The Koreans, the USSR, and the United States

Abstract

As extensively discussed in part I, Stalin’s overriding policy objective concerning Korea after Japan’s defeat in World War II was that Korea would never be used by Japan or any other power as a platform for an attack on the Soviet Union. What this meant in concrete policy terms was that any Korean regime to be set up would need to be, at a minimum, not hostile to the USSR. As we now know, Stalin’s Korea policy ended up with the creation of a separate communist North Korean state in 1948 that was finely allied to the USSR. However, this actual outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion in fall 1945 as the Soviet 25th Army rolled into northern Korea and established its headquarters in Pyongyang. Although the USSR had been preparing a group of Korean partisans led by Kim Il Sung in the area near Khabarovsk in Siberia since the early 1940s as the possible nucleus of leadership for a future independent Korea, when the Red Army arrived in August 1945, it was by no means clear Kim would be able to achieve a dominant position in the new political order to be created, whatever form this was to take.