Ryŏ Ho-jun
Ryŏ Ho-jun | |
|---|---|
 Ryŏ Ho-jun in 1986 | |
| 8th General-Secretary of the Menghe People's Communist Party | |
| In office 24 June 1980 – 22 December 1987 | |
| Preceded by | Sim Jin-hwan |
| Succeeded by | Position abolished |
| Full-time Politburo member | |
| In office 3 November 1971 – 24 June 1980 | |
| First Secretary of the Communist Party in Gilim Province | |
| In office 14 April 1964 – 3 November 1971 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 200px 23 October 1920 Sŏsŏk-ri, Gilim Province, Menghe |
| Died | 14 August 1988 |
| Resting place | 200px |
| Political party | Menghe People's Communist Party |
| Spouse(s) | Kim Jin-a (1941-1950) Go Jae-gyŏng (1964-1971) Paeng Bo-yŏng (1971-) |
| Children | Ryŏ Sang (b. 1942), Ryŏ Gyŏng-hŭi (b. 1954), Ryŏ Sŏng-nam (b. 1957) |
| Parent |
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| Occupation | Farmer, revolutionary, statesman |
| Ethnicity | Meng |
Ryŏ Ho-jun (Menghean Gomun: 呂鎬浚, Menghean Sinmun: 려호준, Heikkinen-Järvinen transliteration: Ryeo Ho-choon; 23 October 1920 - 14 August 1988) was the eighth General-Secretary of the Menghe People's Communist Party. He ruled the Democratic People's Republic of Menghe from June of 1980 to December of 1987, and is identified as its third major leader, following Sun Tae-jun and Sim Jin-hwan.
Born into a poor peasant family, Ryŏ was a staunch populist throughout his political lifetime. He was a hardline communist, even by the standards of the MPCP, and argued for radical changes within the DPRM's government and economy. He was also a firm advocate of the atheist Marxian school, long suppressed in the FSR, and believed that Menghe's traditional values reflected the oppressive superstructure of the old feudal order, and therefore represented an obstacle to the full liberation of Menghean workers and farmers.
Although he was only in power for a little over seven years, Ryŏ Ho-jun had a profound influence on the DPRM's trajectory. His economic reforms, which attempted to force a shift from centralized heavy industry to dispersed production in communes, led to pressing shortages and a severe famine, which he failed to correct. He also launched major attacks on Menghe's traditional culture, initiated a chaotic purge of moderate officials, accelerated Menghe's nuclear weapons program, and attempted to roll back the Sangwŏn Agreement, which had protected the military from Communist ideological interference. These disastrous policies motivated a cell of military officers to carry out the Decembrist Revolution, which led to Ryŏ's trial and execution in 1988.
Early life
Ryŏ Ho-jun was born in 1920, the fifth of seven children in a poor peasant family in northeastern Gilim Province. Three of his siblings died before the age of five, one of them before he had been born, and his mother succumbed to cholera when he was only eight years old. His father, an alcoholic, beat him regularly, and his immediate relatives elsewhere in the village refused to take him in, citing their own dire poverty.
Growing up with the frigid weather and poor soil of Menghe's northeast, Ryŏ gained a particular respect for hardiness and strength, and an attitude which he called "shouldering hardship." In between sessions of farming work, he trained with a martial-arts society in the neighboring village so that he could defend himself and his siblings against an abusive father. Surviving oral accounts describe him as a bully, who often took out his anger on the sons of rich peasant families, and in at the age of sixteen he was briefly arrested for taking part in a rural gambling ring.
Revolutionary career
In Songrimsŏng
In 1938, fleeing poverty and by some accounts an arrest warrant, Ryŏ Ho-jun traveled to the provincial capital of Songrimsŏng to seek work in the No. 3 Munitions Factory. As an employee in the arms sector, he escaped conscription, and unlike most other boys of his generation he did not serve in the Imperial Menghean Army or Navy. Instead, he came of age as a member of the Proletariat in Menghe's still-industrializing economy, at a time when government and factory leaders were rushing to maximize arms production.
Resentful over the long hours and disciplinary conditions of factory work, Ryŏ was drawn into a communist resistance cell among his co-workers. Despite a tightening right-wing inclination among the leadership, Marxist activity was relatively widespread in the Greater Menghean Empire, especially in the northeastern provinces where cross-border contact with Polvokian communists was relatively easy to arrange. In 1940, Ryŏ formally took his oath as a member of the nascent Menghean Workers' Party, and began attending weekly meetings to read Marxist scholarship and discuss social problems.
While living in Songrimsŏng, Ryŏ Ho-jun met Kim Jin-a, who was employed in a neighboring factory's textiles division and had also joined the city's communist reading cell. After the latter became pregnant late in 1941, Ryŏ pressured her to withdraw from the cell, which forbade romantic relationships between members in order to avoid defections if a member was kidnapped or interrogated. A hastily organized wedding took place in November, and Kim gave birth to their only child, Ryŏ Sang, in February 1942.
Revolutionary career
After the end of the Pan-Septentrion War, the Songrimsŏng No. 3 Munitions Factory was shut down, and Ryŏ drifted between industrial jobs. In the context of a cold war against Polvokia and the FSR, the Tyrannian occupation force in Menghe's northeast imposed an even stricter crackdown on communist agitation, and the local Party cell suffered severe attrition.
Frustrated by their difficult situation, Ryŏ Ho-jun began drinking heavily in this period, and took out his anger on his wife and son. Concerned about the danger of arrest and torture, Kim Jin-a begged her husband to give up on Communist agitation, which an increasingly unstable Ryŏ took as a sign of cowardice and defeatism. After a particularly violent argument in August 1950, Kim left with Ryŏ Sang and took shelter with relatives in Wŏlsŏng County.
Kim's departure came as a sharp warning to Ryŏ Ho-jun, who decided to bring his life back under control. After re-establishing contact with the local branch of the now-renamed Menghe People's Communist Party, he applied his skills as an arms manufacturer to organize an illicit explosives workshop in the basement of his new home, which supported a renewed campaign of bombing attacks against government buildings and passing Tyrannian convoys. As the Menghean War of Liberation progressed, Ryŏ Ho-jun assumed control over a large arms-dealing circle which smuggled Polvokian rifles and, later, heavy weapons across the Baek River.
After independence
By the time the Menghe War of Liberation ended in April 1964, the 44-year-old Ryŏ Ho-jun had established himself as the Party's leading arms dealer in the Northeastern region. As a reward for his wartime efforts and ideological rigor, he was assigned an official post as First Secretary of the Party in Gilim Province. According to one account, ruling General-Secretary Sun Tae-jun "expressed some doubts about Ryŏ's moral character, but considered him a valuable ally, essential for holding together Party control in the Northeast."
Involvement in the Jang Su-sŏk affair
In 1968, the central government claimed to have broken up a "Northeastern Clique" under the leadership of Jang Su-sŏk, the First Secretary of Sinbukgang Province. The localized purge, fully declassified in 1989, was based on allegations that Jang Su-sŏk and his close allies were planning to wrest control of the government from the ailing Sun Tae-jun, in a plot that reached deep into the Northeastern security forces and the Donggyŏng secret police.
As the First Secretary of neighboring Gilim Province, with influence across the Northeastern region, Ryŏ Ho-jun was initially suspected of playing a role in the nebulous plot. Jang had been a close friend of Ryŏ during the resistance period, and was a key middleman in the flow of arms from Polvokia into Menghe. Sim Jin-hwan, the First Secretary of Donghae Province and a key actor in uncovering the plot, pushed for a personal investigation of Ryŏ Ho-jun, arguing that the Northeastern conspiracy could not possibly have grown so advanced without the latter's tacit knowledge.
In the end, Ryŏ was spared arrest, but he did face a transfer to Gangwŏn Province, which weakened his political connections and removed him from the likely chain of succession. He held on to a seat in the Politburo, but was not part of the Standing Committee, and remained a target of suspicion after Sim Jin-hwan became General-Secretary in 1972.
Return to prominence
Despite having to work in a new region, Ryŏ Ho-jun maintained his connections with old allies in the Northeast, and forged new partnerships in the center and south of the country. Still resentful over Sim's effort to remove him from power, he became increasingly critical of the General-Secretary's moderate policies, which included an indefinite suspension of collectivization, a focus on heavy industry development, and an effort to improve relations with the FST.
On top of his personal rivalry, Ryŏ came to regard Sim as a potential revisionist, and accused him of being insufficiently loyal to Marxist principles. By playing to other Sim opponents in the MPCP, he gained a steadily increasing support base, forging a hardliner faction that transcended regional or provincial boundaries.
During within-party elections in the summer of 1979, the Party Congress voted Ryŏ onto the Standing Committee, despite tense opposition from Sim Jin-hwan. Once the new Politburo began its regular meetings, the Ryŏ-Sim rivalry soon boiled over into the open, nearly bringing domestic policymaking to a halt. Unable to put up with Ryŏ's opposition, but recognizing that his faction held a majority in the Central Committee, in January 1980 Sim reportedly contacted the Army leadership about the possibility of an armed effort to remove his rivals from power. While Marshal Baek refused, fearing that it would destabilize the country, news of the plan eventually leaked to Ryŏ's faction.
Eager to make the most of this opportunity, Ryŏ Ho-jun accused Sim Jin-hwan of treason, initiating a Party investigation which stripped him of his post. In the show trials which followed, Sim was sentenced to death, and many of his closest allies were placed under house arrest. On June 24th, Ryŏ was formally sworn in as the new General-Secretary of the Menghe People's Communist Party.
As General-Secretary
Economic retrenchment
One of Ryŏ Ho-jun's first acts as General-Secretary was to order a major decentralization of Menghe's economic planning. As a hardline Communist, Ryŏ believed that Sim's centralized economic management was tantamount to state capitalism, in that it focused on extracting surplus production from the working masses. He also thought that decentralized economic production would be more survivable against coastal invasion, strategic bombing, or nuclear attack.
To implement this change, thousands of state-owned enterprises from the central government were transferred to provincial, county, and town control, which in some cases literally involved breaking up large combined facilities into smaller sets of equipment which could be relocated into rural areas. In theory, the new facilities would be run collectively by workers, but in practice they were handed out as patronage to local officials who had supported Ryŏ Ho-jun's takeover or who were willing to pledge their support.
Ryŏ also decimated the Ministry of Economic Planning, which had been a major power base for Sim Jin-hwan's faction, purging hundreds of employees and appointing few replacements. While in 1979 over 1,500 commodities were subject to centralized pricing, in 1985 only 582 appeared on central schedules; no records exist for 1986 and 1987. Instead, he encouraged "collective funding and collective planning," mobilizing villages to set up backyard furnaces and provide their own funds for expanded production.
In the fall of 1980, Ryŏ Ho-jun also ordered that Menghe's remaining individual household plots be amalgamated into communal farms, completing the collectivization project which had started under Sun Tae-jun. This time, Ryŏ ordered local Party cells to use force where necessary, with the goal of completing full collectivization by 1983.
The initial effect of Ryŏ's economic reforms was a sharp recession, though given the paucity of reliable data it is difficult to tell how sharp it actually was. Heightened uncertainty, new complications in planning, and embezzlement by local Party officials caused measurable production indicators to drop in 1981 and 1982, and the decentralized structure proved to be a poor match for heavy industry, generating a shrinking amount of lower-quality steel. Ryŏ Ho-jun himself dismissed the problems as temporary, reassuring the population that "it is better to eat Communist sorghum than to eat Capitalist rice" - a quote which would soon be used against him during the famine of the mid-1980s.
Political upheaval
In the wake of declining agricultural and economic output, the establishment faction in the MPCP began to criticize Ryŏ Ho-jun's hardline approach, with the Economic Planning Board suggesting in the fall of 1981 that he should withdraw from economic management to focus on other domains. Fearful that Sim's faction was preparing to overthrow him, Ryŏ decided to outflank them with one of the Party agencies already loyal to his hardline faction: the Red Pioneers of the Revolution, a precursor to today's Youth Vanguard.
In an April 1982 speech organized to commemorate the coming of age of the first generation born after Liberation, Ryŏ called upon the Red Pioneers to "complete the Menghean Communist revolution" through a bottom-up attack on the vestiges of the old society. Under the slogan of "denounce the revisionists, liquidate the traditionalists" (sujŏngjuŭi-ŭl gongbaghae, jŏntongjuŭi-ŭl malsalhae), he endorsed a two-pronged attack on the nihilist-productionist and national-traditionalist factions in the Party, and among the general public. Other state and party organs held by the hardliner faction fell in behind the new cause, and all agencies were required to hold lengthy "criticism meetings" in which members picked out and denounced any member who appeared guilty of incorrect thinking.
Within the Menghe Socialist Party, this new policy led to a period of political terror in which not only productionists, but also moderates and anyone on poor personal terms with a hardliner came under relentless attack. Those lucky enough to resign early on were usually confined to house arrest and public surveillance; by the mid-1980s, public executions and arbitrary prison sentences were widespread. In violation of the Sangwŏn Agreement, in 1985 Ryŏ extended the political campaign into the upper ranks of the military, removing a number of officers who had served in the Imperial Menghean Army.
Among the general public, the impact of the "liquidate the traditionalists" campaign was especially chaotic. Moving beyond Greater Menghean Empire sympathizers and Communist skeptics, Red Pioneers in rural areas escalated to an all-out campaign to demolish old Sindo and Chŏndo temples. While there is some debate as to whether Ryŏ had directly ordered this move, he soon endorsed it as a way to purge Menghe of its "old habits and old thinking."
Nuclear armament
While Menghe's nuclear program originated under Sim Jin-hwan, Ryŏ brought it into the view of the international community by ordering a nuclear test on November 4th, 1984. Unlike Sim, who hoped to maintain an aura of doubt and plausible deniability around the project, Ryŏ saw it as a way to consolidate his power and win international respect by demonstrating Menghe's military strength.
In the latter respect, the test soon backfired. Invoking the terms of the Septentrion Treaty Against The Proliferation of Nuclear Armaments, the international community imposed a strict embargo on Menghe, which had signed the treaty in 1965. Ryŏ had gambled on support from the Federation of Socialist Republics, but the latter's General-Secretary endorsed the embargo vote, hoping to rein in Menghe's increasingly unpredictable behavior.
Mishandling of the 1985 famine
The impact of the arms-related embargo became more severe in 1985, after a particularly severe El Niño cycle led to a prolonged drought that would last until early 1988. Menghe's agricultural sector, already struggling under the inefficient collectivization reforms and the Red Pioneers' interference in farming, experienced a failed harvest, with the lowest yield since record-keeping resumed in 1964. The nuclear-related embargo also prevented Menghe from receiving food aid and regular imports, intensifying the impact of the shortage.
To his credit, Ryŏ Ho-jun promptly attempted to organize a domestic famine relief fund, but chaos in record-keeping and corruption among village party agencies meant that only 30% of the fund was used to distribute food from the east coast, where rainfall was more consistent, to the south. Ryŏ also refused to dismantle the country's nuclear program in exchange for aid, instead insisting that Menghe pursue a path of self-reliance. In 1986, apparently believing the exaggerated yield figures produced by Red Pioneer committees in some villages, the Chairman proclaimed the famine to be over, terminating the food aid program while raising the quota for shipments to the cities.
The latter decision set off a peasant insurrection in the south, where the impact of the famine had been strongest. Fearful that rural unrest could spread to other provinces and aware that there was no food aid left, Ryŏ ordered an immediate armed crackdown. This move provoked waves of resignations among high-ranking military officers, and was decisive in mobilizing the coup conspiracy that would later turn into the Decembrist Revolution.
From 1984 onward, as the threat of war with Dayashina increased, Ryŏ also initiated a disastrous campaign to "bolster the eastern zone from invasion." Conscripted work teams were dispatched to tear up paved roads and demolish bridges across the provinces of Donghae, Chŏnghae, and Ryŏngsan, so that any invading force which relied on heavy armored vehicles would become bogged down in mud while the infantry-based Menghean People's Army and its local guerilla arm moved around with impunity. In response to complaints from local villagers that these changes would hurt transportation, Ryŏ insisted that all communes would "learn self-sufficiency and endurance," producing and consuming their own goods. Serious food shortages broke out in major east-coast cities as shipments from the countryside were delayed, and millions of workers moved back to their hometowns in response, though shortages in the east never reached the level of severity that prevailed in the southern regions.
Final years
By his final year in power, confronted with multiple crises, Ryŏ Ho-jun became increasingly paranoid unstable. If in 1986 he believed that no famine was still happening, in 1987 he accused Tyrannian spies of smuggling the entire harvest out of the country. Surviving aides, including former allies, testified that his hands trembled uncontrollably and he self-medicated with narcotics.
After the Decembrist Revolution, the Interim Council for National Restoration placed Ryŏ under arrest, in preparation for a show trial which would help expose his guilt and win more support for the coup participants. The start of the trial was delayed for several years, by some accounts due to Ryŏ's failing health, and in court he appeared disoriented and confused, even as the verdict was read. Some anonymous accounts, denied by the Menghean government, claim that Ryŏ was drugged or sedated before all court sessions. His death sentence was carried out on August 14th, 1988; while capital punishment in Menghe generally involves a firing squad or, later, lethal injection, Ryŏ was executed via long drop hanging, on a scaffold built specifically for the occasion.
Legacy
Today, assessments of Ryŏ Ho-jun are overwhelmingly negative, both within Menghe and internationally. The Menghe Socialist Party portrays him as a reckless and unstable ideologue who betrayed the country's traditions and ushered in a famine that took tens of millions of lives, making the Decembrist Revolution a moral necessity. In Dayashina and Themiclesia, as well as the Organized States of Columbia, he is better known for his threats of nuclear war, which were particularly terrifying given Menghe's domestic instability.
In his recent book, the renowned historian Carl Teller presented a more nuanced view of the chairman's legacy, generating more controversy over the man's broader role:
While contemporary observers are right to criticize his erratic and radical leadership, Ryŏ Ho-jun was absolutely instrumental in clearing the ground atop which the post-1987 order would stand. The famine of 1985-1987 directly brought the coup conspirators to power, and decollectivization allowed them to immediately win rural support. The Pioneers' Revolution led to a general nausea about radical Communism, providing support for a right-wing turn, and in some circles led to a fear of chaos and activism, making it more attractive to quietly comply with the new regime's vision of social harmony. Perhaps most importantly, the disastrous decentralization of the economy tore down the increasingly ossified planning sector, allowing subsequent market reforms that never would have been possible in Sim's centralized economy. In an ironic twist of history, Ryŏ's relentless attack on the three things he hated most - pragmatism, productionism, and traditionalism - was profoundly important, perhaps even necessary, in bringing a pragmatic, productionist, traditionalist regime to power.
— Carl Teller, Rebuilding the Fatherland: The Origins and Foundations of Menghe's Developmental State, 2016