History of Korea

Kim Il Sung was the pseudonym for Kim Song Ju. Kim was born in P'yongi, near P'yonyang in 1912. Kim and his family emigrated to Manchuria in the 1920's like many Korean families did at the time. In Manchuria, Kim attended a Chinese school. At the age of fifteen, Kim was arrested and imprisoned for a year by the Chinese authorities for having been a founding member of a Communist Youth League. After his release from jail in 1930, Kim founded the Korean Revolutionary Army, a guerrilla group that fought against the Japanese military. In 1931, Kim left for the hills of eastern Manchuria to join a Chinese Communist guerrilla group fighting the Japanese military in Manchuria. Kim swiftly rose up the ranks of the Chinese Communist Army. between the years 1932-1941, Kim led a band of Korean guerrillas against Japanese positions and personnel in Manchuria. It was during this time that he assumed the pseudonym Kim Il Sung, the name of a legendary resistance fighter that caused the Japanese a lot of trouble. In 1941, Japanese counterinsurgency forces forced Kim to leave Manchuria for the Soviet Union. There he remained until he "hitched" a ride with the Soviet Army into Korea in 1945.

Having received direct Soviet encouragement and backing form the beginning, Kim strove to unify Korea under the banner of communism. After the creation of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948, in response to the formation of a separate regime in the south, Kim became not only the head of the Korean Workers' Party, but premier of the new communist state as well. In late 1949, Kim made the fateful decision to launch a major military campaign to unify Korea under force of arms.

After the war, Kim continued the trend towards one-man rule. He succeeded in constructing a cult of personality with himself as the main icon for adoration{A glimpse of the kind of god-like status that Kim Il Sung had achieved was seen last year when television footage of his funeral procession was released}. In the post-Korean War years, Kim developed the idea of juche, an ideology of self-reliance blended with Marxism, thus creating a distinct "native" Korean communism. Last year (1994), at the age of 82, Kim Il Sung died.

Liberation and the Korean War