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first pre-read and approved in the Soviet Embassy. For more important decisions, an approval had to be received from higher reaches of authority. The Soviet Politburo, the supreme council of the state, approved the agenda of the North Korean rubber-stamping parliament and even formally “gave permission” to stage a military parade in February 1948, when the establishment of a North Korean army was formally announced. 5
    My favorite story in this regard occurred in December 1946, when the first elections in the North were being prepared. On December 15 Colonel General Terentii Shtykov, then responsible for the political operations in Korea, discussed the future composition of the North Korean proto-parliament with two other Soviet generals. The Soviet generals (not a single Korean was present) decided that the Assembly would consist of 231 members. They also decided the exact distribution of seats among the parties, the number of women members, and, more broadly, the precise social composition of the legislature. If we have a look at the actual composition of the Assembly, we can see that these instructions were followed with only minor deviations. 6
    Guided and assisted by the Soviet advisers, between 1946 and 1950 North Korea quickly went through a chain of reforms that were standard for nascent Communist regimes of the era. In the spring of 1946 radical land reform led to the redistribution of land among peasants, while also sending a majority of former landlords fleeing South. Around the same time, all industries were nationalized, even though small independent handicraftsmen would still be tolerated until the late 1950s. In politics the local incarnation of the Leninist Party, known as the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP), began to exercise increasingly thorough control over society.
    In spite of the Christian family background of Kim Il Sung and many other Communist leaders, Christians were persecuted with great ferocity. Like landlords, many former entrepreneurs and Christian activists chose to flee South across the badly guarded demarcation line. Nobody bothered to collect exact statistics, but the number of North Koreans who had fledSouth between 1945 and 1951 was approximately 1.2 to 1.5 million, or some 10–15 percent of the entire North Korean population. Among other things, this exodus meant that the potential opposition exiled itself, inadvertently making the emerging regime more homogenous.
    At first glance the North Korean state of the late 1940s appears to be a nearly perfect specimen of what the cold warriors once described as a “Soviet satellite regime.” But such a view, while not unfounded, is incomplete: North Korea might have been a puppet state, but this does not necessarily mean that the new regime was unpopular and lacked support from below.
    In the late 1980s the Marxist and semi-Marxist Left reemerged in South Korea as a political and intellectual force, and soon afterward the nature of the early North Korean regime became a topic of hot (and largely ideology-driven) debate in Seoul intellectual and academic circles. The left-leaning historians and journalists usually present the events of 1945–1950 as a home grown popular revolution that might have been triggered and assisted by the Soviet presence, but generally developed spontaneously and independently. It is not surprising that South Korean leftist historians have demonstrated a remarkable ability to ignore newly published documentary evidence if it shows the true extent of Soviet control and hence undermines their cherished fantasies.
    At the same time, the South Korean Right remains strangely obsessed with the desire to prove that Syngman Rhee’s regime in South Korea was the “sole legitimate government of the entire Korean peninsula.” Therefore, the right-leaning historians seem to be unwilling to pay attention to ample evidence for the genuine popularity enjoyed by Kim Il Sung’s government in its early days. 7
    This argument,