The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [12]
KIM IL SUNG
The Great Leader, as he was known to his subjects, is among the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century, dominating his country during his lifetime as few individuals are ever able to do. From the late 1950s his power was virtually unlimited within the borders of North Korea, and his decisions often had repercussions involving life and death in South Korea and beyond. As a national leader, Kim surpassed all others of his time in longevity. When he died in July 1994 at age 82, he had outlived Joseph Stalin by four decades and Mao Tse-tung by almost two decades, and he had remained in power throughout the terms of office of six South Korean presidents, nine U.S. presidents, and twenty-one Japanese prime ministers.
The future founder and leader of North Korea was born in Pyongyang on April 15, 1912, the day the Titanic sank. His parents were both Christians. His mother was the devout, churchgoing daughter of a Presbyterian elder, and his father had attended a missionary school.
Kim had only eight years of formal education, the last two in Chinese schools in Manchuria, where his father moved to operate an herb pharmacy. When he was 17 years old, he was expelled from school for revolutionary activities and never returned to the classroom. After being jailed briefly, in the early 1930s he joined guerrilla bands fighting the Japanese who, after turning Korea into a Japanese colony in 1910, had invaded and occupied Manchuria. The Korean guerrillas were organized by and attached to an army led by the Chinese Communist Party.
Although Kim's activities fell short of the brilliant, war-winning exploits later concocted by North Korean propagandists, he was successful enough that the Japanese put a price on his head. By 1941, Kim's unit and other parts of the Chinese guerrilla army were forced to retreat across the Manchurian border to Soviet army training camps, where they spent the next four years. During these years Kim married a Korean partisan and fathered two sons, the elder of whom was Kim Jong Il, his eventual political heir and successor.
It is still unclear how Kim was selected to lead North Korea. Having spent years in a Soviet training camp, Kim was well known to the Soviet officers who occupied the area north of the thirty-eighth parallel in 1945, and he had a reputation for being reliable and courageous. He appeared in Pyongyang immediately after the war in the uniform of a Soviet army captain, according to a Soviet general who served in the occupation force. Some accounts suggest that Joseph Stalin himself made the final choice of Kim from several candidates. Stalin is reported to have said, "Korea is a young country, and it needs a young leader."
As a leader, Kim was cordial to and comfortable with ordinary people. He emerged from a family of hard-working ordinary people and described himself in his memoirs as "an ordinary man." Vadim Medvedev, a Gorbachev aide who was Kim's escort for several days in Moscow in 1986, wrote later that he was "greatly surprised" to find in him "an absolutely normal person, with whom you could talk not only about politics but also weather, exchange opinions on events happening around and impresssions on what we saw."
Yet at the same time Kim came to live in luxury and exclusiveness beyond the dreams of kings. He inhabited at least five sumptuous palaces in North Korea and innumerable guest houses built for his comfort and amusement, all completely cut off from anyone except servants, bodyguards, and carefully screened guests. Uninvited people were barred from even setting foot on the wide and welltended road leading to his Pyongyang