Social reform in northern Korea and founding of the DPRK

Liberation and divided occupation in 1945

Japan’s defeat ended colonial rule, but American and Soviet occupation zones divided the peninsula at the 38th parallel before Koreans could form a single government. People’s committees and political organizations sought to shape the new order, while trusteeship and a provisional government through the US–Soviet Joint Commission were discussed internationally. Disputes over political participation and the direction of state-building intensified among occupation authorities and Korean actors. Source 1

Central institutions and political forces in 1946

The Provisional People’s Committee of North Korea was formed in February 1946 under Kim Il Sung. Soviet support mattered in leadership formation and administration and security, but domestic Communists, activists from China, Soviet Koreans and Manchurian guerrillas brought different experiences and interests. The exclusion of nationalist leader Cho Man-sik illustrates the narrowing political space for forces outside Communist leadership. Source 1 · Source 2

Land reform: confiscation and redistribution without payment

The March 5 land law ordered confiscation of Japanese, collaborator and qualifying landlord property and redistribution to cultivating peasants without payment. Recipients obtained ownership subject to restrictions on sale, mortgage and tenancy. The reform removed landlord rent and changed smallholders’ economic position, widening rural support for the new authorities while provoking resistance and southward movement among dispossessed groups. Source 3

This reform was not immediate agricultural collectivization. Its center in 1946 was the abolition of tenancy and allocation of land to individual households. Post-Korean-War collectivization was a different policy phase. Distinguishing ownership, cultivation and state procurement and taxation makes the changes experienced by recipient farmers and later generations more intelligible. Source 3 · Source 4

Industrial nationalization, labor and women’s rights

Nationalization of major industry in August brought factories, mines, banks and transport facilities belonging to Japanese owners and collaborators into the state sector. Settlement of colonial ownership, restoration of production and preparation for planning were combined. Small private businesses did not all disappear on that date. The large scope of nationalization also reflected northern colonial industry and the weight of Japanese-owned assets. Source 5

The June labor law and July law on equal rights for women sought to change working hours, employment relations and legal standards in family and social life. Legal equality supported wider participation in education, work and politics without instantly establishing equality at home or work. Mass organizations and administrative bodies promoted reform while also transmitting the party’s political line. Source 2 · Source 6

The Workers’ Party and establishment of the republic

The merger of the North Korean Communist Party and New People’s Party created the North Korean Workers’ Party in 1946. Organizational growth widened the governing base while other parties lost the ability to compete independently for power. Amid failed negotiations for a unified government, the Republic of Korea was established in the South and the DPRK in the North on September 9, 1948. Kim Il Sung became premier, a title distinct from his later presidency. Source 6 · Source 1

Soviet troops withdrew at the end of 1948, while advisers, arms and economic cooperation continued. The republic incorporated liberation-era reforms into separate state institutions and hardened division. Later warfare, purges, personal dominance and the development of Juche grew from this starting point without already being complete in 1948. The reform coalition and its unresolved conflicts help explain subsequent change. Source 1 · Source 7

The merger: from vanguard party to mass party, four factions under one roof

The founding congress of the Workers' Party of North Korea, held in Pyongyang from 28 to 30 August 1946, confirmed the merger of the North Korea Bureau of the Communist Party of Korea and the New People's Party. But this merger did not spring from the desire of Korean communists themselves. As the Korean history archive (Usuyeoksanet) states, the Soviet Union was doing in Korea what it did in Eastern Europe with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and the Hungarian Working People's Party: converting a vanguard party into a mass 'workers' party' that could embrace broader strata. In a speech of 26 September, Kim Il Sung called the merger 'the foundation of a Workers' Party representing and defending the interests of the labouring masses,' insisting the party must be 'the vanguard of the working masses' and a 'combat unit' with iron discipline. In reality, few Korean communists wanted the merger, and Kim Il Sung's leadership was not accepted by the majority of the movement at the time; he had been appointed leader by the Soviets rather than elevated by his peers, while the Yan'an faction figures Kim Tu-bong, Kim Mu-chong and Choe Chang-ik enjoyed greater popular standing.

The congress laid this compromise bare. 801 delegates represented roughly 336,000 members; 36 percent had been imprisoned under Japanese rule and 53 percent had spent the occupation abroad. By occupation, office workers numbered 385, the largest single group, reflecting how a Communist Party rooted in workers and peasants and a New People's Party rooted in intellectuals and the petty bourgeoisie became one body from two different social bases. The two party papers, Chongno and Chonjin, were merged to create Rodong Sinmun. The leadership was also balanced: of 43 first Central Committee members, 13 belonged to the domestic faction, 12 to the Yan'an faction, 6 to the Soviet-Korean faction and 4 to Kim Il Sung's guerrilla faction. But nominal representation diverged from real power. Kim Tu-bong was elected chairman with Kim Il Sung and Chu Yong-ha as vice chairmen, yet Kim Il Sung was the de facto leader. Because the Soviets made clear that opposing Kim meant opposing the Soviet Civil Authority, the congress floor saw Pak Pyong-so declare that Koreans 'needed a leader' and brand Kim's critics as reactionaries.

The cost of the merger was billed immediately. In his speech Kim Il Sung denounced communists who opposed the merger as 'a small group of arrogant leftists who thought they were the only true Communists,' while Kim Tu-bong criticized dissenters in the New People's Party for 'right opportunism.' In the purge of the domestic faction that followed in early 1947, between 40,000 and 60,000 members were expelled. This mass party, built not by voluntary union of the two parties but under Soviet sponsorship, showed from its first day that suppressing internal factional conflict would become the party's central task.

Who wrote the constitution: a Pyongyang document with Moscow's edits

The republic proclaimed in Pyongyang on September 9, 1948 was the end of a year of paperwork. In November 1947, as the South drifted toward separate elections under the US military government and the US-Soviet Joint Commission collapsed that October, the People's Assembly of North Korea set up a 31-member constitutional drafting committee. A draft was finished in February 1948 and put to an "all-people discussion" from February 11 to April 25; on July 10 the People's Assembly adopted it as the Constitution of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. That was the nominal procedure. But as Andrei Lankov has shown from declassified records, the draft was in effect edited in Moscow, where Terentii Shtykov and Stalin sat together reviewing the articles, with some clauses later rewritten by Soviet supervisors. Modeled on the 1936 Stalin constitution, it ran ten chapters and 104 articles, codifying land reform, industrial nationalization, and assorted freedoms and rights. The Supreme People's Assembly election of August 25, the first held in the North, was in form a ratification of a predetermined result: per Lankov, even the seat allocation was drawn up in advance by Shtykov and fellow Soviet generals, with no Koreans present. Each district fielded a single candidate, and the North officially recorded 99.97 percent turnout and 98.5 percent approval. Of 572 seats, 212 went to the North and 360 were reserved for the South, a device signaling that the South lay within the new state's territory; the southern deputies were said to have been indirectly elected at Haeju by 1,080 people's delegates chosen underground under the US occupation. On September 9 the first session of the assembly brought the constitution into force and made Kim Il Sung premier and Kim Tu-bong chairman of the presidium (nominal head of state). The crux was that the new state declared itself the government of all Korea, not of the northern half; making Pyongyang rather than Seoul the capital answered the contest over which was the legitimate seat. Fifteen days earlier the Republic of Korea had been proclaimed in the South, and in December the UN General Assembly recognized the southern government as the only lawful one on the peninsula, so the two states' rival claims to the whole territory hardened into institutions.

The troops left, the people stayed: the December 1948 withdrawal

On 25 December 1948 the Soviet government declared that the withdrawal of Soviet troops from northern Korea was complete. The withdrawal was not, however, decided suddenly that autumn. Troop movements had begun in October, and the body that formally requested it was not the DPRK government established on 9 September 1948 but the Supreme People's Assembly that had convened before it. A new state could not enter the international arena with foreign troops on its territory, so the demand for withdrawal was itself a formal assertion of sovereignty. In the south at the same time, Syngman Rhee's government was asking for American troops to stay. NSC 8/2, the National Security Council report submitted to President Truman on 22 March 1949, recorded that contrast: American forces did not leave the south until June 1949, and then left roughly five hundred military advisers behind.

Did the withdrawal mean the Soviet Union had let go of the peninsula? The documents of the time say no. NSC 8/2 judged that although the Soviet occupation forces had in fact withdrawn, "they left behind a well-trained 'People's Army' partly officered by Soviet Koreans who had served in the Red Army, and Red Army personnel attached to the Soviet 'embassy' in the north are acting as advisers." The Korean People's Army had already been publicly proclaimed on 8 February 1948; NSC 8/2 estimated northern forces at 75,000 to 95,000, with the core People's Army at 56,040 as of 3 February 1949. Withdrawal did not abolish an army; it left an already-built army under Korean names while shedding the Soviet uniform. Some four thousand Soviet personnel subsequently remained as military advisers and specialists to continue building the army and training its commanders, staying until 1953. Among them was Senior Lieutenant Yakov Novichenko, who at Kim Il Sung's first mass speech in Pyongyang in March 1946 covered a thrown grenade with his body and lost his right arm, guarding the Korean leadership with his life rather than a rifle.

Who wanted the withdrawal? Historians divide. One account explains it as a contest of opinion at the United Nations: if the Soviets pulled out first, the case for keeping US troops in the south would weaken, and Washington's effort to have the southern government recognized by the General Assembly resolution of 12 December 1948 as the only lawful government would suffer. The other stresses geography: Korea bordered the Soviet Union, so Moscow had no need to keep garrisons there, whereas American troops in the Japanese islands had come across the Pacific and could not simply disappear in the same way. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive. In late December 1948 Moscow convened talks among Korean, Chinese and Soviet representatives on strengthening the North's military, and then appointed Terentii Shtykov as the DPRK's first ambassador, sending him to Pyongyang with a mission of some forty officers, including five generals and twelve colonels. The army left; a command post under the name of an embassy moved in.

The results were double-edged. Formally the North became a sovereign state without occupation troops and settled the American question before the South did, and that formal advantage was used later in armistice and peace-treaty arguments. In substance, however, the axis of command, training and weapons supply merely shifted into institutions bearing Korean names, filled by people and standards that had come from the Soviet Union. That the same Soviet Union, having completed its own withdrawal that December, summoned Kim Il Sung to Moscow in March 1949 to promise large-scale military aid and signed a military agreement in June shows that December 1948 was not the end of the relationship but a change in its form.

What was settled and what was not: the unfinished argument over the founding

The founding of the republic on 9 September 1948 settled some things. A separate state apparatus stood north of the 38th parallel, Kim Il Sung headed it, and the property relations created by the 1946 reforms (owner-cultivator farms, state-owned industry) hardened into legal order. After Soviet troops left in December the state remained, and its leadership had already controlled land, key industry and mass organisations since 1946. In that sense 1948 was not a starting point but the year the gains of 1946 and 1947 were closed out in the form of a constitution and a government.

Far more was left unsettled. First was unification: both halves claimed to be the sole legitimate government of the whole peninsula, and the US-Soviet Joint Commission deadlocked. Second was where power actually lay. Pak Hon-yong, who took the posts of deputy premier and first foreign minister in the 1948 cabinet, had led the Workers' Party of South Korea and entered the new state as the representative of southern organisation, only to be purged in 1953 as the scapegoat for the Korean War's defeat. This shows that the 1946 merger, which bound the northern and southern factions under one roof, deferred rather than resolved the question of how power was shared. Third was the character of the reforms themselves. The reforms of 1946 did not proclaim socialism. The leadership of the time denied that a socialist state was being built at once and instead advanced a stage of 'people's democracy' in which a range of forces took part. The word 'democratic' surviving in the state's name is the trace of that.

Historians still divide over how to read this founding. The Cold War consensus, Soviet-side documents, and the US State Department's 1950 report held that the republic was established 'under Soviet auspices' and 'inherited whatever authority it has exercised directly from the Soviet Union.' The grounds for that view are real. In September 1945 Moscow instructed its commanders in Korea to build a bourgeois-democratic power on a broad bloc of anti-Japanese democratic parties, but to put a 'pro-Soviet' government first and not to introduce Soviet-style orders. Terentii Shtykov reviewed the draft constitution with Stalin, and Soviet generals predetermined the seat allocation for the August election.

On the other side, work by Bruce Cumings, Charles Armstrong and Suzy Kim, drawing on North Korean documents captured in the Korean War (US National Archives Record Group 242) and on Soviet documents opened after 1991, argues this state was no mere transplant. Local people's committees arose on their own initiative, the Soviet army recognised them and handed over administrative authority, and land reform, literacy campaigns and elections actually operated in the everyday lives of peasants and women, making the north a 'liberatory space.' On this reading, Soviet Stalinism adapted to Korean conditions, and that adaptation was the distinctiveness of northern socialism. Even within this school there is disagreement over who was the subject: Armstrong stresses a state-led revolution, Suzy Kim stresses negotiation between state and society and individual subjectivity.

A further assessment holds that the two views occupy different levels rather than contradicting each other. Soviet direction and resources were the 'from above' condition of the 1948 founding; the owner-cultivators and local organisations produced by land reform were the 'from below' condition. Yet criticism remains that this scholarship understates the violent side, that the quickly erected police state and the victims of the purges can be blurred by a narrative of social transformation. In the end the greatest unresolved question this event left is not whose power founded the state, but whose state it was.