North Korean Opposition Movement in 1956

James Person's paper titled "We Need Help From Outside": The North Korean Opposition Movement of 1956" (August 2006, Cold War International History Project Working Paper) shed some interesting light on politics in North Korean during that period.

The paper concluded that the opposition at that time was prepared to vote Kim Il Sung out of power if he failed to admit to his mistakes and make appropriate changes in party democracy and the personality cult. The right to vote him out of power was said to be a democratic right guaranteed in the then recently revised Korean Workers' Party (KWP) charter. Indeed, some semblance of political life seemed to have existed in North Korea prior to the 1956 August Plenum.

The paper also noted that Kim was well aware of his critics' intentions and foiled their attempts. By postponing the start of the Plenum, Kim was able to blackmail and coerce members of the leadership who may have been sympathetic to the opposition.

"Earlier accounts of the August Plenum describe an attempted coup d'etat, perhaps because such rumors serve the purposes of both Kim and his critics. For South Korean intelligence, and later South Korean scholars, rumors of an attempt to overthrow Kim Il Sung may have been welcome because they demonstrated a lack of popular support for the leader. Similarly, within North Korea, the rumors benefited Kim Il Sung since few would question his motives in eliminating such conspirators from the party leadership."

Historical records presented in the paper also indicated that in 1956, the Soviet embassy still played a key role in the affairs of the Korean party. After surviving the attempts by Moscow and Beijing to meddle in internal party matters, Kim redoubled his efforts to limit the influence of foreign communist parties within the KWP. Indeed, the Sino-Soviet rift soon gave him the means to pursue a markedly more autonomous path, "ever vigilant against a renewed threat from his patrons."

For the record, the main factions in North Korea prior to 1956 were: 1) Domestic faction headed by veteran Korean communist Pak Hon-yong, 2) the Soviet faction nominally led by Ho Ka-i but directed from Moscow, 3) the Chinese supported Yan'an faction of Kim Tu-bong and Choe Chang-ik, and 4) the Partisan faction of Kim Il Sung.

All four groups were engaged in "intricate maneuvering" only months after Japan's surrender. Kim Il Sung eventually succeeded in eliminating the intense factional rivalry by purging the rival factions one by one.

The prominence of factionalism is given credence by the dramatic history of internecine bureaucratic factionalism in Choson dynasty Korea where, according to James Palais, "political groupings organized on the basis of personal loyalty irrespective of concrete policy issues." Indeed, the Korean Communist Party (KCP) - founded in 1925 - was dissolved by Comintern in 1928 due to the "ceaseless, unprincipled group struggle of the Korean communists."