August faction incident

August faction incident
Hangul	8월 종파 사건
Hanja	八月宗派事件
RR	8wol jongpa sageon
MR	8wŏl chongp'a sakŏn

The August faction incident (Korean: 8월 종파 사건), officially called the "Second Arduous March", was an attempted removal of Kim Il Sung from power by leading North Korean figures from the Soviet-Korean faction and the Yan'an faction, with support from the Soviet Union and China, at the 2nd Plenary Session of the 3rd Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) in 1956. The attempt to remove Kim failed and the participants were arrested and later executed. Through this political struggle, Kim Il Sung quashed all opposition to him within the central party leadership.

Background

Kim Il Sung sent out preliminary signals in late 1955 and early 1956, before the 3rd Congress of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), that he was preparing to move against the Yan'an and Soviet factions. The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was a bombshell with Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech denouncing Joseph Stalin and inaugurating the process of de-Stalinization. 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 received a copy of the speech on 19 March 1956, leading him to realize he needed to take action. He claimed that there was indeed a cult of personality, but that it was centered around Pak Hon-yong and not Kim, and that the problem was solved since Pak had been executed.

Political struggle

During the 3rd Congress of the WPK in April 1956, North Korean ambassador to the Soviet Union Lee Sang-jo twice sent notes to the congress's presidium, demanding that the issue of cult of personality be discussed. As all the speeches read in the congress were censored by Central Committee departments loyal to Kim Il Sung, this attempt failed. Kim Il Sung embarked on a seven week trip to other Communist countries in the summer of 1956. During Kim Il Sung's absence, Pak Chang-ok (the new leader of the Soviet faction after the suicide of Ho Ka-i), Ch'oe Ch'angik, and other leading members of the Yan'an 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" and his "distortions of socialist legality" (i.e., using arbitrary arrest and executions), and borrowed other Stalinist criticisms of Khrushchovite revisionism to compare to the revisionism of Kim Il Sung. The conspirators aimed to remove Kim as the chairman of the WPK Central Committee, which would have required 36 out of 71 members of the Central Committee voting to remove him. The conspirators also aimed to expel some of Kim's supporters from the Central Committee, which led Kim to respond by sharing responsibility for their alleged misdeeds, effectively protecting them.

On 5 June 1956, Ch'oe Ch'angik met with Soviet Ambassador Vasily Ivanov, complaining about various issues within the senior leadership, including factionalism, nepotism, Kim Il Sung's cult of personality, poverty and attacks on Soviet Koreans. While he did not ask for Kim to be removed, he recommended Kim be given advice to listen to. However, the Soviet embassy ultimately did not intervene. On 9 August, Lee Sang-jo relayed to conspirators plan to the Soviet Union, proposing that Ch'oe Ch'angik be made chairman of the WPK Central Committee, Choe Yong-gon be appointed as the supreme commander of the military, while Kim Il Sung would remain as premier. Kim Il Sung became aware of the plan upon his return from Moscow and responded by delaying the plenum by almost a month. Minister of internal affairs Pang Hak-se, who was a Kim loyalist, mobilized the police to monitor Pyongyang.

Plenum of the Central Committee

When the plenum finally opened on 30 August, Kim started with a report on his visit to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. Near the end of his speech, he said that the issue of cult of personality previously existed in the WPK but had been nearly solved. His speech was followed by one by Party Secretary of North Hamgyong Kim Thae-gun, who praised WPK policy and attacked trade unions and the Ministry of Trade, which were led by anti-Kim figures. His speech was followed by Minister of Trade Yun Kong-hum, who said his speech "will be focused on the personality cult, which exists in our party, and its serious consequences". His speech, which was eventually interrupted, attacked Kim Il Sung for creating a "police regime", accused him of "flagrantly trampling upon democracy inside the Party and stifling criticism", which he said "completely contradict the party’s charter and the Leninist norms of party life". He criticized the Party's Propaganda and Agitation Department for suppressing views contrary to those of Kim Il Sung and recommended the WPK make a decision "on the ideology of the personality cult, the centre of which is Comrade Kim Il Sung".

Kim Il Sung's supporters heckled and berated the speakers rendering them almost inaudible and destroying their ability to persuade members. Kim Il Sung's supporters accused the opposition of being "anti-Party". Kim Il Sung, in response, neutralised the attack on him by promising to inaugurate changes and moderate the regime, promises which were never kept. He also proposed a vote on closure and terminating the discussion immediately. The majority in the committee voted for the closure, with only seven members voting against. Ch'oe Ch'angik and Pak Ui-wan proposed revoking the decision on closure, which failed. Nam Il condemned Yun but proposed he should be allowed to finish his speech, which was also rejected. Seeing that he has no support, Yun left the hall and Kim declared a recess.

Rest of the day was spent with loyalists making speeches supporting Kim and decrying his enemies. Ch'oe Ch'angik tried to make a speech attacking Kim Il Sung for concentrating the power of the party and the state in his own hands as well as criticising the party line on industrialisation which ignored widespread starvation among the North Korean people. However, he was silenced by Kim's supporters. After Yun did not return, Kim took advantage of this situation by accusing him of violating WPK bylaws and proposing to expel him from the Party; only head of trade unions So Hwi voted against. The plenum also voted to adopt a resolution condemning the "factionalist conspiracy".

A few leaders of the Yan'an faction, including Yun Kong-hum and So Hwi, fled to China to escape the purges that followed the August plenum, while supporters of the Soviet faction and Yan'an faction were rounded up. Though Kim Tu-bong, the leader of the Yan'an faction and nominal Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Supreme People's Assembly, was not directly involved in the attempt on Kim Il Sung, he was ultimately purged in 1958, accused of being the "mastermind" of the plot. Kim Tu-bong "disappeared" after his removal from power, and likely was either executed or died in prison.

Hearing their fate, Ambassador Lee Sang-jo wrote directly to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, complaining members have been unjustly expelled from the Central Committee for criticizing Kim Il Sung and recommended several proposals, including sending a representative of the CPSU Central Committee to convene a new plenum in Pyongyang. After deliberation and consultation with the Chinese, a joint Soviet-Chinese delegation co-headed by Anastas Mikoyan and Peng Dehuai went to Pyongyang to instruct Kim Il Sung to cease any purge and reinstate the leaders of the Yan'an and Soviet factions in September 1956. A second plenum of the Central Committee, held on 23 September 1956 under Soviet and Chinese surveillance, officially pardoned the leaders of the August opposition attempt and rehabilitated them. However, Ch'oe Ch'angik was only restored to the Central Committee and not the Presidium.

Aftermath

In 1957 the purges resumed, and, by 1958, the Yan'an faction had ceased to exist. Members of the Soviet faction, meanwhile, facing increased harassment, decided to return to the Soviet Union with hastened urgency. By 1959, the purges had been so ravaging that more than a quarter of seats in the Supreme People's Assembly were vacant. A special by-election had to be organized in July that year. By 1961, the only faction left was Kim Il Sung's own Guerrilla faction, along with members who had joined the WPK under Kim Il Sung's leadership and were loyal to him. In the 1961 Central Committee, there were only two members of the Soviet faction, three members of the Yan'an faction and three members of the Domestic faction left out of a total Central Committee membership of 68. These individuals were personally loyal to Kim Il Sung and were trusted by him; however, by the late 1960s, even these individuals were almost all purged.

One likely reason for the failure of the Soviet and Yan'an factions to depose Kim Il Sung was the nationalist view by younger members of the party who had joined since 1950 that the members of these factions were "foreigners" influenced by alien powers while Kim Il Sung was seen as a true Korean. According to Kim Il Sung's biographer, Dae-Sook Suh: "[Kim Il-sung]'s long struggle to consolidate power was complete ... There were no longer any factions to challenge his position, and, for the first time, no foreign armed forces were occupying the North".

See also

• History of North Korea
• Kapsan faction incident

Sources

• Lankov, Andrei N. (2002). "Kim Takes Control: The 'Great Purge' in North Korea, 1956–1960". Korean Studies. 26 (1): 87–119. doi:10.1353/ks.2002.0010. ISSN 1529-1529. S2CID 153356279.

Further reading

• Lankov, Andrei (2007). Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3207-0.
• Tertitskiy, Fyodor (2023). "The Last Days of Summer: The Story of the August Plenum". Soviet-North Korean Relations During the Cold War: Unruly Offspring. Routledge. pp. 69–102. ISBN 9781032537306.
• Szalontai, Balázs (2005). Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953-1964. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-5322-7.