Carrots and Radishes

In North Korea the U.S. and its allies have routed a Communist government which once ruled 9,000,000 people. Here, for the first time, the free world could make an on-the-spot study of the results of years of Communist rule, and discover what must be done and what undone if liberation is to win the lasting approval of the liberated. Last week in the former Communist capital of Pyongyang, TIME Correspondent Dwight Martin looked for the lessons which U.N. liberators might learn from the pattern of Russian rule in North Korea. His report:

WITHIN hours after the first Russian troops had entered Pyongyang in September 1945, nearly every billboard and wall space in the city was plastered with effective, brightly colored posters extolling the military and civil virtues of the Soviet Union. In every section of the city (pop. 300,000), Russian-trained Korean agitators hammered home the same ideas from soapboxes and sound trucks. Within a few days Pyongyang’s Peony Point Park had been named Molotov Park, the Taedong River had become the Lenin River, and Bell Road, the city’s main thoroughfare, had been renamed Stalin Street.

At first the people of Pyongyang had little reason for resentment. Besides posters, sound trucks and propaganda squads, the Russians also brought with them carefully trained cadres of civilian political officers. These functionaries, most of them Russian-indoctrinated Koreans, had their offices set up only 48 hours after their arrival, and the offices really worked. There was little hunger in Pyongyang, because the Russians got rice into the city promptly and distributed it as fairly as possible. The Russians also insisted that their military government would last only so long as it took to set up an independent “people’s government” run by Koreans for Koreans. But in the end, what the North Koreans got was a government run by the Russians for the Russians.

New Houses & Long Hair. La Sung Duk is 59 years old and an elder in Pyongyang’s West Gate Presbyterian Church. Elder La met his first Russian in September 1945. The Russian was a cheerful, blond young soldier, and he asked Elder La’s help in haggling for an apple with a fruit vendor. Elder La tried to ask the soldier the meaning of the green hatbands worn by some of the Russian officers, but he couldn’t seem to make the soldier understand his question.

Elder La began to notice the men with the green hatbands again when Kim II Sung set up the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea and installed a new national police chief. The difference was that now the men with the green hatbands were Koreans instead of Russians.

The new chief of the green hatbands was Park II Woo, a tall man who wore his hair long in the fashion that Koreans call a “high collar cut.” Kim II Sung and Park II Woo lived in downtown Pyongyang for a while, but soon they moved up into Ocean Village, the old Presbyterian missionary compound. Here their American-style red brick houses were next door to the residence of General Terenty Shtykov, who called himself the Soviet ambassador but was, in fact, Russian governor of North Korea. This move did not escape the attention of Pyongyang’s 50,000 Christians, but the other 83% of the city’s population didn’t seem to notice it.

Cultural Clubs & Stewards. Some of Pyongyang’s Christians think that the reason such changes passed unnoticed was that Kim II Sung and his friends had given almost everybody something to do. The workers in the city’s shoe and textile factories now had labor unions and an eight-hour day. For the intellectuals there was an imposing collection of Russian cultural clubs, Russian friendship societies and Russian-Korean study circles. It was true that the workers’ salaries didn’t buy as much as they had before, and the labor union stewards were appointed by the government, but to people who had had neither unions nor stewards before, it made little difference.

Elder La and his friends, however, were beginning to take a lot more interest in the activities of the men in the green hatbands. As chief of the national police, Park II Woo had abolished Pyongyang’s good Chinese restaurants and kesan (geisha) houses. As Minister of the Interior, he dealt with the city’s private schools, factories and stores. He also found time to take note of some of Elder La’s Christian colleagues.

The first to go was Cha Choi II, an athletic coach at the Boys’ Christian Academy. He was picked up by the green hatbands in the spring of 1946, and his neighbors never heard of him again. Next were Kim Wha Sik, pastor of the Central Presbyterian Church, Kim In Choon, president of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and Kang Yi Hong, secretary of the Pyongyang Y.M.C.A.

The Koreans had become used to arbitrary arrests under the Japanese. But there was a difference between the Japanese and the Russians. Under the Russians no one dared ask whether a missing person had, in fact, been arrested. The people of Pyongyang found themselves repeating over & over a phrase familiar to all Germans a decade before. In Korean the phrase is hang bong pul myung—address unknown.

Active & Passive. Not all of Pyongyang’s Christians were opposed to the Communist oppression. Many of them—probably 30% to 40%—cooperated at least passively with Kim II Sung’s Russian-run regime. Real anti-Communists had a system of vegetable classification for degrees of collaboration. Active Communists were called “carrots”; passive supporters of the government were known as “radishes,” and genuine anti-Communists simply as “the white ones.”

One prominent Christian, Kang Nyang Ook, was a “carrot” from the start. Kang, pastor of the High Place Presbyterian Church and an old teacher of Kim II Sung’s, organized the Christian People’s Association, preached regularly on the evils of U.S. imperialism and the blessings of Soviet democracy. He gathered quite a following, and continued to have one even after some of the “white ones” threw a grenade into his house, killing his eldest son and two visiting pastors.

Elder La thinks he knows the reason for the comparative lack of opposition to the

Communists. “These Russians,” he repeats, “gave the people something to do.” While Park II Woo’s security police were busy pumping bullets into the necks of Pyongyang’s leading Christian “white ones,” his People’s Building Administration was busy throwing up large, Russian-style housing developments for Communist Party members. Between 1947 and 1950 the price of rice in Pyongyang almost quadrupled. “Every time the price of rice went up another ten won,” said a Pyongyang “radish” last week, “the government would announce a new housing project, a new hospital plan or a new wing for Kim II Sung University. This may have been very poor economics, but for most of our people who have never heard of economics anyway, it was excellent psychology.”

Trucks & a Teacher. Last week, two weeks after Pyongyang’s liberation from the dual rule of the Russians and Kim II Sung, the people of the city had nothing to do. In the city hall, a former schoolteacher went falteringly about the business of pretending he was mayor. Two rickety sound trucks wheezed about the streets alternately playing martial music and exhorting the citizenry to get their city running again. But there was no evidence that anyone in town had any idea of what to do next or how to do it. Almost everyone who had held a position of responsibility before the liberation had fled north with the Communists.

The improvised Provisional City Council, appointed during the first days of liberation, was still nominally in office, but the real work of running the city was in the hands of bluff, vigorous U.S. Colonel Charles R. Munske. Colonel Munske makes it clear that he is not in Pyongyang as a military governor. He is commander of a U.S. Civil Assistance Team, which seems to be the title given by the U.S. Army to a military government unit whose existence it doesn’t want to admit.

Munske is a highly capable administrator, but he and his staff of four are battling against heavy odds. The city was almost completely looted of rice during the first few days after liberation, and still has no functioning rice-distributing system. Munske thinks there are fairly large stores of rice in some outlying towns, but he has no trucks to bring them in.

Politics & the Police. Like that of all U.S. military government officers in North Korea, Munske’s work is complicated by a high-level snafu. U.S. Civil Assistance Teams have been given no clearly defined political objectives, and each team is theoretically responsible only to the U.S. tactical commander in its area. In the Pyongyang area the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team is trying to set up local administration in the small communities around the city. The airborne officers are working hard, but they are not trained for the work, and it seems doubtful that their efforts will have any lasting effect.

The appalling fact is that, although the U.S. and U.N. have known from the start what North Korea’s political problems would be, we have come in almost completely unprepared to deal with them. Perhaps things will improve in time, but meanwhile the people of Pyongyang and of the rest of North Korea are dreadfully confused.

Outside of Pyongyang’s City Hall last week a young man with a jitterbug haircut tried to start a conversation with me. I asked my interpreter what the jitterbug wanted. Said the interpreter: “He says he wants rice, and that he will do anything you want him to do if you will give him some.” I told the interpreter to tell the young man that I didn’t have any rice, but that if he waited there, perhaps someone might come along who could give him some. If he waited there long enough, someone might even come along and give him something to do. Or perhaps a whole hatful of people would come along, all of them trying to tell him what to do. If the young man had a long memory, it may well have occurred to him that things weren’t this way under the Russians.