Kim Il Sung

Kim Il Sung was the founding ruler of North Korea, leading the country from its creation in 1948 until his death in 1994. Installed by the Soviet occupiers after the Second World War, he launched the Korean War in 1950, built one of the most complete personality cults of the twentieth century, and created a hereditary dictatorship that his son and grandson have continued.

He was born Kim Song Ju on 15 April 1912 near Pyongyang, two years after Korea had been annexed by the Empire of Japan. His exact birthplace is given differently in different sources; the official version names Mangyongdae, now a shrine. His father, Kim Hyong Jik, was a teacher and anti-Japanese activist, and the family was Protestant Christian. In 1919 or 1920 they moved across the border into Manchuria, like many Koreans escaping Japanese rule.

Kim was educated mainly in Chinese schools. In 1929, while at middle school in Jilin, he was jailed for several months for belonging to a communist youth group. In 1931 he joined the Chinese Communist Party, since there was then no functioning Korean party, and in the mid-1930s he adopted the name Kim Il Sung, which had earlier been used by other Korean resistance figures.

Through the 1930s Kim fought as a guerrilla in the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, a Chinese-led communist force in Manchuria. He rose to command a unit of a few hundred men. His best-known action was a raid on the Korean border town of Pochonbo in June 1937, where his fighters burned a police post and government offices. The raid was small, but it made his name known, and the Japanese put a price on his head. Historians accept that he was a real and capable guerrilla leader; North Korean propaganda later inflated his record into a story of single-handedly defeating Japan.

Under heavy Japanese pressure, Kim and a small group crossed into the Soviet Union in late 1940. He was retrained in the Soviet Far East and from 1942 served as a captain in the 88th Separate Rifle Brigade of the Red Army, a unit of Chinese and Korean exiles. His son Kim Jong Il was born there in 1941 or 1942, although North Korean accounts place the birth on Mount Paektu in Korea.

When Japan surrendered at the end of the Second World War, Korea was divided at the 38th parallel, with Soviet troops in the north and American troops in the south. Kim landed at Wonsan in September 1945 in Soviet uniform. Soviet commanders, looking for a reliable young Korean communist, promoted him, and in February 1946 he became chairman of the Provisional People's Committee. Land was redistributed from landlords to peasants and industry was nationalised. When the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was proclaimed on 9 September 1948, Kim became premier, while the Republic of Korea had been founded in the south a month earlier.

Kim was determined to unite Korea by force. Soviet archives opened after 1991 show that he lobbied Joseph Stalin repeatedly for permission to invade, that Stalin finally agreed in early 1950, and that Mao Zedong also gave his consent. On 25 June 1950 North Korean forces attacked across the 38th parallel, starting the Korean War. They took Seoul within days and pushed the South Korean and American forces into a small pocket around Busan.

The United Nations, led by the United States, intervened. After the landing at Incheon in September 1950, Kim's army collapsed, and UN forces captured Pyongyang in October and advanced towards the Chinese border. Kim's state was saved only by the entry of hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops in late October. The war then settled into a stalemate near the old border, and an armistice was signed on 27 July 1953. No peace treaty followed. Around three million Koreans, most of them civilians, are estimated to have died, and much of the north was flattened by American bombing.

After the war Kim removed every possible rival. Leaders of the domestic communist faction, including the former South Korean party chief Pak Hon Yong, were purged and executed on charges of spying for the Americans. In August 1956 members of the pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions tried to criticise him at a party meeting; he defeated them, and the purges that followed left his own group of former Manchurian guerrillas in full control. A further purge in 1967 completed what was called the monolithic ideological system.

Kim's state divided the population by family background into loyal, wavering and hostile classes, a system known as songbun, which shaped people's access to housing, education, jobs and food. Those suspected of disloyalty, often with their families, were sent to political prison camps where forced labour, starvation and executions were common. Contact with the outside world was almost entirely cut off.

His official ideology was juche, usually translated as self-reliance, presented as Kim's creative application of Marxism-Leninism to Korea. In practice it served to justify independence from both Moscow and Beijing during the Sino-Soviet split, while North Korea continued to depend on Soviet and Chinese aid. The personality cult surrounding the Great Leader grew to extremes: portraits in every home, statues across the country, his birthday a national holiday, and a version of history in which he was the central figure. A new constitution in 1972 made him president.

North Korea's economy grew quickly in the 1950s and 1960s and was at first ahead of the south's, but it stagnated from the 1970s. Kim's regime also carried out attacks abroad, including a commando raid on the South Korean presidential residence in 1968, the Rangoon bombing of 1983 that killed 21 people including four South Korean ministers, and the bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987, which killed 115.

From the 1970s Kim prepared his son Kim Jong Il as his heir, an unprecedented hereditary succession in a communist state; it was made public at the party congress of 1980. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union removed North Korea's main source of subsidised oil and trade, and the economy began to collapse. In 1993 and 1994 a crisis over the country's nuclear programme brought it close to war with the United States, eased after former president Jimmy Carter visited Pyongyang in June 1994.

Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack on 8 July 1994, at the age of 82, weeks before a planned first summit with the South Korean president. Kim Jong Il succeeded him. In the famine of the mid-1990s that followed, hundreds of thousands of people, possibly far more, died.

Kim's embalmed body lies in the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang, and in 1998 he was declared the Eternal President of the Republic. North Korea dates its calendar from his birth year. His grandson Kim Jong Un rules a state that still follows the system he built. For the wider story of the divided peninsula, see the History of North Korea and the History of South Korea.