조선인민군의 창설과 유일지도체제의 기원

Abstract

The Korean People’s Army (KPA) was established on February 8, 1948. At the time in 1948, every governmental structure in the North Korean region was formed in prospect of establishing a unified government. However, one purpose of the Korean People’s Army was to install yuilgun in the entire Korean Peninsula for the unified government. The historical legitimacy of the KPA was incongruent to that of the Eastern European People’s Democratic states. The KPA denied the anti-Japanese struggles of other political powers, and singularized the legitimacy to that of Kim Il-sung. The general headquarters nominated people of various political backgrounds, class, and stratum to the officer positions. The North Korean political powers also advocated the principle of the ‘united front’, which included diverse classes and strata to the nation-building project, and consolidated the People’s army based on such principle, rather than forming the party’s army. Even though Kim Il-sung was the leader of the party and the government by February 1948, the Northeastern Anti-Japanese Union Army (NAJUA) remained in the outskirts of power within either the government or the party. However, the NAJUA seized control of the military command and ideological education sectors consistently throughout the nation-building process. The North Korean army, in effect, adopted Kim Il-sung’s leadership ideology as its guiding ideology and legitimized Kim’s anti-Japanese movement as an independence movement. The ‘revolutionary tradition’ of North Korea emerged in the army prior to its emergence in the Worker’s Party, and gained recognition from all political powers. Before the Korean War, it was in neither the party nor the government that Kim Il-sung held a respected position, but it was within the People’s army that he did so. Although various political powers possessed the authority over ideology education in the party and government, the NAJUA maintained their control over the ideology of the military. Through this authority the NAJUA disseminated the notion that Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese struggles is where the North Korean nation-state derived its legitimacy. This procedure entailed an expansion of political hegemony by seizing control over each individual soldiers’ ideological beliefs instead of the entire military. Ultimately, the revolutionary tradition of the KPA was the historical origin of Kim Il-sung’s monolithic leadership system in the process of North Korea’s construction.