Sixty-Eight Years Before the Soviet Collapse, a Korean in Hawai'i Wrote This

1991. The Soviet Union collapses.

The world called it "the end of communism."

But sixty-eight years earlier, someone had already put the danger at the root of that collapse into print.

Not in Washington. Not in Moscow.

In a small magazine office run by Korean immigrants in Hawai'i.

In 1917, revolution breaks out in Russia.

The February Revolution brings down the Romanov dynasty, and that October Lenin's Bolsheviks overthrow the Provisional Government and establish Soviet power.

It was a declaration that they would build a society without classes.

The news shook intellectuals around the world almost at once.

A good many of the West's most prominent thinkers called the experiment "the future of mankind."

Intellectuals in colonial Korea were no exception.

To people sick of a rigid status order and of the gap between rich and poor, the slogan "we all live as equals" sounded almost like religion.

And yet, in the middle of that fervor, one voice said something else.

That voice belonged to the man we usually remember only as "the architect of the Cold War" or "the pro-American politician" — Syngman Rhee.

From 1913 Rhee had been producing The Korean Pacific Magazine himself, in Hawai'i.

Even after he left Shanghai, where he had led the Provisional Government, and returned to Hawai'i in 1921, the weapon he held was not a gun but type.

March 1, 1923 — the first issue of the fifth year.

And in those pages runs an article titled "The Right and the Wrong of the Communist Party" (當不當).

The title alone is provocative.

Dang-bu-dang — what is right, and what is not right.

It is a declaration that he will neither praise communism wholesale nor reject it outright.

The article opens like this.

One thing should be said plainly.

Nowhere on this page is the name "Syngman Rhee" printed.

Scholarship — a University of Wisconsin doctoral dissertation among others — attributes the article to him, because he founded and ran the magazine and wrote several unsigned pieces in every issue.

What the article says may look unremarkable by today's standards.

But in 1923 international judgment on the Soviet system was still sharply divided.

To say, at that moment, "let us weigh the merits and the faults separately" was neither endorsement nor opposition — it meant he intended to analyze.

Rhee does not deny the aim of the communist party itself.

He begins with Korea's long history of hereditary rank.

An age when yangban and commoner were divided by blood — and slavery, a system in which people were bought and sold.

The caste order was abolished by law, he says, but the gap between rich and poor took its place.

And so he concludes:

Here is what deserves notice.

Before Rhee was an anti-communist, he was a man who never opposed equality as such.

What he took issue with was "how equality is to be achieved" — the method.

And from here on is the real core of the article.

Rhee breaks the communist method into five parts and answers each one.

First: what happens if property is divided by force?

Separate effort from its result, he is saying, and the reason to make the effort disappears with it.

Second: what happens if capitalists are abolished?

Removing what you resent is one thing; producing someone to take over the function it performed is another.

Third: what happens if the educated class is abolished?

The moment you make an enemy of those who hold knowledge, he warns, the level of the whole society falls with them.

Fourth: what happens if religion is abolished?

He treats it not as a question of faith but of the norms that keep people human.

And fifth — the sharpest point of all.

What happens if government, the military, and the state itself are abolished?

This fifth point is, in effect, the conclusion of the whole article.

He had already put his finger on the self-contradiction that "abolish the state and trust one country alone" finally runs into.

Sixty-eight years after Rhee wrote this, the Soviet Union did collapse.

He did not predict the date of that collapse; but the flaw he identified was borne out, sixty-eight years later, by history itself.

And Rhee ends the article on his own country.

Independence comes before ideology.

To him communism was neither an absolute good nor an absolute evil, but something to be weighed by whether it helped Korea's independence or not.

You may remember Japan Inside Out, which this channel covered earlier.

In that book Rhee warned that Japan's theocratic totalitarianism — a system that enthroned the emperor as a god — would end by running headlong into a Pacific war.

Three months and twenty-two days later, Pearl Harbor came.

"The Right and the Wrong of the Communist Party" is another facet of that same insight.

Japan or the Soviet Union, what Rhee actually guarded against was not "ideology itself."

A totalitarian structure that erases individual judgment and makes people stake everything on one system, one belief — that was his real target.

The eye that saw through theocratic totalitarianism and the eye that saw through communist totalitarianism were the same eye.

And the scene that shows he was right did not take long to arrive.

In 1931, eight years after this article, the world-famous playwright George Bernard Shaw visited the Soviet Union and met Stalin.

Two years later he signed an open letter, together with twenty other visitors who had been to the Soviet Union.

Into the very trap Rhee had warned about in print, one of the West's foremost intellectuals walked of his own accord.

Stalin was managing his image exactly this way — inviting foreign intellectuals and entertaining them.

Rhee, sitting in a magazine office in Hawai'i, had drawn that trap in advance, on paper.

When most intellectuals of the age were intoxicated with the illusion that "revolution will save mankind," he was not.

And for that, he was long dismissed as "an anti-communist behind the times."

But read again sixty-eight years later, this article was not behind its time — it was a warning that arrived too early.

One article, carried in a small magazine in Hawai'i in 1923.

"The Right and the Wrong of the Communist Party."

In the next episode: how Rhee carried this sight into the actual choices of politics.