| Summary/Abstract |
This paper studies North Korea’s official narrative on the Second World War.
The country is extremely autocratic, meaning that the only allowed vision
is the one prescribed by the state. This vision was initially imprinted by
the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. However, the official narrative on the
Soviet-Japanese War, which led to the establishment of the North Korean
state, has been rewritten: today Pyongyang credits Japan’s defeat to Kim
Il-sung and his “Korean People’s Revolutionary Army”—an organization
which never existed in reality. This article traces the evolution of the North
Korean false narrative and concludes that each of its pages was farther away
from historical truth than the previous one.
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