Mick Hartley

For North Koreans the Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung, was the sole architect of the Greatest Socialist Country. According to NK expert Andrei Lankov though - betraying perhaps just a hint of Russian chauvinism -  the most influential leader in those formative years after the Second World War was in fact a Stalinist apparatchik called Terenti Shtykov:

Few people in the Korea of the late 1940s would recognize his name. For all practical purposes he was the supreme ruler of North Korea in everything but name. It was under his tutelage that Kim Il-sung’s system was born.

He was an archetypical Stalin’s man: a ruthless, cautious, and hard-working autodidact who combined the vestiges of revolutionary idealism with cunning, shrewdness and efficiency….

Shtykov spent most of the war years in Leningrad where he was a political commissar to different “fronts,” that is, groups of armies. By the end of the war he had become colonel general, the highest rank then available for a political officer. 

In summer 1945 he arrived in the Far East where he became a political commissar to the first Far Eastern front, expecting to fight the Japanese in Korea. This appointment essentially determined his fate for the next five years — probably the most important years in his life.

By late 1945 Shtykov had become the undisputed manager of Korean affairs. He enjoyed direct access to Stalin, whom he met a number of times to discuss Korean affairs. Somewhat surprisingly for somebody of his position, Shtykov held a detailed diary which eventually became an important source for students of Korean history (and also a testimony of his own sharp, practical but somewhat cynical mind).

For all practical purposes for the period 1945-1948 he was the Soviet governor of the North. Suffice to say, that even the results of the North Korean elections were drawn up in advance by Shtykov and his fellow Soviet generals, with no Koreans present. The generals decided how many seats should be allocated to each party, and even determined how many women, workers, and farmers should be elected (needless to say, the voters’ wishes miraculously coincided with the calculations of the Soviet generals!).

One should not be so surprised by such excessive attention to detail. This was a time when North Korea was under Soviet control up to the minutest detail. Suffice to say, even the North Korean constitution was edited by Stalin himself and became law of the land only after a lengthy discussion in Moscow, where Shytkov and Stalin sat together looking through the draft of the country’s future supreme law. They approved it, but not completely, since some articles were rewritten by Soviet supervisors. So Shytkov, together with Stalin himself, can be seen as the authors of the North Korean constitution.

He also played a decisive role in the 1946 land reform, arguably the most popular of all the actions ever undertaken by the nascent North Korean regime. The present author is not amused when he reads the writings of South Korean left-wing historians who tend to describe North Korean land reform in great detail and usually attribute it to Kim Il-sung and Korean communists. Soviet military documents, long declassified and published, make a joke of this statement. From beginning to end, the 1946 land reform was planned and prepared by the Soviet military. It is often said that Kim Il-sung “gave the land to the North Korean farmers.” This is factually untrue. It was Shytkov, not Kim Il-sung, who destroyed the established privileges of the landowners of the Northern half of the Korean Peninsula and made the farmers there masters of their land.

With the exception of Japanese colonial politicians, no other foreigner has ever made such an impact on Korea’s destiny as Shytkov. Even though, this role will probably never be recognized by Koreans themselves, largely due to the complexities of Korea’s ideological politics and nationalist worldview. Shytkov was the actual architect of the North Korean state as it emerged in 1945-50. His individual imprint might have been small, since he implemented a fairly standard Soviet policy for that era. Nonetheless, the results of his actions were tremendous.

Shtykov went on to back the North's invasion of the South in 1950; a debacle which led to his fall from power. 

I originally read Shtykov as Shytkov. It's just too tempting. I see Lankov (or his editor) has been unable to resist the temptation either. Despite his best intentions quite a few Shytkov's have crept in there.