Against the claims of nationalist historians that the Soviets guaranteed the autonomy of the People’s Committees in the North, Kim shows clearly that the occupiers saw them as more of a safety valve and a means through which they could exercise their control more effectively.19 Once an overarching administrative bureau was formed to coordinate the People’s Committees in November 1945, the Soviets made sure that it followed orders from the Soviet civil administration or army headquarters, and all its proclamations had to be approved by them.
(...) But as Kim Ha-yong points out, there was never a workers’ revolution in North Korea, and in the late 1940s Kim Il-sung himself did not talk much about socialism, but rather the ‘people’s democratic revolution’, a theory that Lankov describes as ‘specially designed for Soviet-controlled territories’.25 The basic idea of ‘people’s democracy’ was that the countries liberated by the Soviets after the Second World War would move gradually to socialism via ‘people’s democratic’ reforms, without the need for a revolution like that experienced by Russia in 1917. But according to Kim Ha-yong, ‘People’s democracy was not the path of non-revolutionary transition from capitalism to socialism, but nothing more than the establishment from above of capitalism (a national economy)’...
(...) One of the main elements of the people’s democracy reforms was
the North’s land reform, much praised on the South Korean left. The reform took place in the space of only 20 days during spring 1946, and consisted of land confiscation without compensation and free land distribution to the former tenant farmers... Supplying the cities with food required huge state intervention in agriculture, and the peasants were forced to give the government around 25 percent of their yield as a tax in kind that appeared little different to the portion of their crop they had given up to the landlords under the old sharecropping system or the exactions of rice by the Japanese colonial administration.
(...) The nationalisation of industry and the commencement of a series of one-year plans in the late 1940s are one of the main developments that have led historians and commentators, whether hostile or friendly to the regime, to call North Korea socialist from this time on. In opposition to this view, Kim Ha-yong puts North Korea’s state ownership of industry into the context of the worldwide trend towards state capitalism...
(...) [state capitalism] First, there was the complete separation of North Korean workers from ownership or control over the means of production... The second aspect was the relentless drive for capital accumulation under the newly nationalised and planned economy of North Korea in the late 1940s. What this meant was a massive concentration of production into producing further means of production rather than consumer goods.