Kim Il Sung the Founder of North Korea

by Read Listen Learn

In July of 1994, the news broke around the world that the president of North Korea had just died. This was no surprise: he was eighty-two years old. What did surprise people all over the globe were the extraordinary scenes of grieving. Already, for outsiders, this was a rare look inside a closed country. Pyongyang, the capital, seemed sterile and unwelcoming with its huge concrete buildings and very wide avenues almost without traffic.

The people, too, looked other-worldly. Chronic famine had left most with a pinched look, and everyone, every single person, was wearing a very simple 'Mao' suit, shapeless and functional – grey for the workers, green for the many soldiers and blue for top communist party officials.

All of this was strange to non-Koreans watching but stranger still were the scenes of people throwing themselves to the ground, crying loudly, hitting themselves, pulling their hair out – all in public, millions of Koreans, and all because of the death of their 'Dear Leader', President Kim Il Sung.

What kind of man, on his death, could cause these great scenes of public emotion? And why did the country he had built, the Democratic Republic of North Korea, seem so different than anywhere else on earth?

Kim Il Sung was not even his real name (which is a matter of debate among experts). He had taken it from another, older Korean guerrilla leader during the 1930s when they had been fighting the Japanese who had invaded and colonised Korea in 1910.

'Kim' was born two years after this into a farming family. A lot of his past was rewritten when he became president for life but it seems his family was lower middle class: definitely not rich but not really poor either. Kim claimed they were always one step ahead of poverty. In fact, middle class or not, they were often just one step ahead of starvation as (possibly deliberate) mismanagement of the food supply by the Japanese wartime government killed off hundreds of thousands in the north of Korea. Many Koreans crossed the Yalu River into Manchuria to escape the hunger. Kim's family went too.

He grew up in Manchuria, learning Chinese and forgetting quite a lot of his native Korean tongue. It was here, too, that the teen-aged Kim became interested and actively involved in the socialist and communist politics that, in those years, were the topic of discussion all around him.

He joined a small, socialist party of about thirty men but the Manchurian police took only a couple of months to arrest them all. Kim went to prison for several months. When he came out, he soon joined the official Chinese Communists and was involved in guerrilla operations along the Korean border.

Kim had spent about a year in a military academy and was quickly promoted to lead a group of a few hundred guerrilla fighters. They enjoyed some small successes against the Japanese at a time when few in China or Korea could get the better of the aggressive and well-trained Japanese soldiers. But, by 1940, his luck had changed for the worse and, along with a few dozen survivors from his band of hundreds, he crossed the Manchurian border into the Soviet Union to ask the Russians for sanctuary and help.

He was received with open arms by the communist regime of Joseph Stalin. Kim, at once adopted the attitude of the admiring little brother, taking on Soviet policies and happily treating Stalin as a god-like figure to be obeyed and imitated. When his turn came to lead his country, Kim became just like Stalin, or worse.

At the very end of the Second World War, in August, 1945, Stalin declared war on the Japanese, joining the British and American fight against them now that Hitler and Germany had been defeated. No sooner had he done this than the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, causing the Japanese suddenly and absolutely to surrender. In the peace settlement, Stalin was asked to occupy the northern half of Korea, which bordered China and the Soviet Union. America would occupy the southern half of Korea, nearer to Japan.

This U.S./Soviet occupation of Korea was meant to last just a few years, until the Koreans could form a national government. But, what kind of government would it be? Determined to win the country for communism (and Russian influence), the Soviets immediately prepared Kim as the new leader, backed the Korean communists, north and south, and started to persecute non-communist politicians.

Seeing this, the U.S. started to put in place a new Republic of South Korea. They asked a deeply anti-communist Korean, Syngman Rhee, who had lived in America most of his life, to be the president. He spoke perfect American English and was surrounded by U.S. political agents. Both sides now had a puppet dictator in place, heading a government that suited their own needs and not those of the Korean people.

The border closed between the two halves of Korea and any idea of nationwide elections fell by the wayside when the Americans realised that the communists would win any fair, democratic contest. No-one could say when the country might be united again.

However, Kim thought he knew. He had begun planning an all-out ground attack on the South. A lightning strike that would see his new, Soviet-equipped army take the lower half of the country in days. Kim took his plan to his master, Stalin, who not only agreed to it but went on to reassure Kim that recent Soviet spy reports indicated that the U.S., secretly, no longer planned to defend the South in the event of trouble; and, that the U.S.-backed South Korean army was pathetically weak. If Kim's attack was successful, he would be leader of all Korea, and Stalin would add to his growing Soviet empire.

On the 25th of June, 1950, North Korean soldiers poured across the new border, regiment after regiment, and began to roll back the South Korean forces which proved weaker even than predicted by Kim and Stalin's spies. To Kim's surprise, the Americans decided to rush an American army over from their garrison in Japan. They managed to hold just one port, Pusan, and a little of the surrounding countryside. From here, they resupplied and reinforced and there now followed three years of war, running up and down the Korean peninsula.

The Americans and some other nations come to help under a U.N. flag, were very successful at first but took their counter-invasion of the North right up to the Chinese border on the Yalu River in what the American general, MacArthur, always intended to be a threatening gesture to communist China.

The Chinese, after giving strong diplomatic warnings, invaded the North and drove the U.S. and U.N forces all the way back down South. The Americans now counter-attacked and retook the South but, having learned a little respect for the Chinese, stopped in and around the original dividing line where both sides now dug trenches across the Korean peninsula from coast to coast.

The fighting continued and certain important hills and bridges were the scene of constant battle but the front line never really moved after this. And so it went on for two more years.

In 1953, peace talks were finally arranged and, in an atmosphere of intense hostility and suspicion, a line was drawn across the country following the trench lines. You couldn't call it 'peace' but there was, at least, an 'absence of war'. The division of Korea became permanent and, as Korean soldiers from both sides faced one another across the new border, both the Americans and the Soviets started strengthening the positions of their preferred puppet government. South Korea, after a couple of decades, became a little more democratic and enjoyed an economic boom, partly engineered by the Americans.

In the North, Kim remained Stalin's 'boy' until Stalin's death, and the split between the Soviets and the Chinese in the early 1960s drove him into the Chinese sphere of influence. He had, after all, grown up there. But, even his ties to the Chinese were weak and got weaker. Kim seemed determined to introduce a hard form of communism with no private property at all and no family rights. His dreams of a centrally planned, socialist economy providing modest comfort and happiness for all descended into famines, mass arrests and death camps. Only the 1970s Pol Pot regime in Cambodia was worse and that collapsed in just a few years. Kim lasted in power for more than half a century.

His police and prisons kept the common people in order but Kim also guaranteed their loyalty by building a 'cult of the personality' around himself just as his hero, Stalin, had done in his time. It took on a religiosity as vast icons of Kim appeared everywhere, smiling, handsome and confident.

Little children at school sang songs of praise to him as other children in other places are taught to sing about God. He was the greatest man who had ever lived, North Koreans were told, and his birthday became a national holiday. His past was rewritten, his insignificant guerrilla activities in the 1930s became timeless military victories – he alone had organised victory over the Japanese in Korea.

With absolutely no outside contacts or information, the North Korean people were shaped from the moment they were born by this constant propaganda and Kim became, for them, something like a great Chinese emperor: one of the gods. His supposed goodness and perfection were influenced by perceptions of Jesus Christ among Koreans, many of whom are Christians. Kim's family had been very devout and, so, it was surely no accident.

Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and, with it, the end of the communist bloc did not change anything in North Korea. The North Korean people were never officially told of how the outside world had changed. So, when Kim finally died in 1994, the scenes of exaggerated public grief were the result of more than half a century of his growing personality cult but, many have suggested, at least some of the North Koreans were play-acting, knowing that anything less than extreme sadness at the tragic news could invite a violent attack.

After his death, Kim was named 'Eternal President' and his son, Kim Jong Il, took over just as a prince takes the crown when his father, the king, dies. Korea remains the same to this day – a severe, communist regime, like a fossil from the mid-twentieth century. And the Kim dynasty continues. When Kim Jong Il died in 2011, his son took over, making no real changes to the system his grandfather had put in place.