사공이 많으면 배가 산으로 간다

With many captains, the ship heads to the mountains.

Chung-guyok, Pyongyang, June 5th, 1950

Election wasn't the right word, for it was more of a reshuffling of appointments. A selection of the cabinet for who was going to rule the nation. It was not necessary to consult the people on this matter, after all - they had expressed their will already in recent times. How could the average peasant be expected to understand the intricacies of cabinet appointments?

Kim Il-Sung sat in his office in the new government quarter in Chung-guyok, only recently completed in the weeks before. It was a large structure of the Socialist Classical style, housing a dozen floors of offices, meeting rooms, canteens, and everything else the government in the north would need to direct the new Republic. It could have easily been larger, but as head of the Planning Department Jong Jun-taek had pointed out, it would inevitably take a secondary role to the government quarter in Seoul - which had been unanimously decided as the future capital of the Korean state, once the pretender regime in the south was removed.

The list of appointments had been completed, yet it came to Pak Il-u's desk before it went to Kim Il-Sung's; for revisions, of course. When it was presented, the sweep of power from the People's Committee was mostly complete.

First Cabinet of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

With the preference thus shown for the Soviet Korean, Yan'an and Guerilla factions, and the power of the domestic faction slowly slipping, it was clear that factionalism within the DPRK had not yet fully been eliminated.

To be continued...