Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 by Suzy Kim

Abstract

Reviewed by: Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 by Suzy Kim Glennys Young Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 by Suzy Kim. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. 328 pp. 39 halftones. 1 map. 15 tables. Index. $45.00 (hardcover) Over the last few decades, scholars of global communism have tended to shift their analytical focus from political elites and central institutions to ordinary people and everyday life. A marked exception to this has been scholarship on North Korea. Only a handful of studies, if that, move beyond elite politics. One thinks, for example, of Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009), Charles Armstrong’s The North Korean Revolution: 1945–1950 (2002), Helen-Louise Hunter’s Kim Il-song’s North Korea (1999), and Robert A. Scalapino and Chong-sik Lee’s Communism in Korea: The Society (1972).1 One reason for this, of course, is that scholars have only limited sources with which to explore the everyday dimension of revolutionary transformation. Yet the fact that only a few scholars other than Suzy Kim, such as Charles Armstrong and Bruce Cumings, have used the sources that are available—such as, for the book in question, the North Korean Captured Documents collection at the National Archives II (declassified in 1977)—indicates that perspective has played an even larger role than the documents themselves in how historians have written the first five years of the North Korean Revolution into the larger narratives of the histories of the two Koreas, the Cold War, and the long twentieth century. Kim’s book is a pioneering contribution to the articulation of a new paradigm in that regard. Putting it even more directly, she provides fresh, and often compelling, answers to a most fundamental question: How should the history of North Korea be written, especially in the aftermath of the Cold War? To her considerable credit, Kim articulates cogently the approaches that she adopts as she unearths the much-neglected story of the social revolution that occurred after Liberation in August 1945 and before the beginning of the Korean [End Page 457] War in June 1950. In contrast to prior treatments of this revolutionary process and dominant narrative trends in the historiography of North Korea more generally, Kim accentuates the specifically Korean cultural and historical roots of this social revolution in everyday life, including those stemming from Japanese colonialism and the post-1945, postcolonial conjuncture. Her analysis centers on Inje county, located along the 38th parallel. At the same time, she places the North Korean social revolution in the comparative context of transnational phenomena such as the modern state, colonial and postcolonial modernity, as well as the political practices of Communist polities across the globe, especially those encompassing third world socialisms. Emphasizing the indigenous Korean roots of the social revolution of 1945–50, Kim refuses to see the creation of a North Korean Communist state as primarily the imposition of a Soviet model that itself, as some scholars have claimed, was a totalitarian state derived from Marxist-Leninist ideology. The first five years of the North Korean social revolution—a process straddling the formal creation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in 1948 and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the same year—were not, she emphasizes, a process dictated from above by the Soviet occupiers. This was not the beginning of the imposition of an authoritarian political structure in the sense of a “Soviet puppet regime” devoid of social roots.2 Rather, this social revolution, which encompassed mass participation in remaking everyday life in the fashion of Socialist rather than capitalist modernity, was a grassroots process that North Koreans invented themselves. The People’s Committees, which existed throughout the Korean peninsula by the end of 1945, constituted the nexus of this process in North Korea (p. 36). They, along with other grassroots institutions such as “peasant unions, worker unions, peacekeeping groups, and organizations of students, youth, and women” (p. 37), carried out the major reforms that were central to the remaking of North Korean society: land redistribution, elections to institutionalize the People’s Committees, and the literacy campaign. A significant dimension...