Masters of Land

 

Before Korea’s liberation (August 15, 1945) Korean peasants had been subjected to feudal exploitation and languished under Japanese military occupation. Robbed of their own country they experienced every manner of maltreatment and grief. Their centuries-old desire was so simple: tilling their own land. To them, land was as precious as their lives.

Born into a poor peasant family, President  Kim Il Sung had felt their miseries to his marrow since his childhood. Though faced with numerous tasks after the country’s liberation, he paid primary concern to realizing their desire and set agrarian reform as the top priority in carrying out the democratic revolution.

He often went to the countryside, having talks with the former landlords’ servants and tenants. Based on an analysis of the feudal land ownership and complicated class relations, he promulgated the Law on Agrarian Reform in North Korea on March 5, Juche 35(1946).

With the promulgation of the historic law Korean peasants became masters of land. It put an end to the exploitative land ownership that had been rooted in the countryside for ages and marked a milestone in the destiny of the peasants. As reflected in the slogan Land to the tillers! advanced by the President, it opened a new chapter in resolving the problem of land.

Peasants welcomed the law and, shedding tears of gratitude and happiness, set up signposts bearing their names on the patches allocated to them.

 

                                

 

Impelled by a stirring excitement, a poet said:

…

Land!

Given to me by General Kim Il Sung.

Three thousand phyong!

…

Oh, my mother lies on the ground

As she cannot carry it on her back,

Unable to hold it in her bosom,

Unwilling to go back home without it.

…

This poem is about a woman who lost her father, husband and three children because of the land. Indeed, it gives a vivid portrayal of the happy peasants who fulfilled their lifelong wish thanks to the President’s benevolent care.

Seven decades have passed since then and the generation of those peasants has been replaced by another. Although everything has been changed, their delight is till felt on this land and there remains unchanged the passionate determination of agricultural workers to repay the benevolence of the President who provided them with a genuine life.

Now they devote themselves heart and soul to tilling the fields with an attitude becoming masters of the socialist countryside.