North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 FROM THE PUBLISHER
North Korea, despite a shattered economy and a populace suffering from widespread hunger, has outlived repeated forecasts of its imminent demise. Charles K. Armstrong contends that a major source of North Korea's strength and resiliency, as well as of its flaws and shortcomings, lies in the poorly understood origins of its system of government. He examines the genesis of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) both as an important yet rarely studied example of a communist state and as part of modern Korean history.
FROM THE CRITICS
Foreign Affairs
Armstrong has carefully gone over all of the newly available documents on the founding of the North Korean regime to ask why Pyongyang, in spite of the appalling suffering of its people, remains one of the last holdouts of "unreformed" Marxism-Leninism. He finds that although the Soviet Union was involved early on, Kim Il Sung masterminded a unique adaptation of Soviet totalitarianism so that North Korea turned out to be more Stalinist than Stalin himself. Indeed, Kim's commitment to Marxism-Leninism was stronger than that of the Soviet bloc regimes in Eastern Europe or the communist regimes of China and Vietnam. Kim's success in creating such an enduring Marxist-Leninist system had foundations in Korean culture, such as the stress on ideas and ideology over material conditions and the complete mobilization of society. Armstrong argues that Kim's leadership brought about the "Koreanization" of Soviet communism, not the "Sovietization" of North Korea. He sets the stage for comparisons with Chinese communism, which shared many features with that of the North Koreans but lacked the enduring fanatical intensity.
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