North Korea became a hell on earth – thanks to just one man

Kim Il-sung destroyed the economy, concentrated power and saw his compatriots massacred, works reveal Accidental Tyrant [Accidental Tyrant] by Fyodor Tertitskiy.

By: Christopher Harding / The Daily Telegraph
Translation: Telegrafi.com

On October 14, 1945, a crowd in Pyongyang gathered to hear a speech that would define a new era. Japanese colonial rule in Korea had ended, the peninsula was on the verge of independence, and the people in the north, under Soviet control, had been promised a new leader with a heroic name associated with the great freedom fighters of the past – Kim Il-sung. Instead, before them stood a former elementary school teacher who had spent most of his life in China and the Soviet Union. Dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and tie, he addressed the crowd in shaky Korean and a husky voice. One witness said that Kim reminded them of a Chinese waiter.

Born Kim Song-ju, he took the name "Il-sung" as a war nickname [according to the guerre] about a decade earlier, when his armed resistance to Japanese rule and his ties to Russian and Chinese communism helped him stand out among the communist-sympathizing Korean leaders. But he spoke better Chinese than Korean, and his rapid rise was the result of a selection process by Soviet officials that failed to produce a better candidate. North Korea’s official mythologists had a tough job ahead of them in later years, turning this compromise figure into the world’s most infamous “Dear Leader.”

As Fyodor Tertitskiy makes clear in his new biography of Kim, Accidental Tyrant, decades of misery in North Korea stem from this fateful choice by the Soviet Union. Kim, Tertitskiy writes, “is the darkest figure in all of Korean history”: a man who “launched the most devastating war Korea has ever seen,” “created one of the most oppressive states in human history,” caused mass starvation, and “did everything he could to ensure that this regime would continue after his death.”

The latest effort has been particularly successful, thanks to his son and grandson, Kim Jong-un, who have inherited power; so successful that, while most communist countries in the world have allowed their populations to embrace modern technology, Tertitskiy estimates that all North Koreans with unlimited access to the internet could fit inside a train car.

Given the millions of people killed or oppressed by the regime that Kim Il-sung created, it is both curious and disturbing to find a relatively ordinary man at its center. If we peel back the curtain of propaganda woven by generations of government officials—mostly tales of Kim Il-sung’s heroism against the Japanese and American imperialists—we discover someone who, instead of a grand philosophy, was driven by a desire to turn his country into a large schoolroom, bending the people to his will and allowing them no ideas or aspirations beyond those he chose for them.

A man whose true past is carefully guarded by North Korea’s current leadership presents obvious problems for a biographer; not to mention the fact that Kim seemed to prefer women, food, cars and villas to any other form of deep appreciation. It is no wonder, then, that, apart from official biographies, works devoted to Kim’s life are few and far between. Tertitskiy has assembled an impressive range of sources in several languages ​​to construct this dense, credible and highly readable account. But inevitably this is more of a general history of North Korea, centred around a shadowy figure, than a rich psychological portrait such as those available for other 20th-century leaders.

This makes the personal details about Kim all the more fascinating when they come to light. We learn of his love for his first wife, Han Song-hui: a guerrilla commander who was captured and imprisoned by the Japanese. When they were reunited years later, she had remarried. Kim could have done anything ruthless and unusual to her new husband. But instead, he left them alone, remembering that, long ago, Song-hui had woven his socks with strands of her hair.

Above all, however, we encounter a man with a gift for reading political situations and using them to his advantage. In his early years, Tertitskiy tells us, North Korea was dominated by Stalin, who chose Pyongyang as the capital, Kim as leader, and a disastrous form of agricultural collectivism as the economic model. But over the years, Kim managed to break away from Soviet influence by cultivating Korean nationalism, especially in schools, while eliminating internal political opponents. Not everything went according to Kim's plan: his invasion of South Korea in 1950 was a failure that cost nearly three million lives. Stalin was initially against it, and Mao Zedong intervened only after the war began to go badly for Kim.

Kim continued to maneuver his regime for decades amid the fluctuations of Sino-Soviet relations, securing great aid from both sides but never becoming completely dependent on either. He learned from the chaos of the period after the deaths of Stalin and Mao that a man who wants his ideas to outlive him must appoint a successor whose fate is tied to respect for his life and legacy. The solution, which may seem unusual for a communist regime, was to keep power within the family: The Kims could not deny their founding figure, nor could the country’s elite rise up and rebel against him.

Kim’s greatest disappointment was his failure to unite all of Korea under his rule—a disappointment that was compounded in 1975, when the Vietnamese communists succeeded in that very goal. (Tertitskiy notes that North Korean news reports of the day carefully avoided mentioning the event.) By the time Kim died in 1994, South Korea’s growing prosperity was a further affront to what he had built in the North. And yet, now that North Korea is a nuclear-armed state, building intercontinental ballistic missiles and sending troops to fight in Ukraine, it’s hard to deny the gist of Tertitskiy’s argument. Accidental Tyrant: that, given his unfavorable circumstances, Kim Il-sung's life was a rare success. /Telegraph/