Historicizing North Korea: State Socialism, Population Mobility, and Cold War Historiography

Abstract

The Cold War is far from over on the Korean Peninsula. Korean history—especially for the northern half—remains deeply shaped by the legacies of transnational anti-communism even as historians who study socialism in other settings have shed many of the Cold War–era assumptions about the extensive power of the state. By putting North Korea in a comparative perspective with other socialist countries such as the USSR, the People’s Republic of China, and the German Democratic Republic, this article suggests ways of integrating the constitutive power of social forces beyond the state into our histories of North Korea, as seen through an examination of population movement. Beginning with the dissolution of the Japanese Empire, the mobility of people has always been a politicized issue between the two Koreas. Historians have taken up this issue, yet dependence on sources produced by the North Korean state has led many narratives—however harshly critical of the regime—to reproduce within their own analytical frameworks key assumptions originally produced in Pyongyang in support of the personality cult. The result has been a cartoonish depiction of the North Korean state. By using a diverse set of public media as sources, this article shows that due to conflicting interests of migrants, factory managers, and central economic planners, many North Koreans moved into the cities despite administrative injunctions and the admonishments of Kim Ilsung. Asking questions about the limits of the state, rather than assuming its totalitarian capacity, becomes one way of escaping the historiographical legacies of the Cold War even as the politics of division continue to rage on the peninsula.