The Apprentice: Pyongyang

The Chosun Ilbo reports that Kim Jong Il’s appearance at a surprise session of the Grand People’s Assembly was the latest chapter in the largest purge in North Korea for almost two decades:

Some 100 senior officials were ousted in the latest purge, including Pak Nam-gi, the director of the Workers Party’s Planning and Finance Department, who was executed by firing squad over the botched currency reform late last year. That was Kim’s fifth massive purge.

A South Korean security official said, “Kim Jong-il used to keep tight control over senior officials by taking advantage of their fear of purges, but there seems to have been some unusually strong opposition this time.”

In October 1992, Kim purged some 20 military officers who had studied in the Soviet Union for criticizing the regime and sacked 300 other such officers from active service, experts say.

In some cases, the personnel actions have taken on a more permanent character.
The Chosun Ilbo reports that Ri Je-Jang, 80, “has suddenly died in mysterious circumstances. Ri was the first deputy director of the Workers Party’s Organization and Guidance Department, and is said to have gotten onto the bad side of Jang Son-Thaek.

The deaths of elderly senior officials have been coming thick and fast of late. Kim Jung-rin (87), a party secretary, and Ri Jong-bu, an artillery commander, also died recently.

Jang, meanwhile, has just been promoted to Vice Chairman of the National Defense Committee, making him the second-most powerful man in North Korea, supplanting Kim Yong Nam, who has often been described as North Korea’s second-most powerful man. The reports do not suggest that Yong Nam was demoted, shot, or the victim of a freak accident with a pack of wild boars, so he might have been relegated to a sort of Biden-like status.

Other losers in the latest purge include anyone having responsibility for the economy and stroke-addled geriatric military officers.

What’s curious to me about this particular purge is that it doesn’t seem like an especially good time to throw one. Isn’t the best time to shoot some lackeys when you’re feeling secure in your place? It’s speculation of me to say this, but the disaster of the Great Confiscation suggests that this isn’t one of those times for Kim Jong Il.

Analysts say that the party purges are an attempt to appease growing popular discontent after the failed currency reform led to skyrocketing prices, while the replacement of top brass is a move to prepare for the succession. Dongguk University professor Kim Yong-hyun says, “To ease public dissatisfaction with the currency revaluation, North Korea needs to replace financial officials responsible and adopt a new policy.” Given that the priority that the North puts on the military, the military reshuffle may be aimed at laying the foundation for heir apparent Kim Jong-un to take power. A North Korean source says Kim Jong-un has a post in the Defense Commission and is exercising his influence over personnel changes in the military. [Chosun Ilbo]

I wonder if he’d be doing this now if he thought he had ten more years to live.

For all of their short-term rewards in institutional loyalty, purges also come with high costs in institutional competence. The most famous example of this is Stalin’s Great Purge of 1937, which sent many citizens to perish in the Lubyanka or in Siberia who were already perfectly terrified. Yet the Great Purge so thoroughly destroyed the Red Army’s officer corps (save one who was conveniently transferred to the Far East Front) that it couldn’t even beat Finland in 1940. The Red Army’s performance was so awful that Hitler moved up his invasion of the U.S.S.R. to 1941. And while I don’t believe anyone (with the possible exception of the Chinese) is really contemplating an invasion of North Korea, there could be a whole lot of jostling between competing factions and security forces about now.