Examining the isolated state’s communist roots
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watched the ground jet test of a Korean-style high-thrust engine newly developed by the Academy of the National Defence Science in this undated picture provided by KCNA in Pyongyang on March 19, 2017. KCNA/via Reuters
Unlike the Soviet Union—which collapsed and split into over a dozen non-communist nations, or China, whose leaders maintain the rule and ideology of the Communist Party but introduced capitalist markets and allow interaction with the outside world, North Korea has remained an isolated totalitarian state, coming in and out of news headlines as it menacingly brandishes nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Some have argued that North Korea isn’t exactly communist, as the country removed all references to communism and Karl Marx from its constitution in the 2000s, and because it follows a program of extreme nationalism and implicit dynastic succession. In lieu of Marxism, the official ideology is the so-called “Juche Idea,” a Chinese-derived name that is usually translated as “self-reliance” but may be better understood as a version of dialectical materialism that claims to place people, not productive relations, at the center of historical evolution.
But in terms of leadership, society, and its strictly controlled command economy, North Korea resembles and surpasses the archetypal authoritarian socialist regimes that existed in the Cold War. Moreover, the state owes its ideological foundations and very existence to communism and communist powers.
In the 1940s, the Soviet Union sent specialists to help Kim consolidate power and establish a communist regime. They also trained and sent thousands of agents to destabilize U.S.-led efforts to establish a democracy in South Korea. To gain power, Kim used the same formula as nearly every budding communist dictator when he purged “counter-revolutionaries” with the Concentrated Guidance Campaign. Some 800,000 North Koreans fled to the south, and the state labeled family members of individuals who fled to South Korea as “counter-revolutionaries.”
In a style almost exactly mimicking Stalin, Kim Il-Sung erected a cult of personality around himself, purging the Korean Workers’ Party of all dissent and banishing designated class enemies into a network of gulags—the infamous kwanliso.
In all, the Kim Il Sung regime is believed to have murdered between 710,000 and 3.5 million people, according to researchers, while experts estimate that some 200,000 North Koreans are currently imprisoned in a system of labor camps—of that, 50,000 to 70,000 are Christians. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans were forced to flee the country, with most going to China.
Kim Il Sung, in particular, targeted Korean Christians. “We have executed all Protestant and Catholic church cadre members and all other vicious religious elements have been sent to concentration camps,” he once proclaimed in 1962. Their beliefs got in the way of the regime’s propaganda campaign effectively proclaiming Kim as effectively a living god. In practice, North Korea’s Juche promotes bizarre forms of ethnic nationalism, describing the Kim family as saviors of the “Korean race.”
Soviet-style plans were initially implemented, including the seizure of private property as well as the seizure of national industries. By 1950, Kim was obsessed with unifying North and South Korea before he received substantial help from Soviet advisors, who helped draw up invasion plans and gave military equipment. Later, Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong deployed 300,000 troops to North Korea during the Korean War.
North Korean soldiers march with a portrait of founder Kim Il-Sung on the anniversary of his birth on April 15, 2012. North Korea may launch missiles on April 15, 2013. (Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty Images)
Officially, the country says it isn’t communist—but it behaves just like it is. The country is an anomaly—it could be more accurately described as a communist-inspired monarchy, as some experts have said. The communist Worker’s Party of Korea is the founding and ruling political party of North Korea—using an emblem that’s an adaptation of the communist hammer and sickle, along with a Korean writing brush. In 2010, the party removed a sentence about its goals of “building a communist society.” In 2012, it claimed that Juche is now “the only guiding idea of the party” as Juche can be used to keep the Kim family’s stranglehold on power.
Andrei Lankov, of NK News, says the ruling communist Korean Worker’s Party effectively runs on a Marxist-Leninist model:
“North Korea might be the only place on the face of the earth where these basic principles, once developed by Joseph Stalin around 1930, are still implemented consistently. Admittedly, the ‘universal truth of Marxism-Leninism’ has been replaced by the same truth of Juche, and many elements of the system have been redesigned. Nonetheless, this is still the closest approximation to the once common model, a living fossil of a sort.”
The promotion of communism and Marxism-Leninism seemingly started to disappear after Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994. By 2009, references to the word “communism” had been dropped from North Korea’s constitution while pictures of Marx and Lenin were removed from public areas. Kim Il Sung and son Kim Jong Il were frequently displayed next to them, while both Kims are credited with writing huge numbers of books on Marxist theory.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Juche ideology became the primary doctrine, as “the Kim dynasty is much more than just an authoritarian political regime. It holds itself to be the ultimate source of power, virtue, spiritual wisdom and truth for its citizens,” the DailyNK writes.
Another deviation from typically Marxist states is the North Korean Songbun “caste system,” which was adopted by the communist Worker’s Party in the late 1950s. It amounted to being essentially a massive purge of North Korea’s society to create five social classes. “This system was established in the late 1950s and came into full power somewhere around 1967. It divides the population into groups, according to the actions and status of their paternal ancestor (and themselves, depending on their age) during the Japanese colonial period and the Korean War,” according to NK News. In theory, there are no classes in communist societies—but granulated class hierarchies have developed in both the Soviet Union and China. The Chinese Communist Party, for example, has a fantastically complex hierarchy, where top-level communists enjoy the greatest privileges.
The Organisation Guidance Department of the Communist party controlled the Songbun system, with many experts believing it to have been the true center of power in the 1960s, when North Korean authorities began classifying every citizen as an enemy or a supporter.
But it still retains hallmarks typical of communist states, including the imagery and obsession with ideology. Propaganda pieces of the Kim family are painted in a communist “socialist realist” style. Blood red banners and interior design are commonplace. Kim Jong Un has sported a Mao Zedong-style suit, while the party recently granted him the title of “chairman,” akin to Mao. He’s also the chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea and the Central Military Commissions, which are communist in origin.
North Korea’s apparatus of repression is decidedly Stalinist in nature.
Every newspaper, book, and magazine is authorized by the government to promote Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-Il, and Kim Jong-Un, and North Koreans are forbidden from listening to foreign broadcasters or reading foreign publications.
North Korea also has its own gulag system, with some 150,000 to 200,000 people estimated to be imprisoned currently. Forced labor, starvation, forced abortions, executions, torture, beatings, and more are commonplace. Children born to parents in the camps remain there for the remainder of their lives, as part of the Songbun caste system. Citizens are kept in the dark and are unable to leave, much like in the Soviet Union before its fall. And from 1948 until 1987, the Kim Il Sung regime is believed to have murdered between 710,000 and 3.5 million people, University of Hawaii political science professor R.J. Rummel said.
In 2014, the United Nations investigated Kim Jong Un’s regime for committing crimes against humanity and possibly genocide—also hallmarks of communist regimes. Torture, mass starvation, and mass killings are commonplace in North Korean camps.
“Even now as I speak here today there are still babies being born in the camps, public executions – like that of my mother and brother – happening in the camp, and dying from beatings and starvations,” camp survivor Shin Dong-Hyuk said in 2014, referring to another report on the alleged genocide.
