Communism in Korea
[2][3] Due to the end of economic aid from the Soviet Union after its dissolution in 1991, the impractical ideological application of Stalinist policies in North Korea over years of economic slowdown in the 1980s,[4] and the recession and famine during the 1990s,[5] North Korea has replaced Marxism-Leninism with the Juche idea despite nominally upholding Communism.
The Workers' Party of Korea under the leadership of Kim Jong Un later reconfirmed commitment to the establishment of a communist society, but orthodox Marxism has since been largely tabled in favor of "Socialism in our style".
After his years as a guerrilla leader, Kim Il Sung had moved to the Soviet Union and had become a captain in the Red Army.
His battalion arrived in Pyongyang just as the Soviets were looking for a suitable person who could assume a leading role in North Korea.
Though technically under the control of the Seoul-based party leadership, the North Korean Bureau had little contact with Seoul and worked closely with the Soviet Civilian Authority.
Official North Korean historians later disputed this, claiming that Kim Il Sung had become its chairman from the onset of the Bureau.
October 10 is regarded as the 'Party Foundation Day' in North Korea, on which Kim Il Sung formed the first genuine communist party in the country.
Official North Korean historians tend to seek to downplay the role of early communist leaders like Pak Hon-yong.
[16] On April 3, 1948, the party led a popular uprising on Jeju island, against the unilateral declaration of the foundation of the Republic of Korea.
The guerrilla faction was actually the smallest of the fractions in the Central Committee but they had the advantage of having Kim Il Sung, who led the North Korean government and was highly influential within the party.
Kim Il Sung became the party chairman and Pak Hon-yong and Alexei Ivanovich Hegay became vice chairmen.
According to Andrei Lankov, in the early years of the party Kim Il Sung was the acknowledged leader, but he did not yet have absolute power since it was necessary to balance off the interests of the various factions.
Kim Il Sung also removed Pak Il-u, the Minister of the Interior[22] and reputedly the personal representative of Mao Zedong.
[22] In August 1953, following the signing of the armistice that suspended the Korean War, Yi and eleven other leaders of the domestic faction were subjected to a show trial on charges of planning a military coup and sentenced to death.
In 1955, Pak Hon-yong, the former leader of the WPSK and deputy chairman of the WPK, was put on trial on charges of having been a US agent since 1939, sabotage, assassination, and planning a coup.
[22] Lankov says that the trials of Yi and Pak were accompanied by the arrest of other members and activists of the former WPSK with defendants being executed or sent to forced labour in the countryside.
The domestic faction was virtually wiped out, though a few individual members who had personally allied themselves to Kim Il Sung remained in positions of influence for several more years.
Kim Il Sung outlined the three fundamental principles of Juche in his April 14, 1965, speech "On Socialist Construction in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the South Korean Revolution".
WPK ideologists and speech writers began to openly use Maoist ideas, such as the concept of self-regeneration, in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Five-Year Plan involved rapid economic development of North Korea, with a focus on heavy industry.
In 1972, Juche replaced Marxism–Leninism in the revised North Korean constitution as the official state ideology, this being a response to the Sino-Soviet split.
Kim Il Sung also explained that Juche was not original to North Korea and that in formulating it he only laid stress on a programmatic orientation that is inherent to all Marxist–Leninist states.
After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea's greatest economic benefactor, all reference to Marxism–Leninism was dropped in the revised 1992 constitution.
[26] In 2024, the portraits of Marx and Lenin were displayed in the newly opened Central Cadres Training School of the Workers’ Party of Korea, their first appearance since 2012.
