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The Koreas

2025: A year of milestone anniversaries for Korea 

Lawrence Peck
iStock/Juanmonino

The year 2025 saw some significant anniversaries for Korea, some of which were for the better, while others were for the worse.  

The best known and most celebrated in both Koreas was the 80th anniversary of liberation from Japanese colonial rule as a direct result of the end of the Second World War in 1945. This anniversary was obviously a happy one. Nevertheless, it was also tragic in the sense that it marked the simultaneous entry into Korea of Soviet forces, by prior agreement of the allies, which was the underlying and most basic cause of the division of the peninsula. 

As a related point, it was also tragic in that it marked the practical, if not the official, inauguration of Kim Il-sung’s rule and hereditary communist dynasty. It was in 1945 that Kim and the Soviets began to systematically eliminate all non-communist opposition, thus paving the way for the war he launched in 1950 and the many ensuing decades of the armed attacks and attempts at subversion by his forces.

It was in late November of that momentous year of 1945 that another significant, yet little-known, little-celebrated event took place in the North. This was the student and Christian uprising against Soviet occupation and Korean communist persecution in the town of Sinuiju on the Yalu river border with China. This was one of the earliest revolts against communist rule anywhere outside of the Soviet Union itself, but is far less well remembered, for example, than the East Berlin anti-Soviet revolt of 1953 or the Hungarian uprising of 1956. 

Unlike what are now known to have been various Soviet-funded and Korean communist-ordered and organized uprisings in South Korea in the late 1940s which exploited national or local grievances, the Sinuiju revolt was purely organic and not funded, ordered, or organized by any outside forces. The nature of the incident itself, however, has unfortunately been obfuscated, and its significance often dismissed by the tendentious revisionist writings of certain left-leaning academics in the U.K., the U.S., and South Korea, who in some cases portray the clash as a “class struggle.”

According to Korean sources, the Sinuiju uprising began when thousands of middle school students and Christians marched to the local communist headquarters, chanting “Let’s drive out the Communist Party!” and “Go back to the Soviet Union!” Local communists and Soviet forces then fired indiscriminately into the crowds. 

Casualty figures range from two dozen to 100 killed and 150 to 700 wounded. As many participants and witnesses were arrested and the authorities naturally sought to cover up the massacre, the exact numbers may never be known for certain. The estimates are based on the accounts of survivors who later were able to flee to the South, as well as U.S. and South Korean government reports, and Soviet records. Various sources note that somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand of the protesters were subsequently arrested. Survivors who made it to the South asserted that Soviet tanks and fighter aircraft were involved in putting down teh protest.

It was in late 1955 that Kim Il-sung first signaled preliminary indications of his massive purges of real and imagined opponents within the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, which reached their apex over the next couple of years. The purges eliminated the so-called Yenan faction which had fought alongside Mao Zedong’s forces during World War Two and the Chinese Civil War, as well as the so-called Soviet faction of Korean communists who had lived or been trained for years in the U.S.S.R. 

The purges began in full force after Kim realized the threat inherent in Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization “Secret Speech” of 1956. They served as a major step toward the full consolidation of his rule. The South Korean communist leader Pak Hon-yong, whom Kim blamed for erroneously predicting that South Koreans would rise up in support of the North Korean forces who invaded the ROK in 1950, was executed in either 1955 or 1956. It was also in 1955 that Kim apparently made his first public mention of his concept of Juche, which was eventually to become the state ideology.  

The year 2025 additionally marks the centennial of the establishment within Korea, then a colony of Japan, of the first Communist Party of Korea. As in many other nations, it was founded by radical intellectuals or aspiring intellectuals. 

There had earlier been other communist and socialist groupings of Koreans in the U.S.S.R. and China, but the Party’s official foundation is considered to have taken place at a secret meeting held in a Chinese restaurant Seoul in April 1925. 

Several incarnations of a Korean Communist Party were established, re-established, and subsequently dissolved throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. There were also many Party preparatory and reconstruction committees. These tumultuous and dizzying births, re-births, preparations, and dissolutions were due to a combination of factors, including factional infighting, crackdowns by the Japanese authorities, and orders from the Comintern in Moscow. The Party even betrayed Korean patriots by cynically sabotaging the nationalist united front group Shinganhoe.

It was not until after the liberation that branches of the Party were officially re-established in both the North and the South. The Workers’ Party of South Korea was outlawed by the U.S. military government in 1946 after it was caught counterfeiting South Korean currency. In late 1946 through early 1949, the Party initiated armed uprisings and sabotage of infrastructure based on instructions from the North.

In 1949, the year that U.S. troops were withdrawn from Korea, and a year after the 1948 establishment of the independent ROK government, the separate Party branches were unified, with the Northern branch essentially swallowing the Southern branch. Prior to and during the Korean War, as well as for years after, communists in the South fought as partisan units in relatively remote areas of the countryside, terrorizing local inhabitants, until their insurgency was finally defeated.  

Once this armed struggle ended, undercover communists and other pro-North Korean forces in the South, including some trained in the North, as well as North Korean agents dispatched to the South, continued their struggle by means of propaganda, espionage, political activism, and attempts to create new political parties or stealthily infiltrate existing ones.  

The infiltration of Marxist-Leninist and pro-North Korean elements into the broader South Korean pro-democracy movements of the 1980s ironically and paradoxically led to such anti-democratic forces gaining a new foothold within ROK politics, culture, media, academia, and society as a whole during the 1990s and early 2000s, and up to the present time.  

The impact of these Marxist-Leninist and pro-North Korean elements is still widely felt today. Having survived bitter internal disputes, Comintern reproaches, Japanese colonial repression, Soviet orders, outlawing, suppression, pre-war and wartime extrajudicial killings during South Korean counterinsurgency operations, North Korean purges, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the catastrophic failures and the widespread discrediting of the North Korean system, the comrades and their fellow travelers, in various incarnations, nevertheless continue to cast dark shadows over ROK politics and society.  

One hundred years later, the ghosts of 1925, the brutal communist repression in the North and the attempts at subversion by supporters of the North within the South, continue to haunt Korea.

Lawrence Peck
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