As of 2025, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the longest-lived self-designated socialist state.
It is clear that an emergency requires extraordinary leadership and management measures, and no less important is the political course pursued by the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), which has consistently provided the country’s leadership.
However, the general public knows little about the WPK’s history, and in the run-up to the grand celebrations that will be held in the DPRK on October 10, 2025, we should examine the history of the Korean Communist movement in general.
Unfortunately, the early period of the movement’s history is marked by incessant factional struggle, when instead of creating a united front against the Japanese, Korean communists of various factions were fighting each other.
Two Korean communist parties
Initially, against the background of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the initial interest in Marxism-Leninism, two Korean Communist parties emerged simultaneously in Shanghai and Irkutsk. The first consisted of leftist nationalists who had adopted communist thought; the second consisted of ethnic Korean members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even the Comintern could not reconcile and unite these two factions, and the culmination of the confrontation was the so-called “Svobodny village incident,” when the Irkutsk faction, with the support of the authorities of the Far Eastern Republic, tried to forcibly disarm the partisan detachments associated with Shanghai.
An attempt was made to reassemble the Communist Party in 1925 under the auspices of the Comintern to create a functional organization on the territory of colonial Korea. However, the factional struggle persisted. Within three years, the leadership changed four times—mainly because, as part of the “fight against opportunists,” one group or another handed over its opponents to Japanese counterintelligence. As a result, in December 1928, the Comintern de facto disbanded the Korean Communist Party, inviting Korean communists to join the Communist Party of China (CPC) (the Korean national liberation movement at that time was largely based in China, and both Korean and Chinese communists opposed the Japanese together).
Comintern communists, who were more interested in personal power and getting grants from Moscow, are contrasted by those who actually fought the Japanese and waged a guerrilla war in Manchuria, namely Kim Il Sung and other guerrilla unit commanders. Although it is fair to say that they were not so much experts in philosophy as practitioners. However, in the eyes of the Japanese colonial regime, any leftist activist who actively opposed the authorities was declared a communist.
Thus, in the definition of a Korean communist, the primary feature was not so much loyalty to specific dogmas as specific activity within the framework of the national liberation movement.
Factional struggle
After the liberation, four groups could be distinguished among the broad mass of Korean Communists. The first is Kim Il Sung and his associate, and the second is the so-called “local communists,” i.e., mainly representatives of the old structures of the Comintern, who, in their own words, had been working underground in the country all this time. The other two groups were Soviet Koreans who arrived to solve the personnel crisis in the country and Korean members of the CPC who were in Yan’an at the time of the liberation of Korea (which is why a number of sources call it the “Yan’an faction”).
At first, it was the locals who actively claimed to lead the communist movement, especially since the division into North and South was not yet planned. Western sources claim that when the organizational bureau of the Korean Communist Party was established in Pyongyang on October 10, it was essentially a North Korean branch of the southern structures, since the leader of the “local” Pak Hon-yong was south of the 38th parallel at that time. However, it is clear that the Communists had significantly more opportunities in the Soviet half, and thus the real center of the communist movement was still there, so the North Korean version of the Communist Party’s start date is correct.
Two workers’ parties at once
However, reality was more complicated. Firstly, the Yan’an faction initially organized its own party, the so-called “New People’s Party,” which was merged with the Communists in July 1946, and the new party was named the Workers’ Party. This was due both to the fact that the term “communist” was already banned in the South at that time and a different name was required, and to the fact that the unification of the two parties should not look like a takeover.
Then, until 1949, there were two Workers’ Parties in Korea (North and South). In the North, where the party was legal, it was led by the leader of the Yan’an faction, Kim Tu-bong, and in the South, where it was banned, it continued to be led by the “local” leader, Pak Hon-yong, who by that time had already fled to the North. It was only in 1949 that the two parties merged, and only then did Kim Il Sung become the leader of the united WPK.
During the Korean War (1950-53), the “local” faction withdrew from politics.
A certain reshuffling happened after the war as the country’s new course was being determined. The Yan’an group largely adopted a pro-Chinese approach. Accordingly, a pro-Soviet one arose, and some assumed that North Korea should only focus on one “big brother” in its policy.
Juche means sovereignty
Kim Il Sung advocated an independent path and, in 1955, expressed the need to establish ideological sovereignty. In the author’s opinion, this is how the well-known term “Juche,” which is usually used without translation, should be translated from Korean.
Discussions about the political orientation of the DPRK culminated in 1956, when regimes in the socialist camp were changing as a result of de-Stalinization and the 20th Congress of the CPSU. Thus, the pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet factions tried to stage a palace coup at the August plenum of the Central Committee of the WPK. However, Kim had enough supporters to stop such a development. This was achieved without the extreme measures Nikita Khrushchev would resort to a year later when Malenkov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Shipilov similarly tried to oust him.
By the early 1960s, the “factional coup” had been overcome successfully, and the Workers’ Party adhered to a course of Juche, competently maneuvering between the interests of Moscow and Beijing. This is quite an important point; in choosing between a large amount of assistance—which would have been accompanied by the status of a “younger brother”—and the opportunity to pursue an independent course, Pyongyang chose the latter. Although its position was at times closer to the Soviet one and then to the Chinese one, North Korea has always stood out from the socialist camp and, moreover, tried to pursue an independent policy.
Moreover, an important element of this policy was the DPRK’s active attempts to act within the framework of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The DPRK joined the NAM in 1975, and although Pyongyang did not host any summits or preside over the organization, its role there was quite prominent. The DPRK’s foreign policy in the 1960s and 1980s was significantly diversified through the establishment of diplomatic relations with newly proclaimed developing countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Since by that time the DPRK already had a relatively strong industrial base, its foreign trade with these countries was based on exports of heavy industry products, weapons, and even humanitarian aid and engineering support for the construction of irrigation systems and healthcare. Starting in 1972, seminars about “Juche” were held in the region. In general, the North Korean ideology promoting self-reliant sovereign development as an element of the DPRK’s soft power appealed to young African nations in many ways. North Korea institutionally influenced significant parts of African ideologies, which were based on decolonization.
A friendship “sealed with blood”
As for modern relations with Beijing and Moscow, it can be noted that since 2018, relations between the PRC and the DPRK have been described as “friendship between two peoples and parties proclaiming the socialist path of development, sealed with blood.” In relation to Russia, the WPK leadership “maintains warm and friendly relations” with both the ruling United Russia and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
History is history, and the author will therefore not talk about how the fate of North Korea would have turned out had another faction been in power. One thing is for sure: it was the Juche-oriented WPK that shaped North Korea’s modern trajectory.
Konstantin Asmolov, PhD in History, leading research fellow at the Centre for Korean Studies of the Institute of China and Modern Asia at the Russian Academy of Sciences
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