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Date 1948-09-09

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Partition and Founding (1945–1948)

Category: History
Key figures: Kim Il-sung, Pak Hon-yong, Cho Man-sik, Terenti Shtykov, Dean Rusk, Charles Bonesteel

Summary

The partition of Korea at the 38th parallel and the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in September 1948 emerged from the collapse of Japanese colonial rule in August 1945 and the subsequent division of the peninsula into Soviet and American occupation zones. When Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, Korea was liberated from 35 years of colonial rule but was immediately divided by Cold War competition. Soviet forces occupied the northern zone above the 38th parallel; American forces occupied the south. The 38th parallel, selected in August 1945 by American planners, became the de facto border between two emergent states that would never be reunified and whose division would produce the Korean War (1950–1953) and lasting Cold War tensions.

The 38th Parallel Decision

On the night of August 10–11, 1945, in the hours after Japan announced its intention to surrender, two American colonels—Dean Rusk (later Secretary of State) and Charles Bonesteel—were given the task of proposing a dividing line to delineate American and Soviet occupation zones in Korea. Working with a National Geographic map, they proposed the 38th parallel as a convenient line that would keep Seoul (Korea’s capital and largest city) in the American zone while giving the Soviets occupation of the industrial north. The line was not based on Korean geography, ethnic divisions, or administrative boundaries; it was a military convenience.

Soviet forces, which had entered Korea on August 8, 1945, after declaring war against Japan, were already advancing rapidly down the peninsula and could have occupied the entire country before American troops arrived. The Soviet leadership accepted the 38th parallel proposal without demanding modifications—a decision historians attribute to Stalin’s desire to maintain a stable post-war relationship with the United States and avoid direct confrontation in Korea while consolidating Soviet gains elsewhere in East Asia. Soviet troops reached Pyongyang on August 24, 1945; American troops did not land in Korea until September 8, 1945.

Soviet Occupation (1945–1948)

Soviet occupation authorities under General Ivan Chistiakov and later Ambassador Terenti Shtykov moved quickly to reshape the northern zone politically. Within weeks, Soviet authorities were reviewing Korean communist and nationalist leaders, seeking a pliant local figure who could lead a Soviet-aligned government. They settled on Kim Il-sung (born Kim Song-ju in 1912 in Pyongyang), who had served in the Soviet Red Army’s 88th Special Reconnaissance Brigade in Khabarovsk after fleeing Manchuria in 1940. Kim had been a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese in Manchuria through the 1930s, operating with the Chinese Communist Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army.

Kim was returned to Korea by Soviet authorities in September 1945, reportedly arriving at Wonsan aboard a Soviet ship. His first major public appearance was at a mass rally in Pyongyang on October 14, 1945, where he was introduced by Soviet military commanders. Initial Korean public reception was skeptical—Kim was only 33 years old and relatively unknown compared to veteran politicians—but Soviet backing gave him decisive advantages in the competition for power.

Soviet authorities simultaneously encouraged the formation of People’s Committees throughout the northern zone, grassroots bodies that gave local governance a revolutionary legitimacy while remaining under party supervision. These committees, originally spontaneous formations that arose across all of Korea in the days after liberation, were systematically coopted and reorganized in the north under party direction. By late 1945, a parallel administrative structure was emerging in the northern zone, distinct from whatever arrangements the Americans were making in the south.

Elimination of Rivals

Kim Il-sung consolidated power by eliminating rivals who had different visions for post-liberation Korea. Three categories of rivals were particularly significant:

Traditional Korean communists: Pak Hon-yong led the Korean Communist Party, which had operated underground under Japanese rule, primarily in the southern zone. He moved to the north in 1946 and initially was a senior figure in the new state’s leadership. Kim regarded Pak as a potential rival with a stronger claim to Korean communist legitimacy. Pak served as Foreign Minister of the DPRK from 1948 and was a key figure in the decision to launch the Korean War in 1950. After the war ended in stalemate rather than victory, Kim blamed the failure on Pak, accusing him of being an American spy and a saboteur. Pak was arrested in 1953, tried and sentenced to death in December 1955, and executed in 1956. His elimination removed the last significant alternative communist faction from the DPRK’s political structure.

Christian nationalists and conservatives: Cho Man-sik was a prominent Christian nationalist, educator, and politician who had led passive resistance against Japanese rule and was widely respected in the north. He opposed Soviet-backed trusteeship of Korea and refused to endorse the Moscow Agreement of December 1945, which proposed a five-year international trusteeship before Korean independence. His opposition to trusteeship—which was also the dominant South Korean nationalist position—made him incompatible with Soviet plans. Cho was placed under house arrest in January 1946 and disappeared into the prison system. He is believed to have died in a North Korean prison either during the Korean War or shortly after.

Yan’an (Chinese) communists: A faction of Korean communists who had spent the war years in Yan’an with the Chinese Communist Party, including Mu Chong and Kim Tu-bong, returned to Korea in 1945 with their own organizational base and Chinese Communist connections. Kim Il-sung worked to undercut this faction throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. After the Korean War and the 1956 “August Faction Incident”—in which Yan’an-aligned and Soviet-Korean officials attempted to criticize Kim’s leadership at the August 1956 plenum of the Workers’ Party Central Committee—the remaining Yan’an faction members were purged, executed, or fled to China.

Building the DPRK State

The political machinery of the new state was assembled rapidly between 1946 and 1948. A communist party organization was established in the north in October 1945 — the North Korea Bureau of the Korean Communist Party, the date the DPRK today marks as the founding of what would become the Workers’ Party of Korea — providing the organizational backbone for the new government. A Soviet-style constitution was drafted with direct Soviet assistance, modeling the new state on the USSR’s own constitutional structure.

Key institutional developments included:

  • February 1946: The North Korean Provisional People’s Committee is established with Kim Il-sung as chairman, providing a proto-governmental structure before formal statehood
  • March 1946: Land reform is announced, confiscating landholdings from Japanese colonizers, landlords, and “traitors” and redistributing land to peasant farmers—a popular move that won rural support and eliminated the economic base of the traditional Korean landed class
  • June 1946: Major industries, banks, and transportation networks are nationalized
  • August 1946: The North Korean Workers’ Party is formally constituted from the merger of the Korean Communist Party and the New People’s Party (Yan’an faction)
  • November 1946: Elections to people’s committees at provincial, city, and county levels are conducted under KWP supervision with Soviet-style single-slate voting and reported 99.6 percent turnout
  • February 1947: The North Korean People’s Assembly (a precursor to the Supreme People’s Assembly) is formally constituted
  • September 9, 1948: The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is formally proclaimed, with Kim Il-sung as Premier

The Dual-State Creation and International Recognition

The founding of the DPRK and the earlier founding of the Republic of Korea (ROK) on August 15, 1948, created a de jure two-state partition that formalized what had been a de facto division since September 1945. The United States had supported UN-supervised elections across the entire peninsula, which the Soviet Union refused to permit in the north; elections were held only in the south in May 1948, producing the ROK government under Syngman Rhee. The DPRK’s September proclamation then mirrored this with its own “elections” and government formation.

The Soviet Union recognized the DPRK on October 12, 1948; China (still the Nationalist Republic of China at that point) did not recognize it, but the People’s Republic of China, proclaimed on October 1, 1949, recognized the DPRK and became its most important diplomatic backer. By 1950, the DPRK had been recognized by all Soviet-bloc states and several non-aligned countries. The United States, United Kingdom, France, and most Western states recognized only the ROK as the legitimate government of Korea.

Soviet withdrawal of occupation forces was completed by December 1948. A substantial Soviet military and civilian advisory mission remained embedded in North Korean institutions, providing technical, organizational, and intelligence support. Soviet advisors were present in North Korean military units at the division and corps level when the Korean War began in June 1950.

Economic and Industrial Inheritance

A structural imbalance characterized the two Korean states from their founding. Japanese colonial industrial development had concentrated heavy industry in the north: coal mines in the Hamgyong and Pyongan provinces, the Suiho hydroelectric dam on the Yalu River (one of the world’s largest hydroelectric facilities at completion in 1943, shared with Manchuria), the Hungnam nitrogen-fertilizer complex (a massive Soviet-designed chemical plant), steel production at Chongjin, and copper and zinc smelting facilities. The south, by contrast, had more agricultural land, lighter manufacturing, and a larger commercial economy.

This inheritance gave the DPRK significant industrial advantages in the early postwar years. Soviet economic aid, military equipment transfers, and technical assistance reinforced these advantages. By the mid-1950s, the DPRK’s GDP per capita and industrial output were estimated to exceed the ROK’s, a reversal that would not occur until the ROK’s export-led growth strategy gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s. The north’s industrial concentration would later become a liability as heavy industries aged, spare parts became difficult to obtain, and the energy infrastructure built for Japanese imperial purposes decayed without adequate reinvestment.

Significance

The partition of Korea and the founding of the DPRK in 1948 set the trajectory for the entire subsequent history of North Korea. The arbitrary division at the 38th parallel created two states with opposite political systems and foreign alignments, directly leading to the Korean War (1950–1953) and the permanent militarization of the peninsula. The installation of Kim Il-sung as Soviet-backed leader established the dynasty that continues to rule three generations later; his credentials as an anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter provided the founding myth that juche ideology and personality-cult propaganda have elaborated ever since.

The partition also inherited a structural economic imbalance: the industrial north had factories and mines but limited agricultural land; the agrarian south had more arable territory but less heavy industry. This economic geography, combined with Soviet aid flows and later ruptures (particularly after the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991), would shape the DPRK’s development, its chronic food crises, and its strategic dependence on foreign benefactors.

The founding also locked in the Soviet institutional model—the one-party communist state, centrally planned economy, and security-apparatus dominance—that persists in the DPRK even after the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991. North Korea is today among the last surviving exemplars of a Stalinist-model state, long after the model was abandoned in its country of origin.

Perhaps most significantly, the 1945 partition and 1948 founding of two separate Korean states transformed what had been a colonial administration into a Cold War fault line and created the conditions for the ideological and military antagonism between North and South that has persisted for over 75 years. The DPRK’s identity as a revolutionary state fundamentally opposed to South Korea, and its mission to “liberate” and “reunify” the peninsula under communism, became cornerstones of regime ideology and foreign policy throughout the Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il eras. Only in 2023, under Kim Jong-un, did the regime formally revise this founding mission, amending the constitution to acknowledge North and South Korea as two separate and distinct states—a constitutional recognition that the unification mission inherited from 1948 was effectively abandoned.