When Japan surrendered in the Second World War, Korea – which Japan had occupied since 1910 – became a divided state. From 1945, the US occupied the South and the Soviet Union the North; in 1948 they formed separate governments (until the Korean War broke out in 1950). In this despatch from January that year, Anna Louise Strong tours North Korea under Soviet occupation and speaks to its citizens – among whom political alliance was not so easily divided (“No North Korean would admit that the Russians governed him in any sense at all,” she writes). The Soviets were not the only political presence in the North. When Japan surrendered, most of those sympathetic to the Japanese migrated south, to the American zone, and a left-wing consensus emerged. Koreans formed their own Communist Party and a humanist party called Chendoguo was revived. When the first president, Kim Il-sung, took power, it was with a government which “put through revolutionary measures with breathtaking speed”.
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