"Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War: New Evidence from Russian Archives," Cold War International History Project Working Paper No. 8.

• Author: Rees, David

During June 1994, television newsreels showed former President Jimmy Carter preparing to enter North Korea on a nuclear peace mission. For a brief moment, as Mr. Carter stood talking to North Korean officials at Panmunjom, one could see between the two groups a concrete marker, cemented to the ground and perhaps one inch high, extending across the north-south roadway. This was, of course, the Korean Military Demarcation Line (MDL), established in July 1953, as it passes through the Joint Security Area near the 38th Parallel. In an unpredictable and changing world, which has seen the demise of the Soviet empire and much else besides, the MDL still rigidly divides the two Koreas and reminds the world that the Cold War is not over in Northeast Asia.

The defining event in this rivalry was the conflict of 1950-3, fought on the communist side by North Korea with active Chinese backing and considerable Soviet support, and on the Western side by an American-led coalition sponsored by the United Nations. The Korean War helped define the nature of international relations in a nuclear world, as well as U.S. policy in the Cold War. The four publications under review here speak not just of history, but also to the continuing tension on the Korean peninsula and to the existence of international circumstances in which the United States, for better or for worse, must still often take the lead in resolving regional conflicts.

The primary concern of Sergei Goncharov, John H. Lewis, and Xue Litai in Uncertain Partners lies in Sino-Soviet security relations and their influence on the beginnings of the Korean War. The three co-authors, Russian, American, and Chinese, show that the critical decision to initiate the war was made by Stalin in April 1950 when he decided to support Kim Il Sung's attempt to forcibly reunify Korea. The telling of this complicated story has benefited much from new written and oral sources on the subject made available in Moscow and Peking as a result of the end of the Cold War. The authors have also interviewed former high-ranking North Korean officers who were closely concerned with the launching of the war on that fateful Sunday morning of June 25, 1950.

The extensive new information available in Uncertain Partners adds appreciably to our understanding of the origins of the Korean conflict. The three authors clearly make the key historiographic point, noting that over the past four decades the genesis of the Korean War has been examined from

quite contrasting vantage points. At first,

attention was focused on high-level politics, on the

contacts between Stalin, Kim Il Sung and Mao.

Later, the focus shifted to analyzing the

domestic Korean and Cold War factors that

contributed to the conflict. Our own evidence

indicates that we need to concentrate again on the

high politics.

The authors then take their own advice, wisely avoiding any simple, monocausal explanation of the war.

The new evidence presented here makes Uncertain Partners an important contribution to Korean War studies and points the way to further work based on new Russian, Chinese, and Korean sources. But its main merit is the compelling drive of its historical reconstruction. That reconstruction focuses most of all on Soviet-North Korean relations.

Moscow and Kim Il Sung

The story begins in the period of the Stalin-Mao talks in Moscow, which started in December 1949 and ended with the signing of the Sino-Soviet treaty on February 14, 1950. By this time communist leaders in Moscow and Beijing knew that Kim Il Sung intended to attack South Korea, although none of the principals, including Kim Il Sung himself, then had in mind the precise timing or the conditions of the assault." Such was the "extreme secrecy" surrounding subsequent developments that even the heads of Soviet intelligence knew nothing of the decision to cross the 38th Parallel.

However, in a more specific way, Uncertain Partners instructs us that "the search for the origins of the decision to start the war leads inexorably backwards to the relationship between the Soviet Union and Kim Il Sung's Korea." As a young anti-Japanese guerrilla leader, Kim had arrived in the Soviet Far East sometime during 1939-40. He later became an officer in a special Soviet brigade based in the Khabarovsk district and was tasked with developing cadres for a future Korean People's Army (KPA). Eventually, in October 1945, Kim was shipped back to North Korea and became Moscow's choice as the pro-Soviet leader of its zone, which became an independent state in 1948. But "although Stalin may have regarded Kim as a puppet the reality turned out to be far more complex. In fact, Kim was able to use Stalin's trust for his own aims even as Stalin was using him."

Although Kim and his close associates believed fervently in forcible Korean reunification, Stalin was reluctant to embark on a course that might...