“Shooting between our people is not only a disgrace to the nation but also a serious hindrance to nation-building,” Kim told the students.
He told a citizens’ assembly that “genuine Communists” could never have shot the young people, and he blamed “fake Communists” who had infiltrated the party. The cure for youthful discontent in Sinuiju and across the North, Kim said, was paying more attention to the masses and ridding the Communist Party of “rogues.”
Sinuiju changed Kim, convincing him that he and all party leaders risked chaos if they did not keep an ear to the ground.
Within a few weeks, Kim began giving “on-the-spot guidance” at farms, factories, and mines, listening to complaints and instructing all government and party officials to do likewise. The word “Communist” was associated with the beastliness of Russian soldiers, so Kim either soft-pedaled or eliminated it. The Communist Youth League, the party’s primary tool for organizing young people, became the Democratic Youth League. The Communist Party became the Workers’ Party, and its membership was allowed to expand from 26,000 in late 1945 to 400,000 in the fall of 1946, drawing in new members from factories, unions, and women’s organizations.
Kim also discovered new methods in Sinuiju for rooting out and crushing his rivals. He played the sympathetic populist who recognized the innocence and purity of his people. He did not blame students for criminality. Instead, he called them “naive” and “misled.” He reserved his vitriol for “the influence of reactionary wirepullers behind the scenes.” It was his first recorded discovery of offstage villains as the cause for whatever ailed North Korea. In years to come, Kim would find and purge tens of thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, and military officers, often without any evidence other than his word that they were reactionaries, splittists, factionalists, American spies, Christian traitors, or Japanese collaborators. Going after the purportedly pro-Japanese was an especially easy and efficient way of eliminating political competition. Nearly everyone in Korea had come of age under Japanese occupation, and nearly everyone had been forced to cooperate in some way with the colonial government. Kim could get rid of nearly anyone.
Kim came away from Sinuiju as a proven Soviet fixer and as a demagogue on the make. He listened to peasants and breathed life into their dreams of an independent, self-governed Korea. He also strengthened a state that ruled from the top down. He did not apologize to the parents whose children were shot in the face by Soviet and Korean security forces. Instead, he said that nation building demanded discipline and that everyone should follow his lead as a battle-tested freedom fighter. His government forcibly merged all organizations for the young into the Democratic Youth League. Kim made it clear that while his government would listen to the concerns of young people, it would not take orders from them. “Just as an army lacking iron discipline cannot win battles,” he said, “so an undisciplined youth organization is up to no good.”
The military began to draft young people, who were then drilled by Soviet occupation forces. About ten thousand soldiers a year were sent to Siberia for training. Some of the best and brightest young people in the North were chosen to serve in the Peace Preservation Officers’ School, where they were subjected to mandatory “thought inspection” and self-criticism. One of these indoctrination academies took over a middle school in Sinuiju. Its three thousand students included many who had survived the mass killing of November 1945.
Sinuiju and nearby towns were soon singled out for vengeance. The Soviets moved in more soldiers. They searched train and bus passengers for weapons. Churches were destroyed and ministers executed. In nearby Uiju, according to American intelligence reports, a Methodist minister was ordered to pull an oxcart through town while wearing a sign that said, “National traitor.” His church was burned.
Years after the demonstration, the North Korean government continued to punish Sinuiju residents suspected of participating in the riot. In 1950, a student pilot taking MiG flight training suddenly disappeared. His fellow students were told that he had been involved in the Sinuiju protests.
The Sinuiju incident was a breakthrough for Kim. He learned how to demonize his political rivals and blame anything that went wrong inside North Korea on foreign agitators. He listened to the masses as the state media celebrated his common touch. Then, in the name of nation building and self-reliance, he told everybody what to do.
IV
A few days after No Kum Sok turned seventeen, his father died of cancer. Without money for a funeral service, relatives dug a grave in a community cemetery and lowered him into the ground in an unpainted wooden box. With savings gone, No’s mother became a street trader, buying soy sauce and bean cakes in stores and selling them to restaurants. Her life improved marginally when her son graduated from high school in the spring of 1948. His grades were good enough to win him a stipend to attend Hungnam Chemical and Engineering College, a technical school that trained workers for the fertilizer plant and other factories in town. The boy gave his mother the money, a few dollars a week.
After his father died, No tried not to show emotion. He grieved in private and continued thinking about how to escape the state his father had despised. Millions of Koreans had found their way by train or bus to the thirty-eighth parallel and walked into South Korea. But the border had become dangerous to cross, with soldiers on both sides and constant skirmishes. Rumors of an all-out North-South war grew with each passing month.
Next door in China, Communists were finally in charge. After nearly two decades, the Chinese civil war ended with victory for Mao Zedong, and a quarter of the world’s population joined the Communist fold. Kim Il Sung celebrated the triumph and used it to whip up support for a unified Korean Peninsula under Communist rule. He moved the bulk of the North Korean People’s Army to within a few miles of the thirty-eighth parallel. His army was flush with weapons, thanks to the Soviet Union, which in 1949 had withdrawn its troops after North and South Korea formalized the division of the peninsula. The Soviets left behind all the armaments used by the 120,000 men in their Twenty-fifth Army, plus all the weapons they had seized from the Japanese. The United States also withdrew its military from South Korea, except for a small group of advisers, and left behind its arms. But the balance of firepower tipped overwhelmingly in favor of the North, which also retained more than three thousand Soviet military advisers.
Along with every young male in North Korea, No was ordered to register for the draft. He despaired at the prospect of fighting for a government he loathed, but he tried not to let it show.
He projected Red enthusiasm at school and at mandatory meetings of the Democratic Youth League. There were two meetings a month at school, each lasting two hours. He feigned interest and struggled not to fall asleep. Every two months, there were higher-level Democratic Youth League meetings at city hall. Important Communists from Pyongyang delivered speeches about Marxism-Leninism. These talks were often longer, often delivered in Russian, and always more sleep inducing. Every family in Hungnam also had to send at least one member to twice-a-month meetings of the North Korean Workers’ Party.
Forced feedings of Communist doctrine, together with rising anxiety about war, pushed No to consider new avenues of flight. One way out was Hungnam harbor, where foreign cargo ships dropped anchor. A former English teacher at Hungnam Chemical and Engineering College, who had lost his job when Russian courses replaced English, found work as an interpreter in the harbor. He boarded a foreign freighter, asked for asylum, and escaped to South Korea via Hong Kong, leaving behind his wife and two small children. The story of that escape was well known when No, in his first year at college, was sent down to the harbor to help unload ships. On board a Canadian freighter, he tried to use his limited English to ask for asylum. The Canadians were gruff and unwelcoming. Before he could make himself understood, he lost his nerve.
Yet war was coming, and No did not want to die in Kim’s infantry. When he saw an announcement
on the town bulletin board for an entrance examination to enter the naval academy, he applied. He believed, quite wrongly, as it turned out, that the navy would train and educate naval cadets for three years before sending them to war. He told his mother he would become an educated naval officer and take a gunboat to South Korea.
Nothing worked out as planned.
His first failure was the exam. To take it, he obtained a copy of his chemical college transcript from a physics professor and traveled by train to the nearby city of Hamhung. In an auditorium there, he completed a written test and an oral examination and underwent an exhaustive physical exam. Confident he had aced the tests, he waited outside with fifty others for results to be posted. Two hours passed before a naval officer emerged, tacked a list to a bulletin board, and walked away. No’s name was not on it.
Riding home on the train, he wondered what he had done wrong. He was sure he had correctly answered nearly every question on the exam, and he was physically fit. Suddenly it hit him: he had been honest about his father. During the oral exam, he told an examiner that his late father had worked for a big Japanese company.
A few weeks later, No saw another announcement for the naval academy exam. This time he prepared a suitable pack of lies. Besides lying about his father’s job, he lied about his mother’s Catholicism and his own church attendance. For religion, he said, “None.” He passed the exam, and no one, it seemed, noticed how radically his answers had changed from those he had given on the first exam.
Shortly after dawn on the last day of July 1949, No said good-bye to his mother and grandmother. His mother was sad, but his grandmother was angry. For days she had been demanding that his mother stop him. Her anxiety was prescient; she would never see her grandson again. She was killed, along with her granddaughter (No’s cousin), in the summer of 1952 by an American bomb.
The journey to the naval academy began with an overnight train ride to Najin, a coastal town not far from the Russian port of Vladivostok. From the train station, No walked to the harbor, where he saw two strikingly beautiful Russian girls—both dressed in white uniforms—walking around on the docks. In a cold drizzle, he took a forty-minute boat ride to the naval academy, which had recently taken over a Japanese-built naval base hidden in the folds of towering coastal mountains. From land or water, the base was all but impossible to see until a boat landed at its docks. The campus consisted of fifteen run-down, two-story concrete buildings. There was also a mess hall, a theater, and a field for marching.
No joined a class of 150 cadets. They wore navy whites and navy blue caps, and marched with bolt-action, Russian-made rifles manufactured before the Bolshevik Revolution. But their starchy formal appearance was deceptive; they lived like inmates in a penal colony. The only food served at breakfast, lunch, and dinner was a bowl of rice and a bowl of watery beef-flavored soup. At the academy, No was never offered vegetables, fruit, eggs, or meat.
He had never had such wretched food and so little of it. Like all the cadets, he quickly lost weight. An exception to the rule of regimented malnutrition was kitchen duty. When it was No’s turn to work in the kitchen, he gorged himself, often to the point of severe stomach cramps, vomiting, and diarrhea.
Discipline in the barracks was severe. The enforcer was Sergeant Wun Byong Koo, who was overweight, unreasonable, angry, and loud. Wun demanded that cadets be clean shaven, although the academy provided no razors. No learned how to yank his whiskers out with his fingernails. He got so good at it that he helped fellow cadets by yanking out their whiskers. He also fantasized about using his ancient Russian rifle to shoot Sergeant Wun.
Seven days a week, the sergeant’s shouting awakened No before dawn for calisthenics. After splashing water on his face, he shouldered his old rifle and marched to the dining hall for breakfast, singing songs of the partisan revolution. He attended seven hours of classes a day for calculus, physics, chemistry, Russian, Soviet Communist Party history, meteorology, navigation, and weaponry. Then came an hour of gymnastics, including rings, high bar, and parallel bars. To pass, every cadet had to become proficient on each apparatus. On the parallel bars, for example, No needed to perfect sixteen moves. To build enough arm strength to survive gym class, he did a hundred push-ups a day. After gymnastics, cadets marched outdoors, goose-stepping with their rifles. After supper, they were allowed two hours a night for study. When lights went out in his barely heated barracks, No fell dead asleep on a straw mattress that had one blanket and one sheet but no pillow. Because the barracks did not have showers or hot water, cadets washed themselves from three common faucets. Once a month they were taken to a public bath in a nearby town, and once every fifteen days they changed underwear. Vacations and visitors were not allowed.
About a month after arriving at the secluded naval base, the cadets were ordered to move. They packed up immediately and relocated to Chongjin, another coastal city, about fifty miles south. The new base was in the hills outside the city and considerably smaller, with wooden buildings instead of concrete. But the workload, the discipline, and the privations were unchanged.
No and many other city-bred cadets were angered by the prison-like conditions. They talked about quitting and going home. One of them, Kim Man Suk, asked if he could resign. His request was denied, and he was told that if he asked again, he would be sent to prison. When the warning became common knowledge, No concluded the only way to survive the academy was to excel.
Not long after training began, cadets were called to a mandatory meeting in the base auditorium. The academy’s commander, Admiral Kim Kuang Hiob, delivered a speech that terrified No.
“Comrades, I must warn you that because we have begun in such a hurry to start training, your individual biographies are not too complete,” he said. “If you have anything to confess that you have not told us—if you are a churchgoer, if you have relatives in South Korea, or if your parents worked for the Japanese police or engaged in anti-Communist politics, tell us now.
“If you come to my office and admit it, it will be forgiven. But if we locate the falsehood ourselves, you will be severely punished.”
Smelling a trap, No stayed silent. He had no intention of helping his commanders investigate his past.
A few weeks later, No ran into a naval officer who knew he had flunked his first attempt to enter the academy. Having given No his first oral examination, he also knew that the boy’s father had worked for a Japanese company. The officer was chairman of the mathematics department at the academy, but No was not his student and until then had managed to avoid meeting him face-to-face.
“How did you get in here?” asked the officer, who was the only instructor at the academy who could link No’s face to a failed entrance exam.
“I took the exams and passed, comrade officer,” No said, before running off to try to blend into a crowd of cadets, all dressed in white.
In decades to come, a North Korean’s social origin would be an indelible stain. Descendants of property owners, children of “traitors” who fled to South Korea, and relatives of those who collaborated under Japanese rule would all be classified as members of the “hostile class.” They would be sent away from Pyongyang, consigned to jobs in mines or farms, and never allowed into universities or military academies that trained the future elite. In 1949, however, the caste system was just beginning to develop. War was coming. Record keeping was a mess. Liars leaked through.
For unknown reasons, the naval officer who knew about No’s failed examination and his father’s work history did not make an effort to hunt the boy down, expel him from the academy, and send him to prison. Unlike millions of North Koreans then and in generations to come, No did not have to pay for the sins of his father.
CHAPTER 3
Sweet-Talking Stalin
I
To go to war, Kim Il Sung needed a green light from Stalin. To get it, he invited Terentii Fomich Shtykov to lunch. Shtykov was the Soviet Union??
?s ambassador to North Korea and the man to see. When Shtykov sent telegrams to the Kremlin, Stalin read them personally.
Back in Moscow, Shtykov was known as Mr. Korea. He had been the Soviet proconsul in Pyongyang from 1945 to 1948 and a conscientious midwife to the birth of Kim’s government. The son of a poor farmer, he was an autodidact and a canny careerist under Stalin. Nikita Khrushchev described him as “brilliant.” There was not a major event in the creation of North Korea that Shtykov did not influence. After the North established a nominally independent government in 1948, he was the obvious candidate to be the first ambassador.
Shtykov shared Kim’s enthusiasm for invading South Korea. In several telegrams to Stalin in 1949, the ambassador exaggerated the risk that South Korea would, without any provocation, invade the North. He deliberately downplayed efforts by the United States to restrain the South’s army. Shtykov also supported Kim’s belief that victory would be fast, easy, and cheap.
So when Kim invited Shtykov to lunch at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on January 17, 1950, the Great Leader knew he would be preaching to a convert. Still, as the lunch began, Kim flattered and groveled, expressing his “love and gratitude” to Stalin for liberating Korea from the Japanese. After everyone had eaten and a Chinese trade representative left the room, Kim told Shtykov of the personal toll that not being able to go to war was taking on him.
“Lately, I’ve been feeling very frustrated; I don’t sleep at night. I am thinking all the time of how to solve the problem of unification of the whole country,” he said, according to a cable Shtykov sent to Moscow. “If the cause of the liberation of the people of the southern portion of Korea and the unification of the country is postponed, then I can lose the confidence of the Korean people.”