Communist Party of Korea

(CPK), founded in April 1925 during an upsurge of the national liberation movement in Korea, which grew stronger under the influence of the Great October Socialist Revolution.

The CPK took the lead in forming revolutionary mass organizations of workers and peasants. It directly led mass actions of the working people and organized a huge anti-Japanese demonstration in June 1926. In 1927 the CPK called for the unification of the anti-Japanese patriotic forces. The Japanese colonial authorities began to repress the Communist Party as soon as it was founded, and many party leaders were imprisoned. As a result of the repressions and the unceasing factional struggle within the party, the CPK ceased to exist as an organized force in 1928. But Communists who went underground continued to lead the struggle of the popular masses for the liberation of the country from the colonial yoke. An armed guerrilla struggle against the Japanese oppressors broke out in the early 1930’s under Communist leadership. When the Soviet Army, acting with the Korean people’s revolutionary forces, liberated Korea in August 1945, the Korean Communists assumed the leadership of the democratic movement that had developed in the country and reestablished the Communist Party.

The arrival of the American occupation troops in the South (in September 1945) and the partitioning of the country by the American authorities hampered the work of the Communist Party. The Organizational Bureau of the CPK was set up on Oct. 10, 1945, to direct the party organizations in North Korea. In 1946 the Communist Party in North Korea supervised the formation of working people’s governmental bodies—people’s committees—and the implementation of an agrarian reform, the nationalization of industry, and other democratic transformations. In South Korea the Communists headed the democratic movement of the popular masses against domestic reaction and the policy of the American imperialists, which was inimical to the Korean people. In August 1946 the Communist Party united on the basis of the ideological and organizational principles of Marxism-Leninism with the New People’s Party in the North (founded in early 1946) and with the People’s and New People’s parties (founded in 1945) in the South; as a result the Workers’ Party of North Korea and the Workers’ Party of South Korea were founded. In June 1949 the two parties merged and formed the united Workers’ Party of Korea.