Korean Studies

When historian Bruce Cumings first published The Origins of the Korean War, he was subjected to fierce critiques about his “revisionist” stance, stemming from his portrayal of the post-colonial politics in southern Korea after Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule. Although many scholars took issue with Cumings’ first volume for its suggestion that the Korean War began as a civil war, the more enlightening and valuable information was to be found in the second volume, in which he showed the origins of the North Korean army, the intellectual and political backgrounds of various individuals who would form the backbone of what would become North Korea. Fortunately, the scholarly community has become more mature than what Cumings had to encounter over three decades ago, but because the origins of the Korean War and the Korean Communist movement are topics which still remain under-researched in the English-language scholarship, there is much more to waiting to be explored and discovered if one has the courage and interest to venture outside the orbit of the [End Page 178] Korean War. Suzy Kim’s Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution and Monica Kim’s The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War are some notable attempts to explore how Communism was received among the North Korean public and by American interrogators when they questioned North Korean prisoners of war, but these attempts, important as they were for using North Korean sources and placing the Korean War’s immediate aftermath in a more global context, still did not address variations of the Communist experience in the longue duree, and especially did not address how Korean Communism’s real origins are not to be found in North Korea but in the milieu of colonial Korea, as various Korean intellectuals turned to Communism to search for answers to defining Korea’s political and societal liberation.

Vladimir Tikhnov, a specialist in modern Korean history teaching at the University of Oslo, has written a welcoming introduction to the colonial origins of the Korean Communist movement. Situating what he calls the “Red Decades” between 1919, or the epitome of the Wilsonian moment, so vividly captured by historian Erez Manela, and 1945, the end of the Second World War, Tikhonov portrays Korean Communism largely as a social and a cultural phenomenon, aimed at critiquing both Japanese imperialism and Korean historical nationalism, the former for rendering “democracy” hollow for a people who had lost their country to violence and oppression, and the latter for failing to realize that the breakdown of the world economy and the need to find an alternative ideology and set of policies to reconstruct Korea’s national economy were urgent problems whose solutions were not to be found in an appeal to Koreans’ innate cultural superiority or ancient historicity as a homogenous people. The struggle for a Communist solution to a world beset by a general collapse in commodity prices, low wages, and a weak basis for defending workers’ rights, gained momentum, as enthusiastic underground Communist networks led by activists such as Yi Chongnim and Yun Chayong, first inspired the growth of intellectual interest in Communism and later developed into a grassroots movement. Although the Korean Communist movement experienced a downturn in 1934–1935 as Japan abandoned the gold standard and expanded investments in Korea and Taiwan, continued political oppression and suppression of increases in wage levels still encouraged Communist activism in Korea. Eventually however, continued suppression of the movement by the Japanese police essentially left Korean Communism all but dead by 1945, with only a handful of Communist intellectuals bemoaning the death of modernity and modern progressivism and expressing a deep concern for the growth of Right-wing [End Page 179] nationalism in Korea. Overall, Tikhonov meticulously traces the rise and fall of Korean Communism from the from the end of the first decade of the 20^th century to 1945, showing how Korean Communism was a powerful force, criticizing both Japanese colonial rule and Right-wing nationalism through historicizing and dialectically analyzing the concept of “nation” in Marxist rhetoric. Through such endeavors, Tikhonov argues that the Korean Communists were intent on salvaging reason’s progressive spirit against the banalities of bourgeois culture. The Marxist rhetoric utilized by Korean Communists did not always succeed in achieving their aims, for their idealization of Communism often blinded some from realizing the backwardness of the Soviet capital. However, on the other hand, by critiquing Korean theories of megalomania or proto-nationalism, Korean Communists were instrumental in laying the foundations for theoretically objectifying Korean nationalism to better approximate Korea’s position in the world. These two contrasting facets and images of Korean Communism, in Tikhonov’s view, give much reason to believe that the “Red Decades” between 1919 and 1945 are crucial for understanding the origins of the Korean War and the subsequent division of the Korean Peninsula.

Tikhonov’s book relies on various primary sources, ranging from diaries, letters, political documents, and a wide array of secondary sources from multiple languages. His book is valuable for anyone unfamiliar with the early history of the Korean Communist movement, especially the years he covers, since that period has largely been treated as an interregnum in past scholarship such that he rightly criticizes the notion that Korea had no nascent history of Communist activism before 1945. His selection of topics is very sound, for he not only addresses underground activism, but also how Left-wing critiques of historical nationalism shaped discourses surrounding Korean nationhood, and how Korean Communists interpreted Moscow as the Red capital of the world. Tikhonov thereby succeeds in capturing as many different aspects of the Korean Communist movement and fills an important interregnum too often glossed over or even ignored in past scholarship.

However, the book is not without problems. Two problems are highly noticeable, one associated with the structure and ordering of the chapters and the other, concerning the omission of Sin Ch’ae-ho in discussing Korean nationalist historiography. The first problem is more important than the second, so it deserves a more critical attention. Tikhonov’s introduction makes it clear that the book is essentially a collection of edited or slightly altered versions of his previously published journal articles. He [End Page 180] clearly acknowledges his original sources for these articles and frankly admits that such is the nature of his book. However, it would have been much better if the book was a standalone project inspired by but not directly tied to the journal articles he had written. The book literally reads like a collection of essays. The first two chapters give sufficient confidence that they are chronologically linked and are logically highly connected. However, from the third chapter onwards, the book reads like a somewhat disjointed list of seemingly related topics but also which could be arguably independent such that there is no overarching argument aside from the general coverage of the Communist movement’s pattern as an A-shaped curve. A stronger argument could have been made about why the interregnum period is important, that is to say, an elaboration of the last argument about the origins of Korea’s division before the overall conclusion would have been a clearer thesis statement.

A less glaring problem with the book is that in his discussion of Korean nationalist historiography, Tikhonov omits Sin Ch’ae-ho and does not explain why he decided not to discuss his influence in Korean nationalist historiography. Considering that he mentions Pak Un-sik, it would have been ideal for the book to discuss even a few pages about the father of Korean nationalist historiography. Possible reasons for the omission may be due to Sin’s focus on ancient history and debunking Japan’s Silla Outpost Theory, which arguably has no relation to Communism, but Sin’s sense of nationalism was radical and unique for his time and is still very influential, so Tikhonov ought to have discussed the original model of historical nationalism to at least further clarify what was exactly wrong about the original vision from a Communist perspective. Related to this problem is the fact that because the originator of Korean nationalist historiography is not discussed, it is hard to understand why the other choices Tikhonov had made were more important than Sin Ch’ae-ho. Tikhonov seems to understand why his choices are important individually, but his decision to omit Sin, left unexplained, makes it difficult to understand why the others had to necessarily be included.

Overall, the book is a welcome introduction to the Korean Communist movement’s early history. Tikhonov succeeds in capturing the diverse images of Korean Communism’s interregnum period and presents a balanced assessment of the movement’s achievements and shortcomings and links the movement well to the Korean War and its aftermath in the end of the book. Although it would have been ideal if he had written the book from scratch without relying heavily on [End Page 181] his previously published articles, which partially diminishes the originality of the book, and his discussion Sin Ch’ae-ho would have certainly enriched the complexity of his treatment of Korean nationalist historiography, aside from these drawbacks, Tikhonov has written a great general introduction to a long-forgotten and readily dismissed period and movement in modern Korean history.