North Korea’s Relations with Russia: A Historical Perspective

Author: Dr. Kathryn Weathersby 
October 2025

Introduction

From all appearances, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK or North Korea) reinvigorated relations with Moscow since 2022 have brought significant and widespread benefits. With Russian oil and food flowing into the country, North Korea’s economy grew 3.7% in 2024, the fastest rate in eight years.1  The July 2025 opening of the massive, luxurious Wonsan-Kalma Coastal Tourist Area reflects increased disposable income among the DPRK’s middle class, as well as the regime’s ability to meet the expectations of this key group even without economic interaction with South Korea. North Korean geologists are scheduled to receive advanced training in uranium mining at a Siberian University, while AI researchers, among others, are traveling to Russia for collegial collaboration.2  

The DPRK-Russia Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin signed on 19 June 2024 commits Russia to assist North Korea “with all means in its possession without delay” in case the DPRK is subject to “an armed invasion from an individual state or several states.”3 More immediately, North Korean troops fighting in Ukraine are learning modern drone warfare while Russia transfers relevant technology to the DPRK.4 Moscow continues to block further sanctions on North Korea in the UN Security Council, and now explicitly voices support for Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program. On his visit to the new tourist compound in Wonsan on 12 July 2025, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that Russia respects North Korea’s technological efforts and understands “the reasons why they carry out their nuclear program.”5 Moreover, as prominent Korea specialist Georgy Toloraya subsequently added, Moscow views transfer of satellite technology to the DPRK as “not completely prohibited in the eyes of Russia, since the exploration of outer space, from the point of view of Russia, is the legal right of the DPRK.”6

Perhaps most importantly, North Korea’s new relationship with Russia has elevated its standing with China. Photos of the military parade Beijing held on 3 September 2025 to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Japan showed Xi Jinping standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Kim Jong Un on one side and Vladimir Putin on the other, while the other visiting heads of state stood in rows behind them. This parade protocol suggests that North Korea may be regaining the triangular alliance system that served it so well from 1960 to 1990. Indeed, to a certain extent the geopolitical logic that drove Russia and China to support the DPRK during the Cold War applies now as they seek to forge a powerful bloc of anti-Western authoritarian states.  

A deeper look at North Korea’s relations with Russia, however, reveals that this new alliance is built on a foundation of profound mistrust. Pyongyang is using the bounty from Moscow to reverse the severe, widespread damage the Soviet government caused when it abandoned the DPRK in 1990. Moreover, the famine North Korea suffered in the 1990s was caused not only by the loss of Soviet oil, but more fundamentally by Pyongyang’s longstanding focus on economic self-sufficiency. This fixation on autarky was, in turn, a response to the traumatic destruction the DPRK experienced during the war of 1950-53, which came about because Moscow was willing to sacrifice Korean lives and property to further its own aims. Pyongyang will no doubt make the most of whatever new opportunities the war in Ukraine and the larger shifts in the international system provide, but it will do so with great wariness toward its powerful neighbor, keenly aware that the present circumstances can easily change. 

Moscow Abandons North Korea, 1988-1990 

The rapprochement Moscow initiated with Pyongyang after it seized Crimea in 2014, which intensified following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, was necessary due to the rupture in the former allies’ relations in 1990 when the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea). With its treasury dangerously depleted, the Soviet government decided to take this dramatic step in exchange for $1 billion in cash, $1.5 billion in loans, and $500 million in South Korean capital goods. The money was contingent on Moscow ceasing military assistance to the DPRK. This abrupt cutoff not only weakened the North’s armed forces, but also ended the longstanding concessionary arrangement whereby Pyongyang earned hard currency by selling Soviet military goods abroad. Kim Il Sung’s government retaliated by threatening to recognize the independence of several Soviet republics, prompting Moscow to inform its erstwhile dependency that it would henceforth have to pay for its oil at world market prices, in hard currency. Pyongyang could not meet these terms, Soviet oil deliveries stopped, and the North Korean economy began to implode.    

This cascade of catastrophic events flowed naturally from the shift in thinking within the Soviet leadership that had unfolded since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. The North Korean leadership could scarcely have imagined that the “bulwark of the revolution” would abandon Marxist ideology. Nonetheless, Gorbachev’s team of advisers began to introduce market-oriented reforms in the hope that they would improve the functioning of their centrally planned economy. They also concluded from the Reykjavik summit of October 1986 that the United States under Ronald Reagan no longer posed an existential threat to Soviet Union. The Soviet leader began to reveal the ramifications of this “New Thinking” in a speech at the United Nations General Assembly on 7 December 1988, when he announced that Moscow would make drastic, unilateral cuts in its military presence in Eastern Europe, Mongolia, and the Chinese border region. “Force and the threat of force can no longer be, and should not be instruments of foreign policy,” he declared, as he hailed “the emergence of a mutually connected and integral world.”7

For North Korea, Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” meant that the rationale that had underlain Soviet support for the DPRK since its creation was no longer in force. Ever since the Red Army occupied the northern half of Korea at the end of the Pacific War, Moscow had viewed the area as an essential buffer to protect the Soviet East against future attack by a remilitarized Japan and/or the United States. The North Korean leadership therefore had the luxury of believing, over the succeeding decades, that however much Moscow might dislike Pyongyang’s troublesome actions (such as the seizure of the USS Pueblo in 1968 or the bombing in Rangoon in 1983), the Soviets would nonetheless protect their eastern buffer. The Sino/Soviet split in 1960 famously strengthened Pyongyang’s leverage, as Moscow needed to prevent the DPRK from deserting to the Chinese camp.   

In early 1988, however, months before Gorbachev’s UN speech in December, Moscow’s actions regarding the Summer Olympics to be held in Seoul in September of that year revealed that the Soviets were reassessing their protection of the DPRK. Gorbachev’s government understood full well that North Korea regarded the prospect of its fraternal states, not to mention the global community, gathering in Seoul for the Olympics to be an existential threat. The two Korean states had always defined themselves as the only legitimate government on the Korean peninsula; the first DPRK constitution even named Seoul as its capital. The Soviet Union and its client states had steadfastly supported Pyongyang’s position, refusing to establish diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea or even to allow their citizens to travel there. Consequently, the Soviet bloc’s participation in the Seoul Olympics would undermine the legitimacy of the DPRK. Moreover, it would further undermine the Korean Workers’ Party by giving Seoul an immense stage on which to triumphantly display its stunning economic success.

 Pyongyang was so alarmed by the prospect of Seoul hosting the Olympics that it initially insisted that some of the events be held in the North. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the ROK humored North Korea by holding talks on this possibility, but when the IOC finally ruled in October 1987 that all events would be held in the South, the DPRK turned to terrorism. Hoping to dissuade the international community from traveling to Seoul for the Olympics, Pyongyang dispatched two special agents to plant a bomb in the overhead compartment of KAL flight 858 returning to Seoul from Abu Dhabi. The plane exploded over the Indian Ocean, killing all 115 persons on board. This shocking act only steeled Moscow’s determination to participate in the Olympics. It is unknown what measures the Soviets subsequently took to prevent North Korea from disrupting the games, but Foreign Minister Shevardnadze pointedly assured President Reagan and Secretary of State Shultz in March 1988 that Soviet athletes would be in Seoul to compete and “there will not be any terrorism.”8

As the Olympics approached, Pyongyang’s worst fears were realized. Seoul used the upcoming games to energetically pursue Nordpolitik, its campaign modeled after West Germany’s successful Ostpolitik, to improve the ROK position vis-a-vis the DPRK by establishing relations with Pyongyang’s allies. President Roh Tae-woo sent a letter to Gorbachev praising his perestroika reforms and calling for diplomatic relations between the two states as step toward peace and stability in Asia. The Soviet leader, facing a worsening economic crisis, was receptive to Seoul’s initiative. The day before the games opened, Gorbachev stated in a speech delivered in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk that “within the context of a general improvement in the situation on the Korean peninsula, opportunities can open up for forging economic ties with South Korea.”9       

The Seoul Olympics were a smashing success, with the largest ever number of participating countries.10  Adding salt to Pyongyang’s wound, four days before the opening ceremonies, cash-strapped Hungary announced that it would exchange ambassadorial-level missions with the ROK. Pyongyang learned that Moscow had approved Budapest’s action, which it took in exchange for $625 million in loans from Seoul. North Korea’s Nodong Sinmun newspaper described Hungary’s betrayal as “a treacherous grave act against the principles of Marxism-Leninism and the revolutionary cause of the working class.” It concluded plaintively, “is Hungary so strapped that it has no choice but to beg for a few dollars even from the South Korean puppets, breaching faith with a friend to survive?”11            

As Pyongyang feared, the extensive and highly positive coverage of the games in the Soviet press prompted Moscow to consider the possibility of trade with and investment from economically dynamic South Korea. By that time, North Korea was a significant drain on Soviet resources, receiving $1.9 billion in goods per year from the USSR while paying less than $0.9 billion. Consequently, as South Korean companies expressed strong interest in investment and trade in Siberia, Pyongyang demanded that Moscow declare its intentions. 

The Soviet Communist Party accordingly drafted a memorandum explaining that the USSR was interested in new partners to solve its economic problems: “South Korea possesses technology and products that can be of use, especially in the Far Eastern regions of our state.” Moreover, reflecting Gorbachev’s new inclination to minimize ideological divisions, it noted that South Korea maintains commercial links with almost all countries in the world, including such socialist states as the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Nonetheless, the Soviet Party assured Pyongyang that they “would move gradually, measuring progress in the economic field with the political trend in the region.” Moreover, the party declared that “the USSR remains loyal to its obligations to the DPRK. We do not intend to start political relations with South Korea.”12  

The North Korean leadership was unpersuaded by Moscow’s protestations. Foreign Minister Kim Yong Nam responded to the message Shevardnadze delivered to him in person by accusing “the socialist countries of not evaluating the situation in South Korea correctly, of deepening the division of the country, hindering inter-Korean dialogue, and charged that some socialist countries are betraying socialism for the sake of money.” Shevardnadze denied the accusation and declared emphatically, “I give you my word as a party member: the USSR leadership does not have any intention and will not establish diplomatic relations with SK.”13 

Over the following months, however, Moscow betrayed North Korea in new ways. In May 1989 Gorbachev traveled to Beijing to reestablish relations with China, depriving Pyongyang of its very important ability to play its two patrons off one another. The following month, Moscow did nothing to stop the fall of the Communist government in Warsaw, despite Poland’s position as the Soviet’s Western buffer, analogous to North Korea’s role in the East. The process was shockingly simple. In June 1989 Poland held free elections, resulting in anti-communist candidates of the Solidarity movement winning nearly all seats, and the Soviets did not interfere. Instead, Moscow began withdrawing the military forces it had maintained in Eastern Europe since 1945. 

With the new freedom the Soviet Union now allowed, Hungary moved next. It formally abandoned Leninism and opened its border with Austria, allowing East Germans to travel freely to West. Meanwhile in Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov - who had held power since 1954, nearly as long as Kim Il Sung - was simply voted out of office. In Czechoslovakia, the prominent anti-communist dissident Vaclav Havel was elected president. Most traumatically for Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, their close friend and Romanian leader Nicolai Ceausescu was killed by his own security police following a mass demonstration against his rule. Photos and video of the killing appeared widely in the international press, bringing the North Korean rulers images of the most elemental fear any dictator harbors. 

Finally, the collapse of the German Democratic Republic brought a nightmarish prospect for the North Korean leadership: unification by absorption. In October 1989 when huge protests erupted throughout East Germany, Soviet forces continued their restraint, even though their German client state occupied an even more central position in the Cold War than did the DPRK. In November Berliners joyfully dismantled the iconic Wall and in March 1990 Germans soundly defeated Communist candidates in free elections. West Germany moved quickly to unify the country. In October 1990 the GDR was dissolved and absorbed into the much more prosperous Federal Republic of Germany. 

The Soviet Union relinquished its empire in Eastern Europe for ideological and economic reasons, both of which applied to North Korea. Gorbachev’s leadership team ceased to believe in the ideological rivalry that had necessitated its security buffer in the West, and the USSR could no longer afford to maintain economically failing dependencies. This reality inexorably led to Moscow abandoning Pyongyang in exchange for financial support from Seoul.

By early 1990 the Soviet government faced a budget deficit of 12% of its GDP, and shortages of consumer goods were causing dangerous unrest among its citizens. Fearing the Union would not hold if Moscow could not stanch the financial hemorrhage, Gorbachev turned his attention to the economic benefits the USSR could obtain from South Korea. Consequently, when his senior foreign policy advisor Anatoly Dobrynin was invited to Seoul in May for an informal meeting of former heads of state and senior diplomats organized by former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the Soviet leader instructed him to explore the possibility of a major loan from the ROK. Dobrynin carried a message from Gorbachev that the Soviet leader was willing to meet with President Roh Tae-woo in the United States after his upcoming summit with President George H. W. Bush, a significant symbolic act. The Nordpolitik team that met with Dobrynin at the Blue House was well-prepared. Without specifying an exact number, Roh Tae-woo discussed a possible loan in the billions of dollars if Moscow established full diplomatic relations with Seoul.14

Gorbachev and Roh Tae-woo met on June 4  at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. Speaking to the press immediately afterwards, President Roh raised the prospect of unification, the outcome the North Korean leadership most feared. “As a result of today’s meeting,” he declared, “the cold war ice on the Korean peninsula has now begun to crack. We expect that this will be the first major step toward a peaceful and unified Korea…The road between Seoul and Pyongyang is now totally blocked. Accordingly, we have to choose an alternative route to the North Korean capital by way of Moscow and Beijing. This may not be the most direct route but we certainly hope it will be an effective one.”15

Kim Il Sung’s government responded to this shattering news with denunciation and threats. When Foreign Minister Shevardnadze traveled to Pyongyang to explain to his North Korean counterpart that, contrary to the solemn promise he had made to him two years earlier, the Soviet Union was in fact going to establish diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea,  Kim Yong Nam reminded him that “formal recognition by Moscow would be fundamentally different from and more serious than that by other nations because the Soviet Union, along with the United States, had been responsible for the division of the country in 1945, and because the Soviet Union had been the first to recognize the DPRK as the sole legitimate state in Korea.” More immediately, the collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe following the withdrawal of Soviet protection demonstrated the concrete consequences that could follow such action. Thus, he explained that Moscow’s recognition of Seoul “would embolden South Korea to try harder to destroy socialism in the North and swallow it up, along the lines of the East German scenario.”16

The patron/client relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang had always served to restrain North Korea as well as protect it. Consequently, Soviet abrogation of their role would remove any such constraints. Kim Yong Nam declared that the DPRK would now be free to recognize the independence of Soviet republics that were threatening to separate from the USSR. Moreover, since recognition of the ROK would destroy the basis of the 1961 mutual security treaty between the DPRK and the USSR, North Korea would feel free to take any action it chose without consulting Moscow. It would likewise consider itself no longer bound by previous pledges to refrain from developing any type of weapon.17  

Shevardnadze was so offended by North Korea’s threats that he agreed to the request from ROK Foreign Minister Choi Ho-joong, made at a meeting of the UN General Assembly later that month, to advance the date of diplomatic recognition to September 30. Nodong Sinmun (or Rodong Sinmun) responded to the subsequent announcement by excoriating Moscow for having “sold off the dignity and honor of a socialist power and the interests and faith of an ally for $2.3 billion.”18 In retaliation, Gorbachev’s government demanded that Pyongyang pay for Soviet oil in hard currency, at world market prices. It also ceased shipments of military hardware to the DPRK, as Seoul had requested. North Korean military capacity consequently declined, but Pyongyang also lost its ability to earn hard currency by selling Soviet arms to countries like Iraq and Iran, a concession Moscow had long allowed. By 1993 imports from Russia comprised 10% of the average for 1987-9019 and North Korea’s economy began to implode.

Famine

The abrupt loss of imports from Russia and the former Soviet bloc were the proximate cause of the severe famine that lasted into 1998. Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, the leading scholars of the famine, estimate that the catastrophe claimed between 600,000 and one million lives, or between 3% and 5% of the North Korean population.20 Such an experience would, of course, profoundly affect everyone who lived through it. For the leadership, however, who were reeling from the collapse of fraternal states in Eastern Europe, the loss of Soviet patronage, and the dissolution of the USSR itself in December 1991, the crisis was seen primarily as a threat to the survival of their regime. 

The first requirement for regime survival was to maintain the loyalty of the elite. Consequently, the DPRK directed scarce food resources to the “core class,” those who were allowed to live in the capital or who held high positions elsewhere. It was also slow to request outside assistance, since international aid workers would expose North Korea’s weakness while it was dealing with international pressure to freeze its nuclear program.21 When aid finally did arrive , the DPRK did not use it to increase the overall food supply, which would have benefitted the general population. Instead, Pyongyang used food aid to replace commercial imports so that funds that would otherwise be used to purchase food could be directed to the development of nuclear weapons, their ultimate strategy for regime survival.22    

Despite these efforts to protect their rule, the leadership nonetheless confronted new and unexpected challenges brought by the famine. Ordinary people began to secure their survival by creating a primitive market economy. Having nothing to lose, they illegally brought in goods from China or made products from whatever they had at hand to exchange for money with which to purchase food. The government was unable to stamp out this new market economy since the very people who would enforce such action themselves depended on the markets to survive. 

The politically transgressive creation of a monetized market economy weakened the power of the Korean Workers’ Party, as the official ideology was clearly no longer operative and people no longer relied exclusively on the state for their basic needs. But it also brought an even greater danger to the regime. Among the goods smuggled in from China were DVDs, later replaced by USBs, loaded with movies, TV shows, and music videos from South Korea. Young North Koreans were so drawn to this new entertainment that they risked severe punishment to watch it. In the process, they discovered what the regime had desperately tried to hide by refusing to cover the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The South was far from the poverty-stricken hellscape the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) had always claimed. Instead it was vastly richer, more vibrant, and more appealing than the DPRK.23        

Dangerous exposure to South Korea increased even further after the June 2000 inter-Korean summit, which Kim Jong Il hosted in exchange for a secret payment of $500 million from the ROK. Having lost his previous economic patrons in the Soviet bloc, the North Korean leader had little choice but to agree to “economic cooperation” with South Korean businesses. Thus, in 2002, Hyundai Assan constructed a substantial tourist facility at Geumgangsan, complete with a ferry port and a new road for buses that transported thousands of comparatively wealthy South Koreans to the scenic spot just north of the DMZ. Pyongyang tolerated their presence only until 2008, when the tragic shooting of a South Korean tourist provided an occasion to scuttle the project. North Korea refused to apologize for the border guard’s extreme response when a tourist walked past a “restricted area” sign on her morning walk along the beach. Unable to guarantee the safety of its clients, Hyundai Assan closed the facility and the DPRK confiscated its assets.    

The 2000 inter-Korean summit led to a much larger project at Kaesong, where over one hundred South Korean manufacturing companies constructed factories, power infrastructure, health care, housing, and leisure facilities for some 50,000 North Korean workers. Opened in 2004, the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) brought hundreds of South Korean managers and staff commuting daily to Kaesong to train and supervise North Korean workers. Despite the good salaries, excellent infrastructure, and valuable job skills the KIC provided, Pyongyang’s tolerance for this “cooperation” was likewise short-lived. In 2013, after neighboring states responded negatively to the DPRK’s third underground nuclear test, Pyongyang removed all North Koreans from the KIC for four months. Then, in 2016, after North Korea launched a satellite and claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb, Seoul announced it would halt operations at the KIC. Pyongyang retaliated by expelling all ROK workers and freezing South Korean assets, after which the South cut off the supply of electricity and water to the site.  

Roots of Autarky

The autarkic model North Korea attempts to maintain comes, of course, from the Soviet Union. Over the first year it occupied the northern half of the peninsula following its defeat of Japan in 1945, and the Red Army quickly put in place a full-fledged Soviet system.24 The command economy created in the North initially left it with no trading partners other than the Soviet Union, which wanted the industrial resources Japan had built in the mineral-rich north of Korea.25 As the Soviet bloc took shape in the late 1940s, however, the DPRK’s economic ties were extended to those fraternal states. 

It is unsurprising that the young Kim Il Sung, catapulted from guerilla fighter in Manchuria in the 1930s, to leader of a small group of Koreans who took refuge at a Soviet military base in 1941, to head of the proto-government in the northern zone in 1945, welcomed this Soviet state-building. With the extraordinary good fortune to be leading a Communist government in at least half of his country, he enthusiastically subordinated himself to his Soviet mentors. As he declared to Soviet officials in January 1950, when he requested permission to ask Stalin’s approval for a military offensive against the South, “he himself cannot begin an attack, because he is a Communist, a disciplined person, and for him the order of Comrade Stalin is law.”26   

Kim Il Sung’s fealty to Moscow suffered a severe blow in the first months of the war, however. In October 1950, as the Korean People’s Army (KPA) faced imminent defeat after UN forces successfully landed at Incheon in September, Stalin refused to provide the air cover Beijing required before it would send its soldiers to Korea. Instead, the Soviet leader sent Kim Il Sung instructions to evacuate his remaining forces into Chinese territory. The next day, Mao Zedong persuaded the PRC leadership to intervene in Korea even without Soviet air support, after which Stalin canceled the evacuation order. The psychological effect on Kim Il Sung remained, however.27

The Soviet leader’s unwillingness to use his superb Air Force to protect the DPRK continued through the remainder of the war. Once Chinese soldiers successfully engaged the Americans in late October, Stalin ordered Soviet air units to protect the Yalu River bridges over which supplies and men entered Korea. However, he forbade Soviet planes from flying over the rest of North Korean territory lest their presence provoke war with the United States. The fierce battle between American and Soviet fighter jets in “MiG Alley,” which both sides kept secret, became the largest military confrontation between the two states over the entire Cold War. The MiG 15 pilots were so skilled and their planes so effective that they succeeded in preventing US bombers from taking out the essential Yalu River bridges. However, Stalin’s fear of untimely war with the US left the bulk of North Korean territory unprotected from relentless American bombing.

In February 1952 the North Korean leadership appealed to Stalin and Mao to reach an armistice agreement so that the immense destruction from the bombing would cease. The Soviet leader refused, however, because he had decided that the war in Korea was useful to the USSR. With Chinese forces protecting the Soviet/Chinese border, Moscow could safely keep the Americans stuck in Korea for two to three years to give Soviet bloc countries in Europe time to rearm. Prioritizing the fortification of Moscow’s security buffer in the West, Stalin instructed the North Koreans to keep fighting, refusing any armistice terms the enemy put forward. Mao also saw benefit in continuing the war, as Soviet support for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was transforming the former guerilla army into a modern military force. Unable to defy their patrons, North Koreans had to endure the near-complete physical destruction of their country.28 

After Stalin’s death in March 1953, the new leadership in Moscow moved quickly to end the war in Korea. Stalin’s passing also allowed Kim Il Sung to become more assertive toward his allies. He publicly attributed North Korea’s successes in the war solely to his own leadership, ignoring the Chinese contribution. Once the armistice was signed, Kim Il Sung immediately informed the Soviet Union that it expected it would rebuild his devastated country. With the DPRK now standing on the front line of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies complied. The Soviet bloc rebuilt North Korea from the ground up, with a remarkable speed. 

Three years into the rebuilding, however, Kim Il Sung learned that this support carried a heavy political price. At the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev announced new policies that all communist parties must follow. Determined to end the unjustified imprisonments and executions that had marked the Stalin era, Khrushchev ruled that Stalinist cults of personality must end. In addition, convinced that the second generation of nuclear weapons rendered war with the United States unthinkable, the Soviet leader declared that the USSR and its allies would pursue peaceful coexistence with the West. Khrushchev was confident that Marxism would prevail over capitalism, but it would do so peacefully.  

Since Kim Il Sung had held onto his position through the catastrophic war of 1950-53 in no small measure because he had successfully emulated Stalin’s cult of personality, Khrushchev’s new policy was a serious threat. Moreover, peaceful coexistence with the West would rule out completing North Korea’s unfinished war for unification. Nonetheless, the Soviet government was determined that all communist parties follow Moscow’s new line. Consequently, the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang became the organizing hub for Korean Workers’ Party members who wanted to end Kim Il Sung’s cult of personality. 

The showdown came at the KWP plenum in August. Kim Il Sung corralled enough votes among his supporters that the party ruled against adopting Khrushchev’s policies. It moreover expelled the leaders of the pro-Moscow movement, who then fled to China. Kim Il Sung’s defiance so alarmed Beijing and Moscow that they sent high-ranking officials to Pyongyang to force the North Korean party to toe the line. Still unable to defy his patrons, Kim convened a new plenum, which adopted Moscow’s policies and reinstated the expelled dissidents. This intervention humiliated Kim Il Sung, but unexpected events in Europe saved him. The anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest in November distracted Moscow and Beijing and discredited Khrushchev’s new policies, leaving Kim Il Sung room to continue his cult of personality and his focus on military preparedness.29     

In the wake of the 1956 crisis, Kim Il Sung created a new system of domestic control to ensure that no such opposition to his rule would arise. He began a series of Stalin-style purges, interrogating anyone even remotely connected to the attempt to align the Korean party with Khrushchev’s new policies. Many party members and non-party members were arrested, imprisoned, or executed, after they supplied names of people supposedly disloyal to Kim Il Sung. The leadership then divided the entire population into three groups defined by their loyalty to Kim Il Sung: core, wavering, and hostile. These three groups were further subdivided into some fifty categories, called songbun. 

Each North Korean is assigned a songbun when they turn nineteen, based on their family history and personal actions. Their songbun sets the parameters of their life, determining where they can live, go to school, work, get medical care, travel, etc. It is very difficult to raise your songbun but even the slightest disrespect to the leader could lower it, with catastrophic consequences for yourself and your family. This system has been very effective. To this day, despite the famine of the 1990s and subsequent marketization, no opposition movement has appeared in North Korea.    

Four years after the 1956 crisis, the Sino-Soviet split gave Kim Il Sung external security that lasted until Gorbachev restored relations with Beijing in 1989. In the early 1960s, confident that his patrons’ rivalry would compel them to continue financial and military support to the DPRK, Kim Il Sung was free to put forward his own ideology: the Juche Idea.  Since his subordination to and dependence on his patrons was the most painful reality the North Korean leader faced, he simply proclaimed that the opposite was true. “Self-reliance,” or “Self-determination” was declared to be the defining feature of the DPRK, thanks to the brilliant leadership of the Great Leader.  

Self-sufficiency was not merely a propaganda slogan, however. It led Pyongyang to maintain an autarkic economic system long after its fraternal states had moderated such policy. As Haggard and Noland note, this had the “unintended and sadly ironic effect of making the economy more rather than less vulnerable to external shocks.” According to their analysis, “if the DPRK had “maintained access to commercial imports during the first half of the 1990s, the famine could have been avoided.”30 Thus, Kim Il Sung’s reaction to Moscow’s betrayal in the 1950s created the conditions that threatened to destroy his dynasty in the 1990s and 2000s.       

Conclusion

We do not know what the young Kim Jong Un learned from his father or other senior officials about North Korea’s longstanding relations with Russia. However, since the behavior and attitudes created by this interaction have played a central role in forming the DPRK’s peculiar system, we can assume that they continue to affect the leadership in Pyongyang. Kim Jong Un’s government will therefore be keenly aware that Moscow’s policies can abruptly change. For the time being, Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is leading the Russian leader to provide significant support to the DPRK. However, since the war is causing such serious damage to Russia, Putin’s successor may well change course. When a leadership succession happens, Moscow’s calculations regarding Pyongyang will not be based on any sense of loyalty. The North Korea/Russia relationship is rooted in profound mutual mistrust. US policymakers would do well to factor this reality into their responses to the challenges posed by the DPRK.      

About the Author 

Dr. Kathryn Weathersby is Adjunct Professor of Asian Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. A specialist on the Korean War and the history of North Korea, she previously taught in the Department of History of Korea University, Seoul, and at the US-Korea Institute of the School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, in Washington, DC. In the 1990s she conducted pioneering research in Russian archives on the establishment of the DPRK and the Korean War and has written and lectured widely on these subjects. After Russian archives restricted access in the late 1990s, she coordinated research on North Korean history in East European archives through the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where founded the North Korea International Documentation Project. In 2014 the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs of the Republic of Korea honored her work by awarding her the Medal of Civilian Merit.