The myth of the “genuinely and primarily nationalist” communist leaders Kim Il-sung and Mao Zedong
Kim Il-sung at a mass rally in Pyongyang on October 14, 1945, wearing Soviet military medals and accompanied by Soviet generals. (Image: namu.wiki)
Korea’s March 1, 1919, protest movement, like China’s May 4, 1919 movement, gave voice and impetus to a growing sense of nationalism, in the modern sense of the concept. The movements, along with the 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia, heightened an interest in and the influence of Marxist-Leninist thought in both nations.
This upsurge in nationalistic feeling was skillfully manipulated by communists to recruit idealistic youth, despite the fact that those specific movements were, in Marxist-Leninist terms, bourgeois in nature.
Marxist-Leninist ideology and nascent communist movements among Koreans and Chinese attracted young patriots who mistakenly, and tragically, viewed such alien forces as vehicles for achieving their nationalist aspirations.
This cynical exploitation of nationalism by communist movements in China and Korea, and eventually by the communist dictators who came to power there, is manifested today in the ultra-nationalist-tinged exhortations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the North Korean Workers Party, and pro-North Korea forces in the Republic of Korea (ROK).
Contributing to this historically dubious conflation of communist activities and goals with authentic nationalism has been the tendentious work of revisionist left-wing historians, journalists, and other commentators, who have bought into the myth and promoted the impression that communist forces and leaders in Korea and China, in their actions and policies, were essentially and primarily nationalistic in nature, and only incidentally or opportunistically Marxist-Leninist in outlook.
Those with a broader, more accurate and balanced historical perspective should not hesitate to challenge the dogma inherited from ideologically inspired revisionist academics.
Myths which have long held sway in academic circles, and in public consciousness, finally began to be seriously challenged with recent historical research, thanks to the opening of various national archives. There has recently been a refreshing re-emphasis on the previously unfashionable facts which reveal that the Chinese and Korean communist movements and their respective leaders were far from the genuine, sincere nationalists.
The early communist movements in China and Korea were founded with the direct assistance of, in the presence of, and through the funding of, the Soviet Union and foreign communist agents. Particularly in their formative years and struggles for power, they were not only loyal servants of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, ever willing to submit to its orders, but also, willing to betray their own nations, and even their own communist comrades in the interests of the Soviet Union and the world communist movement.
Their leaders followed every twist and turn of the Soviet “party line” as ordered by the Comintern, even when such instructions were directly contrary to the interests of their own nations and amounted to treasonous betrayals. This submission to the interests of a foreign power included support for the killing of their fellow countrymen.
In the case of China, this was clearly demonstrated by the CCP’s support for the Soviet attack on and invasion of China during the Chinese Eastern Railroad conflict of 1929, in which thousands of Chinese were killed by the Soviet army.
In Korea, this was notoriously displayed during the Free City Incident of 1921, when Korean communists, on the orders of the Soviets and in collaboration with the Soviet army, slaughtered fellow Korean independence fighters. In spite of these attacks on Chinese and Koreans by the Soviets, both the Chinese and Korean communists, including Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung, adopted the slogan, “Defend the Soviet Union with arms!”
As early as the 1920s, the Soviets began deporting Chinese and Koreans from the Soviet Far East. Some Koreans were even deported to Japan. It was in the 1930s, however, under Stalin, that Soviet deportations, repressions, and executions of Koreans and Chinese began on a massive scale.
Viewing Koreans and Chinese as politically “unreliable” based solely on their race, Stalin deported them en masse to Soviet Central Asia. Even loyal CCP members and Korean communists were executed or sent to Gulag camps during Stalin’s “Great Terror” liquidation of imaginary enemies.
This purge also included Korean and Chinese Trotskyists during the mid-to-late 1930s. The CCP and Korean communists fully backed and participated in these killings. Chinese and Korean communists obediently and ruthlessly hunted down and eliminated their own comrades based on policies originating from Moscow, as both the CCP and Korean communists engaged in their own bloody internecine purges.
In China, one such murderous purge was that of the so-called A-B League Incident of the early 1930s, in which CCP leaders and ordinary members slaughtered one another based on highly dubious accusations of anti-communist tendencies.
This CCP purge eventually manifested itself within the Korean communist movement as well, as exemplified by the murders of Korean communists who were accused of sympathizing and with Japan, by their own Chinese and Korean communist leaders, during what was known as the Minsaengdan Incident in Manchuria during the early-to-mid 1930s.
Some historians, especially those of a leftist or pro-North Korean bent, have claimed that Kim Il-sung heroically tried to stop the purge, and portrayed the killings on trumped up charges as being ethnically inspired by Chinese communists against Korean communists. However, other historians and researchers suspect that Kim Il-sung was among those backing and implementing the purge, inexplicably remaining untouched himself. Although apologists for Kim claim that he destroyed the records of those who were suspects in the purge as evidence of his supposed nationalism, others assert that Kim may have done so for the ulterior motive of attempting to cover up his own role in purging his comrades.
As one of the leaders of the Korean communists serving under the CCP in Manchuria, the fact he somehow survived may indicate his role in the purge went far beyond what leftist historians are willing to admit.
Contrary to the official myth fabricated later by North Korean hagiographers, there was no “independent” Korean communist army under Kim Il-sung in Manchuria. Kim was a loyal member of the CCP, as were the other Korean communists serving with him. They were subject to and obediently carried out CCP policies and orders, which originated from the Comintern in Moscow.
Recent scholarship has shown that Mao, even in his years at the CCP base at Yenan, where he was joined by some Korean communists, was far more closely connected with the Soviet Union and submissive to its policies and orders than had previously been thought.
During the Hitler-Stalin alliance, like communists throughout the world, Mao and the CCP fully endorsed the Soviet line that the Nazis were victims of British and French aggression, and that the war against Germany should be opposed and condemned as an “imperialist war.”
While the CCP and the Korean communists were praising their masters in Moscow as the leaders of “progressive humanity,” they nevertheless fully endorsed the Soviet-Japanese non-aggression pact of early 1941, again demonstrating that they habitually prioritized the interests of the Soviet Union and the worldwide communist movement above the interests of their own nations.
In this context, it is interesting to note that Kim Il-sung and his fighters under the CCP reportedly fled into the Soviet Union, effectively ceasing their operations against the Japanese in Manchuria, sometime in late 1940. Although this was conventionally viewed as being a retreat due to Japanese military pressure, it was also during the very months that the Soviet-Japanese pact was being contemplated by Stalin.
Although the CCP and some left-wing historians in the West have attempted to falsify the wartime roles of the CCP under Mao and the nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek by claiming that it was the communists who led the struggle against Japan, it is well-known and accepted by mainstream historians that Chiang and his nationalist armies bore the brunt of the war against Japan by far, and that the CCP played a minor role.
The CCP and sympathetic historians have claimed that some nationalist forces collaborated to varying degrees with Japanese forces in China, but recently historians and researchers have demonstrated that the communist forces under Mao were also, for several years, collaborating with the Japanese army.
Although North Korean propagandists and leftist historians in the ROK and the U.S. have falsely attempted to portray the ROK’s founding President Syngman Rhee as pro-Japanese for having had pro-Japanese individuals in his government, ROK researchers and historians have demonstrated that North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung had several collaborators with Japan in his cabinet.
Of course, the fratricidal war launched by Kim in 1950 is perhaps the starkest illustration which debunks the myth of his supposed role as a “genuine” nationalist leader allegedly motivated “primarily” by patriotism.
Some have argued that the heated ideological disputes between Mao Zedong and the Soviet leadership during the 1960s, which resulted in armed skirmishes on the borders of Manchuria and Xinjiang, as well as the ideological disputes between Kim Il-sung and both the Soviet leadership and the CCP in the 1960s, were motivated by nationalistic motives.
However, given the nature of the Chinese communist and North Korean regimes, it seems more reasonable, based on what we now know from archival research, to ascribe these disputes not exclusively to nationalism, but very substantially to other factors as well.
For example, Mao sought to emerge as the post-Stalin leader of the world communist movement and a position of premier influence among newly independent Third World states, a desire which had ideological roots. Both Mao and Kim, during the mid-to-late 1950s, also sought to consolidate their absolute rule by purging elements who were seen to be aligned with the Soviets, or in Kim’s case with the Soviets and the Chinese, or elements who simply favored a collective form of leadership.
These motivations for the disputes with the Soviet Union, and in the case of Kim with both Mao and the Soviets, rather than being purely nationalistic in nature, were likely to a great extent the result of such jockeying for world communist leadership in an ideological sense by Mao, as well as purges conducted by Mao and Kim pursuant to power struggles of a domestic nature.
Regarding Korea, the myth of Kim Il-sung as a supposed “genuinely and primarily” nationalist leader, as promoted by North Korean propagandists and leftist or pro-North revisionist historians and commentators, is not merely a matter of historical interest. It is also directly relevant to the ROK’s domestic politics since the 1980s and up until the present day.
This is exemplified by the nationalistic appeals, usually focused on anti-Japanese and anti-American feelings, which were and continue to be major themes of the “National Liberation” faction of the far-left and pro-North Korea movement within the ROK. Such appeals typically portray Kim Il-sung and his progeny as the true heirs of supposedly “authentic” Korean nationalism, and the North Korean regime as the more “genuine” or “pure” Korean state, while the founders and subsequent leaders of the ROK are conversely accused of “toadyism” toward foreigners and the ROK itself is condemned as a “puppet” of the “U.S. imperialists.”
This frame of mind is not merely an ideological stance. It also relates to electoral politics in the ROK. In recent decades the “National Liberation” faction and others known as the “Jusapa” element in Korean society have made serious inroads into leftist political parties, most notably through the vehicle of the now banned United Progressive Party of Lee Seok-ki, and in the current Progressive Party, which is essentially the successor to and reincarnation of the United Progressive Party.
Adherents of the “National Liberation” and “Jusapa” factions in the ROK, as well as other pro-North Korean activists, have been able to infiltrate the mainstream left by being brought into the Democratic Party of Korea by Moon Jae-in and Lee Jae-myung, who appointed them as ministers or advisers, and arranged for them to run as party candidates and proportional representatives. In the recent election campaign, Lee and his Democratic Party even went so far as to agree to an official “united front” type of alliance with the Progressive Party. This certainly does not bode well for the ROK or the U.S.-ROK alliance.
Lawrence Peck is a correspondent for NK Insider based in Seoul and Los Angeles. Having intensively researched and closely monitored the activities of pro-North Korea and other extremist groups and activists in the U.S. for over 25 years, he has been recognized in the U.S. and Korea as one of the leading American authorities on such topics, and has lectured, written extensively and been interviewed on such topics in the U.S. and Korea. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Juris Doctor degree from Loyola Law School of Los Angeles. He previously worked in Korea for several of the largest Korean business groups in the fields of intellectual property licensing and international business development. He also serves as an advisor to the North Korea Freedom Coalition of the U.S. Lawrence may be reached at the email address: lawrence.nkinsider@gmail.com
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