Kim Il-sung: The Enigmatic Leader Shaping Korean History

In this captivating episode, we delve into the complex and secretive world of Kim Il-sung, a pivotal figure in Korean history whose legacy continues to influence global geopolitics. From his humble beginnings in Japanese-controlled Korea, where his family's Christian beliefs and educational pursuits amid poverty laid the foundation for his future role in the Korean communist movement, to his rise as a revolutionary leader, Kim's story is one of resilience and strategic acumen.

We explore his early alignment with the Chinese Communist Party against Japanese expansion, highlighting his military triumphs and the pivotal moments that shaped his leadership. The Korean War is dissected, revealing how Kim's ambitions for unification were thwarted, leading to the establishment of his cult of personality and the Juche ideology that fortified his control over North Korea.

The episode also uncovers the oppressive systems under Kim's regime, drawing chilling parallels to Stalin's Gulags, and examines North Korea's covert operations and steps toward nuclear armament. We reflect on the enduring impact of Kim's leadership and the continuity of the Kim dynasty through his succession plans, pondering the legacy of a leader whose influence persists long after his death in 1994. Join us as we navigate the tumultuous corridors of power and resistance that shaped not only Kim Il-sung's life but also the trajectory of Korean politics and its lasting effects on the world stage.

Episode Transcript

(00:05):
The man known to history as Kim Illinois Sung was born on the
15th of April 1912 as Kim Sung Chu in the small village of
Nami, now incorporated into the city of Pyongyang in what is now
North Korea, but which was then part of chosen the imperial name
for Japanese controlled Korea. His father was Kim Hyun Jig, a

(00:30):
member of the Chung Chu Kim clan, which traces its roots
back 30 generations to Kim Tae SA, said to be a descendant of
Kim Hyung's Sun. Who had ruled?
Korea in the 10th century as thelast monarch of the Shilla
dynasty. Despite this heritage, the Kim
family had fallen on hard times in the 19th century.

(00:52):
Kim's grandfather had engaged with Western Christian
missionaries who arrived in the Korean Peninsula from the 1860s
onwards and had converted to Presbyterianism, a form of
Scottish Calvinism, and Kim's father inherited the same faith.
Many members of the family received a good education in the
Christian missionary schools. As a result.

(01:14):
But they were. Poor nonetheless, Kim's mother
was Kang Pan Sook. She and Kim Hyun Jig had several
other children, notably two sonswho were younger than Kim, Kim
Yong Chu and Kim Chul Chu, who died later fighting against the
Japanese occupation of Korea. Kim Yong Chu lived to be over a

(01:35):
century old, only dying in 2021,and for a time until the late
1970s, he was being considered apotential heir to his brother as
ruler of North Korea. The events which would make Kim
Illinois Sung one of the most significant figures in modern
Asian history were already underway before he was even

(01:57):
born. Like Japan and China, the Zhou
Xiong Kingdom of Korea had largely closed its borders to
foreign interference in the 17thcentury, when the first
Europeans in the shape of the Dutch and Portuguese, had begun
arriving in the Far East. It remained broadly isolated
from the world until the middle of the 19th century, when powers

(02:18):
like Britain, France and the United States, which by now were
much more technologically advanced, forced Korea, Japan
and China to open their country's borders to foreign
trade and ideas. After the Meiji Restoration in
1868, Japan embraced Western ideas and methods as the best

(02:38):
means of retaining its independence with Western ships
and weapons and economic and social development.
It soon began to emerge as a burgeoning power itself in the
Western Pacific, forcing Korea into the unequal Japan Korea
Treaty of 1876. Then, with victories over the
other regional powers, China andRussia, in wars fought in the

(03:02):
mid 1890s and mid 1900s, Japan effectively established itself
as the all but ruler of the Korean Peninsula.
This situation was formalized in1910 when Korea was annexed as
the first major territory of theEmpire of Japan.

(03:22):
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(05:12):
By the time Kim was born in 1912, the Japanese were already
beginning to implement a policy of Japanification in Korea,
whereby the Korean people were coerced into adopting Japanese
cultural norms and adhering to the Japanese political system.
This quickly aroused opposition.A major moment came in 1919 when

(05:35):
Kim was just a child. A year earlier, the US President
Woodrow Wilson had outlined a series of 14 points in a speech
to the US Congress in which he stated that national groups had
a right to self determination. It was a sign of the times, and
in Korea many people felt the same, arguing that Korea should

(05:57):
be free from Japanese colonial rule.
The resentment which was building boiled over following
the death of the former Korean Emperor who had been deposed by
the Japanese Emperor Gojong in January 1919, with many
believing the Japanese had poisoned him.
What followed was a series of protest movements across Korea

(06:18):
on the 1st of March 1919, largely led by student groups.
Although the protests were brutally suppressed by the
Japanese occupation forces, the memory of them became a
galvanizing force and the March 1st movement inspired future
resistance to Japanese imperial rule.
This Korean resentment at Japanese domination and

(06:42):
simmering tensions. Was the political?
Environment in which Kim would grow up and which would shape
the politics of the peninsula down to the 1940's.
The details of Kim's early life have become shrouded in myth
over the decades, as the man whowould one day become absolute
ruler of North Korea built up a fantastical biography of his

(07:04):
early life, one which often makes separating fact from
fiction difficult. Much of this was recorded in his
highly unreliable memoirs with The Century, of which 8 volumes
detailing his life down to 1945 were published in the 1990s.
His earliest years were quite possibly spent being raised in

(07:26):
the village of Nami, known todayas Mankyong Bong.
His family was staunchly opposedto the Japanese occupation of
the Korean Peninsula, a hardly unusual political stance at the
time when 10s of thousands of Koreans were being arrested and
detained every year across the country as the Japanese sought
to crack down on dissent. In 1920, the Kim family

(07:50):
evidently joined the exodus of Koreans out of the peninsula and
into the neighboring Manchuria region of northeastern China in
order to remove themselves from Japanese domination, the flow of
political exiles which became particularly acute after the
birth of the 1st March movement in 1919.

(08:11):
In Manchuria, Kim is alleged to have emerged as something of a
precocious leader of an anti Japanese movement.
North Korean state propaganda holds that he was responsible
for setting up the Down with Imperialism Union there in
October 1926, Yet this seems highly unlikely.
Kim was just 14 years of age at the time, and most objective

(08:34):
scholarly studies of the Korean resistance movement in the
interwar era hold that a radicalKorean militant by the name of
Li Chong ROK was its founder. Others still argue that the Down
with Imperialism Union was a very minor group in the late
1920s, and that its role has simply been distorted by North

(08:55):
Korean state propaganda as a means of lionizing Kim's youth
and early years in the Korean resistance movement.
This somewhat fantastical association with the Down with
Imperialism Union movement aside.
There is little doubt that. Kim was a relatively young
bloomer when it came to becominginvolved in the Korean

(09:15):
resistance movement in exile. He attended Yuan Middle School
in Jilin province in northeastern China in the late
1920s, and while there he becameinvolved in communist politics,
having determined that this movement was best placed to
oppose Japan's increasingly right wing imperial regime and
its occupation of Korea. This led to his arrest and

(09:39):
imprisonment for several months in 1929, demonstrating his
immersion in political activity before he reached his 18th
birthday. China's politics were immensely
fractured by the early 1930s, asthe country was ravaged by a
civil war between various factions, within which the
Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang, or Chinese

(10:02):
nationalists, were the two foremost antagonists.
Both groups, however, were bitterly opposed to Japanese
expansion in the Far East. Kim eventually decided in 1931
that the Chinese Communist Partyheld out the better prospect for
opposing the Japanese, and so hebecame a member of that.
Group. Significantly, the Chinese

(10:24):
Communist Party had frosty relations at this time with the
Communist Party of Korea, which had been formed in the city of
Seoul in 1925 owing to the perception that the Korean
Communist Party was too nationalist in its outlook.
Rather than espousing the species of proletarian
internationalism which Karl Marxand Friedrich Engels had

(10:45):
championed in the Communist Manifesto.
The overt nationalism of the Korean Communist movement would
characterize the communism of North Korea throughout Kim's
life. For the time being in the early
1930s, Kim was simply emerging as a promising younger figure
within the Chinese Communist movement, impressing many with

(11:05):
speeches he gave concerning the nature of Korean resistance to
Japan from Manchuria. Kim's emergence as a leader of
the Korean resistance movement was shaped by the events of
1931. In September of that year, the
Japanese used a relatively minorborder incident between China

(11:26):
and the Korean Peninsula as the pretext for launching an
invasion of Manchuria, where much of the Korean resistance
movement had been based for the past decade.
After a six month campaign, Manchuria was brought under
Japanese rule and created into the puppet state of Manchukwa.
In the period that followed, elements operating in Manchukua

(11:47):
were perceived by the leadershipof the Chinese Communist Party
as trying to undermine Chinese sovereignty.
Consequently, in a series of purges known as the Min Sengdan
Incident between 1933 and 1936, many senior Korean members of
the Chinese Communist Party werepurged and some were even

(12:08):
killed. Kim was amongst those who came
under suspicion, but he managed to exonerate himself and in the
months that followed emerged as a new leader amongst the Korean
Communists in exile in China owing to his spirited defense of
the Koreans within the Chinese Communist Party.
It was these. Events more than anything else

(12:29):
in his younger years, which led to Kim becoming recognized as
the unofficial leader of the Korean Communist movement in
exile in China and paved the wayfor his later emergence as the
head of the North Korean state when it was born after the
Second World War. It was around this time that Kim
adopted the name by which he is known to history.

(12:51):
Born as Kim Sung Ju, around 1935he began referring to himself as
Kim Illinois Sung, which transliterates as Kim Become the
Sun, a worrying portent of his tendency to idolize himself and
purport to be a quasi divine figure.
Not long after this he began to acquire a reputation as an

(13:13):
effective military commander andproponent of guerrilla war.
By the mid 1930's, the Korean Communists, in association with
their Chinese allies, were conducting raids into both
Manchukwo and Korea itself against the Japanese.
These attacks escalated from thesummer of 1937 onwards when the

(13:34):
Japanese launched a full scale invasion of China in response to
what became known as the Marco Polo Bridge incident, when
Chinese nationalists had clashedwith the Japanese near Beijing.
The resulting Sino Japanese War saw much of eastern China,
including major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing,

(13:55):
conquered by the Japanese. Right around the same time that
these Japanese attacks on China were beginning, Kim LED a
detachment of 200 guerrilla fighters which defeated a
Japanese force at the Battle of PO Chong Bo in northern Korea.
This led to the growing perception of him as not just a
leading political figure within the Korean Communist movement,

(14:18):
but also as an effective military commander.
The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 is often regarded as the
beginning of the Second World War in the Far East, as the
region would be engaged in constant warfare until 1945, and
even then was wracked by conflict for decades to come.

(14:39):
Kim was central to these events.Throughout the late 1930s, he
was involved in Korean attacks on the Japanese in his homeland,
such that by 1940 he had become one of the most wanted Koreans
sought by the Japanese authorities.
Yet Kim and his allies found growing support within Korea
itself, a country which the central Japanese government used

(15:03):
as a source of slave labor to power the Japanese war economy
as it increased its activities across the Western Pacific and
then attacked the United States in December 1941, triggering
American entry into the Second World War on the side of Britain
and the Soviet Union. This had implications for Kim.

(15:23):
Although the Soviets would not go directly to war with Japan
until 1945, Kim and other Communists were taken into
Russia in the early 1940s and trained in modern methods of war
in the east of the country, not far from the borders with China
and Korea. In 1942, he was assigned to the

(15:43):
88th Separate Rifle Brigade, or 88th International Brigade,
which was sent back to Korea to continue the insurgency against
the Japanese occupation. Kim's personal life entered a
significant phase in the midst of the war.
In 1941, he married Kim Chong Sook, a Korean woman who had

(16:05):
been orphaned in the early 1930safter her family had also gone
into exile in Manchuria before the Japanese intern conquered
that region. In the mid 1930s, when she was
entering her late teens, she joined the Korean resistance
movement. In the late 1930s, she is
alleged to have saved Kim from an attempted assassination by

(16:26):
the Japanese, and their relationship soon began.
Shortly after they were married in 1941, she gave birth to her
and Kim's first child, a boy whowas named Yuri Irsenovich Kim,
seemingly in recognition of his being born while the Kims were
under Soviet protection in Russia, though other accounts

(16:48):
state that he was born in Korea itself in 1942.
This may have been changed laterto ensure that the son, better
known as Kim Jong Illinois, was asserted to have been born in
Korea. 2 further children, a boynamed Kim Man Illinois and a
daughter named Kim Chong Hoy, both born in the mid 1940s,

(17:09):
followed. They would largely grow up
knowing only their father. Kim's first wife, Kim Jong Sook,
died in the autumn of 1949. The cause of her premature death
while still in her early 30s is not entirely clear, though it
may have been owing to complications from a further
pregnancy and general ill healthwhich developed during her many

(17:30):
years as a guerrilla fighter in the 1930s and 1940s.
Back in the early 1940s, in the first years of their marriage,
Kim and his first wife continuedto fight against the Japanese
occupation of Korea. Back in the peninsula, the
number of Koreans who are being drafted into the Japanese

(17:51):
economy or even the military wasgrowing month by month as the
Japanese war effort declined precipitously.
The decision to attack Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and initiate a
war against the Americans in December 1941 was a fatal one
for the Japanese. While they initially succeeded
in 1942 in conquering a vast array of territory across the

(18:14):
Western Pacific and Southeast Asia, eventually even
threatening British India, ultimately the resources which
the United States and Britain, who now allied with both the
Chinese Communists and Nationalists, were too great.
And even with the Allies focusing primarily on defeating
Nazi Germany in Europe between 1942 and 1945, the Americans had

(18:38):
still made major progress in liberating much of the Western
Pacific from the Japanese. By the early summer of 1945,
when Germany finally surrenderedin Europe with victory in
Europe, the Soviet Union, which had avoided outright war with
the Japanese in order to pump all its resources into fighting
the Germans on the Eastern Frontin Europe, now honored its

(19:01):
alliance with the US and declared war on the Empire of
Japan in early August 1945. In the days that followed, the
Red Army conquered Manchuria in a blistering military campaign.
Then, when the Japanese surrendered following the
dropping of the atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki by the Americans, the Russians sent their forces

(19:24):
further South to occupy the northern part of the Korean
Peninsula while the Americans occupied the southern part, an
arrangement which had been pre agreed by the two Allied powers.
The roots of the division of theKorean Peninsula into two States
and the rise of the Kim family to dominate one of those same
states was sown by the occupation of the peninsula by

(19:48):
the Soviets and the Americans inthe autumn of 1945.
Even before the war had come to an end, the Allied leaders had
been drawing the political and military lines which would
divide the world during the ColdWar, with the Western Allies,
For instance, demanding that certain countries in Europe,
such as Greece, would be occupied by their forces and

(20:11):
would be reconstructed along Western lines, while others,
such as Poland would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence.
Korea was to effectively be divided into a Soviet sphere in
the north and AUS sphere in the South, the dividing line being
the 38th parallel. As soon as the war ended, the

(20:32):
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his leading ministers turned
their attention to who might lead the new Soviet state.
On the Korean Peninsula. There were numerous candidates,
especially Chom and Sikh, a longstanding Korean nationalist, yet
they ultimately selected Kim after the chief of Soviet
security, Lavrenti Beria, met with him several times and

(20:56):
confirmed to Stalin that he believed him to be an ideal
candidate. And so it was that Kim Illinois
Sung returned to Korea, doing solegally and not as a guerrilla
fighter for the first time in 1/4 of a century in September
1945. A few weeks later, he was
confirmed as the first secretaryand head of the Communist Party

(21:18):
of Korea and as such the de facto leader of the Soviet
occupied territory. It was, in many ways, a peculiar
appointment. Having lived nearly his entire
life in China, Kim was largely unable to speak Korean and had
to take lessons in the language of the country he was now
governing. The years that followed were

(21:40):
divisive ones for the former Allied nations.
In Europe. There was growing difficulty
surrounding the divided status of Germany.
While in China, the US and Britain had been supporting the
nationalist Kuomintang against the Soviet backed communists in
the civil war, which resumed as soon as the Japanese were
defeated, the division soon spread to Korea as well.

(22:03):
In the course of 1947 and early 1948, the Americans, under the
auspices of the newly established United Nations,
determined to press ahead with organizing national elections
for the whole of the Korean Peninsula, a plan which, if
successful, would possibly have seen Kim disappear from the

(22:23):
annals of international politicsas quickly as he had made his
appearance. But both he and his supporters
in Moscow were determined to avoid this and stated their
unwillingness to participate in the new elections.
In response, the Americans and their Korean allies South of the
38th Parallel acted unilaterallyto hold elections in the South

(22:47):
in the summer of 1948, followingwhich Sung Man Li, a figure who
would become an authoritarian ruler, was elected as the first
president of the nation. The creation of the Republic of
Korea, known widely as South Korea, was declared on the 15th
of August 1948. In response, elections were held

(23:08):
in the Soviet territory on the 25th of August, and two weeks
later, on the 9th of September, the creation of the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea, alsoknown as North Korea, was
proclaimed with Kim as its firstpremier.
The first months of Kim's term as premier of the newly
established North Korea witnessed a broad continuation

(23:31):
of policies which had been implemented since late 1945.
These were in line with Soviet and communist ideology more
broadly, as Korea's industries were nationalized and farms were
collectivized to place food production broadly under
government control, labour reforms were introduced and a
broad range of other measures were adopted to create a more

(23:53):
centralized, managed economy. In a growing sign of the manner
in which Kim's government was indicating its aspirations to
control the entire peninsula, the Workers Party of North Korea
became the Workers Party of Korea.
Already in 1949, Kim had begun supporting communist
insurgencies in South Korea, while the end of the Chinese

(24:16):
Civil War that same year saw 10sof thousands of Koreans who had
fought for the Chinese communists over the years
returning to North Korea armed and trained.
With the timing seeming propitious, Kim now began
pressing for an invasion of South Korea and petitioned
Stalin in Moscow for his approval of this approach.

(24:37):
The Soviets agreed, their intelligence gathering having
incorrectly concluded that the US would be reluctant to
intervene in any such conflict on behalf of South Korea.
It was Kim that was the driving force behind the move to launch
the war. Yet it should be noted that in
the South, Sungmen Lee was also ratcheting up his government's

(24:58):
rhetoric of conquering North Korea and uniting the peninsula
under his. Rule.
The Korean War began on the 25thof June 1950, when Kim ordered
the North Korean People's Army, which numbered around 135,000
men at the time, over the borderinto South Korea.

(25:19):
At this juncture, his forces hada distinct numerical advantage
as the Republic of Korea Army numbered not much over 90,000.
Moreover, the North Koreans werebetter trained and armed, many
of them being veterans of the Chinese civil war and the
resistance movement against the Japanese occupation of Korea in

(25:39):
years gone by. They quickly overran South
Korea, capturing the capital Seoul just three days after the
invasion commenced. Nobody emerged from the initial
engagements looking good in retrospect.
For instance, Sungmin Lee used the opportunity created by the
disorder to massacre some of hispolitical opponents within South

(26:02):
Korea. On the 3rd of July, Inchon fell
to the North Koreans, and by then South Korean forces had
been devastated by casualties and mass desertion.
Yet the US government and military was quick to react,
contrary to the expectations of both Kim and the Soviet
leadership in Moscow. By early July, American forces,

(26:24):
which were still stationed around the western Pacific since
the end of the Second World War,were landing in South Korea and
preparing for a counter attack. Yet a large troop buildup would
take some time, and the Americans were anxious to secure
the cooperation of their allies in the conflict as well.
Consequently, the North Koreans continued to push S through July

(26:47):
and August and had nearly conquered all of South Korea
when a major defensive perimeterwas established by the US and
its UN allies around Pusan in the extreme South of Korea.
The successful defence of the Pusan Perimeter in the early
autumn of 1950 ensured Kim's government did not conquer the

(27:07):
whole of the peninsula. The offensive during the first
two months of the war was the most successful period of the
Korean War for Kim and his government.
By September, large numbers of American troops and ships were
arriving across the Pacific to Korea and with this a major
counter offensive was initiated,beginning with an amphibious

(27:29):
invasion of the region around Incheon.
In tandem, the Americans and their allies broke out of the
Pusan Perimeter and began pushing back the North Koreans.
Seoul was recaptured on the 27thof September, and two weeks
later American forces crossed the 38th parallel into North
Korea. On the 19th of October they

(27:51):
captured. Pyongyang, the capital of North
Korea, Kim might have become something of a footnote of 20th
century history at this juncture, his reign ending after
just a few. Years.
As premier of North Korea, had it not been for China's
intervention? Six days after US and South
Korean forces entered Pyongyang,Chinese troops crossed the Yula

(28:14):
River into North Korea. A major offensive by the
government of Mao Zedong followed, during which China and
America were effectively at war with one another, and saw the
Chinese push the Americans and United Nations forces back into
South Korea by December, capturing Seoul yet again for
the North Koreans on the 7th of January 1951.

(28:38):
A further American counter offensive in the spring saw
Seoul captured again by the Americans and S Koreans in early
April, the 4th time it had changed Occupy in nine months in
the. Aftermath of the 4th Battle of
Seoul, the war stabilized to a significant extent with both
sides now aware that the conflict was simply leading to

(29:01):
ever greater escalations and troop build UPS as one side
gained the initiative and the other having.
To commit ever greater numbers of men.
As this realization dawned in the late spring of 1951, both
sides stopped trying to overrun the peninsula and the conflict
instead descended into a war of attrition along the 38th

(29:22):
parallel near the pre war borders of North Korea and South
Korea. Kim seems to have been a driving
force behind this on the communist side.
Records which have come to lightfrom Soviet archives indicate
that by the second-half of 1951,he had realized that the
peninsula could not be unified under North Korean rule and was

(29:45):
now anxious to end the war that would never be achieved.
Instead, after two further yearsof border warfare, the Korean
Armistice Agreement was entered into on the 27th of July 1953,
signed by Kim and Sungmin Lee. This created a Demilitarized
Zone on both sides of the borderat the 38th parallel.

(30:08):
However, it did not bring the war to an end, and even today,
70 years later, the two nations are still technically at war
with one another. With his goal of unifying the
peninsula under his rule in ruins, Kim set about
consolidating his control over North Korea in the mid 1950s,

(30:30):
his position having been weakened by the failure of the
war. Much of this focused on
cultivating a cult of personality that mirrored those
created in Russia by Joseph Stalin and by many other
totalitarian rulers in the 20th century.
As early as 1949, the first large statues of Kim began
appearing in city centres and other public spaces around North

(30:54):
Korea. The first references to Kim as
Suryung, meaning the Great Leader, date to the same time,
and as the years went by an increasing number of grandiose
titles such as Great Chairman, Heavenly Leader, The Son and
Double Hero were applied to him.Similarly, there was a growing

(31:16):
tendency in official histories and state propaganda to depict
Kim and the troops he commanded from the mid 1930s onwards as
almost single handedly defeatingthe Japanese and ending the
occupation of Korea. As with any 20th century
totalitarian dictator, the national press became an arm of

(31:36):
state propaganda, with national newspapers and radio broadcasts
disseminating words of instruction from the Great
leader. The education system developed
as a form of state indoctrination as well from the
1950s onwards. This cult of leadership
intensified as Kim's reign went on and has only become stronger

(31:58):
over the decades. For instance, since the 1990's,
the calendar system in North Korea uses Kim's birth date on
the 15th of April 1912 as the beginning of recorded time in
North Korea. The development of this cult of
personality was closely related to the emergence of the Tucher

(32:19):
ideology in North Korea from the1950s onwards, a political
ideology which, like the personality cult of the Kim
family, has marked North Korea as distinct from the other
communist regimes that developedin so many countries in the
aftermath of the Second World War.
The term is derived from a word which appeared in Japanese

(32:41):
translations of the works of Karl Marx in the early 20th
century and essentially means self-reliance or autonomy.
It concerned the manner in whichKim tried to fashion a new form
of communism which emphasized more than nation state and
Korean nationalism, an approach which differed from most

(33:01):
communist states which were internationalist in outlook.
This suture ideology is consequently more ultra
nationalist than communist and when combined with the cult of
personality surrounding Kim and his family, has the shape of a
quasi religion. Eventually, in 1974, its core

(33:21):
tenets were outlined in a published mandate entitled 10
Principles for the Establishmentof a Monolithic Ideological
System. This contained prescriptions for
the North Korean people to honorKim as the leader of the nation,
to acknowledge his absolute authority, and for all to make
the nation strong by acting in unison to develop a powerful

(33:45):
military and government. In 1982, the Tsuche Tower, a
large monument in honor of the ideology, was erected,
dominating the Pyongyang skyline.
The general drift of the Kim dictatorship in the late 1940s
and early 1950s perhaps made theevents of the mid 1950s, when

(34:07):
North Korea drifted away from the Soviet Union, somewhat
inevitable. Following Stalin's death in
1953, his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced the
excesses of the Stalinist era and began a process of
destalinization, an aspect of which was a move away from the
kind of intense cult of personality which Kim was intent

(34:30):
on developing in North Korea. Communist leaders elsewhere were
not as keen on Khrushchev's new approach, and both Kim in North
Korea and Mao Zedong in China opposed this Soviet revisionism.
This in turn led the Soviets to offer clandestine support to a
faction within North Korea whichopposed Kim and sought to

(34:52):
establish a more collegial form of communist government where
power would be dispersed amongstsenior party members rather than
centralized in Kim's hands. The result of the second session
of the Third Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea in
late August of 1956 was an effort by his opponents to

(35:14):
undermine Kim's position. However, he struck quickly in
retaliation, purging the party of several of his opponents in
an event which has come to be known as the August Faction
Incident. When the governments in both
Moscow and Beijing called for Kim to cease the purges in
September, he made some effort to do so.

(35:36):
But over the course of the next two to three years, many of
those who had even been remotelyconnected with the opposition
faction in 1956 disappeared or was stripped of any authority
within the North Korean communist movement.
By the early 1960s, a quarter ofthe senior party figures had
been purged, and many were ultimately killed as Kim ensured

(36:00):
that there would be no opposition to his rule going
forward. A large number of those who were
purged in the late 1950s ended up within the North Korean
system of labour and penal campsunder Kim.
These developed into an instrument of state terror, rife
with abuses and dreadful conditions.

(36:20):
There are different types of camps and prisons in the
country, some being coaliso, a type of labour camp for
political prisoners, others being what are deemed re
education camps and others effectively being death camps
where inmates are provided with little more than starvation
rations and used as slave labor until maltreatment or disease

(36:44):
kills them. The system was beginning from
the late 1940s onwards as Kim directly imitated the Gulag
system which had been developed in Siberia in Russia under
Stalin. Interment from the inception of
the system often involved peoplebeing imprisoned with only a
veneer of a trial and due process.

(37:05):
One of the more notorious such facilities was the Hurriyang
concentration camp in the far northeast of North Korea, near
the Russian and Chinese borders,better known as Camp 22.
The North Korean defector and former prison guard ANS Chol
described how a large percentageof prisoners there were
mutilated. From prisoner.

(37:26):
Abuse. And that an average of five
prisoners died every day, many from starvation and overwork,
while conditions were appalling,with prisoners held in cramped
bunk houses without access to proper water and with vermin and
insects rife. This system has seemingly become
worse under Kim's son and grandson, but the roots of it

(37:48):
lie firmly in his own long reignas ruler of North Korea.
In 1957, even as the purges following the August faction
incident was still under way, Kim oversaw the creation of the
Sungbun caste system in North Korea.
This was promulgated through a decree entitled On the

(38:09):
Transformation of the Struggle with Counter Revolutionary
Elements into an all people All party movement.
Through this, the people of North Korea were classified into
three main groups, these being people who were loyal known as
Haked SIM, people who were wavering termed Dungyo, and
people who were hostile to the state, called Choctay.

(38:33):
Eventually, over time, upwards of 50 subcategorizations were
created, but in effect the threemain tiers are the important
ones. As the Songbun system developed,
it led to files being kept on virtually every citizen in North
Korea, identifying their loyaltyto the regime and categorizing

(38:53):
them accordingly. When it was first created,
people were often categorized according to their social status
in pre revolutionary career, with people who had been
adherents of the Japanese occupation, for instance, being
categorized as choc TE or hostiles.
Their children have inherited this status and it can be

(39:13):
difficult to move into a different rung in the caste
system. The implications of this can be
dramatic for one's life prospects.
In North Korea. This was made most clear in the
1990s when a brutal famine gripped the country and during
which the loyal or Higgs SIM caste were given preferential
treatment in the distribution offood.

(39:36):
The peculiar development of the North Korean system, with its
suture ideology and Sung Bun caste system, saw North Korea
drift further away from the Soviet Union from the 1950s
onwards, although relations werebetter between Kim and the new
Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev from 1964 onwards than they were

(39:57):
during the decade that Khrushchev was in charge.
The situation was more difficultwith China, where the advent of
the Cultural Revolution from 1966 saw a growing split between
Mao and Kim. In this situation, where the
international unity of communismwas fractured, Kim leaned more

(40:18):
towards finding allies in smaller communist and
totalitarian states. In the 1960s and into the 1970s,
he developed a close working relationship with the leader of
Romania, Nikolai Ceausescu, who visited Pyongyang in 1978, as
well as several African dictators, such as the president

(40:38):
of Zaire, Joseph Mobutu, whose bloody rule developed along
similar lines to that of Kim's. In the late 1960s, at the height
of the Vietnam War, Kim moved tofoster close relations with Ho
Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese, who he admired for
their success in seemingly winning a war against the US in

(40:59):
very similar circumstances to the war Kim had tried to wage in
the early 1950s himself. Others were less welcoming of
the North Korean dictator. The ruler of Albania and
Verhosha condemned him as being a communist ruler who had little
interest in Marxist Leninism of any kind.
A broadly accurate assessment ofa tyrant who seems to have ended

(41:22):
up in the communist camp simply because it was the one which had
held out a path to power for himin the 1940s.
In 1968, Kim came close to reigniting the war with South
Korea, which had never officially ended.
Since 1966, there had been growing unease around the
Demilitarized Zone between the two nations as Cold War tensions

(41:47):
in the Far East reached a new height in the context of the US
immersion into the Vietnam War. Then in the May 1967 South
Korean presidential election, the dictator Pak Chung Hee won
re election. These events LED Kim to
authorize a 31 man team from theKorean People's Army to travel

(42:08):
clandestinely into South Korea in January 1968, with the goal
of heading to the capital Seoul and assassinating Chung Hee in
the Blue House, the official residence of the South Korean
president at the time. After passing over the
Demilitarized Zone, the North Korean commanders managed to get
within 100. Meters of the blue.

(42:30):
House while disguised as South Korean soldiers.
At this critical juncture, though, they were identified and
a shootout occurred. The commandos then fled and were
pursued for several days. By the time the chase ended,
only two of the 31 were alive, one being captured and one

(42:50):
fleeing back to North Korea. 26 S Koreans and four Americans
were killed, with dozens more injured.
The Blue House raid led to a temporary crisis in the Korean
Peninsula, and Chung Hee's government authorized the
establishment of Unit 684 to begin plotting a means of
assassinating Kim in response, but a reignition of the war was

(43:15):
avoided. As the crisis following the Blue
House raid was dying down, Kim and his closest advisors were
considering the need for a new constitution for the country,
one which would take account of the massive social and political
changes which had occurred sincethe first emergence of the
country in 1948. Discussions continued until

(43:38):
1972, when a committee was formed to work out the new
document. When it was finally proclaimed
on the 27th of December 1972, ithad implications for Kim's
position. He would no longer hold the
office of Premier of North Korea, but now became its first
president. In the wider sense, the new

(43:58):
constitution gave formal recognition to the ideology and
governmental system which Kim had created over the previous 20
years. With much discussion in its
various parts of the elements ofthe Tsuchur ideology and Kim's
position as the great leader of North Korea, the document was
still steeped in the language ofcommunism, with talk of the

(44:21):
complete victory of socialism intime to come.
The specifics were detailed withprovisions for things such as
universal education and the development of Korean culture
and technology, as well as humanrights and the duties of
citizens. If one were to read the
document, it would appear in places to aspire to create a

(44:42):
utopia, but in reality, the Constitution of 1972 only
further embedded the dystopia that Kim had overseen the
creation of in North Korea. By the time he transitioned from
being the premier of North Koreato its president, many people
close to Kim might have speculated that he did not have

(45:04):
long left to live. Beginning in the 1960's, the
dictator had begun to suffer from calcinosis, a rare
condition which causes calcium deposits to build up in a part
of a person's body, often forming into a benign tumor.
In Kim's case, this began to form at the back of his neck,
and in one photo from 1970, whenhe met the Chinese Communist

(45:27):
leader Mao Zedong, there is already a noticeable lump at the
back of his head. This only got bigger as the
years went by, and by the 1980s it had expanded to the size of a
baseball. Many must have wondered if the
growth would eventually prove fatal.
It didn't, yet it must have caused substantial discomfort.

(45:48):
Despite this, Kim refused to have it operated on, which could
have been done quite easily as the president had developed an
extreme paranoia around the ideaof having a medical operation
carried out. On a practical level, the growth
made life awkward for the regime's propagandists in the
last decades of Kim's life, as he insisted that it not be on

(46:10):
display to the public, so photographs and video footage
had to constantly be produced without showing the back of his
head. The regime had more to worry
about in the 1970s than just Kim's growing calcium tumor.
The problems of the North Koreaneconomy which have defined the
country in modern times were starting to appear, although it

(46:33):
is difficult to imagine today given the backward nature of the
North Korean economy by comparison with the
technological powerhouse that isSouth Korea.
In the 1950s and for much of the1960s, North Korea's economy
actually fared better than that of the South.
Two and three-year economic plans from the late 1940s

(46:53):
onwards had proved successful, and by 1957 Kim's government had
managed to return the country's heavy industrial capacity back
to. What it had been prior to the
war and reversed the damage which had occurred at that time.
The late 1950s and early 1960s were then a period of real

(47:14):
economic growth in North Korea, and it appeared that Kim's state
might emerge as a substantial industrial economy.
However. From the mid 1960s, things began
to stall as overinvestment in defense spending, combined with
a lack of innovation and a misguided focus on creating a
self-sufficient economy led to the targets of a seven-year plan

(47:37):
between 1961 and 1967 and a six year plan from 1971 to 1976
being missed by significant margins.
These issues, combined with flaws in the centralized State
Planning Commission, continued into the 1980s, at which time
the failures of the six and seven-year plans was evident in

(47:59):
the fact that they were not as widely publicized.
All the same, while North Korea's economy had begun to
falter dramatically from the mid1960s onwards, the major
economic woes of the North Korean state were not to really
develop until the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War left the
country isolated and huge sanctions on trade with it were

(48:21):
introduced internationally. In response to the developing
economic problems of the country, Kim ordered the
establishment of Room 39, or office #39, as a means of
funding his own family's lavish expenses.
Named after an office number in the building where it was
initially headquartered in Pyongyang, Room 39 was in charge

(48:45):
of generating a large cash flow to provide funding for Kim and
his family members and funding for specialized projects which
they were engaged in, or the court economy of North Korea, as
some commentators have termed it.
The methods used by Room 39 to raise money have been
extraordinarily varied. Some of its activities included

(49:07):
the counterfeiting of foreign currencies, especially $100
notes. As well as.
Fraudulent activity in international banking and
insurance. Latterly, Room 39 became
involved in the international narcotics trade, with
amphetamines, opiates and other drugs being processed in North
Korea and exported, albeit this has largely been a development

(49:31):
under the reins of Kim, Sun and grandson.
Today, Room 39's activities eveninvolve management of the
Pyongyang restaurant chain, which has over 100 outlets
internationally. Kim was in many ways also
responsible for the first emergence of North Korea's
nuclear weapons program. In 1963.

(49:53):
He had made a request to the Soviet government for them to
provide technical expertise to his regime to begin developing a
nuclear weapon. While this was rejected by the
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, he did agree to send
some Soviet engineers to North Korea to aid in the development
of the Jung Bon Nuclear Scientific Research Centre, with

(50:14):
a view to Kim's government gradually developing nuclear
capabilities for energy purposes.
Developments were such in this and another facility by the
1980s that a nuclear weapons program was tentatively
initiated. Despite these efforts, Kim
agreed that North Korea would become a signatory to the
Nuclear Non Proliferation Treatyin 1985.

(50:38):
In reality, the country continued to develop its nuclear
capabilities, and in 1993 it made its first moves towards
abandoning participation in the Non Proliferation Treaty.
That said, the country would only carry out a confirmed test
of a nuclear weapon in 2006, long after Kim's death, and

(50:59):
North Korea's emergence as a pariah nuclear state has largely
occurred under his son and grandson.
Kim's final years were turbulentones.
As he entered his late 70s, he began to turn over a range of
responsibilities to his son and heir Kim Jong Illinois, even as
the world was changing around them.

(51:21):
In the late 1980's, the Cold War, which the state of North
Korea had been born out of, cameto a rather dramatic end as the
new head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, began
reforming the Russian LED state and inadvertently brought about
its collapse. As this occurred, a huge number
of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and other parts of the

(51:43):
world either collapsed or abandoned their pretensions
towards being Marxist Leninist states.
North Korea would be one of the few countries that resisted this
drift of events. Preserving its own brand of
ultra nationalist authoritarianism.
The consequences of this were that North Korea became
increasingly isolated on the world stage in the early 1990s

(52:07):
and it lost its trading partnersand allies.
Although the country's economy had been declining for decades,
the end of the Cold War brought fresh problems.
Despite such developments, the regime continued to have
delusions of grandeur. In the mid 1980s, in response to
the granting of the honor of hosting the Summer Olympics in

(52:28):
Seoul in South Korea, a country which had moved past its own
authoritarian period of politicsto become the technologically
advanced economy and country we know today, Kim's regime ordered
the construction of a vast new stadium in Pyongyang.
Finished in 1989. The Rongrado 1st of May Stadium

(52:49):
can accommodate 150,000 people and it's the largest stadium in
the world. Kim would not live to see many
performances at the stadium or much of how the New World Order
would begin to develop followingthe end of the Cold War.
He turned 80 in April 1992. A formal event was held which

(53:11):
was attended by dozens of world leaders or their
representatives, a gathering which highlighted the manner in
which Kim, as tyrannical as his rule was, was still an
international leader with friends and allies on the world
stage. Unlike his successors, he was in
relatively good health still at this event, and his demise, when

(53:33):
it came two years later, was sudden.
He suffered a heart attack on the 7th of July 1994 and died
hours later in the early morningof the 8th of July, at a country
retreat in the north of Korea. A state funeral was held a week
and a half later, following which Kim's body was preserved

(53:54):
and placed in a glass coffin on display in the Kumsusan Palace
of the Sun. This was a grand palace which
Kim had constructed in Pyongyangin the mid 1970s as the official
residence of the President 1 which was transformed following
his death into a giant mausoleum.
When his son died 17 years later, he was interred there as

(54:17):
well, and the palace has consequently become a family
mausoleum and one of the most significant sites of the regime.
As Kim aged, the issue of the succession had become more
prominent in North Korean politics.
After the death of his first wife in childbirth in 1949, he
had remarried to Kim Sung A in 1952.

(54:41):
He is believed to have had threefurther children through this
marriage, and it is also believed that he also fathered
some illegitimate children. The issue of the succession was
not set in stone until the early1980s, when Kim's eldest son,
Kim Jong Illinois, born in the Soviet Union back in 1941, was

(55:02):
acknowledged as the air designate.
He duly succeeded upon his father's death.
Unlike his father, who for all his flaws had risen to power on
at least some political ability,Kim Jong Il had inherited his
power and displayed many of the personality peculiarities of an

(55:22):
inherited dictatorship, investing much of his energies
on building DVD collections, staging plays and watching
basketball matches. As well as.
Excessive drinking traits, whichare even more exacerbated in his
own son and successor, Kim Jong Un Kim.

(55:42):
Jong Il ruled North Korea for 17years after his father's death.
The first years of his time as the dictator of the country were
dominated by a catastrophic famine.
The roots of which. Had been sown in the latter
stages of his father's reign. Because North Korea is the most
secretive and closed nation on earth, it remains unclear to

(56:05):
this day exactly how many peopledied during the famine, which
went on from 1994 to 1998. The upper estimates of 3.5
million are probably excessive. But it is.
Plausible that a million or morepeople died out of a population
of 22 million people, while millions more were left

(56:25):
malnourished. This set the tone for the rule
of Kim Jong Illinois and his sonKim Jong Un, who succeeded him
in 2011. Under the Kim family, North
Korea has remained A brutal dictatorship with repressive
policies, human rights abuses, and an enormous military
establishment. The country's economic and

(56:46):
social development has met with one catastrophe after another,
with food shortages and lack of electricity being a daily
occurrence for many N Koreans. But under Kim.
Illinois Sung's. Son and grandson, the country's
nuclear arms program has become stronger and stronger.
Thus, as brutal and backwards asthe regime may be, little can be

(57:09):
done by the outside world to remove the Kims from power
without risking a nuclear war inEast Asia.
And there are no signs of it reforming itself anytime soon,
for better or for worse. And few would argue it has been
for the better. Kim Illinois Sung is the most
significant figure in the history of modern Korea.

(57:32):
In his early life, he emerged asthe leader of the Korean
Communist movement in exile against Japanese occupation of
the peninsula. The end of the Second World War
and the Soviet occupation of thenorthern half of the peninsula
provided the opportunity for himto rise to power over North
Korea following its emergence asa rival to the western aligned

(57:55):
South Korea. It was all negative from there.
His first action was to launch awar against South Korea, which
lasted for three years and became the first major clash of
the Cold War. The conflict has theoretically
never ended and the Korean Peninsula remains divided by a
demilitarized border zone. At home, he set the tone for a

(58:18):
North Korean regime which has committed appalling human rights
abuses for the last 3/4 of a century.
There were some initial spring shoots in the economic
development of North Korea in the decade or so following the
end of the war with South Korea.Yes, even this ran aground in
the 1970s and 1980s on the back of the misguided efforts to make

(58:41):
North Korea self-sufficient. The famine which followed
immediately after Kim's death was sown by his government's
policy. Admittedly, things have become
worse in North Korea under his son and grandson, particularly
owing to their unwillingness to abandon their nuclear policy and
the sanctions that have followedinternationally as a result, as

(59:03):
well as the kleptocratic behaviour of the regime.
But the nature of the totalitarian pariah state that
North Korea has become was firstshaped by Kim Illinois Sung.
What do you think of Kim Illinois Sung?
Was he a strong and capable leader through a succession of
conflicts, or was he completely responsible for turning North

(59:25):
Korea into the pariah state it is today?
Please let us know in the comments section.
And in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.

(01:01:13):
Yeah.