Research Note
W H Y D I D S T A L I N A C C E P T T H E 38TH PARALLEL? C h o n g - S i k Lee The reason or reasons for Stalin's acceptance of the 38th parallel have long been intriguing. Although much has been said about the process of dividing Korea at that line, there has been little discussion about why Stalin accepted the U.S. proposal. The facts about the U.S. proposal for the 38th parallel are well known, or believed to be so. It was nearly midnight on August 10, 1945, the day that the Japanese indicated their willingness to surrender, that Colonel Charles Hartwell Bonesteel, 3rd, of the Strategic Policy Committee at the Pentagon, looked up the Far East map and decided to propose the 38th parallel as the surrender line for Japanese forces. General George A. Lincoln and Colonels Bonesteel and Dean Rusk had been drawing up the General Order Number l to define the areas of responsibility for the U.S., Soviet, and Chinese forces in preparation for Japanese surrender, and Colonel Bonesteel was charged with the task of drawing up the first paragraph of the document. They had received cables about the Soviet landing on the Korean peninsula the day before, and presumed that the Soviets would be moving southward. Where to draw the line to stop the Soviets became a question, and eventually the Bonesteel draft was adopted. A cable with the draft for the General Order was sent to Stalin on August 15, and to the amazement of Americans, Stalin wired back the next day consenting to the proposal.~ The telegram began by saying "Your message enclosing General Order Number 1 received. I have nothing against the substance of the order." He only had two "suggestions": (1) to include in the area to be surrendered by the Japanese armed forces to the Soviet troops all the Kurile Islands and (2) to include in the area to be surrendered by the Japanese armed forces to Soviet troops the northern half of the Islands of Hokkaido.2 Those at the Pentagon were amazed because Stalin could very well have waited a day or two and told Washington that the Soviet forces were well on their way to disarm all Japanese forces on the Korean peninsula and hence there was no need for Washington to be concerned about the Japanese there. Washington would have been disappointed, but would not have been Chong-Sik Lee is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. His recent publications include Revolutionary Struggle in Manchuria: Chinese Communism and Soviet Interest, 1922-1945 and Japan and Korea: The Political Dimension.
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surprised. As late as July 24, 1945, Chief of Staff George Marshall had told his Soviet counterpart, General A. I. Antonov, that the United States had not contemplated any offensive against Korea. 3 A number of hypotheses have been offered to explain Stalin's behavior. Stalin obviously considered Hokkaido important, because he emphasized it in his telegram of August 16. "This last point," indicating his Hokkaido request, he said, "is of special importance to Russian public opinion. As is known, in 1919-21 the Japanese occupied the whole of the Soviet Far East. Russian public opinion would be gravely offended if the Russian troops had no occupation area in any part of the territory of Japan properTM One could, therefore, argue that Stalin consented to the proposal for the 38th parallel because he hoped that Truman would be sympathetic to his concern with Russian public opinion and would let the Soviets occupy northern Hokkaido, which faces the La Perouse or the Soya Strait, one of the key channels for the Soviet Far East Fleet. Stalin had informed Truman through Harry Hopkins in May his desire to share in the actual occupation of Japan, ~ and indeed, this would have been one of the factors that influenced him. Another explanation scholars could offer was Stalin's desire not to antagonize U.S. leaders. The Soviet-U.S. relations had been frayed since the beginning of 1945 over Poland, Rumania, lend lease, the loan issue, and the German repatriation issue. 6 The Soviet handling of Poland had particulady aroused Truman's ire. Truman's reprimand of the Soviet Union was so blunt at his first encounter with Molotov, on April 23, 1945, that Molotov exclaimed, "'I have never been talked to like that in my life! ''7 Given Stalin's hopes of participating in the occupation of Japan, offending the United States at this point would have been counterproductive. Although both explanations are highly plausible, there is yet an additional explanation, that is, that Stalin was very much satisfied with the U.S. "offer" to divide Korea at the 38th parallel. The Pentagon presented the proposal to divide Korea with a negative perspective, that is, attempting to prevent the Soviet Union from occupying the entire Korean peninsula, but Stalin saw it as a recognition of legitimate Soviet interest in northern Korea. The battlefront condition in northern Korea in August 1945 supports this argument. It also is based on the conclusion of the Sino-Soviet treaty of August 14, 1945, the treaty that warrants close attention in assessing Stalin's postwar Far East policy. It should be recalled that Truman's telegram was the first concrete proposal presented by either the United States or the Soviet Union pertaining to Allied occupation of Korea. While Roosevelt and Stalin discussed the fate of Korea at Yalta and agreed on imposing trusteeship there, they had not agreed on the means of implementing trusteeship or on who would occupy what part of Korea. Stalin simply "beat the Americans to it" by
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sending a small contingent of Soviet forces (two infantry brigades, an armor brigade, and a few additional infantry battalions)8 to the northern tip of Korea on August 9, but now the United States was proposing to legitimize Soviet action p o s t f a c t u m . 9 Although the Pentagon presumed that the Soviet forces would be sweeping down the peninsula after the landing, they were stalled and pinned down by resolute Japanese troops holding their ground just south of the city of Ch'ongjin above the 41st parallel) ~ Stalin would have been more pleased if the United States had shown no interest in Korea, but given the U.S. desire to occupy the southern half, he would have thought it reasonable that the peninsula be divided equally. The U.S. proposal would have appeared to be fair, if not generous, to Stalin because the United States was "offering" the Soviet Union the territory its forces could not take by military means. More important, Stalin would have been satisfied, because north of the 38th parallel was more than adequate for his purpose in August 1945. What was important was that the Soviet forces occupied northern Korea; South Korea was of lesser significance to him. North Korea was of intrinsic value to the Soviet Union because of its geographic location. It is contiguous to the maritime Province of the Soviet Union; it has three important warm-water ports in the east coast, Ch'ongjin, Rajin, and Wonsan; it also has mineral resources and considerable industry built by Japan. But, most important from the postwar Soviet strategic perspective, North Korea is contiguous to Manchuria, and the west coast of Korea faces the Yellow Sea. A matter of grave significance was that the West Korea Bay at the northwestern tip of Korea is situated just east of the ports of Dairen and Port Arthur. There is no doubt that these ports were very much in Stalin's mind on the day Truman sent his telegram; just the day before, on August I4, 1945, Stalin had signed an agreement with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's representatives: a treaty granting various rights in these ports, as shall be noted presently. Stalin, as is well known, won Roosevelt's assent at Yalta (February 1945) on Soviet recovery of the old Russian prerogatives in Manchuriay and had been negotiating with T.V. Soong on the Sino-Soviet treaty since early July. Stalin would have been in a jubilant mood on August 15 not only because Japan had surrendered the day before but because of his success in recovering the prerogatives in Manchuria. His adroit manipulation of Roosevelt, who was eager for Soviet entry into the Far Eastern front, and his pressures on the Kuomintang government, which was eager to have the Soviet stamp of approval against the Chinese Communist party, enabled him to recover all the losses Russia had suffered in Manchuria since 1905. Now the United States was "offering" northern Korea as an added shield for Soviet fights.
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Stalin's joviality on August 15 can be easily surmised by a glance at the content of the Sino-Soviet treaty of August 1945 and its historical background. The treaty granted the Soviet Union joint ownership of all the trunk railways in Manchuria for 30 years. In addition, the Soviet Union was to share Port Arthur with China as their exclusive naval base and to lease, gratis, half of the port of Dairen. All goods entering or leaving Dairen to and from the Soviet Union were to be duty-free. The Soviet Union, thus, acquired the rights for unrestricted use of the two warm-water ports in Manchuria and the railways to link Siberia with those ports. This access was what Russia had wanted since the late nineteelath century. All Stalin had to do in return was to agree that the Kuomintang government was the "central government of China"! 12 As is well known, both Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union had attached great importance to Manchuria and had struggled long and hard to establish a foothold there. It was the Russians who built the Chinese Eastern Railway and its southern extention that linked the two warm-water ports at the southern tip of the Kwantung peninsula with the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The Russians came into conflict with Japan over Manchuria and fought the disastrous war betweeen 1904 and 1905, devastating their national economy and eventuallly suffering humiliation at the hands of Japanese. The Bolsheviks inherited the Chinese Eastern Railway, only a part of the vast railway network the Czarist regime built, but they had to sell it to the Manchukuo regime in 1935 after suffering monumental headaches for eighteen years. Indeed, the Soviet Union had had to fight a brief war against the Chang Hsueh-liang regime in 1929 to retain control over the railway. 13Stalin would have had a vivid memory of all these events because he had been at the helm much of the time. We must analyze Stalin's August 16 telegram and his Korea (and China) policy from this perspective. Korea, as noted earlier, had its intrinsic value to the Soviet Union. But its importance paled in comparison with what Stalin had gained two days earlier. From his strategic perspective, Korea would serve at most the role of a parapet or a shield for Dairen and Port Arthur, a role that could be performed more than adequately by northern Korea. Stalin, therefore, had every reason to be pleased with the U.S. proposal to divide Korea at the 38th parallel. He would have had misgivings about a U.S. decision to exclude the Soviet Union from the occupation of Japan, but what was more important to him in August 1945 was that the United States kept Roosevelt's pledge to persuade Chiang Kai-shek to accept Soviet terms on Manchuria. Truman's telegram of August 15, therefore, was very much palatable to Stalin. Hence the immediate reply. Having satisfied his needs, Stalin proceeded to solidify his "democratic base" in northern Korea without further ado. Stalin told Milovan Djilas in
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April 1945, "This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise?'~4 The North Korean Provisional People's Committee, established in February 1946, briskly implemented purges, land reform, and nationalization of industries without waiting for an all-Korean provisional government to emerge under the trusteeship formula agreed upon by the Moscow meeting of the three foreign ministers (of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States) in late December 1945. Although the Soviet occupation authorities did participate in the Soviet-American Joint Commission in the springs of 1946 and 1947 as specified by the Moscow agreement, the Soviets were clearly not eager to reconcile their differences with the United States. All the Soviet Union did was to reject all "reactionary elements" from the list of Korean groups to be consulted by the commission, the principal criterion of choice being whether a group supported the Moscow decision or not. As it turned out, only the Korean Communist party and the left wing supported it, and hence all others were labled "reactionary." The Soviet command had already put Cho Man-sik, the head of the Korean Democratic party (Choson Minju-dang) in Pyongyang, on house arrest in January 1946, for opposing trusteeship; and Kim II-song, the Communist leader, loudly denounced Cho as reactionary. His party was "reformed," Cho being replaced by a Communist leader, Ch'oe Yong-gon. Trusteeship had been Roosevelt's idea, but in the face of stringent opposition from the Koreans, Secretary of State James E Byrnes hinted only three days after the Moscow meeting decided on trusteeship for Korea that it might be possible to avoid trusteeship. The Soviet Union, however, would not entertain such a thought, and chose to use the support of trusteeship as a litmus test for all South Korean political groups. Even though the deterioration of Soviet-U.S. relations strongly affected the atmosphere in Korea, Soviet insistence on excluding the right-wing opponents of trusteeship from consultation by the Joint Soviet-American Commission can be attributed to the fact that the Soviet Union already had what it wanted in Korea. The North Korean regime "friendly to the Soviet Union" was all it needed in the immediate postwar years. It was not about to alter the communist system in North Korea for the sake of establishing a unified Korean government consisting of both the communist and anticommunist elements. STALIN AND THE CHINESE REVOLUTION
The Sino-Soviet treaty of 1945 not only cast a new light on Stalin's Korea policy but also raised an interesting question about Stalin's China policy. It
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is often forgotten that the Communist victory and the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 forced Stalin to forfeit the important privilege the Soviet Union had gained from the Kuomintang government in 1945. The PRC leaders obviously considered the recovery of soverign rights over the railway and the ports in Manchuria very important in that the Chinese and Soviet governments signed the Agreement on the Changchun Railway on February 14, 1950, the same day that they signed the treaty of friendship and alliance. The Changchun Railway is a new designation since 1945 for the combined Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian Railways. The negotiation presumably had started in December of the previous year when Map Tse-tung and his retinue arrived in Moscow. The Soviet leaders could impose the imperialistic demands on the "reactionary" Kuomintang government without qualms, but could not sustain it when the country was placed under the leadership of the proletariat. The agreement stipulated in Article 1: "The Soviet government transfers gratis to the government of the People's Republic of China all its rights in the joint administration of the Chinese Changchun Railway, with all the property belonging to the Railway. The transfer will be effected immediately upon the conclusion of a peace treaty with Japan, but not later than the end of 1952:' It further stipulated in Article 2: "Both High Contracting Parties had agreed that Soviet troops will be withdrawn from the jointly utilized naval base of Port Arthur a n d . . , the installations in this area will be handed over to the government of the People's Republic of China immediately upon the conclusion of a peace treaty with Japan, but not later than the end of 1952.''~5 Port Arthur and Dairen, however, were not evacuated until June 1955; the two sides needed another agreement on that matter in October 1954. The question one may legitimately ask is whether Stalin would have been pleased to forfeit the great privilege gained in Manchuria for that of having a Communist regime in China, headed, incidentally, by those Stalin considered to be "not real Communists," but "margarine Communists. "~6 Another question to be asked is what impact, if any, the prospect of losing the privileges in Manchuria had upon Stalin's attitude toward the Chinese Communist party (CCP) after 1945. Did he favor the CCP in the struggle against Kuomintang after 1945 in spite of the loss the Soviet Union would suffer as a result of the CCP victory? Was ideological commitment more important than national interest? Such questions would not have risen in 1945 or 1946, when the CCP was still an underdog, but by early 1947, when the CCP began to launch its counterattack against the Kuomintang government in Manchuria, it would have been a serious question to be pondered. Little is known about the process of negotiation about the 1950 treaty. If Khrushchev's account is correct, the Chinese delegation under Map Tse-
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tung was ignored for days at a time in Moscow by Stalin until the Chinese delegation began to pack their belongings and prepared for their departure. No Soviet dared to go see Mao or any other Chinese visitor because Stalin neither saw Mao nor ordered anyone else to entertain him. ~7This may have been Stalin's way of showing his displeasure at the prospect of losing Manchuria. By then, he certainly would have known what the Chinese wanted from him. If Stalin could be so rude a host during Mao's visit in Moscow, was he favorably inclined toward the CCP before then? Or afterwards? What the Soviet writer L. Kopelev said about Stalin's policy toward China is extremely interesting in this regard: The successes of the Chinese Communists disturbed Stalin; they did not make him happy. It was in those very years [1946-48], after all, that the conflict with Yugoslavia began, and the potential rival in the Far East, the intractable and inscrutable Mao, was undoubtedly stronger and more dangerous than Tito and his potential imitators. Therefore after the definitive victory of the Maoists, which was obviously no longer reversible, under a screen of blustering propaganda, Stalin imposed unequal treaty concessions upon the new China, holding fast to the Chinese Eastern Railway, the naval bases at Port Arthur and Dairen, and Sinkiang. 18 The Sino-Soviet treaty of 1945 certainly makes Kopelev's argument plausible. If so, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek, who could be accused of selling China out in 1945 by giving away an important part of Chinese sovereignty to the Soviet Union, unwittingly sowed the seed of discord between the Chinese Communists and Soviet leaders. NOTES 1. See Soon Sung Cho, Korea in World Politics, 1940-1950: An Evaluation of American Responsibility (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Bruce Cumings, "American Policy and Korean Liberation," in Frank Baldwin (ed.), Without Parallel: The American-Korean Relations Since 1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), pp. 46-48; Arthur L. Grey Jr., "The Thirty-Eighth Parallel," Foreign Affairs, April 1951, pp. 482-487; Shannon MeCune, "The Thirty-Eight Parallel in Korea," World Politics, January 1949, pp. 223-32; and Michael C. Sandusky, America's Parallel (Alexandria, Va.: Old Dominion Press, 1983), pp. 199-252. 2. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the U.S.S.R., Correspondence between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. and the President of the U.S. A. and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957), vol. 2, p. 266. 3. Ibid. 4. Robert M. Slusser, "Soviet Far Eastern Policy, 1945-50," Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye (eds.), The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 134; John Lewis Gaddis, "Korea in American Politics, Strategy, and Diplomacy, 1945-50," ibid., pp. 277-298. 5. Herbert Feis, The China Tangle(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 115. 6. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the CoM War, 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 133-243.
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Ibid, pp. 79-82. See Sandusky, America's Parallel, pp. 207-218. Slusser, "Soviet Far Eastern Policy, 1945-50," p. 137. Sandusky, America's Parallel, p. 240-241,252. The secret Yalta agreement respecting the Far East was signed on February 11, 1945, and provided as follows: "The leaders of the three Great Powers---the Soviet Union, the United States of America and Great Britain--have agreed that in two or three months after Germany has surrendered and the war in Europe has terminated the Soviet Union shall enter into the war against Japan on the side of the Allies on condition that: (1) the status quo in Outer-Mongolia (The Mongolian People's Republic) shall be preserved; (2) the former fights of Russia violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904 shall be restored, viz.: (a) the southern part of Sakhalin as well as all the islands adjacent to it shall be returned to the Soviet Union, (b) the commerical port of Dairen shail be internationalized, the preeminent interests of the Soviet Union in this port being safeguarded and the lease of Port Arthur as a naval base of the USSR restored, (c) the Chinese-Eastern Railroad and the South Manchurian Railroad which provides an outlet to Dairen shall be jointly operated by the establishment of a joint Soviet-Chinese Company it being understood that the preeminent interests of the Soviet Union shall be safeguarded and that China shall regain full sovereignty in Manchuria; (3) the Kuril Islands shall be handed over to the Soviet Union. It is understood, that the agreements concerning Outer-Mongolia and the ports and railroads referred to above will require concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The President will take measures in order to obtain this concurrence on advice from Marshall Stalin. The Heads of the three Great Powers have agreed that these claims of the Soviet Union shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated. For its part the Soviet Union expresses its readiness to conclude with the National Government of China a pact of friendship and alliance between the USSR and China in order to render assistance to China with its armed forces for the purpose of liberating China from the Japanese yoke7 Diane Shaver Clemens Yalta (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 310-311. 12. For the text of the August 14 treaty and additional instruments signed, see U.S. Department of State, United States Relations with China: With Special Reference to the Period 1944-1949, Washington, D.C., 1949, pp. 585-96. For other details of the negotiations, see O. Edmund Clubb, China and Russia: The Great Game (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 343-358. In November, the Soviets requested that 154 industrial and mining enterprises, constituting 80 percent of the heavy industry in Manchuria be placed under joint Sino-Soviet operation; in March 1946, the Soviet ambassador in China proposed the formation of a Sino-Soviet joint-stock company. See ibid., pp. 356-357. 13. For details, see George A. Lensen, Damned Inheritance: The Soviet Union and the Manchurian Crises, 1924-1935 (Tallahassee, FI.: Diplomatic Press, 1974), passim. 14. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962), p. 114. 15. Alvin Z. Rubinstein, Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union, 3rd ed., (New York: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 236-40. 16. As told to W. Avereli Harriman, the American ambassador in Moscow, June 1944. In Herbert Feis, The China Tangle(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 140. Stalin reportedly told his inner circle after talking to Mao Tse-tung in Moscow, "What kind of man is Mao, anyway? He calls himself a Marxist, but he doesn't understand the most elementary Marxist truths. Or maybe he doesn't want to understand themY Strobe Talbott (tr. and ed.), Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 239. Khushchev added: "I agreed with Stalin on that score. I think he was justified in his doubts about Mao7 17. Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 239-240. 18. L. Kopelev, "Lozh" pobedima torko pravdoi" (manuscript), p. 6, as quoted in Roy A. Medvedev, "New Pages from the Political Biography of Stalin," Robert C. Tucker (ed.), Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), p. 230. I wish to thank Edward Mansfield for bringing this writing to my attention.
