S3 Episode 3 - "The Blue House"

August 15th, 1945, Emperor Hirohito broadcasts Japan's surrender to the Allies. When people in Korea heard the speech, they poured into the streets in celebration. Koreans, 75,000 strong celebrate their liberation from Japanese rule. It had been the Soviet Red Army that had liberated Korea. One scholar writes, quote, "Panyeosh Hashina, a member of the Soviet consulate stationed in Seoul was there to bear witness," quote, every two or 300 meters, their spontaneous assemblies, end quote, of people making impassions, speeches, singing, crying, and embracing. In villages throughout the peninsula, people began organizing almost immediately, creating peacekeeping and self-governing organizations to take over the colonial administration. Toward the end of the war in 1945, after defeating Hitler, the Red Army had rolled into Korea, captured Japanese intelligence reports, confirm the Soviet consulate workers' diary, quote, "Soviet forces and Korean committees are taking charge of public security, all policemen have been disarmed, all Japanese are in a state of extreme terror, though the city is generally quiet and calm. Koreans are demonstrating with Soviet and Korean flags and pasting posters everywhere." But days before he or she does speech, two mid-level American officials had drawn the line across Korea that would come to define life on the peninsula forever after. Soon, there would be a US military occupation in the South, while the people's committees flourished in the North below the 38th parallel. The committees were first ignored, and then, forcibly broken up. The Americans had arrived in Korea. (upbeat music) Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is episode three, The Blue House. Last episode, we got up to speed on the history of Korea itself. It's heyday, and then it struggles with Western and Japanese empires. We saw the splits in Korean society as a result of much of that, the split between the mass of peasants and workers and the landlords and upstart capital. The split between the collaborators with Japanese colonialism and the resistance to it. And the split between Korean nationalists and Korean communists. And each one of these conflicts is going to persist after the war and the partition of Korea. In fact, they're going to shape the very nature of society both in the North and in the South. From 1945 to 1948, post-war Korea was occupied in the South by the United States and in the North by the Soviet Union. During this period, two Korean states came to be. Historian of Korea, Bruce Cummings writes, "Nothing about the politics of contemporary Korea can be understood without comprehending the events of this decade." Typically, the story goes that the Soviets, one time ally of the United States, began sharpening their knives in Korea right after the war. They ran into the war. They ran into a totalitarian satellite, staffed by puppets, bloodthirsty for war against the South, which, fortunately, was under U.S. protection. The U.S., meanwhile, not perfect, but it was attempting to build democracy in South Korea and let its people determine their own future. But in fact, Cummings writes, "many Americans express surprise to learn of the U.S. occupation in which Americans operated a full military government in Korea from 1945 to 1948." They may be further surprised at the nature of the Soviet zone. So in this episode, we'll see how the typical American narrative of post-war Korea, North and South, begins to fall apart the closer you look. First, we'll look at the two superpowers, the U.S. and the USSR, and their relative strength after World War II. Then, in Korea itself, we'll see the formation of two distinct societies in the U.S. and Soviet zones. As always, you can find our bibliography and further reading at our website, www.blowback.show. And for this episode, in particular, we've drawn heavily from Suzy Kim's everyday life in the North Korean Revolution, Bruce Cummings' "Korea's Place in the Sun" and Huangsu Kyeong's "Korea's Grievous War." And you'll hear from some of those authors through the course of this episode. What was the nature of this post-war period? The American and Soviet occupation zones, what were their goals? And what seeds were planted that led to war only five years later? And who was puppeteering? Who? [Cheering] [Cheering] [Gunfire] The beautiful Crimean seaside town of Yalta was the setting for the latest and greatest conference of the Big Three. February 1945, the heads of the Allied powers met in Crimea and what was known as the Yalta Conference. Mr. Churchill makes his appearance for the first of the meetings, suitable address for the occasion. The U.S. Ambassador, Avril Hariman, recalls that Joseph Stalin took out a map and circled the curl and lower succulent islands of Japan. "These had changed hands between the Japanese and Russian empires in the past," Stalin said. And he suggested they should now be, quote, "returned to Russia." This was only one of many American negotiations with the Soviet Union after the socialist state's massive sacrifice in World War II. Finally, into the palace courtyard, sweeps the long black car, bearing one of the greatest military leaders of all time, Marshall of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin. Quote, "Given the scale of human and material losses," right, Gladyslav Zubak and Konstantin Plesikov. The Soviet Union, though it had troops almost all over Eurasia from Germany to Manchuria, could not sustain the stress of another war. It is hard to imagine that Stalin could have deliberately chosen to pursue brinkmanship with the West. Stalin's original intention of 1945 to around 1947 was to proceed with some kind of partnership with the West. Indeed, the Soviets had compromised with the other allies during the war. Roosevelt and Churchill recognized the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and Stalin for his part disbanded the common turn, the International Communist Congress in 1943. The Soviet leadership seemed to hope, if cautiously, that these kinds of trade-offs and more cooperation was possible and desirable after the devastating war. Furthermore, at the Potsdam Conference in July of 1945, Stalin had avoided clashing with the United States over German reparations for the war the Nazis had visited on the USSR. He would refrain from supporting revolutionary movements in places such as Greece, and Iran, and even more relevant to our story for a time, China. Russia hails victory in Moscow's Red Square during her May day parade. Above the tomb of Lenin stands Marshall Stalin, taking the salute from a great cavalcade of Soviet military strength. American officers are guests at the ceremony, watching famous Katusha rocket guns on trucks made in the USA. Soviet Union is no longer at war. For just short of four years, she grappled with Germany and today can present this impressive display of power. [Music] As many, including Zubak and Pleshekoff have noted, the Soviet war effort had almost unimaginable costs. More than 27 million people had died. The majority of them young men between the ages of 18 and 30, but also women and children. The European sphere of the USSR was devastated by the German war machine. Shouldn Stalin's leadership expect special treatment from the Western powers after such a sacrifice? "Our direct material losses," wrote a top Soviet diplomat after the war, surpassed the national wealth of England or Germany and constitute one-third of the overall national wealth of the United States. End quote. The Soviet planning committee, Gospelon, soon reported that this was in fact an underestimate. Old Bolshevik and foreign minister Vitchislav Molotov recalled, "We've collected reparations after the war, but they amount to to a pittance." On the other hand, of course, the Soviet Union did absorb productive German industrial machinery and equipment in the form of East Germany or the GDR, not to mention the economic value of forced labor for German prisoners of war. The Soviets triumphant but deeply weakened by the war were not only interested in an ongoing alliance with the West, they were positively counting on it. on it. Two of Molotov's deputies in late 1943 were put in charge of planning for peacetime diplomacy. Maxime Litvinov and Ivan Masek. Both of them were old Bolsheviks, Soviet Jews, and very experienced. Litvinov is described as both "Ariodite and crusty." Masekie sported a gray goti and through his diplomatic English had been friends with HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Their goal was to rebuild the Soviet Union unbothered so that no neighbor or fellow superpower could have a chance at pulling another Hitler. This would be a period as little as 10 years, and as many as 50, to generate a socialist turn in Europe. - Their boss, foreign minister Molotov, felt the same, quote, "It was to our benefit to stay allied with America," he said. And Andre Gromico, you may remember him from season two, Soviet diplomat who sat across from Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Gromico recorded that in 1944, Stalin, quote, "had definitely oriented toward a long post-war cooperation with the West, particularly with the United States." So the Soviets were planning on a pragmatic US foreign policy that left them breathing room to recover from the war, the less conflict, the better. But Molotov's Deputy Masekie also noted, "If the US and the USSR did lock horns," quote, "In the distant future, America would be able to create serious problems for the USSR." For instance, it would employ various means to resurrect Germany and Japan. In fact, those means were already being employed before the war was even over. The United States had a big hand in installing a new ruling class in Europe, many members of which were former Nazis and fascists, and an economic tractor beam was built by the Americans to draw West Germany as far West as possible. The Soviet goal was actually to unify Germany so much so that Stalin delayed several proposals to Sovietize the Eastern Zone, which would have sped up the division. To that point, the Korean peninsula had just been divided at US Instigation. Why? Perhaps to stem the tide of a left-wing post-colonial movement in Asia? Perhaps to preserve it as a bread basket for a resurgent, now pro-Western, Japan? Either way, at this point, Korea was not something the USSR's leadership decided to make a problem about. Once again, the Soviets took the path of least resistance and agreed to the US move a temporary partition of the country. Now, as we mentioned in our last episode, the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not long after starting his fourth term in 1945, brought power to his vice president, Harry S. Truman. The president of the United States, Harry S. Truman, 30-second person to serve as the American nation's chief executive, a man to whom many millions of people look for guidance, a man whose responsibilities are today as great and whose influence as far reaching as any other man on earth. Truman was a machine politician in the truest sense, originally a haberdasher, that's a clothing retailer. For Missouri, Truman was a creature of the Kansas City Democratic machine specifically. He rose from a judgeship to the US Senate in the 1934 election in early midterm wave in which he unseated the GOP incumbent by 20 points. In the summer of 1944, Truman was made FDR's vice presidential nominee in favor of the sitting vice president, Henry Wallace. Wallace had previously been a new deliara secretary of agriculture and was popular with union workers and farmers. And since becoming vice president, Wallace had become increasingly vocal on, among other things, US racial segregation, a topic that the operators of the Democratic party, whose base was still then partly in the South did not enjoy. And so, at the 1944 Democratic convention, Wallace was dumped for Truman, the compromise replacement, after leading Democrats made it clear to Roosevelt that Wallace would be unacceptable. What was Harry Truman's resume up to that point? He had made the cover of Time Magazine for an early 1940s congressional investigation into wartime government spending waste and abuse, which served to elevate Truman from hack politician to plausible statesmen. Little did anyone realize how soon Harry Truman was destined to shoulder the burden of state and carry on to completion the great work which Franklin D. Roosevelt had already come so close to fulfilling. Though Truman was on a path to becoming the first Cold Warier president, he didn't only see eye to eye with the men advising him. Truman was no Roosevelt. For one thing, his vision of the post-World War II order didn't favor as much cooperation with the Soviet Union as it did outright competition. But the World War couldn't last forever. Or could it? And the gigantic restructuring of the country that had taken place in the past six years, bending industrial leaders in the capital class to the needs of the state, it was an ongoing battle. Remember the end of World War I? Remember the rejoicing? But the armistice had an economic aspect too. It's the story of halted war production, an end to war spending and war by. By now, America had built up not only the world's most powerful arsenal, but also the greatest industrial capacity anywhere on the globe. But now that you didn't need as many super fortress planes to bomb Japan or Germany, what would those workers and assembly lines be used for? Tires, guns, trucks, food, fuel clothing, all desperately needed a few weeks before became surplus military commodities. This was hotly discussed in a debate over what was known as reconversion. Of course, for the war and armaments corporations, this idea meant lost revenue. Quote, by November 1943, according to the journalist Fred Cook, in his book The Warfare State, quote, "The best government estimates showed that it would be necessary to cut back military procurement at the rate of a billion dollars a month during 1944, spending cuts of a billion dollars a month. Over the course of 1944, with anticipated spending cuts on the horizon, the war lobby, which was composed of the highest levels of American big business and capital, ramped up their campaign against reconversion, as military spending began to slip from $67 billion per quarter to $62 billion by the end of the year." Industry and government must prepare to overcome the known physical obstacles to post-war prosperity, so the GI Joe's dreams of peace are realized, a peace that brings happiness, employment, and the opportunity for every American to contribute to and share in a rising standard of living. [MUSIC PLAYING] If the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt was Harry S. Truman's game, who is also Joseph Stalin's loss. In an interview with the author, H.G. Wells, Stalin once said, quote, "Undoubtedly, Roosevelt stands out as one of the strongest figures among all the captains of the contemporary capitalist world." In fact, Roosevelt had been Stalin's, quote, "dream partner," right, Zubak and Pleshekov. Quote, "He was the only president from Stalin accepted as a partner, even when he felt that FDR was scheming behind his back," end quote. Winston Churchill, as well, though he was the black sheep in the Big Three, was missed by Stalin when he lost re-election after the war. The Soviet leader, quote, "lost his two equals, the opponents with whom he knew he could play a grand game with a good chance of success," end quote. It is worth imagining the other universe in which FDR survived the war, because his absence changed many things regarding the US and Soviet positions, and therefore the balance of power in Korea. Roosevelt had desired a US Soviet partnership in rebuilding post-war Korea among other places. Once FDR was dead, division became the vulgar substitute on the ground. So Roosevelt, of course, had the new deal. What would Harry Truman have? Not a new deal, his first stab at a legacy-making policy was known as the Fair Deal. Broadly described, the Fair Deal was a moderate attempt to solidify the new deal, creating a national health insurance system, as opposed to say to the USSR's socialized medicine or the United Kingdom's new national health service, which gave people actual treatment. It also aimed to enhance social security and reform antiquated civil rights laws, but Truman withered in the face of Republican opposition. And the Democrats would be trounced in the 1946 midterm elections. How would they be beaten? For one thing, as Michael Brennan's notes, Republican Senator Joseph Ball of Minnesota, quote, "claimed that the political activism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a CIO, eventually part of the AFL CIO, comprised, quote, "a combination of many left-wing elements together with the communists and their fellow travelers." leftists were affiliated with the Truman administration." So here we are, the onset of the Red Scare. Soon it would have a real effect on the events in Korea. Charges of communist sympathy were devastating to the Truman administration, which at the time of the 1946 elections was now dealing with the growing economic distress of Europe, for whom the US had not yet crafted a meaningful foreign aid plan. The Truman administration had some tough squares to circle at this point. A stable Europe was a necessary trading partner for America, and for the American century to continue as such, US industry would still need access to abundant energy sources, especially petroleum. Key Truman officials, quote, "were particularly obsessed with the need to maintain access to mid-east oil, according to the historian Richard Freeland." We saw some of the results of that in season one. The passing of foreign aid bill for Europe was a tall order for Truman, who, in 1947, for example, would unsuccessfully veto the Taft Hartley Act that demolished labor unions in their ability to organize. He just didn't have the political capital. Though Roosevelt had tried to steer the US away from perpetual conflict with communist countries, in September 1946, a State Department advisor wrote a memo showing this was, indeed, starting to happen. The memo concluded that communism had to be fought worldwide. Earlier in February 1946, the diplomat George F. Kenan had sent to Washington the famous, quote, "long telegram" from Moscow. This was a memo that, without using the exact word, essentially argued that the global communist menace had to be contained. Communist movements and governments had, after all, emerged from World War II with immense esteem and support for their effort against the Nazis. Not to mention, capitalism wasn't exactly the only option anymore for the toiling masses. Stephen Gowen sums up, quote, "In the Western Occupation Zone of Germany, food riots led the US military governor to sound the alarm over what he described as a growing communist movement." French conservatives warned Washington that local communists, who had enjoyed enormous prestige owing to the lead role they had played in the resistance to German occupation, might take power. In Greece, communists had also led the resistance to German occupation and had significant popular support. If the US failed to eclipse the growth of communist parties, vast areas of the globe could be walled off from exploitation by US firms and investors. End quote. So what was all this? Truman's domestic reforms for an aid ambitions, an ascended communist world, and increasing pressures on Truman from the American right, what was all of it driving toward? Before the end of the Second World War, the United States, Britain, and nationalist China, declared in Cairo a common policy that, quote, "Korea shall become free and independent." On July 26, 1945, at the aforementioned Potsdam Conference, and again in its Declaration of War against Japan in August of 1945, a Soviet Union too pledged to fight for Korean independence. In September, between the wars and in the occupation, in Korea itself, the League of People's Committees set up in Korea by left-wingers and liberals declared the Korean People's Republic. The government had the following priorities, summed up nicely in a pamphlet from the time, put out by the National Council of Arts, Sciences, and Professions. A) redistribution of land to those who work on it. B) the Nationalization of Japanese-owned property. C) punishment of pro-Japanese traders. Freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and organization for all others. D) progressive labor reform. Equality for women. The spreading of popular education. Health measures. And E) a united, independent, democratic country. As we mentioned at the top of the episode, People's Committees were the mode of organization most Koreans joined immediately after the war. Susie Kim writes, "Through these committees, revolutionary justice was needed out to colonial authorities and their collaborators at times violently." The enemies were defined in terms of their association with the colonial government. Landlords who had been protected by the colonial government to control the countryside, local government officials and the police, and rice collection agents carrying out the orders of the colonial administration. People's committees took over local governance in the vacuum left by the collapse of the Japanese colonial government, punishing national traders and criminals in people's courts, distributing grain and maintaining local security. Peasants who made up the vast majority of the population dominated these people's committees. Two days after the declaration of this People's Republic, the U.S. forces commanded by General John R. Hodge landed in Korea. In December, the Allied Foreign Ministers met in Moscow, making what was called "the Moscow" decisions. The Americans, writes Australian journalist Wilfred Birchett, "made it clear they would not allow the Koreans themselves to unify their country." It was decided to establish a Soviet-American joint commission to achieve the unification. End quote. The Soviets weren't thrilled but insisted in a statement afterward that this was the best compromise they could get and they would work with the U.S. to help Korea get on its feet and unify the country. So the Koreans had already set up a nascent government, a left-wing populist people's republic, before the U.S. occupation had gotten going. It was linked by a network of people's committees across the peninsula and favored what you would call "left-wing populist policy." General Hodge, however, would soon "declare war" on this original people's republic. Here's Hodge, later in his own words. "Flatly stated, one of our missions was to break down this communist government outside of any directives and without benefit of backing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the State Department." End quote. General Hodge took up residence in what was known as the Blue House, the seat of government in Seoul, recently vacated by the governor generals of Japan and some day soon to become the presidential palace of Shingman Rhee. The U.S. military occupation of the South had begun. So let's take a look at the occupation in the South. Quote the State Department instantly determined that Korea was a victim of Japanese aggression, widespread peace. But the occupation command, time and time again, not only treated the South as enemy territory, but its several points actually declared it to be such. And interfered in its politics to the degree that no other post-war regime was so clearly beholden to American midwifery. And according to Rutgers' Newark historian Cornell Chang, quote, "the entry of American occupying forces in September 1945 complicated and ultimately narrowed the range of possibilities for Korean independence." The Korean People's Republic, declared by Koreans themselves, went unrecognized by the United States and soon it would be rendered powerless by the U.S. military government. With that military government came a series of economic, quote, "liberalization measures." In addition to reforming Korean laws to protect, quote, "free labor," the ability to choose one's job unimpeded. In October 1945, the military government ruled that labor strikes were illegal. Charles Hanley, Cho Sang-Hun and Martha Mendoza, right, quote, "the U.S. military government had pleased the farmers by decreasing a limit on the rice rent of 30% of the crop." That was on paper. In reality, enforcement was lax. The American occupation took back the properties that Koreans had seized from collaborationists or Japanese owners, placing them under the custody of, quote, "American advisers." Korean collaborators with Japan, after masses of former Japanese managers had been chased out, were running the factory floors and once again, assuming other positions of influence. And of course, Japanese military advisers and other former colonial bigwigs did stick around for many years. On the issue of the Americans teaming up with former collaborators with Japan, Bruce Cummings puts it bluntly. Well, the U.S. set up a military government in Korea in 1945 and it lasted three years. And the Americans hired every Korean they could find who had served the Japanese, including large numbers of Koreans who had been in the hated Japanese national police. In 1946, I think about 75% of the police force had been Koreans, made up of Koreans who served the Japanese. You know, years ago, I interviewed Leonard Birch who was a civilian adviser to the General had you ram the occupation and was widely found. that to be the most knowledgeable American of what was going on in Korea. And I asked him about collaborators with Japan. And he said basically we thought if they were qualified, we should hire them. Suzy Kim tells us that it was well known within the forces of the US occupation what was going down. Looking at some of the intelligence reports written by US intelligence officials that were part of the US military occupation forces. Richard Robinson was a first lieutenant in the US occupation forces. And he wrote this kind of really extensive piece. And the story of how that even gets out of Korea is really interesting because he talks about how he had to actually burn it or fear that if it fell into his superior that he would be court-martialed for the kinds of things that he was divulging and the critical stance that he took about the US policy. So then he had to burn it and then he had to rewrite it from memory with some of the other documents that he managed to smuggle out. And then the war of course came very quickly after that. And what's interesting is that I think he saw, I mean he was writing, he was there from 45 to 47 but he was able to sort of anticipate that civil war is going to break out if nothing happens. And so he was trying to say that the policy needs to change. But then of course once he was back in the US war does break out. And so he tries to publish this throughout the 50s but nobody is willing to buy it. And particularly in the forces of order you essentially had a Japanese national police and a Japanese armed forces. I mean in 1948 Americans were complaining about the South Korean army doing banxiah charges and other kinds of Japanese battlefield techniques. And Kim Sub-wan who had chased Kim Il-sung in Manchuria became a general in the South Korean army and was commanding the 38th parallel all through the summer of 1949. And then people wonder why you had the civil war. Cornell Chang writes, "The only thing that separated the new American military rule from Japanese colonial rule was a few cosmetic changes." For seeing the occupation was as we said, "General Hodge, a deputy of MacArthur who would in his Korean stint shape the face of the country." The repression unleashed below the 38th parallel entailed locking up most of the significant well-known leftists by the end of a year of US military rule in late 1946. The Korean national police, from the battle days of Japanese imperial rule, had been reconstituted and interwoven with the Korean Democratic Party, the anti-communist Japanese collaborator Block with whom the Americans had decided to partner. By summer 1946, some American military officials were already feeling queasy about the kind of police state they were well more than enabling, more like propping up entirely. Two officials, that July, while investigating allegations of police misconduct found evidence of corruption, prisoner abuse, censorship, and torture. It was obvious to all that this conduct was systemic in the KNP, the National Police. But as one military government official said to G2, that's military intelligence, investigators in the 1940s, "The US military governor ordered American advisers in the Department of Justice not to interfere." Why hush up these growing atrocities aside from the bad public relations that might result for the US for doing the exact thing it had supposedly waged a world war and dropped two atom bombs to stop? US military officials gave their reasoning elsewhere more bluntly, "Though much of the police methods of crime detection and law in Korea is still of jab vintage, out of necessity, they must be used." What made it necessary? The labor unrest, the US military and Korean police were staring down was quite real. There were strikes across South Korea throughout 1946 peaking that autumn. After a mid-September railway workers union strike, their demands had gone ignored by the military government, in which ultimately 36,000 railroad workers shut down rail traffic across the country, the military regime only doubled down. The railroad worker struggle grew into a general strike of an estimated 300,000 worker. From the pamphlet we mentioned earlier, quote, "It must be said in fairness to the US military government that the worsening of the economic situation was not due solely to the lack of reform measures. South Korean industry was mostly in consumer goods, and since it was largely dependent on the heavy industry, raw materials and electric power of the North, the growing split between the two zones of Korea was itself a principal factor. The fact remains, however, that inflation in the South was allowed to reach disastrous proportions. Industrial wages lagged far behind. Factory production fell to 20% of capacity. There was still no real land reform. There was a cholera epidemic, and there was starvation." In September 30, 1946, the railway strike was broken up by 2,000 armed Korean policemen accompanied by the US military. The toll was one worker dead, 40 injured, and over 1,500 arrested. And that wasn't the only reprisal. As Cornell Chang writes, "The American military governor quoted ordered the National Police and Allied Rightist Youth to crack down on worker protests." The culmination of the fall 1946 uprising, or the Taegu uprising, as it's often called, was an explosion of early October violence. Korean protesters clashed with police and burned down police stations in multiple cities. To quash the popular uprising, the occupation government declared martial law. There were South Korean legislative elections around this time, by the way. But a US lieutenant helping to run the show later said that the election "was so rigged as to elect fascists, run by ward heads who got the family's seals and voted them with threats to vote right or lose their rice rations." Those rice rations are important, because as all of this is going on, urban Korean households were encountering what many observers at the time were calling an outright famine. The Korean rice crop had previously been the property of its colonial master, Japan. And because the colonial economic hierarchy had been preserved, you had the same old families and the same wealthy landowners who were now making a killing by selling their rice on foreign black markets rather than at home. The biggest black market for South Korean rice, of course, being the other side of the border in mountainous North Korea, where post-war scarcity was also creating famine conditions. Land reform in South Korea, which as we'll discuss was pursued immediately in the North, could have helped stop this spiral into starvation. But the policy did not change. A top this unfortunate pile was Dr. Seungmin Ri, hand picked by the United States from the start. As we've mentioned, Ri was a convert to Christianity at a young age. In early and ardent anti-communist, a student of Woodrow Wilson's at Princeton University, where Ri had received a doctorate in 1910, Ri was on an American military plane to Japan as the surrender was being negotiated in August 1945. During the war, he had collaborated with the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Now a hard-bitten step to a genarian. Ri would soon prove to be one of the most ruthless leaders in Asia, presiding over a bloody suppression of domestic opposition and constant aggression to his neighbor up north. There's an aspect of the origin story of this South Korean state that sometimes goes unnoticed, and that's the involvement of Korean gangsters. Scholar Eric Mobran writes, "For many years, quote, "gang bosses" had put their organizations at the disposal of party and state actors. In the decade and a half following Korean liberation from Japan in 1945, a category of men proud souls back alleys, and also its halls of power. These figures might be called street leaders, for they were directly linked on one hand to private agents of violence and on the other, to the top state and political elites of the country. The most notorious individuals included Kim Tuhan, a gang leader who became an elected politician, and Yi Chang-jie, the "political gangster," quote unquote, "who helped party politicians with their dirty work." Kim and Yi are the stuff of legends in South Korean popular culture. These guys came out of the soul underworld that blossomed in the 1930s. Mobran writes, "Souls underworld was inhabited by imposing groups of young men who demanded money from shops in exchange for, quote unquote, protection. These men were called fists, shoulders, or hoodlums. They were organized into gangs with territorial boundaries, leadership structures, and symbolic systems. Even as they became tied up in politics, these gangs remained protection rackets run by figures who were tough and ambitious and street smart. And as you can probably imagine, much has happened in the United States. These gangsters were deployed to make threats and crack heads against anyone in Korea who was looking to organize a union, challenge the political elite, or make trouble for the military occupation. Good old-fashioned gangster is small. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) A report on the first three months of occupation by General Hodg red, quote, "Growing resentment against all Americans, "the word pro-American is being added to pro-jap, "national trader, and collaborator," end quote. So what would come next? The first mass elections in Korean history occurred in late 1946 into 1947. They did not take place in the American governed South whose legislative elections a month earlier were acknowledged as a joke even by the Americans. They occurred in the North in what was still the self-proclaimed peoples Republic in the Soviet zone. Here we should back up, because the typical narrative in the United States is that North Korea was, as we mentioned at the top of the show, a puppet state designed top to bottom by the Soviet Union with a cultish leader, Kim Il Sung, nothing more than a potted plant. Maybe even an imposter whose World War II guerrilla credentials were fake. We'll get to that in a second. So just as South Korea was an American creation, Kim was the Soviet puppet. 10 million others in Northern Korea are still Soviet dominated and boldness. But did the Soviets quote deposit Kim in Pyongyang? Bruce Cummings asks, quote, "apparently not." Original research in five languages has suggested that just before the Manchurian guerrillas returned to Korea, the top leaders agreed among themselves to promote Kim Il Sung as the maximum figure for reasons that included his wider reputation and his personal force. The propaganda that would start to crop up in the West and no doubt echoed in South Korea was actually that Kim was an imposter who had stolen a genuine guerrilla hero's identity and was now using it to govern North Korea. Here's Bruce Cummings on this idea. - Well, South Korea and the US maintained that Kim Il Sung was an imposter as a matter of high policy for decades. I think it was around 2005 that I got an email from a colleague at the University of North Carolina. He said that he had a Korean graduate student who was convinced that Kim was an imposter. That's about the last time I heard that story. But it was gospel all during the Cold War and it was so easily disproved. - How does Trangia, whatever your name is, get ready for the big surprise. You and not you, you and me. No shit. - So Kim was the real deal and these guerrillas who had fought with him became quote, the core of the North Korean hierarchy. But let's leave aside for a moment, the top levels of the North Koreans state and in fact the Soviet Union because in her book on post-war North Korea, Suzy Kim writes quote, "The Russians hardly show up in the coming pages. Precisely because they were not present at the local level. Koreans were running the show. The further away one got from Pyongyang. Hong Sun, Han Lee, and Mendoza also write quote, "The Soviets never established a full-fledged military government in the North, moving quickly to local control." Kim goes on, "A decree by the Soviet occupation dated September 27th, 1945, announced the abolition of all Japanese colonial institutions and the confiscation of all lands owned by the Japanese and pro-Japanese elements." Such a decree was in stark contrast to orders by the American occupation, which in effect instructed the colonial structure to be left intact and made English the official language in the South. The Soviets, Suzy Kim writes, clearly understood the political stakes of decolonization, whereas the Americans did not end quote. It turns out that in the South, the People's Committees were essentially stamped out. The US occupation forces deemed them as being leftist and tyrannical for their own taste. And so they were disbanded essentially. Whereas in the North, they were incorporated into a centralized government. So the People's Committees were allowed to flourish. In fact, North Korea was undergoing a genuine Korean social revolution. One of the first and most important aspects of the revolution in the North was, you guessed it, land reform. And it was carried out from the bottom up with peasants for the first time, exercising control over political life in Korea. Quote between February and March of 1946, Suzy Kim writes, "A conference of the Northern peasant league was held in Pyongyang with 150 peasant delegates, 93 of whom were poor peasants demanding land to the tillers." Until this moment, according to Japanese and ministered land surveys, at least 77% of the rural people in the country leased their land. This meant people handing over, quote, "50 to 70% of the harvest in rent, leaving the vast majority of the peasants near the point of starvation." Now in the Depression years, with global markets in the Dung heap, things degenerated even further. Suzy Kim points to an article about village life in Korea from the time, quote, "Conditions are none other than a living hell. Peasants have been depending on grassroots and tree bark for their sustenance, but even such stuffs have now been exhausted." The revolution seized Japanese and pro-Japanese land with no compensation for landowners and distributed it for free to workers and peasants, cancelling all debts. This had the effect of, quote, "abolishing the tenancy system for good." Landlords, at least those who had not already fled, they had to sit and take it. One account from a landlord, quote, "Overnight, we lost all our ancestral land. They did let us keep the big house and three rice paddies that lay between our house and the church. For the first time in my life, we had to do some work." With peasants taking over rural committees, administering the countryside, quote, "Landlords were not only stripped of their land and wealth, but were also eliminated from institutions of political power." Now as you might expect, this was not achieved without a struggle, with landlord and right-wing armed rebellion in parts of the country. But the numbers, as we've seen, were on the side of the revolution, quote, "with the enthusiasm generated by land ownership. Agricultural production increased by as much as 50% in some provinces," Susie Kim writes. "Many of the landlords and their elk," meanwhile, would flee southward. Forming an important social base of the anti-communist and anti-northarm hard core, collaborating with the US military government. Then came the People's Committee elections in late 1946 and into 1947. The first mass elections in Korea were universal, but they were not the traditional, quote, "American type." Quote, "A slate of candidates was selected by a coalition of political parties and 35 social organizations in North Korea, about 6 million members in total. These were candidates known to people, figures from resistance to Japan, to Korean social reform and nationalism," end quote. Once the slate was selected by this cross-section of Korean civil society, voting for representatives went in stages, provincial, city, and village elections in the winter of '46 and '47, and towns in the spring of '47. Here's a United States Army report on these elections via their agents working in the North. The early morning crowd attended the polls eagerly. They comprised the eager people who were fascinated by their first experience in casting a democratic vote. Since the shops were closed, there was nothing to distract the people from performing their duty. Polling places were conspicuously designated by evergreen markings over arches, decorating entrances, signs, colored streamers, and, above all, large colored pictures of Kim Il Sung and Joe Stalin. Votographs of the 41 chosen candidates were on exhibit at principal thoroughfare intersections. Election places are brightly decorated with Korean red banner North Korean colors. Groups of small girls travel from place to place to sing songs and dance folk dances. Trucks are traveling the streets carrying brass bands. The voting places are all well guarded by communist police. Soviet army troops are scarce. Russians are not at any of the booths seen. Now, around this time, there's another familiar policy that comes into focus. A literacy campaign. We remember a similar drive in Cuba last season. Susie Kim writes, quote, "The campaign mobilized vast numbers of people and resources to build schools, libraries, and other educational facilities to educate the staggering number of illiterates, especially in the countryside and particularly women." On that note, the social fabric, relations between the genders, were also a part of the revolution in everyday life. Here's an article from the time calling on women to revolutionize their sangual or life. Let's work and learn. Let's overthrow superstition. Let's have a plan in daily life. Let's reform old habits and customs of the past. Let's have a scientific dietary life, like maximizing nutrition. Let's fix our home so that we can work comfortably and live well. Quote, "No aspect of the everyday was left untouched," writes Susie Kim. The South held free and separate elections of its own. Not so in the North. Soviet-picked Korean candidates played a Marxist too. And brainwashed North Koreans followed the red-pied pipers. Their votes went down the drain. The Democratic South listened to plans for rehabilitation made by freely elected representatives. Some of whom have been since freely deposed. And the nation prospered. Quote, "On August 7, 1947, the US military government outlawed communists. In the road to no gunry, author Sanghan Han Lee and Mendoza report, quote, "Word and soul was that wealthy citizens had put a high price on the heads of leading left-wingers in South Korea. And one by one, they were indeed assassinated." In Yongdong, meanwhile, police entered the Salvation Army Hospital and interrogated patients suspected of being insurgents and then took them outside and shot them. The hospital's director later reported. End quote. The US military government obviously ignoring the elections in the North. We're now stamping out the People's Committees with the help of the South Korean police. Seungmin Ri, the presumed leader of South Korea, was still only the head of a provisional government. But by now it was clear, he and his American friends were planning on making the North South split permanent. And these years following the war, were meant to put everything in place for re. That's not to say that there hadn't been others who sought the throne. One character, Kim Goo, was a favorite of Chen Kai-shek. And he had by now earned the moniker the assassin. And so Kim Goo made his move to take over the government on New Year's Eve in 1946. It failed. Hours later, on New Year's Day, General Hodged dressed him down and told him he would quote, "Kill him if he double crossed me again." And Kim responded by threatening to commit suicide. And he would later be assassinated himself, suspected of being a Soviet agent. Let's get back to the North. We've already talked about its social revolution. Now let's talk a bit more about the structure. If, as Bruce Cummings and others write, quote, "North Korea was never simply a Soviet satellite, but evolved from a coalition based on widespread people's committees, what was the nature of the emerging state in North Korea?" The formal founding of the North Korean Workers' Party was in August 1946. It would come to dominate politics, though other parties existed, such as the Choson Democratic Party, and the charmingly named Friends Party. Quote, "Central agencies nationalized major industries. They had, of course, been owned mostly by the Japanese, and began a two-year economic program on the Soviet model of central planning, the priority of heavy industry." By then, nationalists and Christian leaders, quote, were ousted from all but pro-former participation in politics, Cummings writes. By 1948, the Korean People's Army will have been formed. Christianity had long been a noxious force in Korean history, as we saw last time, and now quote, "Christians were particular targets of the regime. Many pastors were imprisoned in the late 1940s, including Reverend Sun Myeong Moon, who would go on to form the worldwide cult, pejoratively known as the Moonies, with more than a little purchase in the American political scene." Quote, "Christian churches remained open until the war, and worship was allowed, but Christian political activities were ruthlessly stamped out. As we sometimes see in these situations, the workers' party had its social base in the peasantry and a small, but growing, working class. And there was an open-door policy of letting anyone in regardless of class background, which was primarily an invitation to peasants." There was a general impetus to eliminate the power and prestige of the class enemy, as we've discussed in land reform already. As the process of land reform and redistribution got underway, there was also a tightening of the ship of state. Quote, "Police recruits were urged to get rid of the old attitudes of, quote, "high-handedness, arrogance, selfishness, and self-aggrandisement." Recruits must, quote, "respect human rights" and, quote, "beetings, torture, and other inhuman evils" must not be used. Cummings rights of these reports, quote, "they cannot be dismissed as propaganda, since they're taken from secret internal documents." An amendment suggests that whatever the excesses of individual North Korean police, the leadership sought to change some of the worst abuses of the old system. As a result of this radical and unflinching turn toward productivity and safeguarding independence, notions such as press freedom were essentially phased out by the end of 1946. There was no embrace here of liberalism, or bourgeois politics, depending on your point of view. But what else was at play in this more Spartan North Korea? You can see a basic political arithmetic forming here. In the North, those who had been promoted or fetid by the Japanese, a minority largely fled. Those they exploited, the majority, formed the social base of the North's government and its policies. Even where things got violent, there wasn't much call for a greater campaign of violence because it was a relatively small group that had needed to flee anyway. And where did this minority flee? To the South, where they found a more than sympathetic government, and there, the situation was flipped. The minority of landowners and former collaborators was favored by the Southern government, whereas the majority of the population was not supportive of the government and in different ways, fought against it. And so violent repression was much greater than the South. So as coming's notes, in the North, there was a recourse to self-criticism sessions, not unlike the Maoist model. There was in daily life a kind of pervasive meetings culture, quote, the documentation suggests less a totalitarian atmosphere, and more the mundane problems of getting people to come to meetings, be punctual, speak up, and the like. Just as Koreans revolution in the North was not a sci-fi body snatcher's type operation, neither was it a bloodbath. There was no revolutionary violence like that of, say, the early days of the Soviet Union or in Vietnam. Quote within a year after liberation, coming's rights, there was a thoroughgoing renovation of the most hated and feared of colonial institutions. Those who staffed and benefited from it believe it to be a vast improvement over the previous system. Those who suffered from it, thought it to be a draconian network that denied all freedom to the individual. Both were probably right, end quote. And here's what Susie Kim adds, quote, "The forms of mobilization through lectures, study sessions, and collective labor might appear to be the same in post-laboration North Korea, but the content was substantially different. Lectures and study sessions no longer preached nice and eti or colonial unity, but focused on teaching Korean language in history. Labor was no longer mobilized for the Japanese Empire, but solicited by distributing land to the tillers and placing the management of local industries in the hands of factory committees." The North Koreans were definitely using the Soviet system as a model, as every revolutionary socialist government would do in the near future. For example, the Korean minister of education from the North, he had visited the USSR, and while he was probably aware he was on a bit of a select tour that hid some of the most recent effects of the war against the Nazis, he did come away very impressed. It's not that the Soviets and the North Koreans weren't close. They just weren't master and servant. First of all, much like the relationship between Stalin's USSR and the Chinese Communist army at this time, there was something less than a sunny history between them. The darkest spot on Korean Soviet relations lay in Stalin's brutal war time evacuations. Here's Bruce, quote, "In 1937, Stalin ordered the forced deportation of some 200,000 Koreans from the Soviet far east to Central Asia. He feared that they might contain pro-Japanese elements during the war." This, of course, was an unfortunate mirror event to the United States, suspecting similar disloyalty, forcibly relocating and rounding up Japanese Americans on a similar scale, hurting them into internment camps on the West Coast. But by the war's end, the Soviets had not only been a friend in the struggle in Manchuria, it, of course, had been the red army that liberated Korea militarily. The USSR, as the world's preeminent socialist state, was clearly a huge influence on the Korean communists. Still, there was a more nuanced quality to the alliance and simple simpatico. The Koreans certainly found an ally in the USSR, but for their own revolutionary project, they copied from the Soviet model on a selective basis. As for the Soviet interest in North Korea, surely it was a matter of real politique. Quote unquote, "Soviet imperialism," no? Quote, "It has often been surmised that the Russian saw Korea as a gateway to the Pacific and especially to warm water ports," writes Bruce Cummings. Quote many have therefore thought that Soviet policy was a simple matter of Sovietizing Northern Korea, setting up a puppet state, and then directing Kim Il Sung to unify Korea by force in 1950. The problem is that the Soviets did not get a warm water port out of their involvement in Korea, even with their full occupation of half of the peninsula. Quote, "The number of Soviet advisers was never very high in the North, even in the military." British sources estimated that the Soviet advisers the central government dropped from 200 in 1946 to a mere 30% of the population. 30 in April 1947. All right, back in the US. A couple weeks after the 1946 midterm elections, President Truman approved the creation of, quote, "the temporary commission on employee loyalty." By March 1947, Truman signed an executive order formalizing the approval of an American government employee loyalty program, officially marking subversives, that is, communists, as officially designated antagonists of the state. It was imposed with an eye on the impending 1948 elections in which Truman himself would be up for review. In the fall of 1947, Truman had begun to try and outflank the Republicans, who would of course been calling his administration "chami." October 8th, State Department redefines the category of "security risk" to include not only any employee associated with a subversive organization, but any employee associated with any individual, so associated. November 8th, the president announces appointments to the loyalty review board, led by a Republican attorney and whose first meeting was personally attended by President Truman. December 4th, the attorney general publishes a "disloyalty list" that gets on the front pages. There was even an official, quote, "zeal for American democracy" campaign from the Truman administration launched at the time. This frenzy was making even some of Truman's brain trust, like George Kenan, or elites like the president of Harvard, start to feel a little uncomfortable at the anti-communist hysteria. The Truman doctrine, which was the president's attempt to synthesize a coherent foreign policy agenda, was first announced in March 1947, but only took on more significance and depth as time went on. It was, Richard Freeland argues, quote, "to become the seminal declaration of American foreign policy in the post-war period." A big claim, it was just a 20-minute address to Congress, but rhetorically, it laid down the rails on which the American Cold War juggernaut would travel. Crafted with Republican support in mind, the speech declared that Americans would need to be shocked into action in order to fight the Soviet threat. The public was weary of war, and while anti-communism might have short-term political benefits, which Truman was staking his presidency on, actually engaging in an anti-communist war with American troops was a political impossibility. So under the Truman doctrine, communism would have to be revealed for the evil that it was. How would it be revealed? In February 1947, Truman announced the National Security Act, landmark legislation that would formally unify the armed forces under the new Aegis of the Secretary of Defense. What's more, wartime intelligence gathering that had been done under the auspices of the OSS unit in the army, practitioners of those dark arts got their own new agency at this time. It was called the Central Intelligence Agency. That same year Stalin met with George C. Marshall, whose name would soon brand the Marshall Plan for Europe. Listeners to season two may remember that Germany and Berlin, keeping both the country and the city undivided, was a particularly sensitive issue for the Soviets. Krzyszewod hammered Kennedy about it when they met in 1960. For Stalin, back in the 40s, the issue was no less pressing and it appeared he really expected that the West would eventually compromise rather than decide on a separatist German policy. But the Truman administration had already decided to rebuild the western zones of Germany without Stalin, and if necessary, against his will. Then the US announced the Marshall Plan for European Recovery, quote, "In full expectation that Stalin and Molotov would boycott it, thereby freeing the Americans from any commitments to their former partner." While the initial Soviet response actually welcomed the Marshall Plan, it soon became clear Zubak and Pleszkopf, right, that quote, "the intent of the Marshall Plan was to deprive the Soviet Union of its influence in Germany and Central Europe." Indeed, by November of 47, quote, "the US government had made it clear it would not tolerate a naturalized, unified Germany that might gravitate toward the Kremlin. It launched preparations for the creation of a separate West German state." In short, many of the Soviet leaders saw this all as a blanket attempt to get America's arms around Europe, and most alarmingly, to build an anti-Soviet Germany back up. Stalin's improvised attempts to stop this led to the 47 Berlin blockade. It failed, and this eventually led to the division of Berlin into East and West. Only a year or two after the Second World War, the day the Soviets had feared of the West committing to confrontation rather than cooperation, that day had arrived earlier than expected. Arriving at Kimpo Air Draw near Seoul, Korea, our General of the Army, Dr. MacArthur and Mrs. MacArthur, to attend ceremonies formally proclaiming the end of United States military government in Korea and the formation of the free and independent Korean Republic. On August 15, 1948, South of the 38th parallel, the Republic of Korea was declared. Supreme Commander MacArthur meets Dr. Seung-man-Ree, first president of the new Republic, comprising 19 million of his countrymen in southern Korea. Less than a month later, the Northerners founded the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on September 9. Like the South, the Northerners invited MacArthur as a guest to be at their founding. Unlike the South, they were ignored. And at the end of 1948, the Soviet Union withdrew its occupation forces from North Korea. No Soviet troops were again stationed there. What's more, in the coming year of 1949, the best and most battle-tested troops that North Korea had, fighting alongside the Chinese communists over the border, they began to return home. [BLANK_AUDIO]