SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Kwang-jin knows what genuine fear feels like.
Once a member of the Pyongyang elite handling finance, he was in the North Korean capital when rumors of a coup circulated in 1996.
“For two or three months, we all felt terror. We could see it in our friends’ dark faces,” he recalled. “There were rumors — whispers in society.”
The unrest was supposedly fomented by North Korean officers who had studied at Moscow’s Frunze Military Academy and were recalled after the Soviet Union’s collapse. With post-Soviet Russia considered a source of contagion, the regime’s shadowy security apparatus cast a wide, deadly net to root out potential malcontents.
People began disappearing. Any link to Russia was perilous. Mr. Kim’s English professor vanished simply because her husband, a doctor, had studied in Russia. She was pressured to divorce him; he was later executed.
“They were not officers; even exchange students were rounded up,” Mr. Kim said. “We all knew what was going on.”
Russia-linked elites were not publicly executed like common criminals, he said. They were killed “in secrecy, in a remote area.”
Neither the community of outside analysts nor Mr. Kim, who defected in 2003 and now works as an analyst at Seoul’s Institute for National Security Strategy, has determined that “The Frunze Incident” of 1996-1997 reached the stage where a coup was contemplated. More likely, some Frunze graduates, having witnessed the changes sweeping post-Soviet Russia, spoke too loudly, Mr. Kim said.
Today, 10,000 to 13,000 troops have been deployed to Russia, far more than Pyongyang had previously dispatched abroad. Hope is rising that veterans might become agents for change in the isolated dynasty now ruled by third-generation despot Kim Jong-un.
North Korean troops will have firsthand experience with the relative freedoms and prosperity of Russia, more unrestricted access to the internet, millennial combat and the horrors of modern war. In short, they form a cohort that might challenge state leadership.
“The regime is worried that soldiers from the isolated country might pick up ‘incorrect’ ideas,” wrote a Russian researcher, the Agence France-Presse news service reported.
“Has Kim thought through what happens when these troops … come home to North Korea?” a British defense expert asked on X. “That’s got to be a big societal shift incoming.”
“North Korea coup speculation is back!” read the headline of a recent online article by a South Korean analyst.
Many who have studied North Korea and the Kim regime intensively have doubts.
“Casualties will definitely have some impact; however, that impact will not be fatal to the stability of the regime,” said Mr. Kim, the think tank scholar. “We have to take note that troops and soldiers dispatched to Ukraine had no hope when they lived in North Korea, as well.”
Military resistance to three generations of ruling Kims has been modest and unsuccessful. North Korea watchers credit the ubiquity, efficiency and ruthlessness of state control mechanisms for coup-proofing the regime.
When Kims crushed coups
In 1948, former guerrilla leader and Soviet Red Army Maj. Kim Il-sung took power over the newly established North Korea. Today, his grandson Kim Jong-un is firmly ruling the state. Though North Korea offers fewer rights and freedoms than perhaps any other nation, resistance has been minimal.
The Kim regime has avoided the fate of many other totalitarian leaders for multiple reasons. Citizens lack access to the arms and organizational networks required to rebel and are required to spy on one another, even within families.
Pyongyang’s conscript military of 1.2 million full-time troops boasts plentiful weaponry and strong organization. All military challenges to regime leaders have been systematically crushed.
An early example arose within the Yanan Faction of North Korean generals who fought alongside Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong in the 1940s before returning to Korea after the end of World War II.
Having initiated the catastrophic Korean War in 1950, Kim’s regime survived only because of Beijing’s timely intervention. The fighting ended in 1953, leaving North Korea weak and impoverished.
In 1956, tensions between the China-friendly group and Mr. Kim’s Guerrilla Faction flared. The Beijing-linked faction “marked the only organized anti-Kim movement in North Korean history,” wrote historian Jin Guangxi. Kim mobilized the army and purged the faction’s leaders, compelling survivors to flee to China and marking “the thorough eradication of the Yanan Faction.”
Kim Jong-il, the founder’s son who took power in 1994, is thought to have quashed two military challenges to his rule: the Frunze Incident and the 6th Corps Incident.
In the mid-1990s, North Korea was wracked by famines after the withdrawal of Soviet aid. The 6th Corps was a large, rear-echelon force based in the country’s northeast abutting the Chinese border. It is unclear whether its officers plotted a coup or whether disputes over the spoils from Pyongyang’s cross-border trade with China ignited the tension.
Key officers were arrested after Pyongyang loyalists stormed the corps headquarters. An unknown number of military officers were executed, some reportedly burned to death.
The 6th Corps was disbanded.
Total control
Bob Collins, a longtime adviser to U.S. forces in South Korea, said Kim Jong-un and his ruling party follow family tradition and maintain close oversight over the military. “Every officer down to company level has a political officer on his shoulder,” he said.
Rules are strict, and even top generals are not exempt. Army Chief of Staff Ri Yong-gil was purged in the early days of Kim Jong-un’s rule.
“He did not report to Kim Jong-un that some military units were on the move,” said Mr. Kim, the defector. “They have this rule that if a certain unit moves from one place to another, they should get permission.”
Multiple lines — military, political officers, security services — report to the party’s powerful Organization and Guidance Department, which collates colossal amounts of personnel information, including mandatory self-criticism sessions.
“They control and secure loyalty to [Kim Jong-un] and the party,” said Mr. Collins. “It’s personnel management.”
When loyalties are suspect, state agents are not bound by judicial restraint or fundamental rights in addressing the threat.
“Just having a thought and letting it out of their mouth is as good as a coup for the security services,” said Yang Uk, a security specialist at Seoul’s Asan Institute.
Fear is a tactic: The 6th Corps’ fate was meant to teach a lesson.
“I think they became a showcase: ‘If you don’t obey the party, you’ll be wiped out,’” Mr. Yang said.
Even if Mr. Kim’s expeditionary troops in Ukraine are exposed to the wider world, their experience is not unique. A handful of North Koreans already operate internationally.
Diplomats work worldwide, and thousands of workers have labored in Chinese factories and Russian logging camps. Small military units engaged in the Vietnam and Middle Eastern conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s, in Africa in the 1980s, and, some say, in Syria in the 2000s.
Having a family in North Korea provides the regime with hostages, and all North Koreans posted overseas are subject to special attention and oversight.
“They regularly summon them home for debriefs and indoctrination,” Mr. Yang said.
It is not just sticks. Pyongyang also wields carrots, including attractive pay incentives for the troops sent to Russia.
“Those guys who deploy to Ukraine will be compensated,” said Mr. Yang. “I don’t think they are a danger to Kim.”
The Russia-Ukraine war “is a great opportunity for them to receive financial returns,” said Kim Kwang-jin, the think tank scholar. “If they actually lose their lives, their family members can get higher ranks in North Korean society.”
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