How Stalin Helped Build North Korea's Dictatorship

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[00:00:05]Right now, North Korea is one of the most controlled dictatorships on Earth.

[00:00:10]Three generations of a single family have ruled it without interruption for 80 years.

[00:00:17]Its people can't leave. Its opponents disappear.

[00:00:21]Most people assume a system like that just happens. It doesn't. North Korea's political order was built deliberately by one man using methods he'd already proven worked. That man was Joseph Stalin.

[00:00:37]The evidence of how he did it is on the record.

[00:00:41]To understand what Stalin built in North Korea, you have to go back to 1910 when Japan formally annexed the Korean Peninsula and began one of the most systematic colonial occupations of the 20th century.

[00:00:56]For 35 years, the Japanese colonial administration worked methodically to strip Korea of everything a functioning independent state requires.

[00:01:08]Korean political organizing was banned outright.

[00:01:11]Koreans were forced to adopt Japanese surnames, speak the Japanese language, and practice Japanese religion.

[00:01:20]The peninsula's industrial output was systematically redirected to serve Japan's economy with Korean workers paid a fraction of what their Japanese counterparts received for the same labor.

[00:01:33]An estimated 1/8 of the entire Korean population was conscripted and sent to other parts of the Japanese Empire to mines, factories, and military installations across Asia as forced labor.

[00:01:50]By the time Japan's empire collapsed in 1945, Korea hadn't just been governed from outside. It had been hollowed out. A full generation had grown up under occupation with no functioning political parties, no independent courts, no free press, and no military of its own.

[00:02:12]The experienced political class that might have organized a transition to self-governance had been suppressed for three and a half decades.

[00:02:21]When Japan announced its surrender on August 15th, 1945, the liberation that followed was real.

[00:02:30]But that absence of institutional infrastructure isn't incidental to what came next. It's the condition that made everything that followed possible.

[00:02:41]On the night of August 10th to 11th, 1945, days before Japan announced its surrender, two American Army colonels were handed an urgent assignment.

[00:02:53]Their names were Dean Rusk and Charles Bonsteel.

[00:02:58]Neither man was a Korea expert. Neither had detailed knowledge of the peninsula's geography, its administrative boundaries, or the communities that lived along its length.

[00:03:10]Working with a National Geographic map and roughly 30 minutes to reach a decision, they proposed dividing the Korean Peninsula at the 38th parallel, a line of latitude that roughly bisected the country and critically kept the capital Soul within the proposed American occupation zone. No Korean was present in that room. The Korean people learned their country had been divided after the fact. Rusk later reflected that had he known Japan and pre-revolutionary Russia had once discussed dividing Korea along the same parallel 40 years earlier, he would, in his own words, almost surely have chosen a different line. That line placed 16 million Koreans in the American zone to the south and 9 million in the Soviet zone to the north. Professor Michael Robinson of Indiana University has spent decades studying modern Korean history.

[00:04:11]He described the core of what happened this way. The catalyzing incident, Robinson said, is the decision that was made really without the Koreans involved between the Soviet Union and the United States to divide Korea into two occupation zones.

[00:04:31]The Soviets accepted the arrangement almost immediately, and what the two powers then did with their respective zones couldn't have been more different.

[00:04:41]The United States entered the South and began a somewhat disorganized effort to establish an administrative structure.

[00:04:49]The Soviet Union entered the North with a plan already in motion. The Red Army didn't arrive simply to accept the Japanese surrender. It arrived accompanied by a carefully selected group of expatriate Korean communists who'd been politically vetted by Moscow.

[00:05:08]Men chosen not because they commanded popular support inside Korea, but because they demonstrated loyalty to the Soviet system and could be expected to take direction from it.

[00:05:20]Korea wasn't simply liberated anymore.

[00:05:23]It had become within weeks of Japan's defeat, a front line of the emerging cold war. And in the North, the Soviet Union wasn't waiting to see what kind of government Koreans might build for themselves.

[00:05:37]It was already constructing one for them.

[00:05:41]The man Stalin chose to lead that government was born Kimsung Ju near Pyongyang. His family was Christian, working class, and active in opposing the Japanese occupation.

[00:05:56]When Kim was a child, the family fled to Manuria in northeastern China, where he received a Chinese education and developed an early involvement in radical politics.

[00:06:08]By his mid- teens, he joined the Communist Youth League. By his 20s, he was fighting as a guerilla commander against Japanese forces in the forest of Manuria, earning by most accounts a genuine reputation for bravery under difficult conditions.

[00:06:27]In 1940, with Japanese forces closing in on his unit, Kim crossed into Soviet territory with a small group of followers.

[00:06:37]The Soviets gave him refuge, brought him to Moscow for military training, and gave him a captain's commission in the Red Army. He served through the remainder of the Second World War, eventually rising to the rank of major.

[00:06:52]The exact details of his wartime service, where he was stationed, what operations he was involved in, remain sparse in the historical record because the Soviet archives on this period weren't fully accessible until after the fall of the USSR and even then incompletely.

[00:07:14]What is clear from those archives is how Kim came to be chosen. It was Laventi Beria, Stalin's security chief and the head of the Soviet secret police who identified Kim as a suitable candidate for leadership of the Soviet occupied zone.

[00:07:31]Stalin agreed and Kim was sent to Korea to prepare for a public role.

[00:07:37]In October 1945, Kim arrived in Pyongyang in the uniform of a Soviet Red Army major. He was introduced to the population as a national hero, a legendary resistance fighter, the great liberator of the Korean people.

[00:07:55]The Soviet occupation authorities had constructed an official biography that positioned him as exactly what the Korean public needed to see, a homegrown revolutionary who'd fought Japanese imperialism for decades and returned to lead his people toward a better future.

[00:08:14]In December of that year, Kim was named head of the North Korean Bureau of the Communist Party of Korea.

[00:08:22]By September 1948, when the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was formally established, he became its premier, having risen from Soviet Red Army officer to head of state in roughly 3 years. not through Korean political life, but because the most powerful state in the communist world had decided he was the right man to manage their interests on the Korean peninsula.

[00:08:49]Andre Lanoff is a historian at Kukman University in Seoul who has spent his career studying how the North Korean state was formed.

[00:08:58]In his research on that period, Lanov concluded that the country's foundations were laid through the interaction of the Soviet Stalinist model. Imposed from outside with local Korean conditions.

[00:09:13]Imposed from outside. That is how Lanov describes it. And in those three words, the entire nature of what was built in North Korea becomes clear.

[00:09:25]Kim Ilsung wasn't a leader who rose through Korean political life. He was a deliberate placement and the system constructed around him was just as deliberate.

[00:09:37]Once Kim was in position, the construction of the state proceeded at pace. There weren't any elections, no competing parties, no open debate about the direction of the new government.

[00:09:50]What took place was an installation of laws, institutions, security structures, and ideological frameworks drawn almost entirely from the Soviet model and applied to a Korean context with Soviet technical assistance and Soviet advisers on the ground to guide it. The legal and economic transformation came first.

[00:10:16]In 1946, a sweeping series of laws remade North Korea's social order along Soviet lines. A land reform law redistributed agricultural land from the landed class to landless peasants. A policy that was genuinely popular with a significant portion of the rural population and that simultaneously destroyed the economic base of any class that might have organized independent political opposition.

[00:10:46]A labor law followed establishing Soviet style work structures across industry. A law on sexual equality.

[00:10:55]A law nationalizing industry, transport, communications, and banking. Removing at a single stroke any private economic power that might have funded or sustained political alternatives to Kim's government. The state was now the sole employer, the sole distributor of resources, and the sole authority over economic life.

[00:11:19]If you wanted to survive materially, you had to operate within the framework of a state entirely controlled by Kim and his Sovietbacked party.

[00:11:30]Kim consolidated his political hold simultaneously, isolating rivals and removing competitors through a combination of bureaucratic maneuvering and direct elimination.

[00:11:42]By 1949, 4 years after arriving in Korea in a Soviet uniform, he was the undisputed political authority in the North.

[00:11:53]The official ideology of the state had already been given a name that told you exactly what kind of system this was becoming. It was called Kim IlSung thought. Not Marxism Leninism, not Soviet communism, not even North Korean communism. Kim IlSung thought, "Every system of this kind requires a parallel infrastructure of fear, a security apparatus capable of identifying, monitoring, and removing anyone who might attempt to organize resistance.

[00:12:29]North Korea's was built from the Stalinist foundations that Soviet advisers brought with them. Secret police structures were embedded into state institutions from the earliest days of the occupation.

[00:12:43]Surveillance became a routine feature of social life with citizens expected to report on neighbors, colleagues, and in some cases, family members.

[00:12:54]Political opponents weren't subjected to open proceedings.

[00:12:58]They were quietly removed in ways designed to be visible enough to discourage others while leaving the precise mechanism of removal deliberately unclear.

[00:13:11]The economic architecture followed Soviet templates with equal fidelity.

[00:13:16]Central planning replaced market mechanisms across every sector. The state took ownership of all industrial production.

[00:13:25]Five-year economic plans modeled directly after Soviet five-year plans oriented the entire economy toward heavy industry and arms production rather than the consumer goods or agricultural development that might have improved ordinary life. Agricultural collectivization was driven through in parallel. By 1958, the last private farms had been absorbed into state cooperatives.

[00:13:54]In 1960, the Chong Sanri method restructured how party cadres directed the management of those cooperatives, placing agricultural planning under firm top-down party control.

[00:14:06]In 1961, the Tea work system extended the same principle to industry, putting factory management under party committee authority rather than technical managers.

[00:14:19]The scale of Soviet investment required to build and sustain this apparatus was substantial.

[00:14:26]Between 1946 and 1960, North Korea received an estimated $1.4 billion in plants and equipment.

[00:14:36]Soviet technicians personally supervised the reconstruction of North Korean factories.

[00:14:42]Soviet military advisers shaped the structure, training, and doctrine of the Korean People's Army from the ground up.

[00:14:50]The Shinwu Air Force Academy was established under Soviet leadership in October 1945.

[00:14:58]Within weeks of the occupation beginning to train the first generation of North Korean military pilots, the Soviets provided 40% of all external economic support North Korea received during this period.

[00:15:13]The personality cult was the final structural element, and it's the one that more than any other reveals the degree to which the Stalinist model had been transplanted wholesale into a Korean context.

[00:15:28]Kiml Sun was already using the title great leader as early as 1949.

[00:15:35]Portraits and images of him began appearing across public spaces almost from the moment he assumed power in workplaces, schools, railway stations, and government buildings.

[00:15:49]The practice of using monumental imagery to make a leader's presence feel omnipresent to render him inescapable even in spaces where he was physically absent had been developed and refined in the Soviet Union under Lenin and then under Stalin.

[00:16:07]North Korea adopted that model and extended it further than almost any other state in history.

[00:16:15]By 1960, there were an estimated 10,000 statues, portraits, or murals of Kimmel Sun in Pyongyang alone.

[00:16:25]North Korea wasn't a direct copy of the Soviet Union. The specifics were Korean.

[00:16:32]The historical grievances that Kim's propaganda exploited, the bitterness of colonial occupation, the humiliation of Japanese rule, the deep desire for national dignity and sovereignty were authentically Korean emotions responding to authentic Korean historical experience.

[00:16:52]But the structures underneath all of that, the single party apparatus, the security services, the centrally controlled economy, the leadership cult were built from Soviet blueprints with Soviet backing and set in place before North Korea was a year old.

[00:17:12]So why did Stalin do it? He needed a buffer.

[00:17:16]The Soviet Union had just lost an estimated 27 million people in the Second World War. Stalin wanted governments on his borders that answered to Moscow, not Washington.

[00:17:29]North Korea on a peninsula that touched Soviet territory served that purpose directly.

[00:17:36]He also structured the relationship to ensure Kim couldn't survive without him.

[00:17:42]In March of 1949, Kim traveled to Moscow and came back with Soviet loans, military equipment, and technical agreements.

[00:17:51]Moscow got access to North Korean ports, metals, and trade routes in return.

[00:17:58]When Kim asked for weapons, Stalin approved. When Kim asked for early loan payments to expand his army, Stalin approved. When Kim asked for fuel, medicine, and ships weeks before invading the South, Stalin approved within a day.

[00:18:17]Researchers at the Wilson Cent's Cold War International History Project, working directly from declassified Soviet archives, reached an unambiguous conclusion.

[00:18:28]Kim IlSung would have never dared to launch the Korean War without the approval of Stalin.

[00:18:36]He also probably wouldn't have done it without the arms, experts, and rubles that the Soviet Union provided.

[00:18:43]Moscow also never trusted nationalism it couldn't control. An independent Korean political movement was a structural threat, not an asset.

[00:18:54]Leaders with independent mandates stopped following instructions.

[00:18:58]Kim was chosen precisely because he depended on Soviet support to survive.

[00:19:04]It's communism that could be controlled.

[00:19:07]On June 25th, 1950, approximately 90,000 North Korean soldiers crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea. They moved on foot, by train, and in Soviet built tanks. Soul fell within 3 days. The South Korean military lost close to 3/4 of its effective force in the opening phase of the offensive.

[00:19:32]3 years of war followed a conflict that killed around 3 million people in total with more than half of those casualties on the North Korean side.

[00:19:43]Every major city on the peninsula was subjected to sustained bombardment.

[00:19:48]The industrial base the Soviets had spent years helping to build was largely reduced to rubble. By the time the armistice was signed on July 27th, 1953, months after Stalin's death in March of that year, North Korea had been devastated in almost every material sense.

[00:20:10]And yet, the war gave Kimmel Sun something no peaceime policy could have delivered with the same speed, a permanent state of national emergency that justified total political control.

[00:20:24]the maintenance of a massive standing military and the suppression of any internal disscent under the cover of an ongoing existential threat. In the months after the armistice, Kim moved against every remaining internal political rival. He purged the Workers Party of Korea of officials connected to pro-soiet factions.

[00:20:48]He removed officials associated with Chinese influence.

[00:20:52]Soviet Koreans, the ethnic Korean administrators Moscow had sent from Usuzbekiststan and Kazakhstan to staff the new government in its early years, became direct targets of ideological investigation.

[00:21:08]They were forced to choose between leaving for the Soviet Union or remaining and risking arrest.

[00:21:15]Some of those who stayed were executed.

[00:21:18]The man Moscow had installed as a manageable, dependent partner was now removing Moscow's own people from his government.

[00:21:27]When Nikita Kruchev delivered his denunciation of Stalin's cult of personality at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, the reverberations reached Pyongyang almost immediately.

[00:21:42]Some North Korean students who'd been studying in the Soviet Union returned home and began quietly to voice similar criticisms of Kim IlSung's growing personality cult.

[00:21:56]The response was swift and total.

[00:21:59]Hang Jang Yap was the second most senior North Korean official ever to defect to the South. He was also the man who had personally designed the Gu ideology.

[00:22:11]the very ideological framework Kim used to consolidate his rule.

[00:22:16]When he testified about what happened to those students, his account was direct.

[00:22:21]They were subjected to months of intensive interrogation, and those found the least bit suspicious were killed in secret. North Korea's dictatorship wasn't the product of a single decision, a single leader's ambition, or a single historical moment.

[00:22:39]Joseph Stalin didn't design modern North Korea in any comprehensive sense, but he chose the man. He built the army. He funded the economy. He transferred the governance model that had already proven its self-sustaining capacity across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He structured the relationship of dependence that kept Kimmel Sun bound to Moscow's framework during the critical years when the system was being set. And he authorized the war that gave that system its permanent emergency, its justification for never relaxing its grip and its reason for existing that required no further argument. Kim IlSung governed North Korea until his death in July 1994.

[00:23:30]His son Kim Jong-el governed until his death in December 2011.

[00:23:36]His grandson Kim Jong-un governs today.

[00:23:40]What was constructed between 1945 and 1953 in the years when Stalin was alive, engaged, and directly shaping the political system of the northern Korean state hasn't been dismantled. That's the nature of systems built this way.

[00:23:58]They're designed to make every alternative unthinkable, every exit inaccessible, every challenge feudal before it can organize into something capable of threatening the structure itself.

[00:24:12]That is what Stalin understood. That is what he built. And in North Korea, it is still standing.