Leaders
DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA 12 APRIL 1912 - 8 JULY 1994
Seasoned generals and wily politicians clashed on the battlefield and across the negotiating table
The life of the North Korean state’s founding father is shrouded in myth. He is alternately vilified in South Korea as an evil dictator and adulated almost as a deity in the North.
Although the narrative of his early life is uncertain, it is known that he was born Kim Jong-su to a middle class, possibly Christian, family in Mangyondae, today a suburb of Pyongyang. In 1920, with the Japanese in control of Korea, the family relocated to Manchuria, north east China, where he became interested in left-wing politics in his teens.
Having been imprisoned by China’s Nationalist government in 1929, he joined the Communist Party of China in 1931 and soon took the alias of Kim Il-sung (of the Sun), the name of a local folk hero. With Chinese training, he returned to Korea as an anti-japanese partisan, leading several hundred men in guerrilla attacks. By 1940 he had escaped the Japanese authorities and received political and military training at the Soviet party school in Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. Stalin favoured Kim for leading the most loyal of Korea’s communist factions, and he entered Pyongyang with the Red Army in October 1945.
Within three years the Korean Peninsula had been partitioned along the 38th parallel of latitude into a Soviet-backed North and anti-communist South. Border incursions by both regimes regularly took place. Kim attained Stalin’s blessing for a strike against South Korea in early 1950 but the latter assumed the United States would not intervene militarily. China’s leader Chairman Mao Zedong acquiesced to the action but did not intervene militarily until October 1950, as the American-led UN taskforce approached the Yalu River.
After the war ended, Kim Il-sung conducted brutal purges of his ruling Korean Workers’ Party, eliminating members considered too ideologically close to China or the Soviet Union. He also cultivated a personality cult to rival even those of Stalin and Mao.