by Ralph Hassig
On September 19, 1945, just over a month after the Japanese surrender, a Soviet naval vessel carried Capt. Kim Il-sung and sixty of his Korean comrades to Wonsan, Korea. Back in Pyongyang, Kim was installed in office and controlled by the Soviet military, who considered him to be a disciplined and reliable surrogate communist leader. After a few administrative false starts on the part of the Russians, who were not sure how best to govern North Korea, a provisional people’s committee was formed in February 1946, and Kim was appointed to lead it.
To make a long and complicated story short, over the next several years Kim used his political talents, along with the advice of his Soviet advisors and the support of Soviet troops, to take control of the newly established Korean security and military forces, thereby enabling him to outmaneuver political rivals who lacked a military base. By 1950 he had consolidated his position and created a miniature version of the Soviet Union in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula.7 His next goal was to extend his control over the southern half of the peninsula. What the North Koreans call the “Great Fatherland Liberation War,” known to foreigners as the Korean War, began with a surprise attack on June 25, 1950, although the North Korean people are told that the Korean People’s Army (KPA) was launching a counteroffensive against a South Korean attack.
In the years immediately following the war, Kim’s generalship was questioned, and those who naively believed that he was the first among political equals made a political attempt to unseat him.8 As is often the case when people are gradually deprived of their individual freedoms, Kim’s political opponents did not realize that he was well on his way to becoming a totalitarian dictator. Kim used his political skills, as well as the backing of the army and secret police, to purge political opponents and secure his regime, and by the late 1950s he had firmer control over the country than before the war. Kim Il-sung incorporated the guerrilla lifestyle that had enabled him to survive in China into his governance of North Korea and wedded it to the regimented economic and political structures that had made the Soviet Union a world power and kept Stalin in office.9
A decade after the Korean War, Premier Kim (he would take the title of president under a new constitution in 1972) could be proud of himself. Despite having little formal education and no political connections, he had become the unrivalled leader of half a country. Communism continued to spread through Asia, and Kim surely believed that the tide of history was on his side. He rarely traveled outside his country, except for occasional trips to China and the Soviet Union, but in his own little corner of the world, he was a god-king.
Kim ruled by what seemed to him to be common sense, and technocrats had little impact on policy. He traveled around the country giving what the press called “on-the-spot guidance.” In this sense he was like a king traveling among his subjects, dispensing advice on matters great and small. His people loved him, and most foreigners who met him thought him a charming man. It was hard to believe that behind the hearty handshake and jovial manner was a man who had ruthlessly started the Korean War and cold-bloodedly purged his political rivals and who oversaw a gulag system that imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Koreans for crimes no more serious than questioning his policies.
Kim’s thoughts and actions were more like those of the mayor of a small city or the lord of a fiefdom than the leader of a twentieth-century state. Policy mistakes, of which there were many, were covered up by aid from China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. His people were kept so isolated that they could not compare their standard of living with that of the South Koreans or Chinese. The one sphere of life in which Kim had to stay on top of his game was domestic politics; he had a sixth sense about how to influence and control people, a sense that his son would develop as well. Motivated by adoration for their leader and by their own self-interest, party officials created for Kim a cult of personality that he gracefully accepted. He was not an evil or intentionally corrupt man. Better to say, he was a normal human being who gradually succumbed to adulation and privilege and who used whatever power his followers granted him.
The goal of Korean reunification continued to elude him. After the Korean War truce, he kept looking for an opening, but South Korea grew faster than the North and remained firmly under the protection of the United States. The Korean War had turned most South Koreans into ardent anticommunists who accepted their own military dictatorships as a necessity for national survival. In the late 1960s, Kim increased North Korea’s commando raids into the South, but they were repulsed and made the South Korean people even more hostile toward the North.
Judging by his lack of significant policy initiatives, Kim did not seem to notice that international communism was losing its legitimacy as a provider of people’s welfare. The gap between rich and poor was smaller in communist than in capitalist economies, but communist economies were never healthy, and North Korea found itself locked into a trading system with other inferior economies. North Korean factories turned out third-rate products that were traded to other communist countries for their second-rate products. Meanwhile, South Korea was joining the other East Asian economic “dragons” on its way to prosperity.
In the 1970s, as the shortcomings of North Korea’s economy were becoming more evident, Kim was in his sixties and beginning to sink into a comfortable semiretirement. It seems likely that in the 1980s and 1990s, Kim Jong-il was running the country with his father presiding over formal diplomatic tasks and public appearances. Kim Il-sung reportedly died of a heart attack at 2 a.m. on July 8, 1994, although the exact circumstances of his death are not likely to be known until after the secretive North Korean regime has been replaced. News of his death was announced thirty-four hours later on the Korean Central Broadcasting Station (KCBS), the country’s only domestic radio station, and an hour after that to the international community by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). Millions of sobbing mourners appeared at the thousands of Kim Il-sung monuments scattered across the country to pay their respects (although one former North Korean we interviewed said that she only pretended to cry in order not to stand out from the crowd and attract the attention of the police). To this day, a visit to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where Kim’s body lies in state, is a moving experience for the tens of thousands of North Koreans who go every year.
Two days before he died, Kim Il-sung reportedly gave a talk to a small group of officials in which he outlined several tasks to be accomplished, not knowing of course that this would be his last instruction.10 After his death, his words were enshrined as a sacred “behest,” and whenever it was convenient, his son invoked the behest as the mission his father wanted him and the North Korean people to accomplish, reminiscent of Stalin’s pledge at Lenin’s funeral to carry on his work. Kim’s last instructions showed how out of touch he was with economic reality. He instructed his officials to construct oil-powered power plants to help solve the chronic energy shortage, although North Korea had to import all its oil from abroad. He urged the repair of a large fertilizer plant and the “normalization” of the cement industry. He also ordered that the production of steel be increased. All these industries had been failing for years and would continue to fail because he could not tell the people where to get the resources to run them. He wanted to see an increase in trade with Southeast Asia, for which one hundred large cargo ships should be built—although North Korea only has the capacity to build small cargo ships. He also instructed his economic officials to go abroad to study modern business practices, although the country really needed a better economic system, not better businessmen. Kim’s final instruction was significant: to “achieve the complete victory of socialism and the fatherland’s reunification,” that is, the reunification of the peninsula under communism.
The Rise of Kim Jong-il
North Korea is one of the rare cases of successful hereditary succession in national politics. As the oldest son of the founder, Kim Jong-il had an inside track on succession, even though hereditary rule has never been a notable featur
e of communist regimes.11 But being a dictator’s son was not enough to guarantee Kim Jong-il the succession. He had to prove himself, because his father was not foolish enough to put the country he had built into the hands of an incompetent. The approval process lasted from the time Jong-il graduated from college in 1964 to the time he was publicly presented as the future leader in 1980. Along the way there were purges and banishments and most likely a few dead bodies. Once in power, Kim Jong-il took the country as it had been shaped by his father and, with a view to staying in power, made no substantial changes.
According to an early edition of North Korea’s Dictionary of Political Terminology, hereditary succession is “a reactionary custom of exploitative societies,” but that inconvenient characterization was deleted in later editions of the work. From 1974 to 1977, and sometimes even in later years, the North Korean media referred to Kim Jong-il only as the “party center,” leaving people to guess the exact identity of that individual.12 Why he was not identified by name is not known, although the most popular guess is that he or his father was concerned about how the public would react to such an obvious case of nepotism. When he was mentioned by name, he was often referred to as “Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-il” (kyongaehanun jidoja Kim Jong-il dongji).
The official story of Kim Jong-il’s birth has this auspicious event taking place in a log cabin on the forested slopes of North Korea’s Mt. Paektu, where his father’s guerrilla band was allegedly based. The mountain above the cabin, originally called Chang-su Peak, was later renamed Jong-il Peak. In fact, Kim was not even born in Korea but rather in a Russian military camp near Khabarovsk. In late November 1945, two months after Kim Il-sung was escorted back to Korea by Russian troops, the three-year-old Jongil and his mother landed at the small eastern port of Unggi, later renamed Sonbong, meaning “leading torch.” Kim’s younger brother, Shura, who had been born in 1944, died in a drowning accident at the family home at the age of five. Kim also had a sister, Kyong-hui, born in 1946, who would become one of his closest associates.
His mother, Kim Jong-suk, died while giving birth to her fourth child in 1949, and in about 1953, Kim’s father married the attractive Kim Song-ae and had a second son, Kim Pyong-il, a handsome and popular boy. Kim Jongil disliked his stepmother and stepbrother, and when he gained political power, he saw to it that both of them were kept out of the circle of influence, his mother under house arrest and his brother permanently assigned to ambassadorships in Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland, and Poland, where he was kept under close surveillance.
Kim discarded his Russian name of Yura at about the time he graduated from high school, and he would later change the Chinese characters of his Korean name to make them fitting for a member of the ruling family, because in Asia names carry more meaning than they do in the West. Jong-il, originally written in Chinese characters meaning “righteousness the first,” was changed to “righteousness the sun” when Kim made his political debut in 1980. The “sun” name is the same as the first character of his father’s name, Il-sung. Kim’s mother’s name, Jong-suk, originally written with the Jong character meaning “virtue,” was posthumously changed to the same Jong character for “righteousness” that is part of her son’s name.13 Thus, Jong-il ended up with one name from his father and one from his mother, signifying that he is firmly in the family “revolutionary bloodline.”
Kim’s childhood was typical—for the son of a dictator. He was treated with great deference by one and all and thoroughly spoiled. His father probably did not have much time to spend with his son, and having a father who was worshipped as a great hero and almost a god set a very high standard for the young Kim, who was always trying to gain his father’s respect. After middle and high school in Pyongyang (except for a few years in China during the Korean War), Kim enrolled in the university named after his father, Kim Il-sung University, and graduated with a degree in political economy in 1964. Kim’s university dissertation, perhaps ghostwritten (he was a bright, but somewhat distracted, student who had special tutors to assist him), was titled “The County’s Position and Role in the Construction of Socialism.” In 1964, Kim joined the Korean Workers’ Party’s (KWP) Propaganda and Agitation Department, which was headed by his uncle, Kim Yong-ju. By 1967 the young Kim was chief of the Culture and Art Guidance Section of the department, rising to department vice director in 1970.
Testimony from North Korean defectors suggests that Kim played an active role in the management of party and government affairs from the time of his first party appointment in the mid-1960s, including (according to the North Korean press) bearing direct responsibility for the capture of the U.S. spy ship Pueblo in 1968 and the ax killings of American soldiers at the border post of Panmunjom in 1976.14
Kim moved steadily into his role as successor. In 1973 he became a Central Party secretary, and the next year he was appointed to the Politburo. His leadership succession was made official at the Sixth Party Congress in 1980, where at his father’s direction he was appointed a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, secretary of the Central Party Committee, and member of the Central Military Committee. Only two other persons held such prestigious posts: his father and the top general, O Jin-u, who, not being a family member, could not be in the line of succession.
It appears that the junior Kim ran most of North Korea’s domestic affairs from about 1980 onward. He issued commands in the name of his father and, by that token, had to be obeyed because his father’s word was quite literally the law of the land. Because he served as his father’s principal administrative assistant, reports sent to Kim Il-sung had to go through Kim Jong-il, who therefore decided what information his father would receive.
In the 1990s, Kim Jong-il was given (or took) several titles and top posts to consolidate his control over the military, the only institution that could conceivably block his succession. In 1990 he was elected first vice chairman of the National Defense Commission (NDC), an entity whose only significance at the time was that Kim Il-sung was its chairman. In 1991 Kim Jongil was named supreme commander of the KPA, and the following year, on the KPA’s sixtieth anniversary, he received the title of marshal (his father took the title of grand marshal). While reviewing the military parade commemorating the KPA’s anniversary, Kim made the only publicly broadcast utterance of his career, calling out in a high-pitched voice, “Glory to the heroic KPA officers and men.” According to one South Korean source, his words were only supposed to go out on the public address system, but due to a sound engineer’s error, his brief speech was picked up by Korean Central Television (KCTV), a mistake for which several broadcasting officials were duly punished.15 In 1993, Kim Jong-il succeeded his father as chairman of the NDC.
When Kim Il-sung died on July 8, 1994, no one other than Kim Jong-il was even remotely positioned to succeed him, but it is likely that Kim had to do some additional work to consolidate his political position now that his father was no longer around to back him up. To this end, Kim placed even more emphasis on the military as his main source of support and the “pillar” of North Korean society. He continued to reward and promote KPA generals, usually announcing the promotions on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, thereby making the officers loyal to both him and his late father.
Many observers of North Korea, ourselves included, doubted that Kim Jong-il could hold on to power after his father’s death. The reasons for such skepticism were numerous, but two stand out. First, the junior Kim was riding to power on his father’s coattails. It seemed quite possible that the KPA generals might not rally around the great leader’s son, who had no military experience, even though North Korean propagandists called him “a military genius who has boundless military insights, limitless boldness, extensive military knowledge, and political insights.”16 This line of skepticism failed to consider, however, that the top generals, most of whom were of Kim Il-sung’s generation, recognized that they could not run the country themselves. They were, after all, uneducated warriors who owed their positions to having fo
ught alongside the senior Kim fifty years before.
Another reason for discounting Kim Jong-il’s staying power was his relative obscurity. Unlike his father, who loved to meet people and give speeches, the junior Kim avoided the public and never gave a public speech or made a media broadcast. He even failed to utter a word on the fiftieth anniversary of the country’s founding in 1998, when the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) convened for the first time since his father’s death. Instead, the assembled delegates were treated to a recording of a speech made by his father in 1990. But, of course, the North Korean people have no voice in politics, so even though they were skeptical of Kim Jong-il’s leadership ability, it hardly mattered.
By the mid-1990s the North Korean economy was in disastrous shape because Russia had ended its concessionary trade relations with North Korea, and China had curtailed them. Food rations began to run short even before floods hit the country in the summer of 1995. For three years after his father’s death, while millions were going hungry and even starving, Kim Jong-il lived in seclusion. The press said he was such a loyal son that he was honoring a traditional three-year mourning period. Only in 1997 did he come out of his self-imposed seclusion to have himself appointed to his father’s position as general secretary of the KWP. The appointment was made without convening a party congress, which had not met since 1980 (nor has it met since). In 1998, when Kim finally convened the Supreme People’s Assembly, the delegates adopted a new constitution that retired the position of president, thereby making his father North Korea’s “eternal president.” Kim chose to be reelected as NDC chairman, a position declared to be the country’s top leadership post. In the North Korean media, Kim is often referred to by the full complement of his ruling titles: Comrade Kim Jong-il, chairman of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) National Defense Commission, general secretary of the Korean Workers’ Party, and supreme commander of the Korean People’s Army.
