Communist Party of Korea

Communist Party of Korea 조선공산당 朝鮮共產黨 Chosŏn Kongsantang
Leader	Kim Jae-bong Kang Dal-young Pak Hon-yong
Founded	April 1925 (1925-04)
Dissolved	November 23, 1946 (1946-11-23)
Ideology	Marxism-Leninism
Political position	Far-left
International affiliation	Comintern

Communist Party of Korea (Korean: 조선 공산당) was a communist party in Korea. It was founded during a secret meeting in Seoul in 1925.^[1] The Japanese colonial regime had banned communist parties under the Peace Preservation Law (see History of Korea), so the party had to operate in a clandestine manner. The leaders of the party were Kim Yong-bom and Pak Hon-yong.

The party became the Korean section of the Communist International at the 6th congress of the international in August-September 1928. But after only a few months as the Korean Comintern section, the perpetual feuds between rival factions that had plagued the party from its foundation led the Comintern to disband the Communist Party of Korea in December the same year.^[1][2] However, the party continued to exist through various party cells. Some communists, like Kim Il-sung went into exile in China, where they joined the Communist Party of China. In the early 1930s Chinese and Korean communists began guerrilla activity against the Japanese forces.

After the Second World War and the liberation from Japanese rule, the situation for the Korean communists changed considerably. The country was divided into US and Soviet occupation zones, and the working conditions for the party were very different in the two zones.

In the US-occupied South, the party leader Pak Hon-yong, who had been a prisoner of the Japanese, and became active in Seoul upon his release in 1945. He reorganized a Central Committee, of which he became the Secretary. Being based in Seoul, he had limited contact with the Soviet occupation forces in the north.

The Soviet Red Army liberated northern Korea from the Japanese occupation in August 1945. Most members of the Communist Party of Korea were in southern Korea which was occupied by the United States and there were very few Communist cadres in the Soviet occupied zone. The practice of the Soviets in most countries it occupied after World War II was to rely on the domestic Communist Party to transform the occupied state into first a pro-soviet and then a Soviet style socialist state but this was initially difficult in what became North Korea because of the lack of a strong domestic Communist presence. The Soviets began to rely largely on exiled Communists who returned to Korea at the end of World War II as well as ethnic Koreans who were part of the large Korean community in the USSR and therefore Soviet citizens.

Kim Il-sung became a prominent figure of the party in the northern areas. After his years as a guerilla leader, Kim Il-sung had moved to the Soviet Union (where historians believe his son Kim Jong-il was born in 1941) and had become a Captain in the Red Army. His battalion arrived in Pyongyang just as the Soviets were looking for a suitable person who could assume a leading role in North Korea.

On October 13, 1945 the North Korea Bureau of the Communist Party of Korea was established. Though technically under the control of the Seoul-based party leadership, the North Korean Bureau was had little contact with Seoul and worked closely with the Soviet forces (termed the Soviet Civilian Authority). The first chairman of the Bureau was Kim Yong-bom who had been sent to Korea by the Comintern in the 1930s to conduct underground activity. Kim Il-sung was a member of the Bureau at its founding and replaced Kim Yong-bom as chairman in December, 1945. Official North Korean historians later disputed this, claiming that Kim Il-sung had become its chairman from the onset of the Bureau. Moreover, official North Korean sources claim that the meeting was held on October 10. October 10 is regarded as the 'Party Foundation Day' in North Korea, on which Kim Il-sung formed the first genuine Marxist-Leninist party in the country. Needless to say, official North Korean historians seek to downplay the role of early communist leaders like Pak Hon-yong. Official North Korean sources claim that the name of the Bureau was changed to 'Organizational Committee of the Communist Party of North Korea' (often simpled referred to as the 'Communist Party of North Korea')^[3]

On July 22, 1946, following a similar united front formula that was implemented in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, the North Korea Bureau joined with the New People's Party, the Democratic Party and the Chondoist Chongu Party (supporters of an influential religious movement) to form the North Korean Fatherland United Democratic Front.

On July 29, 1946 the New People's Party and the North Korea Bureau held a joint plenum of the Central Committees of both parties and agreed to merge into a single entity. A founding conference of the Workers Party of North Korea was held on August 28-30.

The remainder of the party, still functioning in the southern areas, worked under the name of Communist Party of South Korea. The party merged with the New People's Party of South Korea and the fraction of the People's Party of Korea (the so-called forty-eighters), founding the Workers Party of South Korea on November 23, 1946.

See Also

• Worker's Party of Korea

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Project MUSE
2. ^ [1]
3. ^ Page Error : 찾으시는 Page의 URL이 잘못되었거나 없습니다