How did the Soviet faction, Pyongyang faction, Yanan faction and South Labor faction disappear?
Kim Il-sung era
After the end of World War II, there were six major factions in the Korean Workers’ Party: 1) the guerrilla faction represented by Kim Il Sung; 2) the Pyongyang faction represented by Hyun Jun Hyuk; 3) the Kapsan faction represented by Park Kim Chol; 4) the Soviet faction represented by Heo Ja Yi; 5) the Nam Rao faction represented by Park Hyun Yong; and 6) the Yanan faction represented by Kim Ji Bong, Moo Jeong, and Park Il U. The guerrilla faction occupied a leading position in the party.
However, when the guerrilla faction returned to Korea in September 1945, there were still three stronger than Kim Il-sung, namely Cho Wan-sik, Hyun Jun-hyuk, and Park Hyun-young. However, Cho and Hyun had serious disagreements with the Soviet command in Korea; Park, who had been active in the south for a long Time, was wanted by the U.S. Army and fled to the north, and his strength declined sharply. Kim Il Sung became the supreme leader of North Korea with the support of the Soviet Union.
In the 1940s, the Pyongyang faction was the first to lose power when Hyun Jun Hyuk was assassinated. The real culprit in this case is still a mystery – Ko Bong-ki, who was the head of Kim Il-sung’s secretary’s office, believes in his posthumous letter that Kim Il-sung was responsible. Later, Kim Rong Beom, the number two figure in the faction, died of illness, and Oh Ki Seop, the number three figure, was thrown into prison.
In 1953, Heo Ja-yi, the third most powerful person in North Korea after Kim Il-sung and Park Hyun-yong and the leader of the Soviet faction, committed suicide in his office, leaving a suicide note saying, “I left this world with the pistol given to me as a gift during Kim Il-sung’s visit.” Later, Park Chang-ok, the number two figure of the Soviet faction, was expelled to the Soviet Union, and in 1957, the vast majority of the Soviet faction chose to retain their Soviet citizenship and party membership and renounce their North Korean citizenship and party membership. The Soviet faction lost its power since then.
In 1953, Lee Seung-yeol, the No. 2 member of the South Korean faction, was executed for “treason as a spy” and Park Hyun-young, the No. 1 member of the faction, was imprisoned. 1955, Park was also sentenced to death for “treason as a spy” and was executed the following year.
In 1950, Woo-jeong, the No. 2 man in the Yan’an faction, was forced to leave the leadership of the North Korean military and died immediately afterwards. In 1955, Park Il-woo, the No. 3 member of the Yan’an faction, was expelled from the Party and later executed; in 1956, Choi Chang-ik, the No. 4 member of the Yan’an faction, was criticized and later died in prison; in 1958, Kim Ji-bong, the No. 1 member of the Yan’an faction, was expelled from the Party and executed in 1960 (some say he died in a farm after a long illness). Since then, the Yan’an faction has lost its power.
According to Kim Il-sung’s summary, the struggle within the party in the 1940s and 1950s was mainly about “liquidating the sectarians and completely crushing the …… sectarian power”.
In 1967, representatives of the Kashan faction, Park Jin-chul, Lee Hyo-sun, and Kim Do-man, were expelled from the party. The reason was that they resisted the Juche idea founded by Kim Il-sung and opposed to the armed struggle against Japan led by Kim Il-sung as the only revolutionary tradition in Korea; and propagated the secret anti-Japanese merits of the Kashan faction by making films and performing dramas; and even opposed to Kim Il-sung’s reappointment of his third brother, Kim Young-ju -” What did Kim Young-ju do while we were gnawing on frozen peas in a blizzard?” The three and other cadres of the faction were characterized as “anti-Party revisionists.” Park and Lee were imprisoned and died in the 1970s.
In 1969, Kim Chang-bong (Chief of the General Staff of the KPA) and Heo Bong-hak (Director of the KPA Political Bureau), senior generals in the military who came from the guerrilla faction, were expelled from the military and the Party for “obstructing the establishment of the Party’s sole ideological system in the military. At the same time, many senior generals, including several corps commanders, were also punished. The cause of death and the year of death of both men are unknown.
The defeat of the Kashan faction and the opposition within the military paved the way for Kim Il-sung to make Juche idea the only ideological system in North Korea and make his eldest son Kim Jong-il his successor.
In 1970, Kim Kwang-man, a senior general from the guerrilla faction who had served as chief of the Korean People’s Army and chief of the General Staff, was expelled from the party and imprisoned in a political prison, where his fate was unknown. in February 1974, Kim Jong-il was officially established as Kim Il-sung’s successor, but was opposed by Kim Dong-kyu, then secretary of the Workers’ Party Central Committee and vice president of the state. in 1977, Kim Dong-kyu and his supporters were branded as In 1977, Kim Dong-kyu and his supporters were expelled from the party and sent to a political prison for the crime of “poisoning the ten programs of the party’s sole ideological system”, and their lives were unknown.
Kim Jong-il era
On May 31, 1986, Kim Il-sung announced clearly that “the successor issue has been successfully resolved”; on February 16, 1992, Kim Jong-il’s 50th birthday, Kim Il-sung personally composed a Chinese poem to congratulate him, which reads: “On the top of Baekdu Mountain, the peak of Jong-il, the small Baishui River, the blue stream flows. The 50th anniversary of the birth of the star of light, all praise the civil and military loyalty and filial piety ready. All the people praised together and cheered loudly.” It means that North Korea has officially entered the Kim Jong-il era.
There are two most famous purges in the Kim Jong-il era. In this campaign, all officers and generals who studied in Soviet military Education institutions after 1986, as well as military attachés and deputy military attachés of the embassy in Moscow, were arrested, and all officers who returned from their stay in the Soviet Union were prosecuted and investigated. In 1994 alone, more than 600 generals and senior officers were forcibly demobilized. As for the number of those executed, it is still a mystery.
The second is the “Deepening Group Incident” in 1997. According to the South Korean media, the incident involved more than 20,000 senior North Korean cadres, and thousands of them were executed by firing squad. The incident started when Seo Kwan-hee, an agricultural secretary of the Workers’ Party, was publicly executed in Pyongyang for “systematically persecuting our agriculture as a spy for the U.S. and south Korea in order to let our people starve to death” after he misappropriated 30 tons of chemical fertilizer at a time of severe Food shortage in North Korea. “The “Investigation Group for Deepening the Handling of the Seo Kwan-hee Incident” was established to dig deeper into the “latent U.S.-Korean spies.
In December 2013, Jang Sung-taek, the main operator of the “Deepening Group Incident”, Kim Jong-il’s brother-in-law and Kim Jong-un’s aunt, was expelled from the party; he was later executed.
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