Kim Il Sung

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kim Il Sung arrived at the Korean port of Wonsan on the 19th of September 1945, stepping off a ship as a 33-year-old captain in the Soviet Red Army after 26 years away from the peninsula. According to one Soviet official, he had been "created from zero." His Korean was, at best, marginal. He had only eight years of formal education, all of it conducted in Chinese. And yet this man would go on to rule the country he was about to claim for more than 45 years, outlasting allies like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, surviving ten American presidents, and leaving behind a dynasty that continues to govern North Korea today.

  How did a guerrilla fighter who needed to be coached through his first speech end up founding one of the most enduring authoritarian states on earth? What does it take to build a personality cult so total that your portrait hangs in every train station and airport in a country, and your birthday becomes a national holiday called the Day of the Sun? And what happened to the nation of people who lived under his rule for nearly half a century? The story of Kim Il Sung spans guerrilla camps in Manchuria, a devastating war that killed more than 2.5 million people, a caste system imposed on an entire society, and a death in 1994 that prompted ten days of national mourning. This documentary follows each of those threads.

• 2. Roots and Resistance

  ›

  Kim was born Kim Song Ju on the 15th of April 1912, in or near the village of Mangyongdae-guyok outside Pyongyang, in what was then Japanese-ruled Korea. His father, Kim Hyong-jik, was an independence activist and an elder in the Presbyterian Church who had attended a missionary school. His maternal grandfather was a Protestant minister. Kim later said he was raised by a very active Presbyterian Christian family, one that was, by his account, always a step away from poverty.

  Japanese repression of Korean opposition was relentless. In 1912 alone, more than 52,000 Korean citizens were arrested and detained. Kim's father participated in the anti-Japanese March First Movement of 1919, and that same May, he packed up the family and crossed into China, settling in Badaogou to escape the violence sweeping the peninsula.

  The young Kim who arrived in China absorbed the radicalism around him quickly. By his teenage years he had become a communist. At the age of seventeen he became the youngest member of the Korean Communist Youth Association, an underground organization with fewer than twenty members, led by a man named Ho So. The police discovered the group just three weeks after it formed in 1929, and Kim spent several months in jail. His formal education was over.

  From that point on, Kim moved through a succession of guerrilla organizations in northern China, eventually joining the Chinese Communist Party in 1931, the same year Japan occupied northeast China following the Mukden incident. He worked as a propagandist, joined partisan units, and by 1935 had taken the name Kim Il Sung, meaning "Kim become the sun." That name would carry enormous weight; some historians would later question whether he had borrowed it from an earlier resistance hero, a claim disputed by his wartime comrades and by historian Andrei Lankov.

• 3. The Guerrilla Years

  ›

  On the 4th of June 1937, Kim led 200 guerrillas in a raid on Poch'onbo, destroying government offices and setting fire to a Japanese police station and post office. The Japanese military took notice. Kim appeared on their wanted lists under the nickname "the Tiger." In February 1940, a unit called the Maeda Unit was deployed specifically to hunt him down.

  The Japanese also used other methods. In 1940, they kidnapped a woman named Kim Hye-sun, believed to have been Kim's first wife, and used her as a hostage to try to pressure his guerrillas into surrendering. She was killed when that effort failed.

  By the end of 1940, Kim was the only surviving leader of the 1st Army. On the 23rd of October 1940, he and a dozen fighters crossed the Amur River into the Soviet Union to escape pursuing Japanese troops. The Soviets sent him to a camp at Vyatskoye near Khabarovsk, where Korean communist guerrillas were retrained. In August 1942, Kim was assigned to the 88th Separate Rifle Brigade of the Soviet Red Army, where his immediate superior was Zhou Baozhong. He served there until the end of World War II.

  During the brutal Minsaengdan purge within the Chinese Communist Party, which resulted in more than 1,000 Koreans being expelled and 500 killed, Kim himself was arrested in late 1933 and exonerated in early 1934. According to his memoirs and those of other guerrillas, he seized and burned the purge committee's suspect files, breaking the cycle of accusation. Historian Suzy Kim writes that he "emerged from the purge as a definitive leader, not only for the bold move but also for his compassion." That reputation would become the seed of something far larger.

• 4. Soviet Installation

  ›

  When the Soviet Red Army entered Pyongyang on the 24th of August 1945, it needed someone to govern the northern half of Korea. The intelligence section of the 25th Army drew up a list of candidates, and Kim's name was not on it. What changed was a chance impression. Soviet General Grigory Mekler visited the 88th Separate Rifle Brigade, met Kim, and wrote a positive assessment. That report reached Soviet generals Maksim Purkayev and Iosif Shikin, who summoned Kim to evaluate him as a possible deputy commandant of Pyongyang.

  By late October 1945, deputy premier Georgiy Malenkov, deputy commissar of defense Nikolai Bulganin, and Iosif Shikin were all recommending Kim for leadership. Lavrentiy Beria met Kim several times and brought his name to Stalin. Stalin's final decision passed through Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, then to General Terentii Shtykov, and then down to the 25th Army. In December 1945, Kim was installed as first secretary of the North Korean Branch Bureau of the Communist Party of Korea.

  The Soviets had initially preferred another man, Cho Man-sik, to lead a popular front government. Cho refused to endorse Soviet-backed trusteeship, clashed with Kim, and was set aside. On the 8th of February 1946, General Shtykov backed Kim to chair the Provisional People's Committee for North Korea. Kim remained, in practice, subordinate to Shtykov until the Chinese intervention in the Korean War.

  On the 1st of March 1946, while Kim was giving a speech to mark the anniversary of the March First Movement, a member of the anti-communist White Shirts Society threw a grenade at his podium. Soviet military officer Yakov Novichenko grabbed it and absorbed the blast with his body, leaving Kim unharmed. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea was formally proclaimed on the 10th of July 1948, and Kim was designated premier on the 9th of September.

• 5. The Korean War

  ›

  Archival material suggests the decision to invade South Korea in 1950 was Kim's initiative, not a Soviet directive. Soviet intelligence had gathered information on the limits of the United States' atomic stockpile and on defense budget cuts, leading Stalin to conclude that President Harry S. Truman's administration would not intervene. China acquiesced reluctantly, having been told by Kim that Stalin had already approved the plan.

  North Korean forces captured Seoul in the early weeks of the war and occupied most of the South, save for a small perimeter around Pusan in the southeast. But the US-led counterattack beginning with the landing at Incheon in September drove the North Koreans back. By October, US and South Korean troops had captured Pyongyang, forcing Kim and his government to flee north to Sinuiju and then to Kanggye.

  On the 25th of October 1950, Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River in large numbers and entered the war alongside the Korean People's Army. They retook Pyongyang in December and Seoul in January 1951. A grinding period of largely static trench warfare then followed, lasting from the summer of 1951 to July 1953, when a ceasefire fixed the Military Demarcation Line on the 27th of July 1953. Over 2.5 million people died in the conflict.

  Kim grew increasingly frustrated during the latter stages of the war. He had been warned that an amphibious landing at Incheon was likely and had ignored the warning. Chinese and Russian documents from that period show him pressing urgently for a truce, since the prospect of unifying Korea under his rule had grown remote. He also resented that Chinese forces had taken over the bulk of the fighting, with the Korean People's Army largely confined to the coastal flanks of the front line. Despite the failure to reunify Korea, Kim publicly declared victory in what he called the "Fatherland Liberation War."

• 6. Building the Totalitarian State

  ›

  On the 30th of May 1957, Kim published a document that divided the entire North Korean population into three permanent classes: "core," "wavering," and "hostile." This system, called songbun, was based on each person's political, social, and economic background, and it governed access to education, housing, employment, food, party membership, and even which part of the country a person was permitted to live in. Large numbers of those classified as hostile, including intellectuals, former landowners, and anyone who had cooperated with Japan's occupation, were forcibly relocated to isolated northern provinces. When famine came in the 1990s, those remote communities were hardest hit.

  The North Korean ambassador to the Soviet Union, Lee Sang-jo, reported that it had become a criminal offense to write on Kim's picture in a newspaper, and that more than 30,000 people were imprisoned for reasons as minor as not printing Kim's portrait on sufficiently high-quality paper, or using a newspaper bearing his image to wrap parcels. Grain confiscation from peasants, Lee reported, had produced at least 300 suicides.

  In May 1967, the Kapsan faction incident, in which veterans of the 1930s and 1940s anti-Japanese struggle challenged Kim for leadership, led to the introduction of the Monolithic Ideological System at the fifteenth plenum of the 4th Central Committee. It became compulsory to write Kim's name in a larger or bolder font. His birthday became the Day of the Sun. Local government-issued travel certificates, required for citizens to leave their home county, were introduced that same year. Even the Soviet Union's Pravda and China's People's Daily were banned, and the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were removed from libraries.

  Albanian leader Enver Hoxha wrote in June 1977 that in Pyongyang, even Yugoslav leader Tito would be astonished at the proportions of Kim's cult, which had reached a level, in Hoxha's words, "unheard of anywhere else, either in past or present times."

• 7. Economy, Famine, and Final Years

  ›

  By the 1960s, North Korea's standard of living was slightly higher than South Korea's, which was then struggling through political chaos and economic crises. That position reversed over the following decade. South Korea stabilized and transformed into an economic powerhouse drawing on Japanese and American investment. North Korea's economy, built on centralized planning and heavy industry, stagnated and then declined through the 1980s.

  In October 1983, North Korean agents attempted to assassinate South Korean president Chun Doo-hwan during a visit to Rangoon, Myanmar, killing 21 people. In November 1987, agents planted a bomb on Korean Air Flight 858, killing 115 people. The Revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union by 1992 cut off Soviet-subsidized oil supplies to North Korea's coal and chemical industries, contributing directly to the emergence of widespread famine.

  An internal CIA study acknowledged that in earlier decades, the North Korean government had achieved notable results in healthcare: before the famine, the country had a network of nearly 45,000 family practitioners, around 800 hospitals, and roughly 1,000 clinics. Life expectancy in the North had reached 72, only marginally lower than in the South. Those gains were erased as the economy collapsed.

  In early 1994, Kim began investing in nuclear power to offset energy shortages. On the 19th of May 1994, he ordered spent fuel to be unloaded from the nuclear research facility at Yongbyon. In June 1994, former US president Jimmy Carter traveled to Pyongyang and, to the astonishment of the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Kim agreed to halt the nuclear research program and appeared to be opening toward the West. He collapsed from a heart attack on the 7th of July 1994, at his residence in Hyangsan in North Pyongan, and died in the early hours of the 8th of July, aged 82. His death was not announced for 34 hours.

• 8. Legacy and the Eternal President

  ›

  Kim Jong Il declared a ten-day mourning period after his father's death. The funeral, originally scheduled for the 17th of July 1994, was delayed until the 19th, attended by hundreds of thousands of people brought into Pyongyang from across the country. Kim Il Sung's body was placed in the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun, where it lies in a glass coffin under the flag of the Workers' Party of Korea, his head resting on a traditional Korean pillow. In a 1998 amendment to the constitution, the position of president was abolished, and the preamble named Kim Il Sung the country's Eternal President.

  More than 500 statues of Kim stand across North Korea. His posthumous portrait, released in 1994, hangs at every North Korean train station and airport, and is placed prominently near border crossings with China. Thousands of gifts from foreign leaders are housed in the International Friendship Exhibition. His birthday remains a public holiday, and the April Spring Friendship Art Festival, gathering hundreds of artists from around the world, is held each year to mark it.

  The political prison camps known as kwanliso, where prisoners were forced into logging, mining, and agricultural labor in mountainous areas under conditions an internal CIA report described as often deadly, were a direct instrument of Kim's rule and continued operating after his death. Prisoners were denied medical care, adequate housing and clothing, and were subjected to torture and sexual violence. Not only dissenters but their entire extended families were reduced to the lowest songbun rank and many were incarcerated.

  According to North Korean sources, Kim Il Sung authored approximately 10,800 speeches, reports, books, and treatises. Shortly before his death, he published an eight-volume autobiography titled With the Century. The revolutionary theatrical opera The Flower Girl, credited to him, was adapted into a feature film in 1972. Kim Pyong Il, a son from his second marriage, served as ambassador to Hungary and later to the Czech Republic before officially retiring in 2019 and returning to North Korea, the latest figure in a dynastic succession that Kim had begun planning publicly at the 6th Party Congress in October 1980.