호랑이는 죽어서 가죽을 남기고 사람은 죽어서 이름을 남긴다

When a tiger dies, it leaves behind its pelt. When a person dies, they leave behind their name.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, March 1952 - March 1954

Baduk is the Korean name for the game called Go in Japan and the West. Baduk is in the same category of abstract strategy as Chess - an intensely intellectual, complex game that appears simple from the outset. Baduk is played on a 19x19 grid, containing 361 individual points. Players take turns placing their stones - one set white, one set black - onto the board, with the intent of surrounding as much territory as possible. A player’s stones are captured when they are surrounded orthogonally by the opponent’s pieces, at which point they are removed from the board. While Chess is a game of grinding attrition, Baduk is a slow, methodical contest of subtle strategy. Chess is tactical, while Baduk is strategic.

Ho Jong-Suk’s Ministry of Propaganda, after the war, played up the Baduk bonafides of Kim Il-Sung significantly. “Great Liberator, Founder of the Republic, Skilled General” they called him. Yet, during the war, the only consistent Baduk games were those being played at gathering of the Yan’an faction, the group of high ministers and other powerful functionaries who had lingering loyalty for the Chinese Communist cadre that they had cut their teeth as part of.

Pak Il-U, the interior minister, was a notable adherent of Sunjang Baduk, the ancient, exclusively Korean variant of the game, that had fallen out of favour as Japanese rule over what was the colony of Korea brought their conception of “modern Go” to the peninsula. Each game of Sunjang Baduk started the same way, with a prescribed opening. The first move by Black was the placement of a stone in the very center of the board.

For Pak Il-U, this first stone had been Lee Chang-Ok, the first of his attack dogs within the Democratic People’s Republic. Lee Chang-Ok was a violent man, a blunt instrument. Yet when it came to eliminating opposition, to placing Pak’s tendrils in every sector of the peninsula, Lee had singularly succeeded. Few knew of the informants that Lee had cultivated then had shot once they had outlived their usefulness. Few knew of the break-ins Lee had orchestrated on Pak’s orders, planting bugs and taps and gaining kompromat. For Lee, success was also his undoing. Pak Il-U had sent flowers to his funeral, lasciviously smiling as he calligraphed the note attached to them: “Goodbye Lee Chang-Ok, a Dear Friend.” He tied it to the flowers with a strip of the same bandage that he had watched Lee be strangled with.

Yet no Baduk game is played in isolation. For every stone placed by Black, White must place their own. This stone was Ho Ka-i, leader of the Soviet Korean faction. Whereas some referred to Pak Il-U as the ”Mouthpiece of Mao Zedong” within the Korean Worker’s Party, others referred to Ho Ka-i privately as “Disciple of the Great Russian,” the tongue-in-cheek nickname for Iosef Stalin that proliferated amongst the Koreans. Ho despised that nickname, and was quick to point out Stalin was Georgian, not Russian. When Stalin died in March of 1953, Ho had been inconsolable for days, weeping madly, unable to fulfill his role as Vice Premier.

This was all the more surprising, and the subject of much gossip when the matter of Ho Ka-i’s past was discussed. Ho had been born Alexei Ivanovich Hegai (Алексей Иванович Хегай) in Khabarovsk in 1908. He spoke much better Russian than Korean, and had been active in Soviet politics before the Worldwide Anti-Fascist War. In 1937, during the Great Purges he became so convinced of his imminent purge that he packed a bag and set it by his door, expecting Yezhov’s NKVD to arrive at any moment. Yet, it never came - whether this was due to the Great Russian’s magnanimity or a simple mix-up in paperwork was never clear. After that moment, Ho Ka-i’s attempts to rationalize the terror he had personally experienced resulted in even more fanatical devotion to the Soviet cause.

Thus when he arrived in Korea in 1945 and was given a leadership role, his first loyalty was not to the interests of Korea in an absolute sense. The interests of Stalinistic communism under the aegis of an elite, Soviet-style Communist party had been Ho Ka-i’s barely-concealed goal from the beginning of his career in the Central Committee. Ho Ka-i had fanatical interest in the purging of anti-revolutionaries, and the constant checking of “loyalty to the party” preoccupied much of his Vice Premiership.

The board the stones laid upon was the Chairman himself. Kim Il-Sung was a man sculpted as the ideal for hero worship. Amongst the revolutionaries of this period, Kim Il-Sung’s background was one that historians would struggle to understand for decades, and the virulent propaganda efforts of Ho Jong-Suk helped to effect an untarnishable image of heroic struggle and self-sacrifice. Iosif Stalin had once been a bank robber; Mao Zedong had been a librarian. Meanwhile, to the outside world, Kim Il-Sung seemed to have engaged in Anti-Imperialist struggle since the age of 17, and dedicated himself selflessly to that cause through his whole life.

On the 15th of April, 1952, Kim Become-the-Sun celebrated his 40th birthday. The war had begun to take its effect on him, and rumours had been spreading throughout the Central Committee since he collapsed in March. As he arrived to the celebration at the semi-destroyed Government quarter, the eyes upon him were a mix of emotion; some of concern, some of envy, some of barely-concealed malice. The Soviet Koreans looked at him as a farmer views a calf about to be slaughtered - mentally picking out what to do with each of the poor animal’s parts.

Paranoia had racked Kim Il-Sung and robbed him of slumber the longer that the war went on. While the Korean People’s Army had stood as conquering heroes in the first few months of the war, the longer the war dragged on, the more and more their relevancy and potency on the battlefield was called into question. This was especially true as the Soviet contingent from the International Volunteer Army took over control of the Korean People’s Army in a hotly-contested decision, instituting the so-called “Russian Order” that re-ranked many members of the military and reassigned them. With the Soviets calling the shots, Kim Il-Sung began to increasingly withdraw, hiding away in the bunker complex under Moranbong Hill in Pyongyang to escape the constant Coalition bomb attacks.

The Hamhung Clique

Faced with the idea of becoming a Soviet client kingdom, several generals of the Korean People’s Army decided to take matters into their own hands. While they had been robbed of ultimate command of the military, they still had significant power within individual units. As the Korean conflict involved the first direct confrontation between Soviet “volunteers” and the American military in the intense technological boom following the Worldwide Anti-Fascist War, General Order No. 6 from Marshal Rodion Malinovsky had decreed any captured enemy equipment of “significant novel technological value” should be sent, at once, up the Korean railway system to Rason and on to Vladiovostok, safely out of Coalition attack range.

Under this pretext, the Generals, soon to be nicknamed the Hamhung Clique and including many of the old-guard Guerilla faction, organized a secret storage facility to be taken over by the military Hamhung - conveniently upon the railway line leading to the Soviet Union. This facility soon grew to house an almost completely intact (though disassembled) B-29A, the remnants of two others that had been destroyed by anti-aircraft fire, an intact F-86A Sabre, a Centurion tank captured from Commonwealth forces, alongside hundreds of small arms and uniforms. The goal of Operation Seonmul (선물; “gift, present”) was to force the Soviets to hand back control of the military by holding these valuable intelligence prizes hostage in an undisclosed location.

The conspiracy soon grew to encompass most of the military high command, with many prominent figures being inducted into the Hamhung Clique - even the First Hero of the Republic, Park Hwan, the famous leader of the 112th Heavy Tank Regiment that had proved instrumental in liberating Seoul in the first month of the war, was inducted to provide frontline assistance to the project. Only the Minister of National Defense, Choe Yong-gon, seemed unaware of the project - though later speculation would call his apparent aloofness into question.

The time to act had never been one which the Clique had agreed upon, yet outside events seemed to present the best opportunity. When Wonju, the Eastern Fortress City which the KPA had staked much of its manpower in defending, fell in November of 1952, the Guerilla faction made its move. On November 13th, 1952, Major General Kim Chaek, alongside a local detachment of motorized troops, arrived at the bivouac point of the International Volunteer Army at Namyangju to deliver an ultimatum to Marshal Malinovsky: declaring that the “Soviet command had failed” in its goals to defend Korea, and supposedly with the backing of Kim Il-Sung, the Soviet command staff was demanded to cede control back to the generals of the Korean People’s Army. Failing so, Kim Chaek declared that the “cooperation of the Korean supply chain” could not be guaranteed for the IVA in the future.

Marshal Malinovsky, according to Soviet records, coolly received the request - turned around, and telephoned the Soviet representative to Korea, Vladimir Nikolaevich Razuvaev. After a brief conversation, he telephoned directly to the bunker in Moranbong, where Kim Il-Sung had just woken. Upon receiving the call through a translator, Kim Il-Sung flew into a rage and dismissed Kim Chaek directly over the telephone. He was shortly taken into custody by his own troops and sent back to Pyongyang to face court martial.

The Namyangju Incident strangled the Revolt of the Generals in its cradle. In the hectic months that followed, the Court Martial of Kim Chaek kept having to be pushed back - but Soviet intelligence, helped by the Soviet Korean faction, unraveled the Hamhung Clique in short order. The report of the apparent treachery of the top commanders of the Korean People’s Army shocked much of the Central Committee, but Kim Il-Sung especially, who had always had absolute faith in the military above all else. Feeling the betrayal of the Guerilla faction, and the intense embarrassment and shame that the incident had brought upon the Korean command structure, Kim Il-Sung considered purging the entire military. Most of the Hamhung Clique found themselves reassigned to rear-area commands, air defense regiments, and logistics. Polkovnik-General Tu Lying-Su, the Brother-in-Law to Kim Il-Sung through his first marriage, found himself reassigned as head of the Korean People’s Army Navy - which had been reduced to nothingness by the end of 1951, leaving the previously influential general with little to do except inspect coastal defense batteries and drink plum wine.

The Dragon and the Palace

This betrayal by the Guerilla faction, of which Kim Il-Sung had nominally been the leader, meant that the Baduk game was only about to get more intricate. The next stone to be placed was Pak Il-U’s, who had placed his latest attack dog, Yoon Si-U - the Minister of Social Security, the internal political security organization within the Democratic People’s Republic - onto finding the machinations of the Soviet Korean faction. In so doing, Pak Il-U had made a grave underestimation of his piece.

Yoon Si-U had risen alongside Lee Chang-Ok to become one of the highest security officials within the state. Yet, while Lee Chang-Ok was a violent, direct man, Yoon Si-U was quiet, exacting, slight - hard to notice in a room, which worked to his benefit as a spy. Yoon Si-U, using the Political Security Bureau headed by Pak Kwan-Hui (a distant cousin of Pak Il-U’s), had intercepted a flurry of wires sent from Chongjin, an important hotspot for Soviet Korean activity, after Kim Il-Sung’s purported collapse in March of 1952. These had led to a tapped conversation in one of the Worker’s Clubs near the huge steel mills in Chongjin in June of 1952, attended by many of the top Soviet Koreans - the Vice Premier Ho Ka-i, the Chairman of the State Planning Commission Pak Chang-Ok, the rotund Minister of Commerce Yi Chu-yon - and one name that neither Pak Kwan-Hui or Yoon Si-U recognized: Park Sung-Ki.

Yoon Si-U had to look back into the old Japanese Empire records to find any mention of Park Sung-Ki - the only record of which was an arrest in 1928 for extortion, a charge later dropped. A collection of whispers, rumours and old police records led Yoon Si-U down a dark alley on a stormy night in the relatively untouched, northern city of Sinuiju on September 29th, 1952. A small guesthouse stood at the end of the alley, with several unscrupulous looking characters outside. He was about to turn and depart when a Mauser pistol was shoved into his back; a rough voice with a heavy Chinese accent told him to march, which he obliged. He knew better than to come armed, which a rough search once inside the smokey, low-ceiling den confirmed.

Park Sung-Ki presided over his own imperial court within these walls - a wide smile across his face. Tattoos showed prominently up his arms, and a collection of three Mauser pistols sat on the table in front of him. These pistols were hallmarks of the old Warlord era in China, and his possession of multiple of different calibers and models marked him as a powerful man.

“I would not expect a Minister to grace my walls,” Park Sung-Ki intoned in his velvety smooth baritone as Yoon Si-U approached. Yoon could only bow and curse himself internally for allowing himself into this situation.

That rainy night taught Yoon Si-U quite a few things. Only when several rounds of Soju had been passed around, which Yoon tried his best to avoid or pretend to drink, did tongues begin to loosen. Minister of Social Security Yoon Si-U learned a great deal of things that night, not least of which was the furtive connection between the Yan’an faction and the criminal element in northeast China.

Looking back on it, it made eminent amounts of sense that the Yan’anists would be colluding with Triads and Jopok gangs. Their activities had been thoroughly illegal throughout the Japanese occupation, yet now that victory was at hand for the revolution - Yoon Si-U felt his stomach dropping as the seventh Soju bottle he was handed was popped open. He had not expected to hear of Pak Il-U’s illicit activities, his voracious appetite for comfort women, or the gambling dens that he frequented within Peking and Shenyang. Nor had he expected to hear of the lines of communication the gangs were involved in keeping open, in the secret messages that they transmitted back and forth by untraceable courier - the promises and threats that passed between Pak Il-U and the People’s Republic of China.

Only when the morning sun filtered through the smudged windows, most of the others gangsters having fallen asleep or gone off to adjoining rooms for heaven-knows-what activities, did Yoon Si-U stand and prepare to leave. Before he did so, he turned to his host.

“Why do you consort with Ho Ka-i?”

Park Sung-Ki’s smile told him the answer before he spoke. “Hedging our bets, as it were. You see how leaders come and go. China knows this better than Korea.”

Yoon Si-U had never wished for the power to bring the Machiavellian Interior Minister to his knees, from a connection that had gone unknown to the rest of the Central Committee for years. Minister Yoon uncharacteristically disappeared for a week, returning to bomb-ravaged Pyongyang with little sleep and with little plan moving forward. He had the stones to surround Pak Il-U, to surround the Yan’anists and effect their purge.

He would not play them. The fallout of the Namyangju incident consumed Central Committee meetings for most of the Winter of 1952 - 53, and the next year brought only more disastrous news for the Democratic People’s Republic The disastrous collapse of the Triangle Defense of Pyeongtaek - Anseong - Osan, and the surrender of thousands of troops of the Korean People’s Army to the enemy brought further shame to the Korean People’s Army. Kim Il-Sung varied between rage, despair, alcoholism and a new addiction to sleeping pills. He spent more and more time in the bunker complex at Moranbong, with his mistress Kim Song-ae. Ho Ka-i and Pak Il-U, with their factions behind them, circled like vultures - yet the Yan’anists could not make a move with the Soviets in the country, and Ho Ka-i ran into the bizarre issue of Soviet support for Kim Il-Sung outstripping their support for him - the middle of a losing war was no time to be marshaling support behind a new leader. By the time in September 1953 that Ho Ka-i had convinced Lazuvaev of his political desirability, especially in the context of Kim’s extended disappearances, the arrival of the People’s Volunteer Army made any overthrow of the government politically untenable for the Soviet Koreans.

A malaise suffused the Central Committee, which only lifted when the news from Sejong was good. The government had been holding its breath for years, expecting the Crown Jewel of Korea, Seoul, to fall at any moment - yet, by early 1954 the spell was suddenly broken. Kim Il-Sung appeared in public to make rousing speeches, extorting the bravery of the International Socialist Order. Pak Il-U seemed to be losing weight and sleeping better. Even Ho Ka-i managed to put on a smile at official events. It seemed that the game of baduk was at a recess.

The end of the war brought jubilant celebrations throughout the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea - the expansion had not been a complete success, but Seoul and other territory beside was now firmly in the hands of the Democratic People’s Republic. To Kim Il-Sung, it was a great victory, and one that could and would be repeated in the future. Yet, it was not complete. The hated enemy, Syngman Rhee, still escaped justice in the south. In some ways, the fact that the victory had not been complete, while the defeat, too, had not been complete, left the politics of the Democratic People’s Republic in an intense state of flux. The opening had been played through. Many stones had been put on the board, yet many were still in the hands of the opponents. When Pak Il-U played Yoon Si-U in Sunjang Baduk for the first time in many months in April of 1954, Yoon Si-U handily defeated him.

“Well, my fox-of-the-trees,” Pak said, “I see this war has taught you much.”

More than you know, Yoon Si-U thought to himself. More than you will ever know.

Between them sat the just-read invitation to the wedding of Kim Il-Sung to Kim Song-ae - a happy affair, in the midst of a bombed-out country.

To be continued…