Excerpt from "Alliance of the Adversaries. The Congress of the Toilers of the Far East" by John Sexton. Pages 31-35.
Conditions were extraordinarily favourable for the Comintern’s revolutionary work among Korean nationalists. There were hundreds of thousands of Koreans in Siberia and sizable Korean communities in Moscow and other parts of European Russia. An earlier generation of economic migrants had been supplemented by political refugees from the Righteous Army rebellion and the uprising of March 1919. Dozens of anti-Japanese organisations, many of them armed militias, sprang up both in Russia and in the even larger Korean diaspora in Manchuria. With tens of thousands of Japanese intervention troops on Russian territory, allied with the Whites, the Soviets and the Koreans were natural allies. Thousands of Korean fighters enlisted in the Red Army, and independent militias were given training and weapons. The Koreans sent the largest, best organised and most representative delegation to the Far East Congress.
But despite these advantages, far from building a workable alliance between nationalists and communists, the Comintern was unable even to put together a viable Korean Communist Party. This was as much due to extreme factionalism as it was to the severe repression carried out by the Japanese. The Finnish Comintern official Otto Kuusinen, who was tasked with uniting the warring factions, wrote later: ‘Over the years … factional disputes have taken place in many Parties. There are parties which have achieved a certain amount of notoriety in this respect such as the American and Polish Parties, but the Korean factions hold the record’.73
The first step towards creating a Korean communist party was taken in June 1918 by the former army officer and Righteous Army insurgent, Yi Tong-hwi, who organised a Korean Socialist Party in Khabarovsk along with Alexandra Kim74 and Pak Chin-sun. Pak, who was also known as Pak Din-shun, attended the Second Comintern Congress, was elected to the ECCI and became a semi-official Soviet spokesman on Korean affairs. The respected veteran Yi was named prime minister of the Shanghai-based Korean Provisional Government the following year.
The Provisional Government seemed to represent the sort of communist-nationalist co-operation advocated by the Second Comintern Congress, and Moscow donated a large sum to the government, to be delivered via Yi and his associates. But coexistence between the prime minister and the right-wing President Syngman Rhee proved impossible. Yi’s strategy was to liberate Korea through armed struggle but Rhee placed his faith in diplomatic initiatives aimed at the democratic powers, principally the United States. Rhee’s maneuvers exasperated more radical nationalists. The last straw for many was a petition to Woodrow Wilson to have Korea placed under a League of Nations mandate. Yi, along with several other ministers, including Kim Kyu-sik, resigned from the government in May 1921.
Shortly afterwards, Yi and Pak Chin-sun diverted money Moscow had donated to the Provisional Government and re-launched their party as the Korean Communist Party. But simultaneously, in Irkutsk, a conference sponsored by Boris Shumyatsky launched another Korean Communist Party, made up largely of Korean members of the Russian Communist Party. The rival parties were known as the Shanghai faction and the Irkutsk faction75 – slightly misleadingly, since not all Korean Communists in Shanghai supported Yi Tong-
hwi. Yŏ Unhyŏng, for example, although based in Shanghai, was aligned with the Irkutsk faction.
In civil war conditions, where both sides had armed wings, the factional dispute rapidly escalated into violence. In June 1921, a bloody confrontation took place. Korean guerrillas retreating from a Japanese offensive had gathered in the Siberian garrison town of Alekseyevsk, where they had been promised training and supplies. But efforts by the Soviets to unite the guerrilla groups under a single command led to the so-called Free City Incident. Suspecting that the unified command would put them under the control of the Irkutsk group, Yi’s Greater Korean Independence Corps resisted and battled with the Irkutsk faction’s Korean Revolutionary Military Congress. The latter, backed by Red Army troops prevailed. According to some accounts, hundreds of Koreans were killed or wounded.
The Comintern condemned both factions for the conflict. By the time the Korean delegation arrived in Irkutsk for the Far East Congress, Moscow had begun taking steps to resolve the dispute. Yi Tong-hwi and his Shanghai faction colleague Hong Do were sent to Irkutsk with instructions to unify the warring factions. Yi convened a joint meeting of a provisional central committee of the Korean Communist Party with the Korean delegation. According to Kim Kyu-sik, who was the chairman of the Korean delegation, Yi agreed to convene a broadly-based national congress, to be organised by the ‘five main constituencies of the Korean revolutionary movement’ – the delegation to the Far East Congress, the Korean Communist Party, the Organizing Committee in Shanghai, the Provisional Government, and the Korean National Council in Siberia.76
When the Korean delegation left for Moscow, Yi Tong-hwi remained in Irkutsk, supposedly to begin organising the national congress.77 But, according to Kim Kyu-sik, instead of working towards a broad-based assembly, Yi decided that the ‘congress should be convened by the Korean Communist Party alone’ and sent an agent to Shanghai with a large sum of money to assemble a congress of some sort. In a letter to the Comintern, Kim charged that Yi was ‘vainly hoping that he will become the head of a new government’, and said that ‘if the Korcom Ceco78 convenes a congress alone … the so-called national congress will be an insignificant affair and an absolute farce’. Yi, Kim said, had embezzled Soviet money donated to the Korean Provisional Government, and squandered it ‘right and left together with Kim Rip, Pak Dzin-shun [Pak Chin-sun] and others to increase [his] staying power’.79 Although Yi was considered a veteran leader by Moscow, he was only ‘one of many leaders, and a very insignificant one at that’.
Kim and three other members of the Korean delegation remained in Moscow after the Far East Congress hoping to secure Soviet financial and military aid for the ‘directing force’ they hoped would issue from the Korean national congress. But Comintern efforts were focused on reconciling the Shanghai and Irkutsk factions within the Communist Party. Kuusinen organised a unity congress in Verkhne Udinsk (now Ulan Ude) in October 1922 but failed to bring the two sides together. Kim’s letter to the Comintern, written in April, expresses frustration at having waited ‘nearly two months’ and adds that ‘it is not possible for us to spend too long a time here. Affairs in Korea and China among our revolutionary elements and undertakings may take such a turn … that we may find difficulty in making proper adjustments’. Kim was also clearly irritated that the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs had refused to deal with the delegation on the grounds that it did not represent a government.80
A fairly common perception is that the Shanghai faction was made up of nationalists who had only a thin coating of socialism, while the Irkutsk faction was supported by Russianised Koreans who were more or less indistinguishable from the Bolsheviks.81 But Kim Kyu-sik, who was not a Communist but, in Soviet terms, an archetypal bourgeois-nationalist, was firmly allied with the Irkutsk camp. The moderate communist Yŏ Unhyŏng was also aligned with Irkutsk. Pak Chin-sun, by contrast, had made a radical speech to the Second Comintern Congress, declaring that ‘the national liberation movement’ was ‘not only directed against Japanese imperialism but also against their own bourgeoisie’.82 It is probable that the split between the two sides was as much a matter of personal loyalties as political differences. Yi soon lost his leadership position and worked for International Red Aid in Vladivostok until his death in 1935. Pak Chin-sun, whom Kim described as ‘utterly ignorant of the Korean revolutionary movement and its history’, seems to have played no further role in the movement. He was executed during the Great Purges.
After the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Siberia, Moscow’s priorities changed. It was no longer in Russia’s interests to support military operations that risked provoking Japan and would delay the return of Northern Sakhalin. Comintern emphasis shifted from supporting insurgents among the émigré community to organising a party inside Korea.83 In the summer of 1923 a secret bureau and a legal front organisation, the Tuesday Society, were set up in Seoul by Kim Chaebong, Rim Wŏn-gŭn and Kim Tanya, all of whom had been delegates to the Far East Congress. On 17 April 1925, the first Korean Communist Party to be officially recognised by the Comintern was established at a meeting in a Chinese restaurant. Kim Chaebong, a member of the Irkutsk faction, was elected general secretary. The executive committee included another Far East Congress delegate, Cho Tongho, also from the Irkutsk faction, and Yi Tong-hwi’s associate from the Shanghai faction Pak Hŏnyŏng.84 But the Comintern’s attempt to develop a party in Korea fared no better than its efforts in Japan. In November 1925 the police rounded up the party after discovering a list of names in the apartment of a youth league supporter they had fortuitously arrested over a drunken brawl. Attempts to revive the party over the next few years failed.
72. See Batbayar and Kaplonski 1999, p. 233. Dendev’s mandate to the congress is in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History 495.154.177.
73. Quoted in Martin 2013, p. 731.
74. Alexandra Kim (1885–1918) is usually recognised as the first Korean Communist. She was born in Siberia to Korean parents. Her father fought against the Japanese in Manchuria. She joined the Bolsheviks in 1916 and was tasked with winning over Korean émigré community in Russia. She was captured and executed by White forces in September 1918.
75. Or the Shanghai Korean Communist Party (Sanghaep’a koryŏ kongsandang) and the Irkutsk Korean Communist Party (Irŭk’uch’ŭk’ŭp’a koryŏ kongsandang).
76. See the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History 495.154.175.
77. Some earlier accounts said that Yi Tong-hwi was a delegate to the Far East Congress and also that he had avoided going to Irkutsk for fear of being executed by Shumyatsky. See for example, Scalapino and Lee 1961, p. 155.
78. I.e. the Central Committee of the Korean Communist Party.
79. Kim Rip was assassinated in 1923, supposedly for misappropriating the Soviet funds.
80. Letter to the Executive Committee III Communist International, 5 April 1922, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History 495.154.175.
81. See, for example, Kim 2005, p. 133.
82. Minutes of the Second Comintern Congress, Fifth Session, 28 July 1920, available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd‑congress/ch05.htm, retrieved 24 May 2015.
83. To avoid disputes with Japan, the Soviets deported some militants, and were accused of betrayal by both communists and nationalist.