Terenty Shtykov

Shtykov was born in 1907 to a family of farmers in eastern Belarus. In 1929 he joined the Communist Party in Leningrad and became a Komsomol activist. In 1938 Shtykov became the Second Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee,[6] where he became the protege of First Secretary Andrei Zhdanov. Zhdanov's support allowed Shtykov to rise rapidly: he even briefly held a leading role in the Great Purge that September.

During World War II, Shtykov served as a political commissar in several fronts near Leningrad. By the end of the war he was one of only three Colonel general political commissars (the highest rank allowed for political commissars in the Red Army). As political commissar of the Far Eastern Front, Shtykov assisted Marshal Kirill Meretskov in accepting the surrender of Japan in northern Korea on August 19, 1945. After the war, he was made deputy commander of the Primorskiy Military District.[4][5]

Following the division of Korea, Joseph Stalin sought to turn northern Korea into a socialist buffer state between the Soviet bloc and the American occupation in the southern half of the peninsula. Shtykov's influence rose in tandem with the rise of his mentor Andrei Zhdanov, who was thought to be Stalin's most likely successor after the war. As member of the Military Council for the Primorskiy District, Shtykov frequently visited Pyongyang and communicated to Zhdanov and Stalin about developments on the Korean Peninsula. Shtykov "exercised extremely close supervision over political events in North Korea" on Stalin's behalf.[5] Shtykov also headed the Soviet delegation to the Joint Soviet-American Commission on Korea. The Americans thought Shtykov was a "hot-tempered authoritarian," and the two governments failed to negotiate a unified government for the Korean peninsula.[4]

As the most powerful man in the northern occupation zone of Korea, Shtykov personally selected the composition of the Soviet Civil Administration, and its second leader would comment that “there was not an event [in North Korea] in which Shtykov was not involved.”[7] Shtykov's strong support of Kim Il-sung was decisive in Kim's rise to power. Shtykov continued to be the preeminent power in the North after Kim was made chairman of the Provisional People's Committee for North Korea.[4] In December 1946, Shtykov and two other Soviet generals designed the election results of the Assembly for the Provisional Committee. Without any Korean input, the generals decided "the exact distribution of seats among the parties, the number of women members, and, more broadly, the precise social composition of the legislature."[8]

The original 1948 North Korean constitution was primarily authored by Stalin and Shtykov in Moscow. The constitution only went into effect after the two had a lengthy discussion editing the draft, though some articles were later rewritten by Soviet supervisors. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was proclaimed after the withdrawal of Soviet forces in 1948, and Shtykov was named the first Soviet Ambassador to the DPRK.[2]

After being fired, Shtykov was demoted to major general on 3 February 1951 and was appointed deputy chairman of Kaluga Oblast. He later served as First Secretary of Novgorod and Primorskiy Oblast, before being named Ambassador to Hungary in 1959. Shtykov's hardline Stalinism clashed with János Kádár's Goulash Communism policies, and he was recalled in 1960. He served as Chairman of the State Control Commission for the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federal Republic before dying on vacation in 1964.[2][4][5]

Shtykov's decisions proved highly consequential for the Korean Peninsula and the world. Although Shtykov was the preeminent leader of North Korea from 1945-1950, he allowed Koreans to take the credit for his policies. Shtykov's support of Kim Il-sung over other Korean communists such as Pak Hon-yong was a chief factor in the Kim dynasty's rise to power. Additionally, Shtykov masterminded the 1946 land reform in North Korea, which was arguably the most popular policy conducted in either Korea. South Korea reversed the land reform during the brief United Nations occupation of the North, which provoked a backlash among Northern farmers.[11] Most significant was Shtykov's decision to support Kim's effort to violently reunite the peninsula, which ended his career. Had Shtykov been unsympathetic to Kim's expansionist aims, it is highly unlikely that Stalin would have authorized the Korean War. While the war did not end in the liberation of the American-backed South, it did allow Kim Il-sung to secure effective North Korean independence from the Soviet Union. All of Shtykov's actions are today attributed to Kim Il-sung by North Korean official media, and even South Korean media assumes that Kim was the driving force behind land reform.[2]