Russia increasingly resembles North Korea

Mark O'Neill April 02, 2024 22:46

In 1945, the Soviet Union created the country of North Korea and installed Kim Il-sung, an unknown 33-year-old Red Army officer, as its president. Kim created a state in the image of his model, Josef Stalin.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, Moscow stopped supplying goods and capital at friendship prices to North Korea and treated it like an ordinary trading partner. Russia wanted to become a European state.

Now, three decades later, Russia is becoming increasingly like the small state it created – highly militarised, a cult of personality, an ideology of hatred toward its neighbours, ruthless suppression of different opinions and murdering its opponents, at home and abroad.

This year Vladimir Putin will visit Pyongyang for the first time in more than 20 years. North Korea has become a major supplier of arms to Russia in its war in Ukraine, in exchange for Russian oil.
North Korea is a creation of Stalin and the Red Army. After Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, the Red Army invaded Korea from the north, as the U.S. army did from the south. Each occupied half of the peninsula, with the 38th parallel as the dividing line. Unable to agree, each set up a government in the sector they occupied.

On October 14, 1945, 100,000 gathered in downtown Pyongyang to celebrate their liberation from Japan. A Russian general on the podium stood up and told them: “now is the moment to introduce you to the new leader of the country, Comrade Kim Il-sung.”

The crowd was expecting to see a man in his 50s with a face hardened by years of war, a famous guerrilla leader of that name. Instead a plump man with a full head of hair stepped forward. The crowd could never have imagined that this man would rule them for the next 49 years, to be followed by his son and grandson until today, with a cult of personality similar to that of Stalin during his 29 years of power.

Kim had fought as a guerrilla against the Japanese from 1935 to 1937. But, after the Japanese wiped out most of his brigade, he spent most of World War at a Red Army base near Khabarovsk. The Soviets picked him as the leader of the new country as young and obedient.

They then rewrote history to give him the achievements of the real Kim Il-sung, who had been killed by the Japanese during the war, and changed his name to that of the guerrilla hero.

In January 1950, Stalin gave his approval to Kim to “liberate” South Korea. He assured Stalin that he would be able to do it before the Americans had time or will to intervene.

Kim launched the war on June 25 that year. He was completely wrong. The United States did intervene, bringing allies with them. The war lasted three years, costing 2.5 million military dead, as well as two-three million civilians killed. They included 160,000 Chinese “volunteers”. At the end of the war, the border line was almost the same as before.

It is similar to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He believed that his army would conquer the country within a matter of weeks, before the West could intervene. Now, after 25 months, an estimated 500,000 are dead on both sides, and the border has not changed substantially since before the war.

To justify their invasion, both Kim and Putin have used the Big Lie. Kim said – and most North Koreas believe – that it was South Korea that started the war. Similarly, the Kremlin said that NATO launched the war against Russia, which a majority of Russians believe.

To maintain this Big Lie, Kim and Putin have imprisoned those who say otherwise. In extreme cases, they kill opponents, at home as well as abroad.

For 44 years after 1945, the Soviet Union was a close ally of North Korea. It conducted barter trade at friendship prices, so that Pyongyang did not have to use hard currency of which it had very little. This changed when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989 and Russia became a market economy.

During the Yeltsin and early Putin eras, the two countries grew apart. North Korea had nothing to offer its giant neighbour, except labourers in mines, factories and fields.

The Ukraine war has changed everything. Russia has few friends in the world. At a vote in the United Nations in February 2023, 141 countries called for Russia to leave Ukraine, and only six voted with Moscow. Putin needs more weapons and ammunition, one of the few things which North Korea can supply.

The mother is growing closer to the child it brought into the world.

Mark O'Neill

A Hong Kong-based writer, teacher and speaker.