Kim Il Sung
(1912–1994), State leader of North Korea. The longest-serving head of state in the twentieth century, Kim Il Sung dominated North Korean politics for nearly fifty years, from his installation by Soviet occupying forces in fall 1945 until his death on 8 July 1994. Given his intense Stalinist personality cult and the extreme concentration of power under him, one could say that he was North Korean politics.
Born Kim Song Ju on 15 April 1912 near P'yongyang, he emigrated to Manchuria with his family in 1926. Imprisoned briefly for membership in the Communist Youth League in 1930, he joined (and some accounts claim later led) a guerrilla band fighting against the Japanese two years later. At this time, he took the nom de guerre Kim Il Sung, after an earlier Korean guerrilla leader. He went to the Soviet Union in 1941, or earlier, receiving military and political training in Moscow, the Soviet Far East, or both.
As chairman of the Soviet-supported People's Committee of North Korea in 1945, he quickly consolidated power and became the first premier of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in September 1948. Eager to unify the two Koreas by force, he obtained conditional support for an invasion of South Korea from the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. After nearly conquering the South, his regime was almost destroyed by an American counterattack in fall 1950, and he was saved only by Chinese military intervention. Agreeing with the Chinese to an armistice in 1953, he never accepted a divided Korea, and until his death he worked to undermine what he viewed as an illegitimate U.S.supported government in Seoul.
During the 1950s, Kim reconsolidated power and purged Communists he viewed as loyal to Beijing or Moscow. He sought to preserve a measure of independence by carefully balancing relations with the neighboring Communist giants through a policy often called equidistance. Up through the 1970s, his government pursued high growth by means of heavy industrialization and gradual collectivization of agriculture. Even so, the North was heavily dependent on aid from and barter trade with the Soviets and Chinese. Beginning in the 1950s, Kim propounded his opaque juche (self-reliance) philosophy, which purported to explain Korean uniqueness and in timeeclipsed Marxism-Leninism as the state's core ideology. North Korean society became even more regimented than its Soviet or Chinese counterparts, and over all the godlike Kim personality cult (what historian Bruce Cumings calls an extreme form of corporatism) loomed large.
North Korean officers and officials seated in front of a portrait of Kim Il Sung on 14 April 2000, the eve of his birthday, celebrated as Sung Day in North Korea. (AFP/CORBIS)Economic growth halted in the 1980s, and Kim refused to consider a reform-and-opening policy like that employed in China. With the collapse of Soviet and Chinese support in 1990, the North Korean economy gradually fell apart. In 1972, Kim had begun to retire from some of his formal positions and to groom his son Kim Jong Il (b. 1941) as his successor. The elder Kim nonetheless retained ultimate authority and oversaw the ventures that were to mark North Korea as a "rogue state": arms sales to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, international terrorism aimed at destabilizing South Korea, and the development of long-range missiles and nuclear weapons. The latter led to Kim's final crisis in 1994, and a second Korean War was averted when Kim agreed with the former U.S. president Jimmy Carter to halt the nuclearweapons program in exchange for moderation of international economic sanctions and talks with the United States on nuclear and other issues. Kim died of a heart attack, and his funeral was an occasion for a mass outpouring of grief from a people who had known no other leader.
Further Reading
Buzo, Adrian. (1999) The Guerrilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Cumings, Bruce. (1993) "The Corporate State in North Korea." In State and Society in Contemporary Korea, edited by Hagen Koo. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 197–230.
——. (1998) Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton.
Hunter, Helen-Louise, and Stephen J. Solarz. (1999) Kim Il Sung's North Korea. New York: Greenwood.
"Kim Il Sung." Encarta Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23 August 2001, from: http://encarta.msn.com/find?Concise.asp ?ti+04C16000
"Kim Il Sung: A Brief Biography." (From official North Korea sources.) Retrieved 20 August 2001, from: www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/146 1/kimilsungbio.htm
"Kim Il Sung: North Korean Leader." Retrieved 20 August 2001, from: http://clinton.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/kb ank/profiles/kim/
Noland, Marcus. (2000) Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas. Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics.
Suh, Dae-Sook. (1995) Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader. New York: Columbia University Press.
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