Kim Il Sung - Founder of North Korea Documentary

The man known to history as Kim Il Sung was born on the 15th of April 1912 as Kim Song-Ju in the small village of Namni, now incorporated into the city of Pyongyang in what is now North Korea, but which was then a part of Chōsen, the imperial name for Japanese controlled Korea. Kim’s father was Kim Hyong-Jik, a member of the Jeonju Kim Clan which traces its roots back thirty generations to Kim Tae-Seo, said to be a descendant of King Gyeongsun who had ruled Korea in the tenth century as the last

monarch of the Silla Dynasty. Despite this heritage, the Kim family had fallen on hard times in the nineteenth century. Kim’s grandfather had engaged with western Christian missionaries who arrived in the Korean Peninsula from the 1860s onwards and had converted to Presbyterianism, a form of Scottish Calvinism, and Kim’s father inherited the same faith. Many members of the family received a good education in the Christian missionary schools as a result, but they were poor nonetheless. Kim’s mot

her was Kang Pan-Suk. She and Kim Hyong-Jik had several other children, notably two sons who were younger than Kim, Kim Yong-Ju and Kim Chul-Ju who died later fighting against the Japanese occupation of Korea. Kim Yong-Ju lived to be over a century old, only dying in 2021, and for a time until the late 1970s he was being considered a potential heir to his brother as ruler of North Korea. The events which would make Kim Il Sung one of the most significant figures in modern Asian history were alre

ady underway before he was even born. Like Japan and China, the Joseon Kingdom of Korea had largely closed its borders to foreign interference in the seventeenth century when the first Europeans in the shape of the Dutch and Portuguese had begun arriving in the Far East. It remained broadly isolated from the world until the middle of the nineteenth century when powers like Britain, France and the United States, which by now were much more technologically advanced, forced Korea, Japan and China t

o open their countries’ borders to foreign trade and ideas. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan embraced western ideas and methods as the best means of retaining its independence. With western ships and weapons and economic and social development, it soon began to emerge as a burgeoning power itself in the Western Pacific, forcing Korea into the unequal Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876. Then, with victories over the other regional powers, China and Russia, in wars fought in the mid-1890s and mi

d-1900s, Japan effectively established itself as the all-but ruler of the Korean Peninsula. This situation was formalised in 1910 when Korea was annexed as the first major territory of the Empire of Japan. By the time Kim was born in 1912 the Japanese were already beginning to implement a policy of Japanification in Korea, whereby the Korean people were coerced into adopting Japanese cultural norms and adhering to the Japanese political system. This quickly aroused opposition. A major moment cam

e in 1919, when Kim was just a child. A year earlier the US President, Woodrow Wilson, had outlined a series of Fourteen Points in a speech to the US Congress in which he stated that national groups had a right to self-determination. It was a sign of the times and in Korea many people felt the same, arguing that Korea should be free from Japanese colonial rule. The resentment which was building boiled over following the death of the former Korean Emperor, who had been deposed by the Japanese, Em

peror Gojong, in January 1919, with many believing the Japanese had poisoned him. What followed was a series of protest movements across Korea on the 1st of March 1919, largely led by student groups. Although the protests were brutally suppressed by the Japanese occupation forces the memory of them became a galvanising force and the March 1st Movement inspired future resistance to Japanese imperial rule. This Korean resentment at Japanese domination and simmering tensions, was the political envi

ronment in which Kim would grow up and which would shape the politics of the peninsula down to the 1940s. The details of Kim’s early life have become shrouded in myth over the decades as the man who would one day become absolute ruler of North Korea built up a fantastical biography of his early life, one which often makes separating fact from fiction difficult. Much of this was recorded in his highly unreliable memoirs, With the Century, of which eight volumes detailing his life down to 1945 wer

e published in the 1990s. His earliest years were quite possibly spent being raised in the village of Namni, known today as Mangyungbong. His family was staunchly opposed to the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula, a hardly unusual political stance at the time when tens of thousands of Koreans were being arrested and detained every year across the country as the Japanese sought to crack down on dissent. In 1920 the Kim family evidently joined the exodus of Koreans out of the peninsula an

d into the neighbouring Manchuria region of north-eastern China in order to remove themselves from Japanese domination, a flow of political exiles which became particularly acute after the birth of the 1st March Movement in 1919. In Manchuria Kim is alleged to have emerged as something of a precocious leader of an anti-Japanese movement. North Korean state propaganda holds that he was responsible for setting up the Down-with-Imperialism Union there in October 1926, yet this seems highly unlikely

. Kim was just fourteen years of age at the time and most objective scholarly studies of the Korean resistance movement in the interwar era hold that a radical Korean militant by the name of Ri Chongrak was its founder. Others still argue that the Down-with-Imperialism Union was a very minor group in the late 1920s and that its role has simply been distorted by North Korean state propaganda as a means of lionizing Kim’s youth and early years in the Korean resistance movement. This somewhat fanta

stical association with the Down-with-Imperialism Union movement aside, there is little doubt that Kim was a relatively young bloomer when it came to becoming involved in the Korean resistance movement in exile. He attended Yuwen Middle School in Jilin province in north-eastern China in the late 1920s and while there he became involved in communist politics, having determined that this movement was best placed to oppose Japan’s increasingly right-wing imperial regime and its occupation of Korea.

This led to his arrest and imprisonment for several months in 1929, demonstrating his immersion in political activity before he reached his eighteenth birthday. China’s politics were immensely fractured by the early 1930s as the country was ravaged by a civil war between various factions within which the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang or Chinese Nationalists were the two foremost antagonists. Both groups however were bitterly opposed to Japanese expansion in the Far East. Kim eventu

ally decided in 1931 that the Chinese Communist Party held out the better prospect for opposing the Japanese and so he became a member of that group. Significantly, the Chinese Communist Party had frosty relations at this time with the Communist Party of Korea, which had been formed in the city of Seoul in 1925, owing to the perception that the Korean Communist Party was too nationalist in its outlook, rather than espousing the species of proletarian internationalism which Karl Marx and Friedric

h Engels had championed in The Communist Manifesto. The overt nationalism of the Korean communist movement would characterise the communism of North Korea throughout Kim’s life. For the time being in the early 1930s Kim was simply emerging as a promising younger figure within the Chinese communist movement, impressing many with speeches he gave concerning the nature of Korean resistance to Japan from Manchuria. Kim’s emergence as a leader of the Korean resistance movement was shaped by the event

s of 1931. In September of that year the Japanese used a relatively minor border incident between China and the Korean Peninsula as the pretext for launching an invasion of Manchuria, where much of the Korean resistance movement had been based for the past decade. After a six month campaign, Manchuria was brought under Japanese rule and created into the puppet state of Manchukuo. In the period that followed, elements operating in Manchukuo were perceived by the leadership of the Chinese Communis

t Party as trying to undermine Chinese sovereignty. Consequently, in a series of purges known as the Minsaengdan Incident between 1933 and 1936 many senior Korean members of the Chinese Communist Party were purged and some were even killed. Kim was amongst those who came under suspicion, but he managed to exonerate himself and in the months that followed emerged as a new leader amongst the Korean communists in exile in China owing to his spirited defence of the Koreans within the Chinese Communi

st Party. It was these events more than anything else in his younger years which led to Kim becoming recognised as the unofficial leader of the Korean communist movement in exile in China and paved the way for his later emergence as the head of the North Korean state when it was born after the Second World War. It was around this time that Kim adopted the name by which he is known to history. Born as Kim Song-Ju, around 1935 he began referring to himself as Kim Il Sung, which transliterates as ‘

Kim become the Sun’, a worrying portent of his tendency to idolise himself and purport to be a quasi-divine figure. Not long after this he began to acquire a reputation as an effective military commander and proponent of guerrilla war. By the mid-1930s the Korean communists in association with their Chinese allies were conducting raids into both Manchukuo and Korea itself against the Japanese. These attacks escalated from the summer of 1937 onwards when the Japanese launched a full-scale invasio

n of China in response to what became known as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident when Chinese nationalists had clashed with the Japanese near Beijing. The resulting Sino-Japanese War saw much of eastern China, including major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing, conquered by the Japanese. Right around the same time that these Japanese attacks on China were beginning, Kim led a detachment of 200 guerrilla fighters which defeated a Japanese force at the Battle of Pochonbo in northern Korea.

This led to the growing perception of him as not just a leading political figure within the Korean communist movement, but also as an effective military commander. The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 is often regarded as the beginning of the Second World War in the Far East, as the region would be engaged in constant warfare until 1945 and even then was wracked by conflict for decades to come. Kim was central to these events. Throughout the late 1930s he was involved in Korean attacks on the

Japanese in his homeland such that, by 1940 he had become one of the most wanted Koreans sought by the Japanese authorities. Yet Kim and his allies found growing support within Korea itself, a country which the central Japanese government used as a source of slave labour to power the Japanese war economy as it increased its activities across the Western Pacific and then attacked the United States in December 1941, triggering American entry into the Second World War on the side of Britain and the

Soviet Union. This had implications for Kim. Although the Soviets would not go directly to war with Japan until 1945, Kim and other communists were taken into Russia in the early 1940s and trained in modern methods of war in the east of the country not far from the borders with China and Korea. In 1942 he was assigned to the 88th Separate Rifle Brigade or 88th International Brigade which was sent back to Korea to continue the insurgency against the Japanese occupation. Kim’s personal life enter

ed a significant phase in the midst of the war. In 1941 he married Kim Jong-Suk, a Korean woman who had been orphaned in the early 1930s after her family had also gone into exile in Manchuria before the Japanese in turn conquered that region. In the mid-1930s when she was entering her late teens, she joined the Korean resistance movement. In the late 1930s she is alleged to have saved Kim from an attempted assassination by the Japanese and their relationship soon began. Shortly after they were m

arried in 1941 she gave birth to her and Kim’s first child, a boy who was named Yuri Irsenovich Kim seemingly in recognition of his being born while the Kims were under Soviet protection in Russia, though other accounts state that he was born in Korea itself in 1942. This may have been changed later to ensure that the son, better known as Kim Jong Il, was asserted to have been born in Korea. Two further children, a boy name Kim Man-Il and a daughter named Kim Kyong-Hui, both born in the mid-1940

s, followed. They would largely grow up knowing only their father. Kim’s first wife, Kim Jong-Suk, died in the autumn of 1949. The cause of her premature death while still in her early thirties is not entirely clear, though it may have been owing to complications from a further pregnancy and general ill health which developed during her many years as a guerrilla fighter in the 1930s and 1940s. All of that lay ahead. Back in the early 1940s in the first years of their marriage Kim and his first w

ife continued to fight against the Japanese occupation of Korea. Back in the peninsula the number of Koreans who were being drafted into the Japanese economy or even the military was growing month by month as the Japanese war effort declined precipitously. The decision to attack Pearl Harbour in Hawaii and initiate a war against the Americans in December 1941 was a fatal one for the Japanese. While they initially succeeded in 1942 in conquering a vast array of territory across the Western Pacifi

c and Southeast Asia, eventually even threatening British India, ultimately the resources which the United States and Britain, who now allied with both the Chinese communists and nationalists, were too great and even with the Allies focusing primarily on defeating Nazi Germany in Europe between 1942 and 1945, the Americans had still made major progress in liberating much of the Western Pacific from the Japanese by the early summer of 1945 when Germany finally surrendered in Europe. With victory

in Europe the Soviet Union, which had avoided outright war with the Japanese in order to pump all its resources into fighting the Germans on the Eastern Front in Europe, now honoured its alliance with the US and declared war on the Empire of Japan in early August 1945. In the days that followed the Red Army conquered Manchuria in a blistering military campaign. Then, when the Japanese surrendered following the dropping of the atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans,

the Russians sent their forces further south to occupy the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, while the Americans occupied the southern part, an arrangement which had been pre-agreed by the two Allied powers. The roots of the division of the Korean Peninsula into two states and the rise of the Kim family to dominate one of those same states were sown by the occupation of the peninsula by the Soviets and the Americans in the autumn of 1945. Even before the war had come to an end the Allied l

eaders had been drawing the political and military lines which would divide the world during the Cold War, with the Western Allies, for instance, demanding that certain countries in Europe such as Greece would be occupied by their forces and would be reconstructed along western lines, while others such as Poland would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence. Korea was to effectively be divided into a Soviet sphere in the north and a US sphere in the south, the dividing line being the 38th paral

lel. As soon as the war ended the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, and his leading ministers turned their attention to who might lead the new Soviet state on the Korean peninsula. There were numerous candidates, especially Jo Man-Sik, a longstanding Korean nationalist, yet they ultimately selected Kim after the chief of Soviet security, Lavrentiy Beria, met with him several times and confirmed to Stalin that he believed him to be an ideal candidate. And so it was that Kim Il Sung returned to Korea,

doing so legally and not as a guerrilla fighter for the first time in a quarter of a century in September 1945. A few weeks later he was confirmed as the First Secretary and head of the Communist Party of Korea and as such the de-facto leader of the Soviet-occupied territory. It was in many ways a peculiar appointment. Having lived nearly his entire life in China, Kim was largely unable to speak Korean and had to take lessons in the language of the country he was now governing. The years that f

ollowed were divisive ones for the former Allied nations. In Europe there was growing difficulty surrounding the divided status of Germany, while in China the US and Britain had been supporting the Nationalist Kuomintang against the Soviet-backed communists in the civil war which resumed as soon as the Japanese were defeated. The divisions soon spread to Korea as well. In the course of 1947 and early 1948 the Americans under the auspices of the newly established United Nations determined to pres

s ahead with organising national elections for the whole of the Korean Peninsula, a plan which if successful would possibly have seen Kim disappear from the annals of international politics as quickly as he had made his appearance. But both he and his supporters in Moscow were determined to avoid this and stated their unwillingness to participate in the new elections. In response the Americans and their Korean allies south of the 38th parallel acted unilaterally to hold elections in the south in

the summer of 1948, following which Syngman Rhee, a figure who would become an authoritarian ruler, was elected as the first president of the nation. The creation of the Republic of Korea, known widely as South Korea, was declared on the 15th of August 1948. In response elections were held in the Soviet territory on the 25th of August and two weeks later, on the 9th of September, the creation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea, was proclaimed with Kim as its

first Premier. The first months of Kim’s term as Premier of the newly established North Korea witnessed a broad continuation of policies which had been implemented since late 1945. These were in line with Soviet and communist ideology more broadly, as Korea’s industries were nationalised and farms were collectivised to place food production broadly under government control. Labour reforms were introduced and a broad range of other measures were adopted to create a more centralised managed econo

my. In a growing sign of the manner in which Kim’s government was indicating its aspirations to control the entire peninsula the Workers’ Party of North Korea became the Workers’ Party of Korea. Already in 1949 Kim had begun supporting communist insurgencies in South Korea, while the end of the Chinese Civil War that same year saw tens of thousands of Koreans who had fought for the Chinese communists over the years returning to North Korea armed and trained. With the timing seeming propitious Ki

m now began pressing for an invasion of South Korea and petitioned Stalin in Moscow for his approval of this approach. The Soviets agreed, their intelligence-gathering having incorrectly concluded that the US would be reluctant to intervene in any such conflict on behalf of South Korea. It was Kim that was the driving force behind the move to launch the war, yet it should be noted that in the South, Syngman Rhee was also ratcheting up his government’s rhetoric of conquering North Korea and uniti

ng the peninsula under his rule. The Korean War began on the 25th of June 1950 when Kim ordered the North Korean People’s Army, which numbered around 135,000 men at the time, over the border into South Korea. At this juncture his forces had a distinct numerical advantage, as the Republic of Korea Army numbered not much over 90,000. Moreover, the North Koreans were better trained and armed, many of them being veterans of the Chinese Civil War and the resistance movement against the Japanese occup

ation of Korea in years gone by. They quickly overran South Korea, capturing the capital Seoul just three days after the invasion commenced. Nobody emerged from the initial engagements looking good in retrospect. For instance, Syngman Rhee used the opportunity created by the disorder to massacre some of his political opponents within South Korea. On the 3rd of July Incheon fell to the North Koreans and by then South Korean forces had been devastated by casualties and mass desertion. Yet the US g

overnment and military was quick to react, contrary to the expectations of both Kim and the Soviet leadership in Moscow. By early July American forces, which were still stationed around the Western Pacific since the end of the Second World War, were landing in South Korea and preparing for a counterattack. Yet a large troop build-up would take some time and the Americans were anxious to secure the co-operation of their allies in the conflict as well. Consequently, the North Koreans continued to

push south through July and August and had nearly conquered all of South Korea when a major defensive perimeter was established by the US and its UN allies around Pusan in the extreme south of Korea. The successful defence of the Pusan Perimeter in the early autumn of 1950 ensured Kim’s government did not conquer the whole of the peninsula. The offensive during the first two months of the war was the most successful period of the Korean War for Kim and his government. By September large numbers

of American troops and ships were arriving across the Pacific to Korea and with this a major counter-offensive was initiated, beginning with an amphibious invasion of the region around Incheon. In tandem the Americans and their allies broke out of the Pusan Perimeter and began pushing back the North Koreans. Seoul was recaptured on the 27th of September and two weeks later American forces crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea. On the 19th of October they captured Pyongyang, the capital of N

orth Korea. Kim might have become something of a footnote of twentieth century history at this juncture, his reign ending after just a few years as Premier of North Korea, had it not been for China’s intervention. Six days after US and South Korean forces entered Pyongyang, Chinese troops crossed the Yula River into North Korea. A major offensive by the government of Mao Zedong followed, during which China and America were effectively at war with one another, and saw the Chinese push the America

ns and United Nations forces back into South Korea by December, capturing Seoul yet again for the North Koreans on the 7th of January 1951. A further American counter-offensive in the spring saw Seoul captured again by the Americans and South Koreans in early April, the fourth time it had changed occupier in nine months. In the aftermath of the Fourth Battle of Seoul the war stabilized to a significant extent, with both sides now aware that the conflict was simply leading to ever greater escalat

ions and troop build-ups as one side gained the initiative and the other having to commit ever greater numbers of men. As this realisation dawned in the late spring of 1951 both sides stopped trying to overrun the peninsula and the conflict instead descended into a war of attrition along the 38th parallel near the pre-war borders of North Korea and South Korea. Kim seems to have been a driving force behind this on the communist side. Records which have come to light from Soviet archives indicate

that by the second half of 1951 he had realised that the peninsula could not be unified under North Korean rule and was now anxious to end the war. That would never be achieved. Instead after two further years of border warfare the Korean Armistice Agreement was entered into on the 27th of July 1953 signed by Kim and Syngman Rhee. This created a demilitarised zone on both sides of the border at the 38th parallel. However, it did not bring the war to an end and even today, seventy years later, t

he two nations are still technically at war with one another. With his goal of unifying the peninsula under his rule in ruins, Kim set about consolidating his control over North Korea in the mid-1950s, his position having been weakened by the failure of the war. Much of this focused on cultivating a cult of personality that mirrored those created in Russia by Joseph Stalin and by many other totalitarian rulers in the twentieth century. As early as 1949 the first large statues of Kim began appear

ing in city centres and other public spaces around North Korea. The first references to Kim as Suryong, meaning the ‘Great Leader’, date to the same time and as the years went by an increasing number of grandiose titles such as ‘Great Chairman’, ‘Heavenly Leader’, ‘The Sun’ and ‘Double Hero’ were applied to him. Similarly, there was a growing tendency in official histories and state propaganda to depict Kim and the troops he commanded from the mid-1930s onwards as almost single-handedly defeatin

g the Japanese and ending the occupation of Korea. As with any twentieth-century totalitarian dictator, the national press became an arm of state propaganda, with national newspapers and radio broadcasts disseminating ‘words of instruction’ from the great leader. The education system developed as a form of state indoctrination as well from the 1950s onwards. This cult of leadership intensified as Kim’s reign went on and has only become stronger over the decades. For instance, since the 1990s the

calender system in North Korea uses Kim’s birth date on the 15th of April 1912 as the beginning of recorded time in North Korea. The development of this cult of personality was closely related to the emergence of the Juche ideology in North Korea from the 1950s onwards, a political ideology which like the personality cult of the Kim family has marked North Korea as distinct from the other communist regimes that developed in so many countries in the aftermath of the Second World War. The term is

derived from a word which appeared in Japanese translations of the works of Karl Marx in the early twentieth century and essentially means ‘self-reliance’ or ‘autonomy’. It concerned the manner in which Kim tried to fashion a new form of communism which emphasised more the nation state and Korean nationalism, an approach which differed from most communist states which were internationalist in outlook. This Juche ideology is consequently more ultra-nationalist than communist and, when combined w

ith the cult of personality surrounding Kim and his family, has the shape of a quasi-religion. Eventually, in 1974 its core tenets were outlined in a published mandate entitled Ten Principles for the Establishment of a Monolithic Ideological System. This contained prescriptions for the North Korean people to honour Kim as the leader of the nation, to acknowledge his absolute authority and for all to make the nation strong by acting in unison to develop a powerful military and government. In 1982

the Juche Tower, a large monument in honour of the ideology, was erected dominating the Pyongyang skyline. The general drift of the Kim dictatorship in the late 1940s and early 1950s perhaps made the events of the mid-1950s when North Korea drifted away from the Soviet Union somewhat inevitable. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced the excesses of the Stalinist era and began a process of De-Stalinization, an aspect of which was a move away from the kind of

intense cult of personality which Kim was intent on developing in North Korea. Communist leaders elsewhere were not as keen on Khrushchev’s new approach and both Kim in North Korea and Mao Zedong in China opposed this Soviet revisionism. This in turn led the Soviets to offer clandestine support to a faction within North Korea which opposed Kim and sought to establish a more collegial form of communist government where power would be dispersed amongst senior party members rather than centralised

in Kim’s hands. The result at the second session of the 3rd Central Committee of the Worker’s Party of Korea in late August of 1956 was an effort by his opponents to undermine Kim’s position. However, he struck quickly in retaliation, purging the party of several of his opponents in an event which has come to be known as the August Faction Incident. When the governments in both Moscow and Beijing called for Kim to cease the purges in September he made some effort to do so, but over the course o

f the next two to three years many of those who had even been remotely connected with the opposition faction in 1956 disappeared or were stripped of any authority within the North Korean communist movement. By the early 1960s a quarter of the senior party figures had been purged and many were ultimately killed as Kim ensured that there would be no opposition to his rule going forward. A large number of those who were purged in the late 1950s ended up within the North Korean system of labour and

penal camps. Under Kim these developed into an instrument of state terror, rife with abuses and dreadful conditions. There are different types of camps and prisons in the country, some being Kwalliso, a type of labour camp for political prisoners, others being what are deemed ‘re-education’ camps, and others effectively being death camps where inmates are provided with little more than starvation rations and used as slave labour until maltreatment or disease kills them. The system was beginning

from the late 1940s onwards as Kim directly imitated the Gulag system which had been developed in Siberia in Russia under Stalin. Interment from the inception of the system often involved people being imprisoned with only a veneer of a trial and due process. One of the more notorious such facilities was the Hoeryong concentration camp in the far north-east of North Korea near the Russian and Chinese borders. Better known as Camp 22, the North Korean defector and former prison guard, Ahn Chol, de

scribed how a large percentage of prisoners there were mutilated from prisoner abuse and that an average of five prisoners died every day, many from starvation and overwork, while conditions were appalling with prisoners held in cramped bunkhouses, without access to proper water and with vermin and insects rife. This system has seemingly become worse under Kim’s son and grandson, but the roots of it lie firmly in his own long reign as ruler of North Korea. In 1957, even as the purges following t

he August Faction Incident were still underway, Kim oversaw the creation of the Songbun caste system in North Korea. This was promulgated through a decree entitled ‘On the Transformation of the Struggle with Counterrevolutionary Elements into an All-People All-Party Movement’. Through this the people of North Korea were classified into three main groups, these being people who were ‘loyal’ known as haeksim, people who were ‘wavering’ termed dongyo and people who were ‘hostile’ to the state calle

d choktae. Eventually over time upwards of 50 sub-categorisations were created, but in effect the three main tiers are the important ones. As the Songbun system developed it led to files being kept on virtually every citizen in North Korea identifying their loyalty to the regime and categorising them accordingly. When it was first created people were often categorised according to their social status in pre-revolutionary Korea, with people who had been adherents of the Japanese occupation, for i

nstance, being categorised as choktae or hostiles. Their children have inherited this status and it can be difficult to move into a different rung in the caste system. The implications of this can be dramatic for one’s life prospects in North Korea. This was made most clear in the 1990s when a brutal famine gripped the country and during which the loyal or haeksim caste were given preferential treatment in the distribution of food. The peculiar development of the North Korean system, with its Ju

che ideology and Songbun caste system, saw North Korea drift further away from the Soviet Union from the 1950s onwards, although relations were better between Kim and the new Soviet Premier, Leonid Brezhnev, from 1964 onwards than they were during the decade that Khrushchev was in charge. The situation was more difficult with China, where the advent of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 saw a growing split between Mao and Kim. In this situation, where the international unity of communism was frac

tured, Kim leaned more towards finding allies in smaller communist and totalitarian states in the 1960s and into the 1970s. He developed a close working relationship with the leader of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, who visited Pyongyang in 1978, as well as several African dictators such as the president of Zaire, Joseph Mobutu, whose bloody rule developed along similar lines to that of Kim’s. In the late 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, Kim moved to foster close relations with Ho Chi Minh

and the North Vietnamese, who he admired for their success in seemingly winning a war against the US in very similar circumstances to the war Kim had tried to wage in the early 1950s himself. Others were less welcoming of the North Korean dictator. The ruler of Albania, Enver Hoxha, condemned him as being a communist ruler who had little interest in Marxist-Leninism of any kind, a broadly accurate assessment of a tyrant who seems to have ended up in the communist camp simply because it was the o

ne which had held out a path to power for him in the 1940s. In 1968 Kim came close to reigniting the war with South Korea, which had never officially ended. Since 1966 there had been growing unease around the demilitarised zone between the two nations as Cold War tensions in the Far East reached a new height in the context of the US immersion into the Vietnam War. Then in the May 1967 South Korean presidential election the dictator Park Chung-Hee won re-election. These events led Kim to authoris

e a 31-man team from the Korean People’s Army to travel clandestinely into South Korea in January 1968 with the goal of heading to the capital Seoul and assassinating Chung Hee in the Blue House, the official residence of the South Korean president at the time. After passing over the Demilitarised Zone, the North Korean commandos managed to get within 100 metres of the Blue House while disguised as South Korean soldiers. At this critical juncture though they were identified and a shoot-out occur

red. The commandos then fled and were pursued for several days. By the time the chase ended only two of the 31 were alive, one being captured and one fleeing back to North Korea. 26 South Koreans and four Americans were killed, with dozens more injured. The Blue House Raid led to a temporary crisis in the Korean peninsula and Chung Hee’s government authorised the establishment of Unit 684 to begin plotting a means of assassinating Kim in response, but a re-ignition of the war was avoided. As the

crisis following the Blue House Raid was dying down, Kim and his closest advisors were considering the need for a new constitution for the country, one which would take account of the massive social and political changes which had occurred since the first emergence of the country in 1948. Discussions continued until 1972 when a committee was formed to work out the new document. When it was finally proclaimed on the 27th of December 1972 it had implications for Kim’s position. He would no longer

hold the office of Premier of North Korea, but now became its first President. In the wider sense the new constitution gave formal recognition to the ideology and governmental system which Kim had created over the previous twenty years, with much discussion in its various parts of the elements of the Juche ideology and Kim’s position as the great leader of North Korea. The document was still steeped in the language of communism, with talk of the complete victory of socialism in time to come. Th

e specifics were detailed, with provisions for things such as universal education and the development of Korean culture and technology, as well as human rights and the duties of citizens. If one were to read the document it would appear in places to aspire to create a utopia, but in reality, the constitution of 1972 only further embedded the dystopia that Kim had overseen the creation of in North Korea. By the time he transitioned from being the Premier of North Korea to its President, many peop

le close to Kim might have speculated that he did not have long left to live. Beginning in the 1960s the dictator had begun to suffer from calcinosis, a rare condition which causes calcium deposits to build up in a part of a person’s body, often forming into a benign tumour. In Kim’s case this began to form at the back of his neck and in one photo from 1970 when he met the Chinese communist leader, Mao Zedong, there is already a noticeable lump at the back of his head. This only got bigger as th

e years went by and by the 1980s it had expanded to the size of a baseball. Many must have wondered if the growth would eventually prove fatal. It didn’t, yet it must have caused substantial discomfort. Despite this, Kim refused to have it operated on, which could have been done quite easily, as the President had developed an extreme paranoia around the idea of having a medical operation carried out. On a practical level, the growth made life awkward for the regime’s propagandists in the last de

cades of Kim’s life as he insisted that it not be on display to the public, so photographs and video footage had to constantly be produced without showing the back of his head. The regime had more to worry about in the 1970s than just Kim’s growing calcium tumour. The problems of the North Korean economy which have defined the country in modern times were starting to appear. Although it is difficult to imagine today, given the backward nature of the North Korean economy by comparison with the te

chnological powerhouse that is South Korea, in the 1950s and for much of the 1960s, North Korea’s economy actually fared better than that of the South. Two and three-year economic plans from the late 1940s onwards had proved successful and by 1957 Kim’s government had managed to return the country’s heavy industrial capacity back to what it had been prior to the war and reversed the damage which had occurred at that time. The late 1950s and early 1960s were then a period of real economic growth

in North Korea and it appeared that Kim’s state might emerge as a substantial industrial economy. However, from the mid-1960s things began to stall as over-investment in defence spending, combined with a lack of innovation and a misguided focus on creating a self-sufficient economy led to the targets of a Seven Year Plan between 1961 and 1967 and a Six Year Plan from 1971 to 1976 being missed by significant margins. These issues, combined with flaws in the centralised state planning commission,

continued into the 1980s, at which time the failures of the Six and Seven Year Plans was evident in the fact that they were not as widely publicised. All the same, while North Korea’s economy had begun to falter dramatically from the mid-1960s onwards, the major economic woes of the North Korean state were not to really develop until the 1990s when the end of the Cold War left the country isolated and huge sanctions on trade with it were introduced internationally. In response to the developing

economic problems of the country Kim ordered the establishment of Room 39 or Office No. 39 as a means of funding his own family’s lavish expenses. Named after an office number in the building where it was initially headquartered in Pyongyang, Room 39 was in charge of generating a large cash flow to provide funding for Kim and his family members and funding for specialised projects which they were engaged in, or the ‘court economy’ of North Korea, as some commentators have termed it. The methods

used by Room 39 to raise money have been extraordinarily varied. Some of its activities included the counterfeiting of foreign currencies, especially $100 notes, as well as fraudulent activity in international banking and insurance. Latterly Room 39 became involved in the international narcotics trade, with amphetamines, opiates and other drugs being processed in North Korea and exported, albeit this has largely been a development under the reigns of Kim’s son and grandson. Today Room 39’s activ

ities even involve management of the Pyongyang restaurant chain which has over a hundred outlets internationally. Kim was in many ways also responsible for the first emergence of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme. In 1963 he had made a request to the Soviet government for them to provide technical expertise to his regime to begin developing a nuclear weapon. While, this was rejected by the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, he did agree to send some Soviet engineers to North Korea to aid in

the development of the Yongbon Nuclear Scientific Research Centre with a view to Kim’s government gradually developing nuclear capabilities for energy purposes. Developments were such in this and another facility by the 1980s that a nuclear weapons programme was tentatively initiated. Despite these efforts Kim agreed that North Korea would become a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985. In reality, the country continued to develop its nuclear capabilities and in 1993 it made

its first moves towards abandoning participation in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That said, the country would only carry out a confirmed test of a nuclear weapon in 2006, long after Kim’s death and North Korea’s emergence as a pariah nuclear state has largely occurred under his son and grandson. Kim’s final years were turbulent ones. As he entered his late seventies he began to turn over a range of responsibilities to his son and heir, Kim Jong Il, even as the world was changing around them. I

n the late 1980s the Cold War which the state of North Korea had been born out of, came to a rather dramatic end as the new head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, began reforming the Russian-led state and inadvertently brought about its collapse. As this occurred a huge number of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world either collapsed or abandoned their pretensions towards being Marxist-Leninist states. North Korea would be one of the few countries that resisted t

his drift of events, preserving its own brand of ultra-nationalist authoritarianism. The consequences of this were that North Korea became increasingly isolated on the world stage in the early 1990s and it lost its trading partners and allies. Although the country’s economy had been declining for decades, the end of the Cold War brought fresh problems. Despite such developments, the regime continued to have delusions of grandeur. In the mid-1980s, in response to the granting of the honour of hos

ting the Summer Olympics in Seoul in South Korea, a country which had moved past its own authoritarian period of politics to become the technologically advanced economy and country we know today, Kim’s regime ordered the construction of a vast new stadium in Pyongyang. Finished in 1989, the Rungrado 1st of May Stadium, can accommodate 150,000 people and is the largest stadium in the world. Kim would not live to see many performances at the stadium or much of how the new world order would begin t

o develop following the end of the Cold War. He turned eighty in April 1992. A formal event was held which was attended by dozens of world leaders or their representatives, a gathering which highlighted the manner in which Kim, as tyrannical as his rule was, was still an international leader with friends and allies on the world stage, unlike his successors. He was in relatively good health still at this event and his demise when it came two years later was sudden. He suffered a heart attack on t

he 7th of July 1994 and died hours later in the early morning of the 8th of July at a country retreat in the north of Korea. A state funeral was held a week and a half later, following which Kim’s body was preserved and placed in a glass coffin on display in the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun. This was a grand palace which Kim had constructed in Pyongyang in the mid-1970s as the official residence of the President, one which was transformed following his death into a giant mausoleum. When his son di

ed 17 years later, he was interred there as well and the palace has consequently become a family mausoleum and one of the most significant sites of the regime. As Kim aged, the issue of the succession had become more prominent in North Korean politics. After the death of his first wife in childbirth in 1949, he had remarried to Kim Song-ae in 1952. He is believed to have had three further children through this marriage and it is also believed that he also fathered some illegitimate children. The

issue of the succession was not set in stone, until the early 1980s when Kim’s eldest son, Kim Jong Il, born in the Soviet Union back in 1941, was acknowledged as the heir designate. He duly succeeded upon his father’s death. Unlike his father, who for all his flaws had risen to power on at least some political ability, Kim Jong Il had inherited his power and displayed many of the personality peculiarities of an inherited dictatorship, investing much of his energies on building DVD collections,

staging plays and watching basketball matches, as well as excessive drinking, traits which are even more exacerbated in his own son and successor, Kim Jong Un. Kim Jong Il ruled North Korea for seventeen years after his father’s death. The first years of his time as the dictator of the country were dominated by a catastrophic famine, the roots of which had been sown in the latter stages of his father’s reign. Because North Korea is the most secretive and closed nation on earth it remains unclea

r to this day exactly how many people died during the famine which went on from 1994 to 1998. The upper estimates of 3.5 million are probably excessive, but it is plausible that a million or more people died out of a population of 22 million people, while millions more were left malnourished. This set the tone for the rule of Kim Jong Il and his son, Kim Jong Un, who succeeded him in 2011. Under the Kim family North Korea has remained a brutal dictatorship, with repressive policies, human rights

abuses and an enormous military establishment. The country’s economic and social development has met with one catastrophe after another, with food shortages and lack of electricity being a daily occurrence for many North Koreans, but under Kim Il Sung’s son and grandson the country’s nuclear arms programme has become stronger and stronger. Thus, as brutal and backwards as the regime may be, little can be done by the outside world to remove the Kims from power without risking a nuclear war in ea

st Asia. And there are no signs of it reforming itself anytime soon. For better or for worse, and few would argue it has been for the better, Kim Il Sung is the most significant figure in the history of modern Korea. In his early life he emerged as the leader of the Korean communist movement in exile against Japanese occupation of the peninsula. The end of the Second World War and the Soviet occupation of the northern half of the peninsula provided the opportunity for him to rise to power over N

orth Korea, following its emergence as a rival to the western-aligned South Korea. It was all negative from there. His first action was to launch a war against South Korea which lasted for three years and became the first major clash of the Cold War. The conflict has theoretically never ended and the Korean Peninsula remains divided by a demilitarised border zone. At home he set the tone for a North Korean regime which has committed appalling human rights abuses for the last three-quarters of a

century. There were some initial spring shoots in the economic development of North Korea in the decade or so following the end of the war with South Korea, yet even this ran aground in the 1970s and 1980s on the back of the misguided efforts to make North Korea self-sufficient. The famine which followed immediately after Kim’s death was sown by his government’s policy. Admittedly, things have become worse in North Korea under his son and grandson, particularly owing to their unwillingness to ab

andon their nuclear policy and the sanctions that have followed internationally as a result, as well as the kleptocratic behaviour of the regime, but the nature of the totalitarian, pariah-state that North Korea has become was first shaped by Kim Il Sung. What do you think of Kim Il Sung? Was he a strong and capable leader through a succession of conflicts, or was he completely responsible for turning North Korea into the pariah state it is today? Please let us know in the comment section, and i

n the meantime, thank you very much for watching.