Mick Hartley

One significant point that authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday make in their “Mao: The Unknown Story” is the important role that Stalin played in the early years (late Twenties and Thirties) when Mao was struggling to gain control over the Chinese Communist Party, and how on a number of occasions his interventions on Mao’s behalf proved vital, at times when there were clearly better-suited candidates for the leadership. The likely explanation is that Stalin recognised Mao as someone with the necessary ruthlessness. Now, reading Jasper Becker’s “Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea” (reviewed here by Ian Buruma), it appears that he played a similar role for Kim Il Sung in Korea, supporting someone who was by no means the obvious choice as leader. In the Darwinian struggle for supremacy within the Communist elite, a unashamed willingness to sing Stalin’s praises, together with the necessary lack of scruples about sacrificing others in the scramble for power, were all that mattered.

Also of interest, the casual attitude to Korea’s future taken by the Allies after it had been liberated after World War 2: at Yalta, Churchill confessed he’d “never heard of the bloody place”. And so an arbitrary demarcation line was drawn at the 38th parallel, dividing – and thereby punishing – a country which had been an entirely innocent victim of Japanese aggression. So the stage was set for Stalin’s stooge:

By 1949, his DPRK was a fully-fledged Stalinist dictatorship with labor camps, purges, arbitrary arrests, public executions, and a personality cult. Kim erected the first statue to himself in 1949 before he was even 40 and began calling himself “The Great Leader”, or Suryong.

Anyone who might contradict his version of history was either shot or sentenced to decades of imprisonment. According to senior defector Hwang Jang-yop, in 1958, Kim ordered his oficials to edit his selected works and destroy all evidence of how he came to power. “Through this project, any records that gave the impression of worshipping the Soviet Union were destroyed, and all records of ‘Long Live Stalin’ were also deleted,” said Hwang. The contribution of all other nationalists was erased, indeed even their names disappeared, until it was Kim himself who founded the Korean Communist Party in 1933.

Eventually acquiring immortality as the first and only Communist deity.

And this episode is not without some resonance nowadays. During the Korean war, Kim wasn’t overly concerned about the truth of his anti-American propaganda – the claim that the US started it all, still insisted on by Pyongyang, being only the most outrageous example.

On February 22, 1952, North Korea told the United Nations that US aircraft had dropped disease-bearing insects in seven raids. Two weeks later, China’s Zhou Enlai claimed that the United States had sent 448 aircraft on 68 missions to spread plague, anthrax, cholera, encephalitis, and meningitis. An “International Scientific Commission” led by British biochemist Joseph Needham, an avowed Marxist, issued a 669-page report accepting the Chinese claims on the basis of testimony from witnesses.

The charges spread by the press and the World Peace Council, a Soviet-backed organisation with branches in many countries, led to large-scale anti-American demonstrations around the world, especially in Europe. Needham, now dead, repeated the charge in a 1990 ceremony in which he was honored by Beijing on his ninetieth birthday. And the charges were still being repeated in 1989 in a book by British journalists Peter Williams and David Wallace.

To make the charges stick, the Communists took extraordinary measures – like infecting North Koreans awaiting execution with plague and cholera so that their bodies could be shown to outside investigators, and forcing 25 captured American pilots to sign “confessions”. Although neither China nor the Russians have ever publicly admitted they lied, new documents from the Presidential Archives in Moscow recovered by historian Kathryn Weathersby and biological warfare specialist Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland showed that both knew the allegations were untrue.. Conclusive proof came with the discovery of a secret May 2, 1953, resolution of the presidium of USSR Council of Ministers. With an armistice only a few months away, and Stalin dead, it said: “The Soviet Government and the Central Committe of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) were misled. The spread in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations against the Americans were fictitious”