History of the Workers' Party of Korea

According to North Korean sources, the origins of the Workers' Party of Korea can be traced to the Down-with-Imperialism Union, which was supposedly founded on October 17, 1926 and led by Kim Il Sung, then 14 years old.

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 and reputedly the personal representative of Mao Zedong.

[6] 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.

[6] The trials of Yi and Pak were accompanied by the arrest of other members and activists of the former SWPK, with defendants being executed or sent to forced labour in the countryside.

[6] 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.

Throughout the Soviet bloc domestic Communist parties inaugurated campaigns against personality cults and the general secretaries who modelled themselves after Stalin were deposed throughout Eastern Europe.

Kim Il Sung was summoned to Moscow for six weeks in the summer of 1956 in order to receive a dressing down from Khrushchev, who wished to bring North Korea in line with the new orthodoxy.

During Kim Il Sung's absence, Pak Chang Ok (the new leader of the Soviet faction after the suicide of Ho Ka Ai), Choe Chang Ik, and other leading members of the Yanan faction devised a plan to attack Kim Il Sung at the next plenum of the Central Committee and criticise him for not "correcting" his leadership methods, developing a personality cult, distorting the "Leninist principle of collective leadership" his "distortions of socialist legality" (i.e. using arbitrary arrest and executions) and use other Khrushchev-era criticisms of Stalinism against Kim Il Sung's leadership.

Kim Il Sung's supporters heckled and berated the speakers rendering them almost inaudible and destroying their ability to persuade members.

In September 1956, a joint Soviet-Chinese delegation went to Pyongyang to "instruct" Kim Il Sung to cease any purge and reinstate the leaders of the Yanan and Soviet factions.

A second plenum of the Central Committee, held on September 23, 1956, officially pardoned the leaders of the August opposition attempt and rehabilitated them, but in 1957 the purges resumed, and, by 1958, the Yanan faction had ceased to exist.

Even at this stage, there was a personality cult of Kim Il Sung, but it was usually assumed in the West that the DPRK was a Soviet satellite like Poland or East Germany though, in reality, this had stopped being the case after 1956.

The Sino-Soviet split helped Kim Il Sung take the Workers' Party of Korea on an independent path between Moscow and Beijing.

In the late 1950s, the DPRK began to increasingly emulate the People's Republic of China (PRC), launching its own version of the Great Leap Forward calling it the Chollima movement.

Editorials began to appear in the press openly criticising the Soviet position and defending the Chinese and obliquely attacking Khrushchev.

The Soviet Union responded by cutting off all aid to the DPRK, seriously damaging North Korea's industry and military capability.

Pueblo, an American spy ship, showing that Kim Il Sung was running his own version of the Cold War, independent of Soviet or Chinese tutelage.

Rather, he pursued an independent policy and initiated his Juche program of national self-reliance in order to diminish the influence of the USSR and China over domestic North Korean affairs.

By 1960, Kim Il Sung had purged virtually all the members of the Yanan, Domestic, and Soviet factions through show trials, intimidation, and encouraging Soviet Koreans to return to the USSR, leaving the party to be dominated by his "guerrilla comrades" as well as young technocrats who had joined the party after its founding and were loyal to Kim Il Sung.

Thereafter, Kim Il Sung's personality cult reached heights that made even Stalin and Mao appear modest by comparison.

[citation needed] Kim Il Sung was credited with personal direction of every supposed achievement of the regime, his biography was rewritten to make him the founder and leader of the WPK from its inception, and a new ideology of Kim Il Sung's creation, Juche or self-reliance, replaced Marxism–Leninism[citation needed] as the regime's official ideology.

All other WPK leaders remained completely anonymous, although Kim Il Sung's power in fact depended on the control of the Korean People's Army and the security forces by his loyal agent, Defence Minister Oh Jin-wu.

[citation needed] The practical effect of Juche was to seal the DPRK off from virtually all foreign trade, except to a limited extent with China and the Soviet Union.

This, added to the continuing high level of expenditure on armaments, led to a steadily mounting economic crisis from the 1980s onwards.

In fact, it seems that Kim Il Sung had always planned that his son would succeed him, and had been advancing him within the Army (the real source of power in the DPRK) since 1974.

In the wake of the revision of the constitution in 1998, making the National Defense Commission the highest state body, there had been a dramatic reshuffling of the official leadership rankings.

The elevation of the NDC to preeminent status placed Kim’s unique stamp on the North Korean regime through the creation of a quasi-wartime crisis management system.

[16] At the 8th Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea, held in early January 2021, Kim Jong Un delivered a nine-hour-long report in which he admitted failures in carrying out the economic plan and lambasted leading official's shortcomings.