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"Honored Pak Ch'ang-sik", 35 x 25 cm, oil on canvas, 1955
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Biographical
sketch of Pak Ch'ang-sik (1905-early 1960s?), the man in the portrait Pak Ch'ang-sik was born in 1905 in Sinelnikovo village, located in Maritime province (Rus. Primorskii krai). Pak was born in a peasant family, most likely a poor family. Like most Koreans, he also had a Russian name of Illarion Dmitrievich. Pak had only primary education (2 years of village primary school). At an early age he joined the Communist Youth League (komsomol) and then, in 1929, the Communist Party. From the middle 1920s, he was a village-level komsomol cadre. In 1933 Pak graduated from a 'Party school' (2-years party cadre training centre) in Ussuriisk, in Russian Far East, and continued to work as a low level party cadre. For a while he was working in Northern Sakhalin island, but in 1936 was transferred to the Maritime province again. By 1937 he had been an instructor (that is, a minor official) in a district Committee. Unlike most ethnic Korean party cadres, he was lucky to survive the forced relocation of the Soviet Koreans in 1937 to Central Asia and even continued as a medium level official there. In 1938-1944, he was a deputy chairman of the district Soviet (that is, municipal committee) in Nizhnii Chirchik district, near Tashkent. He was married to Matrena Kim, had two sons and a daughter. Like many ethnic Koreans of some prominence, he was drafted to the Red Army in August or September 1945, to be sent to Korea. He entered Korea in October 1945 (not in 1946 as other sources claim). In August 1946 he ranked 9 (of 43) in the KWP Central Committee roster, and was also a member of the NK 'Politburo' (then called Standing Committee) which included 13 top politicians. Since then his career steadily went downhill. In 1948 he was "reelected" to the KWP Central Committee (but not to its Politburo, and ranked only as number 36). Since the late 1940s (likely, from 1948), Pak was a deputy Chairman of the P'yŏngyang City People's Committee (that is, vice-major of the capital). For a while he even was a vice-major of Seoul when the city was under North Korean control. But by 1951 he was again a deputy Chairman of the P'yŏngyang City People's Committee. In the Soviet political tradition it was not a particularly powerful position, since the real power belonged to the party institutions rather than the 'people's committees.' After the war, Pak briefly served as Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Deputy Minister of City Management. In 1956 Pak was a chairman of the Chagang-do Province People's Committee. Around the same time he made a partial political comeback, becoming a member and vice-chairman of the Central Auditing Committee (April 1956), but not a member of the KWP Central Committee. In late 1956 Pak expressed public support for the desicions of the September (1956) Plenary Meeting of the KWP Central Committee. This Plenum had been held under strong Chinese and Soviet pressure, with Peng Dehuai and A.I. Mikoyan themselves present. Its main task had been to reverse the decisions of the August 1956 Plenum which had expelled several top opposition leaders from the Party and had launched a large scale purge of both Soviet and Yan'an factions. In the late 1950s, following further large-scale purges of Soviet Koreans, Pak's position began to deteriorate again, but, contrary to the advice of his friends and family, he refused to consider leaving Korea. In June 1960, the Soviet Embassy learned that Pak had been recently dismissed from his job at the Central Auditing Committee and sent to the countryside for re-education. For a while he was a manager of a duck farm, but in September 1960 he was arrested as an "American spy." Nothing has been heard about him since then. His family, with some help of the Soviet Embassy, managed to leave Korea soon afterwards. Major sources: 1938 party member registration card for Pak (from a Moscow archive); Soviet Foreign Ministry papers describing the purges of Soviet Koreans in the late 1950s and early 1960s; other Soviet documents where Pak Ch'ang-sik is mentioned (mostly from the Central Committee archives); official rosters of the KWP Central Committee. Andrei N. Lankov |
I am greatly
indebted to Dr. Andrei N. Lankov (Andrei.Lankov@anu.edu.au)
from the Australian National University, for contributing this biographical
sketch of Pak Ch'ang-sik, mainly based on unpublished source materials
from Russian archives.
Some of Dr. Lankov's work can be found online: A,
B
and C.