This opinion was written by Prof. Sergey Radchenko for NPR. An interesting piece with insights to the bromance between two global juggernauts – Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
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When in September 1990 Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze traveled to Pyongyang with the news of the imminent Soviet recognition of South Korea, North Korea’s dictator Kim Il Sung was so angry that he refused to receive him. Instead, in a testy meeting, Shevardnadze’s counterpart, Kim Yong Nam, read out a litany of complaints.
The Soviets, he charged, were trying to discard their erstwhile ally like a pair of “worn-out shoes.” But they would not get what they want. North Korea, he said, would not follow East Germany’s path toward dissolution and reunification. Instead, Pyongyang would build a nuclear bomb to make sure that it could resist external encroachment.
Shevardnadze took this criticism in stride. It did not really matter. In his view, North Korea was a grim, bankrupt, Stalinist tyranny that seemed destined for the garbage bin of history. South Korea — glittering, bustling and open — was so much more attractive as a partner.
If anyone told Shevardnadze that in 2024 North Korea would be one of Russia’s few allies, actively helping it reconquer a neighboring country, he surely would have thought the idea utterly absurd. And yet, Russian President Vladimir Putin is in Pyongyang this week, working hard to build up his axis of tyrannies.
Kim Il Sung’s grandson, Kim Jong Un, is playing the courteous host. For the first time in the troubled history of Moscow-Pyongyang relations, he has become an equal partner. He no longer feels the need to beg the Russians. Putin is there to attend to his wishes, and, in turn, grasp a helping hand.
Kim the grandfather, in his time, was completely subservient to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. He had to beg Stalin to allow him to invade South Korea. After months of hesitation, the Soviet dictator signaled his agreement in January 1950. As I show in my new book, To Run the World, Soviet spies intercepted American cable traffic suggesting that the United States would not intervene in Korea. Stalin presently felt reassured that his gamble would succeed.
It didn’t go well. The North Korean invasion of the South or, as Putin now conveniently calls it, Pyongyang’s “patriotic war of liberation,” triggered U.S. involvement and ultimately China’s intervention, too. It was the Chinese that managed to push the advancing U.S. and United Nations troops back to the 38th parallel. The fighting ended with a cease-fire in 1953, although the two nations are technically still at war.
Although he owed his survival to Beijing and Moscow, Kim the grandfather was a very difficult client even in the best of times. “He is like a seedling,” China’s dictator Mao Zedong grumbled in 1956, in a conversation with an envoy from Moscow. “You planted him. The Americans pulled him out. Then we planted him again in the same place. Now he is assuming airs.”
Mao was referring to a purge of the Workers’ Party of Korea that Kim unleashed in 1956, when he targeted his opponents whom he suspected of pro-Chinese and pro-Russian leanings. Kim got away with his purge and embraced what Pyongyang called juche (a form of self-reliance). It was never actual self-reliance, of course, certainly not in economic terms. The North Koreans continued to depend on their two sponsors — China and the USSR — for economic and military aid.
The Soviet relationship with North Korea never quite returned to what it was under Stalin. Pyongyang leaned to China’s side in the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, and although Kim later quarreled with the Chinese (few know that the two dictatorships fought a brief border skirmish in 1969), he never drifted to the Soviet camp, preferring a posture of fierce independence.
Read the full opinion piece on NPR
Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt distinguished professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is based at SAIS-Europe, in Bologna, Italy. His new book, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power, was published by Cambridge University Press in May.
