The philosophy lecturers were mostly people who had crossed over to the North Korean side during the Korean War. They had experience of teaching at Seoul National University and other universities in the South. Even though I was younger than they, they treated me as a teacher and tried to learn as much as possible. Ham Bong Seok, who among them had an exceptionally broad knowledge, mostly studied German classic philosophy. Since I still had a lot of doubts about Hegel’s dialectic, I merely conveyed Russian scholarly interpretations to my students.
However, Ham was still very touched by my efforts and tried to learn from me, so I handed over to him all the research materials on German classical philosophy that I had collected to study later when I had time. Sometime after that, he published a thick book entitled “German Classical Philosophy” using the materials I had given him. I never got a chance to read it, but the people around me gave it very positive reviews.
Not long after it was published, Ham came and offered an envelope of money to me, saying that he had done well out of the book.
I asked him, “Why are you giving this to me?”
“Without your help it wouldn’t have been possible to publish my book,” he replied. “Please accept it.”
I burst out laughing and, joking that he was a little bit mental, returned the money. His simplicity and innocence, however, had surprised me.
The university emphasized that program chairmen should attend lectures and oversee the professors’ curricula, but I did not follow those orders. It would have been no use to check and criticize the work of the professors without making them study as well, because teachers can only teach what they know. The professors, of course, wholeheartedly supported me.
Instead, I held a lot of seminars for the professors. The president and the Party chairman of the university had faith in me. As a result, I was elected Vice-Chairman of the University Party Committee representing the professors, and, thereafter, even the dean could not intervene in my work.
Before I went to Russia to study, North Korean philosophers’ understanding of Marxist philosophy was very limited. Their knowledge was derived from fragmented readings dating from the Japanese occupation. Even the level of the professors from Russia was no different. But since it was the first time any of the students had encountered philosophy, they just assumed that the professors had a vast knowledge of the course and listened to their lectures intently.
For example, before I left North Korea to study in Moscow, a Korean-Chinese philosopher based at Alma Ata University in Kazakhstan gave some lectures at Kim Il Sung University. The professors at our university thought he was a well-known professor. But later on, when I was studying at Moscow University as a researcher, a professor from Alma Ata University came to Moscow University as a researcher. He was a year behind me. I asked him about that well-known Korean-Chinese philosopher in Pyongyang, and he told me that the person had been his assistant.
Another time, there was a Korean-Russian high official who visited Moscow while I was studying there, and I decided to go and meet him. He was from the Central Party College. He gave us philosophy lectures and boasted about his status, but I found out that his Russian was really bad, let alone his philosophical understanding. I only found out the truth because I had studied in Russia. He knew almost nothing about the achievements of Marx and Engels. Early North Korean philosophers taught Marxist philosophy without even understanding it.
In 1954, a big public works project started in Pyongyang. Students and even professors had to go downtown and join in the construction activities. But Baeksong-ri, where the university was located, was far from the center of the city. Therefore, it provided a great environment for studying as the intervention and control of the Party were not that severe.
Therefore, at that time I wrote a small booklet entitled “Introduction to the History of the Development of Society” and a lot of other theses which earned me some money, almost as much as the salary I was receiving from the university. I wrote a few thousand pages a year, not including my writings for textbooks.
In the late 1955, the reconstruction of the main building on the Pyongyang campus was in progress, so we moved to Pyongyang. A year later I was allotted a fairly good house. After we moved, I brought my parents to live with us there. This gave our home some life.
My second daughter, Noh Seon, was born in May of that year, while my wife was in charge of taking care of the foreign students in the school.
However, while the university was moving to Pyongyang, the political situation grew very complicated. I had heard a rumor in 1953 when I was studying in Moscow that a faction led by Park Heon Young and Lee Seung Yop, the leaders of Workers’ Party of South Korea, was being purged. Even in Moscow there was a conference held for ideological examination. I assumed that what the Party was claiming was not true, but I tried not to intervene in politics because I knew that the communists were merciless to their enemies.
There was also an ideological conference held allegedly to clear up the harm left by the Park Heon Young-Lee Seung Yop faction in Baeksong-ri in 1954. Then, when the university moved to Pyongyang, it was held again. Usually in such conferences, every single party member had to go through a self-criticism in terms of his or her loyalty to the Party. Then they moved on to mutual criticism. After that, there was an especially concentrated criticism of those whose position had been called into question. Until 1955, the targets of the attacks were mostly Park Heon Young, Lee Seung Yop and other people in the Workers’ Party of South Korea.
So the situation for scholars who had crossed over to North Korea during the War became very difficult. By this time, North Korean scholars had started taking their revenge on those scholars. Scholars who had defected from South Korea were innocent and tended not to flatter, while those who had grown up in the North Korean education system considered themselves loyal subjects to the Party and tried to supplement their lack of knowledge with their political superiority. Naturally, the North Korean scholars had complete control of ideological examinations.
I tried to protect the South Korean scholars in my own way. However, those who had even the smallest connection to the Workers Party of South Korea, I could not save. Fortunately, teachers in the philosophy program, except one, passed through the crisis safely. The sacrificed teacher was dragged into the whole purge chaos because he was acquainted with people from Deokwon Monastery in Wonsan who were being accused of espionage. He was one of my favorites, because he had a comprehensive knowledge. He had a beautiful wife from North Pyongan and a child with her, but one day he was arrested by the secret police.
After his arrest, I found out that he was refusing to admit to his crime. But nobody, after getting arrested by the secret police, got released without charge. It’s been a long time, but I want to reveal his name so that he may get some credit. His name was Kim Jin Gu, a graduate of Seoul National University.
There was a secret police informant in my philosophy lectures. There were some in other lectures too, and they did not like it when I spoke highly of Kim Jin Gu. They also criticized me, telling other people that I was defending him just because he flattered me. It is true that I did not believe the things of which he was accused. It was not possible for someone so faithful to the truth to be a spy.
In February of 1956, the personality cult of Stalin was heavily criticized by Krushchev at the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Kim Il Sung used that chance to attack Russian factions. It wasn’t just factional relations he attacked, though. His target was all those intellectuals who agreed with the criticism of the cult of personality and espoused the ideology of a free democracy.
Although there is no difference now, North Korea’s cult of personality at the time was the severest among the Socialist countries. North Korea still harbored the vestiges of a feudal society, and Kim Il Sung, who was in power, was still young and had little experience of the communist struggle.
