Soviet Military Advisory Group in North Korea

Name and character

Russian sources call the members military advisers and their head the chief military adviser; South Korean scholarship uses the descriptive name 'Soviet military advisory group in North Korea'. The occupation administration from which the apparatus descends was the Soviet Civil Administration, formed on 24 August 1945, formally a civilian administration but originally a military organization, and the official ruling authority in northern Korea until 9 September 1948. Colonel General Ivan Chistyakov, commander of the 25th Army, chose Pyongyang as the army headquarters and thereby the capital; Major General Nikolai Lebedev, a political officer of the 25th Army, trained Kim Il Sung and coined the state's official name; and Terentii Shtykov, de facto leader in 1945-1948, edited the initial draft of the constitution and formed the first cabinet. The occupation phase also produced a documented record of repression: Soviet soldiers committed rape against Japanese and Korean women and looted the property of Japanese and Koreans, and the administration allegedly built a relationship with the Soviet Sakhalin administration to secure a cheap Korean workforce, with the Korean workforce reaching about ten thousand on Sakhalin alone by 1950.

Formation and secrecy

Soviet soldiers were instrumental in creating and developing the Korean People's Army and Air Force from 1945, and the Korean People's Air Force academy was founded under Soviet leadership on 25 October 1945 to train pilots. After the occupation troops left at the end of 1948 the USSR retained military advisers, technicians and naval personnel. Advisers were not registered with the consular department of the Soviet embassy, gave the party Central Committee a pre-departure undertaking not to disclose secrets, and arrived in civilian clothes, with Chinese uniforms sewn for them within two or three days. The source states almost all of the advisers were Soviet Koreans, Soviet citizens of Korean nationality, some as Korean-language interpreters and others as military advisers and specialists, and their role as direct conduits of Moscow's policy is still underestimated.

Organization and material support

A pact concluded on 17 March 1949 provided arms and equipment for six infantry divisions and three mechanized units plus arms for eight battalions of border constabulary, and, once North Korea had sufficiently trained air personnel, 20 reconnaissance aircraft, 100 fighters and 30 bombers. Kim Il Sung's March 1949 Moscow trip returned with aid pledges including loans for Soviet civilian and military goods, new rail and airway links, joint stock companies, an agreement for Koreans to study engineering in the USSR and the right to station Soviet naval units at Chongjin; Meretskov and Shtykov pressed North Korean requests for Soviet specialists, arguing such presence would strengthen Soviet influence in Korea even after the troops withdrew. In January 1950 Stalin wrote that Kim might need Soviet technical assistance and specialists and that the USSR was ready to render it; in April 1950 Kim's request for Russian military instructors at a new academy was approved, and in late May 1950 a request for fuel, medicine and ships was approved in less than a day. Under a Council of Ministers decision of 16 May 1950, 246 military advisers were dispatched and served in corps staffs and divisions and, after the war began, in corps staffs, the second echelon and rear staffs. A secret directive ordered that advisers not be attached to KPA vanguard units or field army staffs and that not one adviser cross the 38th parallel.

Conduct of the war

Shortly before the war Lieutenant General N. A. Vasiliev was appointed chief military adviser, coordinating closely with Ambassador Shtykov, though the secret Stalin-Shtykov correspondence shows Shtykov was in practice the link between the Soviet leadership and the advisory apparatus. On the second day of the war Shtykov reported that North Korea attacked at 04:40 on 25 June but that once the Soviet military advisory group could not accompany the troops south of the 38th parallel the North Koreans failed to organize combat orders, were not skilled with artillery and tanks, and communications failed; the advisers had been excluded from the invasion force for fear their capture in the South would give the US a pretext to intervene. Stalin's telegram of 1 October 1950 ordered that every means be taken so that not a single adviser be taken prisoner, a passage reported as the reason the advisers' presence in North Korea was long not disclosed. In late November 1950 Shtykov and Vasiliev were relieved for 'miscalculations in work' during the counteroffensive in northern Korea, and Lieutenant General V. N. Razuvaev, who replaced Shtykov as ambassador, simultaneously became chief military adviser and held both posts almost to the end of the war.

Size and wartime record

Sources give competing figures for the group's size. Alongside the 246 dispatched in May 1950 stands an archival figure of only 123 Soviet military advisers with the Korean People's Army as of 17 November 1950, cited in Khrushchev's recollection that Stalin recalled advisers to avoid their capture. Also cited are US Department of the Army evidence that 2,000 military advisory personnel and 1,000 security personnel remained after the December 1948 withdrawal, and the 19 June 1950 CIA estimate of a four- to five-thousand-man Soviet mission headquartered at the embassy in Pyongyang with advisers infiltrated throughout government, economy and political organizations. That estimate reflects an agency that described the DPRK as a firmly controlled Soviet satellite that exercises no independent initiative, and it is not a neutral count; none of these figures can be fixed as the single number. After the front stabilized on the 38th parallel at the start of 1951 the advisers operated mainly in rear areas near the Yalu River; 11 military advisers and 7 civilians were killed in 1951 alone, and in October 1951 seventy-six people were decorated with Korean national orders for helping the KPA against the American and English interventionists. Razuvaev's report of 16 February 1951 records 33 officers in each corps charged with 'describing combat activities', but no comprehensive report on the group's own organization has been disclosed, so research on it remains limited.

Limits of the periodization

Russian scholarship frames the advisory group's activity as spanning the Korean War of 1950-1953, and on the eve of the armistice Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky, chief of the Soviet General Staff, ordered the chief military adviser that by the moment of signing there should be not a single Soviet adviser in KPA combat units and that only a minimal number of advisers remain in Korea. The year 1953 is therefore the archival horizon of documented adviser presence, not a documented dissolution. A recalled figure sometimes attached to the group's size cannot serve as a count.