One very important historical dynamic in the evolution of North Korea's political system and ideology is the changing political relationship between North Korea and the Soviet Union following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent onset of the de-Stalinization campaign in Soviet Russia in the latter part of the 1950s. During the early state formation period of 1945–1950, North Korea's political leadership and social elite looked up to Soviet Russia as an esteemed guide and benevolent elder-brother figure for their newly emerging revolutionary polity. This relationship began to change dramatically in the late 1950s when, according to Tatiana Gabroussenko in Soldiers on the Cultural Front: Developments in the Early History of North Korean Literature and Literary Policy, “North Korean policy makers started to position the DPRK as a self-sufficient state, equipped with a potentially world-dominating ideology . . . with Pyongyang replacing Moscow as the center of the inhabited universe” (p. 43).
The result was the birth of a highly self-righteous, radically self-centered political system that saw itself as an ideal human society and an exemplary modern post-colonial nation-state. The construction of this radical self-centeredness was a vital part in building a political order based on a cult of charismatic personality and, later, of perpetuating the charismatic authority in the form of hereditary leadership. North Korea prides itself on a number of historic achievements. The most important of these achievements is the realization of an objective that North Korea's more powerful socialist neighbors aspired to but failed to fulfill. North Korea secured and perpetuated the authority of the country's founding father without risking such structural turbulences in the transition of power as the de-Stalinization in the late 1950s caused in Soviet Russia. This achievement required North Korea to conceptualize itself as the leader of the progressive world and even as the center of the meaningful human world in place of the Soviet Union.
In her remarkable work, Gabroussenko explores the historical relationship between the Soviet Union and North Korea, focusing on how this changing relationship is rendered in early North Korean literature. Her book makes a clear and persuasive argument that an understanding of Stalin's Russia is vital for grasping North Korea's political and social development. This is not merely because the state of North Korea was built while the northern part of post-colonial Korea was militarily occupied by Soviet forces. It is more to do with the fact that early North Korea consciously sought to model itself on Stalin's Russia.
After the end of the Korean War and Stalin's death in 1953, North Korea made a dramatic shift away from its earlier orientation by pursuing an aggressively independent revolutionary rhetoric. Gabroussenko offers a detailed description of this important shift with reference to a well-chosen set of major North Korean literary works of the era. The conclusion that follows her informative description is an important one: North Korea's effort to free its politics and art from Soviet models was far from an effort to part with Stalin's legacy. She contends that its postwar de-Sovietization drive was an effort to nationalize Stalin's political legacy: that is, to keep this legacy and re-make it as a North Korean legacy at the same time that it was being debunked in its powerful neighbor. Thus, the de-Sovietization of North Korean politics and art developed in parallel with a further Stalinization of these domains.
In politics, this process manifested itself most clearly in the growing propensity to attribute everything North Korea achieved to the merit and authority of the country's founding leader and, simultaneously, to elevate the authority of this leader from a national leader to a single hope for the entire progressive humanity. The art and literature of North Korea closely assisted this political development to the extent that, in the end, art and politics became synonymous in North Korea, and North Korean writers and artists became “soldiers on the cultural front.”
Whether readers are interested in the formation of North Korea's early revolutionary art or in the works and careers of the country's formative literary heroes, Soldiers on the Cultural Front is sure to offer a gripping read. The relevance of this book, however, goes beyond a history of literature. Soldiers on the Cultural Front makes an important, long-awaited contribution to the understanding of a pivotal era in North Korea's modern political genesis.
