Titans of History

In June 1950—despite warnings from Stalin urging patience—Kim ordered his troops to invade South Korea in order to reunite the country, thereby triggering the Korean War. North Korea received logistical, financial and military support from China and the Soviet Union, while the South received backing from the UN, who sent an international force, mainly composed of US troops. Despite initial successes, the North Korean troops were soon beaten back. Kim was only rescued by massive Chinese intervention. After three years the conflict—which cost between 2 and 3 million lives—ended in a stalemate.

At home, Kim tightened his grip, banishing outside influence and liquidating internal enemies. An attempted coup by eleven party members in 1953—the first of a number of such attempts—ended in a Stalinist show trial of the participants, who were swiftly executed. A purge of the party followed, and tens of thousands of Koreans were sent to labor camps—still a feature in North Korea.

Kim promoted an all-pervasive cult of personality centered around the Juche (or Kim Il Sungism), a political philosophy based on his own supposedly god-like qualities. According to the state media, Kim was the flawless Eternal Leader or Supreme Leader.

Meanwhile, with military spending taking up nearly a quarter of the country’s budget, poverty became rife. In the 1990s food shortages led to famine, in which as many as 2 million people may have perished. The country maintained its utter isolation. Korea came to be seen as a rogue state and a sponsor of terrorism, particularly against its southern neighbor: North Korea was responsible for the assassination in 1983 of seventeen South Korean officials who had been on an official visit to Burma, and for the downing in 1987 of a South Korean commercial jet, resulting in the deaths of 115 people. North Korea went on to develop its own nuclear arsenal.

The ailing Kim Il Sung was already training one of his sons, Kim Jong Il to succeed him in a Marxist version of a hereditary monarchy. The younger Kim started to wield power in the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee at the end of the 1960s.

In 1980, he finally emerged as a Politburo member and his father named him as his heir apparent. By this time he had become a major influence, and had liquidated any hint of opposition, organizing terrorism abroad in the form of bombings and assassinations, as well as kidnappings. It was he who devised the South Korean jet bombing and the killings of South Korean ministers in Burma, and it was on his orders that Japanese citizens were kidnapped.

His own life was recast as a heroic story, in which he was the Son of God. His birth, in a log cabin in a revolutionary camp on holy Mount Paektu was portrayed as a sacred event foretold by a swallow, a double rainbow and a new star. In fact he had been born in 1942 in the Soviet Union. By 1991, he was already the real ruler of North Korea, having been promoted to supreme commander of the armed forces. In 1994, his father, the Great Leader, finally died at age eighty-two and Kim, hailed as Dear Father and Dear Leader, succeeded him as general secretary of the party (not the presidency, for Kim Il sung remained eternal immortal president).

Kim became the object of a preposterous cult—it was said he could change the weather, melt snow and bring sunshine. He was, it was alleged, the author of no less than 1,500 books and six operas; he was the Glorious General from Heaven, and the Guiding Star of the 20th Century.

In reality, he was just 5 foot 2 inches tall and had a paunch that was accentuated by his ever-present green zip-up Mao tunic. He wore wrap-around dark glasses and platform shoes, and sported a bouffant quiff. Kim dined extravagantly on shark’s-fin soup and sashimi sliced off living fish, drank Scotch whisky and always traveled on the armored train given to his father by Stalin. He loved movies, especially Godzilla, and wrote a book On the Art of Cinema. Kim even went so far as to kidnap a director and some actors from South Korea to star in his movies.

His policies of Juche—self-reliance (actually isolation)—coupled with Songun—Military First (which meant maintaining a million soldiers, a nuclear program and engaging in brinksmanship through murderous military skirmishes with South Korea)—led to famine amongst his people in the 1990s: one million, or 5 percent, died. He ruled by brutal repression and terror. One in twenty of his people have been incarcerated in concentration camps, while 200,000 toiled within them at any given time.