James F. Person, Coordinator of the Hyundai Motor-Korea Foundation Center for Korean History and Public Policy will speak at Harvard University's Korea Institute as a part of the Kim Koo Forum on Korea Current Affairs.

The 1956 August plenum of the Korean Worker’s Party, an event that transformed North Korea’s domestic political landscape and had a tremendous impact on Pyongyang’s relations with Moscow and Beijing, has long been depicted as an attempt by rival factions to remove North Korean leader Kim Il Sung from power, or alternatively as the critical final step in Kim’s consolidation of absolute authority. While decades have passed since rumors of the plenum first emerged, few scholars have challenged the basic narrative, even with the declassification of select documents on the event from the archives of North Korea’s former communist allies in the early 1990s. Indeed, those with early access to materials from the “other side” failed to question how we know what we do about the event and used the documents to reinforce the existing narrative of factional rivalry and Kim Il Sung’s ruthless pursuit of absolute power in North Korea. Based on these former communist bloc documents and along with critical new materials from Chinese and Russian archives, James Person challenges the conventional wisdom on this pivotal event, which has important implications for how we continue to view the regime today, by questioning key assumptions, including the existence of multiple competing factions. He will discuss recently-declassified materials from former socialist camp archives and his new findings on the plenum and its impact on the political, ideological, and diplomatic history of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  

Chaired by John Park, Adjunct Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School