reactionary middle-class layers against it.54 But were fascism’s implications limited to a simple change in a mode of capitalist domination, or merely unprecedented intensification of counterrevolutionary violence? In Central Europe, the erstwhile cradle of the continental social democratic movements now swept by the fascist frenzy, Marxist analyses were divided on the issue of the extent to which fascism represented a break with the preexisting bourgeois order of things. Otto Bauer (1881–1938), a theorist of the Austro-Marxists known for his earlier work on the nationality issue, regarded fascist monopolization of power—helped by middle classes’ violent antiworker militancy—as a political expression of the economical domination of the financial and armament industry oligarchy in the era of monopolistic capitalism. In a word, fascism was the most archetypic expression of the étatisme immanent to the times of monopoly capitalism.55 At the same time, however, Rudolf Hilferding (1877–1941), another famed representative of the Austrian Marxist School, discovered by 1940 a new totalitarian order in the fascist system of power. It was the order under which



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economic interests no longer controlled the political power, but rather vice versa. Economy was now relegated to a mere tool of totalitarian political power, which qualitatively differed from the bourgeois polities of the past.56 In his turn, the great old man of continental social democracy, Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), was sadly observing that the “peaceful” or humanist orientation characteristic of the European bourgeoisie during its nineteenth-century historical ascent was seemingly gone for good in the era of twentieth-century total wars and mass mobilization. Militaristic brutality, previously associated with the bourgeoisie’s erstwhile antagonists, feudal princes and nobles, was now the dominant trend of the “latter-days capitalist world.” Democracy too was seemingly eschewed now by Europe’s ruling classes.57 Pak Ch’iu’s analysis of the contemporary times—as known from Pak’s publication in 1930s Korean newspapers and journals, which will be analyzed below—was a part of his general Marxist scheme of modernity’s historical development. Already in 1934, Pak Ch’iu, then still a student at Keijō Imperial University’s Philosophy Department, argued in his programmatic piece, The Philosophy of the Crisis (Wigi ŭi Ch’ŏrhak), that in the time of the breakdown of the erstwhile liberal order, the individuals were essentially facing a choice between Bolshevism and fascism. While never stating it explicitly (since even the philosophical journals were censored), Pak believed, of course, that Bolshevism represents the right, “truthful” choice. Its truthfulness was to be understood through the fa­ cility of reason (logos), a necessary precondition for any successful attempt to overcome social contradiction. Solutions for contradictions were to be found in the realm of social practice, but only the actions underpinned by reason (meta logou, as Pak expressed it, quoting Aristotle) or reason-based theory qualified as practice in the philosophical sense of the word. Practice, in the form of the struggle against the social conditions representing an objective contradiction, was, according to Pak, to take place in the atmosphere of what Aristotle famously defined as pathos, that is, the emotional intensity conducive to personal sacrifice and self-abandonment. It is not difficult to grasp that Pak, with ample use of Aristotelian terminology, was attempting to provide a philosophic description of the social and personal preconditions for the antifascist struggle on the Left (theory-underpinned and self-sacrificial actions constituting the practice of antifascism). At the same time, yet another

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noticeable point of this article is the importance attached by Pak to the “subjective” (chuch’ejŏk) understanding of the true nature of the social contradictions by the individuals and groups involved in the social practice.58 Subjectivity (chuch’e), the concept that was to become the basis for North Korea’s official ideology beginning in the 1960s, was, as we will see, a singularly important term in Pak’s dialectics of individuality and collectivity.59 Whereas bourgeois individualism was seen as being toppled by the totalitarian deluge of the 1930s, the socialist antipodes of the ultracollectivist extreme right-wing needed subjectivity, understood as ability to make the reason-based judgments and follow on them in practice, in order to successfully fight their way through the trials and tribulations of the crisis times. While it may sound counterintuitive to those more accustomed to the conceptualization of the Soviet experience in the terms of the “totalitarian” or at the very least harshly authoritarian nature of the Soviet state, especially since the mid-1930s,60 subjectivity was in fact quite central for the Soviet culture of the 1920s and early 1930s, reflecting more the general trends of the European culture of leftist radicalism with which early Soviet society was closely linked.61 Proletarians, the supposed subjects of the revolutionary transformation of the world, were first to be transformed themselves—becoming “cultured” and “conscious,” reaching the stages of both cultural and political “maturity.”62 Left-wing radicalism, in Soviet Russia and elsewhere, preached collectivism but at the same time needed high levels of deeply held, internalized convictions— subjectivity, in other words—to form the collectives it desired. In the context of the general engagement with the notion of subjectivity in the contemporary culture of progressive radicalism, it comes as little surprise that Pak’s philosophy also focused on the issues of individuality and subjectivity. Social practice, as Pak understood it, was assumed to lead to the creation of a new type of personality: the “new human,” an archetypical feature of contemporaneous radical thought.63 In his trademark historicist spirit, Pak never tired of pointing out that both the existing modern personality and its future postcapitalist replacement are fruits of the historical conditions of their times. Pak regarded the Renaissance as the time when the modern personality, with its trademark rationality and (bourgeois) individualism, came into being. So, as the liberal capitalist order was heading for its terminal agony,



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the “new Renaissance” was to “discover the new human,” armed with “authentic subjectivity.” The philosophy needed to create such “new humans” was to be “demanding” (fordernde was the German term Pak himself used), rather than simply observing and “appealing” (appellierende, in Pak’s own words), to its potential supporters rather than simply critical. It was to become a philosophy of action rather than simply a tool for understanding and criticizing the reality. The “new humans” were to be “proud of their capacity to struggle” against the contradictions around them, dynamic and able to combine both emotions and reason in their social practice. The practice was to be rather collective than simply individual—or, to be precise, both collective and individual, so the dichotomy of collectivity and individuality was to be sublated (aufheben) ­here. Contrasting “European individualism” with “Japanese” or “Eastern” collectivity was among the commonplaces in the philosophizing in 1930s’ Japan.64 Pak, however, manages to avoid the trap of essentializing contrasts by saying that ideas or “isms,” while tinged with individuality (Kor. kaesŏng, J. kosei), do not necessarily have to be limited by individual subjectivity. As long as the ideas are based on the shared perception of the objective reality, these ideas import a “collective I” to their adepts. These adepts were to be neither Nietzschean superhumans (Übermenschen) nor moralists rooted in tradition: on the contrary, they were to recognize and accept their own inner contradictions and to learn how to confront them.65 In this way, Pak sublates the individualism versus collectivism contradiction as such, making also clear the universal, transcultural applicability of his philosophy. At the same time, he nuances his “new humans,” making abundantly clear that the new subjects of history are in no way free from internal, immanent contradictions themselves. In accepting the inherently contradictory nature of the “new humans” and their own development through the series of struggles and conflicts, Pak demonstrates his penchant for dialectics. Together with deep, thorough historicism, predilection for dialectical comprehension was yet another trademark of his philosophy. While “bourgeois individualism” was one of these “isms” that humanity, as Pak saw it, was to leave in the past if it was to overcome the current crisis of liberal capitalism, Pak was at the same time explicitly against the negation of the individuality practiced by right-wing totalitarian (chŏnch’ejuŭi) ideologies. It should be remembered that in the

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politico-philosophical discourse of the 1930s, “totalitarian” did not necessarily possess the exclusively pejorative semantics it acquired after 1945. Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), fascist Italy’s official neo-Hegelian philosopher, used “totalitarian” as a part of the self-description of the state he was proudly serving. He accentuated the totality of the state’s involvement in the lives of its citizenry and the synthetic incorporation of both private and public realms into the all-encompassing body of the corporate statehood.66 “Totalitarianism” was not necessarily a pejorative word among certain sections of Korea’s own right-wing in the 1930s either. Yi Kwangsu (1892–1950), colonial Korea’s best-selling novelist and an open admirer of Mussolini and Hitler, already in 1932 defined old Korea’s “healthy” collectivism of self-sacrifice in the name of family and village collectivity— of course, contrasted to the “egoistic Anglo-American individualism”— as “totalitarian,”67 apparently in the most positive sense of the word. During the wartime, the meaninglessness of individual existence unrelated to the totality and the role of the state community as the only subject capable of endowing individual lives with any meaning was also periodically discussed in such journals as Kungmin Munhak (November 1941 to May 1945).68 The journal’s editor, Ch’oe Chaesŏ (1908–1964), was one of the foremost proponents of the absolute allegiance to the “meaning- and value-bestowing” totality of the state.69 At the same time, Maeil Sinbo, the Government General’s official organ, was keen to make clear that Japan’s “unique” kokutai (national polity), the “Imperial Way” principle, embodies the principle of all-encompassing totality in a much superior way compared to the totalitarian ideologies of the West.70 Still, kokutai’s Korean supporters did not shy away from acknowledging their indebtedness to the Western far-right ideologies of totality. Yi Kwangsu, for example, later expressed his pride, in a 1940 paean to his beloved “Chancellor Hitler,” that he was the first Korean author to introduce the term “totalitarian” into the Korean language, initially under the influence of Italian fascist developments.71 Among the Korean philosophers and ideologists of his age it was indeed Pak who managed to develop the most systematic and outspoken criticism of right-wing totalitarian worldviews, on a solid philosophical basis. Having started in the late 1930s and aimed at German and Italian fascisms in the beginning, Pak’s work continued after Korea’s liberation from colonialism in 1945, at that time



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as a philosophic critique of the authoritarian collectivism that was so popular among right-wing ideologues in post-liberation South Korea.72 Pak, of course, did not attempt to deny the role of human collectivity per se. In a 1936 essay on liberalism, he defined modern freedom as such as “citizen’s freedom.” The freedom of societal collectives was to provide the preconditions for the freedom of the individuals. By citizens (simin), the constituents of bourgeois civil society who managed to wrestle their freedoms from the absolutist regimes, were meant. Acquisition of freedom distinguished modern societies from archaic ones dominated by the idea of fate in different forms (the “original sin” of Christianity, or earlier Greek visions of the tragic nature of human destiny, etc.). This acquisition became possible partly due to the gradual evolution of the idea of fate, and its later philosophic dissection into the concepts of “natural laws” and “human freedom” inside the framework of these laws. Partly it was at the same time facilitated by the success of bourgeois revolutions in more advanced societies where collectives of citizens managed to obtain freedoms from the oppressive old orders. Nevertheless, the freedom of citizens inherently implied at the same time nonfreedom for non-citizens, that is, for everybody who was not classified as belonging to the bourgeois civil community at the given historical moment. A weak point of the modern bourgeois civil society was at the same time the fact that economically, it was underpinned by the capitalist market based on the pursuit of profits. As the profit margin showed in the most dramatic way its tendency to decrease in times of crisis due to the inescapable misbalance of supply and demand (overproduction), the capitalist economy had to shift to its controlled, statist mode of functioning. At that point, fascism came to dominate the political agenda of the day. The liberalism of the bygone days came under such circumstances to amount to something resembling the Tsarist-time medals on the breast of a White Russian émigré officer. At best, it was now a hopeless shadow of its past glory. As Pak expressed it, bourgeois civil society, dialectically speaking, negated its own older self, “dismissing” liberalism, with all the freedoms of the past, from its service. And, as the crisis of liberalism was just one indication of the general crisis of the bourgeois order, its defense without suggesting an alternative to capitalism—in the manner of Andre Gide (1869–1951)—had no meaning. It was, however, the most that the epigones of liberalism, forced by the

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high tide of fascism to take a more militant stance than they were accustomed to, were capable of doing.73 Gide, one of interbellum Europe’s most popular writers, was well known to the Korean intellectuals of the 1930s–1940s as well. He was commonly praised for his masterly reading of isolated individuals’ inner world, with its labyrinth of small and large fears and anxieties.74 ­ the Gide’s social criticisms, as well as his fluctuating attitudes vis-à-vis Soviet experience, were also attentively followed in colonial-era Korea.75 Gide’s pronounced individualism was, according to Pak, a far cry from authentic leftism, despite Gide’s claims to leftist persuasions.76 However, Pak regarded right-wing totalitarianism as a much more pressing challenge. In February 1939—with Austria already incorporated into Nazi Germany and Czechoslovakia dismembered—Pak serialized in Chosŏn Ilbo (in three articles on February 22–24) his analysis of fascism, one of the first attempts to approach fascism as a philosophical issue in the Korean thought of the 1930s–1940s. That the series was later republished as a single article in Chosŏn Ilbo’s affiliated monthly, Chogwang (April 1941), demonstrates the importance of the issue to Pak and to Chosŏn Ilbo’s editorial office.77 Sŏ Insik (1905–?), another prominent Marxist intellectual, was also invited by Chosŏn Ilbo to contribute his analysis of the totalitarian phenomenon at an earlier point.78 Of course, Marxist analyses of the European right-wing authoritarianism, German fascism included, were nothing new in Korea by the end of the 1930s—no wonder, given the amount of attention and the dramatic events in Central and Southern Europe were attracting in Korea.79 A leftist 1932 analysis of Italian fascism’s decade-long history described this phenomenon, rather typically, as a reactionary middle-class revolt against the post–World War I wave of plebeian radicalism aided by the political impotency of the Italian liberals and the upper segment of bourgeoisie they represented.80 Many analyses focused on the economical and geopolitical aspects of the fascist movements. Paek Nam’un (1894–1979), a great Marxist economic historian (on his post-1945 travel to Moscow, see Chapter 7), for example, produced an orthodox Marxist analysis of the events in his series on the bloc economy,81 and his analysis of modern warfare’s economic implications.82 As Paek saw it, the uneven and misbalanced nature of capitalist economy, together with underconsumption by the impoverished majority, naturally led to the depressions. One way out



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of the depression was a larger, semi-autarchic bloc market in combination with an increasingly state-controlled economy in fascist or semi-fascist authoritarian states, which were predestined to clash in a new confrontation for the sake of redivision of colonial and dependent areas. In fact, Paek predicted the Second World War already in 1936, three years before it started in Europe.83 Yet another prominent Marxist intellectual, Pae Sŏngnyong (1896–1964)—a Communist in the 1920s who moved, not unlike Yŏ Unhyŏng, to social democracy in the 1930s—was also envisioning a perspective of the next world war by 1936. He also analyzed the policies of Europe’s emerging fascist states primarily in the terms of “interimperialist contradictions” alleging that both Italy and Germany were principally interested in creating colonial empires and dependency zones in Africa and Southern and Eastern Europe. Pae hoped in the mid-1930s that the coming clash between “Western democracies” and the fascist states of Central and Southern Europe would result in a global selfdestruction of capitalism per se, although, perhaps on account of Japanese censorship restrictions, he did not offer a narrative of a successful socialist revolution in the wake of imperialism’s global collapse.84 Neither Paek (an economic historian) nor Pae (an economist and sociologist) attempted, however, to analyze fascism’s deeper philosophical implications. It was Pak Ch’iu who pioneered this undertaking in colonial Korea. For fully understandable reasons—open criticism of Japan’s own fascism was by that time unthinkable in the censured Korean press—Pak focused on the critical philosophical analysis of the European (rather than Japanese), fascisms, with special attention being paid to its German and Italian varieties. While remote beginnings of the logic of totality that the fascists were employing were, according to Pak, already discernible in the ideas of Plato or mediaeval scholastic realists (who believed in the real existence of the Platonic universals), totalitarianism in its developed, political form was a product of modernity, or, rather, the terminal crisis of bourgeois modernity. For the political totalitarianism, ideas were rather secondary. They were employed in accordance with the political needs of the totalitarian state, and were more emotionally mobilizing (“the logic of blood”) than intellectually persuasive. Mobilizational appeal was what the state demanded, first and foremost. While fascisms could be diverse—the German variety put forward “blood” as its shibboleth while the Italian version emphasized a political rather than ethnic

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nation—Pak defined the main common trait of various fascisms as absolutization (chŏltaehwa) of the national (political or ethnic) totality, and relativization of the individual. The latter is allowed to exist only as an organic part of the former, and the freedom of the latter is to be strictly limited by the demands of the former. Further, Pak suggested that, philosophically, the main objective of fascist or semi-fascistic nationalist conservative thinkers—the likes of Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) and Othmar Spann (1878–1947)—is the denial of both rational thinking and dialectics. Dialectics, after all, implied the unavoidability of the social conflicts and struggles, class struggle included—and that was exactly the possibility of contradictions inside the “organic body” of a nation that the fascist thinkers wanted to preclude. Dialectics presuppose the inexorableness of contradictions both inside each individual and internally in every society, but such logic implied the rejection of fascism’s most essential principles. So, while neo-Hegelian ideas served as one important background for some of the varieties of fascist thought, Hegelian dialectics are just as alien to the fascist constructions of “organic national body” as the cosmopolitan ideas of the Enlightenment.85 Pak was then in no position to directly criticize the Japanese Imperial ideology. Judging from the tone of his arguments, he was most likely aware of the antinationalist polemics by such Japanese Marxists as Tosaka Jun (1900–1945), whose ­Japanese Ideology (1935) brilliantly exposed the complete ahistoricism of Japan’s ultranationalist thinking.86 Tosaka was, however, languishing in prison since 1938, and censorship was much stricter in Korea than in Japan proper. Not being allowed to directly criticize Japanese fascist philosophy, Pak made, however, some interesting critical remarks about the Kyoto School idealist philosophies. Their logic, while not necessarily fully identical with the official positions of wartime Japanese authorities, was nevertheless essential in buttressing the edifice of conservative nationalism on which the wartime state ideology was based. He wondered, for example, whether Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), one of the central figures in the Kyoto School development, would be able to continuously engage with dialectic in his understanding of the relationship between the whole and the part, given the Kyoto School’s general tendency to eschew anything that hinted at a possibility of contradictions inside a national community. He defined the position of Japan’s pioneering Husserlian phenomenologist (strongly influenced by Kyoto



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School thinkers), Takahashi Satomi (1886–1964), as “emphasis on the totality and rejection of dialectics” and wondered whether Takahashi’s concept of “love” as a medium of intersubjective communications was to transcend the international borders. In addition, he was noticing the inherently contradictory nature of Watsuji Tetsurō’s (1889–1960) concept of fūdo (“climate,” which was supposedly to determine the “intrinsic characteristics of civilizations”). The concept, as Pak formulated it, was “instrumental in evoking the ideas of fatherland and native land” but hardly supportive per se of the project of Japan’s external expansion enthusiastically approved of by Watsuji himself as a public intellectual.87 In a word, totalitarian philosophy was regarded by Pak as an intellectually hopeless project. It aimed at persuading the egoistic individuals to reduce themselves to the “parts of the national body” but could never develop a consequent logical explanation of the reasons why the part was to be completely subsumed by the whole. Developing such an explanation required the application of dialectics. But that was impossible for the philosophers of the totality who did not want to accept the realities of conflict-ridden human existence.88 German, Italian, or Japanese fascisms ended up being defeated by 1945. However, the authoritarian right-wing nationalism continued to exist, in Korea and elsewhere. Already by 1946, it showed itself to be a serious force in the divided society of US-occupied South Korea.89 That was the reason Pak felt the need to turn again to the same topic—criticism of the extreme versions of totalitarian nationalism—again in 1946. This time, Pak’s account was more of a political rather than philosophical diagnosis. While Pak’s colonial-era analyses of contemporary totalitarianism emphasized its aversion towards the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment or the dialectics, now Pak chose to focus on irrationality as the main feature of what he termed “ultra-nationalist fascism” (kuksujuŭijōk p’asijŭm). As he saw it now, South Korea’s extremist nationalism—associated with such politicians as Yi Pŏmsŏk (1900–1972), the de facto leader of the National Youth Corps (Chosŏn Minjok Ch’ŏngnyŏndan), and the coterie of the ideologists around him—was prelogical in some of its basic theses, and concurrently militantly anti-logical in its practices. Its idealization of imagined antiquity ends up in the belief in “heavenly descendants” as “our” ancestors, typologically similar to the Shinto nationalism of defeated Japan. Pak was seriously afraid that

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­

­

In this regard, and with reference to Europe’s experiences with united antifascist fronts, Pak explicitly articulated the need for an antifascist alliance spanning Right and Left, the supporters of “socialist democracy” and the adherents of the “capitalist democracy,” with strong workingclass participation.90 Pak’s appeal for a democratic alliance across Right and Left against the ultra-right-wing extremism demonstrates that South Korean Communists, whose voice he, as Pak Hŏnyŏng’s secretary, was representing, were still prepared to be integrated into a pluralistic political system in the beginning of 1946, when the article on the “ultranationalist fascism” was penned and published. Their intentions, however, were overridden by circumstances out of their control. In the political reality of the late 1940s, it was the National Youth Corps and other ultra-nationalists rather than South Korean Communists, with their avowed internationalist orientation, that were warmly welcomed by the US Occupation authorities—which had started its suppression of Communism already by summer 1946—and the post-1948 South Korean government.91 And Pak Ch’iu, despite his appeals to rationality and the vision of socialist future for Korea as essentially democratic, was forced to flee to the North by the right-wing terror in the South and the American persecutions against South Korea’s domestic Communists. After



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that, he found himself in a position of a philosophy teacher for wouldbe guerrilla soldiers who had to operate inside a system that hardly could be characterized as democratic.92 Yet another key southern intellectual who chose North, Yi T’aejun (1904–1970; see Chapter 7 on his travel to Moscow in 1946), once told a visiting Soviet writer in 1949 that propaganda obligations took too much of his time, leaving little to proper creative work.93 In fact, Pak was placed into a comparable position: he hardly wrote a single philosophical article after his move to North Korea and until his untimely and violent death.

c o nc lu s ion Pak Ch’iu lived a short life, ending it on the battleground in the literal rather than ideological meaning of the word—battling South Korean government forces as a member of a Communist guerrilla detachment. For a philosopher whose trademark was a belief in the force of rational arguments, rather than state authority or weapons, it was indeed a tragic end, although Pak’s penchant for sociopolitical participation per se did not essentially contradict his philosophical emphasis on practice. However, a denouement of this kind was probably inevitable. Ironically enough, the academism of the university or scholastic environment of 1930s colonial Korea served as a defensive mechanism that Pak Ch’iu—a Marxist philosopher with a proclivity for historicizing and highly dialectical ideological critique—would have lacked in any case in both parts of divided postcolonial Korea, had he lived throughout the Korean War and its aftermaths. His Marxism would have made him a persona non grata in the fervently anti-Communist frontline Cold War state of South Korea. At the same time, his closeness to Pak Hŏnyŏng, arrested in 1953 and executed in 1955 by North Korean authorities, would have precluded any career perspectives for him in North Korea 94 ­ While colonial academia, with its liberal and cosmopolitan either. traits, could protect the sprouts of scholarly Marxism in the 1930s, the postcolonial politics of regimented police states were much more inimical to Marxist critics of capitalism, modern state order, and its ideologies. Pak Ch’iu should be considered one of the founders of Marxism as a philosophy, as well as a tradition of sociopolitical and ideological critique,

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in Korea. Whereas Korea’s Marxism of the 1920s was essentially limited to the translation of certain basic classics (often via the medium of Japanese), radical journalism, and political or socioeconomic pamphleteering, Pak Ch’iu based his Marxist method and theory on the primary texts in original languages, operated with the terminology of European philosophical tradition, and was keenly aware of the work by his peers in Japanese and European academia. Pak’s philosophy, while being built on premises similar to that found in the works of other contemporary Marxists elsewhere (Tosaka Jun and other Japanese Marxists included), demonstrated also some interesting, peculiar features. It strongly focused on the problems of theoretically informed, conscious social practice, both on the individual and collective levels, and on the application of dialectics to historically informed analysis of the current society. It was also sharply critical, on both philosophic and political planes, of nationalistic constructions, with their focus on totality and their penchant for resurrecting premodern mythology and appropriating an irrational, mythological mode of thinking for political purposes. Pak’s analyses of nationalist totalitarian ideology as a world-historical and philosophical phenomenon are important for a more holistic understanding of the intellectual opposition to a wartime total mobilization regime in colonized Korea. It is also essential for a more inclusive view of the diverse histories of East Asia’s Marxism in the first half of the twentieth century. In the context of Korea’s twentieth-century history, Pak’s critique of right-wing nationalism constitutes an important intellectual counterweight to the more mainstream and socially dominant nationalist ideologies. Its existence and its relative prominence in the intellectual circles of 1930s–1940s Korea demonstrate the critical potential that Korea’s intellectual milieus accumulated in the course of their engagement with the issues of modern national statehood and nationalism throughout the first half of the twentieth century. However, this potential was largely precluded from becoming a meaningful phenomenon of the public intellectual life due to the extent of social, political, and cultural controls deployed first by the Japanese colonial authorities and afterwards by both postcolonial states on the Korean Peninsula.

c h a p te r   5

The Socialist Concepts of Nation and History

T

his chapter deals with the debates surrounding the definition of minjok (ethno-nation) in colonial-period Korea. The main protagonists in the debates were, on one side, Marxists (some of them related to the underground communist movement), and on the other side, more conventional nationalists. This chapter will focus on the arguments and stances of the former, in order to understand how the introduction of Marxism into Korea worked to change the ways in which ethno-national identity was articulated.

e thn o - n ­ at io n in p r e c o l o n ial k ­ o r ea First and foremost, it is noteworthy that the Marxists were attempting to work out an understanding of nation that can be termed protoconstructivist.1 The nationalists, as I attempt to make clear in this chapter, were further developing the minjok discourses of the last precolonial decade (1900–1909), to which a set of qualities ascribed to the ethno-nation (“national character”) was central. For the nationalists— in contrast to the Marxists and their emphasis on the dialectics of production force development and class struggle—“nation” constituted the fundamental, primeval essence of Korea’s time-honored history. Their view of nation was archetypically essentialist. To them, nation was an organic body with its own set of immutable, immanent characteristics rather than a historically constructed category.2 At the same time, the view of nation as an extended familial lineage bound with blood ties, common to the precolonial nationalists, was much less pronounced in 157

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colonial Korea. Nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s were more sophisticated in their attempts to understand the minjok as a product of primarily historical and cultural developments, partly due to the influence that Marxism, with its claim to “scientific” approach, exerted on the discursive field as a whole.

t h e c o nt inu o u s im p o r t an ce o f e t h no -­nat io n Minjok is, without a doubt, one of the central concepts of Korean modernity. For both Koreas, North and South, the concept is of serious ideological importance today—and for North Korea, the importance is crucial. Whereas South Korea officially adopted multiculturalism as a state doctrine at the start of the first decade of the twenty-first century—its younger generation being increasingly inclined to identify South Korean nationality as political (rather than ethnic), belonging to the South Korean state3—minjok still serves as the main instrument of strengthening sociocultural cohesion, as well as the ideological ground for South Korea’s claim to eventual unification with North Korea.4 In the case of North Korea, the discursive status of minjok appears to be significantly higher. Much less integrated into the capitalist worldsystem and influenced by the international migration trends of late capitalism to an incomparably lesser degree, North Korea bases much of its legitimacy on its claim to the role of guardian of Korean ethno-cultural values against imperialist predations.5 In 2006, North Korea’s main ­ party-state newspaper, Rodong Sinmun (Workers’ Daily), even explicitly editorialized against multiculturalism, claiming that in the last analysis the positive attitude towards international marriages and multiethnic coexistence would “mongrelize” (chapt’anghwa) South Korea, fulfilling the “US imperialist aim of Americanizing” South Korean society.6 South Korea’s left-liberal human rights organizations, normally avoiding unnecessary frictions vis-à-vis North Korean authorities for the sake of building up the momentum for peaceful coexistence with North, were forced into making a rare public rebuke,7 after which North Korean governmental journalists became noticeably more careful in publicly articulating their ethno-national homogeneity theories. That,



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however, does not necessarily signal an essential change in their underlying attitudes. Concurrently, minjok is crucially important to the relationship between the two Korean states and the worldwide Korean diasporas currently totaling approximately seven million people, or 10 percent of the Korean Peninsula’s population, according to South Korea’s statistical authorities.8 The relationship between these diasporas and the two Koreas are complicated and potentially conflict-ridden. In South Korea’s case, Chinese Koreans (chaoxianzu, ethnic Korean citizens of the People’s Republic of China), or Koreans from the former Soviet Union (1922–1991, popularly known as Koryŏ Saram), for example, may justifiably resent being placed below Korean Americans in the official and unofficial hierarchies of South Korean life.9 According to 2016 research commissioned by the governmental Overseas Koreans Foundation, 63  percent of Chinese Koreans currently residing in South Korea answered that they experienced discrimination by native South Koreans.10 Still, minjok provides a special ground for relations between co-ethnic return migrants and South Korean state and society, which non-Korean foreign workers lack.11 By law, overseas ethnic Koreans are allowed preferential treatment in the matters of staying and working in South Korea.12 All in all, although the globalizing trends of the late capitalist age have reduced to a certain degree the significance of ethno-national cohesion, it still remains important for the majority of people self-identifying as Koreans, inside and outside the Korean Peninsula.

e t h no -­nat io n in ­k o r ea: t h e b e g inni n gs It is noteworthy, however, how relatively recent the concept of minjok is, and how historically quick was its ascendance to a central position in Korea’s nascent system of modern discursive coordinates during the early twentieth century. As research by South Korean scholar Kwŏn Podŭrae demonstrates, the Meiji Japanese word minzoku (K. minjok, Ch. minzu)13 first entered the Korean language in 1898, when Chang Hoik (?–1904), then a Korean student in Japan, mentioned the term in an article on Spenserian societal competition in a journal published by Tokyo-based

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Korean students. Inside Korea proper, the first known usage occurred in 1900 in a letter to the editor of Hwangsŏng Sinmun (Capital Gazette), a mouthpiece of reformist Confucians. The letter used minjok as a translation of “race” and discussed the vicissitudes in the history of “White minjok” or “Eastern minjok.”14 Minjok first appears in Hwangsŏng Sinmun articles (rather than letters to the editor) in 1903, in the run-up to Russo-Japanese war, in an article describing the prowar views of a prominent Japanese businessman, Viscount Shibusawa Eiichi (1840–1931).15 However, in the period between 1895 and 1905, the most usual way to refer to the collectivity of Koreans was either to use age-honored terms like tongp’o (compatriots) or such, rather traditional, political vocabulary as inmin (people) or sinmin (subjects), with its emphasis on loyalty vis-à-vis the sovereign state rather than ethnic identity per se. It changed in 1905 when, with the conclusion of the Protectorate Treaty (Ŭlsa Choyak) imposed by a triumphant Japan, the victor of the Russo-Japanese War, the Korean state lost much of its sovereignty, leaving ethnic cohesion as the only continuously valid form of Korean collectivity.16 As noted by Podŭrae Kwŏn, in 1905–1906, Korean periodicals routinely used the word minjok as a reference to both Koreans as a historical ethno-national group and Koreans as a political nation—that is, the subjects of the Korean Empire (1897–1910).17 Ethno-nation as a concept was being quickly entrenched in a country threatened with foreign colonization (and ultimately annexed by Japan in 1910): the concept was to provide the sort of cohesion that the weakened Korean Empire, a Japanese protectorate since 1905, could no longer build among its subjects. Since the subjects were not to become citizens so far—the greatly weakened (and placed under Japanese “supervision”) Korean monarchy remained in theory absolute— ethnic cohesion was a more logical venue for developing collective political subjectivity than the formation of citizenry’s political community, for example. From 1905 to 1910, minjok had several important connotations in its Korean usage. On the one hand, it was understood as an extended lineage of sorts, shaped by the supposed four thousand years of history since the times of Korea’s legendary progenitor, Tan’gun (believed to have come to power in 2333 BCE).18 In a country where the dominant stratum of yangban scholar-officials was still patrilineal and many of them



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lived together in the villages of their ancestral clans, the understanding of ethno-nation as one giant pan-national lineage offered great potential.19 A famous editorial published on July 30, 1908, in the radically na­ tionalist and vociferously anti-Japanese Taehan Maeil Sinbo (Korea Daily News) dealing with the differences between “ethno-nation” (minjok) and “political nation” (kungmin), made this potential clear. Ethnonation was understood to be constituted by homogeneity of blood lineage (hyŏlt’ong), territory, history, religion, and language. However, to develop into a political nation, the ethno-nation needed, in addition, the unity of “spirit” (chŏngsin), especially in relationship with the outer world, as well as the consciousness of common interests and ability to take coordinated political action. An ethno-nation failing to develop itself into a political nation was seen as having little chance of survival in modernity’s Darwinian jungles.20 A March 12, 1908, editorial in Hwangsŏng Sinmun about the “basic improvement” of the Korean ethno-nation proclaimed that the Korean ethno-nation, “descendants of Tan’gun,” was regarded as originally possessing the qualities of loyalty and humaneness seen as woefully lacking in the present. Thus, its merits were to be improved in the direction of developing the spirit of ethnic solidarity, industriousness, and public-mindedness.21 Once such improvement took place, the Korean ethno-nation, as early nationalists saw it, had decent chances to survive in the new Darwinian world. An April 23, 1910, Taehan Maeil Sinbo editorial described the “sacred Korean ethno-nation,” the “descendants of sagely Tan’gun,” as inheritors to the grandeur of the military victories over countless contenders and foreign invaders. Koreans’ very survival throughout four millennia of uninterrupted history testified, according to the editorial writer, to their ability to score the ultimate triumph in the survival contest of the new age.22 On the other hand, concurrent with signifying a sort of extended clan of Tan’gun, minjok could also mean simply the “people” as an ethnopolitical subject. Importantly, as a political category, it was broader than kungmin, as it also included women and adolescents, who were so far not supposed to claim full membership in the nation as a political construction. They were, however, also exhorted to be aware of their role as the country’s preservers and excel in competition with foreigners, to guarantee Korea’s survival in the age of Darwinian struggles.23 A letter to the editor published in Taehan Maeil Sinbo on August 11, 1908, for

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example, made it clear that a failure to educate women could result in the downfall of the state and the extinction of its people, since uneducated women could not, in turn, provide the needed level of domestic education to their (male) offspring.24 While an essentialized cultural and historical category built upon a fusion of the imported concept of ethnonational volk25 and the indigenous focus on descent groups as the basic units of a society, minjok was simultaneously denoting citizenship and civic duties, as being a part of historical Korean nation was supposed to imply certain public obligations. This sort of ambiguity continued to accompany the usages of minjok in the colonial period, which started in 1910 with Korea’s annexation by Japan.

e thno - nat io n and c ol o n ial nat io nalis m Ethnicity as a L ­ egal and Discursive Category ­



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not but become a term for anticolonial subversion, for the Left and Right alike. It was the central ideological code for the March 1 movement in 1919 (see Introduction)—when Wilsonian “self-determination” was demanded by demonstrators in the name of the Korean ethno-nation.28 Ironically enough, it was the system of colonial discrimination that made minjok, a relatively novel term in the Korean vocabulary, into a word of daily usage, with millions of demonstrators proclaiming minjok rights on the streets during the days of the March 1 movement.29 Deprived of civil rights and put under a strict censorship regime,30 the colonial-era nationalist intellectuals were adding further details to the essentialized images of minjok’s past and its current status, the blueprints for which, as I have mentioned, were found in the last precolonial decade. Nationalists typically saw minjok as an extended family-like, ageold, and very homogenous (or homogenized) entity, with its own consciousness, spirit, character, and special features. However, in line with the general tendency towards an analytical approach to reality—inspired by the social sciences and strongly influenced, inter alia, by the surge in popularity of Marxism and other leftist discourses in the 1920s—the new views of minjok placed stronger emphasis on its historicity rather than on its pseudo-familial qualities. A good example of such a definition is a programmatic editorial in Tong’a Ilbo, “Discussing Korea’s Ethnonational Movement at the Beginning of the Worldwide Reformation,” which defined minjok as a “product of history” but in the same time as an “ever-flowing, continuous totality” (chŏnch’e).31 Even if it was history that formed minjok, the time of its historical existence—assumed to amount to four thousand years—was supposed to be long enough to make it almost a transhistorical, eternal entity. In addition to being a community of common fate, minjok was also a combination of special features (such as “national character”) that were to define the attributes of everyone’s existence. Homogeneity, Blood, and Spirit Nationalist ideologists regarded not only individuals but nation-states, too, as being defined by their ethnic composition, and Tong’a Ilbo’s 1920 editorial—mentioned above—assumed that a “homogeneous nation” (tan’il minjok) in each and every nation-state was to be the standard of

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modern international society. However, it is noteworthy that “homogeneity” here referred to the common character and culture grounded in shared historical experiences, rather than the assumption of an identical bloodline. The editorial made a point of saying that “infusions of Chinese or Japanese blood” into Korean veins did not matter, as the totality and actuality of minjok was primarily anchored in its historicity and communal consciousness.32 In a word, minjok was the overarching, totalizing entity creating the possibility for both individual existence and statehood and possessing historically rooted characteristics of its own, but it was primarily based on nurture (shared fate and historical experiences) rather than nature (blood). It was accepted that Korean “blood” was most likely mixed and that it was not supposed to matter too much. As Kim Kijin (1903–1985), then a youthful and promising literary critic who was developing at that time an interest in Marxism but remained a (progressive) nationalist in many ways, put it in a 1925 journalistic piece, there was no need to investigate whether Koreans were a homogenous ethno-nation, or had their blood mixed with Han Chinese and Mongols in the course of their tumultuous history of mutual interactions. What mattered was their history, and especially the history of the Chosŏn Dynasty, which Kim viewed mainly in terms of exploitation, decay, and subservience.33 In the relatively liberal climate of the 1920s, Tong’a Ilbo was definitely focusing more on “spirit” than “blood.” Six years later, in an editorial on “The Greatness of Spiritual Strength” the newspaper defiantly pronounced that as long as the spirit of a weaker, conquered minjok is alive, the conquest is only temporal.34 As demonstrated by the proindependence rallies in Seoul on June 10, 1926—co-organized by Communists and the adepts of the native Ch’ŏndogyo religion (see Chapter 2) on the occasion of the funeral of independent Korea’s last emperor, Sunjong (r. 1907–1910)—Korea’s minjok retained its spiritual strength. The new editorial implied that Korea’s “individuality, dignity, and selfreliance” were all intact.35 In this and other nationalistic narratives, minjok was typically described as an individual-like collectivity, almost as a single person—with a strongly individual set of characteristics—in plural. Indeed, much of the early nationalistic scholarship on Korea’s history and culture was devoted to attempts to produce a coherent description of timeless Korean-ness as a combination of national mores, habits, beliefs, and traits.



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Koreans and Their National Character Designed to counter Japanese Orientalist (mis)representations of Koreans and Korean-ness, early nationalistic descriptions of Korean minjok were often strongly self-affirming, defining it as a set of universal human virtues—in addition to certain special, historically defined qualities. The exiled Korean nationalists, free from the Japanese censorship constraints, could allow themselves to contrast the positive national qualities of Koreans with the assumed evilness of their Japanese colonial victimizers. As Pak Ŭnsik (1859–1925), a senior nationalist figure in Chinese exile, put it in his celebrated 1920 Bloody History of the Korean Independence Movement (Han’guk tongnip undong chi hyŏlsa), Koreans and Japanese were “as mutually incompatible as ice and coal” since the ancient times due to irreconcilable differences in national character. Koreans saw Japanese as uncultured, lewd, and lecherous, in contrast to their own virtuous civility. Japan’s rise in Meiji times was ascribed to the Japanese imitation of European culture, but, as Pak claimed, Koreans, once given an opportunity, could excel their colonizers in both appropriating European culture and creating a modern culture of their own.36 The nationalists in Korea proper, subject to censorship restrictions, had to concentrate on describing Koreans’ innate goodness. Typically, An Hwak (1884–1946), a well-known nationalist historian, in a 1922 work on Korean literary history, The History of Korean Literature (Chosŏn munhaksa), defined Koreans as collective-oriented, polite and respectful, simple and warm-hearted, peace-loving, optimistic, and able to combine down-to-earth pragmatism with good Confucian virtues of humaneness 37 ­ The infusions of Han Chinese, Mohe (K. Malgal), and righteousness. or Xianbei (K. Sŏnbi) blood in the Korean bloodline did not really matter, as long as all Koreans were united in worshipping Tan’gun, their forefather “equal to bright and fair Heaven in the Korean thinking.” In other words, as long as beliefs and national character worked to consolidate the minjok, its heterogeneous descent would have little impact.38 It is important to remember that the national character as seen by the nationalist intellectuals was both a given and a variable. National character was regarded as a reality that one could observe and assess; at the same time, Korean nationalism as a movement was supposed to improve it in the desirable direction. A thinker with strong interest in the

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idea of national character improvement was, for example, An Ch’angho (1878–1938), one of the most respected nationalist leaders and, together with Pak Ŭnsik, one of the principal driving forces behind the Shanghai Provisional Government in the early 1920s. An Ch’angho was also considered one of the most moderate nationalist luminaries, due to his willingness to make alliances with the Left, if necessary.39 He published in 1926 an exhortatory appeal to Korean student youth. Younger educated Koreans, representing the nation’s hopeful future, were asked to develop the qualities that An Ch’angho wanted to see all Koreans developing— namely, a self-sacrificial spirit of public commitment and cooperative skills. In An Ch’angho’s thinking, Koreans were lacking in these qualities, but the situation could be improved through conscious collective efforts. Yet another important exhortation to the students was to not treat less educated compatriots contemptuously, and to not focus too much on the shortcomings of the Korean national character. The character could be, after all, improved under the guidance of the new, nationalist elite, and a merciful attitude toward compatriots’ shortcomings would also translate into stronger hatred toward the colonialist enemy.40 “National Homogeneity” and the Heterogeneity of Korean Nationalism As researchers have noticed before, the belief in the cultural and “spiritual” homogeneity of the Korean minjok took shape in colonial Korea even without a mytho-history of Koreans’ “homogeneous descent” being properly articulated and popularized. Historical and cultural homogeneity was more than enough for the purpose.41 On certain occasions the “unitary descent line” from Tan’gun straight to the present day was solemnly mentioned. For example, the mouthpiece of the Shanghai Pro­ visional Government, Tongnip Sinmun (The Independent; run by An Ch’angho’s protégés, including Yi Kwangsu, later a famous prose writer and right-wing ideologist), reported on November 24, 1919, on a speech delivered by Yi Tongnyŏng (1869–1940), then minister of the interior in the Provisional Government. In that speech, timed to the occasion of Tan’gun’s annual birthday celebrations, Yi stated that all Koreans belonged to Tan’gun’s blood lineage (hyŏlt’ong). That made them “one blood lineage-based ethno-nation” (han hyŏlt’ong ŭi minjok) obliged to



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aid each other, as befits blood relatives in a large family.42 In fact, Tan’gun’s supposed birthday (the third day of the tenth lunar month), was widely celebrated by the exiled Korean communities in the 1910s and later. On the occasion of one such celebration, in 1912, a local Korean newspaper in Vladivostok also editorialized on the importance of mutual love among Tan’gun’s descendants, especially in the diaspora.43 However, as Richard Kim persuasively argues in his volume on colonial Korea’s diasporic nationalism, it was the principle of territorial national sovereignty, coupled with the belief in self-determination and popular sovereignty—rather than the “blood lineage”–related ideas—that formed the backbone of overseas Koreans’ nonsocialist nationalism in the 1910s through the 1930s.44 As Pak Ch’ansŭng concludes in his study, cultural and historical homogeneity took precedence over speculations about a unitary Korean blood lineage in the Korean nationalist discourse of the 1920s and 1930s. Some nationalists, both inside and outside Korea, sometimes mentioned the assumed singular bloodline. However, in most cases it was understood as a complementary element in relationship to the homogeneity of the beliefs, spirit, and virtues. Collectively believing in Tan’gun’s role as the nation’s forefather was clearly more important than the presumed bloodline of Tan’gun per se.45 One necessary caveat is that nationalist views on the issue of national bloodline were as ideologically and politically diverse as the nationalist milieus themselves. In theory, the positions on radical land reform or the feasibility of going further towards a Soviet-type society after the hoped-for national liberation separated the socialist and nonsocialist nationalist camps on a general level. In practice, the lines between them often blurred, and diverse groups and opinions coexisted inside each camp.46 This diversity is visible, for example, in the answers given by various nationalist intellectuals to a question concerning the appropriateness of interracial marriages, asked in September 1931 by the editors of a popular monthly, Samch’ŏlli. All the intelligentsia luminaries who answered the question made clear their opposition to economically or politically motivated marriages “with foreign races inside Korea” (obviously referring to the intermarriages with Japanese settlers, politically encouraged by the Japanese imperial authorities).47 Other than that set of answers, the opinions were divided. Han Yong’un (1879–1944), a selfproclaimed Buddhist Socialist (but not a Communist) and simultaneously

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an uncompromising nationalist who, however, shared many social concerns of the leftists,48 made it clear that humanity’s progress was achieved precisely through “blood contact” between different nations and that, in his opinion, it was internationalism that constituted the dominant trend of the current age. By contrast, Hwang Aesidŏk (Esther Hwang, 1892–1971), an American-educated female Christian and concomitantly nationalist activist, defined Koreans as possessors of “superior qualities” and concluded that their marriages with non-Koreans had little chance of success due to differences in customs and “ethnonational sentiments.”49 While both Han and Hwang, being nationalist thinkers, used minjok—rather than, for example, social class—as the primary category of analysis, they differed considerably in their views on the degree to which minjok members’ intimacy with the outsiders was permissible. To summarize, whereas the Japanese colonial administration legally defined the category of ethnic Korean-ness by systematically according different juridical treatment to respectively Koreans and Japanese on the Korean Peninsula, Korean nationalists of the colonial era, building further on the conceptual developments of the last precolonial decade, were attempting to challenge the colonizers’ power to define and fill the category of Korean-ness with meanings of their own. Whereas the radical émigré nationalists could be explicit about their belief in Koreans’ cultural and racial superiority over Japanese since ancient times (when Koreans acted as teachers to “backward” inhabitants of Japanese Islands) and complete impossibility of Koreans being assimilated into the greater ­Japanese nation,50 the nationalists placed under the colonial censorship regime had to focus mainly on the superiority of the Korean ethno-nation (minjok) in more general and neutral terms. The historically constituted Korean ethno-nation, as the nationalists imagined it, was simultaneously united, transcendent in relationship to the myriad of differences inside the Korean ethno-community, and at the same time particular and separate vis-à-vis the rest of the world. All Koreans, just like one person, possessed a special set of traits, virtues, and characteristics, and all had to regard their national commitment as primary and all-consuming. By the standards of the 1920s–1930s, Korean nationalists’ speculations on Korean national character were not perhaps standing apart too much if viewed in a global context. Folk psychology, an anthropological-



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psychological study of the assumed differences between diverse national characters, was then a growing field in both Europe and the United States, and non-Marxist social psychologists habitually took the supposed national traits of individual personalities as an important variable in their research.51 In other words, essentialization of the national was a global, rather than uniquely Korean, trend, not only in popular but also in specialist literature. It was this totalizing, ahistorical way of imagining the nation and its presumed qualities—with complete disregard to both the realities of class differentiation and the international relatedness of different classes, groups, and interests—that Korean Marxists of the 1920s and 1930s attempted to deconstruct.

co m m u nis m , m ar xism , an d t h e k o r e an e t h no -n at io n Marxism and Ethno-­National Issues Marxism took its shape in Europe after the democratic and national revolutions of 1848 and, naturally enough, had to engage from the very beginning with the issues of nation and nationalism. In the beginning, Marxist understanding of the dialectic of national identities and movements was rather instrumental.52 Such founders of Marxism as Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) viewed nationalisms (Polish or, say, Hungarian), allied with the rising tide of bourgeois liberalism in the struggle against the outdated autocratic governments as progressive.53 More generally, in Poland and elsewhere, independent national statehood was regarded as an important prerequisite for internationalist working-class cooperation—hence the attention paid to the “Polish question.”54 The point about the essentiality of support for national(ist) demands for independence—naturally, only as long as such a demand, voiced against an oppressive multiethnic empire, is “progressive”—was further developed by Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924). He famously foregrounded the right to national self-determination as a fundamental democratic principle, although it was clearly always expected that the “proletarian and peasant masses” of most minorities in Russia, or any other country opting out of the capitalist system, would eventually voluntarily choose to align with the newborn “socialist motherland.”55

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Still, Lenin’s advocacy of national self-determination in principle was one of the major reasons that his version of Marxism attracted so many independence-oriented intellectuals in colonized Korea. Indeed, the Government General’s mouthpiece, Maeil Sinbo, had to emphasize the formal nature of ethnic autonomy in Soviet Union and supposed disingenuity of Lenin’s appeals to minorities’ self-determination56 in a bid to lead its Korean readers to reconsider their fascination with Lenin’s national ­ self-determination policies. Yet another commonality shared by Lenin, Engels, and other Marxist theoreticians in their views on nations and nationalisms was the basic proto-constructivist position. Nations—Hungarian, Polish, or what Lenin termed “advanced capitalist nations of Western Europe and the United States of America”57—were seen as products of economic and political history, most significantly as the results of the history of capitalist development inside the frameworks of absolutist states and the history of democratic and liberal (“bourgeois”) revolutions. In a classic Marxist statement on the problems of nationhood, Die Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätenfrage (1907), Otto Bauer (1881–1938), a famed Austrian Marxist theoretician, recognized the premodern roots of modern nations in tribal “communities of nature” and medieval “communities of culture.” However, as he emphasized, it was the capitalist development of transportation, industry, commerce, postal systems, and press that produced the nations in the modern sense of the word.58 Bauer preferred to solve ethnic issues with national-cultural autonomy for minorities, which would both alleviate ethnic discrimination and prevent the breakup of large multiethnic states (including his own, Austria-Hungary) by offering minorities a practical alternative to secession. The implementation of this solution was, interestingly, attempted in the short-lived Far Eastern Republic (1920–1922) vis-à-vis the Korean, Jewish, and Ukrainian populaces.59 Some sort of local, village-level Korean autonomy existed in the Russian Maritime Province even after the demise of the Far Eastern Republic, annexed by Bolshevik Russia in 1922. However, by 1926, non-Bolshevik, pan-Russian ethnic organization of Koreans was disestablished (partly on the insistence of Japan, with which Soviet Russia normalized in 1925; Japanese authorities were wary of Korean pro-independence nationalism) and further Korean immigration to Soviet Russia banned.60 Koreans were defined as a foreign population



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whose national aspirations were to be fulfilled by the liberation of its historical homeland via the Leninist route of combined national and social struggle, rather than as a Soviet nationality to be accommodated through autonomy on Soviet territory. Lenin, the father of the Soviet Union’s ethnic policies, was more a practitioner than a theoretician of Marxism. Although he did not necessarily share Bauer’s practical program (he was emphatically against Bauer’s appeal for establishing national-cultural autonomy for minorities), he did share Bauer’s understanding of the historical roots of modern nations and nationalism. “Awakening of national life and national movements, the struggle against all national oppression, and the creation of national states” were, in Lenin’s view, important traits of historical capitalism’s early history. Wherever capitalism was still underdeveloped, the formation of modern nations was stunted as well.61 Lenin’s original mentor, Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), was also fond of mentioning the importance of absolutist and consequently centralized nation-states’ uniform bureaucracy, with its demand for linguistic uniformity, for the development of what later became national language and nationalist consciousness.62 In fact, Bauer’s—and Kautsky’s or Lenin’s—accounts of the origins of modern nations contain in their nuclei all the essential theses of contemporary constructivist theoreticians of nations and nationalisms, including the centrality of “print capitalism”63 and standardized high culture, popularized through the educational system and media.64 By contrast, French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan, in his influential 1882 speech, emphasized modern European nations’ presumed roots in post-Roman Germanic barbarian kingdoms, as well as “common will” and communal consciousness as the cornerstones of nationhood.65 Such an approach had more in common with the views of the Korean nationalists of the 1920s and 1930s discussed earlier. Bauer’s belief in the existence of national character—which he, however, considered a highly variable product of historical conditions66—was also not entirely different from the speculations of the likes of An Hwak on the Korean national psyche, the difference being Bauer’s emphasis on the decisive importance of modern, rather than ancient, history. However, Bolshevik thinkers who exerted especially strong influence on the Korean Marxists of the 1920s and 1930s—for example, Joseph Stalin (1878– 1953) in his well-known 1913 pamphlet Marxism and the National

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Question—made it clear that the different classes and groups of which nations consist were hardly in a position to share the same character, the use of common language notwithstanding. It was the communality of (capitalist-age) economic life rather than mystical character that defined the commonality of modern nation’s members.67 Korean Marxism: Defining Nation, Nationalism, and National Anti-Imperialist Revolution The basics of Korean Marxists’ understanding of ethno-nation did not essentially differ from that typical of Marxists elsewhere, although colonial Korea’s peculiarities were also to be taken into consideration. As Marxist thinker, famed Korean philosopher, and popular writer Sin Namch’ŏl (1903–1958) defined it, an ethno-nation was a historically formed human collective, united by its shared language, territory, and economic life, as well as the “spiritual communality” produced by the experience of cultural unity.68 Sin’s definition appears in a monograph published after the decolonization but is based on his colonial-era works.69 Sin obviously agreed with his non-Marxist contemporaries on the ethno-nation’s historicity, as well as the (historically conditioned) existence of some sort of spiritual communality among fellow nationals. He did not, however, regard national existence as a precondition for individual life, and showed little interest in speculations on the ethnonational traits, character, or virtues of Koreans that were so popular in the nationalist milieus. He was even less interested in the ethno-nation’s supposed common descent, which he did not even mention in his definition of the ethno-nation.70 Indeed, in the mid-1930s, Sin Namch’ŏl was a thorough Marxist universalist who was skeptical not only about the theories of essentialized national peculiarity but also about the reified, ahistorical dichotomy of East versus West. He acknowledged the difference between the “West’s human-centeredness” and the “Eastern” attachment to the ideas of nonaction (Ch. wuwei; K. muwi) or cosmic interconnectedness, but tended to ascribe this difference to the disparity of the economic basis in the capitalist West and precapitalist East, exactly in line with Marxist orthodoxy.71 Sin was also seriously troubled by the rise of nativist nostalgia for the ethno-national past in post-1933 fascist Germany and Japan’s



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rapidly expanding ultra-nationalist and pan-Asian circles, and saw a certain connection between Korean nationalists’ essentialist and nativist leanings and the turn towards nationalist extremism elsewhere.72 However, given Korea’s sociopolitical situation in the 1930s, simply defining ethno-nation in an orthodox Marxist way and subsequently denouncing nationalist attempts to absolutize or essentialize it would not be sufficient. After all, with the explicit blessing of the Comintern (see Introduction), Korean Communists—whose understanding of the political situation and the sequence of the tasks strongly influenced nonparty Marxists as well—designated the first stage of the coming revolution as national and anti-imperialist (see Chapter 3). As Korean Communist theoretician from the ML (Marxist-Leninist) faction (see Chapter 2) Han Wigŏn (1896–1937) formulated it in his programmatic ­ article, On the Present Tasks of the Working-Class Vanguard—first published in 1929 in Kyegŭp T’ujaeng (Class Struggle), a China-based Communist magazine mainly targeting party members and their fellow travelers—such a revolution had to be conducted by a proletarian-led collaborative front (hyŏptong chŏnsŏn) of different classes and groups with anti-imperialist potential on the ethno-national (minjok) basis. Whereas a broader front, including the nonproletarian masses previously influenced by nationalist leaders, was seen as needed, Han viewed the political stance of the right-wing nationalist bourgeoisie as increasingly reactionary (see Chapter 2),73 a view that was broadly shared by the Comintern’s own Korean cadres. A typical case was Li Kang (pseudonym for Yang Myŏng, 1902–1936), a Beijing University graduate and originally an ML militant who stayed in Moscow after arriving as a political immigrant in 1931. Affiliated with the Comintern’s Communist University of Eastern Toilers (KUTV, 1921–1938; on Korean students there see Chapter  1), Li described Korean “national reformism” in Russian in a lengthy analytical article in a small-circulation Comintern journal, Materialy po Natsional’no-kolonial’nym problemam (Materials on National-Colonial Problems), as a reactionary force driven by unscientific beliefs in Koreans’ uniqueness and disregarding class issues.74 Generally, the Comintern’s approach to the diverse nationalisms of the non-European world was just as instrumental as early Marxists’ views on ethno-national issues; explicitly anticolonial nationalisms were seen as potential allies, albeit temporarily,75 whereas those too tightly connected

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to the great powers, implicated in colonial enterprises, or seeking territorial expansion were condemned as reactionary. For example, the Comintern and its affiliated Palestinian Communist Party defined Zionism as “imperialism’s military unit” destined to oppress the (legitimate/revolutionary) nationalism of the “Arab masses” on behalf of British and other colonizers.76 This opinion was fully supported by Korea’s Marxists too: they accused Zionists of relying on British imperial power.77 The Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, was (relatively) progressive until its anti-Communist turn in 1927, after which its nationalism was, naturally enough, redefined as reactionary.78 It was, in fact, reredefined as a temporary ally again in 1936, when the Soviet Union, in the spirit of a united antifascist front, started to provide the Guomindang government of China, then struggling against the Japanese invasion, with military aid.79 Although Comintern militants inside and outside Korea viewed the more radical wings of Korean nationalism as potential allies until the late 1920s or early 1930s, this view changed under the influence of the Great Depression. Since the late 1920s, the Comintern espoused a (not fully substantiated) belief in impending revolutionary explosions all over the world and of growing rapprochement between certain moderate nationalist groupings inside Korea and the colonial authorities. By the early 1930s, Korean nationalism was regarded in Comintern circles as one of the obstacles on the way to the supposedly looming revolution in Korea.80 These attitudes were in sync with Korean Communists’ own discontent vis-à-vis their nationalist allies inside Sin’ganhoe (1927–1931), a cooperative “united front” that included Communists and more radical nationalists. Tired of what they saw as nationalists’ lack of genuine anticolonial militancy, Communists—led by ­ the theoreticians from the ML faction, including Han Wigŏn—were increasingly advocating the dissolution of Sin’ganhoe in 1930–31, leading to the eventual termination of this united front undertaking in May 1931 (see Chapter 2). Marxist Criticisms and Nationalist Reactions Such hardening Communist attitudes towards political nationalism in Korea were largely echoed by Marxist intellectuals—including the nonparty ones—inside Korea dealing with the issues of nation, nationalism,



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and national culture or national studies (kukhak). The academic or quasiacademic search for Korean-ness came in vogue in the early 1930s with the growing depoliticization of Korea’s more mainstream nationalists. The latter preferred to deal with the discursive challenges represented by the Japanese colonialist deprecation of Korea’s national culture rather than the political challenges of colonial domination.81 Depoliticization, however, did not necessarily imply a uniform turn to the right. In fact, contrary to Han Wigŏn’s or Li Kang’s view of Korean nationalism as an exclusively reactionary force, the nationalists—especially those based at Chosŏn Ilbo, where a number of Communists used to work or publish in the 1920s as well—began giving serious consideration to socialist viewpoints. Indeed, a considerable amount of intellectual interchange between socialist and nonsocialist intelligentsia was taking place, espe­ cially on minjok-related issues. An Chaehong (1891–1965), a long-term editor-in-chief of Chosŏn Ilbo and one of the Sin’ganhoe leaders on the nationalist side, agreed, for example, that class movement might indeed be needed. However, he also maintained that the progress of the class struggle is, first and foremost, nationally important, since it would influence the situation of the nation as a whole in the end.82 Judging from the columns he published in Chosŏn Ilbo in January 1936 under the general title “On the Cultural Particularity Process Seen from the International Solidarity Viewpoint” (Kukche yŏndaesŏng esŏ pon munhwa t’ŭksu kwajŏngnon), he also appears to have believed that Korea’s “backward” culture would benefit from the influences of “international vanguard culture” (most likely, he meant socialist culture). At the same time, he appealed to respect for Korea’s particularity, in a cultural sense but also in the evolutionary meaning of the word. Nationalism, a vestige of the nineteenth-century past for established European nation-states, might be still needed in colonial Korea, but this nationalism had to be internationalist in its outlook.83 By 1936, socialist ideas had changed Korea’s intellectual landscape to the degree that even nationalist thinkers felt obliged to pay homage to the ideas of class struggle and international solidarity. Still, nationalists’ predilection towards foregrounding Koreans’ supposed ethno-national homogeneity and particularity—rather than socioeconomic factors of national life—and their uncritical attitudes towards ancient mythology would not go unchallenged by the Marxists, with

figure 5.1 Chosŏn Ilbo, a nationalist daily, reports on Korean Communists’ trial, September 13, 1927.



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their universalist worldview and scientific methodology. The tone of their criticism was not very different from the ridicule with which Li Kang cited An Chaehong’s musings on the supposed specificity of Koreans’ “philosophical and utopia-loving national character” in his lengthy ­Russian article.84 In a 1935 article on ethnic groups (chongjok) and nations (minjok), An Chaehong described Koreans—differently from such composite nations as the Japanese or British, which formed through assimilation and conquest—as a single natural group made by centuries of common life under the same (relatively isolated) natural conditions and collectively possessing “virgin-like self-pride and emotional spirit of [collective] advance.”85 At the same time, Marxists were maintaining that nations in the modern sense of the word were formed under the conditions of capitalist development. “National spirit” was among the terms they studiously avoided.86 A prominent Communist activist of the 1920s, Yi Yŏsŏng (1901–?) made the point clearly in his article on the national question serialized in Chosŏn Ilbo in November 1929: the transition from feudalism to capitalism had brought ethno-nations into modern existence, although there existed a sort of proto-nationalism even in the premodern world evident from the proclivity of ancient Chinese or Greeks and Romans to refer to the neighboring peoples as “barbarians” and assign themselves a special position of cultural superiority. Still, authentic nationalism could only develop with the formation of full-blown, bourgeois nations in the world of large-scale industrial enterprises, consolidated national markets, and newspapers and journals in national languages—in a word, in the world changed by the Industrial Revolution.87 ­

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his influential 1934 article on Korean literature (originally published in Chosŏn Ilbo) that Koreans had already formed their ethno-nation at the time of the Three Kingdoms, in the first century BCE to CE 668.89 Although “nation” here seems to signify a premodern ethnic group rather than a nation in the modern sense,90 it is also clear that Hong considered the Koreans’ case to be different from that of, say, Italians, who entered the process of ethno-national formation only during “Dante’s times” (that is, the end of the Middle Ages). Academic Studies of Korean Ethnogenesis and Korean Tradition Linguistic nationalists equated “Korean literature” with “literature in Korean.” A famous example is Yi Kwangsu (see above in this chapter on his past activities as Tongnip Sinmun editor; see Chapter 4 on his infatuation with far-right totalitarian thought), who, in his January 1929 article for the popular monthly Sinsaeng (New Birth), defined Korean literature as everything written in Korean and thus explicitly excluded the vast corpus of classical Chinese works from the Korean literary tradition.91 Interestingly, contrary to the position of linguistic nationalists, Hong Kimun considered Korean literature in classical Chinese a part of Korean literary history, too. The only caveat was that it was the literature of the yangban scholar-official class. From Hong’s viewpoint, it was the national identity of the writer rather than the linguistic medium of writing that was to define literature’s belonging.92 When it came to issues of the formation of ethno-national identity in its more modern meaning, however, the Marxists were, expectedly, more on the universalist than exceptionalist side. Paek Nam’un (1894–1979), a prominent Marxist historian who also went on to occupy an important political position in North Korea,93 suggested that the tradition of national studies (kukhak)—a form of selfknowledge that implies some development of national self-awareness— began in the age of Chosŏn king Sukchong (r. 1674–1720) and was spearheaded by the Practical Learning (Sirhak) school that was less bound by neo-Confucian dogmatism. Like elsewhere, it took place in Korea in the age of the “crisis of feudalism and emergence of merchant capital.”94 In dealing with the most ancient past of proto-Korea, Paek Nam’un attempted to maintain rigorous distinctions between race (injong), ethnic group (chongjok), and ethno-nation (minjok). Proto-Korean ethnic



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groups, according to Paek, were racially related to the Sushen (K. Suksin) tribes mentioned in the Chinese classics, and the Yilou (K. Ŭpnu)— supposedly “the most backward” descendants of Sushen described in Chinese sources on early Korea.95 The direct ancestors of proto-Koreans were, in Paek’s view, the Puyŏ people, who built the eponymous kingdom in what is northeastern China today in the second and first centuries BCE. However, the Puyŏ ended up splitting into several tribal (pujok) or ethnic groups in the process of their expansion onto the Korean peninsula, and these groups grew increasingly different from each other.96 The same fate befell the people of the Three Han in the southern parts of Korea (first to third centuries AD), who were originally interrelated but split into three major tribal alliances in the process of territorial expansion and socioeconomic development. Then, with the first states coming into being, they started to slowly move towards the formation of 97 ­ Paek was scathingly critical about the nationalist atethno-nation. tempts to lump a number of ancient Korean rulers together as mutually related heirs to Tan’gun’s state and “members of the clan of supposed Sun descendants.” Such idiosyncratic interpretations of the past had nothing to do with what Paek regarded as “the only scientific method of research.”98 As we can see, Paek strove to give a balanced account of both homogeneity and heterogeneity involved in the process of the Korean ethnogenesis. His efforts contrast with the nationalists’ much stronger emphasis on the alleged homogeneity of the Koreans. As a professional historian, Paek Nam’un attempted to make a clear distinction between an ethnic group (chongjok) and ethno-nation (minjok). However, some Marxist polemists who were not historians by trade also sometimes described ancient proto-Koreans as an ethno-nation— at the same time maintaining a distinction that they were primitive (wŏnsi) rather than modern nations. Still, the thrust to apply “the only scientific method of research” and discover the general, universal logic of Korea’s ethno-history was common to all Marxists without exception. A good example is a 1935 polemic by Kim Myŏngsik (1891–1943), one of the original pioneers of the Korean socialist movement and a graduate of Waseda University’s Department of Politics and Economy.99 From the beginning, Kim proclaims himself to be a Marxist evolutionist, believing in the gradual sophistication of societies and cultures as they progress forward from “primitive life” to slave-owning or feudal stages in

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their development. Yet another starting point for Kim was the anthropology of Franz Boas (1858–1942), with its explicit historicism, cultural relativism, and repudiation of racism and the doctrines of ethno-national exclusivity. Boas was hardly a Marxist,100 but Kim clearly deemed important Boasian anthropology’s broad, international view with its emphasis on the commonalities found in different cultures. Arguing against the nationalist penchant for glorifying the “Tan’gun age,” Kim Myŏngsik maintained that the primitive communities of the Korean Peninsula and neighboring Manchuria simply could not possess the cultural splendor ascribed to them by the nationalist authors: sophistication came later, in the “feudal period,” with the development of Confucianism and Buddhism, which nationalists often used to denigrate as foreign to the original “Korean spirit.” Kim Myŏngsik saw the nationalist paeans to “Tan’gun’s spirit” as a nonsensical attempt to “equate national soul with barbarism.” Moreover, he ascertained that there was hardly anything specifically national in the supposedly typical traits of the Korean minjok at the primitive stage of its development. Nationalists— typified by An Hwak in connection with his speculations on Koreans’ national character, as mentioned earlier—were ascribing to the primitive “Korean nation” such qualities as optimism, democratic cooperation, and high religiosity. However, as Kim Myŏngsik saw it, most peoples of the world demonstrated a broadly similar set of characteristic traits during their gradual transition from egalitarian communal life to the early class societies. “National character” was an artificial, far-fetched construction, but the same could be said about the very idea of unchanging, eternal, self-contained nation.101 According to Kim Myŏngsik, the Korean ethno-nation of his day was basically a product of a long history of Confucian transformation of society and cultural impulses from outside, China in particular. All nations, Koreans included, were products of long-term historical processes rather than static entities preserving their “spirits” since primitive times. Both Japanese and Koreans were composite, heterogeneous nations combining the bloodlines of at least several different peoples—interestingly, Kim referred to the research of the famed Japanese anthropologist Torii Ryūzō (1870–1953) when he argued this point—but so were most nations of the world. Disputing the Hitlerian emphasis on the “pure blood of the German nation,” Kim Myŏngsik mentioned the presence of Slavic and



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other heterogeneous elements in the process of German ethnogenesis and claimed that the Jews, Hitler’s main target, were no “pure-blooded 102 ­ In short, Kim Myŏngsik attempted to radically demynation” either. thologize the Korean national past, refusing to privilege the Korean ethno-nation and viewing its history as just one example of the universal process of nation formation. For Kim Myŏngsik, ethnic Korean culture (minjok munhwa) did exist and unquestionably mattered greatly; but still, it was to be researched objectively, with what Kim conceived of as the general laws of historical development in mind. In a similar vein, a brilliant Marxist literary criticist and poet, Im Hwa (1908–1953; see more on him in Chapter 4), was willing to allow that Korean literature might reflect Koreans’ ethno-national traits (minjoksŏng). He was, however, demanding that Korean writers simultaneously direct their critical focus towards the (universal) social problems unrelated to ethno-cultural issues, and was warning that the emphasis on Korea’s—often exoticized— ethnic past and present did fit into the construction of Japan’s imperial nationalism, as long as Korea was conceptualized as one province of Greater Japan.103 Whereas ethno-nation was seen as a part of the capitalist age’s objective reality, nationalism was regarded as an attempt to (ab)use this reality for dominant classes’ nefarious purposes. Proto-­Constructivism and the Teleology of Liberation In a nutshell, Marxists saw nationalist views on issues related to the Korean ethno-nation as devoid of the scientific methodological approach and the sort of liberational perspective that, in their opinion, only a universalist view of human history as a process teleologically leading to human—and national—liberation could bring. Talk of homogeneous Koreans and their national traits supposedly nurtured by millennia of history had a weak foundation and led nowhere. Kim Kijŏn (1894–1948), a prominent nationalist and ideologist of an indigenous Korean new religion, Ch’ŏndogyo, regarded the story of Tan’gun and his supposedly benevolent rule over Korea’s first state, Ancient Chosŏn, as proof of such special ethical Korean qualities as love of justice and kindheartedness.104 By contrast, such Marxist researchers as Paek Nam’un and literary scholar and Sinologist Kim T’aejun (1905–1949) interpreted the Tan’gun myth as historical evidence of the process of primitive communities’ dissolution

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and as part of the legitimizing ideology of early Korea’s nascent ruling classes.105 Both ancient mythology and the history of traditional Korea as a whole took form and developed according to the general laws of the world history, according to Hong Kimun’s summary of the Marxist historical method. The driving forces of this development were the progress of society’s productive forces and the class struggle of the exploited, rather than the “national spirit.”106 Socialist revolution was supposed to bring forward a society where previously “backward” ethnic groups would have their “developmental level” lifted up on par with the formerly “advanced” nations; in the end, fully Communist society would be a classless and nationless one, all the nations eventually merging together.107 However, the nonexistence of the national spirit did not imply that Communists failed to recognize the historical existence of the Korean ethno-nation or were reluctant to give members of the ethno-nation a promise of hope in the future. Quite to the contrary, the teleology of Marxist historical theory was essentially the teleology of ethno-national liberation (see Chapter 3), in the eyes of the colonial-era radical intellectuals. After all, as Paek Nam’un wrote in a review of an article by a fellow Marxist (and later a fellow member of North Korean academia), Kim Kwangjin (1902–1986), on the Chosŏn dynasty’s (1392–1910) monetary economy, the only special feature of Korean history was the fact that its normal capitalist development was precluded by imperialist intrusions.108 But as long as Korean Communists were able to join the epic historical battle against both capitalism and its inevitable outgrowth, imperialism—which, as Korean Communists asserted, enslaved threefourths of humanity, Koreans included—their victory in the struggle for both ethno-national and social liberation was assured. After all, as emphasized in the Declaration of the Korean Communist Party (first published in the Shanghai-based Communist journal Pulkkot [Flame]), they did not fight Japanese imperialism on their own, but were a local unit of the world socialist revolution.109

c o nc lu s io n The intellectual world of colonial Korea was an arena of fierce discursive battles over the definitions of everything related to Korean-ness—and



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the concept of ethno-nation (minjok) was a focus of heated ideological contention. After the concept entered Korea at the very beginning of the twentieth century, the nationalist interpretation of it shifted from the precolonial vision of a nationwide descent group united in worshipping its titular patriarch, Tan’gun, to a mystical image of a national totality as a historically conditioned homogeneous community bound not only by common traditions and legacies but also by its supposedly shared national character. “Homogeneity” did not necessarily imply a unitary descent line, and the mixture of non-Korean blood in Korean veins was accepted, albeit somewhat reluctantly. However, it did imply the possibility of, for example, rejecting the place of traditional literature in classical Chinese in the history of Korean literature: after all, the homogeneity of the ethno-nation had to start with linguistic uniformity. It also implied the subsuming of group—including class—interests into what the nationalists were to define as the sacred interests of the unchanging, ageold ethno-nation with its roots in mysterious antiquity. Given the privileged backgrounds and rather conservative politics of nationalist leaders, it is hardly surprising that Marxist critics regarded the nationalist views on the ethno-nation’s supreme importance as self-interested. In addition, Marxists viewed their opponents’ attempts to define the Korean ethno-nation in terms of particularity, uniqueness, and unitary, homogeneous character as dangerously ahistorical, implying disinterest towards or ignorance of the universalities of historical development. In a modern sense of the word, nations were products of capitalist development (although at the same time some Marxists allowed that the nuclei of the ethno-nations could also have premodern roots and that the Korean ethno-nation could predate capitalism, due to the early emergence of centralized statehood in premodern Korea), and the loci of all the contradictions inherent to capitalism, first and foremost, class contradictions. Trying to demystify the absolutized notion of the ethno-nation typical of the nationalistic literature, Marxists emphasized the shared worldwide commonalities of historical developments in “primitive” times, as well as the role of outside impulses in the long process of Korean identity formation. In contrast to the nationalist accentuation of the uniqueness of Tan’gun’s descendants, the Marxists were attempting to develop a proto-constructivist view of Korean ethno-national history that would qualify as scientific. Korean minjok and its history were to

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be seen as just one case of certifying the truthfulness of what was assumed to be the universal logic of historical development. Victorious struggle against capitalist imperialism for both national and class liberation was an important part of this logic. Whereas the universality of the world-revolutionary process also gave hope for the Korean nation’s escape from a colonial predicament, the exaggerated particularism of the nationalists indeed resembled the nativism of Japanese imperialist ideology, as the brilliant Marxist philosopher Pak Ch’iu (1909–1949; see also Chapter 4) mentioned in an article published just after the 1945 Liberation.110 In yet another article written in the same year and specially dealing with “fascization” (p’asyohwa) of “extreme nationalism,” Pak defined fascism as an attempt to conceal and suppress the very existence of class antagonisms by substituting “class” with “nation” and to create an indefinite state of emergency while relying on violence and national sentiments. Many of these national sentiments could be illogical, or indeed even prelogical, but that no longer mattered in the framework of extreme nationalism’s ideology of “blood and soil.” In Pak’s view, descent into a dictatorship based on the communality of nationalistic emotions was a serious threat to Korea’s future, as “backward” countries generally tended to fall into the trap of nationalistic and authoritarian politics.111 Given the prominence of both authoritarian politics and ethnic nationalism in both Koreas, North and South, in their postliberation history,112 it may be said that Pak’s chilling warning indeed hit the mark. At a time when—as I have mentioned in the beginning of this chapter—civic nationalism is gradually replacing the ethno-nationalist mode of societal cohesion in South Korea, the colonial-era Marxist attempts to deconstruct ethno-nationalist notions are worth revisiting. Such a rereading may contribute to creating a post-ethno-nationalist civic society. Rather than basking in the glory of the capitalist successes of the increasingly polyethnic South Korean state, this society would be committed to emancipatory visions akin to those once espoused by the Marxists of the 1920s and 1930s.

c h a p te r   6

Kim Saryang’s Observation of Liberated China, 1945

K

im Saryang (real name: Kim Sich’ang, 1914–1950) was among the Korean authors of the 1930s and 1940s who wrote abundantly on issues related to the Korean ethno-national identity from the perspective of the Korean diasporas in multiethnic societies. Many of his writings were based on his own firsthand impressions and observations prior to the Pacific War during his own eight-years-long stint in Japan, where he studied and eventually launched his literary career as a Japanese-language writer. He provides us with an interesting example of resistance against “imperialization,” which—while being undoubtedly national in the sense of the author’s embeddedness in the Korean ethno-cultural milieu—was not simply nationalistic ideologically. Educated at Saga High School (1933–1935; on Kim’s days there, see Shirakawa 2008) and Tokyo Imperial University (1935–1939, at the postgraduate school until 1941),1 equally proficient in Korean and Japanese and able to publish his Japanese pieces in the major literary journals in Japan proper, Kim still forcefully argued against the full abandonment of Korean language in belles lettres, maintaining that a Korean ethnic community needed the sentimental side of its life to be amply expressed in the only language its majority could properly understand.2 Writing on Korea in Japanese could easily end up exoticizing Japan’s colony in accordance with the colonizers’ tastes. Kim Saryang, however, made it clear to his Japanese readers that, even while switching to the empire’s language, he remained a Korean writer, an heir to the Korean literary tradition, and a bearer of Korea’s particular sentiments. His language switching was, in his own words, motivated by his desire to contribute 185

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to the horizontal, humanism-empowered exchanges across the division line separating the colonial metropole and the colony.3

b a c k g r o u nd o f t h e escap e Kim was a creative author of the persuasions that can be characterized as a combination of a general leftist—that is, internationalist—worldview with an acute sense of belonging to a vulnerable minority of colonial provenance. A good friend and collaborator of Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–1977), one of the major figures in the interwar leftist theatrical movement, and an acquaintance of a number of left-wing Koreans in Japan, Kim was deemed dangerous enough to be “preventively” arrested two days after the Pearl Harbor attack, on December 9, 1941, and kept in detention for a couple of months.4 No Communist underground member, Kim could be defined nevertheless as a leftist in a broad sense of the word. His Japanese proficiency and literary fame in Japan proper

figure 6.1 Kim Saryang, his wife Ch’oe Ch’angok, and his son Kim Nangnim, ca. late 1930s. Credit: Kwak Hyŏngdŏk, Myongji University



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notwithstanding, Kim had no intentions to spend the wartime as a Japanese Imperial Army supporter. When sent on a lecture tour to the Japanese army units stationed in North China, he used the opportunity this trip provided in order to escape and join the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army guerrillas in the Taihang Mountains in May 1945.5 After spending several months there, he returned to now-liberated Korea. He spent some months in Seoul in late 1945 before returning to his native city of Pyongyang in early 1946, where he soon become a prominent member of North Korea’s nascent literary establishment. His China diary, Ten Thousand Li of a Dull-Witted Horse (Nomamalli), was serialized in the Seoul-based journal Minsŏng in 1946–1947 and published in book form in Pyongyang in 1947.6 This text, later republished without significant changes in Kim Saryang’s 1955 Selected Works,7 provided the basis for the post-1990s South Korean editions of Nomamalli, one of which8 I use here as the main reference. It cemented Kim Saryang’s new status as a North Korean writer. In this chapter I will attempt to demonstrate how a new socialist formula of Korean-ness was being created in Kim’s diary, against the background of a complex international confrontation in which Korea’s socialist revolutionaries were allied to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—itself a temporary ally of its bitter nationalist rival, the Guomindang, and, by extension, of the Western Allies and the USSR in their fight against the fascist states, Imperial Japan included. I will emphasize the ways in which the memories of the anticolonial struggle and Sino-Korean anti-Japanese alliance—in reality, often self-contradictory, their articulation being dependent on the postLiberation political developments—were used as building blocks for the nation-building task by Kim Saryang in his new capacity as a founding father of North Korean literature. I will also attempt to analyze Kim Saryang’s narrative on the liberated areas of China as a blueprint of sort for Korea’s own postwar socialist reconstruction in accordance with the main ideas of the Red Age—prominently including empowerment of the erstwhile downtrodden and gender equality. According to his diary, Kim Saryang started his successful defection to Communist Chinese forces by arriving in Beijing (then Beiping) on May 9, 1945—quite accidentally on the same day when, unbeknown to Kim or his travel companions, the fighting in Europe was ended by the Allies’ victory. This news was kept secret from the colonial Korean public,

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although Kim, apparently better informed due to his contacts with Korea’s underground resistance—which he mentions in the diary—was in a position to understand that Japan’s perspectives were hardly bright.9 To be able to come to China, Kim accepted an offer to participate in a “solacing tour” to the Korean students drafted into Japan’s battle lines in Northern China by the colonial authorities. The tour was undertaken under the auspices of the Korean League for Total National Manpower (J. Chōsen Kokumin Sōryoku Renmei, K. Chosŏn Kungmin Ch’ongnyŏk Yŏnmaeng), a notorious wartime collaborationist group.10 Events of this kind, however, were the only opportunity to leave wartime colonial Korea, where movements across the border were strictly regimented.11 Once in Beijing, Kim Saryang was approached by Yi Yŏngsŏn. Yi, a former football (soccer) player and Chosŏn Chungang Ilbo journalist, was a moderate leftist activist and had worked as a liaison between Yŏ Unhyŏng’s (1886–1947) inclusive League for Preparing the Establishment of the [Korean] State (Kŏn’guk Tognmaeng), then underground, and he also had ties to the Yan’an-based Korean Independence League (Chosŏn Tongnip Tongmaeng), led by such prominent Communist leaders as Ch’oe Ch’angik (1896–1957) and Kim Mujŏng (1904–1951).12 Yi offered Kim a passage to the area in the Taihang Mountains area controlled by the Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army and its Korean allies, the Korean Volunteer Army (KVA; Chosŏn Ŭiyonggun). In May 1945, it was a policy of the Korean Volunteer Army’s political leadership in the Korean Independence League to co-opt Korean luminaries of broadly leftist—although not necessarily exactly Communist— persuasions, with the goal of engaging them in anti-Japanese resistance activities on Chinese territory. As the war against Japan was coming to the endgame phase, the Korean Independence League was interested in attracting prominent Korean intellectuals to its side, and in anticipation of the future competition for power and influence against the right-wing nationalist Korean Provisional Government, then allied to the Guomindang’s government in Chongqing. The Korean Independence League’s recruitment of Kim Saryang mirrored that of another prominent Japaneducated intellectual, An Mak (1910–?), who was helped to move from Beijing to Yan’an in 1945. These actions were a part of the Left’s efforts to strengthen its voice in the public space by attracting the more cooperative among established intellectuals to its side.13



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t h e k o r e an v o lu n t eer ar m y and t h e lib e r ated ar ea In early June 1945, Kim Saryang headed to the base of the Korean Volunteer Army in the Taihang Mountains. He did so by travelling through the vicinities of Xingtai (then Shunde) by the Japanese-controlled railway, accompanied by an underground operative sent from the KVA’s headquarters. KVA was an example of Korean national leftist militancy combined with transborder liberational aspirations and transnational revolutionary activism. As Kim Saryang mentions in his diary, the original nucleus ­ of the KVA—the Korean Volunteer Corps (Chosŏn Ŭiyongdae)—was created in October 1938 by the Korean National Front Alliance (Chosŏn Minjok Chŏnsŏn Yŏnmaeng), a coalition of mostly leftist nationalist groups led by the Korean National Revolutionary Party (KNRP; Chosŏn Minjok Hyŏngmyŏngdang, founded in 1935).14 The KNRP was a relatively large (with initially around two thousand members) grouping of the leftwing, China-based Korean exiles; Kim Wŏnbong (1898–1958), an anarchist radical-turned-socialist, was its de facto leader. The anarchist-led Alliance of Korean Revolutionaries (Chosŏn Hyŏngmyŏngja Yŏnmaeng) was, in fact, a part of the Korean National Front Alliance,15 which, thus, represented an interesting example of cooperation between Marxian socialists and anarchists, otherwise bitter rivals since the early 1920s (see the Introduction). The two best-known military leaders of the Korean ­ Volunteer Corps were Pak Hyosam (1910–?) and Yi Iksŏng (1911–?). While both were graduates of Guomindang officer schools, both men owed their primarily political allegiance to the Korean National Revolutionary Party. The latter was open to collaboration with the nationalists, both Korean and Chinese in the common anti-Japanese struggle; in the first years of its existence, it was doing intelligence and propaganda work for the Guomindang army, utilizing the knowledge of Japanese that many of its fighters possessed, for agitation among the Japanese troops and more effective interrogation of Japanese prisoners.16 Some of the fighters of the Korean Volunteer Corps were Chinese or Japanese—both defectors and prisoners who decided to switch sides in the war. Among them was Nosaka Sanzō (1892–1993), one of the founders of the Japanese Communist Party and its long-term postwar leader.17 Some of them, as we will see below, appear in the pages of Kim Saryang’s diary.

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By 1940–1941, the Korean Volunteer Corps moved to the north, into the operational areas of the Communist Eighth Route Army with which it had entered into a long-standing symbiosis.18 The unit that operated in Taihang Mountains was known as the Northern China Unit (Hwabuk Chidae) of the Korean Volunteer Corps; in April 1942, it was integrated in the 129th Division of the Eighth Route Army as its regular sub-unit, under the name of Korean Volunteer Army. While the unit did participate in actual fighting, its main duties were still propaganda and intelligence work, oriented towards Japanese troops and especially towards the ethnic Korean soldiers in their ranks. It was disseminating more than seventy different Japanese handbills (more than thirteen thousand copies altogether), shouting propaganda speeches in Japanese in the immediate vicinity of the Japanese positions, and conducting underground organizing work with ethnic Koreans living on the Japanesecontrolled territory close to its Taihang Mountains bases.19 As Kim Saryang emphasized in his diary,20 Korean fighters also were expected to ­ the broaden their underground activities and to organize work vis-à-vis approximately two hundred thousand strong Korean population of Northern China.21 From Kim Saryang’s viewpoint, this work was central, for it was in the crucible of the KVA’s political work with the local Korean dwellers and military resistance against the Japanese enemy that the modern and independent Korean statehood was being born. Kim contrasts the authentic resistance and incipient nation-building activities of the Korean Volunteer Army to the “feudal” factional squabbles inside the Korean Provisional Government subsisting off the Guomindang’s largesse and dreaming of “receiving” Korean independence from Chiang Kai-shek or Americans.22 The Taihang Mountains base area, where the KVA had its headquarters during the later stage of the war, is often mentioned as an example of the positive social changes brought by the reforms on the ground that the Communists were spearheading in the course of the war. The center of the CCP control in 1940–1945 was Zuoquan (Liaoxian) country in Hebei Province. Zuoquan was not very far from the Korean Volunteer Army headquarters at the base of Wuzhi Mountain, which Kim Saryang arrived to at the end of his arduous trek through the Taihang area. Especially in 1940–1942, the area had been subjected to devastating mop-up operations by Japanese troops, the cruelty of which was still vividly remem-



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figure 6.2 A picture commemorating the first anniversary of the establishment of the Korean Volunteer Corps, October 10, 1939. Credit: Tongnip Kinyŏmgwan (Independence Hall of Korea), Han’guk Tongnip Undongsa Yŏn’guso (Institute of Korean Independence Movement’s History)

bered in 1945. Kim Saryang therefore had ample opportunity to listen to eyewitness accounts of the Japanese brutalities. However, despite war, disease, and famines, the Communist-led social engineering programs were showing their effectiveness. Mass campaigns for literacy training and evening-time winter study aimed at both men and women greatly reduced illiteracy and positively influenced the self-consciousness of young women, who started to demand the right of choice in marriage and more venues for upward social mobility. While the majority of the CCP members in the area were men, the female Communists were strategically promoted to visible positions of responsibility. The party supervised elections—at that point, still competitive and open to the independents—on all levels, from village to the country, striving for a balanced representation of Communists, progressives (non-Communist “democratic forces”), and neutrals in the elected organs of power. Taxes were assessed on wealth and represented a relatively light burden for

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the majority of middle and poorer peasants, while the party was keeping to the minimum the number of the cadres who were to be supported by public grain. In the climate of the “democratic reforms,” the landlords, although still not formally expropriated, were already feeling the pressure to redistribute or sell the excess land that they did not till themselves. In the eight years after 1936, the proportion of landlords in the Taihang base area in general dropped from 26 percent to just 5 percent, while that of middle peasants increased from 31 to 65 percent.23 The positive results of wartime reforms were astonishing even the Westerners without any particular leftist sympathies. A famed US war correspondent, Jack Belden (1910–1989), who witnessed life in the liberated areas in 1947, two years after Kim Saryang’s peregrinations there, was shocked by the fact that no soldiers were needed to guard the administrative buildings: the region was free from banditry thanks to an effective and popular government, in contrast with Guomindang-dominated areas.24 It is hardly surprising that Kim Saryang—with wartime colonial Korea as his main point of reference—found the liberated areas of China a ready-made blueprint for a qualitatively new society, valid for China as well as for Korea. Whereas the “red capital” of Moscow was the blueprint for alternative socialist modernity in general (see Chapter 7), the Chinese liberated areas offered a more realistic, down-to earth model for Korea’s own impoverished countryside.

t h e t w o w o r ld s in w ar - t ­ o r n ch in a As seen through Kim Saryang’s eyes, China in 1945 was a conflation of several mutually contradictory worlds. As the giant country had been engulfed by an eight-years-long aggression, a large part of it being under foreign occupation, the different worlds Kim Saryang constructed in his narrative were all of a rather international kind, with different ethnonational categories mixed together in a giant spectacle of war-related depredations and corruption contrasted against the heroism of resistance. The uglier side of wartime profiteering was represented by the luxurious hotel in Beijing where Kim Saryang stayed prior to his departure to the Taihang Mountains area. The hotel was populated by assorted opium dealers, pimps, brokers making money on exchange operations



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with different regional currencies and money transfers, and, at best, rice traders. A rice trader, in fact, happened to be Kim’s roommate for the duration of his hotel stay. A large proportion of the hotel dwellers were resident Koreans who enriched themselves during the Japanese occupation of China and were, Kim wrote, eventually going to share the fate of the occupiers after their defeat.25 Kim Saryang’s patriotism did not stop him from revealing the more problematic sides of the resident Koreans’ society in China—most typically, war profiteering and collaboration with the hated Japanese occupiers. Recent research reveals that Kim Saryang’s impressions were not necessarily mistaken. Among the ten thousand resident Koreans of Tianjin (by January 1942), for example, several dozens of the richer traders and entrepreneurs are known to have been closely connected to the Japanese Consulate since the later 1930s. They led the local pro-Japanese Korean organization Chosŏnin Minhoe (Korean People’s Association), which was sending Korean volunteers to the Japanese army operating in China since 1937. Even more nefariously, some of them were recruited into the Japanese espionage networks headed in occupied China by notorious general Doihara Kenji (1883–1948), who was responsible for the intelligence gathering in Tianjin in the early 1930s. While the majority of Tianjin Koreans had nothing to do with all these activities, the collaborating and profiteering minority was highly visible.26 Some reminiscences about this minority may be found in the records of Kim T’aejun (1905–1949), a famous Korean (and Chinese) literature scholar and concurrently Communist activist who left Korea in late November  1944 heading for Yan’an, where he was to contact the Chinabased Korean Communists headquartered there.27 In Xingcheng (Liaoning), his falsified travel permit was produced by a local Korean broker, a certain Mr. Pyŏn, an opium addict who used to eke out his living by brokering the release of petty offenders in exchange for bribes, using the connections of his son who worked for the Japanese police as an interpreter.28 For both Kim Saryang and Kim T’aejun, the two major Korean intellectuals who experienced war-torn China of early 1945 on the Communist side, acknowledgment of some Koreans’ complicity with the travesties of the world of aggression, occupation, and personal opportunism obviously seemed to constitute a necessary step on the way to the national redemption and rebirth.

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As Kim Saryang—who officially came to Beijing on a Japanese military propaganda assignment—was pondering his own fate, a defection to the Korean Provisional Government in Chongqing was obviously one possibility. However, the internal rivalry–ridden Provisional Government, which “followed the [Guomindang] government as a prostitute and lived off the small money thrown to it by Chiang Kai-shek’s terrorist gangs, such as Blue Shirts Society or CC Clique,” was regarded by Kim Saryang as an organic part of wartime corruption and profiteering rather than an alternative to it.29 The alternative, Kim wrote, was “the sun rising over the [Communist-managed] Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region where [the revolutionaries] opposed Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship, resisted his policy of fomenting a civil war, fought against the enemy under Revolution’s flag, organized the people’s government and saved the masses from the calamities.” As Korean patriots constituted a part of this epochal struggle, Kim hoped to join them and “observe the life of the Chinese peasants, the conditions of the army and the construction of the new democratic culture, in order to contribute later to the state foundation” back in Korea.30 Notably, neither “Communism” nor “Socialism” was at that point an explicit part of Kim’s project of learning CCP’s experiences in the world of the base areas. These terms were almost unmentioned also in the program of the (Yan’an-based) Northern Chinese [Korean] Independence League (Hwabuk Tongnip Tongmaeng)—that was how the political leadership of the KVA (de facto in the hands of Communist cadres, notably Ch’oe Ch’angik and Kim Ch’angman) was known since November  1942.31 “New democracy” as proclaimed by Mao Zedong and other CCP leaders during the last wartime years was the task of the day. It was the observations over the “new democracy” experiences in the Taihang base areas that constitute the bulk of Kim’s diary. “New democracy” implied that the grassroots market exchanges would continue undisturbed—even be protected—for the time being. In fact, peasants’ markets were among the first things Kim Saryang took notice of in the liberated areas. A variety of tobacco products, soap, matches, female accessories, and writing brushes, together with grain, millet, and different local fruits (apricots, melons, watermelons, etc.), were all in abundant supply already at the first village market he observed on having entered the liberated zone. The prices were on average around



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one-third of what one had to pay in the adjacent occupied areas. As Kim noticed, in a matter-of-fact manner, the economic policies of the Communist government of the liberated areas were in principle autarkic: the CCP wished the liberated areas to produce most of what they consumed. Still, a considerable amount of smuggling took place, and Kim himself could spot the toothbrushes or pens produced in the Japanese-controlled areas, on the marketplace in the first Communist-controlled village he visited. These articles, however, were all extremely expensively priced.32 A difference that Kim Saryang took notice of very quickly was the absence of soothsayers—“a usual sight in the Chinese marketplaces,” as Kim put it—in the market of a Communist-controlled village. Instead, the anti-Guomindang and anti-Japanese placards were highly visible, together with short-haired female Communist troops who were conducting a nonstop, high-pitch agitation-and-propaganda campaign “on Eighth-Route Army, Mao Zedong and Zhu De.”33 The age-old institution of the town market was employed now to serve new and different politics. In a small town where Kim stayed for a day on his way to the Korean Volunteer Army headquarters, even a bookshop—obviously, a privately run one—was in business. However, the highlights there were the Yan’an-produced Chinese translation of Stalin’s Problems of Leninism (the first edition was published in Russian in 1926, then the book was reedited and republished several times; the Chinese translation was first published in the USSR34 and then a different translation was printed in Yan’an35) as well as Mao’s On New Democracy (1940) and Mao’s newly ­ printed report to the Seventh National Congress of the CCP, On Coalition Government (April 24, 1945). Kim Saryang quickly purchased the works by Stalin and Mao, as well as “some other booklets produced by the CCP” and distributed through the private booksellers.36 The spirit of “new democracy” was succinctly formulated in the slogans on the “Ten Main Policies of the CCP” that Kim spotted while entering the town. The ten policies centered on the “struggle against the enemy,” as well as the promise “to simplify the administration and concentrate on the troops.” The politics were to be dominated by a united front that included Communists, independents, and Guomindang— despite all the anti-Guomindang propaganda Kim Saryang was a witness to, the official wartime policies of Communist-Nationalist unity in struggle were formally in place for the time being. Officials (Ch. ganbu)

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t h e s h ad o w o f t h e s u n sh in e? Given that in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the normal interest rate in the Korean countryside was around 20 percent while tenancy payments averaged 50 to 60 percent, Kim Saryang had indeed good reasons to regard “new democracy” policies in China’s liberated areas as a usable policies reference for post-Liberation Korea.39 The only reference to the radical politics of any sort in the “ten policies” slogan were the “three rectifications.” As Kim assiduously noted, the three rectifications referred to the “movement for the rectification of literature, study and party work which began with February  1942 report by Chairman Mao and was fiercely conducted throughout the whole country and whole army changing thought and the style of work.”40 Most likely, this brief notice by Kim Saryang constitutes one of the earliest mentions of the ill-famed Yan’an “thought rectification (zhengfeng) movement” (1942–1944)—which implied the imposition of one-size-suits-all Maoist orthodoxy onto the party—in the Korean literature inside Korea.41 To what degree was Kim Saryang aware of the implications of Yan’an “rectifications” that foreboded the eventual tightening of the political regime after the ultimate demise of the “new democratic” age in the early 1950s? In the diary, he mentions a talk with a couple of female CCP agitators about the present state of affairs in Chinese literature, and confidently relays to his readers that since Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (May 1942) were published, “the position of the writers became more concrete . . . while their activities are rapidly developing in a more precise direction.”42 However, as the diary reveals to us, one of the few masterpieces of China’s modern liter-



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ature that Kim actually read—and he mentioned in his dialogue with the female agitators—was Yiwaiji (The Unexpected Collection, 1934)43 produced by Ding Ling (1904–1986), China’s premier progressive female writer, on the basis of her experiences in the Guomindang’s custody.44 Did he know that his favorite Chinese writer had been among those who were explicitly targeted by the Yan’an rectification campaign?45 While Kim was certainly in no position to openly contradict Mao Zedong in his account, he chooses not to elaborate on his vision of an artist as a “cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine” (Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art)46 either. Perhaps it constituted a hidden form of resistance. Instead, it is the popular organization on the grassroots level that Kim Saryang focused primarily on. One phenomenon that he witnesses everywhere throughout the whole liberated areas he traverses is the omnipresence of minbing (K. minbyŏng)47—the peasant militias under the overall control of the CCP authorities, but organized with a high degree of voluntary participation from below, as guarding the villages from the rampaging Japanese or warlord troops, or bandits, was indeed an urgent task. Quoting an official CCP report, Kim Saryang mentioned that the number of local militia members in all the liberated areas totaled almost 2,200,000.48 While he was in no position to check these figures independently, he could himself witness the armed local peasants at every corner in the villages he and his co-travelers went through. Minbing were checking the documents of Kim and his travel companions;49 they were also guarding Kim and his comrades through the countryside roads in heavily mined areas, making sure that they safely arrive at the next village.50 Indeed, a good organization of village selfdefense and order maintenance witnessed by Kim Saryang could have been the key to the outsiders’ testimonies on the relative safety of travel in the Communist-dominated areas mentioned above. Helping to organize the villagers was one task of the CCP leaders in the liberated areas; enlightening them was yet another one. In fact, Kim Saryang mentions that the greatly increased availability of primary education was one of the most noticeable traces of the peasant life in the Communist-controlled Taihang Mountains region.51 Still, literacy was far from universal. As Kim remarked, the main method of political education he himself witnessed were oral speeches in front of the peasant

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public, as well as theatrical performances often utilizing the Hebei region’s tradition of pingju folk opera. “Korean comrades,” multilingual and keen to build bridges with the local Chinese population, were often employed in such propaganda operations, delivering songs and theatrical performances in Chinese on the basis of their own unique antiJapanese resistance experience.52 As we know from contemporary Chinese newspaper reports, such performances tended to be rather popular. For example, the second battalion of the KVA was engaged in fighting in the vicinity of the sacred Wutai Mountains in Shanxi Province in March 28 to April 20, 1943. During that period, its fighters conducted thirteen theatrical performances for the benefit of the locals, each attended by around six hundred to seven hundred viewers. All in all, the number of those exposed to Koreans’ theatrical propaganda in the Wutai area during that month was up to ten thousand people.53 Kim Saryang’s fluency in Chinese was limited mostly to reading— throughout the diary, he confesses that he lacked the ability to understand the local dialect of spoken Chinese. His sojourn in the liberated areas did not exceed a couple of months, which he mostly spent in the company of the KVA activists rather than locals. Pyongyang in the year 1947—when Kim’s diary was published there—was not exactly the most convenient place to criticize Maoist practices, even if one wished to do so. After all, Kim Il Sung (Kim Ilsŏng, 1912–1994), the foremost figure among the local leadership of the Soviet-controlled Northern Korea already by 1947, had been a Chinese Communist Party member while fighting the Japanese as a Manchurian guerrilla in the 1930s.54 Kim Saryang met Kim Il Sung soon after his return to Pyongyang in February 1946, and keenly needed Kim Il Sung’s political protection in his new quality as one of North Korea’s most prominent authors. Moreover, the author’s social background (a scion of a family of wealthy industrialists able to receive prestigious Japanese education) could potentially expose him to hostile attacks by his competitors in the literary world.55 Some evidence exists that by the end of the 1940s, Kim Saryang’s real—as opposed to declarative—appraisal of Kim Il Sung was no longer as salutary as it had been during the early post-Liberation years. Kim Hakch’ŏl (1916–2001), a Taihang Mountains guerrilla-turned-Chinese-Koreanwriter (and later, in the 1950s, a literary protégé of Ding Ling, Kim Saryang’s favorite contemporary Chinese writer),56 while living in Pyongyang



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before the Korean War, befriended Kim Saryang and developed a rather critical assessment of Kim Il Sung’s character and abilities by the end of the 1940s. He mentioned in his memoirs that Kim Saryang completely shared his views. He added, however, that neither he nor his friend Kim Saryang had any doubts about the desirability of the socialist project of Chinese or Soviet kind in principle.57 At this stage Kim Saryang tended to perceive his writing activities as primarily a contribution to the cause of socialist nation building.58 Therefore his narrative of the CCP’s organizational and educational work in the liberated areas as an essentially democratic affair, conducted in the best interests of the locals if not by their own independent volition, cannot be simply taken at the face value. There was an obvious element of political propaganda in it. Indeed, the contemporary research in the history of the liberated areas demonstrate that the CCP labor mobilizations or attempts at devising cooperative enterprises at the village level could sometimes be intrusive and quite coercive;59 in some places in the Taihang area they could, in fact, end up in violent clashes with the local religious groups. Still, while Kim Saryang’s account obviously glosses over the top-down aspects of the CCP organizational and political work in the areas it dominated, his eyewitness accounts of the popular enthusiasm for the “new democratic” system instituted by the CCP on the grassroots level are nevertheless not to be ignored. In any case, they help the researchers to understand what aspects of the CCP’s “new democratic” political practices could be seen by Korea’s left-of-the-center intellectuals as an important reference for Korea’s own state-building after the long-awaited Liberation.

i n t e r nat io nalis t n at io n al i de nt it y— f o r g e d in t h e bat t l es Moscow, the “red capital,” a site for Korean leftists’ pilgrimages during the colonial age, was described in Korean travelogues as simultaneously the center of “workers’ and peasants’ Russia” and an international city, home to a transborder socialist project (see Chapter 7). In a similar vein, Nomamalli, while geographically limited to Kim Saryang’s experiences in China, deals at the same time with a highly internationalized battlefield.

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Chinese Communist troops, officially a part of the US-allied united front coalition with the Nationalist government of republican China, battled the Japanese army, with Koreans to be found on both sides of the frontline. The international cauldron of the anti-Japanese resistance, soon to provide the ground for the establishment of both the People’s Republic of China and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), was the place where contemporary national identities, both Chinese and Korean, were being formed. In Kim Saryang’s account, the new Korean identity-in-making is being both reflected in Kim’s battlefield observations and further proactively given form through the act of writing on the armed anti-Japanese resistance—in broad meaning, the sacred formative background of what was further to become North Korean history. The new Korean identity Kim was observing in its incipiency, and also simultaneously attempting to help to shape, was concurrently internationalist and deeply national. Koreans fought Japanese in China as a part of their alliance with Chinese (the CCP)—and, despite the obvious asymmetry of the strength in such an alliance, Kim Saryang makes a point of defining Korean fighters as equal allies of their Chinese comrades, rather than the CCP’s foreign dependents. Korean fighters’ contributions are noted in detail concerning an engagement near Hujiazhuang (Hebei Province) on December 11–12, 1941. There, twenty-nine fighters of the Northern China Unit—who were doing their routine propaganda work among the local Chinese when they were suddenly attacked by the enemy60—struggled valiantly against more than three hundred Japanese (and puppet Chinese) soldiers, who killed or wounded almost half of their opponents in the process. The engagement took place after the Korean unit opened a “people’s meeting” in a Chinese village conducting “mass work” there on the CCP’s behalf. Kim Saryang’s account paints the engagement as symbolic of the dedication of Koreans to their joint cause with the Chinese comrades, as well as the Korean Communists’ willingness to sacrifice themselves in the common fight.61 Kim Hakch’ŏl, who was later to become Kim Saryang’s friend and confidant (see above), was wounded and taken prisoner by the Japanese in this engagement.62 And, of course, Kim Il Sung and his fighters’ contribution to the great anti-imperialist cause was the very symbol of Koreans’ ethno-national dignity as a party to the international anti-Japanese alliance. Kim Saryang registers his joy and pride when a Chinese Eighth



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Route Army officer asked him about the current whereabouts of “general Kim”—that is, Kim Il Sung—with whose guerrillas he used to fight side by side in Manchuria in the early 1930s. Kim Saryang confesses that, prior to this encounter, he knew little about the “legendary general . . . an eagle flying high in the sky while battling in the mountains and a tiger when it comes to a fight in a forest”—except for his name “which all Koreans knew.” So, he “felt happy” while listening to a Chinese Communist officer’s tales about Kim Il Sung’s “arduous patriotic struggle, great sagacity and superhuman bravery.”63 While the episodes of the diary where Kim Il Sung is mentioned are narrated in a clearly propagandist tone (and, indeed, we have no ways of verifying whether the Chinese admirer of Kim Il Sung was a real or fictitious personage), one thing is obvious: Kim Saryang emphasizes the role of Kim Il Sung and his guerrilla unit in the anti-Japanese resistance as a guarantee of Korea’s proud and dignified place in the anti-Japanese alliance with the Chinese—and, further, Soviet—comrades. On the battlefields of 1930s–early 1940s China, a new Korean identity, simultaneously accentuating the equal participation in the worldwide anti-imperialist struggles and Korean ­ ethno-national (minjok) patriotism, was being forged. Kim Saryang’s literary work was supposed to articulate and solidify this identity, magnifying its appeal and symbolic power.64

w h e r e w as t h e su n ? Given the circumstances under which the diary was published, it comes as little surprise that Kim Saryang—at least, on the surface—puts the de facto supreme local leader of the Soviet-occupied northern part of Korea and his political patron, Kim Il Sung, into the very center of this new Korean identity formation. As Kim Hakch’ŏl’s memoirs (mentioned above) indicate, in reality Kim Saryang’s take on Kim Il Sung was much more critical than it could look on the surface. However, regardless of what Kim Saryang’s personal attitude vis-à-vis Kim Il Sung could be by the end of the 1940s, Kim Il Sung already was the very personalization of the socialist project for Korea. Thus, he had to be given the honored place at the very top of the symbolic hierarchy of leadership. Indeed, Kim Saryang uses an extremely telling metaphor in the fragment of his diary

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dealing with the overall history of anti- Japanese Korean resistance in China, calling Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla unit “the Sun,” around which “the Solar System” of diverse Korean resistance groups in exile has been coalescing.65 This particular fragment, however, stands in sharp stylistic contrast with the rest of the book. It employs a formal, dry, and highly didactic style of a historic narration, while generally Kim Saryang’s diary is written in rich, colorful, sometimes almost colloquial language peppered with folksy Pyongyang dialect words and expressions. The fragment gives a strong impression of a later—perhaps editorial— addition, while the natural culmination of the diary narrative is the scene in the headquarters of the KVA that Kim Saryang reaches at the end of his journey through the liberated areas in the Taihang Mountains. There comes what Kim Saryang himself calls “the most unforgettable day in my life”: in the clubroom near the office of the headquarters, he sees Korea’s flag standing side by side with the flag of the Chinese Communists. He talks to Yi Iksŏng and other military and political leaders of the KVA and listens to their plan of militarily liberating Korea “when the right moment comes”—that is, when the triumph of their Chinese or Soviet allies allows them to “cross the Yalu River at last together with the forces of General [Kim Il Sung].”66 Indeed, we know that KVA leadership had ambitious plans to move into Korea the moment Japan was defeated; underground organizing work among the local Koreans in Manchuria was being conducted since the autumn 1942 to facilitate a move from the Taihang Mountains towards the Korean borders in the future.67 In reality, the Korean Volunteer Army was only allowed to repatriate to North Korea after the Communist victory in China’s 1945–1949 Civil War, in which it fought on the Communist side. The Soviet military occupation authorities permitted an early entry to North Korea in December 1945 only to about eighty main cadres of the KVA; the rest was left under CCP command in Northeastern China.68 However, the initial plans of the KVA leadership were much bigger, and it was exactly these plans that Kim Saryang wanted to concentrate on in his inspiring account. In a word, Kim Saryang describes there the Korean nation-making at its incipience. The KVA, enriched by the experience of “new democracy” in the Chinese liberated areas, was to become a nuclei of the new, proud, “democratic”



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figure 6.3 Kim Mujŏng (1904–1951), the commander in chief of the Korean Volunteer Army (KVA), early 1940s. Credit: Yŏm Inho, Chosŏn Ŭiyongdae, Chosŏn Ŭiyonggun (Korean Volunteer Corps, Korean Volunteer Army) (Ch’ŏnan: Tongnip Kinyŏmgwan, 2009), 229.

and simultaneously internationalist Korean nation, which was to take its rightful place in the sun, side by side with the USSR and “new China.” Such a vision of the new Korean-ness—being forged in the KVA’s struggles in Hebei and Shaanxi, in the crucible of propaganda and military work undertaken in close alliance with the Chinese comrades—was still acceptable in Pyongyang when Kim’s diary was first published there in 1947. It became much less acceptable after some of Kim Saryang’s interlocutors—including such prominent political leaders of the KVA and later important North Korean politicians as Kim Ch’angman (1907–1966) and Sŏ Hŭi (1916–1993), whom Kim Saryang mentions by their names69—were purged from power by Kim Il Sung’s own faction in the mid-1950s and 1960s.70 It is hardly surprising that Kim Saryang’s diary was not republished in North Korea until 1987, when the purges against the majority of the former leaders of the KVA (“Yan’an faction”) had long become history.71

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­ Expectedly, the main negative Other against whom the new Korean identity is to be formed was Imperial Japan—including even the rankand-file Japanese “masses” in military uniforms as long as they were still not “reeducated” into acquiring “class consciousness” needed to liberate themselves from the malaise of the imperialist ideology. A number of Korean voices in Kim Saryang’s diary testify to the discrimination, abuse, and beatings they habitually suffered at the hands of the Japanese—army officers, administrators, and Japanese subalterns all included.72 It looks as if this conceptualization of Japanese as racist abusers draws heavily on Kim Saryang’s own unpleasant experiences from his stay in Japan, or the experiences of marginalized, discriminated, underpaid, and precariously employed Korean workers in Japan73 whom Kim could so often observe there and whom he depicted in some of his novels, such as 1940’s Mukyū Ikka (Endless Family).74 However, Kim Saryang concomitantly emphasizes that Korea’s liberation through internationalist armed struggle implies the possibility of an essential shift of the roles. His diary includes a chapter on a Japanese POW camp Kim visited together with his Chinese hosts. In such camps, Chinese and Korean cadres were attempting to “reeducate” the Japanese prisoners, hoping to further use them for propaganda work targeting the Japanese soldiers.75 In a sort of psychological compensation for the discrimination he experienced in his preceding life in Imperial Japan, Kim vividly describes the obsequiousness of the Japanese prisoners, “wishing to survive despite all their samurai ideas” and thus grovelingly currying favor with their Chinese guards. He himself, a Korean speaking fluent Japanese, was treated “as the goddess Amaterasu” by the former colonizers, now hoping that the former Tokyo student would help them to survive and return home. The roles are completely reversed now. The supposedly “superior” Japanese, notorious for their abysmal cruelty towards Chinese prisoners,76 are treated kindly by the “inferior” Chinese and Koreans. the latter who hope to achieve a genuine “homogenization” between themselves and “Japanese workers and peasants” and “strengthen the democratic forces of Japan.” The colonial underdogs, Koreans, take the new role of the teachers of proletarian internationalism in such encounters.



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The faux imperial internationalism is exposed for what it was, and contrasted with the “proletarian” combination of patriotism and internationalism. Kim associates this combination with “the two great teachers of all the humanity, Teacher Lenin and Generalissimo Stalin.”77

c o nc lu s ion Moscow travel diaries by Korean leftist intellectuals—analyzed in Chapter  7—were often an attempt to formulate the lessons taught by the world’s “red capital” in order to apply its models and methods on the Korean soil in the future. In a similar vein, Kim Saryang’s China diary was an attempt to utilize the memories of the anticolonial struggle in order to reformulate Korean-ness as an ethno-national identity born in ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ the whirlwind of emancipatory struggles—simultaneously “proletarian internationalist” and deeply national. Whereas socialist modernity worldwide, Korea included, was inspired by Moscow’s imagery, the new Korean statehood, to be created by the Korean Volunteer Army (KVA) fighters after the anticipated “liberation of fatherland” (choguk haebang), was obviously expected to draw also on the Chinese “new democracy” experiences. These experiences strongly moved Kim Saryang by their combination of modern enlightenment with the avowed emphasis on “voluntary mobilization of the masses” and clever employment of the market economy and other preexistent institutions for the progressive purposes. Chinese and Koreans were to ally themselves against the Japanese imperialist barbarity—and in an attempt to reeducate at least some Japanese (prisoners of war) into becoming a part of the worldwide “democratic camp.” A special emphasis was being placed on the supposedly equalitarian nature of the Sino-Korean revolutionary alliance, sharply contrasted with the ethnic abuse Koreans had to incessantly suffer in Japanese hands. It is certainly hard to deny that Kim Saryang’s account retouches the actual memories of the events the author himself witnessed and gives a rather idealized picture of the circumstances he experienced in the liberated areas of China in May–August  1945. However, this account is important for understanding the hopes that such progressive Korean intellectuals like Kim Saryang, who chose to ally themselves with the Communist cause in the final months of the war or/and immediately

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­

c h a p te r   7

The Red Capital of Moscow in the Eyes of Korean Travelers

T

his chapter deals with Moscow travelogues by colonial-era Korean intellectuals, including both known leftists and more mainstream or apolitical figures. The reasons why the travelogues describing Moscow, the “red capital” of the 1920s and 1930s, are to be examined in this book are obvious. Unlike most European countries or its colonial metropole, Japan, Korea had no pre-1917 history of homegrown socialist movements. Socialism was introduced to Korea on the wave of the Russian Revolution’s success, and revolutionary society was unambiguously identified with the newborn country of which Moscow was the capital. As we saw earlier (see Chapter 3), Korean Communists saw national liberation and general democratization as the essential first step on their future road. The ultimate goal, however, was to construct a society modeled after the new world that the “red capital” represented. This chapter will attempt to demonstrate that these Communist aspirations could indeed be viewed in a generally positive light by a number of figures and factions in the Korean intellectual milieu to which so many better-educated Communists belonged. There was, of course, no consensus on whether the new society, which Moscow exemplified, was practically achievable or even desirable in Korea’s particular case. There was, however, general admiration for many features of the Red Russian experiment, on which the Communists could further build their propagandist efforts. Concurrently, I will argue that this admiration was not necessarily unthinking and uncritical. Korean observers noticed both the pervasive poverty of 1920s Moscow and the conservative turn in Stalinist Moscow of the 1930s. Nevertheless, the genuine achievements of the “red capital”—the 207

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efforts to eradicate racial discrimination and open access to highbrow culture for formerly underprivileged workers—were given due credit, facilitating Communists’ propagandist efforts among the Korean educated public, the chief consumers of the Moscow travelogues.

in t rodu c t io n: m o s c o w tr av el o gu es b e tw e e n lit­e r­at ­ u r e and p o l it ics As the Soviet experiment captivated worldwide attention in the 1920s– 1930s, Moscow travelogues grew into a special subgenre both in Korea and elsewhere, placed somewhere on the boundary between travel literature and political writing. Salutary impressions from Moscow during the most tragic periods of Stalinist repression were often regarded as a hallmark of an authentic progressive writer in the left-wing circles of prewar Europe. A typical case is Lion Feuchtwanger’s (1884–1958) somewhat notorious Moskau 1937, which, inter alia, contained an explicitly apologetic description of the Moscow trials. These travelogues were typically criticized during and after the Cold War either for naiveté or for gross neglect of the truth, hardly justifiable even in the name of an antifascist strategic alignment with the USSR. By contrast, more analytical and critical accounts—such as André Gide’s (1869–1951) Retour de l’U.R.S.S (1936)—could be vilified by some contemporaneous proMoscow zealots while praised by later critics for their acute penetration into the details of Stalinist Russia’s de facto conservative turn in the 1930s. The narratives of the type presented by Feuchtwanger’s and Gide’s accounts placed Soviet society into a critical relationship with European intelligentsia’s emancipatory ideals. They attempted to determine to what degree the Soviet experiment contributed to the liberation of humanity, as it was understood by capitalism’s critics in the core regions of the world capitalist system.1 Much less attention in the Anglophone scholarship has been paid so far to Moscow travelogues by intellectuals from the colonized peripheral areas of the world-system. These intellectuals, naturally enough, tended to assess the changes they witnessed in the Soviet capital in relationship to their own historical aspirations— first and foremost, the aim of liberation from colonialism and latecomer modernity development. Some academic writings can be found on the



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Soviet experiences of Indian2 or Chinese3 luminaries, while colonial-era Korean travelogues on Soviet Russia’s capital remain largely unexplored in English-language scholarship. This chapter is intended to fill the niche, by attempting to analyze the angle from which Korean observers tended to view Moscow in the 1920s–1930s. While travelogues generally tend to be heavy on exoticism and often represent a projection of their authors’ views onto the lesser-known realities of faraway destinations,4 they often also offer outsiders’ perspectives, which are indispensable for post factum historical reconstructions. As this article will demonstrate, Koreans’ impressions of Moscow not only reflected their own agenda but also pointed to some very essential features of Soviet developments in the 1920s–1930s and, in this aspect, are relevant also for specialists working on the interbellum history outside the narrow field of Korean studies.

the m e t am o r p h o s e s o f m o sco w : 189 6 t o 1937 In the year 1937 Maritime Province Koreans, accused of being “Japanese spies” en masse, were forcibly moved to Central Asia amid the hurried preparations for a military showdown with Japan along the Soviet border with Tokyo’s Korean colony (known as the Battle of Lake Khasan, it eventually came in July 1938). In that fateful year, an anonymous correspondent from a popular monthly, Chogwang, interviewed Yun Ch’iho (1865–1945), one of the key conservative leaders of colonial society, about his experience of traveling to Russia in 1896. At that time Yun Ch’iho, one of the most fluent English speakers in the officialdom of a still independent Korean monarchy, was appointed as an interpreter of the Korean mission sent to the belated coronation festivities of Russia’s (last) Tsar Nikolas II (r. 1894–1917). Asked about his impressions of Moscow—where the coronation extravaganza took place—Yun vividly remembered the lavishness of the festival decorations and the luxury of the coronation hall, draped in gold and silver. It was as if the Russian Empire was to show off all its prosperity and splendor in the coronation city, Yun assumed. Yet at the same time, “a giant stampede killed more than two thousand people, and nobody paid any attention.”5

figure 7.1 Yun Ch’iho (1865–1945), one of the richest and most influential luminaries of colonial-age Korea, 1934. Credit: Yun Kyŏngnam (grandniece of Yun Ch’iho), private collection



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The Russian capital here appears to be a two-faced Janus—the extravaganza of the pompous imperial coronation is juxtaposed with the enormity of the Khodynka tragedy where negligence and unskilled administration ended up in a crowd-rush and the death of around 1,400 (rather than 2,000) mostly lower-class participants in the festivities. Ambivalence of this kind also characterized Yun Ch’iho’s very first impressions of Moscow. While in Moscow, he confided to his English diary that the hospitality of his imperial hosts was impeccable—“good fare, clean beds, cool drinks, efficient service, fine carriages” were all to the service of the Korean envoys. The wonders of Russia’s old capital, to which the envoys were treated, were superb. The military parade Yun and his fellow delegates were invited to observe was “magnificent as regiment after regiment of well-equipped soldiers―infantry, artillery, and cavalry― passed by in superb order marching to the lively notes of the martial ­ music” (June 7, 1896).6 At the same time, the streets in this city of church domes and palaces were “very rough―so full of big gravel, with which the streets are paved. Sidewalks are narrow and sometimes a strip of sidewalk is in the middle of the road” (May 23, 1896).7 Why could the tsar not use the money wasted on coronation festivities, for paving at least the main arteries of his ancient capital with asphalt (June 4, 1896)?8 Obviously, Moscow was a place of contrasts―the most salient of which was that between imperial ostentation and the absolute Russian monarchy’s blatant disregard for the well-being of its poorer subjects. Thirty-eight years later, in 1934, a certain Kim Haech’un (who presented himself in his text as a Korean student in Moscow, now the Soviet capital) sent to a commercial monthly with considerable, albeit avowedly nonpolitical, interest in Russian culture and Soviet realities, Samch’ŏlli,9 his essay on Tolstoy’s Resurrection performed by Moscow’s Khudozhestvennyi Theater. The performance, as he explained, was to open the eyes of the public to the dark side of prerevolutionary Russian life, with its philandering aristocrats, poor, suffering women reduced to selling their bodies, and the horrors of Siberian prison life. Other wise, Tolstoy’s religious moralism had little appeal for the new Soviet public. Moreover, importantly, the public now in large part consisted of the workers, men and women, in their characteristic rubashkas (cheaper Russian shirts). At last, the contrast between the magnificence of Moscow’s artistic aura and pitiable fates of the poorer Muscovites, was, to a

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degree, overcome. Revolution had drastically changed the erstwhile image of Moscow.10 Some of the noteworthy changes—from the viewpoint of Korean observers—happened in the sphere of gender relations. Communist observers used to express their admiration for the Soviet system of maternity protection and socialized childcare, which was supposed to enable women to combine motherhood with self-realization in the workplace.11 However, a high degree of appreciation for the steps taken towards gender equality in Soviet Russia was by no means limited to the Communists.12 At a round-table discussion between several Koreans with experience of long-term Russian sojourn held by the Samch’ŏlli editorial office in 1935, it was mentioned that in prerevolutionary Moscow, such central streets as Tverskaya or Petrovka were “heavens” for the throngs of yellow-ticketed, often under-age prostitutes. The Soviet authorities, however, were reported to have removed them from the streets, building instead special facilities for rehabilitation and professional training of former sex workers.13 How contrasting did it seem compared to the reports on the professionalized, well-established patterns of commercial prostitution in, say, Germany or Austria!14 And how different did it sound in comparison with the realities of colonized Korea, where pioneering feminists were tirelessly campaigning for the abolishment of human trafficking (insin maemae) in women, one of the main supply channels to both licensed and unlicensed brothels!15 ­



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­ orea.20 From then on, however, trade in women was no longer a definK ing trait of Moscow, or new Russia in general. At the same round-table discussion, yet another change in gender roles was mentioned. Female nudity became more accepted in certain public spaces—informally, some of the beaches along the Moscow River were turned into female-only nudist bathing spaces. The discussion participants related this change to the unprecedented penetration of mass sports into the masses, males and females alike. While sportive fashions underpinned the tendency towards more extensive exposure of trained, healthy female bodies, the popular mood was also boosted by the newly established tradition of mass festivities on May 1 (Labor Day) and November 7 (Revolution Day). Korean observers witnessed crowds cheerfully dancing under the accompaniment of ubiquitous accordions. The positive mood was also maintained by the release of Vesyolye Rebyata (Merry Fellows) (1934), the pioneering Soviet comedy film that seemingly impressed Korean observers of Russian life.21 In fact, the film was strongly influenced by Hollywood aesthetics.22 In Stalin’s Moscow of the 1930s, more developmentalist than revolutionary, “America” denoted the progressiveness of the industrial age. The Korean observers, however, emphasized this part less, although, as we will see below, they too noticed the conservative turn in the 1930s Moscow life. What could explain the ebullience of the Moscow crowds? The participants of the Samch’ŏlli round-table discussion emphasized the fast path of industrial development in the 1930s that was quickly changing Moscow’s cityscape. As if following Yun Ch’iho’s suggestion, confessed to his diary thirty-nine years earlier, the central streets of Moscow were all now asphalted. The tempo was a matter of surprise—asphalting Tverskaya, the main thoroughfare of the city, took less than two days! Cars displaced the horses, and the brand-new Moscow metro, with its marbledecorated entrances—“more impressive than anything one could ever see in the United States”—overawed the Korean guests. Trolleybuses23 were yet another Moscow novelty that one could find no analogues for in either Korea or its colonial metropole of Japan. As one of the discussion participants put it, in prerevolutionary Russia modern clothes implied a very special social position above an ordinary level. Now, modernism became daily life for the masses.24

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f ro m r e v o lu t io nar y zeal t o t h e ne w no r m al cy But then, what happened to the Revolution—a watershed event that changed Moscow beyond recognition? Not unlike some Western travelogues of the 1930s (see, for example, the 1932 travelogue by a known Swedish writer, Bengt Idestam-Almquist, which contrasted the post1917 devastation with the new mood of joy and optimism),25 Korean publications of the mid- or late 1930s represent Soviet Moscow as a postrevolutionary, rather than revolutionary, society. In the round-table discussion cited above, for example, the new class stratification in postrevolutionary Moscow was mentioned in a matter of fact, natural way. That the women, whom one could meet in Moscow’s hotels or other elite venues for socialization, were dressed in a “high-collar” (haik’ara)26 manner, unlike the Soviet women of lesser standing, was stated as a fact not requiring special explanation. Of course, it was also mentioned that the attire of those gathering to dance in Moscow’s poshest hotel, the Metropole, was hardly comparable with the fashionable clothes to be seen in Tokyo’s Imperial (Teikoku) Hotel or in the prominent social venues of New York. Still, the contrast between the relative luxury of the outfits of female socialites in Moscow’s theaters, hotels, or dance halls, and the still “modest” clothing of the majority of Soviet women, including ordinary party members, was taken more or less for granted.27 The changes for the better in Soviet Moscow—which Korean observers obviously admired— were explained in the developmentalist terms of cultural level (munhwa chŏngdo) improvement rather than being related to the Revolution’s equalitarian impulses. These observations stand in stark contrast with Korean travelers’ accounts of the Soviet capital’s early days, which first and foremost foregrounded the revolutionary zeal. Tongnip Sinmun (The Independence), the mouthpiece of Korea’s Shanghai Provisional Government, serialized in January 10–February 26, 1920 a longish description of Russian revolutionary events (translated from an anonymous foreign source), ending with the Soviet capital’s transfer to Moscow on March 12, 1918. As its editorial writer emphasized, the Russian Revolution, which now had the “red capital” of Moscow as its center, was the only positive outcome of the First World War and was now to define the development of the world’s future history.

figure 7.2 Article on the histor y of the Russian Revolution in Tongnip Sinmun, Januar y 10, 1920. Credit : National Museum of Korean Contemporar y Histor y (Taehan Min’guk Yŏksa Pangmulgwan)

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Its influences were everywhere, from the railway strikes in the United States or miners’ strikes in Britain to the postwar rioting in Japan.28 Yŏ Unhyŏng (1886–1947), one of the Provisional Government’s original founders in 1919, a former Communist who since the late 1920s moved to positions more akin to middle-of-the-road social democracy, described in a memoirist piece (published in 1936) the Soviet Moscow he visited in 1922 as a locus of revolutionary heroism. Moscow’s Communists—as he saw them—were secular ascetics sacrificing themselves to save their country, which had been almost completely destroyed by eight to nine years of continuous warfare. Drinking was strictly prohibited for all citizens, and could be punished by death on the spot. Moscow’s “semiAsiatic” beauty, its churches and old streets, captivated Yŏ; but the atmosphere of revolutionary passion was what he remembered best after fourteen years. The scene that remained intact in his memory was Leon Trotsky’s speech at a ceremony when he, as Soviet war minister (People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs), was presented a gift of weapons by Outer Mongolian delegates to the First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, which Yŏ himself was attending. The speech, initially meant to last for half an hour at most, ended up continuing for a couple of hours. It electrified the audience so strongly that the listeners started to spontaneously applaud and shouted approvingly as Trotsky was speaking. The speech mesmerized the Russian comrade who was asked to interpret it for Yŏ (into English, which Yŏ was fluent in), to the degree that he did not interpret a single word while Trotsky spoke, instead trying hard to discern each word uttered by the great revolutionary amid the shouting, cheering, and applause. It was only on the way back to the Congress delegates’ residence that Yŏ could at last understand the gist of the speech. One did not need to speak Russian, however, to appreciate Trotsky’s oratorical talents, and it was memories of the crucible of revolutionary fervor, in which such talents were so much appreciated, that constituted the main content of Yŏ’s Moscow impressions.29 By 1925, when Tong’a Ilbo’s first Moscow correspondent, Yi Kwanyong (1894–1933), came to report on Russia’s revolutionary capital, Trotsky was, in practical terms, pushed away from real power: the peak of radical ardor was already in the past. Still, the visible egalitarianism of new Moscow nevertheless caught the eye of the Korean visitor. Amid the discomforts of life in a city of overcrowded street cars, chaotic hordes



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of street peddlers, and throngs of beggars (including many young homeless children), Soviet elections gave voting rights to both women and men (in contrast to Japan proper, where 1925 saw the introduction of the universal franchise for Japanese males only). Even the hotel maids could be voted in as Soviet deputies! Traditional overdependent women completely reliant on their men could no longer be spotted in Moscow; if such “men’s decoration”-like creatures could be seen on Moscow streets at all, one might safely assume that they were foreigners.30 All the middleschool pupils, their social background notwithstanding, were to undergo obligatory labor practice at a factory, as one of Yi’s photographs tellingly demonstrated.31 The streets of Moscow were bustling with people from all the parts of globe, Korea (and Japan) included: “colored” faces easily caught the eye of observers. For the nonwhite visitors and sojourners, Moscow was the capital of a global struggle for national, racial, and social liberation. Yi, once an Oxford student himself (1913– 1917), contrasted the “red capital” with London, the “world’s capital of national slavery and imperialism.”32 Yes, it was true that the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s restored private capitalism under party and state control, generating a richer class of nepmans (Soviet bourgeoisie); they, however, were deprived of voting rights and social respect. In stark contrast with contemporary Korea, in Moscow one had to wear workers’ clothes to be respected!33 A neo-Kantian philosopher, prolific journalist, and influential moderate nationalist keen to collaborate with the Korean leftists, Yi—unlike Yŏ Unhyŏng—was neither a Communist nor even a socialist.34 Still, the social leveling in postrevolutionary Moscow, as well as the Soviet government’s deliberate emphasis on the promotion of gender and racial equality, seem to have strongly appealed to him. Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), yet another well-meaning nonCommunist foreign observer who came to Moscow two years later than Yi, was appalled at the complete loss of any semblance of privacy in an overcrowded city of multi-family “communal flats”—the cultural progress or the newfound egalitarian élan of which he other wise admired.35 That obviously did not constitute an issue to Yi: after all, how much privacy did one have in the rural hamlets of city slums where millions of Koreans dwelt? The Moscow impressions of 1920s Korean visitors did not have to be overtly ideologically tinged. Many, but not necessarily all, colonial-era

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Korean intellectuals with a strong interest in or sympathies towards Russia were leftists or pro-independence nationalist activists. Some were drawn to Korea’s gigantic northwestern neighbor by a mixture of romantic infatuation with Russian literature and fascination with the peasant land of seemingly borderless plains and forests, so different from both East Asia and the ordered, modern landscapes of Western Europe. One example of the Russophile attitude of a more literary kind is Ham Taehun (1907–1949), a graduate of the Tokyo Foreign Language School’s Russian Department known for his translations of Nikolai Gogol’s Revizor and Maxim Goriky’s Na dne.36 In his partly autobiographical novel, Ch’ŏngch’unbo (Records of the Youth),37 he projects his own past onto the main protagonist, Kwak Sŏngsik, a true lover of Russian literature and language, who even traveled from colonial Korea to Harbin to read Russian newspapers and learn conversational Russian from local Russian émigrés.38 Kwak’s love affair with Russia ends tragically: Soviet occupation authorities in the northern part of Korea fall out with the right-wing nationalists of the Korean Democratic Party, to which Kwak belongs, ultimately forcing Kwak to move south. Ham’s own post-1945 biography followed the same trajectory.39 Yet another prominent colonial-period romantic admirer of Russia was Pak Roa (literarily “son of Russia,” 1904–?), a distinguished poet and playwright, born and raised in a family of Korean immigrant parents in the Russian Far East and known to have studied in Moscow in 1925–1926.40 His essay on Moscow life, published in 1929, gives an impression of what mid-1920s Moscow looked like to a well-disposed, Russian-speaking, non-Communist Korean observer. Moscow of the NEP era, as Pak Roa saw and represented it, was a realm of rank-and-file, down-to-earth common folks. They were by no means marching all together to a bright Communist future: Pak’s attentive eye and native-speaker-level Russian abilities helped him to discern a number of divergent shades in Moscow’s postrevolutionary palette. All the official prohibitions and rehabilitation measures notwithstanding, street prostitutes were still visible to a trained observer. At the Red Square, Strastnaya (later Pushkin) Square, and on the smaller, narrow streets around the main thoroughfare of Tverskaya, they were still plying their trade, apprehensively watching for militsiya (police) patrols. Sometimes they were seen attempting to attract customers directly beneath street propaganda posters on the dangers of prostitution



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and sexually transmitted diseases, which they obviously regarded as laughable nonsense. Coquettish young girls from the provinces were peddling apples, bulka (Russian bread), and semechki (sunflower seeds) on the central streets; the semechki husks were littering the street pavement. Drunkards were still searching for Russkaya gor’kaya (strong vodka) late at night, frightening passersby with outbursts of mat (obscenities), being themselves too afraid of the night patrols to commit more serious violence. But against this backdrop of discomfort, survival struggles, and bad old habits, a tangible democratization of high culture was taking place. Workers, both men and women, were gathering in the evenings near Moscow’s famed Bol’shoi Theater, as radio speakers there were broadcasting the operas played inside the theater to the culturehungry public standing outside. Trade union clubs were popularizing chess among their members, and young workers were forming long queues in front of cinemas and theaters, eager to buy tickets and enjoy the arts that had been reserved for the rich and privileged in prerevolutionary times. Non-Russians—Chinese, Mongols, Turks, etc.—were highly visible: new Moscow looked like an “exhibition space for different races.”41 The visible egalitarianism of Moscow’s public life, and the cultural rights won by the erstwhile underdogs, were appreciated even by rather apolitical Korean observers. That was a facet of an alternative modernity one could only dream of in the highly regimented and un­ ­ equal colonial-era Korea. Indeed, what colonial censorship permitted the Korean Communist activists to publish in the legal press about their Moscow experiences did not significantly differ from the gist of Pak Roa’s impressions. Ideological issues were not easy to deal with in the censored press,42 but the images of a new, less racist, and more egalitarian society full of knowledgehungry “workers and peasants” could be more or less safely put into print. For example, a former student of the Moscow-based Communist University of Eastern Toilers (KUTV), protected by a pseudonym, gave an account of his encounter with a young shepherd in the vicinity of Moscow, who told the Korean visitor that he attended a trade union–run library and regularly devoured books there. An agricultural worker in summer, the lad was a student for the rest of the year. Yet another encounter was with a female student of medicine, who contrasted women’s dependency on men under the Tsarist regime with the multitude of

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opportunities offered by gender-equal, postrevolutionary society.43 A medical doctor, Kim Seyong (1907–1966), known to have studied at the Communist University of Eastern Toilers in the mid-1920s, remembered his time there as a veritable feast of racial and gender equality. His recollections of his Moscow days, published in 1932, feature a tale of an excursion to Leningrad in the company of a Turkish man and a Japanese woman. What followed in Leningrad was warm friendship with the female Soviet students of Japanese and heated discussions about Alexandra Kollontai’s (1872–1952) radical gender theories, which aimed at liberating the sexual instincts, no longer to be obstructed by the “reactionary institutions” of family and marriage. The description of the Japanese woman (most likely a fellow KUTV student) singing a Korean nationalist revolutionary song at the request of Russian friends exemplified Kim’s impressions of the atmosphere of radical brother- and sisterhood he enjoyed so much while in Moscow.44 By the mid-1930s, however, Moscow—as Korean observers saw it— came to be much less associated with social or political radicalism than before. Of course, one reason why the Moscow-related texts in Korean periodicals came to put much less emphasis on radical Soviet experimentation by the mid-1930s was the stricter censorship regime in the period in which the KAPF (Korean Federation of Proletarian Artists), weakened by police repression, had to end its legal existence in 1935. Police tolerance of radical discourses, quite limited even in the more liberal 1920s, was quickly waning.45 Yet another reason was, however, the ebbing of the radical currents that the Korean visitors could themselves witness in Moscow. A Korean student in Moscow observed in 1934, for example, that since 1933, Moscow theaters had started to noticeably prefer staging pieces by prerevolutionary authors. Enthusiasm for revolutionary experimentation was supplanted by a stronger emphasis on the development of preexisting national traditions.46 Vsevold Meyerhold (1874–1940), the very epitome of revolutionary radicalism in the theatrical arts, on whom and whose method Ham Taehun wrote an admiring treatise,47 was no longer in favor. A Korean cinema student on a visit to Moscow’s famed Vsesoyuznyi Gosudarstvenyi Institut Kinematografii (VGIK, All-Union State Institute of Cinematography) discovered that the revolutionary films of the 1920s—like Pudovkin’s ­Mother (1926), based on an adaptation of Gorky’s eponymous novels—were treated as clas-



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sics but were not easy to watch. Old films were routinely in too bad a condition to screen and were not screened very often;48 mid-1930s Soviet cinema was becoming more professional, but also more frequently aimed at mass consumption rather than aesthetic experiments. Much more than cultural experimentation, it was success in industrialization and weapon development that came to symbolize developments in Moscow—and in the USSR in general—in the Korean press in the mid1930s and later.49 Korean observers were, of course, not alone in praising Soviet developmental successes that contrasted so starkly with the misery of the Great Depression. The contemporary liberal and moderate social democratic consensus was summarized by Jawaharlal Nehru (1889– 1964). Despite its “defects, mistakes, and ruthlessness,” Nehru wrote, Soviet industrialization is “stumbling occasionally but ever marching forward.”50 Unsurprisingly, Korean leftist authors had produced paeans to the Soviet industrialization since its beginnings,51 but—just like in the West and Western colonies—the interest in Soviet industrial development was indeed much wider. In 1934 a telling picture in Tong’a Ilbo showed a procession of Soviet-made tanks against the background of Moscow’s majestic Palace of the Soviets (Dvorets Sovetov).52 The Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951), defined, in his famous speech to the Fourth Session of Soviets’ Central Executive (December 29, 1933)—translated soon into Korean as well—maintenance of peace as the absolute priority of the Soviet international policy.53 The Soviet Union, however, was simultaneously heavily investing in arming itself as its industrialization drive was bringing fruits, something Korean observers were taking notice of. In 1935, an exhaustive analysis of the international situation in Samch’ŏlli named the high-speed expansion of the Soviet industrial economy, as well as the development of Soviet economic ties with the United States and Soviet rivalries vis-à-vis Japan and Germany, as the defining aspects of global politics.54 It is noteworthy that, after 1945, technical sophistication and industrial prowess of the USSR were among the important recurring themes in North Korean writers’ Soviet travelogues, their impressions of Moscow and its environs included.55 In the West, even the staunchly pro-Stalinist Walter Duranty (1884–1957), notorious for his denial of the catastrophic hunger, with several millions of peasant deaths, in Ukraine and Kazakhstan in 1932– 1933, still had to mention in print the food shortages in the USSR, plainly

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visible even from its more or less better protected capital, where the New York Times Russian Bureau chief was residing.56 Korean observers were seemingly disinterested in this part—after all, periodical food shortages were affecting the Korean countryside as well, and the true scale of Stalin’s famine catastrophe was hardly a fact of common knowledge at that time.57 A revolutionary, experimental state that was reinventing itself as a “normal” global power of a more conventional kind was their prevailing image of the USSR in mid-1930s. The image of its capital in their eyes was developing along the same trajectory. In 1937, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. The Soviet Union had militarily supported the Nationalist government of China58 and was accordingly seen as a major potential enemy in Japanese ruling circles. Soviet-Japanese clashes near Lake Khasan (1938) and Khalkhin Gol (1939) ensued; all these events were widely reported in the heavily censured colonial Korean press. One could expect neither a friendly nor a neutral tone any longer, as the USSR was now seen as a key inimical power on Japan’s border. Korean journals had to publish what the Japanese censors wanted to read. An influential Ch’ŏndogyo (Religion of the Heavenly Way)59 figure, formerly a pro-socialist peasant movement leader60 and now a hopelessly pro-imperialist war propagandist, Yi Sŏnghwan (1900–?), argued in 1938, for example, that the inhabitants of Korea’s northeastern areas bordering on the USSR demonstrated model loyalty to the Japanese Empire in the time of the Lake Khasan battles, despite their earlier captivation with “red” ideas. Koreans and Japanese, due to the strength of their “racial unity,” were to fight together under any circumstances against a racially and culturally heterogeneous 61 ­ ­ The erstwhile fascination with Moscow’s progresRusso-Soviet enemy. sive modernity was now replaced with angry denouncements of Soviet imperialism from which Japan was supposed to “defend” East Asia. A number of especially zealous denouncers were former Communists, for whom criticizing “the Comintern’s deception of the world proletariat and weaker nations aimed at defending the USSR by any means”62 and the Comintern’s “single-minded determination to harm Japan without any regard for Korea’s national interests”63 was part of the recantation ritual. However, these Communists, who maintained their convictions in the atmosphere of wartime repression, continued to look at the Soviet Union as the very embodiment of human progress, both on social and



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economic levels. The latest known large-scale underground Communist organization in wartime Korea, the Kyŏngsŏng Communist Group (Kyŏngsŏng K’omgŭrup: 1939–1945), included some KUTV graduates. One of them, Hong Inŭi (who studied in Moscow in 1932–1934), when arrested in 1943 told his Japanese interrogators that Moscow as he saw it—with a working time limited to seven hours a day (with one holiday after every five working days), month-long vacations, six-months-long maternity leave, and so on—was superior to any capitalist society. At the same time, encouraged by Soviet industrialization successes and the Red Army’s battleground prowess, the Kyŏngsŏng Communist Group members wished to organize a popular rising in Korea in order to facilitate its liberation by Soviet forces at the end of the Soviet-Japanese war they eagerly anticipated.64 Both the visible progress of Moscow life and Soviet industrial triumphs were giving hope to colonial Korea’s radicals.

the c ap it al o f h ­ u m an p r o ­g r ess? ­

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literacy, a well-developed school system and Moscow State University, named after Lomonosov, with students representing more than a hundred different ethnicities—were more than impressive (Moscow State University elicited the admiration of other early North Korean pilgrims to the Soviet capital as well).67 Yet the most inspiring factor was the tangible progressiveness of Soviet life. What impressed Yi most was seeing women employed regulating traffic, driving buses and trolleybuses, and staffing the university’s physical laboratory, together with citizens receiving medical treatment free of charge.68 In fact, female employment grew in Western societies (typically in the United States) as well during and after the war years, but indeed, nowhere even remotely close to the scale achieved in the USSR.69 It did not matter to Yi that a capitalist society could offer shop show windows much more luxurious than those he was observing in a still-ascetic postwar Moscow.70 What mattered was that Moscow was the vanguard of a giant transformation of the whole of humanity, parallel to the discovery of the individual in the time of Renaissance. Here in Moscow a new model of human society, which substituted cooperation for competition and liberated the citizens from the yoke of exploitation and alienation, was being pioneered.71 As Yi formulated it later, in his contribution to Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party’s mouthpiece, in the days of the Korean War, Moscow was now “the capital of the world”; Moscow’s sacred center, Red Square, was “the heart of the world,” no less.72 The image of Moscow as the capital of human progress, so tangibly visible in the 1920s and early 1930s, had returned, as the Soviet Union was taken as the model for North Korea’s own radical social transformation. Of course, one caveat is definitely needed. The positive images of Moscow, typified by the travelogues of Yi T’aejun, or another prominent intellectual who chose the North, well-known historian Paek Nam’un (1894–1979),73 were completely dominant in early North Korean public discourse74 but otherwise they were not unopposed. Hardly anything else was as politicized worldwide as the images of Soviet Union or Moscow in the early Cold War world. Divided Korea, already at the forefront of the global Cold War by 1948, could hardly be an exception. The refutations of Yi T’aejun’s statements on the USSR appeared as early as 1947, some of them in the pages of Catholic newspapers (Kyŏnghyang Shinmun, K’at’ollik ch’ŏngnyeon, etc.)—especially interested in the furtherance



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of anti-Communist propaganda—and written by Koreans with firsthand Soviet experience.75 A very detailed refutation by a certain Pak Minwŏn, a former schoolteacher from North Korea who went South after prolonged training in Moscow, appeared serialized in Tong’a Ilbo in October–November  1948. Pak and several dozens of his colleagues were dispatched to Moscow for five-month-long training in 1947. There, interestingly, one of the founders of postwar Soviet Korean studies (and, on a more personal note, the former PhD adviser of the present author), Mikhail Park (1918–2009), was among the Soviet-Korean intellectuals who were to lecture them (in Korean) on the Soviet Constitution, Soviet and world history, and other subjects. Despite listening to these ideologically “correct” lectures, Pak Minwŏn (1948) was appalled by the obvious poverty of most Soviet citizens, foodstuff shortages, malodorous public toilets at the overcrowded railway stations of Moscow, and the exploitation of Japanese prisoners of war—some of whom, he had heard, were actually ethnic Koreans. The postwar austerity that Pak witnessed and emphasized was indeed uniformly mentioned by the Western observers too, including the well-meaning progressive ones.76 Yi could not avoid mentioning the scarcity too, albeit in the most diplomatically euphemistic way, and with obligatory references to the consequences of war and war-related industrial mobilization. Yi T’aejun and Pak Minwŏn most likely witnessed broadly the same reality while in Moscow: indeed, Pak even claims to have met the Soviet Korean who served as Yi’s guide a year earlier, in 1946. What differed was their interpretation, as certain features of postwar Soviet realities were either emphasized or deemphasized from mutually opposing ideological vantage points in the travelogues of Yi and Pak. Soviet Russians’ visibly Spartan living conditions could be explained away as an unintended consequence of the concentration on heavy industrial growth needed to win the victory over fascism,77 or, to the contrary, seen as a major systemic issue (as it is in Pak’s travelogue). Both patterns of perception were heavily ideologized. The limitations of Yi T’aejun’s chosen ideological angle are easily visible from today’s standpoint. In fact, they would become amply visible to Yi himself in the later days of his life. For example, Yi quotes approvingly—and in detail—Andrei Zhdanov’s (1896–1948) notorious invectives against the “misanthropic poetry of an old aristocratic poet, Akhmatova,” as well as “anti-Soviet novels by

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another old writer, Zoshchenko.”78 These attacks against unorthodox writers were an important part of the early Cold War cultural policies in the Soviet Union.79 Yi was obviously incognizant that he himself was going to encounter a similar ideological assault already by 1953 and later be purged from Pyongyang’s literary world as a “bourgeois liberal” and reduced to a life of low-level editorial or manual work, interspersed with ghostwriting, in faraway provinces.80 While North Korean writings, travelogues written after the voyages to Soviet Union included, are notorious for their ideological conformity and ideologically driven disregard of the undesirable side of realities,81 the nascent South Korean genre of anti-Communist criticisms of Soviet life and institutions owed equally much, if not more, to ideological stereotypes. For example, a certain Kim Ilsu (1948) condemned Soviet Union, first and foremost, for “licentious sexual life,” the supposed availability of abortion, and the ease of divorce proceedings in his book on Soviet daily life published in 1948.82 Issues of value judgment put aside, his criticism was outdated by almost two decades, as the gender radicalism of the Soviet 1920s—which, as we could see above, was indeed admired by more progressive Korean contemporaries in its time—was long gone in Stalin’s Moscow by the late 1940s.83 The diatribes against supposed “sexual debauchery, depravity, drinking, licentious behavior and suicides in the Soviet primary schools”84 were apparently strategically calculated to frighten and scandalize the more conservative, still largely Confucian South Koreans. They did not, however, seem to have proven particularly effective as far as Korea’s modern intelligentsia was concerned, as dozens of colonial-age literary talents who ultimately chose the North have testified.85 Their choosing of Pyongyang’s alternative modernity was most likely related, among many other things, to their positive attitude vis-à-vis its Moscow prototype.

t h e w o r ld - h is t o r ic al v al u e o f the e ar ly s o v ie t e x p er ien ces? All in all, the metamorphoses of Moscow’s image in precolonial and colonial Korea closely followed developments in the old city of Muscovy’s tsars and later Soviet capital and the historical vicissitudes of the inter-



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bellum Red Age in general. Prerevolutionary Moscow, as seen by Yun Ch’iho, a knowledgeable and acute observer with experiences from China, Japan, the United States, and Western Europe, was a strange combination of expensive tsarist pageantry, an underdeveloped urban infrastructure, and catastrophic levels of misadministration, which resulted in the Khodynka tragedy. Moscow in the postrevolutionary era and through­ ­ out the 1920s, in the sturm-und-drang radical period of the Red Age, was seen as a site of unprecedented social experimentation—the place where one could witness the birth of the new, relatively more equalitarian world. One did not have to be a socialist revolutionary to admire what one could see in 1920s Moscow. Yi Kwanyong, a neo-Kantian philosopher and moderate nationalist, lauded the country where the workers were respected and bourgeoisie was deprived of voting rights. Even rather apolitical observations of quotidian life in 1920s Moscow, of the type one can find in Pak Roa’s essays on his travel to the Soviet capital, included mentions of the large-scale democratization of what had been elite high culture in prerevolutionary days. The observations of this kind underline the appeal that the early Soviet party-state was capable of exuding. By the mid-1930s, however, the Red Age was going through times of general retreat. The new patterns of the social stratification and cultural conservatism typical of the Stalinist age were also duly noticed by the observers, Korean and foreign. Gide’s criticisms of the Stalinist Soviet Union’s bourgeois mores and attitudes in Socialist garb—known to Korean intellectuals through a partial Japanese translation already in 193686—were countered by Yu Chino (1906–1987), then still a Marxist and afterwards, after his shift to the Right, one of the drafters of South Korea’s first constitution. In a newspaper review of Gide’s book, Yu rebuked him for his presumed inability to discern the Soviet Union’s brighter Socialist future through the Communist Party’s program, while looking at the still-deficient present state of affairs.87 However, the realities pointed out by Gide were visible to his Korean contemporaries as well. Korean observers of Moscow life in the mid-1930s used to notice the differentiation in attire between diverse social groups, or classical works’ preponderance on the theatrical scenes. They noticed the general mood of austerity, though the real extent of shortages even in Moscow, not to speak about the catastrophic hunger in some of the Soviet provinces in 1932–1933, remained unreported. In the mid-1930s, it was

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high-speed modern development—symbolized by the Moscow metro’s grandeur or newly asphalted streets—that attracted the most attention in Korea. While the official press, both in Japanese and Korean, treated Moscow as an enemy capital beginning in 1937–1938, the underground Communists still considered the progressive labor and welfare practices, which they could earlier witness there, the pinnacle of world-historical development. A similar attitude was further developed by certain pioneering North Korean visitors, such as Yi T’aejun, who wanted North Korea to change in Moscow’s image. A frequent visitor to Moscow, Yi Kiyŏng, formerly a colonial-age socialist writer (see Chapter 2) and subsequently, in the 1950s, one of the leading figures in the North Korean literary world,88 famously proclaimed in his 1954 Soviet travelogue that “everybody” in ­ Korea (presumably, North Korea was meant) had a great desire to visit Moscow at least once in their life, since Soviet people were “leading mankind along the road to freedom and happiness.”89 It is important to remember, however, that the admiration was far from being universal. As the Cold War was setting in on the Korean Peninsula, Moscow was rapidly becoming the signifier of the evil incarnate for right-wing antiCommunists. While their criticisms of Stalinist Moscow’s regime of terror90 were not necessarily ungrounded,91 some of them were appealing to conservative stereotypes, turning the presumed loose sexual mores of the Soviet capital into a handy antipode of Confucian virtue. Inimical descriptions of Moscow were equally, if not more, ideologized than the pro-Soviet ones. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy, of course, to notice a glaring lack of knowledge mixed with naiveté in many foreign observations of Moscow, by Koreans and non-Koreans alike. In fact, these two categories are closely interrelated: the “red capital” was of such interest to the interbellum Korean public that the Moscow travelogues by prominent Europeans or Americans were often introduced in Korean immediately after their publication in their original languages. Bernard Shaw had famously visited Moscow (and several provincial destinations carefully selected by his Soviet hosts) between July 21–31, 1931, and pronounced his conclusion on September 6, 1931, in London. The Soviet leaders he had seen were supposedly both intellectually and morally superior compared to their Western counterparts, and Moscow was practicing ex-



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actly the sort of Fabian socialism that Shaw had been preaching for so long. The Korean public could enjoy the translated excerpts from his impressions already in the September 1931 issue of Samch’ŏlli92 and make its own conclusions, of the similar sort and with the similar faults clearly discernable in retrospect. We know, for example, that legal gender equality did not imply immediate and complete cessation of gender discrimination practices even in the first and most idealist years of the Revolution. The New Economic Policy—basically private capitalism under the party-state control— revitalized economic life but added to the woes of the more vulnerable groups, women included. Even party congress resolutions of the early 1920s mentioned, for example, the widespread practices of gender discrimination in many factories, including those located in Moscow. Female workers were often the first to be fired and had enormous difficulties finding work, as more women (compared to men) lacked trade union membership, then an important prerequisite for employment. Unemployed women, either unmarried or abandoned by their husbands, often had to turn to prostitution to feed themselves (and their children). Contrary to many Korean observers’ hopeful descriptions of full gender liberation in “red Moscow”—and more in line with Pak Roa’s shrewd observations of 1920s Moscow street life—prostitution did not disappear in the Soviet capital. A 1924 survey of 601 Moscow prostitutes found that half of them were forced onto the streets by hunger. A 1925 research study reported that 84 percent of surveyed prostitutes tried to leave the streets but could not find jobs.93 The party indeed initiated the establishment of rehabilitation facilities for the prostitutes (“work-treatment preventative clinics”), which Kim Sŏsam mentioned, but by the early 1930s many such facilities came to simply utilize these forcibly institutionalized women as a cheap workforce without much interest in rehabilitating them. Meanwhile, underground prostitution continued to exist in most big cities, Moscow included.94 For a number of Soviet observers, the persistence of such known social evils as prostitution served as evidence of Soviet authorities’ failure to achieve the conditions describable as “socialist.”95 While Yi Kwanyong admired the prevalence of toilers—including females—among the Soviet deputies in Moscow in 1925, the real power was by then no longer in the hands of the Soviets. Soviets were largely relegated to fulfilling the tasks set by party directives. Since nonindustrial

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workers—artisans, ­ small-time ­ traders, white-collar ­ workers, housewives, ­ ­ and so on—were often reluctant to vote for party candidates, the voting rights for different population groups were far from equal. The unequal suffrage was, indeed, official. For example, in Moscow Soviet elections on all levels in 1926–1927, industrial workers could elect one deputy per one hundred persons, while nonindustrial workers were allowed only one deputy for six hundred persons. The voters—while being offered no organized political alternative to the Communists since the early 1920s—were still relatively free in exercising their electoral rights, but party control over the elections was being gradually tightened.96 In other words, the rosy pictures one finds in the Korean accounts of 1920s–1930s Moscow did not fully reflect the facts on the ground. Korean observers—not unlike the likes of Feuchtwanger or Shaw—obviously tended to project their own longings for an alternative, noncapitalist modernity onto their Moscow narratives. Still, the Korean accounts of 1920s–1930s Moscow were more than simply reflections of Korean travelers’ own yearnings for socialist utopias. For one thing, Koreans astutely noticed the deep social changes that took place in the mid-1930s, when the new bureaucratic hierarchy of status and privilege was more or less cemented. They were, however, much less critical of the retreat from the revolutionary egalitarianism than such Western critics of the Soviet realities as, for example, Gide. After all, from colonial Korea’s standpoint, even the amount of social reforms that the Soviet Union of the Red Age still managed to accomplish was rather significant. And, like Feuchtwanger, who pinned his hopes for antifascist resistance on Moscow, anticolonial Koreans had a reason to hope that Soviet industrial development and concurrent military buildup would be helpful for their liberation. In addition, even if their accounts were somewhat misinformed, simplistic, or exaggerated, they were still a truthful representation of certain tendencies that the newborn Soviet society possessed. Despite all its limitations, it, in sync with the dominant élan of the Red Age, indeed attempted a drastic democratization of social and cultural life. Gender norms undeniably switched in the direction of greater equality, although the real picture was much less perfect than that which the Korean visitors observed and reported. A wider popular access to high culture was indeed ensured. Soviet internationalism and efforts to combat racist and chauvinistic attitudes were authen-



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tic, although again perhaps significantly less successful in concrete social practice than Korean observers might think. It was these tendencies that made Moscow the mecca of the new, coming world for so many Koreans, both Communists and non-Communists, in the 1920s–1930s. For Communists, it represented their desire for a more equalitarian, modern Korea of the future, and it inspired the enormous sacrifices the project of building such a future might demand. Such an image of Moscow continued to exercise its influence on the Korean intelligentsia in general after the 1945 Liberation as well—something that the 1946 account of a pilgrimage to Moscow by Yi T’aejun, who was not involved with the socialist movement before 1945,97 can testify to. For a number of Korean intellectuals, including some colonial-era moderates, these tendencies demonstrated the desirable direction of social transformation for the whole world, Korea included.

Postscript The Afterlife of Socialism in the Two ­Koreas

I

n the spirit of Marxist dialectics, one can say that, to maintain its existence and possess perspectives for development, any phenomenon— socioeconomic systems included—needs its opposite. It is hard, for example, to imagine Europe’s mediaeval feudal society developing somewhere beyond the level of “stationary bandits”1 extracting their protection rent from the impoverished peasants and lording over their serfs without the decisively nonfeudal element of relatively autonomous cities or long-distance trade. One may also argue that the relative easiness with which the East Asian states accepted the modern, nondynastical forms of rule—be it a bureaucratic oligarchy of the Meiji type or the party-state political form that eventually took root in China, North Korea, and Vietnam—since the late nineteenth century had something to do with an early development of relatively rational, well-structured bureaucracy. The bureaucrats, who later adopted Western education as their main qualification for their jobs, were, indeed, in any case to overcome the vagaries of the personalized dynastic rule.2

s o c ialis m , c ap it al ism ’s ine s c ap ab le o t her The dialectic struggle between the opposites of the castle and town, or the monarchical palace and the bureaucratic office in the premodern, has its obvious parallel in the contestation between the forces of (generalized) capital and various socialist movement in the twentieth century. While 232

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the former wanted the industrial modernity to fit into the logic of the capital accumulation, the latter wanted different forms of mass politics to dominate and, ideally, abolish the accumulation process and, in the end, to reshape the industrial modernity in accordance with their own priorities. This contestation between the forces of the economical ­ ­ 3 largely shaped the world of the twentieth century and the social/political as we know it, during the Red Age of 1923–1937 (see the Introduction) and later in the postwar age of (relative) affluence (in the core areas of the world-system), and welfare reforms. Many phenomena qualified with the adjective “mass”—from mass education to mass welfare, or even mass consumption (hardly thinkable in its current form without at least some elements of the social state in the core zone of advanced capitalism)— are understandable only in this context.

c o l o nial- a ­ g e s o c ial ism in k ­ o r ea Seen from this angle, defining the last century as Korea’s socialist century implies that Korea, a (peripheral) part of the capitalist world-system since the late nineteenth century, was following the general global trends—of course, in its peculiar form and perhaps with somewhat peculiar intensity. Intensity here does not necessarily imply the numerical strength of the socialist movement cadres. The movement, after all, was a persecuted underground opposition in an impoverished peasant-majority society where any modern-type political group was destined to remain a small minority in quantitative terms. For the early 1920s, the age of early socialist developments in Korea, the researchers know—from the Japanese police materials—around 520 Communist activists of some visibility. As Chapter 1 of this book makes clear, they were mostly educated males in their twenties and thirties: significantly, eighty-two of them studied abroad, mostly in Japan or Soviet Russia, in the times when the total number of Korean students abroad was only around one thousand (about 990 in Japan for the year 1924, and several hundred individuals in the US, Europe, and China).4 In essence, colonial-age socialists were initially a numerically limited counter-elite with its own alternative modernity project. It is significant, however, that, with time, this counter-elite—as I also attempted to demonstrate in Chapter 1—managed to penetrate the

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grassroots in a much deeper and thorough-going manner compared with the early 1920s, when the main preoccupation of the socialist radicals was to create their vanguard party modeled on Soviet Bolsheviks. By the late 1930s, in the atmosphere of stiffening police repression, creating a nationwide party was hardly realistic. However, the whole country was by that time covered by a network of grassroots radical organizations: red peasant unions, radical labor unions, socialisminfluenced reading societies, and various smaller underground groups of generally socialist persuasion. Even archconservative Kyŏngju in Southern Kyŏngsang Province had its red peasant union since March 1933. It made headlines by violently opposing Shiragi matsuri (Sillaje in Korean), a festival conducted by local Japanese settler elite (as well as some wealthier Koreans allied with them), in September 24–28, 1934, and was then suppressed by the Japanese police.5 Only in Myŏngch’ŏn County (kun), Northern Hamgyŏng Province, the local Communists managed by 1935 to organize a county-level peasant union with twenty-eight branches in various villages and fifty-eight different peasant groups affiliated with these branches. Led by a Moscow-educated cadre, Hyŏn Ch’unbong (1899–?), they produced several underground journals and organized discussion societies and even self-defense groups—which dared to physically attack individual Japanese policemen and isolated police posts. By 1936, 1,647 persons had to be arrested in the county to prevent the spread of the grassroots radicalism.6 Admittedly, Myŏngch’ŏn County, close to the bases of the armed anticolonial resistance in Manchuria, had a reputation for special militancy during the 1930s. Still, some forms of left-wing radical organization were present in most of the 220 counties7 that colonial-era Korea administratively consisted of. The ubiquitous people’s committees, the basic form of postcolonial popular self-organization of the Korean population that mushroomed all around the country in the wake of the Japanese surrender in August–September 1945, were often led by the people with the experience of left-wing organizational work in the colonial days. Whereas the US military administration quickly moved to suppress these committees in the US-occupied South of Korea, they were eventually integrated into the Soviet-controlled local administration in the northern part of the country, functioning as an important reserve of the cadres for the North Korean sociopolitical revolution of the late 1940s.8 Colonial-era Korean

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socialists did not manage to produce their dreamed-of national and social revolution on their own and on the whole area of the Korean Peninsula, but they were vital to the success of the sociopolitical changes made possible by the Soviet military presence in the northern part of Korea in 1945–1948. Eventually, these changes laid the foundations for North Korea’s independent statehood, which, however, as researchers know very well, evolved into a model of its own. Inspired by the programmic demands of colonial-era Communists (see Chapter 3), it ended up being both similar in certain ways to its original Soviet prototype and at the same time unique, after the country gained de facto geopolitical autonomy in the late 1950s.9

n o r t h k o r e a and th e gl o bal s o c ialis t ­c e nt u r y I am not going to deal with the history of North Korea in this Postscript in detail. That North Korean experiences were Korea’s contribution to the global socialist century is obvious. That today’s South Korea too is formed in certain aspects, inter alia, by the socialist legacies is much more counterintuitive; hence, I am going to focus on this part here. Early North Korea, as I have argued elsewhere (Chapter 3), was shaped, inter alia, by the demands and desires of the pre-Liberation Communist movement. A number of its protagonists—whose names the reader could easily find on the pages of the present volume—ended up moving north, as the atmosphere of anti-Communist repression was strengthening in the US-occupied southern part of Korea since the summer of 1946. Many of them—including Pak Hŏnyŏng, the vice prime minister and foreign minister of North Korea since its foundation in 1948 (on his colonialera revolutionary activities, see Chapter 1)—ended up being purged and either executed or imprisoned in 1952–1955, as Kim Il Sung’s victorious “partisan” faction was using the atmosphere of total mobilization in the time of the Korean War to cement its power.10 Izvestiya, the Soviet state mouthpiece, informed its readers about death sentences given to Im Hwa (see Chapter 4), Yi Kangguk (see Chapter 1), and others accused in the process against an “espionage-terrorist conspiracy in brotherly Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” on August 8, 1953.11 At this

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stage, Soviet authorities did not intervene in Kim Il Sung’s policy of increasing power monopolization. Later, however, as Kim Il Sung was taking an increasingly independent line, Soviet authorities were position­ ing themselves (at least, unofficially) more critically vis-à-vis Kim’s repressions against colonial-era Communist veterans. One of them, Kang Chin (aka Lavrenty Kang, 1905–1966), a Posyet-area Soviet-Korean native famed for his underground work in colonial-age Korea (including the work with Keijō Imperial University’s anti-imperialist radicals; see Chapter 1), by 1959 a Russian language translator in the Ministry of Chemical Industry, was arrested by North Korean authorities but then released and allowed to return to the USSR.12 The rupture with the colonial-era Communist experience, however pronounced by the late 1950s, was nevertheless hardly full. At least some colonial-age domestic Communist activists and Marxist academics were retained on expert and even certain decision-making bureaucratic positions. One of them was, for example, Pak Mun’gyu (1906–?), Pak Ch’iu’s fellow Marxist academic from Keijō Imperial University (see Chapter 4), who was, as an agriculture expert, successively employed as agriculture minister (1948–1954), vice minister (1954–1956), state control minister (1956–1959), and even the minister of the interior (since 1962). While he confided to the Soviet diplomats that North Korean authorities distrusted him,”13 he was nevertheless never purged. So, at least a certain degree of personal continuity between the colonial-era domestic revolutionary movement and North Korean statehood is hard to deny. Since North Korea and the issue of twentieth-century global socialism are mentioned, one question is hard to omit. To which degree one can refer to a society as “socialist” if its producers have, admittedly, very little influence over the management of the production system? Indeed, they have limited influence over the management of their own lives too, their workplaces being assigned in a top-down fashion and even their domestic travel being strictly controlled by the state security apparatus.14 In this connection, it is worthwhile to remember that to Marx and many original Marxist thinkers, “socialism” meant the abolishment of the capital accumulation process in favor of an alternative society based on free association of producers, industrial democracy, and social priorities,

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in which the state was destined to “die out.” Friedrich Engels, for example, envisioned the state disappearing (“abolishing itself ”) after the final act of socializing the means of production: Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State.15

In the light of such a definition of socialism, North Korean society may be regarded as standing even farther from this ideal than the countries that allow, at least, some degree of citizenry’s democratic participation in national politics. Indeed, the broader question will probably have to encompass the relationship between North Korea’s original models and competing great-power benefactors, the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China and the socialist ideas as outlined above. There is, in fact, vast Marxist literature arguing that the Stalinist Soviet model per se, including by extension its Chinese or North Korean variations, was hardly more than “state capitalism” of sorts, the state substituting private capitalists as the main (or even the only) subject of capital accumulation and catching-up industrial development. Some Marxist critics see it as a consequence of the Stalinist conservative turn in the aftermath of the Stalin faction’s victory over the opposition inside the party in the late 1920s; others even ascribe it to the basic limitations of the Red Age revolutionists operating in the semi-peripheral and peripheral societies that objectively had to go through either capitalist industrialization or its state capitalist substitute.16 Admittedly, it is close to impossible to discuss North Korea’s role and place in the history of global socialism without taking a position of principle on this question first. If we view the stream of global history in a holistic way since the times when Marx first suggested his alternative modernity ideals and

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However, the postrevolutionary, radicalized activist states, in North Korea and a number of other peripheral countries sharing the similar postcolonial trajectory, could also utilize at least some share of surplus, which they now commanded for the aims with which the social democratic reformers of the core states hardly could disagree. North Korea’s particular version of top-down authoritarian leftist corporatism implies

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a number of restrictions on the citizenry’s spatial mobility (domestic travel) or information access few other activist states could ever rival (although Soviet peasantry, for example, was also deprived full freedom of movement in 1932–1974).19 However, simultaneously, the same North Korean state used to be one of the pioneers of Third World welfarism since the 1950s, perhaps the first-ever postcolonial state to develop a comprehensive welfare system, with free education and medical services, already by the end of the postwar reconstruction in the 1950s.20 It has been also running relatively large overseas aid budgets in the 1960s– 1980s, waging a campaign of international anti-imperialist solidarity, which had a large number of developing states among its beneficiaries.21 It is easy, of course, to discard these redistributive policies vis-àvis North Korea’s domestic populace and its overseas anti-imperialist partners as simply tools of regime consolidation through fostering a healthier, better-educated workforce at home and strengthening state legitimacy via altruistic gestures abroad. However, a similar assessment may be persuasively given to the welfarist policies of the postwar European social democratic governments as well. Did not universal health coverage, tuition-free universities, and overseas aid budgets contribute to creating societies of relatively content producers-cumconsumers tending to believe in the humanitarian roles claimed by their governments? While the limitations of the redistribution in the overall capitalist accumulation context, in North Korea or elsewhere, are plain and obvious, it may be highly unwise for a historian of global socialism to write off all these attempts at supposedly social solidaritybased policies as phony, or simply geared to benefit the existing sociopolitical formations. No doubt, these policies indeed worked beneficially for their architects too,22 but in the last analysis, their historical significance exceeded their role as social governance tools. They also were instrumental in demonstrating that industrial societies can organize at least parts of their citizens’ lives relatively free from capital accumulation considerations, that at least some spheres of societal activity can be de-marketized, and that de-marketization worked to the greater good of the underprivileged majority, consistently with the original socialist spirit. Seen from this angle, North Korea’s role as a global Third World welfare state pioneer is worth a positive reappraisal by the world’s socialist historians.

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a n t i -mar x is t c e ns o r s h i p , co l o n ial and p o s t c o lo ni al The implications of national division and the post-1953 state of constant military preparedness on both sides of the inter-Korean border were not, however, salubrious for the fate of the socialist quests in both Koreas. Systemic competition implied the need to accelerate the capital accumulation processes in both North and South Korea. Thus, all the welfarist policies of North Korean authorities notwithstanding, the bulk of the surplus had to be reinvested or used for military purposes rather than for the benefit of the producers themselves. Indeed, the North Korea producers of the 1950s and 1960s were driven to overwork to the extent that bears an uncanny resemblance to the exploitive capitalist practices of contemporary South Korea. North Korea’s Ch’ŏllima Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, for example, included a mini-campaign aimed at inducing the workers to “drink no soup” so as to spare the time that would have been other wise used for going to lavatories and produce more.23 The North Korean government’s project of rapid and independent industrialization, while empowering many previously underprivileged people (for example, poor peasants-turned-skilled workers or engineers), strained the possibility of communally useful production and distribution.24 A more perfect antithesis to what is supposed to be socialist labor management is hard to find. Militarization of labor and, broader, the militarization of both Korean societies as a whole was accompanied by the imposition of censorship regimes in comparison with which even the censorship practices of the Japanese Empire of the 1920s and 1930s will pale. In 1920s Japan, in Miriam Silverberg’s words, the quality and quantity of the legally published and available Marxist texts encompassing works on theory and revolutionary strategy equaled that of Weimar Germany.25 In 1930s colonial Korea, such academic Marxists as Pak Ch’iu had little problem with the access to Marxist works via Keijō Imperial University’s library (see Chapter 4). By comparison, as Marxists in the West sometimes mention in disillusionment, access to the works of Marx or Lenin appears to be severely restricted in North Korea. Classical Marxist works were normally unavailable in the bookshops in the late 1980s.26 Some contemporary foreign leftists, normally rather sympathetic to North Korea, voiced criticisms of such restrictions.27 Marxist

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classics were printed, sometimes in the form of thematic collections,28 and frequently cited until the 1960s by North Korea’s ideologues and officials.29 However, they were seemingly removed from the open shelves following the imposition of the uniform Chuch’e thought in the 1970s.30 In South Korea, after the post-Liberation boom in Marxist publications in 1945–1948,31 Marxism became a virtually tabooed subject until the late 1980s under the regime of Cold War ideological confrontation. In the 1950s, criticisms of Marxism were tolerated by the censors only as long as no substantial Marxist content was being introduced to the readers.32 In a word, in both Korean states, locked in military confrontation and in the pattern of mutually competitive developmental authoritarianism, Marxism, eventually, was to come into conflict with the dominant official ideologies of nationalistic mobilization, be it South Korea’s anti-Communist orthodoxy or North Korean Chuch’e ideas.

“ re f o r m is t p ar t ie s ” an d so u t h k o r e an s o c ial d e mocr at ic tra d it io n in t h e 1950s an d 19 60s However, even under the weight of anti-Marxist censorship restrictions rather unprecedented in Korea’s pre-1945 history, the influence of the socialist traditions so strongly implanted onto the Korean soil during the Red Age was still discernible in South Korean society. One easily perceivable aspect of this influence was the tenacious, often extremely dangerous self-sacrificial attempts by the survivors of the colonial-age socialist milieu to build some sort of legal social democratic party in South Korea. While such parties hardly could openly exhibit any Marxist views, broadly socialist orientation was often palpable in their platforms and slogans. Cho Pong’am (1898–1959), a former student of the Comintern’s Communist University of Eastern Toilers of (1922–1923) and one of the founders of the original Korean Communist Party (1925) (see Chapter 1 for his brief biography), famously founded his Progressive Party (Chinbodang) in late 1955 on the slogans of a nonexploitive mixed economy with a strong element of state planning, reduction of military expenditures, and peaceful unification with North Korea. After he obtained more than two million votes in the 1956 presidential elections and proved to

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pose a serious threat to Syngman Rhee’s dictatorship, he was arrested on trumped-up espionage charges (in 1957), tried, and executed.33 His death, however, did not discourage other social democratic dissidents from further attempts at legal organization. After all, as Cho’s rather impressive 1956 election vote results amply demonstrated, social democratic slogans had a good chance to achieve popularity and recognition among the public, which still remembered the prominence of socialist grassroots organizers in the Red Age years and was disillusioned with the almost complete absence of social security guarantees in the impoverished postwar society. Even prominent colonial-age anarchist independence fighters like Yi Chŏnggyu (1897–1984), who were recognized as important social and cultural figures in post-1945 South Korea, were attracted to the ideas of democratic socialism and welfare state since the 1950s— notwithstanding their principal skepticism about “state” per se.34 The April 1960 democratic revolution offered an opportunity for making social democracy legal again. Of course, the offending word “socialism” had to be avoided at all costs. As a veteran of the political and ideological battles of the 1950s–1970s, Chŏn Ch’ang’il (b. 1922), later explained to researchers, it was impossible to avoid the charges of being pro-North Korean once socialism was mentioned, so “reform” (hyŏksin) was used as an agreeable euphemism for “socialism” ’ or “social democracy.”35 Several “reformist parties” (hyŏksin chŏngdang) that emerged in the wake of the April 1960 democratization—the Social Mass Party (Sahoe Taejungdang), Independent Labor Party (Tongnip Nodongdang), and so on—were demanding a shift to a planned economy. Other demands included a reduction of the military budget, repudiation of the February 8, 1961, economic agreement with the United States (which was alleged to transfer too much control over the South Korean economy into American hands), and concrete steps towards peaceful unification with the North. The social democratic political performance during the brief democratic interlude between April 1960 revolution and May 16, 1961, military coup was per se hardly a success. The violent destruction of the Progressive Party eliminated much of the grassroots organizations, which South Korea’s social democrats badly needed under the conditions of political funds scarcity and limited access to the mainstream press. To make a bad situation worse, the social democrats’ ranks were also divided, mostly between the former Progressive Party

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f rom t h e e x t r e m e s o f o p p r essio n t o t h e reb ir t h o f t h e g r a ssr o o t s l ef t : t h e 1970 s and 1980s The story was indeed a sad chronicle of governmental suppression and political martyrdom. Even Kim Ch’ŏl (1926–1994), an internationally well-known South Korean social democrat whose United Social Party (T’ong’il Sahoedang) joined the Socialist International in 1969, was repeatedly arrested and harassed by the authorities on account of his professed belief in the desirability of both Koreas’ neutrality.37 Lessknown socialists fared much worse. Typically, underground leftist circles detected and destroyed by the military regimes’ secret police were exaggerated into underground “parties,” their activists often paying with their lives for what amounted to political discussions or nonviolent organization activity. The most notorious case is that of the so-called People’s Revolutionary Party (Inmin Hyŏngmyŏngdang). In 1964, amid heated popular struggle against the diplomatic normalization with Japan (widely seen as a sell-off to the former colonizers), forty-one leftist intellectuals, mostly from Kyŏngsang Province and the Seoul area, were arrested for supposedly forming an “underground People’s Revolutionary Party in accordance with North Korean instructions.” However, the

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evidence of any North Korean involvement was so glaringly lacking that the case resulted in only two convictions. Nevertheless, a decade later, facing growing resistance to the overtly authoritarian Yushin (Revitalization) regime (1972–1979), the military government rearrested a number of old and some new suspects on the charges of forming the People’s Revolutionary Party and promptly executed in 1975 eight of them, mostly veterans of “reformist parties” activities in 1960–1961, triggering a significant international outcry.38 This particular case was perhaps the most infamous example of deadly antisocialist repression, but far from the only one. The 1968 Unification Revolutionary Party case featured 158 suspects arrested and three of them executed. One of the victims, Sin Yŏngbok (1941–2016), then a young left-leaning economist, who managed to read (in the original German!) Das Kapital by Marx before the 1960–1961 democratic interlude ended, later achieved considerable fame inside South Korea as a progressive public intellectual after having spent twenty years in prisons (1968–1988).39 Yet another victim, Pak Sŏngjun (b. 1940), survived thirteen years in jail to eventually become a leftist, socially oriented theologian.40 It is important, however, to mention that some of the victims of the 1960s–1970s witch hunts seriously attempted to link up to the growing workers’ movement, for the first time after the destruction of most leftist unions in South Korea in the late 1940s.41 Kwŏn Chaehyŏk (1925– 1969), a US-educated professor of economics fascinated by Paul Sweezy’s (1910–2004) neo-Marxism, was since 1963 attempting to build a workers’ party in South Korea. These attempts allowed the authorities to misrepresent a leftist circle around Kwŏn as a South Korean Liberation Strategy Party, arrest Kwŏn and his comrades, and finally execute him.42 These pioneering attempts were continued by yet another underground socialist circle, the South Korean National Liberation Front (Namchosŏn Minjok Haebang Chŏnsŏn, 1976–1979), which, while being led by the surviving veterans of the 1960–1961 “reformist parties” movement, managed also to organize a group of teachers aspiring to build a teachers’ union, and typographic workers.43 The beginnings were modest, but it was a sign of the new developing tendency. Socialist intellectuals were increasingly attempting to organize workers and fertilize the growing labor movement with socialist ideology, in the manner of the Communist

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­ It is not my task to elaborate here on the history of the workersstudents alliance (nohak yŏndae) movement of the 1980s, since it is so well explored elsewhere, including a number of monographic works in ­English.44 As Namhee Lee noted in her brilliant monograph on the politics of resistance in 1970s–1980s South Korea, the first attempts by socialist dissidents (Kim Munsu, Chang Kip’yo, etc.), mostly hailing, like Sin Yŏngbok, from Seoul National University, with its long-established tradition of underground Marxist circle activities to unionize and radicalize workers at the factories, date back to the 1970s. Then, however, left-leaning Christian groups, such as Urban Industrial Mission (UIM), dominated the movement. They tended to theoretically rely on the Christian Socialist, rather than purely Marxist, tradition, Paulo Freire’s (1921–1997) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) exerting a particularly strong influence. In the 1980s, however, classical Marxism, mostly in its Leninist interpretation, came back and took roots as the main ideology of the rapidly growing radical workers’ movement. ALMSA (Sŏnoryŏn, Alliance of the Labor Movement in Seoul Area, 1985–1986), was envisioned as a Leninist vanguard workers’ organization and aimed at revolutionary consciousness-building that would enable the workers, in the spirit of Lenin’s What Is to Be Done (1902), to go beyond simple economic demands. ALMSA and a number of other like-minded groups were subjected to savage repression, but their influence was instrumental in bringing forth the Great Labor Struggle (Nodong taet’ujaeng) of 1987 and the emergence of independent trade unions—often led by the workers who went through the school of underground socialist circles— ­ in its aftermath.45 The number of the so-called hakch’ul (student-origin) workers, the young intellectuals of mostly socialist persuasion who chose to delay or give up their white-collar careers, instead going to the factories and industrial districts’ night schools and “enlightening” and organizing workers there, was not too high per se. It was estimated at around ten thousand persons nationally by the end of the 1980s.46 Due to their status as mentors of workers’ leaders their influence, however, was much stronger than the figure can suggest.

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the ko re an d e m oc r at ic l abo r p ar t y (2 0 0 0 – 2 0 0 8 ) e x p e r im e nt an d it s las t ing inf lu e nces Such socialist intellectuals of the 1960s as Kwŏn Chaehyŏk could, in their time, dream of an independent workers’ organization decisively contributing to South Korea’s liberation from dictatorship and ushering the country into the age of institutional democracy when further political struggle for socialism would become possible. Kim Segyun (b. 1947), one of the most important living Marxist scholars of contemporary South Korea, argued for building up an independent workers’ party in 1989, disputing the argument of those who considered workers’ support for the liberal antidictatorial opposition sufficient for the sake of politically empowering the working class.47 By the 1990s, the dreams of an independent workers’ party were looking more realizable than before. The Great Labor Struggle and the mass demonstrations of June  1987 gave an impulse to political democratization. Of course, in the beginning of the 1990s, democratization still did not translate into tolerance for political socialism. South Korea’s Socialist Workers League (Sanomaeng), a would-be socialist workers party organized in 1989, was destroyed by police repression in 1991–1992,48 most of its leading activists subjected to torture49 and remaining in jail until the second half of the 1990s. A short-lived experiment with the Mass Party (Minjungdang, 1990–1992) led, inter alia, by ALMSA veterans, demonstrated also that even a legal socialist party would struggle enormously in a society shaped by four decades of official anti-Communism: Mass Party never succeeded in sending any socialist politician into parliament.50 ­Things, however, changed after the demise of the developmental state and the imposition of neoliberalism in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–1998. The crisis and the social dislocations in its wake shattered the confidence of the public in the growth the state had been promising them in exchange for political loyalty51 and made it possible for socialists to reenter the political terrain. ­

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South Korea at the point of this writing. In 2000, the alliance was restructured and relaunched as the Korean Democratic Labor Party (KDLP, Minju Nodongdang). It represented a broad coalition of radical, social democratic and labor groups. Some of them subscribed to a version of ­ leftist nationalism, which prioritized antihegemonic struggle vis-à-vis the US presence in South Korea and unification with North Korea (chajup’a). Others were pursuing either socialist/social democratic or welfarist agendas (p’yŏngndŭngp’a). The breadth of the groupings, which the party united, was initially its strength, helping it to secure more than 13 percent of the vote in the 2004 parliamentary elections, the best-ever result South Korean social democrats managed to achieve after Cho Pong’am obtained more than two million votes, circa 30  percent of the total, half a century earlier, in 1956. However, factionalism, especially the tensions between leftist nationalists and social democrats, ultimately led to the party being split into three in 2008.52 At the beginning of 2023, five successor parties, only one of which (Justice Party) has parliamentary representation (six deputies), represent the spectrum from leftist antihegemonism to moderate social democracy in South Korean politics. The first generation of South Korea’s social democrats, represented by such people as Cho Pong’am, with long experience of colonial-period underground Communist work, was mostly mowed down, excluded from the public politics, or marginalized by the repressions of the 1950s–1960s. The next generation, that of Sin Yŏngbok or Pak Sŏngjun, were the people whose schooling took place after the 1945 decolonization. The repressions of the 1960s–1980s mostly excluded them from politics, leaving them only the role of progressively minded public intellectuals—and even that was in many cases made possible only by the democratization of the late 1980s. Sim Sangjŏng and her colleagues at the Democratic Labor Party and its successor parties effectively represented the third generation. Its maturation took place in the context of 1980s sociopolitical struggles. Often it happened in the crucible of the factory-floor fights where socialist hakch’ul organizers were, like their predecessors in the 1930s (see Chapter 1), to organize the workers for defense of their rights and, ultimately, for a political revolution. When the former hakch’ul activists, like Sim Sangjŏng, joined the electoral politics in the late 1990s, “revolution” had to be dropped. Even a social democratic agenda was not an easy sell in a society so strongly permeated by developmentalist hopes and desires

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as South Korea after the high-speed-growth age of the 1960s to mid1990s.53 Shunned by dominant print and electronic media, the Democratic Labor Party never joined the political mainstream, despite relatively good (for a smaller party) approval ratings in the early 2000s, during the first years of post-crisis neoliberal restructuring. However, just as the real scale of influence eventually exerted by the 1980s hakch’ul activists is not necessarily fully represented by their relatively moderate numbers, the Democratic Labor Party and its successors changed South Korean politics more than their approval ratings or voting results might indicate. The Democratic Labor Party’s original program featured, inter alia, the promises to transfer chaebŏl (large familyowned corporations) assets to public, socialist ownership and to abolish the “unequal” military alliance treaty with the United States. Moreover, it made clear that the party wished to force the US troops out of South Korea and proclaim neutrality in the foreign policy. It also wished to reduce (in cooperation with North Korea) the standing army more than sixfold, to 100,000 soldiers, and abolish the current conscription system in favor of an all-voluntary military, in addition to a very significant increase in social spending.54 In fact, North Korea was officially proposing a reciprocal reduction of both Koreas’ standing armies to 100,000 soldiers as early as in 1960, a proposal routinely dismissed as “propagandist” by the South Korean government at that time.55 Such a degree of radicalism was hardly digestible for the South Korean political mainstream, given the degree of chaebŏl influence over the country’s society and politics,56 or the long-standing embeddedness of conscription into the fabric of the social life.57 However, the social democratic credo still influenced the programs of the other parties eager to target the working-class vote and appeal to other social groups among which the support for social democratic agenda was relatively strong (educated urban youth, etc.). Indeed, the liberal Roh Muhyun (No Muhyŏn) administration (2003–2008), its commitment to neoliberal restructuring notwithstanding, chose to pursue the policies of drastic welfare expansion, enlarging the proportion of welfare spending in the state budget from 19.9  percent in 2002 to 27.9 percent already by 2006. Part of preschool education was made free, and long-term care for the elderly was strengthened. In 2007, 8.6 percent of South Korea’s GNP was used for welfare purposes. Roh’s ambitious

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long-term strategy, Vision 2030, envisioned expanding this proportion to 21 percent by 2030. Indeed, Roh’s administration may be said to have built South Korea’s—still rudimentary—welfare state,58 partly under the pressure of competition vis-à-vis the Democratic Labor Party for organized labor and youth support.59 Indeed, since the Democratic Labor Party’s 2000 debut on the political scene, welfarism became so entrenched in South Korean political culture that even archconservative Park Geun-hye campaigned in the 2012 presidential elections on promises to expand welfare spending and reduce economic inequalities. Her failure to make good on those promises (welfare spending stagnated under her rule) might be one important element in the dramatic collapse of her administration in 2017.60

w orking - c las s f r ag m en t at io n an d the l im it s o f p o lit ical so cial ism in s o u t h k or ea As was noted earlier, in the case of avowedly “socialist” North Korea, the extent of redistributive policies was in the end limited by the developmentalist drive, which took place in a divided nation, in a situation of systemic competition. The surplus had to be either reinvested or used for military purposes rather than redistributed in the ways beneficial for the majority of North Koreans. In South Korea after the early 2000s, it is the corporate drive towards profit maximization that weighs down welfare state development. Indeed, larger corporations prefer to buy off their full-time, high-skilled core workers (predominantly middle-aged or older males) and enterprise-based unions with generous benefits and company welfare packages (sponsoring, for example, the college tuition of workers’ children), rather than agree to the higher tax rates that would finance a universal welfare system, or de-marketization of education and medicine. As a result, South Korea’s working class—which the socialists since the Red Age hoped to organize into a revolutionary force—is badly fragmented now.61 Whereas better-paid, relatively privileged core employees of chaebŏl plants—for a large part unionized—mostly limit their demands to purely economic ones, the peripheral workforce of shortterm contract workers, dispatch workers, or the laborers at small-time

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suppliers to the bigger firms, has to fight for the basics, such as permanent employment or unionization.62 Such a working-class fragmentation was a phenomenon relatively unknown in Red Age Korea, where even comparatively better-to-do railway workers sometimes could not feed their wives and had to send them away to their natal families in the mid1930s.63 In terms of class power, the North Korean working class possesses little opportunity for independent organization or consciousnessbuilding under the garrison-state mechanisms of societal control. As to South Korea’s working class, its negotiating power seemingly peaked in the early and mid-1990s, in the aftermath of the 1987 Great Labor Struggle and before the imposition of neoliberalism in 1997–1998. All that does not promise a rosy future for socialism as a sociopolitical movement in twenty-first century Korea. For the near future, the continuation of the present patterns—namely, the steady development of bureaucratically controlled capitalism in North Korea and very slow growth of redistributive mechanisms under alternating conservative and liberal administrations in South Korea—seems much more likely than any shift to the left.

so c i a lis m as t h e m ain co u n t er h e g e m o nic nar r at iv e an d t h e so urc e o f d ynam is m in so u t h k o r ea The reason why, acknowledging all this, I still insist on referring to the century following the 1919–1923 Red Wave in Korea (see the Introduction) as a “socialist century” is the importance I attach to the influence of socialist thought onto the discursive sphere. Indeed, it is not necessarily that many South Koreans are themselves aware of the degree to which socialism influenced the ideas and thoughts that today constitute an organic part of the ideological and institutional landscape in the country. For example, most Korean educators know, as a part of the shared common-sense knowledge, that Pang Chŏnghwan (1899–1931) was the father of modern Korean children’s literature and a children’s rights activist beyond the institutionalization of Children’s Day (May 5). Few know, however, that his pioneering ideas about respecting children’s subjectivity and treating children as individuals—rather than the property of their

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parents—were inspired by his socialist convictions.64 Pang was hardly alone. In 1920s Korea, socialism was spreading among the educated minority—including Korea’s pioneering modern writers—much quicker than in the grassroots (see Chapter 1). Unbeknown to many South Koreans who readily know the name from their Korean literature textbooks, such accomplished colonial-era prose masters as Yi Hyosŏk (1907–1942) were until the mid-1930s regarded as “fellow travelers” of Korea’s proletarian literature. The connection to leftist writing tradition greatly influenced the way in which social antagonisms are depicted in his novels.65 While, as noted above, the antisocialist censorship in 1950s–1980s South Korea was stricter compared even to the 1920s Japanese Empire, the trajectory of ideas’ circulation—from the radical circles and to the political and cultural mainstream—remained essentially the same. For example, by the late 1980s, peaceful coexistence and eventual peaceful unification with North Korea were enshrined as the official policy of the last military administration, headed by President Roh Tae Woo (1988– 1993).66 Few could recollect by that time, however, that peaceful unification as a slogan was first launched by Cho Pong’am’s cruelly suppressed Progressive Party and then popularized by the reformist parties during the democratic interlude of 1960–1961. Of equal salience was the socialist criticism of the inhumanity inherent in the South Korean developmental model, with its emphasis on export competitiveness buttressed by long hours of low-paid work. Reduction of maximum weekly working hours (from the original sixty-eight to fifty-two) was a signature policy of Moon Jae-in’s (Mun Chaein) liberal government (2017–2022),67 but the criticism of the inhumanly long working hours was indeed pioneered by labor militants and socialism-influenced campus activists of the 1960s and 1970s.68 Such examples are indeed many, although it has to be simultaneously remembered that a number of socialist discourses ended up as thought-provoking dissident narratives, of importance for the general evolution of the ideological landscape but never adopted for policy implementation. For example, the Democratic Labor Party’s programmatic position on South Korea’s neutrality as a precondition for unification is genealogically related to the thesis on the possibility of unifying Korea via its neutralization, which was popular in the reformist parties’ milieu since the early 1960s and was articulated by such prominent social democrats as Kim Ch’ŏl, mentioned above.69 This position, however,

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stands little chance to be adopted by any South Korean government in the foreseeable future, given the depth of the US influence on the South Korean bureaucracy and especially its military and intelligence services. To put it briefly, socialism has been functioning as the central counter-hegemonic discourse of the Korean modernity, since the Red Wave and until the modern era. It provided the most consistent criticism of all the systems and institutions of colonial and postcolonial capitalism, from the exploitive character of the labor management regime in the service of capitalist accumulation to the inequality inherent in Korea’s relationship to the regional (Japan) and global (US) centers of the military, political and economic domination. While the South Korean establishment hardly could share its power with the representatives of political socialism or allow the socialist critique of capitalism to penetrate into its ideological power apparatus (educational system, etc.), some aspects of the socialist counter-narrative had to be adapted even in avowedly anti-Communist South Korea for the sake of legitimacy or societal cohesion. For example, the national history textbooks, developed uniformly for all the South Korean schools by the National Institute of Korean History (Kuksa P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe) and used in 1974 to 2010, were definitely marked by ahistorical ethno-nationalism (it was presumed that the Korean ethno-nation was the main subject of Korean history since ancient times) and militaristic undertones (national history was presented as a series of struggles against external enemies). However, they simultaneously subscribed to a version of the originally Marxist “colonial wealth drain” theory. Japanese imperialism was accused there of “underdeveloping” colonized Korea in the interest of capital accumulation in Japan proper.70 While Marxist researchers have good reasons to be critical about the oversimplification of the colony-to-metropole surplus transfer logic in the textbook version of wealth drain theory, there is no doubt about its provenance. It was first developed by the Marxist economists of the colonial period (notably, Pak Mun’gyu, whose subsequent career path in North Korea was described earlier in this chapter).71 South Korea’s dominant classes, given their institutional and personal ties with colonialera pro-imperialist local elites, would have undoubtedly preferred the New Right revisionist version of colonial history, which praises “modern capitalist development’s successes” under colonial rule. However, since it proved unacceptable for the majority of South Korean public,72 the nar-

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rative of colonial exploitation and wealth extraction has to be kept in its place as the official discourse. As the official ideology of North Korea and the main counterhegemonic narrative of South Korea, socialism plays a number of roles in the early twenty-first century’s Korean societies. Its entrenched place in North Korea’s official worldview and broad social consensus may, for example, prevent North Korean authorities from withdrawing their de jure commitments to free medicine, education, and housing (however little these commitments may mean de facto in the situation when the welfare system is severely underfinanced), even amid the ongoing transition to a version of bureaucratically controlled mixed economy. In South Korea, initially social democratic notions of peaceful unification with the North and welfarist redistributive justice were appropriated by the political mainstream by the late 1980s and mid-2000s respectively. The network of underground leftist activists that permeated much of grassroots Korea by the late 1930s was largely annihilated in the southern part of the country before, during, and after the Korean War. However, the workers-students alliance movement of the 1980s—itself a result of the long-term development of postwar socialist tradition in South Korea—educated a whole generation of labor activists in socialist thought. Granted, the attempt by that generation to organize a classbased, mass workers party along the European social democratic lines failed. There are several parties in South Korea now claiming to represent the working class, but none of them has even a remotest chance in the near future to exercise a role in the government commensurate to the size of the electoral segment they claim to represent.

s oc ialis m as t h e c o n t in u it y o f s t r u g g le ag ains t t h e l o gic o f ac c u m u la t io n However, does it signify a “failure of socialism” in South Korea, as some researchers claim?73 The failure of socialist political representation— mostly due to the high degree of neoliberal working-class fragmentation noted above—does not necessarily imply a drastic decrease in labor militancy. Indeed, the number of workdays lost to strikes per 1,000

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salaried employees in South Korea in 2015—23 days—was somewhat lower than in 1995 (30 days) but remained significantly higher than the statistics for the US (5 days), UK (6 days), or Japan (0 days).74 Underrepresented politically, South Korean workers have to establish their societal presence through nonparliamentary forms of militant activism. This activism remains inspired by a hope for a redistributive justicebased society in which the technical progress associated with industrial modernity would serve the interests of the majority of the direct producers rather than the logic of capital accumulation. Recently, unions in South ­ ­ ­ Korea outside of the world of chaebŏl-co-opted enterprise unionism are increasingly demanding workers’ right to participation in executive board decision-making—in other words, they are demanding the introduction of workplace democracy, if only in its rudimentary form.75 While these forms, of course, do not constitute socialism per se, their introduction is directly related to a long-term struggle for a society where democracy exists on economic and social strata, rather than only the political level. This struggle, in a long-term perspective, has been a part of the socialist project as we know it since the late nineteenth century. Rather than a failure, socialism in Korea—South Korea included—represents a continuum of struggle, with their high and low points, intensifications and lulls, defeats, and victories. Socialism did not triumph on the Korean Peninsula in the twentieth century (even supposedly socialist North Korea hardly represents the socialist project’s vision of a better future), nor did it manage to do it elsewhere. However, the struggle continues, and this ­ ­ ­ struggle constitutes perhaps the principally important part of Korea’s modern and contemporary history.

Conclusion A Balance Sheet of ­Korea’s Red Age

T

his book deals with Korean socialism as a cultural and social phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s in Korea. My emphasis in the book is the interconnectedness of the global and the local in making up the interbellum Red Age—the leftist radicalization trend of the 1920s and 1930s—in Korea. Locally, there was a general mood of discontent following Japanese colonization in 1910—the imposition of foreign rule via a modern bureaucratic machinery that, however, failed to bring any tangible benefits of the economic or cultural kind to the absolute majority of the colonized populace.1 This mood resulted in the March 1, 1919, anticolonial uprising, which, however, was at the same time triggered as much by external events as by internal factors. The Bolsheviks’ bold appeal to the universal principle of ethno-national self-determination since their revolution in 1917 put mainstream liberals everywhere into a defensive position and helped to push then US president Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) into acquiescing to self-determination in principle (while having no serious interest in practicing it anywhere aside from the possessions of the defeated Central Powers of Europe). The Wilsonian declaration, as well as the news about the defeat of German militarism and the dissolution of the Russian Empire, worked to move a number of Korean religious and social figures into appealing for Korean independence on March 1, 1919, precipitating a mass uprising of hitherto unseen proportions.2

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the 19 2 0 s in k o r e a and el sew h er e: t h e s e t t ing s The sought-for liberation of Korea, however, did not come with the defeat of Wilhelmian militarism and the Romanov Dynasty’s archaic empire, all the Wilsonian declarations notwithstanding. Japan, a victor nation, swiftly and brutally put down the mostly unarmed demonstrations. Japanese atrocities became known in the US and elsewhere (inter alia, through the medium of missionary dispatches)3 but provoked no significant reaction; nor was Japan’s seizure of the former German concessions in Shandong, which triggered the May 4, 1919, outburst of anti-imperialist rage in China, seriously opposed by any of the victorious “democratic” nations. The disillusionment with the liberal mainstream of the capitalist world-system could not be greater: “democracy” rang hollow to people deprived of the right to their own statehood, or any representation inside the Japanese state.4 At the same time, the predominantly agrarian character of Korean society was beginning to visibly change as the post-1919 colonial government, now in an appeasement mode, liberalized the rules for Korean commercial investments, including industrial ones. The excess capital from dynamically developing Japan began to be invested in the low-wage Korean colony of the Japanese empire as well. As a result, the 2,087 factories in Korea in 1920 multiplied by 1929 into 4,025 factories. By 1929 the factories of Korea employed around 100,000 ethnic Korean workers, with an additional 32,700 registered as construction workers. Since 1920, Korea had its own trade union federation (Chosǒn Nodong Kongjehoe), and large-scale strikes, like the strike by some five thousand Korean dockworkers in Pusan in September–October  1921, were succeeding in forcing concessions from unwilling employers, both Japanese and Korean.5 The quest of intellectuals for a more just world order driven by unfulfilled national aspirations, and workers’ increasing militancy, were the two major ingredients out of which colonial-era socialism in Korea was to be born.

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ko r e an s o c ialis m in t h e 192 0s: t h e b e g inni n gs As I make clear in Part 1, Chapter 1 of the book, the early socialist milieu in 1920s Korea was a complex conglomerate of different social strata and groups. The Korean diaspora in Russia—mostly second-generation, bilingual Russo-Korean intellectuals (teachers and journalists being especially prominent)—were among the Communist pioneers, although diaspora activists were rarely able to travel to Korea proper. Foreignbased exiles and students—most of them fluent in Japanese and Chinese, many able to read English, and some even mastering Russian—played an important role in leading the nascent movement. The oversized role of the intelligentsia was not necessarily seen as desirable. The model that Korea’s early Communists had before their eyes was either the predominantly factory-based contemporary German Communist Party or the pre-1917 Russian Bolsheviks, with their influence on large collectives of factory workers. Han Wigǒn (1896–1937), a medical doctor and Wasedaeducated journalist-turned-Communist militant, lamented in his article Theoretical and Practical Mistakes in the Period of Direction Shift in Korean Proletarian Movement and Their Critique6 about the “petit bourgeois vacillations, doubts, disunity, splits, factionalism and compromises” that leadership of the intelligentsia supposedly implied. As Han saw it, even the Communists of the late 1920s, despite their attempts to “liquidate” factionalism and proletarianize the party, still were not in position to build a mass-based and militant organization: further Bolshevization was demanded as a condition for obtaining the hegemonic position in the Korean national revolutionary movement. However, all the criticisms notwithstanding, the nascent Communist Party of Korea—formed underground on April 17, 1925—was far more than simply a conglomerate of petit bourgeois groups of leftist intellectuals. The fledgling party demonstrated both its flexibility and its potential by allying with more radical nationalists inside Ch’ǒndogyo, the most popular local new religion, and preparing mass anticolonial demonstrations on June 10, 1926, timed for the funerals of the last emperor of independent ­Korea, Sunjong.7 Such early Communist militants as Kim Yǒngman (1894–1934) and Ch’a Kŭmbong (1898–1929) were also among the central actors in Korea’s incipient trade union movement since 1920.8 The

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socialist intellectuals were indeed making sustained, conscious efforts to reach out to the supposed main actors of the coming revolution: the workers and their hoped-for allies among the poor peasantry. Successes ­were mixed, with failures in Korean Communists’ quest to fight both a social and a political battle concurrently. On the one hand, by 1927, the underground Communist Party of Korea was prominent enough to become one of the two main forces behind the historical formation of Sin’ganhoe, a legal “unitary national party” broadly modeled on the Comintern-brokered united front-type collaboration between Communists and Nationalists in contemporary China. The other major force was the more radical nationalists, many of them with a Ch’ǒndogyo background (see Chapter 2). Sin’ganhoe was formed on February 15, 1927, and when it was dissolved in May  1931, it boasted 126 local chapters with 39,914 members. Such a broad scope of organizational political participation from below was hitherto unseen in colonial-era Korea’s history, and much of it owed to the grassroots strength of Communists and other leftists. Aside from Pyongyang, a stronghold of Ch’ǒndogyo and Protestant nationalists, and some other localities, most local chapters were led by the leftists, either Communists or their sympathizers and collaborators. By October 1928, Japanese police acknowledged the leading presence of at least forty-five known Communist Party cadres in forty-four local chapters of Sin’ganhoe.9 While managing to keep themselves out of the central leading positions in order to avoid police repression, underground Communists acted as a leading force of national political mobilization, no small feat for a party that was formed just two years earlier than Sin’ganhoe. On the other hand, as Han Wigǒn, one of the movement’s brightest theoreticians, had to acknowledge in his lengthy analysis of the experiences of the 1929 Wǒnsan general strike (the largest-ever labor dispute of colonialage Korea, which continued for three months and involved up to ten thousand workers and family members), Wǒnsan workers were led exclusively by their “non-militant, opportunistic, reformist and corrupt” trade union bosses. Communists failed to play any tangible role in the dramatic events.10 The party was trying its best to consolidate its influences in the masses it wished to represent, but it was a challenging task. ­

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rebuilding it “from below,” by acquiring hegemony in the grassroots workers’ and peasants’ struggles and side-lining the “bourgeois nationalists,” was announced by the Comintern to its Korean followers. Korean Communists were excoriated for factional strife and their limited ability to reach out to the masses, and the latter were asked to create a new “revolutionary vanguard” in the course of their struggles.11 While the rather harsh attitudes that the Comintern exhibited at that time towards Korea’s “bourgeois nationalists”—from whose domain of influence the Communists were asked to pull the “toiling masses” from12—may be easily dismissed as representative of the ultra-leftist attitude generally characteristic of the Comintern’s leadership in the late 1920s, it happened to coincide with a watershed of broader historical importance. The October 1929 Wall Street crash triggered the Great Depression, ushering the whole world, Korea included, into a cataclysmic decade of world trade disruption, economic malaise, general impoverishment, the rise of autarkic economies, total-mobilization states, and interstate warfare—a decade that culminated in the start of general war, in 1937 in East Asia and two years later in Europe. It looked as if the apocalyptic Comintern prognostications about the coming demise of world capitalism were almost vindicated. The mechanism of capitalist accumulation appeared broken, in urgent need of being supplanted by some sort of nationally organized economy, either of the leftist kind, which Soviet Union started practicing with the start of five-year plans and industrialization in 1928, or of the rightist kind, which the conservative dirigiste bureaucrats in the Japanese army and state apparatus (the “reform bureaucrats”) were envisioning, directly inspired by developments in Mussolini’s Italy, the pioneering fascist state.13 In any case, the implosion of orthodox capitalism was also opening the room for radicalization from below, especially in colonies like Korea, in line with at least some of the Comintern’s—and ­ Korean Communists’—expectations.

kor e an s o c ialis m in t h e 1930s: int o t h e m a sses ­

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worldwide collapse in commodity prices—aggravating the persistent woes of the Korean countryside. Between 1930 and 1940, the number of pure, landless tenants increased by some 550,000 households; already in 1930, 6.7  percent of Korean peasants were destitute farm hands, whose precarious existence depended on their ability to find employment day by day.14 Peasants were increasingly moving to the cities, but there too, subsistence was a tricky task. Workers’ wages were in persistent decline: an adult male Korean worker was expected to earn one colonial wǒn (yen) a day in 1929, but only 90 chǒn (sen) in 1935. Understandably, as elsewhere in the depression-hit capitalist world, labor issues were multiplying too: after the record 201 disputes were registered in 1931, the number peaked again at 199 in 1934 before then starting to slowly reduce in number.15 Seeing a clear window of revolutionary opportunity and armed with the Profintern’s (the trade-union arm of Comintern) instructions—create new, revolutionary unions or take over existing ones from below, pay attention to separate demands for female and adolescent workers, combine legal and illegal work, begin with the fights for the most pressing daily needs of the workers, attempt attracting Chinese and even more privileged Japanese workers into unions16—Korean Communists enthusiastically entered the field, hoping to eventually rebuild their party as a genuinely mass organization in the wake of fiery grassroots struggles. If they failed in this task, it was not due to a lack of trying. The attempts to penetrate Korea and build the required network of factorybased cells there were unrelenting, and successes in organizing workers, peasants, and even more privileged students were clearly recognizable. A 1934 Japanese police publication on the Korean security situation, while optimistically judging the Korean Communist movement as “declining,” mentions at the same time a steady influx of Comintern “agitators” into Seoul, Pyongyang, Pusan, Mokp’o, Masan, Ch’ǒngjin, and Sinŭiju—practically all the growing industrial centers across the nation— and the “menacing” moves towards organizing an illegal party center in Seoul. Yi Chongnim (1900–1977), a Wǒnsan-born revolutionary with experience of work among the Soviet Koreans and subsequently in Manchuria, is duly mentioned there. He illegally entered Korea in 1929 and managed to organize the League for Reestablishment of the Korean Communist Party in February 1931 in Kimp’o, near Seoul, building a complicated network of connections with a number of Communist labor,

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student, and peasant groups. Separately, yet another Manchurian Communist movement veteran (but with a different factional pedigree), Yun Chayǒng (1894–1938), was said to be active in building the “revolutionary unions” in Hamgyǒng Province, and to have attempted to organize a preparatory committee for building a Korean Council of Leftist Unions. The colonial police never caught either Yi or Yun. Both managed to flee to the Soviet Union, where Yi was imprisoned in 1935 for three years and Yun was executed, found to be in possession of banned works by Zinoviev, one of the main Old Bolsheviks targeted by the Great Purges.17 Yi and Yun were a part of broad underground networks that covered a number of Korean regions. One of Yi’s collaborators, Waseda-educated Kwǒn Taehyǒng (1898–1947), moved in April 1931 from the Yǒngdŭngp’o industrial cluster near Seoul to Taegu, where he established a Korean Communist Alliance that later assisted in organizing a “red” peasant union in Yangsan (Southern Kyǒngsang Province) and a leftist union federation in Kwangju (Southern Chǒlla Province). To the bewilderment of Japanese police investigators, the anti-imperialist student group secretly instructed by Yi and his collaborator Kang Chin (Lavrenty Kang, 1905–1966; see Chapter 1 and the Postscript on the vicissitudes of his fate before and after the 1930s) at Keijō Imperial University in Seoul managed to recruit even ethnic Japanese students into their ranks, while in the Korean provinces, underground Communist groups organizing “red” unions of workers or peasants were detected even in the rural counties of Yōngam or Yōsu in Southern Chǒlla, as well as Ponghwa or Yǒngju in Northern Kyǒngsang.18 While the Japanese police were clearly in a position to destroy most underground groups, partly or fully, after several years of activity, the dogged stubbornness with which new groups kept reappearing indicates that Communists, at last, managed, to a rather large extent, to link their visions of alternative modernity to the everyday struggles of the underprivileged Korean majority, both in the cities and in the countryside. What started as intellectuals’ circles developed by the mid-1930s into a genuine grassroots movement. No wonder that the Japanese police singled out a 1933 case of a “red” sailors and port workers union detected in Sǒngjin, Pusan, Wǒnsan, and other Korean ports as a case in point for its account of the Korean security situation.19 Communism, even in the absence of a centralized, formally organized party, was becoming a force to count on.

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A downturn, however, was evident from around 1934–1935, due to a combination of factors. On the one hand, the Japanese establishment proactively responded to the Great Depression by leaving the gold standard, boosting inflationary spending,20 and encouraging outward investments to the formal colonies, notably Korea and Taiwan, as well as the informal colony of Manchuria, acquired after the invasion there in 1931. Korea, with its cheap labor and abundant mineral resources in the northern part of the peninsula, became one of the favored places for Japan’s investment. Economic growth picked up, the manufacturing employment rose to 295,000 workers (with an additional 205,000 in mining), and unemployment, persistent after the Great Depression, was somehow ameliorated. The increases in private consumption were, however, minuscule (negligible 0.3  percent annually), and manufacturing wages returned to their 1929 pre-Depression level only by 1940.21 However, wage oppression-based economic growth was combined with increased political suppression, at home and abroad. In 1936, the most successful underground organizer who still cherished the aim of reconstituting the Korean Communist Party, Yi Chaeyu (1905–1944), was arrested once again, for the last time in his eventful career punctured by several detentions: he eventually died in prison.22 The “red” surge brought by the Great Depression was largely subdued by the increasingly sophisticated repressive apparatus of the colonial state. One of the last holdovers of the underground Communist network, the Kyǒngsǒng (Seoul) Communist Group, established in 1938—amid the wartime strictures, as the Pacific War was in full swing—was led by Yi Kwansul (1900–1950), Yi Chaeyu’s former comrade, and Pak Hǒnyǒng (1900–1956), one of the Korean Communist Party’s original founding fathers. It was weakened by repeated arrests in 1941 and 1942 but survived precariously until 1945.23 This and other survivor groups, however, were largely deprived of societal influence in increasingly tightly regimented wartime Korea. The erstwhile Communist intellectuals unaffiliated with this or any other groups, such as brilliant literary criticist and poet Im Hwa (1908–1953; see also Chapter 4), were left to bemoan the death of modern citizenry (simin) literature. More broadly, they lamented the passing of the whole culture of progressive modernity, with its emphasis on objectivity and universality, in the whirlwind of ethno-nationalistic “totalism” unleashed by the Depression and the new world war.24 It was deeply ironic that Im

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Hwa, a staunch Marxist and anticapitalist, had to pin in 1940 his hopes about the possible survival of the last vestiges of old, democratic culture of Europe on arch-capitalist America in case the whole European continent would be overrun by the forces of fascist ethno-nationalism.25 ­These hopes demonstrate, however, the depth of despair experienced by Korea’s intellectual Marxists at the sight of ethno-nationalist, far-right authoritarian states seemingly destroying once and forever the last oases of democratic modernity with at least some potential for further emanci­ patory struggles.

t h e a- s h ap e d c u rv e o f t h e s o c ialis t ­r e s is t an ce In a word, the historical trajectory of the 1920s–1930s Communist movement in Korea resembled an A-shaped curve: it started as a movement pioneered by diasporic revolutionaries and intellectuals in the early 1920s, picked up momentum after the 1929 onslaught of the Great ­ ­ Depression—ironically, after the recognized Communist Party of Korea ceased to function—and then was slowly put down amid the intensified repression and co-option by the colonial state in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As I attempted to demonstrate in Chapter 1 of this book, Communists’ organizing work was instrumental in allowing the downtrodden in urban and rural areas—the workers and peasants joining “red” unions and associations, or evening schools and reading societies led by radicals—to construct their identity as sociopolitical actors. Furthermore, Communists helped their grassroots supporters to strengthen their agency in quotidian life’s struggles and to articulate their demands and desires. However, underground Communists’ conspiratorial techniques were, inevitably, no match for the police apparatus of the colonial state. The trajectory of events unfolding at the same time in the forests of Manchuria, colonial-age Korea’s frontier zone, was essentially similar. While this book is not intended to deal with the armed Communist resistance movement by Koreans in Manchuria, it was also largely defunct by the early 1940s. Kim Il Sung’s legendary guerrilla unit had to cross the Soviet border and seek shelter on Soviet territory after a series of Japanese extermination campaigns.26 In that, Korea resembled both

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Japan proper and the right-wing authoritarian regimes in Central and Southern Europe. In Germany or, say, Hungary, the Communist underground was almost completely destroyed after the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, in 1941–1942. The few remaining Communist underground resistance groups in Germany were decimated by a wave of arrests in 1942.27 In the case of Hungary, there were only around one thousand Communist underground activists by 1944.28

c o lo nial-­e r a s o c ial ism : w h at is le f t in t h e en d ? However, as the Postscript to this book attempts to make clear, the Left in wartime Korea—again, not unlike Japan proper, Germany, or Hungary—was suppressed but by no means exterminated. As soon as the Japanese colonial rule ended, the old leftist networks resurrected and were largely integrated into the ubiquitous people’s committees, which were again suppressed by Americans in South Korea but ended up providing important props for the new-born North Korean statehood.29 A number of colonial-era domestic Communist personages—prominently, Pak Hǒnyǒng, post-1945 leader of the South Korean Communists and later North Korea’s foreign minister—played highly visible roles in postLiberation politics as well. As the Postscript further elaborates, even the hardcore anti-Communism of the South Korean regime did not prevent the surviving colonial-period leftists, now positioning themselves as social democrats, from continuing their political activities in the 1950s and 1960s, giving birth to the left-progressive tendency, which strengthened itself by making links with the burgeoning workers’ movement in the 1980s and has been continuing to fight for its place on the South Korean political and social stages until the present. However—again, not unlike Japan proper or a number of Central European societies—the greatest historical contribution of Korea’s interbellum-period socialism may be found in its role in Korea’s intellectual life. It is this role that the present research focuses on. Again, this aspect of the Korean Left’s interbellum history is perhaps somewhat universal. The 1920s and 1930s were globally the golden age of Marxist intellectual vigor. In German-speaking academia, a Hegelian

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Marxist, Georg Lukács (1885–1971), produced his seminal work on history and class consciousness, in which he argues for the primacy of dialectics over the mechanical understanding of productive forces and production relationship, and foregrounds the concept of totality as a cornerstone of his view of society and its manifold phenomena. Proletariat, or, rather, the Marxist thinkers who position themselves as its vanguard, were supposedly able to grasp this totality, whereas the “bourgeois” thinkers were destined to fail, inhibited by the inescapable limi­ 1937 Historical Novel tations of their social practice.30 Lukács—whose was translated (from Russian) and published in Japan as early as in 193831—influenced both Japanese and Korean leftist writers, and was in fact one of the inspirations behind the historical novels of Korea’s renowned socialist author, Kim Namch’ŏn (1911–1953?).32 On a different ­ field—although not without certain relationship to Lukács’ quest—the newborn Frankfurt School was attempting to fill the Marxian omissions in the domain of social psychology and cultural studies by drawing on neo-Freudian insights and modernist aesthetics in an attempt to explain the rise of right-wing authoritarianism in contemporary Europe and, generally, the deepening of alienation and the unheard-of extent of manipulations on mass consciousness by propaganda, advertisement, and the cultural industry.33 The heirs of Marx in German-speaking Europe had to deal with a capitalist world that was in many aspects strikingly different from what Marx witnessed in Victorian London. The workers, no longer simply exploited cogs in the factory machine, were now both alienated consumers of industrially produced mass culture and atomized political subjects co-opted by authoritarian states and movements. This new reality demanded a new language of analysis that was largely created in the 1920s and 1930s and subsequently essentially defined the postwar intellectual landscape.

di ss e c t ing nat io nali sm : so cial ism as a we ap o n o f cr it iq u e The Korean Marxist contemporaries of Lukács or the Frankfurt School thinkers were facing a capitalist reality of yet a different kind. In the construction of the colonial society, class inequity and economic exploitation

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among the colonized were masked by the nationalist ideology that operated with “Korea,” “Koreans,” or “Korean-ness” as a unitary and deeply essentialized category, drawing on the Confucian metaphor to represent all Koreans as one extended family. Concomitantly, the turn to the right that the Japanese Empire as a whole was experiencing throughout the 1930s demonstrated obvious similarities with European fascisms while at the same time retaining a particular bureaucratic conservatism of its own. Japanese rulers were also utilizing, as one more source for their imperial nationalism, the national religion of state Shinto, a phenomenon without any clear parallels in contemporary Germany or Italy. The objects of Marxist critique were not completely similar to their counterparts in Europe, and neither were the subjects: German-speaking Europe saw at least one generation of Marxist thinkers before the emergence of Lukács or the Frankfurt School, while the Korean Marxists of the 1920s and 1930s were the pioneers, expected to offer, then and there, their pathbreaking Marxist analyses of Korean and, broader, global realities rather than to contribute to the development of Marxist theory at a more abstract level. While their theoretical approaches were hardly novel in the global context, they can be said to have fulfilled these expectations, producing coherent, poignant, and theoretically informed critique of the superstructural phenomena that they were encountering locally and globally, from Korean nationalism to German fascism, and deepening Marxist understanding of colonial society’s productive basis. It is these achievements of colonial-era Korean Marxists that this book primarily focuses on. While recently a North Korean literature researcher, Tatiana Gabroussenko, went as far as to suggest that “Korea had no established Communist intellectual tradition” prior to its liberation in 1945,34 this book hopefully serves to prove that such a tradition indeed existed, and left its deep imprint upon both contemporary and subsequent developments in the Korean intellectual world, even if it lacked in global recognition. As I demonstrate in Chapters 4 and 5, colonial-era Marxists countered both official Japanese imperial nationalism and Korea’s homegrown nationalist ideology with a critique that sought to historicize both nation and nationalism as a part of bourgeois modernity and point out nationalists’ failure to see how inherently contradictory the construction of “nation” is, in a society divided by hierarchies of statuses and contra-

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dictions of economic interests. In the totality of the Marxist historical view, “nation” had its own place, representing the predominant form of state collectivity in the world in which nation-states were the most important units of capitalist accumulation process. While Korea could need its own national statehood on its way to the postcapitalist society— indeed, Communist political programs tended to define the national democratic revolution as the first stage of the desired revolutionary process (Chapter 3)—“nation” was not supposed to be reified and absolutized. The precapitalist past of Korea was seen as concomitantly prenational, and the postcapitalist future was assumed to be post-national as well. Referring to the nationalist beliefs in the historical homogeneity of Koreans or the grandeur of their ancient culture, Kim Myǒngsik (1890–1943), a pioneering Waseda-educated Marxist, sarcastically remarked that Germans, contrary to Hitler’s assertions, are historically just as heterogeneous as Americans or European Jews; Koreans’ heterogeneity was equally easy to document. Ancient Korea’s lack of architectural or artistic greatness compared to, say, Greek city-states, had, as Kim Myǒngsik saw it, nothing to do with either supposedly superior national qualities of proto-Koreans or their absence. A lack of enslaved foreigners and, consequentially, the limitations on surplus value extraction, were of much more decisive meaning.35 In the age when various regional va­ ­ rieties of Blut und Boden, “blood and soil” ideology, dominated much of Europe, and Shinto myths were reconstructed into the hegemonic ideology of Japanese imperial nationalism, such an assertion of critical distance vis-à-vis the national(ist) narrative was indeed revolutionary. The critique through historicization and dialectic analysis deployed by Marxists against nationalism could be equally scathing in relationship to other concepts and phenomena, from the globally declining liberal beliefs to the fashionable Heideggerian philosophy. Pak Ch’iu (1909– 1949), one of Korea’s pioneering Marxist philosophers—with whom I deal in Chapter 4—explicitly opposed the reification of such concepts as “individual” or “freedom” on the same grounds he was opposed to the essentialization of “nation”: like the latter, the former were essentially a product of modern historical development rather than everlasting constants of human society. As Pak saw it, “individual freedom” was invented in the time of modern capitalist transition, signifying a rupture with the premodern world ruled by belief in fate and a predestined system of

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statuses bestowed by birth. However, the immanent contradictions of liberal capitalist economy (misbalance between overproduction and workers’ underconsumption, resulting in the gradual fall of profits and subsequent flow of capital into militarization) brought, together with the world wars, the advent of controlled economies and fascistic societies to which the original forms of bourgeois liberty are alien and extraneous. Dialectically speaking, bourgeois individual liberty negated itself in the process of capitalism’s historical development.36 One of the reactions by intellectuals to the progressing destruction of their lifeworld, as Korean Marxists understood it, was early existentialism of the kind Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) represented. Along the same lines, Pak Ch’iu historicizes Heideggerian philosophy—as well as the philosophical systems of his like-minded predecessors and contemporaries, including Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) and Lev Shestov (1866–1938)—as well, alleging that ­ ­ ­ Heideggerian Angst (anxiety), supposedly disclosing being-in-the-world, ­ ­ ­ ­ as well as Heideggerian emphasis on Sein-zum-Tode (being-towardsdeath) and Heideggerian depreciation of rationality, are all related to contemporary realities, dominated by historically determined selfnegation of earlier bourgeois liberal culture. Not without good ground, Pak Ch’iu also sensed a deeper interrelatedness between the Heidegge­ ­ rian sidelining of reason and the Nazi obsession with Blut-und-Boden myths, their secondary mythologization of the world.37 If the Frankfurt School was attempting to penetrate deeper into the inner world of the alienated subject in a society increasingly shifting towards the mass consumption of symbolic products, its Korean contemporaries of the 1930s were positioning themselves as the rescuers of what was still meaningful and progressive in modern Vernunft (reason), endangered by what they saw as a terminal agony of bourgeois culture.

c on c l u d ing t h o u g h t s : so cial ism a s cu lt u r e , ac h ie v e m en t s, and lim it at io ns In retrospect, we can clearly see that the 1930s Marxist neophytes in Korea obviously underestimated the global resilience of “bourgeois liberalism”—working, as they did, in the increasingly tense atmosphere

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of Imperial Japan’s wartime all-out mobilizations, and mostly with German texts, German being the language of choice for the contemporary Japanese philosophical milieu. Their naiveté was not limited to the sphere of abstract philosophical debates. While Korean Marxists such as Kim Myǒngsik came to identify the “epoch of the dominance by monopolistic financial capital” as the time when one-party fascist dictatorships flourished and parliamentarism was becoming increasingly hollowed out,38 they still avoided asking the obvious but embarrassing question: to which extent, then, was the Soviet party-state an exception from the worldwide turn towards dictatorial politics? Sometimes, the unwillingness to ask discomforting questions led Korean Marxists to produce plainly self-contradictory texts. Kim Seyong (1907–1966), a graduate of the Moscow-based, Comintern-run Communist University of Eastern Toilers (see Chapter 1 on its Korean students, including Kim), was stating in an article on the Soviet Young Pioneers corps that they, in contrast to boy scouts, had nothing to do with militarism. At the same time, a couple of paragraphs below, he frankly mentioned that the Young Pioneers underwent shooting practice as a part of their training.39 To him, obviously, Soviet military training for children could not, per definition, be classified as militaristic. The descriptions of Moscow produced through such a lens (see Chapter 7) tended to seriously underestimate, to put it mildly, both the extent of material deprivations immanent to the Stalinist model of accelerated catch-up modernization, and the extent of the repressive practices endemic in the societies where such a model is practiced.40 The 1945 travelogue by a leftist writer, Kim Saryang (1914–1950), (mis)represented wartime China’s Communist-ruled liberated areas as heavens for popular, participatory democracy, again focusing more on how the things, in theory, should have looked like rather than on the much messier picture of the realities on the ground (Chapter 6). Should, then, the leftist philosophy, travelogues, or polemics from the 1920s and 1930s Korea be primary judged in terms of their—rather obvious—epochal limitations, as monuments to the imaginative geographies of the Moscow-centric realm of “progress” and dogmatic, misplaced grand prophecies of the immanent self-destruction of “bourgeois culture”? While the limitation are more than obvious, so are the achievements. The descriptions of the nascent Soviet utopia, consciously or perhaps even unconsciously cleansed by their authors from discomforting

270 C on c lusion

“nonessential” nuances, were playing a complex historical role providing, after all, the cementing glue for the unprecedented mobilization from below—for the “red” workers and peasants (see Chapter 1) who were inspired by the narrative of the Soviet “future-in-the-present” to organize, to educate and empower themselves, and to articulate their dreams in a modern idiom. Based on a largely utopic narrative as they were, these “red” workers and peasants associations, together with student reading and debating societies, laid the foundations for the counterhegemonic public sphere in modern and contemporary Korean history. Later, in the 1980s, they would, in turn, serve as important historical antecedents and inspirations for the radicalized intellectuals leading the democratization struggles in South Korea (see the Postscript). Colonialera Communist demands for land reform or a Soviet-inspired welfare state would later influence the direction of post-Liberation reforms in North Korea, which by the mid-1950s was one of the first welfare states in the Third World, with officially free education and medical services (Chapter 3). The idealized images of the Soviet “red capital,” Moscow, would itself be a sacred cow of the colonial-era Korean Left (see Chapter 7), but the historicizing Marxist analysis employed by the leftist polemists and scholars helped to relativize a number of nationalist sacred cows, “national character” or heavily mythologized construction of ancient Korean past included (Chapter 5). Unquestioning as it was towards its own holy shibboleths, Korean socialism contributed greatly, in the end, to the development of mass-based and self-reflective, critical modern culture in twentieth-century Korea; that is why referring to it as Korea’s “socialist century” does not constitute an exaggeration (see the Postscript). Korean leftists of the 1920s–1930s lived in a utopic world, but, as their Central European contemporary, Karl Mannheim (1893– 1947), famously suggested in the year when the Great Depression nudged a socialist upsurge in Korea, utopias might be unescapably needed for a society in order to proceed to a qualitatively different future.41 The post1945 North and South Korean trajectories, socially, culturally, or politically, are hardly comprehensible without referring to the two fiery “red ­decades” in colonial-era ­ ­Korea.

not e s

int r o d u c t i o n ­ ­

­

­

­

271

272

Notes to Pages 3–7







­







Notes to Pages 7–10

273



36. Chung-shin ­ Park, Protestantism and Politics in Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 135. 45. Joong-Seop ­ Kim, The Korean Paekjǒng under Japanese Rule: The Quest for Equality and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2003), 37–68.

274

Notes to Pages 11–13









Notes to Pages 14–20

275

racy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 206–236. ­

­

276

Notes to Pages 20–23













Notes to Pages 24–29

277



­ ­



­ ­ ​­ ​ ­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ­ ­ ­

278

Notes to Pages 30–37



c ha pter   1 . ac t o r s o f t h e k o r ean c o m m u nis t m o v e m en t ­



Notes to Pages 37–42

279



20. Ban, 144. 22. Im, 361–363.

280

Notes to Pages 42–46

34. Son, 268, 293.

­ ​­ ​ ­ ​­ ­ ​­ ­ 44. Yi, Han’guk Sahowjuŭi, 158–170. ŏ ŏ

ŭ

​



Notes to Pages 47–50

281





­

​­

​­

​­ ​ ­ ​ ­

​ ­

​ ­





282

Notes to Pages 50–55











Notes to Pages 55–61

283

1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 138–139; see the original, under its revised 1932 title, Paper Factory Village, in Kiyŏng Yi, “Cheji Kongjangch’on” (Paper Factory Village), in Oppa ŭi Pimil P’yŏnji (Secret Letter from Elder Brother). (Pyongyang: Munhak Yesul Chonghap Ch’ulp’ansa, 1993 [1932]), 166–184.





284

Notes to Pages 61–66

90. Im, 238–246.

96. Suny, “A Journeyman for the Revolution.”





Notes to Pages 67–70

285





286

Notes to Pages 70–76



c h a p t e r   2 . f ac t io ns an d t h e me a ning s o f t h e f act io n al s t r u g­g le











Notes to Pages 76–80

287

­



­





288

Notes to Pages 81–83

to the Comintern Executive, on the Resolutions of the Initial Congress of the Korean Communist Party, June  1921), 66–69. Reprinted in Kirill Shirinya and Wada Haruki, eds., VKP(b), Komintern i Koreya, 1918–1941 (All-Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Comintern and. Korea, 1918–1941) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007), 134–140. ­ ­ ­





­





Notes to Pages 83–89

289











290

Notes to Pages 90–93







­









Notes to Pages 94–99

291











292

Notes to Pages 102–105

cha pte r   3 . t h e c o m m u nis t p r o gr am s









Notes to Pages 105–109

293







19. Kuo-T’ao ­ Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1927, vol. 1 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1971), 44.





294

Notes to Pages 109–112

Company: Japanese Imperialism and Asia-Pacific) (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyoronsha, 2003).





­







Notes to Pages 112–121

295







296

Notes to Pages 121–125





66. Gi-Wook ­ Shin, Peasant Protest and Social Change in Colonial Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 174–175.





Notes to Pages 126–133

297



c h ap t e r   4 . t h e mar x ist p h ilo s o p h ie s o f pak ch ’iu



298

Notes to Pages 133–136













Notes to Pages 136–139

299





­



­

­

­

300

Notes to Pages 139–145







­



Notes to Pages 145–148









301

302

Notes to Pages 148–151

­ ­ ­



­

83. Ibid., 277.



Notes to Pages 151–155

303





­











304

Notes to Pages 155–159

Literary Policy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 124, on the implications of this episode for Yi’s subsequent fate.

c ha pte r   5 . t h e s o c ialist co n cep t s o f nat io n and h ist o r y ­



5. Gi-Wook ­ Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 89–93. ­ ​­ ​­ ­ ​­ ​­ ​­ ​ ­ ​­ ​­ ­ ​ ­ ​­

­

​­

​­

​

​­

​

­



Notes to Pages 159–161

305

zens] Residing in South Korea) (Seoul: Overseas Koreans Foundation, 2016), 58. 12. See Seol and Skrentny, “Ethnic Return Migration.”







306

Notes to Pages 161–163









­

­









Notes to Pages 164–167

307







­





308

Notes to Pages 167–170

Colonial Korea, 1920–1925 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988).



57. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 22, 148–153.



Notes to Pages 170–173

309



­

­ ­

310

Notes to Pages 174–178

76. Programmnye Dokumenty Kommunisticheskijh Partiy Vostoka (Program Documents of the Communist Parties of the East) (Moscow: Partizdat, 1934), 294. 77. See Yŏsŏng Yi, “Yudaein ‘Sionijŭm’ kwa Changnae Yakso Minjok Undong ŭi Chŏnmang, 2” (The Jewish “Sionism” and the Perspectives of the Weak and Small P ­ eople’s Movements in the F ­ uture), Chosŏn Ilbo, January  2, 1931, 5. 78. See Natalya Mamaeva, Komintern i Gomindang, 1919–­1929 (Comintern and Guomin­dang, 1919–1929) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1999). 79. See John  W. Garver, “Chiang Kai-­shek’s Quest for Soviet Entry into the Sino-­Japanese War,” ­Political Science Quarterly 102, 2 (1987): 295–316. 80. See Vladimir Tikhonov, “ ‘Korean Nationalism Seen through the Comintern Prism, 1920s–30s,” Region: Regional Studies of Rus­sia, Eastern ­Europe, and Central Asia 6, 2 (2017): 201–222. 81. Sŭngch’ŏl Paek, “ ‘Chosŏnhak Undong’ Kyeyŏl ŭi Chagi Chŏngdangsŏng Mosaek kwa Kŭndaegwan” (The Quest for Self-­Legitimation by the “Korean [National] Studies Movement” and Its Views on Modernity), in Tohyŏng Kim, ed., Ilchega Han’guk Sahoe ŭi Chŏnt’ong kwa Kŭndae Insik (Views on Tradition and Modernity in Korean Society u ­ nder ­Japanese Rule)(Seoul: Hyean, 2008), 97–128. 82. Cited in Paek, “ ‘Chosŏnhak Undong’ Kyeyŏl,” 110. 83. Chaehong An, Minse An Chaehong Sŏnjip (Selected Works of Minse An Chaehong), vol. 1 (Seoul: Chisik San’ŏpsa, 1981), 558–560, 564. 84. Li, “O national-­reformizme v Koree.” 85. Reprinted in An, Minse An Chaehong Sŏnjip, 546–547. 86. Hyŏngnyŏl Cho, “1930 Nyŏndae Chosŏn ŭi ‘Yŏksa Kwahak’ e taehan Haksulmunhwa Undongnonjŏk Punsŏk” (An Analy­sis of the Korean “Historical Science” [Movement] of the 1930s as an Academic and Cultural Movement) (PhD diss., ­Korea University, 2015), 77–79. 87. Yŏsŏng Yi, “Minjok Munje Kaegwan: 2” (A General View on the Ethno-­ national Issues: 2), Chosŏn Ilbo, November 29, 1929; also cited in Cho, “1930 Nyŏndae,” 78. 88. See Yŏngju Kang, “Kukhakcha Hong Kimun Yŏn’gu” (A Study of (Korean) National Studies Researcher Hong Kimun), Yŏksa Pip’yŏng 68 (2004): 154–198. 89. Kimun Hong, “Chosŏn Munhak ŭi Yang’ŭi” (Two Meanings of Korean Lit­ er­a­ture), in Tuwŏn Sin and Hyŏnggu Han, eds., Han’guk Kŭndae Munhak kwa Minjok-­kukka Tamnon Charyojip (Collection of Materials on ­Korea’s



Notes to Pages 178–181

311

Modern Lit­er­a­ture and Nation-­state Discourses) (Seoul: Somyŏng, 2015 [1934]), 315–326. 90. Cho, “1930 Nyŏndae,” 80. 91. Kwangsu Yi, “Chosŏn Munhak ŭi Kaenyŏm” (The Concept of Korean Lit­ er­a­ture), in Tuwŏn Sin and Hyŏnggu Han, eds., Han’guk Kŭndae Munhak kwa Minjok-­kukka Tamnon Charyojip (Collection of Materials on ­Korea’s Modern Lit­er­a­ture and Nation-­state Discourses) (Seoul: Somyŏng, 2015 [1929]), 186–192. 92. Hong, “Chosŏn Munhak.” 93. On his writings related to the ­Great Depression, fascism, and imperialist politics, see Leonid Petrov, “Turning Historians into Party Scholar-­ Bureaucrats: North Korean Historiography in 1955–1958,” East Asian History 31 (2006): 101–124; also see Chapter 4. 94. Nam’un Paek, “Chosŏn Yŏn’gu Kiun e chehaya 1: Ilmun Ildap” (On the Rise of Korean Studies 1: Questions and Answers), Tong’a Ilbo, September 11, 1934, 3. 95. Nam’un Paek, Chosŏn Sahoe Kyŏngjesa (­Korea’s Socioeconomic History) (Seoul: Pŏmusa, 1989 [1933]), 95. 96. Nam’un Paek, Chosŏn Sahoe Kyŏngjesa, 145. 97. Paek, 129. 98. Paek, 145. 99. On his participation in the New Asian Alliance in 1916 and his role in the early socialist ­ organizations, see Tongjŏn Kim, “Kŭndae Cheju Chiyŏk Chisigin ŭi Oebu Segye Sot’ong kwa Hwaldong” (The Activities of the Cheju Intellectuals in the Modern Age and Their Communications with the Outside World), Yŏksa Minsokhak 27 (2008): 63–92; also see Chapter 1.. 100. Maurice Bloch, Marxism and Anthropology: The History of a Relationship (London: Routledge, 1983), 126–128. 101. Myŏngsik Kim, “Chosŏn Minjok Kiwŏn ŭi Munhwajŏk Koch’al” (Cultural Research on the Origins of the Korean Ethno-­nation), Samch’ŏlli 7, 1 (1935): 56–58. 102. Kim, “Chosŏn Minjok Kiwŏn ŭi Munhwajŏk Koch’al,” 52–55. 103. See Hwa Im, “Munhak sang ŭi Chibangjuŭi Munje” (The Issues of Provincialism in Lit­er­a­ture), in Ha Chŏng’il, Im Hwa Munhak Yesul Chŏnjip. P’yŏngnon 1 (The Complete Literary and Artistic Works of Im Hwa. Criticism 1)(Seoul: Somyŏng, 2009 [1936]), 704–723. 104. Kijŏn Kim, “Chosŏn Minjok man i Kajin Uwŏlsŏng” (The Superiority that only Koreans Possess), Kaebyŏk 61 (1925): 4–7.

312

Notes to Pages 182–185

105. See Sŭngch’ŏl Paek, “ ‘Chosŏnhak Undong’ Kyeyŏl ŭi Chagi Chŏngdangsŏng Mosaek kwa Kŭndaegwan” (The Quest for Self-­Legitimation by the “Korean [National] Studies Movement” and Its Views on Modernity), in Kim Tohyŏng, ed., Ilchega Han’guk Sahoe ŭi Chŏnt’ong kwa Kŭndae Insik (Views on Tradition and Modernity in Korean Society u ­ nder J­ apanese Rule) (Seoul: Hyean, 2008), 97–128. 106. See Minyŏng Chŏng, “1930–40 Nyŏndae Hong Kimun ŭi Yŏksa Yŏn’gu” (Hong Kimun’s Historical Research in the 1930s–1940s), Chungwŏn Munhwa Yŏn’gu 18–19 (2012): 241–283; and Kimun Hong, “Yŏksahak ŭi Yŏn’gu: Chŏngsin Sagwan kwa Yumul Sagwan” (Historical Research: Spirit-­ Based and Materialistic Views of History), Chosŏn Ilbo, March 20, 1935, 4. 107. Pyŏngju An, “Minjok Munje Chaeŭmmi: 2” (Reconsidering the Ethno-­ national Issues: 2), Chosŏn Ilbo, January 30, 1930, 4. 108. Nam’un Paek, “Book Review: Pojŏn Hakhoe Nonjip e taehan Tokhugam” (Book Review: My Impressions ­after Reading the Collection of Articles by Posŏng Special College’s Academic Society), Tong’a Ilbo, May 4, 1934, 3. 109. See Yŏksa Pip’yŏng, ed.,“Charyo palgul: Chosŏn Kongsandang Sŏnŏn” (Discovery of the Sources: Declaration of the Korean Communist Party), Yŏksa Pip’yŏng 19 (1992 [1926]): 349–361. 110. Ch’iu Pak, “Minjok kwa Munhwa” (Ethno-­nation and Culture), in Taesŏk Yun and Miran Yun, eds., Sasang kwa Hyŏnsil (Ideas and Realities)(Inch’ŏn: Inha Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2010 [1946]), 279–286. 111. Reprinted in Kim, Im Hwa, 332–350. 112. Pak, Minjok, Minjokchuŭi, 232–256.

c h ap t e r   6 . k im s ar y an g’s ob ser v at io ns o f liber at ed c h ina, 1 9 4 5 1. See Hyŏngdŏk Kwak, “Kim Saryang ŭi Tonggyŏng Cheguk Taehak Sijŏl” (Kim Saryang’s Time at the Tokyo Imperial University), in Chaeyong Kim and Hyŏngdŏk Kwak, eds., Kim Saryang, Chakp’um kwa Yŏn’gu (Kim Saryang, Works and Research), vol. 1 (Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2008), 381–411. 2. On Kim Saryang’s mode of ­resistance against the full-­scale, forcible assimilation policies, see Chaeyong Kim, “Ilchemal Kim Saryang Munhak ŭi Chŏhang kwa Yanggŭksŏng” (­Resistance and Ambivalence in Kim Saryang’s Lit­er­a­ture in the End of the J­apanese Colonial Rule), in Kim and Kwak, Kim Saryang, Chakp’um kwa Yŏn’gu, 411–429.



Notes to Pages 186–189

313

3. On his ­Japanese writing, see Saryang Kim, “Naichigo no bungaku” (Lit­er­ a­ture in the Metropolitan Language), Yomiuri Shimbun, February  14, 1941, in Kim and Kwak, Kim Saryang, Chakp’um kwa Yŏn’gu, 263–264. 4. Hyŏngdŏk Kwak, Kim Saryang kwa Ilchemal Singminji Munhak (Kim Saryang and the Lit­er­a­ture of the Late ­Japanese Colonial Period) (Seoul: Somyŏng, 2017), 76–95. 5. See Chaeyong Kim, Hyŏmnyŏk kwa Chŏhang (Collaboration and ­Resistance) (Seoul: Somyŏng, 2004), 241–261. 6. Saryang Kim, Nomamalli (Ten Thousand Li of a Dull-­Witted ­Horse) (Pyongyang: Yangsŏgak, 1947). 7. Saryang Kim, Kim Saryang Sŏnjip (Kim Saryang’s Selected Works) (Pyongyang: Kungnip Ch’ulp’ansa, 1955). 8. Saryang Kim, Nomamalli (Ten Thousand Li of a Dull-­Witted ­Horse), ed. Chaeyong Kim (Seoul: Silch’ŏn Munhaksa, 2002 [1947]). 9. For the perspective on the end of World War II in E ­ urope from Tokyo, see Yukiko Koshiro, “Eurasian Eclipse: Japan’s End Game in World War II,” American Historical Review 109, 2 (2004): 417–444. 10. On its functioning on the grassroots level, see Haedong Yun, Chibae wa Chach’i (The Rule and the Autonomy) (Seoul: Yŏksa Pip’yŏngsa, 2006), 360–373. 11. Saryang Kim, Nomamalli, 19–21, 315. 12. For more on Yi’s background, see Usik An, Kim Saryang P’yŏngjŏn (Critical Biography of Kim Saryang), trans. Wŏnsŏp Sim (Seoul: Munhak kwa Chisŏngsa, 2000), 362; Pyŏngjun Chŏng, “Chosŏn Kŏn’guk Tongmaeng ŭi Chojik kwa Hwaltong” (­Organization and Activities of the League for Preparing the Establishment of the [Korean] State), Han’guksa Yŏn’gu 80 (1993), 93–94. 13. Yŏmhong Son, Kŭndae Pukkyŏng ŭi Hanin Sahoe wa Minjok Undong (Korean Society and National Movement in Modern Beijing) (Seoul: Yŏksa Kong’gan, 2010), 344–345. 14. Kim, Nomamalli, 228. 15. Dongyoun Hwang, Anarchism in K ­ orea: ­Independence, Transnationalism, and the Question of National Development, 1919–1984 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 142. 16. Man’gil Kang, Chosŏn Minjok Hyŏngmyŏngtang kwa T’ong’il Chŏnsŏn (Korean National Revolutionary Party and the United Front) (Seoul: Yŏksa Pip’yŏngsa, 2003), 56–81, 268–279. 17. See Il Sung Kim, “Talk with Nosaka Sanzo and His Party,” December 21, 1945, in Kim Il Sung Complete Works, vol. 2 (August 1945–­December 1945). (Pyongyang: Foreign Language Publisher ­House, 2011), 410–415.

314

Notes to Pages 190–196

18. Hwang, Anarchism in ­Korea, 150. 19. Inho Yŏm, Chosŏn Ŭiyongdae, Chosŏn Ŭiyonggun (Korean Volunteer Corps, Korean Volunteer Army) (Ch’ōnan: Tongnip Kinyŏmgwan, Han’guk Tongnip Undongsa Yŏn’guso, 2009), 152–158. 20. Kim, Nomamalli, 230. 21. Kang, Chosŏn Minjok Hyŏngmyŏngtang, 280. 22. Kim, Nomamalli, 228–229. 23. David Goodman, Social and ­Political Change in Revolutionary China: The Taihang Base Area in the War of R ­ esistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 30, 61–62, 83–100. 24. Jack Belden, China Shakes the World (New York: Harpers, 1949), 72. 25. Kim, Nomamalli, 35–39. 26. See Myohŭi Hwang, “Ch’imnyak chŏnjaeng sigi Ch’ŏnjin ŭi Ch’in’il Han’in chojik yŏn’gu” (Research on the Pro-­Japanese Korean ­Organizations in the War-­time Tianjin), in Kang Taemin et al., eds., Ch’imnyak Chŏnjaenggi Ch’in’il Chosŏn’in tŭr ŭi Haewae Hwaltong (The Overseas Activities by the Pro-­Japanese Koreans in the Period of the War of Aggression), vol. 2 (Seoul: Kyŏng’in Munhwasa, 2013), 36–70. 27. See T’aejun Kim, Chosŏn Sosŏlsa (History of Korean Narrative Lit­er­a­ture) (Seoul: Ch’ŏngjin Sŏgwan, 1933). 28. T’aejun Kim, Kim T’aejun Chŏnjip (The Complete Works of Kim T’aejun), vol. 1 (Seoul: Pogosa, 1998), 433–467. Kim T’aejun’s rec­ord of the travel to Yan’an, Yŏn’anhaeng, was originally serialized in the quarterly Munhak (July 1946 to April 1947). 29. Kim, Nomamalli, 40. 30. Kim, 42–43. 31. Yŏm, Chosŏn Ŭiyongdae, 172–173. 32. Kim, Nomamalli, 119. 33. Kim, 120. 34. Iosif Stalin, Lieningzhuyi wenti (Prob­lems of Leninism) (Moscow: Foreign Workers’ Publishing ­House, 1935 [1926]). 35. Iosif Stalin, Guanyu Lieningzhuyi diwenti (On the Prob­lems of Leninism) (Yan’an: Jiefangshe, 1943 [1926]). 36. Kim, Nomamalli, 158. 37. Kim, 156–157. 38. Kim, Kim T’aejun Chŏnjip, vol. 3, 461. 39. Kyŏngsik Pak, Ilbon Chegukchuŭi Chosŏn Chibae (­Japanese Imperialism’s Rule in K ­ orea) (Seoul: Haengji, 1986), 497–500. 40. Kim, Nomamalli, 156.



Notes to Pages 196–199

315

41. Kim, 140; for a detailed history of this movement, see Hua Gao, Hong Taiyang shi zenyang Sheng Qi De: Yan’an Zhengfeng Yundong de Lailongqumai (How Did the Sun Rise over Yan’an: A History of the Rectification Movement) (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2000). 42. Kim, 140. 43. A con­temporary edition is Ling Ding, Yiwaiji (The Unexpected Collection) (Beijing: Zhongguo Guoji Guangbo Chubanshe, 2013). 44. Kim, Nomamalli, 139. 45. Yi-­tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern Chinese Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 102–105. 46. Zedong Mao, Selected Works of Mao Tse-­Tung, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1965), 86. 47. Kim, Nomamalli, 181–192. 48. Kim, 103. 49. Kim, 105. 50. Kim, 111–112. 51. Kim, 104. 52. Kim, 231–233. 53. Cited in Yŏm, Chosŏn Ŭiyongdae, 215. 54. Andreĭ Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Song: The Formation of North ­Korea, 1945–1960 (London: Hurst, 2002), 52–54. 55. See Imha Yu, “Kim Saryangnon: Inmin Munhak ŭroŭi Mosaek kwa Chŏnhoe” (On Kim Saryang: Metamorphoses and the Search for the ­People’s Lit­er­a­ture), in Ihwa Yŏja Taehakkyo T’ongilhak Yŏn’guwŏn, ed., Pukhan Munhak ŭi Chihyŏngdo (The Landscapes of the North Korean Lit­ er­a­ture) (Seoul: Ihwa Yŏja Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2008), 19–43. 56. See Ch’ŏngsu Kim, “Kusul 56. Sōul—­P’yŏngyang-­Pukkyŏng, Kukchesŏn e Olla. Kim Hakch’ŏl P’yŏn 5” (Oral Testimonies 56. Seoul-­Pyongyang-­ Beijing, Taking an International Route. On Kim Hakch’ŏl 5), Killim Sinmun, July 3, 2020. Available at http://­www​.­jlcxwb​.­com​.­cn​/­area​/­content​ /­2020–07​/­03​/­content​_­259994​.­htm (accessed September 15, 2020). 57. Hakch’ŏl Kim, Ch’oehu ŭi Pundaejang (The Last Squad Commander) (Seoul: Munhak kwa Chisŏng, 1995), 337. 58. See Imha Yu, “Sahoejuŭijŏk Kŭndae Kyehoek kwa Choguk Haebang ŭi Tamnon: Haebang Chŏnhu Kim Saryang Munhak ŭi Tojŏng” (The Socialist Modernity Proj­ect and Motherland Liberation Discourse: The Road of Kim Saryang’s Lit­er­a­ture ­after the Liberation), Han’guk Kŭndae Munhak Yŏn’gu 1, 2 (2000): 174–199.

316

Notes to Pages 199–205

59. See Pauline Keating, “Getting Peasants O ­ rganized: Grassroots ­Organizations and the Party State in the Shaan-­Gan-­Ning Border Region, 1934–45,” in David Goodman and Chongyi Feng, eds., North China at War: The Social Ecol­ogy of Revolution (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 25–59; also Goodman, Social and P ­ olitical Change. 60. Yŏm, Chosŏn Ŭiyongdae, 159. 61. Kim, Nomamalli, 158–166. 62. Yŏm, Chosŏn Ŭiyongdae, 160. 63. Kim, Nomamalli, 113–115. 64. On the role of lit­er­a­ture in creating modern Chinese identity, see Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 19. 65. Kim, Nomamalli, 226. 66. Kim, 250–252. 67. Inho Yŏm, Chosŏn Ŭiyongdae, Chosŏn Ŭiyonggun (Korean Volunteer Corps, Korean Volunteer Army) (Ch’ōnan: Tongnip Kinyŏmgwan, Han’guk Tongnip Undongsa Yŏn’guso, 2009), 255–263. 68. Tomer Nisimov, “Troublesome Brotherhood: The Korean Volunteer Army and the CPC,” Journal of Northeast Asian History 17, 1 (2020): 45–90. 69. Kim, Nomamalli, 251–252. 70. On the ultimate defeat of the “Yan’an faction” of the former Korean allies of the CCP in the North Korean politics see Guangxi Jin, “ ‘The August Incident’ and the Destiny of the Yanan Faction,” International Journal of Korean History 17, 2 (2012): 47–76. 71. Yu, “Kim Saryangnon.” 72. Kim, Nomamalli, 122–125, describes especially gruesome abuse against the ethnic Korean soldiers in the ­Japanese military ranks. 73. Ken Kawashima, The Proletarian ­Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 64–66, 93, 127–128. 74. See T’aejun Kim, “Mukyū Ikka” (Endless ­Family), Kaizo, September 1940, in Chaeyong Kim and Hyŏngdŏk Kwak, eds., Kim Saryang, Chakp’um kwa Yŏn’gu (Kim Saryang, Works and Research), vol. 4 (Seoul: Yŏngnak, 2014), 273–327; Kwak, Kim Saryang kwa Ilchemal, 220–225. 75. Yŏm, Chosŏn Ŭiyongdae, 153. 76. On the J­ apanese massacres of Chinese prisoners, see Rotem Kowner, “Imperial Japan and Its POWs: The Dilemma of Humaneness and National Identity,” in Guy Podoler, ed., War and Militarism in Modern Japan: Issues of History (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 89. 77. Kim, Nomamalli, 166–189.



Notes to Pages 208–212

317

c h ap t e r   7 . t h e r ed cap it al o f m o s c o w in t he ey es o f k o r e an t r av el er s 1. See Anne Hartmann, “Lion Feuchtwanger, A German Opponent to Gide,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 52, 1 (2011): 109–132. A comparison of the two narratives. 2. Indian pilgrimages to the USSR by Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), as well as their travel writings on Soviet Rus­sia, are dealt with in Rahul Vaidyanath, “Soviet Studies in India,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 11, 2 (1969): 145–155. 3. On the Moscow sojourn of Qu Qiubai (1899–1935), see Tsi-an Hsia, “Ch’ü Ch’iu-­pai’s Autobiographical Writings: The Making and Destruction of a ‘Tender-­Hearted’ Communist,” China Quarterly 25 (1966): 176–212. 4. On the preconceived nature of many travel observations, see Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1–7. 5. Chogwang, “Hanmal Oegyo Mudae-­e Namgin Chinmun—­Nodo T’ũkp’a Taesa ũi Kogũp Suwŏn Yun Ch’iho ssi” (A Rare Account of the Diplomatic Scene in the Time of the Late Chosŏn ­Korea—­Mr. Yun Ch’iho, a High-­ Ranked Attendant of the Extraordinary Envoy to the ­Russian Capital), Chogwang 3, 5 (1937): 37–39. 6. Ch’iho Yun, Yun Ch’iho Ilgi (Yun Ch’iho’s Diary), vol. 4 (Seoul: T’amgudang, 1973–1989), 205–206. 7. Yun, Yun Ch’iho Ilgi, 183. 8. Yun, 200. 9. On its attitudes vis-­à-­vis Soviet Rus­sia, see Yŏng’ŭn Chang, “Kŭmjitoen P’yosang, Hŏyongtoen P’yosang: 1930 Nyŏndae Ch’oban Chapji Samch’ŏlli e Natanan Rŏsia P’yosang ũl Chungsim ũro” (Prohibited Repre­sen­ta­tions, Permitted Repre­sen­ta­tions: Focusing on the Repre­sen­ta­tions of Rus­sia Appeared in Samch’ŏlli in the Early 1930s), Sanghŏ Hakpo 22 (2008): 195–232. 10. Haech’un Kim, “Maksagwa ŭi Sinyŏn’gŭk: Mosŭkkũba Yesulcchwa ŭi Puhwal” (Moscow’s New Theater ­Performance—­Moscow Khudozhestvennyi Theater’s Resurrection), Samch’ŏlli 6, 11 (1934): 250–252. 11. See Ch’ŏlbu, “Ssabet’ŭ Tongmaeng ŭn Adong ŭl Irŏk’e Pohohanda” (That Is How the Soviet ­Union Protects ­Children), Sin’gyedan 8–9 (1933): 29–32.

318

Notes to Pages 212–213

This is an article in the leftist monthly journal Singyedan, mostly based on Anglophone and ­Japanese sources, by a journalist using the pseudonym Ch’ŏlbu. 12. Tongha Hwang, “Ilche Singminji Sidae (1920nyŏn-1937nyŏn) Chisigin ­e Pich’in Rŏsia hyŏngmyŏng” (­Russian Revolution as Seen by the Korean Intellectuals in the J­ apanese Colonial Period, 1920 to 1937), Sŏyangsaron (Western History Review) 102 (2009): 204. The article is a more general positive appraisal of the new Soviet systems of maternity protection and childcare. 13. Tongmin Yi, Haeryong Kim, Ilsŏn Ch’oe, and Myŏng Han, “Maksagwa ũi Sinyŏsŏng kwa Sinmunhwa” (Moscow’s New W ­ omen and New Culture), Samch’ŏlli 7, 8 (1935): 210–218. 14. Chinnamsaeng, “Segye Yŏsŏng Yech’an” (Paean to World’s ­Women), Pýŏlgŏngon 32 (1930): 113–120. 15. Kyewŏl Song, “Akchedo ŭi Ch’ŏlp’ye” (Abolishment of the Evil Social Systems), Tonggwang 29 (1931): 73. 16. See Hyeyŏng Ch’a, “Singminji Sidae Sobiet’ŭ Ch’ongyŏngsagwan T’ongyŏk Kim Tonghan ŭi Rosŏa Pangnanggi Yŏngu” (Research on the Rec­ords of Wanderings in Rus­sia by Kim Tonghan, a Colonial-­Age Interpreter at the Soviet Consulate General), Chungso Yŏn’gu (Sino-­Soviet Affairs) 40, 3 (2016): 401–451. Kim Sŏsam was identified in current South Korean scholarship as Kim Tonghan, a Soviet-­educated ­music and dance teacher who worked as a Korean-­Russian interpreter for the Soviet Consulate in Kyŏngsŏng (Seoul) in 1925–1938. 17. See Youn-ok Song, “­Japanese Colonial Rule and State-­Managed Prostitution: ­Korea’s Licensed Prostitutes,” Positions 5, 1 (1997): 171–217. 18. Vladimir Tikhonov, Modern ­Korea and Its ­Others: Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity (London: Routledge, 2016), 55. The first translation in abridged form was made by Ch’oe Namsŏn (1890– 1957) in 1914, and an ­adopted translation by Pak Hyŏnhwan (1892–­?) was published in 1918. 19. See Hakmun Chin, trans., “Ŭijung Chiin” (­Imagined Friend), Sinsaenghwal 7 (1922): 139–147; Chinyŏng Kim, “Ilbon Yuhaksaeng kwa Rŏsia Munhak: Chosŏn ŭi Il Sedae Romunhakdo rŭl Ch’a­jasŏ” (Korean Students in Japan and ­Russian Lit­er­a­ture: In Search for ­Korea’s First-­Generation ­Russian Lit­er­a­ture Students), Rŏsia Yŏn’gu (­Russian Studies) 25, 1 (2015): 10. The ­Russian original was published in 1897. Chin Hakmun’s (1894– 1974) ­adopted translation into Korean was published in 1922. 20. Chinyŏng Kim, Siberia ŭi Hyangsu (The Siberian Nostalgia) (Seoul: Isup, 2016), 316–321.



Notes to Pages 213–218

319

21. Yi et al., “Maksagwa ŭi Sinyŏsŏng.” 22. See Beth Holmgren, “ ‘The Blue Angel’ and Blackface: Redeeming Entertainment in Aleksandrov’s ‘Circus,’ ” ­Russian Review 66, 1 (2007): 5–22. 23. On the background of their introduction in 1933, see Nobuo Shimotomai, “Management of the Municipal Economy,” in Moscow ­under Stalinist Rule, 1931–34 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), 108–124. 24. Tongmin Yi, Haeryong Kim, Ilsŏn Ch’oe, and Myŏng Han, “Maksagwa ŭi Yŏdangwŏn kwa Sinhŭng Konggi” (Moscow’s Female Party Members and New Atmosphere), Samch’ŏlli 7, 9 (1935): 202–209. 25. Bengt Idestam-­Almquist, Landet som skall skratta (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1932), 38. 26. In ­Japanese and colonial-­age Korean usage, this loanword could also denote stylishness or smartness of dressing. 27. Yi et al., “Maksagwa ŭi Yŏdangwŏn.” 28. Cited in Wŏnmo Kim, Ch’unwŏn ŭi Kwangboknon: Tongnip Sinmun (Yi Kwangsu’s Writings on Korean I­ ndependence: The I­ ndependence) (Seoul: Tan’guk Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2009), 817. 29. Unhyŏng Yŏ, Mongyang Yŏ Unhyŏng Chŏnjip (Complete Works of Mongyang Yŏ Unhyŏng), vol. 1 (Seoul: Hanul, 1991), 70–74. 30. Kwanyong Yi, “Chŏngno Sudo San’gyŏn P’yŏnmun: Yŏgwan Hanyŏ ro Chŏngch’i e Kansŏp!” (Miscellaneous Impressions of Red Rus­sia’s Capital: Even H ­ otel Maids Interfere into Politics!), Tong’a Ilbo, June 14, 1925; Kwanyong Yi, “Chŏngno Sudo San’gyŏn P’yŏnmun: Segye Taejung ŭi Isang ŭl Chipchung” (Miscellaneous Impressions of Red Rus­sia’s Capital: The Ideals of World’s Masses Are Concentrated ­Here), Tong’a Ilbo, June 16, 1925. 31. Kwanyong Yi, “Chunghaksaeng ŭi Kongjang Kwansŭp Kwanggyŏng” (The Sight of Middle-­School Pupils ­Doing Their Factory [­L abor] Practice), Tong’a Ilbo, June 2, 1925. 32. Yi, “Chŏngno Sudo San’gyŏn P’yŏnmun.” 33. Kwanyong Yi, “Chŏngno Sudo San’gyŏn P’yŏnmun: Yaso Taesin e Lenin ŭl Kuju ro” (Miscellaneous Impressions of Red Rus­sia’s Capital: Lenin Is Made into the Savior Instead of Jesus), Tong’a Ilbo, June 17, 1925. 34. See Hyŏnhŭi Yi, “Yi Kwanyong ŭi Sasang Paljŏn kwa Hyŏnsil Ŭisik” (The Development of Yi Kwanyong’s Ideas and Real­ity Perceptions), Tongbang Hakchi (Journal of Korean Studies) 174 (2016): 163–199. 35. Theodore Dreiser, Dreiser Looks at Rus­sia (New York: H. Livenght, 1928), 66. 36. Kim, “Ilbon Yuhaksaeng kwa Rŏsia Munhak,” 20–26. 37. See Yŏnghun Kang, “Haebang Chŏnhu Ham Taehun Sosŏl e Natanan ‘Rŏsia’ P’yosang Yŏn’gu” (A Study on the Repre­sen­ta­tions of “Rus­sia” in

320

Notes to Pages 218–221

Ham Dae-­hun’s Novels before and a­ fter the Liberation), Pigyo Munhwa Yŏn’gu (Cross-­Cultural Studies) 44 (2016): 87–121. 38. Taehun Ham, Ch’ŏngch’unbo (Rec­ords of the Youth) (Seoul: Kyŏnghyang Ch’ulp’ansa, 1947), 78–79. 39. Kang, “Haebang Chŏnhu.” 40. See Hojŏng Kang, Pak Roa Si Yŏn’gu (A Study of Pak Roa Poems), Hangukhak Yŏn’gu (Journal of Korean Studies) 43 (2012): 127–155. 41. Roa Pak, “Pukguk ŭi Kyŏul” (Northern Land’s Winter), Pyŏlgŏngon 24 (1929): 2–5. 42. See Chungyŏn Yi, Ch’aek ŭi Unmyŏng (The Fate of the Books) (Seoul: Hyean, 2001), 401–502. 43. Yogŭri, “Ssobiet Kongsan Taehaksaeng Saenghwal” (The Life of a Communist University Student in the Soviet ­Union), Samch’ŏlli 7 (1930): 57–59. 44. Seyong Kim, “Maksagwa ŭi Hoesang” (Moscow’s Recollections), Samch’ŏlli 4, 3 (1932): 58–61. 45. Yŏngmin Kwŏn, Han’guk Kyegŭp Munhak Undong Yŏn’gu (Research on the History of Class Lit­er­a­ture in ­Korea) (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2014), 400–410. 46. Nakkwan Paek, 1934. “Mosŭkkŭba Kŭkchang” (Moscow’s Theaters), Samch’ŏlli 6, 5 (1934): 160–161. 47. Taehun Ham, “Ssabettŭ Yŏn’gŭk ŭi Iron kwa Silje 3” (The Theory and Practice of the Soviet Drama 3), Pip’an (Criticism) 1 (1932): 93–99. 48. Ŭlla Pak, “Mosŭkkŭba Yŏnghwa Hakkyo Ch’amgwan’gi” (Account of My Visit to the Moscow Film School), Samch’ŏlli 7, 7 (1935): 143–149. 49. Hwang, “Ilche Singminji Sidae,” 211–212. 50. Jawaharlal Nehru, “Introduction to M. R. Masani, Soviet Sidelights,” in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 7 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1972 [1936]), 128–129. 51. See Chigyu Mun, “Soryŏn Che 2ch’a 5gaenyŏn Kyehoek” (The Second Soviet Five-­Years Plan), Pip’an (Criticism) 3 (1932): 9–16. 52. Tong’a Ilbo, “Chŏngno Kungjŏn gwa T’aengk’ŭ” (A Red ­Russian Palace and Tanks), Tong’a Ilbo, April 3, 1934. 53. Maksim Litvinov, P’yŏnghwa rŭl wihan T’ujaeng esŏ ŭi Ssessesserŭ (USSR in the Strug­gle for Peace) (Khabarovsk: Dal’partizdat, 1934). 54. See Kyŏngjae Kim, “1935nyŏn Rae wa Kukje Chŏngguk Taegwan” (The 1935 Came. An Overview of the International ­Political Situation), Samch’ŏlli 7, 1 (1935): 41–53. 55. Tatiana Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early Literary History of North Korean Lit­er­a­ture and Literary Policy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 31–33.



Notes to Pages 222–224

321

56. Walter Duranty, “All Rus­sia Suffers Shortage of Food,” New York Times, November 25, 1932. 57. See David Engerman, “Modernization from the Other Shore: American Observers and the Costs of Soviet Economic Development,” American Historical Review 105, 2 (2000): 383–416. 58. John Garver, “China’s ­Wartime Diplomacy,” in James  C. Hsiung and Steven I. Levine, eds., China’s ­Bitter Victory: The War with Japan, 1937– 1945 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 3–33. 59. On the development of this new religion in precolonial and colonial-­age ­Korea, see Karl Young, “From Tonghak to Ch’ŏndogyo: Changes and Developments, 1895–1910” (PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies 2004). 60. Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Lit­er­a­ture and Leftist Culture in Colonial ­Korea, 1910–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 143. The book details Yi Sŏnghwan as the ­founder of the progressive magazine Chosŏn Nongmin in the 1920s. 61. Sŏnghwan Yi, “Ilso Chŏnjaeng ŭi Kyŏnghŏm kwa Chosŏn Minsim ŭi Tonghyang” (The Experience of the Japanese-­Soviet War and the Directions of the Korean Public Opinion), Samch’ŏlli 10, 12 (1938): 35–41. 62. Chaejŏng Ch’a, “Nyet Tongji e Koham” (To My Former Comrades), Samch’ŏlli 10, 11 (1938): 109–118, 134. 63. Chŏngsik In, “Adŭng ŭi Chŏngch’ijŏk Nosŏn e daehayŏ Tongji Chegun ege Ponaenŭn Konggaejang” (A Public Letter to My Comrades on Our ­Political Line), Samch’ŏlli 10, 11 (1938): 50–59. 64. Cited in Aesuk Yi, “Ilje Malgi Panp’asijŭm Inmin Chŏnsŏnnon” (Anti-­ Fascist ­Popular Front during the Late J­ apanese Colonial Period), in Pang Gijung, ed., Iljeha Chisigin ŭi P’asijŭm Ch’eje Insik kwa Taeŭng (Korean Intellectuals’ Perceptions of and Response to Fascism in the Colonial Period) (Seoul: Hyean, 2002), 361–397. 65. See Kaehwa Pae, “Yi T’aejun: Haebanggi Chungganp’a Munhakja ŭi Ch’osang” (Yi Tae-­jun: A Portrait of a Middle-­of-­the-­Road Writer in the Post-­Liberation Period), Han’guk Hyŏndae Munhak Yŏn’gu (Journal of Modern Korean Lit­er­a­ture) 32 (2010): 473–513. This book was prohibited in South ­Korea from 1948 to 1988. 66. T’aejun Yi, Soryŏn Kihaeng. Nongto. Mŏnji (Soviet Diary. Agricultural Land. Dust) (Seoul: Kip’ŭn Saem, 2001 [1947]), 50. 67. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 39. 68. See Yi, Soryŏn Kihaeng, 46–80. 69. Susan M. Hartmann, “­Women’s Employment and the Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years,” in Joanne Meyero­witz, ed., Not June Cleaver:

322

Notes to Pages 224–226

­ omen and Gender in Postwar Amer­ic­ a, 1945–1960, 84–103 (PhiladelW phia: ­Temple University Press, 1994). 70. Yi, Soryŏn Kihaeng, 168. 71. Yi, 170–171. 72. T’aejun Yi, “V Srazhayushcheisya Koree” (In Struggling ­Korea), Pravda, May 1, 1952. 73. He visited Moscow in 1949. See Paek Nam’un, Ssoryŏn Insang (Soviet Impressions) (Seoul: Sŏnin, 2005 [1950]). 74. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 21–24. 75. See Chinyŏng Kim, Siberia ŭi Hyangsu (The Siberian Nostalgia) (Seoul: Isup, 2016), 46–47. 76. See, for example, John Steinbeck, A ­Russian Journal (New York: Viking Press, 1948). 77. Yi, Soryŏn Kihaeng, 33. 78. Yi, , 98–99; Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 26. 79. Kees Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896–1948 (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2004), 279–281. 80. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 123–133; Hyŏnggi Sin and Sŏngho O, Pukhan munhaksa (The History of North Korean Lit­er­a­ture) (Seoul: P’yŏngminsa, 2000), 167; see also RGASPI, F. 495, Op. 228, d. 677, “Po Materialam Organa TsK TPK Gazety Rodong Sinmun, April 13, 1953” (Following the Materials from Newspaper Rodong Sinmun, the Organ of Korean ­Labor Party’s Central Committee, April  13, 1953), 3. The latter source provides a rec­ord of his downfall in the documents of Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang. 81. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 21–23. 82. Cited in Haengsŏn Yi, “Haebang Konggan, Soryŏn, Pukjosŏn Kihaeng kwa Pan’gongjuŭi” (The Space of Liberation, Travelogues on Soviet U ­ nion and North K ­ orea, and Anti-­Communism). Inmun Kwahak Yŏn’gu Nonchong (Journal of Humanities) 34, 2 (2013): 65–107. 83. On the Stalinist restoration of “­family values,” see David Lloyd Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–­1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 88–118. 84. Cited in Haengsŏn Yi, “Haebang Konggan, Soryŏn, Pukjosŏn Kihaeng kwa Pan’gongjuŭi” (The Space of Liberation, Travelogues on Soviet U ­ nion and North K ­ orea, and Anti-­Communism), Inmun Kwahak Yŏn’gu Nonchong (Journal of Humanities) 34, 2 (2013): 92. 85. Manjae Yi, Wolbukhan Ch’ŏnjae Munin tŭl (The Literary Genies Who Chose the North) (Seoul: Tapke, 2016).



Notes to Pages 227–232

323

86. Chinyŏng Kim, “Yi T’aejun ŭi ‘Pulgŭn Kwangjang’: Haebanggi Soryŏn Yŏhaeng ŭi Chihyŏnghak” (Yi T’aejun’s “Red Square”: The Morphology of the Soviet Travelogues during the Post-­Liberation Period), Rŏsia Yŏngu (­Russian Studies) 26, 2 (2016): 46–47. 87. Cited in Yi, “Haebang Konggan,” 74–75. 88. See Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 92–104. 89. Cited in Gabroussenko, 29; Gabroussenko’s translation. 90. Cited in Yi, “Haebang Konggan,” 92. 91. Kim, “Yi T’aejun ŭi ‘Pulgŭn Kwangjang,’ ” 48–49. The arrests of the opponents of Soviet occupation policy on the North Korean territory by the Soviet military authorities in 1945–1948 provided one ground for such descriptions. 92. Bernard Shaw, “Yŏga pon Rosŏa” (Rus­sia as I Saw It), Samch’ŏlli 3, 9 (1931): 65–67. 93. Cited in Wendy Z. Goldman, ­Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet ­Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 110–119. 94. See Natalia Lebina, Sovetskaya Povsednevnost’: Normy i Anomalii (The Soviet Quotidian Life: Norms and Anomalies) (Moscow: Novoye Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2015), 321–401. 95. Frances Bern­stein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 185–190. 96. See Marina Salamatova, “ ‘Nam Ugrozhaet Opasnost’ Zakhvata Gorsoveta Chuzhdym Elementom’ . . . ​Uchastie Neproletarskikh Sloev Gorodskogo Naseleniya v Izbiratel’nykh Kampaniyakh 1920-kh gg. v RSFSR” (‘We Are Threatened with a Possibility of City Soviet being Captured by Alien Ele­ ment’ . . . ​Participation of Non-­Proletarian Layers of the Urban Population in 1920s’ Electoral Campaigns in Soviet Rus­sia), Genesis: Istoricheskie Issledovaniya 4 (2005): 384–407. 97. Hŏnho Pak, Yi T’aejun kwa Han’guk Kŭndae Sosŏl ŭi Sŏnggyŏk (Yi T’aejun and the Character of Modern Korean Lit­er­a­ture) (Seoul: Somyŏng, 1999), 261–269. He gradually radicalized in 1945–1946, before his move to North ­Korea in July–­August 1946.

p o s t s c r ip t 1. See Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American ­Political Science Review 87, 3 (1993): 567–576.

324

Notes to Pages 232–236

2. Francis Fukuyama, ­Political Order and ­Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Pre­sent Day (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), 335–386. 3. Gøsta Esping-­Andersen, Politics against Markets: The Social Demo­cratic Road to Power (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1985). 4. Sangsuk Chŏn, Ilche Sigi Han’guk Sahoejuŭi Chisigin Yŏn’gu (The Research on the Korean Socialist Intellectuals in the J­apanese Colonial Period) (Seoul: Chisik Sanŏpsa, 2004), 83–94. 5. See Yŏngdŭk Cho, “1930 Nyŏndae Kyŏngju Chiyŏk ŭi Chŏksaek Nongmin Chohap Undong” (The Red Peasant ­Union Movement in Kyŏngju Area in the 1930s), Han’guk Kŭnhyŏndaesa Yŏn’gu 64 (2013): 69–91. 6. See Sugŏl Chi, “Hambuk Myŏngch’ŏn Chiyŏk ŭi Hyŏngmyŏngjŏk Nongmin Chohap Undong (1934–1937)” (The Revolutionary Peasant ­Union Movement in Myŏngch’ŏn Area, Northern Hamgyŏng Province (1934– 1937)), in Ilcheha Sahoejuŭi Undongsa (History of the Socialist Movement in the J­apanese Colonial Era) (Seoul: Hangilsa, 1991), 359–427; Chubaek Sin, 1930 Nyŏndae Kungnae Minjok Undongsa (The History of the [Korean] Domestic National Movements in the 1930s) (Seoul: Sŏn’in, 2004), 296–301. 7. Haedong Yun, Chibae wa Chach’i (The Rule and the Autonomy) (Seoul: Yŏksa Pip’yŏngsa, 2006), 105. 8. Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–50 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 43–52. 9. See Bruce Cumings, “Corporatism in North K ­ orea,” Journal of Korean Studies 4 (1982–1983): 269–294, on the North Korean model of the 1960s–1980s. 10. See Yong-­Pyo Hong, “North K ­ orea in the 1950s: The Post Korean War Policies and Their Implications,” Korean Journal of International Studies 2, 1 (2004): 215–234. 11. TASS, “Protsess po Delu Antigosudarstvennogo Shpionsko-­ terroristicheskogo Tsentra v KNDR” (The P ­ rocess against the Anti-­State Espionage-­Terrorist Center in the DPRK), Izvestiya, August 8, 1945, 2. 12. RGASPI, F. 495, Op. 228, d. 7, “Kang Din—­Kharakteristika, November  22, 1959” (Kang Chin—­the Personal Assessment, November  22, 1959), 2–3. 13. RGASPI, F. 495, Op. 228, d. 22, “Pak Mun’gyu—­Ministr Vnutrennikh Del KNDR, November 21, 1963” (Pak Mun’gyu—­the DPRK Minister of the Interior, November 21, 1963), 31. 14. Andrei Lankov, The Real North K ­ orea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39–41.



Notes to Pages 237–241

325

15. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Pro­gress Publishers, 1970), 149–150. 16. Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet U ­ nion: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates since 1917 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). A handy overview of the Marxist lit­er­a­ture on this issue. 17. Immanuel Wallerstein, ­After Liberalism (New York: New Press, 1995), 108–125. 18. Charles K. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 215–240. 19. Mervyn Matthews, Party, State, and Citizen in the Soviet ­Union: A Collection of Documents (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), xxix. 20. Helen-­Louise Hunter and Stephen J. Solarz, Kim Il-­song’s North K ­ orea (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 207–239. 21. See Lyong Choi and Il-­young Jeong, “North ­Korea and Zimbabwe, 1978– 1982: From the Strategic Alliance to the Symbolic Comradeship between Kim Il Sung and Robert Mugabe,” Cold War History 17, 4 (2017): 329–349. 22. See Herbert Obinger and Shinyong Lee, “The Cold War and the Welfare State in Divided ­Korea and Germany,” Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy 29, 3 (2013): 258–275, on social policy as Cold War international competition tool in the German and Korean cases. 23. Scott Snyder and Joyce Lee, “The Impact of the Korean War on the Political-­Economic System of North K ­ orea,” International Journal of Korean Studies 14, 2 (2010): 168. 24. Cheehyung Harrison Kim, Heroes and Toilers: Work as Life in Postwar North ­Korea, 1953–1961 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 108–111. 25. Miriam Rom Silverberg, Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1990), 48. 26. David Goodman, Communism and Reform in East Asia (London: Routledge, 1988), 16. 27. See, for example, John Peterson and Fred Weston, “Where Is North ­Korea ­Going?,” Defence of Marxism, April 26, 2017. Available at https://­w ww​ .­marxist​.­com​/­where​-­is​-­north​-­korea​-­going101006​.­htm (accessed September 11, 2019). 28. See Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, and Iosif Stalin, Rodong Kyegŭp ŭi Tang (Party of the Working Class) (Pyongyang: Rodongdang Ch’ulp’ansa, 1965).

326

Notes to Pages 241–244

29. See Thomas Stock, “North ­Korea’s Marxism-­Leninism: Fraternal Criticisms and the Development of North Korean Ideology in the 1960s,” Journal of Korean Studies 24, 1 (2019): 127–147. 30. Chaejin Sŏ, Pukhan ŭi Malksŭ-­Leninjuŭi wa Chuch’e Sasang Pigyo Yŏn’gu (Comparative Study of Marxism-­Leninism and Chuch’e Ideas in North ­Korea) (Seoul: T’ongil Yŏn’guwŏn, 2002), 122–124. 31. Das Kapital was for the first time fully translated and printed in Korean in 1947. See Karl Marx, Chabonnon (Das Kapital), trans. Sŏktam Chŏn, Yŏngch’ŏl Ch’oe, and Tong Hŏ (Seoul: Sŏul Ch’ulp’ansa, 1947 [1867]). 32. See Jae-­hyun Kim, “Marxism in ­Korea: From the ­Japanese Colonial Era to the 1950s,” ­Korea Journal 39, 1 (1999): 86–129. 33. Wŏn’gyu Yi, Cho Pong’am P’yŏngjŏn (Critical Biography of Cho Pong’am) (Seoul: Han’gilsa, 2013), 141–207, 495–585; T’aeyŏng Chŏng, Cho Pong’am kwa Chinbodang (Cho Pong’am and the Progressive Party) (Seoul: Han’gilsa, 1991) is a standard academic study of the Progressive Party. 34. Dongyoun Hwang, Anarchism in K ­ orea: ­Independence, Transnationalism, and the Question of National Development, 1919–1984 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 169–208. 35. “Int’ŏbyu: Chŏn Ch’ang’il, T’ongil Yŏndae Sangim Komun” (Interview: Chŏn Ch’ang’il, S ­ enior Advisor to the Unification Alliance), Kiŏk kwa Chŏnmang 14 (2006): 106–139. 36. Pyŏngju Hwang, “4.19 wa 5.16 ŭi Chŏnhuhan Sigi Chuyo Chŏnggch’i seryŏk tŭr ŭi Tonghyang kwa Inyŏmjŏk Chihyang” (The Movements and Ideological Orientations of the Main ­Political Forces in the Period between the April 19, [1960 Revolution] and May 16, [1961 Coup]), Kiŏk kwa Chŏnmang 14 (2006): 66–86. 37. Sŏngho Mun, “ ‘Minjujŏk Sahoejuŭi’ Chuch’anghan Kim Ch’ŏl Salligi” (Reviving [the Legacy of ] Kim Ch’ŏl, a Proponent of ”Demo­cratic Socialism”), Ohmynews, January 4, 2011. Available at http://­w ww​.­ohmynews​ .­com​/­NWS​_­Web​/­view​/­at​_­pg​.­aspx​?­CNTN​_­CD​=A ­ 0000038528 (accessed September 17, 2020). 38. See Hyŏngt’ae Kim, “Inhyŏktang Chaegŏnwi Sakŏn ŭi Kyŏnggwa wa Ŭimi” (The Developments and Meaning of the ­People’s Revolutionary Party Reconstruction Committee Case), Kwagŏ Ch’ŏngsan P’orŏm Charyojip 4 (2007): 3–25. 39. Honggu Han, “Sin Yŏngbok ŭi 60 ŭl Sasaekhada” (Thinking about Sin Yŏngbok’s Sixtieth [Anniversary]), Hangyoreh 21, May 11, 2006. Available at http://­legacy​.­h21​.­hani​.­co​.­kr​/­section​-­021075000​/­2006​/­05​/­02107​ 5000200605110609056​.­html (accessed September 15, 2020).



Notes to Pages 244–246

327

40. See Chinho Kim, “Minjung Sinhak ŭi Kyebohakchŏk Ihae” (The Genealogical Understanding of Minjung Theology), Sidae wa Minjung Sinhak 4 (1997): 6–29. 41. On destruction of the leftist ­unions in the late 1940s, ­under the direction of the US Occupation authorities, see Songja Im, Taehan Minguk Nodong Undong ŭi Posujŏk Kiwŏn (Conservative Origins of Republic of ­Korea’s Workers’ Movement) (Seoul: Sŏnin, 2007), 33–84. 42. Ch’anghun Yi and Kyehwan Yi, “Tangsi Pogi Tŭmulge Nodong Undong han Kwŏn Chaehyŏk!” (Kwŏn Chaehyŏk, Whose Engagement with ­L abor Movement Was Rare for His Time!), T’ongil News, November 4, 2012. Available at http://­w ww​.­tongilnews​.­com​/­news​/­quickViewArticleView​ .­html​?­idxno​=­100496 (accessed September 15, 2020). 43. See Hŭiyŏn Cho, “1970 Nyŏndae Pihappŏp Chŏnwi Chojik ŭi Inyŏm e taehan Yŏn’gu: Namminjŏn ŭi Chungsim ŭro” (A Research on the Ideology of the Illegal Vanguard O ­ rganizations of the 1970s: Focused on South Korean National Liberation Front), Yŏksa wa Hyŏnsil 5 (1991): 281–300. 44. See Mi Park, Democracy and Social Change: A History of South Korean Student Movements, 1980–2000 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 75–201, for a detailed treatment of the issue. 45. Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Repre­ sen­ta­tion in South ­Korea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 213–268. 46. Mi Park, “South Korean Trade ­Union Movement at the Crossroads: A Critique of “Social-­Movement” Unionism,” Critical Sociology 33 (2007): 324. 47. Segyun Kim, “Kyegŭp Undong kwa Kukka” (Class Movement and the State), in Han’guk Chŏngch’i Yŏn’guhoe, ed., Hyŏndae Chabonjuŭi Chŏngch’i Iron (­Political Theory of Con­temporary Capitalism) (Seoul: Paeksan Sŏdang, 1989), 37–77. 48. Hŭiyŏn Cho, Hyondae Han’guk Sahoeundong kwa Chojik: T’onghyŏkdang, Namminjŏn, Sanomaeng ŭl chungsim ŭro bon Pihappŏp Chŏnwi Chojik Yŏn’gu (Modern South Korean Social Movement and ­Organization: A Research on Illegal Vanguard ­Organizations Focused on Unification Revolutionary Party, South Korean National Liberation Front and South ­Korea’s Socialist Workers League) (Seoul: Hanul, 1994), 208–224, 256– 280, 313–346. 49. ­Lawyers Committee for H ­ uman Rights, Critique: Review of the U.S. Department of State’s Country Reports on ­Human Rights Practices for 1991 (New York: ­Human Rights First, 1992), 358.

328

Notes to Pages 246–249

50. Kevin Gray, “Challenges to the Theory and Practice of Polyarchy: The Rise of the ­Political Left in ­Korea,” Third World Quarterly 29, 1 (2008): 107–124. 51. See Hyun-­Chin Lim and Jin-­Ho Jang, “Neo-­liberalism in Post-­crisis South ­Korea: Social Conditions and Outcomes,” Journal of Con­temporary Asia 36, 4 (2006): 442–463, for an analy­sis of neoliberal restructuring in post-­ crisis South ­Korea. 52. Yŏngt’ae Chŏng, P’abŏl: Minju Nodongdang Chŏngp’a Kaltŭng ŭi Kiwŏn kwa Chongmal (Factions: The Roots and the Final Results of Demo­ cratic ­L abor Party’s Factional Conflicts) (Seoul: Imaejin, 2011). The factional strife and the history of the KDLP in general is well documented ­here. 53. See Eun-­shil Kim, “The Cultural Logic of the Korean Modernization Proj­ ect and Its Gender Politics,” Asian Journal of ­Women’s Studies 6, 2 (2000): 50–77, for an analy­sis of the developmentalist ethos and its influence on South Korean public consciousness. 54. See David  I. Steinberg and Myung Shin, “Tensions in South Korean ­Political Parties in Transition: From Entourage to Ideology?,” Asian Survey 46, 4 (2006):517–537. 55. See a TASS correspondence from Pyongyang for 1960, September 11: RGASPI, F. 495, Op. 228, d.22, pp. 14–16. 56. See Thomas Kalinowski, “The Politics of Market Reforms: ­Korea’s Path from Chaebol Republic to Market Democracy and Back,” Con­temporary Politics 15, 3 (2009): 287–304, on the corporate influence over the policies before and ­after the Asian Financial Crisis. 57. Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South ­Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 58. Peng Ito, “Social Investment Policy in South ­Korea,” in Rianne Mahon and Fiona Robinson, eds., Feminist Ethics and Social Policy: T ­ owards New Global P ­ olitical Economy of Care (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 94–111. 59. Jae-­jin Yang, “Parochial Welfare Politics and the Small Welfare State in South ­Korea,” Comparative Politics 4 (2013): 457–475. 60. Hyejin Kim, “ ‘Spoon Theory’ and the Fall of a Populist Princess in Seoul,” Journal of Asian Studies 76, 4 (2017): 839–849. 61. Hyorae Cho, “Industrial Relations and ­Union Politics in Large Firms in South ­Korea,” in Changwon Lee and Sarosh Kuruvilla, eds., The Transformation of Industrial Relations in Large-­Size Enterprises in K ­ orea (Seoul: ­Korea ­Labor Institute, 2006), 84–131.



Notes to Pages 250–254

329

62. Jennifer Jihye Chun, ­Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of ­Labor in South ­Korea and the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 44–68. 63. Kyŏngil Kim, Ilcheha Nodong Undongsa (The L ­ abor Movement History [in ­Korea] ­under the ­Japanese Imperialist Rule) (Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa Pip’yŏngsa, 1992), 81–82. 64. Yunsik Min, Sop’a Pang Chŏnghwan P’yŏngjŏn (A Critical Biography of Sop’a Pang Chŏnghwan) (Seoul: Star Books, 2014), 239–273. 65. Theodore Hughes et al., eds., Rat Fire: Korean Stories from the ­Japanese Empire (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 89–90. 66. Norman D. Levin and Yong-­Sup Han, Sunshine in ­Korea: The South Korean Debate over Policies ­toward North ­Korea (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2002), 8–9. 67. Benjamin Haas, “South K ­ orea Cuts ‘Inhumanely Long’ 68-­Hour Working Week,” The Guardian, March 1, 2018. Available at https://­www​.­theguardian​ .­com​/­world​/­2018​/­mar​/­01​/­south​-­korea​-­cuts​-­inhumanely​-­long​-­68​-­hour​ -­working​-­week (accessed September 16, 2020). 68. Ch’ang’ŏn Yi, Pak Chŏng Hŭi Sidae Haksaeng Undong (The Student Movement in Park Chong Hee Years) (Seoul: Hansin Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu, 2014), 186–188. 69. Taesik Im et al., eds., Nonjaeng ŭro pon Han’guksa: Kŭnhyŏndae (­Korea History Seen through the Debates: Modern and Con­temporary History) (Seoul: Yŏksa Pip’yŏngsa, 2016), 309–310. 70. See Chongik Chŏn, “Kodŭng Hakkyo ‘Kuksa’ Kyokwasŏŭi Minjokchuŭijŏk Kyŏnghyang e taehan Punsŏk” (An Analy­sis of the Nationalistic Tendencies in the High School “National History” Textbooks), Han’il Haptong Kyoyuk Yŏn’guhoe 12 (2002): 22–30. 71. See T’aehŏn Chŏng, “Sut’allon ŭi Songnyuhwa sok e Sarajin Singminji” (The [Real­ity] of Colony Disappearing amidst the Vulgarization of [Colonial] Exploitation Theory), Ch’angjak kwa Pip’yŏng 25, 3 (1997): 344–357. 72. See Vladimir Tikhonov, “The Rise and Fall of the New Right Movement and the Historical Wars in 2000s South K ­ orea,” ­European Journal of Korean Studies 18, 2 (2019): 11–44. 73. Yunjong Kim, The Failure of Socialism in South K ­ orea: 1945–2007 (London: Routledge, 2015). 74. OECD, OECD: Industrial Disputes, 2017. Available at https://­w ww​ .­oecd​.­org​/­els​/­emp​/­Industrial​-­disputes​.­pdf (accessed on September 24, 2019).

330

Notes to Pages 254–258

75. Chŏngsu Kwak, “Nodongja Kyŏngyŏng Ch’amyŏ Hwalbalhan Yurŏp, Kaltŭng Churŏ Sŏngjang Mitch’ŏn ŭro” (In ­Europe, where Workers’ Participation in Workplace Decision-­Making Is Widespread, the Conflict Is Reduced and Growth Is Boosted), Daily Hangyoreh, January 8, 2018. Available at http://­www​.­hani​.­co​.­kr​/­arti​/­economy​/­economy​_­general​ /­826695​.­html (accessed on September 16, 2020).

c o nc lu s io n 1. See Kyung Moon Hwang, Rationalizing K ­ orea: The Rise of the Modern State, 18940–1945 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 119–145, on the bureaucratic character of the colonial regime and its failure to engage in any meaningful state-­led industrial development in the 1910s. 2. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-­Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 119–145. 3. See Frank Baldwin, “Missionaries and the March 1st Movement: Can Moral Men Be Neutral?,” in Andrew C. Nahm, ed., ­Korea ­under ­Japanese Colonial Rule: Studies of the Policy and Techniques of ­Japanese Colonialism (Kalamazoo: West Michigan University, Center for Korean Studies, Institute of International and Area Studies, 1973), 193–219. 4. Ch’ansŭng Pak, Han’guk Kŭndae Chǒngch’i Sasangsa Yǒn’gu (Research on the Modern History of Ideas in ­Korea) (Seoul: Yōksa Pip’yǒng, 1991), 168–176. 5. Yunhwan Kim, Han’guk Nodong Undongsa 1 (A History of Korean ­Labor Movement 1) (Seoul: Ch’ǒngsa, 1982), 89–117. 6. First appeared in Kyegŭp T’ujaeng, vol. 3, January  1930. Reprinted in Sǒngch’an Pae, ed., Singminji Sidae Sahoe Undongnon Yǒn’gu (Research on the Colonial-­Period Social Movement Debates) (Seoul: Tolbegae, 1987), 182–206. 7. Kyǒngsǒk Im, Ijŭl su ǒmnŭn Hyǒngmyǒngka e taehan Kirok (The Rec­ords on the Unforgettable Revolutionaries) (Seoul: Yǒksa Pip’yǒngsa, 2008), 99–106. 8. Hyǒnju Yi, Han’guk Sahoejuŭi Seryǒk ŭi Hyǒngsǒng, 1919–1923 (The Formation of Socialist Forces in ­Korea, 1919–1923) (Seoul: Ilchogak, 2003), 221–226. 9. Chungsǒk Sǒ, “Ilche Sidae Sahoejuŭija tŭr ŭi Minjokkwan kwa Kyegŭpkwan” (­Japanese Colonial-­Age Socialists’ Views on Ethnic Nation and Class), in Hyǒnch’ae Pak and Ch’angnyǒl Chǒng, eds., Han’guk Minjokchuŭŭ 3



Notes to Pages 258–262

331

(Korean Ethno-­Nationalism 3) (Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa Pipyǒng, 1995), 272–342. 10. First published in Kōjō, vol. 2, February 1930, in J­apanese. Reprinted in Pae, Singminji Sidae, 348–376, in Korean translation; see Myŏngho Hyŏn, “Wŏnsan Ch’ongp’aŏp ŭi Kongganjŏk Chŏn’gae” (The Spatial Unfolding of Wŏnsan General Strike), Han’guk Tongnip Undongsa Yŏn’gu 73 (2021): 125–169. 11. RGASPI, F. 495, Op 135, d. 161, “Obrashchenie Ispolkoma Kominterna k Revolyutsionnym Rabochim i Krestyanam Korei, January 3, 1929” (The Appeal of Comintern’s Executive to the Revolutionary Workers and Peasants of ­Korea, January 3, 1929), 1–2. 12. See RGASPI, F. 495, Op. 3, d. 71, “Rezolyutsiya Politsekretariata IKKI po Koreiskomu Voprosu, December 10, 1928” (The Resolution of Comintern Executive’s ­Political Secretariat on the Korean Question, December 10, 1928), 137–149, for a lengthy analy­sis of the Korean situation. 13. Janis Mimura, Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the W ­ artime ­Japanese State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 7–40. 14. Katsuo Hori, Han’guk Kŭndae ŭi Kongǒphwa (Industrialization in Modern ­Korea) (Seoul: Chǒnt’ong kwa Hyǒndae, 2003), 108–109. 15. Kim, Han’guk Nodong, 250. 16. Profintern, “Zadachi Revolyutsionnogo Profdvizheniya v Koree” (The Tasks of Revolutionary U ­ nion Movement in K ­ orea), Vostok i Kolonii (Orient and Colonies) 23, 4 (1930): 3–4. 17. See Hŭigon Kim, “Kŏn’guk Hunjang Ch’usŏtoen ‘Ich’yŏjin Hyŏngmyŏngka’ Yun Chayŏng” (Yun Chayŏng, a “Forgotten Revolutionary” Posthumously Awarded the Order of Merit for National Foundation), Monthly Sindong’a 12 (2004). Available at https://­shindonga​.­donga​.­com​/­3​/­all​/­13​/­104071​/­6 (accessed September 29, 2020); and Svetlana Ku-­Degai, ed., Koreitsy—­ Zhertvy Politicheskikh Repressiy v SSSR, 1934–1938 (Koreans Victimized by the P ­ olitical Repressions in the USSR, 1934–1938), vol. 11 (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2008), 32. 18. Chōsen Sōtokufu, Keimukyoku, Saikin ni okeru Chōsen Chian Jōkyō (Keijō: Chōsen Sōtokufu, 1934), 12–22. 19. Chōsen Sōtokufu, Keimukyoku, Saikin ni okeru Chōsen Chian Jōkyō, 296–297. 20. See Myung Soo Cha, “Did Korekiyo Takahashi Rescue Japan from the ­Great Depression?,” Journal of Economic History 63, 1 (2003), 127–144. 21. See Toshiyuki Mizoguchi, “Economic Growth of ­Korea ­under the ­Japanese Occupation: Background of Industrialization of K ­ orea 1911–1940,” Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics 20, 1 (1979): 1–19.

332

Notes to Pages 262–268

22. Kyǒngil Kim, Yi Chaeyu: Na ŭi Sidae, Na ŭi Hyǒngmyǒng (Yi Chaeyu: My Age, My Revolution) (Seoul: P’urŭn Yǒksa, 2007), 247–255. 23. Kyǒngsǒk Im, Ijǒng Pak Hǒnyǒng Iltaegi (A Biography of Ijǒng Pak Hǒnyǒng) (Seoul: Yǒksa Pip’yǒng, 2005), 188–204. 24. Hwa Im, “Simin Munhwa ŭi Chong’ŏn” (The End of Citizenry’s Culture), in Ha Chŏng’il, ed., Im Hwa Munhak Yesul Chŏnjip. P’yŏngnon 2 (The Complete Literary and Artistic Works of Im Hwa. Criticism 2) (Seoul: Somyŏng, 2009 [1940]), 187–190. 25. Hwa Im, “Munŏjekanŭn Nalgŭn Kurap’a” (Old E ­ urope Falling Down), in Chŏng’il, Im Hwa Munhak Yesul Chŏnjip. P’yŏngnon 2, 225–228. 26. Charles K. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 32. 27. Frank McDonough, Opposition and ­Resistance in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6–9. 28. Peter Kenez, Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 20. 29. Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 38–70. 30. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000 [1923]). 31. Georg Lukács, Rekishi Bungakuron (On Historical Lit­er­a­ture), trans. Yamamura Fusaji (Tokyo: Mikasa Shōbō, 1938 [1937]). 32. Sunyoung Park, The Proletarian Wave: Lit­er­a­ture and Leftist Culture in Colonial ­Korea, 1910–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 243. 33. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 29–147. 34. Tatiana Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early Literary History of North Korean Lit­er­a­ture and Literary Policy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 167. 35. Myǒngsik Kim, “Chosǒn Minjok Kiwǒn ŭi Munhwajǒk Koch’al” (Cultural Research on the Origins of the Korean Ethno-­nation, Samch’ǒlli 7, 1 (1935): 52–58. 36. Ch’iu Pak, “Siminjǒk Chayujuŭi” (Bourgeois Liberalism), 1936, in Ch’iu Pak, Sasang kwa Hyǒnsil (Ideas and Real­ity) (Inch’ǒn: Inha Taehakkyo Ch’ul’p’anbu, 2010 [1946]), 132–141. 37. Ch’iu Pak, “Puran ŭi Chǒngsin kwa Int’eri ŭi Changnae” (The Spirit of Anxiety and the F ­ uture of the Intellectuals), 1935, in Pak, Sasang kwa Hyǒnsil, 81–90.



Notes to Pages 269–270

333

38. Myǒngsik Kim, “Tokchae Chǒngch’i wa Ŭihoe Chǒngch’i” (Dictatorial Politics and Parliamentary Politics), Samch’ǒlli 9, 4 (1937): 20–21. 39. Seyong Kim, “Chǒngno Pionel Chojik kwa Hullyǒn” (The O ­ rganization and Training of the Red ­Russian Pioneers), Samch’ǒlli 10 (1930): 7–16. 40. Gabroussenko, Soldiers on the Cultural Front, 33, 36–38. This point is emphasized ­here. 41. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. (London: Routledge, 1956 [1929]), 229–235.

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Inde x

Abe, Yoshishige, 133, 143 agriculture, impact of colonial capitalism on, 66 Alliance of Korean Revolutionaries (Chosŏn Hyŏngmyŏngja Yŏnmaeng), 189 ALMSA (Sŏnoryŏn, Alliance of the Labor Movement in Seoul Area 1985–1986), 245, 246 An, Chaehong, 175, 177 An, Ch’angho, 166 An, Hwak, 165, 171, 180 An, Kwangch’ŏn, 47, 88, 92–93, 94, 96–97, 114–115, 118, 120 An, Mak, 188 anarchism, 2, 3–4, 13, 41, 189; Chinese, 2, 4; and communism, 4; converts, 2; Korean, 3–4, 9; and Marxian socialism, 4, 189 anticolonialism, 69, 95, 98, 173–174; alliances, 80, 106, 115; and Comintern, 28; and Communism, 80, 89, 92; movements, 77; pan-national revolution, 111–112, 123; struggles, 7, 13, 24, 73, 113, 187, 205. See also colonialism; March 1 movement in 1919 anti-imperialism, 45, 52, 55–57, 65, 78, 94, 109; and bourgeoisie, 93, 94; in China (1919), 78, 256; and ethno-nationalism, 175, 200–201; international anti-imperialist solidarity campaign, 239; nationalism, 28, 80; in North Korea, 27–28; and

Sin’ganhoe, 93; and socialist independence movements, 80 Anti-Imperialist League, 135 anti-Marxism, 240–241 antisocialism, 244, 251 antisystemic movement, 81, 99 April 1960 Revolution, 242 Aristotle, 145 Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–1998, 246 Austria, 8, 12, 150, 212 authoritarian politics, 153, 184 Bauer, Otto, 144, 170, 171 Bebel, August, 33, 34, 54 Belden, Jack, 192 “Bloody May” (Blutmai) of 1929, 16 Blut-und-Boden myths, 267, 268 Boas, Franz, 180 Boles’ (Her Lover) (Gorky), 212 Bolsheviks, 33–34, 36–37, 48, 61, 104; ethno-national self-determination, 255; factions, 33, 102–103; homosexuality decriminalization, 10; and Menshevik, 103; postrevolutionary programs, 103–104; pre-1917, 10, 33, 62, 257; proletarian, 96; Russian, 48, 70, 74, 102–103, 128, 170, 234, 257; voting rights, 10 Boucek, Françoise, 77

383

384 Index bourgeois(ie), 95; individualism, 146, 268; intellectuals, 96; Korean, 115; modernity, 143, 266; national, 95; petty, 114, 115, 121, 123, 144; and proletariat, antagonism between, 80 British Labourism, 5 Brüning, Heinrich, 17 butchers, 5, 10 capital accumulation, 6, 26, 233, 236–240, 252, 254 capitalist democracy, 154 capitalist economy, 149, 150, 268 Central Committee of Korean Communist Organizations, 61, 62 Ch’a, Chaejŏng, 54 chaebŏl, 248, 249, 254 Ch’a Kŭmbong, 63, 64, 257 Chang, Chirak (Kim San), 44, 74 Chang, Hoik, 159 Chang, Hyŏkchu, 68 Chang, Tŏksu, 46 child labor prohibition, 121, 125 China, 11–12; 1945–1949 Civil War, 202; national liberation movement, 78; “new democracy” experiences, 205; postrevolutionary one-party rule, 79; as safe haven for Korean Communists, 43; War of Resistance against Japan, 16, 196 Chinese Communism, 16, 19, 78–79, 104 Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army, 188 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 74, 104, 105, 195, 199; alliance with Guomindang, 110; “spy” paranoia among cadres of, 19 Chinese Communist Party Program, 107 Chinese Koreans, 159 Chinese Nationalist Party. See Guomindang Chinese Revolution, 78 Cho, Hun, 43 Cho, Pong’am, 19, 21, 41, 53, 84, 241, 247, 251 Cho, Tongho, 61–62, 109

Ch’oe, Chaesŏ, 148 Ch’oe, Ch’angik, 44, 188 Ch’oe, Ch’angok, 186 Ch’oe, Hakso, 70 Ch’oe, Ikhan, 47, 69, 72, 91; sons of, 69 Ch’oe, Sŏhae, 67 Ch’oe, Sŏng’u, 37, 38, 42, 74, 122 Ch’oe, Yongdal, 65, 134 Chogwang, 150, 209 Chōkōzetsu (Long Discourses) (Kōtoku Shūsui), 2 Ch’ŏllima Movement, 240 Chŏn, Ch’ang’il, 242 Ch’ŏndogyo, 6, 38, 87, 164, 181, 257, 258 Chŏng, Paek, 82, 88 Chŏng, Sunnyŏn, 138–139 Chŏng, T’aesik, 50, 134 Chŏng, Unhae, 62 Ch’ŏngch’unbo (Records of the Youth) (Ham), 218 Chŏng’uhoe declaration, 88, 89–91, 97 Chŏnjinhoe, 90–91, 96 Chosŏn Ilbo, 21, 49, 62, 92, 97, 150, 175, 177 Chosŏn Dynasty, 164, 182 Chosŏnin Minhoe (Korean People’s Association), 193 Chosŏn Nonong Ch’ongdongmaeng (General Association of Korean Workers and Peasants), 62, 63 Christianity, 109, 149 Christian Socialist, 245 Chu Chonggŏn, 61 civil rights, 163 civil-status registration, 162 Civil War of 1936–1939 (Spain), 154 class, 71; “class against class” strategy, 93; class consciousness, 69; conflicts, 81; contradictions, 183; liberation, 184; middle classes, 6, 8, 9, 14, 35, 133, 144; movement, 175. See also working class Cold War, 14, 155, 206, 208, 224, 226, 228, 241 collectivism, 146, 147, 148, 149

Index 385 collectivization, 21, 107 colonialism, 6, 12, 104; censorship, 219; and contemporary totalitarianism, 153; and democratic reforms, 126; and Korea’s backwardness, 34, 100; modernization under, 49; samizdat (self-publishing) during, 70; schools of, 58; and socialism, 233–235, 264–265; united front strategy and tactics, 104. See also anticolonialism; ethno-nation (minjok), and colonial nationalism Comintern, 4, 13–14, 71–74, 222, 258–259; and anticolonial nationalists, 28; and Communist programs, 104–105, 108–111, 113–115, 122–124; definition of Zionism, 174; and domestic revolutionaries, 54, 58, 63, 65; and factionalism, 75–77, 78, 80–83, 85–88, 92, 93, 97–98; and German Communist Party, 137; KUTV. See KUTV (Communist University of Eastern Toilers); and migratory revolutionaries, 36–38, 42–43, 46; and revolution, 173, 174; schools in Moscow, Korean students at, 47–50; and Trotskyist activity, 23; ultra-radicalism, 17 commercialization, 66–67 Commoners’ Village (Yi Kiyŏng), 67 Communist espionage, 49 Communist Manifesto, 4, 20, 41, 132 Communist milieu, 4, 71–74, 87, 89, 99 Communist Party, 14; of China. See Chinese Communist Party (CCP); of Korea. See Korean Communist Party; pre-1945 Japanese, 26 Communist programs, 25, 74, 126–128; in the core and on the periphery, 102–106; holiday per year, 121; Korean. See Korean Communist programs; militarist and statist nationalist organizations, disbandment of, 119 Communist underground, 11, 13–14, 51, 86, 190, 228, 243–244, 258, 264; and

Comintern, 137; and Japanese police, 70; and Keijō University student radicals, 135; Kyŏngsŏng Communist Group, 123, 223; New Science Research Society, 72–73; proto-Communist groups, 132; and students friendships, 58; urbanbased groups, 78 Communist University of Eastern Toilers. See KUTV (Communist University of Eastern Toilers) conscription system, 125, 138, 248 corporal punishments, 58, 112 corporations, 248, 249 corporatism, 238–239 counter-elites, 233 coups: Guomindang (1927–1928), 79, 112; Kapsin coup (1884), 39; May 16, 1961 military coup, 242 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 212–213 cultural capital, 9, 47, 52, 69 cultural development, 12, 106, 158 cultural essentialism, 76 cultural nationalism, 26, 106 Current Duties of the Korean Communists, The (An, Kwangch’ŏn), 114 Das Kapital (Marx), 244 December 1928 Resolution, 95, 113, 258 Declaration of the Korean Communist Party, 109, 182 decolonization, 26, 127, 247 de-marketization, 239, 249 democracy: capitalist, 154; and dictatorship, 115; interbellum, 17; “new democracy,” 194–195, 196, 202–203, 205; people’s, 123–124, 127; pro-democracy activism, 28–30; progressive, 125–126; social. See social democracy; and South Korea, 28–30, 241–243, 246–249 democratic emancipatory modern society, 126–127 Democratic Labor Party, 247–249, 251

386 Index democratic reforms, 124–125, 127, 192, 238; and colonialism, 126; and North Korea, 124, 126 democratic revolutions, 11, 103, 105, 110, 116, 242, 267 Democratic Socialism, 242 democratization, 10, 108, 119; of high culture, 219; and party-state, 15; political, 246; radical, 103 deportations, forced, 22 diaspora, Korean, 35–39, 71, 159, 257 dictatorship, 104–105, 144, 194, 242, 243, 246; democratic, 115; fascism-like, 27, 269; proletarian, 8–9, 106, 113, 114 Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific) (Engels), 82 Die Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätenfrage (Bauer), 170 Dimitrov, Georgi, 144 Ding, Ling, 197, 198 discipline, 14 Doihara, Kenji, 193 domestic revolutionaries, 54–55; peasants, 66–70; students and intellectuals, 55–58; workers, 58–66 dormitory regulations, 119, 120, 121 Dostoevsky, Feodor, 212 Dreiser, Theodore, 217 Duranty, Walter, 221 economical pragmatism, 127 Economics Research Society (Kyŏngje Yŏn’guhoe), 134–135 education, 126, 196; discrimination in, 112; free, 107, 109, 110, 126, 239; mandatory primary school, 107, 111, 125, 197; sector, radical democratization of, 119 elites, 8, 100, 252 emergency, state of, 17, 18, 21–23, 184 Engels, Friedrich, 82, 169, 237 espionage charges, 19, 20, 41, 44, 235 ethnic minorities, 10, 34, 103

ethno-nation (minjok), 157, 158, 183; continuous importance of, 158–159; and ethnic group (chongjok), distinction between, 179; history of, 183; in Korea, beginnings, 159–162; Korean ethnogenesis and tradition studies, 178–181; and Korean Marxism, 172–174; Marxist Criticisms and Nationalist Reactions, 174–178; in precolonial Korea, 157–158; Proto-Constructivism and the Teleology of Liberation, 181–182; self-determination, 255 ethno-nation (minjok), and colonial nationalism: ethnicity as a legal and discursive category, 162–163; homogeneity, blood, and spirit, 163–164; Koreans and their national character, 165–166; national homogeneity and nationalism heterogeneity, 166–169 evening schools, 56, 69, 72, 263 exiles, 37, 39–44, 88, 97, 165, 167; denouncing, 19; and KNRP, 189; resistance groups, 202, 257; and students abroad, 52–53, 58, 71; survival of, 50 existentialism, 137, 268 factions and factionalism, 73, 75, 76, 247; affections-based, 76; and agenda-setting process, 77; and anticolonialism, 77, 80, 89, 92, 95, 98; and anti-imperialism, 78, 80, 93, 94; “class against class” strategy, 93; as a constructive practice, 77–79; direct physical violence, 83; elimination of, 98; factional lines, 73; ideological, 77, 81; interests-based, 76, 77, 79; and internationalism, 97; Korean and Chinese dynamics, compared, 78; leader-centered, 76; modern faction of the Korean ruling class, 112; “old” Seoul faction, 90; origins in Korea, 79–81; orthodox vs. nationalist, 82–85; personal, 76; polemics, and socialist discourse deepening, 99–101; political,

Index 387 77; principles-based, 76; and proletarian hegemony, 91–95, 98; real, 73; Seoul and Shanghai faction, 82, 83–84, 88; Sin’ganhoe, polemics around. See Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society); social movement (Communist) factions, 84–85; tactical differences, 76, 78, 94; theorybased approach to, 98. See also coups factory-floor workers movement, 50 factory girls, 118 factory housing, 123 factory workers, 8, 58, 63, 85, 257 fascism, 137, 149, 150, 152–153, 184, 225; social, 17; system of power, new totalitarian order in, 144–145; ultranationalist, 153 female cadres, 74 female employment, 120, 224, 229 female nudity, 213 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 208, 230 feudal mistreatment, abolition of, 118 films, 213, 220–221 First Regiment of the People’s Guerrilla Army, 142 folk psychology, 168–169 food shortages, 221–222, 225 Foreign Workers Publishing House, 43 France, 12, 18 Frankfurt School, 265–266, 268 freedom: of citizens, 149; individual, 267; of societal collectives, 149 Freire, Paulo, 245 Fukumotoism, 90 Gabroussenko, Tatiana, 266 Gakidŏ (Hell of the Starving) (Chang, Hyŏkchu), 68 gender equality, 125, 220, 229 gender relations, 212 gender role, 213 Gentile, Giovanni, 148 German Communist Party, 17, 71, 104, 108, 257

Germany, 7, 11, 16, 108, 264; 1924 Action Programme, 108; and fascism, 137, 150, 153; workers’ uprisings in, 7 Gide, André, 150, 208, 227, 230 global rebellion, year of (1919), 5–7 global socialism, 236, 237, 239 gold mining, 59 Gorky, Maxim, 212 Grand Dictionary of the New Words, 82 grassroots: Korean Communist programs, 116–122; and middle-level cadres, 33; in Moscow, 243–245; radicalism, 234 Great Depression, 68, 114, 135, 174, 221, 259, 270 Great Labor Struggle (Nodong taet’ujaeng) of 1987, 245, 246, 250 Great Purges, 18–19, 43, 50, 68, 122, 261 guerrilla struggle, 18, 140, 142 guerrilla unit, 201–203 Guomindang, 105, 108, 138, 174, 189, 190, 199; and Chinese Communist Party, 90, 110, 187; coup (1927-1928), 79, 112; massacres, 17 Ham, Taehun, 218, 220 Hamgyŏng Province, 39, 40, 136, 243, 261; natives of, 39–40, 57, 73; Northern, 51, 57, 62, 65, 69, 124, 136, 234; Southern, 50, 52, 234, 261 Han, Hyŏngkwŏn, 40 Han, Myŏngse (Andrei Abramovich Han), 37 Han, Wigŏn, 87, 93, 97–99, 115–116, 118, 120, 173–174, 257–258 Han, Yong’un, 22, 167–168 Han’guk Tongnip Undong chi Hyŏlsa (Bloody History of the Korean Independence Movement) (Pak, Ŭnsik), 165 Hansŏng Sunbo, 2 Hartmann, Nicolai, 136 Heidegger, Martin, 268 Hilferding, Rudolf, 17, 72, 144

388 Index Hindenburg, Paul von, 17 Historical Novel (Lukács), 265 History of Korean Literature, The (Chosŏn munhaksa) (An, Hwak), 165 Hitoshi, Yamakawa, 3 Hobsbawm, Eric, 13–14 Hoernle, Edwin, 11 Hometown (Kohyang), 70 homogeneity, 164, 179, 183 Hong, Inŭi, 223 Hong, Kimun, 177–178, 182 Hong, Yangmyŏng, 91–92, 94 Hŏ, Sŏngt’aek, 123–124 Hume, David, 76–77 Hungarian Revolutions, 8 Hungary, 7, 264 Hwang, Aesidŏk (Esther Hwang), 168 Hwang, Pyŏng’in, 78 Hwang, Sŏg’u, 2, 3 Hwangsŏng Sinmun (Capital Gazette), 160, 161 Hyŏn, Ch’unbong, 234 Ichikawa, Asahiko, 135 ideological factions, 77, 81 Idestam-Almquist, Bengt, 214 illiteracy liquidation campaign, 111, 125 illiteracy reduction, 191 Im, Hwa, 139, 181, 235, 262–263 “Imperial Way” principle, 148 Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) (Remarque), 132 indentured slavery, abolition of, 118 Independence Club (Tongnip Hyŏphoe), 5 Independent Labor Party (Tongnip Nodongdang), 242 independent workers’ party, 246 India: Non-cooperation Movement, 11 individualism, 146, 150, 268 industrial growth, 11–12 industrialization, 34, 221, 223 Industrial Revolution, 177 industry nationalization, 110

“Initiatory Group, the,” 122 insurance policies, 12, 112, 121, 122 intellectual progress (1930s), 131–136 intellectuals: as domestic revolutionaries, 55–58; radical, 33, 131; role of, 96, 100; world-be, 53 intelligentsia, radicalized, 100 interest conflicts, 77, 79 internationalist national identity, 199–201 International Lenin School, 45 interracial marriages, 167 inter-state system, 16 Ireland, 7 Irkutsk Communist Party, 36–37, 40–42, 61, 79, 80, 82, 107 Italian fascism, 150, 153 Izvestiya, 235 Jacobins, 14–15, 18, 27 January Society (Irwŏlhoe), 47 Japan, 58, 108, 256; censorship, 222; and China, 131; invasion of China (1937), 222; Manchuria invasion (1931), 135; Public Security Preservation Law (1925), 84; Sino-Japanese War, 131; suppression of Communist guerrillas, 19 Japanese colonization, discontent following, 255 Japanese Communist movement, 78 Japanese consular police, 42–43 Japanese espionage charges, 19, 20 Japanese fascism, 153 Japanese Ideology (Tosaka, Jun), 152 Japanese imperialism, 95, 98, 114, 184, 205, 252 Japanese-owned landholdings, 127 Japanese police, 258–259; agents, 73; arrests, impact on Communist activities in Korea, 113; publication on the Korean security situation, 260 Japanese prisoners of war: exploitation of, 225; and the role reversal, 204–205 Japanese student movement, 119

Index 389 Jaspers, Karl, 268 Johnson, Chalmers, 104 Kaebyŏk, 84 Kang, Lavrenty (Kang, Chin), 51–52, 71, 135, 236, 261 Kang, Man’gil, 75 Kang, Mokku, 50 Kangdong Political School, 140, 142 KAPF (Korea Artista Proleta Federacio, Korean Federation of Proletarian Artists), 131–132, 220 Kapsin coup (1884), 39 Kautsky, Karl, 33, 34, 145, 171 Kawaii, Eijirō, 133 Kawakami, Hajime, 3, 50, 133 Keijō Imperial University, 46, 50, 52, 71, 135, 240 Khalkhin Gol battle, 222 Khodynka tragedy, 221, 227 khvostizm, 87 KIM (Communist International of Youth), 52 Kim, Afanasiy, 61 Kim, Chaebong, 61–62, 68, 72 Kim, Ch’an, 62, 83, 88, 110 Kim, Ch’angman, 195, 203 Kim, Ch’ŏl, 243, 251 Kim, Ch’ŏlch’u, 121 Kim, Ch’ŏlsan (Kim Chersan), 43 Kim, Ch’ŏlsu, 45–46, 88 Kim, Chunyŏn, 92 Kim, Chwajin, 4 Kim, Haech’un, 211 Kim, Hail, 78 Kim, Hakch’ŏl, 198–199, 198–200 Kim, Hoban, 65 Kim, Hyŏngsŏn, 120 Kim, Ilsu, 226 Kim, Il Sung, 18, 28, 79, 124, 200–201, 235–236, 263; guerrilla unit, 201–203; regime of, 20–21 Kim, In’gŏk, 50

Kim, Kijin, 164 Kim, Kijŏn, 181 Kim, Kyŏngjae, 84–85 Kim, Kyusik, 38, 80–81 Kim, Kyuyŏl, 95–96 Kim, Man’gyŏm (Ivan Stepanovich Serebryakov), 37, 41–42 Kim, Mujŏng, 188 Kim, Myŏngsik, 5, 45–46, 179–181, 267, 269 Kim, Namch’ŏn, 139, 265 Kim, Nangnim, 186 Kim, Pyŏngno, 94 Kim, Richard, 167 Kim, Rip, 40 Kim, Saguk (Kim Haegwang), 84 Kim, Samnyong, 56 Kim, Saryang (Kim Sich’ang), 18, 58–60, 164, 185, 186, 205, 269; in Beijing, 187, 188; and CCP organizational and political work, 199; and Chinese Communist Eighth Route Army guerrillas, 187; escape, background of, 186–188; experiences from his stay in Japan, 204; fluency in Chinese, 198; focus on grassroot-level organizations, 197; and internationalist national identity, 199–201; on a Japanese POW camp, 204; Japanese proficiency and literary fame in Japan proper, 186–187; and Kim Hakch’ŏl, 199, 200; and Kim Il Sung, 198–199, 200–201; and Korean Independence League, 188; and Korean patriots, 194; language switching, 185; on local militia members, 197; on method of political education, 197–198; and Murayama Tomoyoshi, 186; on “new democracy” policies in China, 196; on new Korean identity-in-making, 200; and omnipresence of minbing, 197; and peasants’ markets, 194–195; on primary education accessibility, 197; on rectifications, 196; on resident Koreans’ society

390 Index Kim (continued) in China, 193; on socialist nation building, 199; solacing tour to the Korean students, 188; stay in luxurious hotel in Beijing, 192–193; on two worlds in war-torn China, 192–196; view on Provisional Government, 194; view on ten policies of CCP, 195–196; on villagers and CCP leaders, 197; and Yan’an, 196; and Yi Iksŏng, 202; and Yi Yŏngsŏn, 188 Kim, Segyun, 246 Kim, Seyong, 49, 220, 269 Kim, Sŏsam, 212, 229 Kim, T’aejun, 57, 181, 193 Kim, Talsam, 142 Kim, Tanya, 19, 20, 42, 43, 45, 53, 57, 76, 83 Kim, Wŏnbong, 44, 189 Kim, Yaksu, 47, 61, 72 Kim, Yongbŏm, 48, 51 Kim, Yŏngman, 257 Kim, Yuly, 43 Ko, Kyŏnghŭm, 93, 94 Ko, Myŏngja, 19 Kojong (Sunjong’s father), 87 kokutai (national polity), 148 Kollontai, Alexandra, 220 komchvanstvo (Communist swagger), 86 Korean Communist Alliance, 261 Korean Communist movement, reinvention of, 95–99 Korean Communist Party, 50, 61, 82, 123 Korean Communist programs: Communists hopes and demands, 123–126; early optimism, 106–108; of grassroots organizers, 116–122; Korean responses to the Comintern’s radicalism, 114–116; of Moscow-based Korean Communists, 122–123; new radicalization, 111–114; towards a two-staged revolution, 108–111 Korean Council of Leftist Unions, 261 Korean Democratic Labor Party (KDLP, Minju Nodongdang), 246–249, 247

Korean Empire, 160 Korean identity formation, new, 201 Korean Independence League, 188 Korean intelligentsia, second-generation Russophone, 61 Korean League for Total National Manpower, 188 Korean Marxism, 172–174, 269 Korean National Front Alliance (Chosŏn Minjŏk Chŏnsŏn Yŏnmaeng), 43, 189 Korean National Revolutionary Party (KNRP, Chosŏn Minjŏk Hyŏngmyŏngdang), 43–44, 189 Korean-ness, 27, 164–165, 168, 175, 182, 187, 203, 266 Korean progressive movements, 84 Korean proletarian movement, 80, 97, 98 Korean Provisional Government, 38, 188, 190, 194 Korean Revolution, democratic stage of, 111 Korean socialism, 5; in the 1920s, 257–259; in the 1930s, 259–263. See also socialism Korean Socialist Party (Han’in Sahoedang), 79, 80 Korean Soviet Government, 118, 121 Korean Soviet Republic, 109 Korean students abroad, 44–50, 233 Korean Volunteer Army (KVA, Chosŏn Ŭiyonggun), 43, 188, 190, 202, 205; activities, 44; and the liberated area, 189–192; and “new democracy,” 202–203; Northern China Unit (Hwabuk Chidae), 44, 190 Korean Volunteer Corps (Chosŏn Ŭiyongdae), 189–190 Korean War, 4, 70, 125, 155, 199, 206, 224, 235, 253 Kōtoku Shūsui, 2 Kōyama, Iwao, 27 Kozaki, Hiromichi, 1 Kropotkin, Peter, 3 Kungminhoe (National Association), 61

Index 391 Kunisaki Teidō, 135 KUTV (Communist University of Eastern Toilers), 45, 47–49, 51, 73, 122, 173, 219 Kwangjin, Kim, 182 Kwŏn, Chaehyŏk, 244, 246 Kwŏn, Osŏl, 69, 72, 83–84 Kwŏn, Podŭrae, 159, 160 Kwŏn, Taehyŏng, 261 Kwŏn, Yŏngt’ae, 50, 73 Kwŏndoksa, 82 Kyegŏp T’ujaeng (Class Struggle), 173 Kyŏngju, 234 Kyŏngsŏng Communist Group, 57, 123, 223, 262 Kyoto School, 27, 152 labor movement activists, 87, 246 labor unions, 50, 62, 107, 121, 124, 234. See also trade unions Lake Khasan battles, 209, 222 land: redistribution, 106, 110, 115, 122, 124–125, 192, 239; reform, 110, 116, 118, 124, 270 landlords, 69, 87, 94, 115, 124, 192; agents of, 67; and bourgeoisie, 94; in the Taihang base area, 192 leader-centered factions, 76 League Against Imperialism, 135 League for Reestablishment of the Korean Communist Party, 260 Lee, Namhee, 245 Lenin, Vladimir, 9, 53, 61, 86, 169–171, 245 Leninism, 9, 29, 48, 82, 95, 97, 100. See also Marxist-Leninist (ML) faction; MarxistLeninist (ML) militants Leninist parties, 13–14; “new type,” 13; political practice of, 15 Li, Kang (pseudonym for Yang, Myŏng), 173, 177 liberated zone, 44, 194 Limerick, 7 liquidationism, 93 Litvinov, Maxim, 221

Lohnarbeit und Kapital (Wage Labor and Capital) (Marx), 82, 132 Long March (1934–1935), 78 Lozovsky, Solomon, 124 Lukács, Georg, 265 lunch provisions, discrimination in, 120 Maeil, Sinbo, 148, 170 Manchuria, 4, 19, 132, 262 Manifesto, 106–107 Mannheim, Karl, 270 Mao, Zedong, 194, 196 March 1 movement in 1919, 46, 116, 163, 255; anticolonial uprising, 255; independence movement, 87; and women, 10 March 1946 land reform, 124 market-based economy, 127 Marx, Karl, 8, 33, 72, 132, 236, 244, 265 Marxian socialism, 2, 4 Marxian socialists and anarchists, cooperation between, 4, 189 Marxism, 3, 132, 133, 157; and ethnonational Issues, 169–172; and the national question, 171–172 Marxist historical theory, 182 Marxist-Leninist (ML) faction, 82, 97–98, 114, 120, 135 Marxist-Leninist (ML) militants, 94, 173 Marxist works, 240–241 mass-based organization, 100 mass-based socialist movement, 245 mass consumption, 6, 15–16, 221, 233 mass demonstrations of June 1987, 87, 246 masses, 102, 121, 233; factory, 101; spontaneous movements of, 85–86 mass festivities, 213 mass mobilization, 93, 100, 105, 106, 145 Mass Party (Minjungdang), 242, 246 Materialy po Natsional’no-kolonial’nym problemam, 173 maternity policies, 26–27, 110–111, 121, 212, 223 mediaeval feudal society, 232

392 Index medical service, 107, 125–126, 239, 270 Meiji type, 232 Mensheviks, 34, 103 Meyerhold, Vsevold, 220 middle- and lower-ranked cadres, 26 middle classes, 6, 8, 9, 14, 35, 133, 144 migratory revolutionaries: diaspora, 35–39; educated second-generation Korean, 35–36; emigration and homecoming, 50–55; exiles. See exiles; students abroad, 44–50 militarization, 240 military alliance treaty, unequal, 248 military parade, 211 Minjungsa, 82 Minsŏng, 187 Miyake, Shikanosuke, 133–134, 135 Miyamoto, Wakichi, 143 modern bourgeois civil society, 149 modernity, 72; emancipatory, 127; industrial, 233 modernization, under colonialism, 49 modernizational tendencies, 103, 104, 105 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 124 Moscow, 216, 269–270; Bol’shoi Theater, 219; as capital of human progress, 223–226; Communists of, 216; crowds, 213; drinking prohibition in, 216; high-speed modern development of, 228; hospitality in, 211; impressions of visitors, 217–218, 228; metamorphoses of (1896–1937), 209–213; and modernism, 213; new class stratification in, 214; of the New Economic Policy era, 218; oppression and grassroots, 243–245; postrevolutionary palette, 218; prerevolutionary, 212, 227; privacy semblance, 217; from revolutionary zeal to new normalcy, 214–223; social or political radicalism, 220; travelogues between literature and politics, 208–209; trials (1936-1938), 22; as two-faced Janus, 211 Moskau 1937 (Feuchtwanger), 208

Mother (Gorky), 70 Mother (Pudovkin, film), 220–221 Mukyū Ikka (Endless Family) (Kim, Saryang), 204 multiculturalism, 158 multilingual activists, 53 Munhak, Kungmin, 148 Myŏngch’ŏn County, 234 Na, Kyŏngsŏk, 2 Nam, Manch’un, 110 Nam, Manch’un (Pavel Nikiforovich Nam), 17, 36, 37–38, 63, 67, 74, 80, 89, 110 national culture, 26, 46, 127, 175 national history textbooks, 252–253 nationalization, 125; of factories, 110; of industries, 115 national liberation, 23, 78, 81, 104–105, 108, 110, 111, 126, 207 national sovereignty, 10, 105, 167 National Youth Corps, 154 nations and nationalisms, 100, 157, 267; bourgeois, 97; bourgeois-democratic, 80; civic, 184; cultural, 106; depoliticization, 175; dissecting, 265–268; factions, 97; as proto-constructivist position, 170; pure-blooded, 181 nation-states, 163–164 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 221 neocolonialism, 81 neo-Japanism, 84 nepmans, 217 New Asian Alliance (Sina Tongmaengdan), 45 new democracy, 194–195, 196, 202–203, 205 New Economic Policy (NEP), 9, 127, 217, 218, 229 new humans, 146, 147 New Korea Society. See Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society) New Science Research Society, 72–73 night labor for youth, prohibition of, 121

Index 393 Nikolas II, Tsar, 209 Nishida Kitarŏ, 27 No, Paengnin, 38 Nogin, Viktor, 62 non-Communist nationalists, 93, 100 nonindustrial workers, 229–230 non-mainstream factions, 87–88 nonsocialist national movements, 113 North Chŏlla Communist program, 121–122 Northern Star Society (Puksŏnghoe), 47 Northern Wind Society (Pukp’unghoe), 47 North Korea, 79, 126, 128, 142, 200, 202, 206, 270; and democratic reforms, 124, 126; economic crisis, 28; and global socialist century, 235–239; land reforms in, 124; and Marxist militants, 134; minjok. See ethno-nation (minjok); nationalist and internationalist antiimperialism, 27–28; official ideology of, 253; rapid and independent industrialization plans, 240; Soviet influences, 124, 139, 224–225, 235; subjectivity ideology, 146; and Tan’gun myth, 27–28, 160–161, 166–167, 183; welfare system, 126, 128; writings, travelogue, 226 Nosaka Sanzō, 189 October 1917 revolution, 9–10, 103, 126, 132 October 1929 Wall Street crash, 259 oikumene, 7 old-age pensions, 110–111 On Coalition Government (Mao), 195 On New Democracy (Mao), 195 On the Present Tasks of the Working-Class Vanguard (Han, Wigŏn), 173 Oriental Bureau of the Comintern, 109 Oriental Development Company, 109 Overseas Koreans Foundation, 159 Pae, Sŏngnyong, 151 Paejae School, 55

Paek, Nam’un, 150, 178–179, 181–182, 224 Pak, Ch’angyŏng, 136 Pak, Ch’ansŏng, 167 Pak, Chinhong, 57, 74 Pak, Chinsun (Ivan Fedorovich Pak), 20, 38, 40, 72 Pak, Ch’iu, 20, 27, 136, 155–156, 184, 236, 240, 267–268; analysis of contemporary times, 145; biography of, 136–143; on Bolshevism, 145; on bourgeois civil society, 149; collectivity and individuality dichotomy, 147, 149; colonial-era analyses of contemporary totalitarianism, 153; on contradictory nature of Watsuji Tetsurō, 153; criticism of Japanese Imperial ideology, 152; dialectical comprehension, 147, 152; editorial job at Hyŏndae Ilbo, 139; on fascisms, 151, 152; first job of, 137; on individuality and subjectivity, 146; interest in Marxism, 143; on Japan’s pioneering Husserlian phenomenologist, 152–153; as journalist at Chosŏn Ilbo, 138; at Keijō University’s Philosophy Department, 138; and Miyamoto Wakichi, 136, 143; modern freedom, definition of, 149; on need for an antifascist alliance, 154; and Pak Hŏnyŏng, 138, 155; part in organizing the Democratic National Front, 139; part in organizing the Korean-Soviet Cultural Association, 139; philosophical inquiries of, 137; at the Philosophy Department, 136; as political commissar of First Regiment of the People’s Guerrilla Army, 142; radicalization, in his student years, 137; remarks about the Kyoto School idealist philosophies, 152; return to Seoul, 138; on right-wing nationalism, 156; on right-wing totalitarianism, 150; right-wing totalitarian world-views, criticism of, 148–149; suspensions at Keijō University, 137; as teacher for the

394 Index Pak (continued) would-be guerrillas, 140, 155; on ultranationalism, 154; understanding of social contradictions, 146; universalist streak in his life and career, 142–143; and US Occupation authorities, 139; visit to Pyongyang, 139; writings, publication of, 139–141 Pak, Chŏngae (Tsoi, Vera), 73, 74 Pak, Chonghong, 136–137, 140 Pak, Hŏnyŏng, 19–21, 42–43, 45, 52–53, 138–139, 143, 235, 262, 264 Pak, Hyosam, 189 Pak, Minwŏn, 225 Pak, Minyŏng (Nikifor Alexandrovich Pak), 43 Pak, Mun’gyu, 134, 236 Pak, Nikanor, (Pak, Pyŏngnyul), 140 Pak, Roa, 218–219, 229 Pak, Sŏngjun, 244, 247 Pak, Ŭnsik, 165–166 Pak, Yŏngch’ul, 143 Pang, Chŏnghwan, 250 Pan-National Council of the Korean Trade Unions (Chŏnp’yŏng), 123–124 Park, Geun-hye, 249 Park, Mikhail, 225 Park, Sunyoung, 1 parliamentarism, 4–5 Particularities of the Communist Movement in Korea and the Question of its Development, The (Yi Chaeyu), 116 party organizational theory, 78 party-state, 14–16; and democratization, 15; political form, 232 pathos, 145 pauperization, 67 peasantry: collectivization of, 21; landhungry, 110, 112, 115 peasants, 34, 66, 71, 103, 118, 232, 234, 263, 270; agrarian revolution, 94; illiteracy, 70; movement, 87; power of government of, 127; “red” associations, 68, 69, 72

Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 245 people’s committees, 70, 264 people’s democracy, 123–124, 127 “people’s militia” system, 109 People’s Party (Inmindang), 49 people’s republic, 112 People’s Revolutionary Party (Inmin Hyŏngmyŏngdang), 243 People’s Victory 21 (Kungmin Sŏngni 21), 246 permanent employment, 250 personal factions, 89 Petrograd (St. Petersburg), 10, 61, 212 Petrovka, street, 212 Philosophy of the Crisis, The (Wigi ŭi Ch’ŏrhak) (Pak Ch’iu), 145 Pieck, Wilhelm, 65 Platform of Action of the Communist Party of Korea, 122, 123 Platform of the Korean Communist Party, 106–107 plebeian radicalism, 7, 9, 150 Poland, 169 political asylum, 39, 42 politically inclusive attitudes, 127 political realists, 8–9 political struggle, 91 politization, of factories, 108 popular sovereignty, 167 Posŏng, 55 Postliberation Communists, 124 postwar austerity, 225 Practical Learning (Sirhak) school, 178 Pravda, 224 primitive communities, 180–182 principle-driven factional rivalries, 76 private capitalism, 217, 229 Problems of Leninism (Stalin), 195 pro-democracy activism, 28–30 productive capacities development, 125 professors, 133–134 Profintern, 65, 260 progressiveness of Soviet life, 224

Index 395 Progressive Party (Chinbodang), 133, 241, 242 proletarian hegemony, 91–95, 98, 103, 109 proletarian movement, 62, 80, 265 prostitution, 212, 218–219, 229 Protectorate Treaty (Ŭlsa Choyak), 160 Protestants, 6, 8; layfolk, 8; nationalists, 40–41, 258 proto-constructivist, 157, 170, 183 proto-Koreans, 178–179, 267 Provisional People’s Committee for North Korea, 125 public hospitals, 126 public toilets, 225 Pulkkot, 109, 110 Puyŏ people, 179 Pyongyang, 139, 198–199, 258; alternative modernity, 226; Pyongyang Upper Middle School, 58 Qu, Quibai, 53 racial equality, 220 radicalism, 12–13, 16–17, 146, 248; modernization by mass mobilization, 106; redistribution of land, 106; social, 127 radicalization, 6–7, 57, 112 railway workers, 65, 250 rank-and-file cadres, 14, 71, 87, 109, 120, 218 rational thinking, 152 raznochintsy, 85 reading societies, 57, 71, 72, 234, 263 realism, 8–9, 23, 115, 151 Red Age, 14, 35, 227, 230, 241; essential traits, 11–16; limitations and contributions, 25–27; movement, 72; and state of emergency, 16–21 redistributive justice, 108, 253, 254 Red Square, 224 Red Square Cap (Pulgŭn Kangmo), 135 Red Vienna, 8, 12

“Red Wave” (1919-1923), 7–11 reformist parties, 241–243, 244 religion and religious organizations, 80, 109. See also Remarque, Erich Maria, 132 Renan, Ernest, 171 Resurrection (Tolstoy), 211, 212 Retour de l’U.R.S.S (Gide), 208 revolutions: agrarian, 94, 113, 115; bourgeois-democratic, 105; democratic, 11, 103, 105, 110, 116, 242, 267; intellectuals, 85; and Moscow, 214–223; movement, 257; October 1917 revolution, 9–10, 103, 126, 132; pan-national anticolonialism, 111, 123; revolutionary wave in Europe, 9; Russia-based Korean revolutionary émigrés, 80; socialist, 107, 182; two-stage, 28–29, 108–111; upsurge, transitional period of, 96. See also domestic revolutionaries; migratory revolutionaries rice prices, 259–260 rightist deviation, 91 Rodong Sinmun, 158 Roh, Muhyun (No Muhyŏn), 248–249 Roh, Tae Woo, 251 Rolland, Romain, 23 Romanov Dynasty, 256 Rosenberg, Alfred, 152 Roter Frontkämpferbund (Alliance of Red Front Fighters), 17, 18 round-table discussion (1935), held by Samch’ŏlli editorial office, 212, 213, 214 rural development, 106 rural owners-cultivators, 115 Russia, 6, 8, 39; backward country, definition of, 103; -based Korean revolutionary émigrés, 80; October 1917 revolution, 9–10, 103, 126, 132 Russian Bolsheviks. See Bolsheviks Russian Maritime Province, 21, 35, 59, 170, 209 Russian radicals, 8–9

396 Index Russian Revolution, 207, 214–215 Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP), 33, 34 Russophile attitude, 218 Sakurai, Saburŏ, 135 Samch’ŏlli, 22, 167, 211, 212, 213, 221, 229 Schmittean “state of emergency” (Ausnahmezustand), 18 secret police, 19, 20, 42, 112, 243 Selected Works (Kim, Saryang), 187 self-determination, 163, 167, 255 self-reliance (chuch’e) ideology, 125–126, 241 semi-feudal capitalism, 118 Seoul: and Shanghai, faction, 82, 83–84, 88; streetcar workers, 63; strike by Katakura Silk-Spinning Factory, 120 Seoul Rubber Factory, 50 Sergeev-Artyom, Fyodor, 62 sex trafficking, 112 sexually transmitted diseases, 219 Shabshina, Fanya Isaakovna, 139 shakaishugi, 1 Shanghai: Koreans in, 42; and Seoul, faction, 82–83, 88 Shanghai Communist Party, 38, 61, 106 Shanghai Korean Communist Party, 80 Shanghai Provisional Government, 10, 166, 214 Shaw, Bernard, 228–229 Shestov, Lev, 268 Shibusawa, Eiichi, 160 Shinto myths, 138, 153, 266, 267 Shiragi matsuri (Sillaje), 234 Shlyapnikov, Alexander, 34 Siberian Koreans, 61 Silverberg, Miriam, 240 Sim, Sangjŏng, 246–247 Sin, Hyŏnjung, 135 Sin, Iryong, 92–94 Sin, Namch’ŏl, 16–17, 58, 172–173 Sin, T’aeyŏng, 142

Sin, Yŏngbok, 244–245, 247 Sin’ganhoe (New Korea Society), 100, 174, 258; Chŏng’uhoe vs. Chŏnjinhoe, 89–91; formation of, 90; June 10, 1926, and beyond, 88–89; Pak Chinsun vs. Nam Manch’un, 85–88; reshaping on a proletarian and peasant basis, 114; Tokyo branch of, 112; workers and peasants entry rate, 93 Sinhŏng, 137 Sinkyedan (New Stage), 46 Sinsaeng (New Birth), 178 Sŏ, Hŭi, 203 Sŏ, Insik, 27, 150 social citizenship, 12 social democracy, 4, 29–30, 34, 151, 154, 216, 246–248; European, 15, 18, 33, 238, 239; in Germany, 16–17; movement, 13, 144; reformism, 100, 238–239; in South Korea, 133, 241–243; working-class organization, 14 social fascism, 17 social housing programs, 12 social insurance payments, 122 socialism, 103, 232–233, 252; colonial-age, 233–235, 264–265; as continuity of struggle against the logic of accumulation, 253–254; and counter-hegemonic narrative of South Korea, 250–253; criticism of, 265–268; definitions of, 1; varieties of, 2. See also Korean socialism Socialist Labor Law, Article 13, 126 socialist radicalism, 2, 25, 29, 103–104 socialist resistance, 263–264 socialist revolution, 28–29, 107, 182 Socialist Revolutionary Party (Sahoe Hyŏngmyŏngdang), 46 socialist society, 8, 111 Socialist Workers League (Sanomaeng), 246 Social Mass Party (Sahoe Taejungdang), 242 social reform, 4, 230 Song, Kŏnho, 75 Song, Kunch’an, 78

Index 397 South Chŏlla League for Korean Communist Party Re-establishment, 120 Southern Hamgyŏng Communist Youth movement, 50 South Hamgyŏng Province Cadre Organization (Kanbu Kigwan), 52 South Korea, 4, 81, 139–140, 226, 240–243, 270; accumulation and socialism, 253–254; antisocialist censorship in 1950s-1980s, 244, 251; Communists, 154–155; and Democratic Labor Party, 246–249; extremist nationalism, 153; and First Regiment of the People’s Guerrilla Army, 142; leader-centered factions in, 76; leftist unions, 244; Leninism in, 29; limits of political socialism in, 249–250; and Marxism, 241; minjok. See ethno-nation (minjok); multiculturalism, 158; politics of resistance, 245; pro-democratic struggles in, 28–30; radicalism in, 29–30; social democratic tradition (1950s and 1960s), 241–243; socialism as counter-hegemonic narrative, 250–253; transmogrifications of socialism in, 28–30; and US Occupation, 49, 247, 264; working class fragmentation in, 249–250 South Korean Liberation Strategy Party, 244 South Korean National Liberation Front, 244 Soviet Bolsheviks. See Bolsheviks Soviet Union, 10, 74, 86, 110, 230; collectivization in, 21; combating racist and chauvinistic attitudes, 230–231; developmental achievements, 223–224; internationalism, 230–231; Koreans from, 159; maternity protection and socialized childcare system of, 212; social policies, 111; voting rights in, 217; world-historical value of experiences of, 226–231 Spain, 154 Spann, Othmar, 152

Ssoryŏn Kihaeng (Soviet Diary), 223 stageism, 29 Stalin, Joseph, 18, 34, 43, 171–172 Stalinist Soviet model, 7, 227, 237 Stalinist violence, 22, 24 Stalin’s Moscow, 213, 226 Stasova, Elena, 17 streetcar workers, 61, 63 students: and Communist underground, 58, 135; as domestic revolutionaries, 55–58; engaging in illegal work, 51; foreignbased, 44–50, 257; hakch’ul (studentorigin) activists, 245, 247, 248; Japanese student movement, 119; self-defense units, 119 Study on Korea through Figures (Succha Chosŏn Yŏn’gu) (Yi, Yŏsŏng), 49 Sukchong (Chosŏn king), 178 Sun, Yat-sen, 53 Sun and Moon Society (Irwŏlhoe), 82, 88, 91, 114 Sunjong (emperor), 87, 164, 257 surplus value theory, 132, 267 Sushen (K. Suk-sin) tribes, 179 Sweezy, Paul, 244 Syngman, Rhee, 84, 242 systemic competition, 240, 249 tactical differences, 76, 78, 94 Taehan Maeil Sinbo (Korea Daily News), 161–162 Taejonggyo cult, 81 Taihang Mountains bases, 44, 187–190, 192, 194, 197–198, 199, 200, 202 Taisho Democracy period, 45 Taiwan, 26, 119, 262 Takahashi, Satomi, 153 Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (Mao), 196, 197 Tanabe, Hajime, 152 Tan’gun, 27–28, 160–161, 166–167, 181–183; bloodline of, 167; myth, 181–182

398 Index tenants and tenancy, 110, 112, 260; associations, 69; disputes, 114; payments and fees, 112, 196; rate, 67, 115; rights, 113, 115 Ten Thousand Li of a Dull-Witted Horse (Nomamalli) (Kim, Saryang), 60, 187, 199–200 theatrical propaganda, 198 Theoretical and Practical Mistakes in the Period of Direction Shift in Korean Proletarian Movement and Their Critique (Han, Wigŏn), 257 Theses on the Agrarian Issues, 107, 111–112, 119 Theses on the Labor Issues, 107, 111–112, 119 Third World: movements, 28; welfarism, 239, 270 Three Han, 179 Tianjin, 193 Tokyo Imperial University, 133 Tolstoy, Leo, 212 Tomoyoshi, Murayama, 186 Tong’a Ilbo, 21, 46, 64, 163–164, 216, 221, 225 Tongnip Sinmun (The Independence), 166, 178, 214, 215 Torii, Ryūzō, 180 Tosaka, Jun, 152 Toshihiko, Sakai, 133 totalitarianism, 26, 148, 150, 151, 153 trade unions, 3, 33–34, 51, 54, 104, 109, 219, 229, 245, 256–258, 260. See also labor unions transnationalism, 74 Trotsky, Leon, 21, 34, 144, 216 Trotskyist movement, 13 Tsarist empire, 10, 16, 35–36, 149, 211, 212, 219, 227 Tsoi, Vera (Pak Chŏngae), 51 Tuesday Society, 19–20, 42–47, 82, 84, 88, 94, 96 Tverskaya, street, 212, 213

ultra-leftism, 85, 92, 259 ultranationalism, 81, 143, 153, 154 underground Communist Party. See Communist underground unemployment: benefits, 110, 111; insurance, 12, 112, 121 Unification Revolutionary Party, 244 unionization, 118, 250 unions and associations, 68–69, 72, 116, 263. See also labor unions; trade unions United States, 213, 234, 242, 247, 248 United States Occupation, 139; authorities, 154; liberal education reforms, 133 university students. See students Urban Industrial Mission (UIM), 245 utopia, 230, 269, 270 vanguard, 98; of mass anticolonial struggles, 113; party, 93, 234 Varga, Eugen, 134 Versailles Peace (1919), 12 Vesyolye Rebyata (film), 213 Vision 2030, 249 Vladivostok, 37, 39–40, 51, 52, 61, 65, 167 Voitinsky, Grigory, 37, 110 voting rights, 227, 230 Vsesoyuznyi Gosudarstvenyi Institut Kinematografii, 220 wage laborers, 112 wages, 260; equal pay for equal work rule, 125; increments, 120; minimum, 118, 122; special wage rates for night shifts, 121 Wales, Nym, 44 wartime mobilization, 125, 131 Watsuji, Tetsurŏ, 153 weapons, 140, 155, 216, 221 Weimar Germany, 11, 16, 45, 74, 111, 240 welfare state, 126, 242, 270; commitments, 126; development, 249 welfare system, 112, 128, 239, 249; agendas, 247; model, 121; modest, 1; policies, 127; reform, 113; social, 110; universal, 249

Index 399 weltanschauung, 18 What Is to Be Done (Lenin), 245 Wilhelmian militarism, 256 Wilson, Woodrow, 255 Wilsonian declarations, 255, 256 Wilsonian “self-determination,” 163 witch-hunts, 19, 20, 22, 244 women: attire, 214; part in overthrowing Tsarist authorities, 10. See also female cadres; female employment; gender equality Wŏnsan general strike (1929), 258 workers, 34–35, 71, 95, 107, 118, 246, 254, 263, 270; -based movement, 58–62, 244; bona fide, 33, 51; conditions of, 113; female, 229; power of government of, 127; radicalism, 66; uprisings, in Germany, 7; urban, 123; wages. See wages; welfare, 114. See also welfare system Workers’ Opposition, 34 Workers’ Party, 125 working class, 75, 81, 93, 98, 238, 249; consciousness, 94; fragmentation, and limits of political socialism, 249–250; votes, 248 working hours per day, 111, 118, 120, 125, 223 workplace food provisions, 123 workplace movements, 81 World War, First, 2, 9, 24, 35 Xingcheng (Liaoning), 193 Yan’an, 44, 57, 73, 188, 193, 195–197, 203 Yang, Myŏng (Li Kang), 20, 42–43, 68, 71 Yi, Chaeyu, 55–58, 72–73, 116–120, 134–135, 143, 262 Yi, Chŏnggyu, 242 Yi, Chongnim, 135, 260, 261 Yi, Ch’ŏngwŏn, 78 Yi, Chuha, 63–65, 71–72 Yi, Chuhong, 11

Yi, Hoje, 142 Yi, Horyong, 1–2 Yi, Hun’gu, 67 Yi, Hwayŏng, 48 Yi, Hyojŏng, 57 Yi, Hyŏnsang, 56–57 Yi, Hyosŏk, 251 Yi, Iksŏng, 189, 202 Yi, Kangguk, 65, 71–72, 134, 137, 235 Yi, Kit’aek, 120 Yi, Kiyŏng, 55–56, 67, 70, 228 Yi, Kwangsu, 148, 166, 178 Yi, Kwansul, 57, 262 Yi, Kwanyong, 216, 217, 227, 229 Yi, Munhong, 52 Yi, Pŏmsŏk, 153 Yi, Pongsu, 46 Yi, Sŏnghwan, 222 Yi, Sŏngt’ae (Kim, Chunsŏng), 19, 20, 82, 83 Yi, Sun’gŭm, 57 Yi, T’aejun, 139, 155, 223–225, 224, 225–226, 228, 231 Yi, Tonggyu, 11 Yi, Tonghwa, 133 Yi, Tonghwi, 40–41, 52–53, 95 Yi, Tongnyŏng, 166 Yi, Unhyŏk, 96 Yi, Yŏngsŏn, 188 Yi, Yŏsŏng, 49, 177 Yilou (K. Ŭpnu), 179 Yiwaiji (The Unexpected Collection) (Ding, Ling), 197 Yŏ, Unhyŏng, 4, 20–21, 40, 52–53, 132, 188, 216–217 Young Pioneers, 269 Yu, Chinhŭi, 46, 61 Yu, Chino, 227 Yun, Chayŏng, 261 Yun, Ch’iho, 209, 211, 213, 227 Zhdanov, Andrei, 225 Zionism, 174 Zuoquan (Liaoxian), 190

a b ou t the au t hor

Vladimir Tikhonov is professor of Korean and East Asian studies in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Oslo University. Previously, he taught at Kyunghee University (Seoul, 1997–2000). His research focuses on the history of modern ideas in ­Korea and currently on Korean Communist movement. He published Social Darwinism and Nationalism in ­Korea: The Beginnings (2010) as well as Modern ­Korea and Its ­Others: Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity (2015). He also coauthored Intellectuals in Between: Koreans in a Changing World, 1850 to 1945 (2022) and coedited Buddhist Modernities—­Re-­inventing Tradition in the Globalizing Modern World (2017) and Military Chaplaincy in an Era of Religious Pluralism (2017). He is concurrently a columnist for South ­Korea’s progressive Hankyoreh Daily.

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