The founder of North Korea returned from the Soviet Far East
On 14 October 1945, more than 100,000 gathered at Pyongyang's sports ground for a rally honouring the liberating Soviet army. A Soviet general introduced 'the national hero and famous partisan leader, comrade Kim Il Sung.' Onto the podium stepped a 33-year-old — the crowd stared in disbelief, having expected a legendary guerrilla in his fifties.
After guerrilla activity against Japanese rule, he served with the Soviet Far East’s 88th Separate Rifle Brigade in the 1940s and rose to the center of power in northern Korea under Soviet occupation authorities after 1945. Having founded the DPRK in 1948, he concentrated party, state, and military power over decades.
Career Timeline
- 1930년대Anti-Japanese guerrilla activity in Manchuria
- 1942–1945Served with the Soviet 88th Separate Rifle Brigade
- 1945–1948Built a power base in northern Korea under Soviet occupation
- 1948–1972Premier and Workers’ Party leader
- 1961Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance with the USSR
- 1972–1994President of the DPRK
Related historical events
4 June 1937: The Night of Pochonbo
On the night of 4 June 1937, troops of the Sixth Division of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army's First Route Army, commanded by Kim Il Sung, crossed the Yalu River and raided Pochonbo in Kapsan county, South Hamgyong province (today Pochon county, Ryanggang province). The Japanese police substation, the township office, and other organs of colonial rule were burned. Militarily it was a small operation, but its political echo was large: the Donga Ilbo carried the news in two extra editions the next day, and Koreans at home learned that Korean guerrillas were fighting Japan across the border, under a commander named Kim Il Sung.
Kim Il Sung was born on 15 April 1912 at Mangyongdae near Pyongyang and moved to Manchuria with his family as a boy. From the early 1930s he fought in anti-Japanese guerrilla units organized under the Chinese Communist Party, rising to command Korean forces in the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. When Japanese punitive campaigns intensified in 1940 he withdrew to the Soviet Far East, where he and his comrades prepared for the day of liberation in the Soviet 88th Separate Rifle Brigade.
The battle of Pochonbo later became the emblem of the anti-Japanese armed struggle in the DPRK. Scholars such as Wada Haruki argue that this Manchurian guerrilla experience shaped the very character of the postwar North Korean state.
9 September 1948: From Founding the Republic to Juche
Returning to Korea at liberation in 1945, Kim Il Sung, as chairman of the Provisional People's Committee of North Korea, carried out the land reform of March 1946 on the principle of confiscation without compensation and distribution without payment, followed by the nationalization of major industries and the law on equal rights for women. On 9 September 1948 the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was founded, with Kim as its first premier.
In the war of 1950–1953, American bombing reduced the cities of the north to ashes. Postwar reconstruction, aided by the Soviet Union, China, and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, proceeded at remarkable speed, and the Chollima movement of the late 1950s built a heavy-industrial base through a mass production drive. By the 1960s the DPRK's level of industrialization was widely judged to be ahead of South Korea's at the time.
In a speech of 28 December 1955, On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work, Kim first formulated the idea of Juche. Between the two great powers of the Soviet Union and China, this line of Juche in ideology, independence in politics, self-sufficiency in the economy, and self-reliance in defence was later systematized as the Juche idea, the guiding ideology of the republic. He led the state for nearly half a century, until his death on 8 July 1994.