The Formation of Korean Worker's Party and Kim Il-Sung

The Connection with his Maneuver to Open the Korean War

Abstract

In this paper, I reflect on the correlation between the formation of Korean Worker's Party (KWP) and KIM Il-sung's maneuver to wage the Korean War. For a long time, it was believed that KWP was formed through the merging of South Korean Worker's Party (SKWP) and North Korean Worker's Party (NKWP) from June to July in 1949 with KIM Il-sung as the chairman of the Central Committee. However, new materials prove that the formation of KWP just meant the integration of the Central Committee of both KWPs and had a close connection with the tactical defferences between PAK Honyong, the top leader of SKWP, and KIM Il-sung who had been pointed out the leader of Korean Communist Movement by Stalin in 1946.
PAK pursued the overturn of Rhee Syng-man's regime by guerrilla conflict of SKWP in South Korea and tried to avoid the civil war between South and North regimes by appealing for a ‘peaceful unification plan’ which the Democratic Front for the Unification of the Fatherland (DFUF) proposed. DFUF was established under PAK's initiative in June 1949. In this tactics it seems that SKWP and NKWP formed a ‘Joint Central Committee’ to manage activities of DFUF between June 28 and July 7 in 1949, when KIM Il-sung failed to take up the chairmanship of the Central Committee since the appeal of DFUF was not only one to withstand invasion of South Korea but also to contain KIM Il-sung's tactics. His tactics had dual purposes to achieve Korean unification and to seize the actual initiative of Korean Communist Movement with KIM's head position of KWP through advancing Korean People's Army into South Korea.
KIM opened up his tactics in a conversation with T. Shtykov, Soviet Ambassadar to North Korea, in August 1949 after his agreement to the ‘peaceful unification plan’ of DFUF. Although in September 1949 the Central Committee of Soviet Communist Party rejected this military option and ordered KIM and PAK to develop the latter's tactics with alerting KWP to the intervention of U. S. forces into the civil war, KIM Il-sung made a use of an opportunity of the favorable turn of Sino-Soviet relation. Finally, KIM gained his end in January 1950 that Stalin allowed him to prepare to open the war on condition that Mao Tse-zung should agree with KIM's tactics. Before the agreement of Stalin and Mao to open the civil war in Korean Peninsula, PAK had no other choice but to cooperate with KIM's tactics. Therefore the Korean War broke out in June 1950 and KIM began a purging of KWP after failing to accomplish his purposes through the war.