Pen Varlen’s Dispatch to North Korea (1953-1954) and Changes of North Korean Art in the first half of the 1950s

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 207-239
Author(s):  
Moonkyoung Kim
Keyword(s):  
North Korea ◽  
Korean Art ◽  
The 1950S

The Demise of Non-Communist Parties in North Korea (1945–1960)

2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei N. Lankov
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
North Korea ◽  
History Of ◽  
United Front ◽  
The 1950S

This article, based on newly declassified material from the Russian archives, deals with the fate of non-Communist parties in North Korea in the 1950s. Like the “people's democracies” in Eastern Europe, North Korea had (and still technically has) a few non-Communist parties. The ruling Communist party included these parties within the framework of a “united front,” designed to project the facade of a multiparty state, to control domestic dissent, and to establish links with parties in South Korea. The article traces the history of these parties under Soviet and local Communist control from the mid-1940s to their gradual evisceration in the 1950s.

Visualizing History: Truthfulness in North Korean Art

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-201
Author(s):  
Min-Kyung Yoon
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
The State ◽  
Korean Art ◽  
Visual Form ◽  
Utopian Vision ◽  
The North ◽  
The Soviet Union

Abstract In North Korean paintings, history is mobilized to legitimate the North Korean system and its leaders. Utilizing the mode of socialist realism, North Korean paintings give visual form to a socialist world, a utopian vision full of unremitting heroism, harvest, and happiness centered on the ruling Kim family. In these paintings, positive heroes such as laborers, workers, farmers, and children are depicted in historically correct scenes that always propel the North Korean revolution forward. After adopting socialist realism from the Soviet Union, North Korea localized this creative method to meet its specific political needs through medium and content. Through this process, socialist realism came to reflect the ideals of juche, the state ideology of North Korea. Informed by North Korean theoretical writings on art and art reviews, this article examines how history is visually mobilized in three paintings created in 1985 and 2000 through the language of juche realism.

“The East Asian Frontier of the Socialist World: North Korea in the 1950s”

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 160-183
Author(s):  
Avram Agov
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
East European ◽  
Socialist System ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The 1950S

The decade of the 1950s was a formative period for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (dprk), one that shaped its integration into the international socialist system. This article examines the interaction between North Korea’s internal (institutional) and external (international) integration into the socialist system that, at this time, the Soviet Union and its East European bloc allies dominated. It argues that North Korea was more integrated into the socialist world than its nationalist ideology implied. The 1950s marked the culmination of the dprk’s connectivity to the international socialist world. The narrative begins in the second half of the 1940s with the building of North Korea’s socialist system. It then focuses on East European bloc aid to North Korea during and after the Korean War, as well as the dprk’s reactions to this fraternal assistance. By the second half of the 1950s, North Korea came to associate integration with dependency, generating nationalist impulses in dprk policy and laying the foundation for the juche (self-reliance) paradigm. North Korea’s nationalist ideology was part of a broader post-colonial nation building drive, but socialist interdependency also played a role in the dprk’s divergence, after the early 1960s, from the Soviet bloc and the People’s Republic of China.

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