ABSTRACT
On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union entered World War II in the Pacific when it declared war on Japan. Soviet troops immediately advanced into Korea and Manchuria. Historians have debated whether Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had concrete plans for post-war Korea. Relying on Soviet public papers and official memoirs, Erik Van Ree (1989) has elaborated on the traditional interpretation, defining Soviet post-war goals in Korea as first realizing an historic desire to acquire warm-water ports and second creating a buffer zone against an expected revival of Japanese aggression. During World War II, Stalin was not enthusiastic about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plan for a Korean trusteeship because he had plans to dominate the entire peninsula. Chong-sik Lee and Kathryn Weathersby (1993), James I. Matray (1998), and Shen Zhihua (2012), citing declassified Soviet documents, have shown that Stalin’s support for a multinational trusteeship in post-war Korea at both the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences was sincere. Shen concludes that as late as June 1945, Stalin “had no firm policy for postwar Korea” (Shen 2012: 32). By contrast, President Harry S. Truman delayed negotiation of a final trusteeship agreement in the hope that atomic attacks would bring prompt surrender of Japan before the Soviets entered the war, allowing for unilateral U.S. occupation of Korea. When his gamble failed, Truman at the eleventh hour persuaded Stalin to accept the temporary division of the peninsula at the 38th parallel into two zones of occupation. Soviet occupation of the north was the first step toward establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) that came after the United States and the Soviet Union refused to agree on a plan to restore sovereignty to a reunited Korea.
