Kim Il-sung: Leader by Chance

The turbulent political history of the Korean Peninsula—enough for several countries—played out in the middle of the 20th century through a series of branching paths and points of no return, and in the end, of all the possible candidates to lead the state, North Korea emerged as Kim Il Sung—a merciless man, brilliant in the art of political intrigue and holding onto power, but equally incompetent at running the economy and indifferent to the needs of most of his fellow countrymen.

Kim Il Sung, a great master of political manipulation, managed to accomplish almost the impossible: in the fifteen years after taking power in 1945, he fully removed the Soviet satellite state created for the USSR from Soviet control. It would be an exaggeration to call Kim Il Sung the embodiment of vice and absolute evil—under certain circumstances he could show himself as a brave person and a competent tactician, sometimes possessed of qualities like kindness, compassion, and the ability to forgive. Yet it was Kim Il Sung who became the darkest figure in Korean history. He started the most terrible war of all that happened on the Korean Peninsula, and created one of the planet’s most cruel and closed states.

The most important legacy of the Great Leader is the social and political system he built, which survived him by at least a quarter of a century—and no one knows how and when it will meet its end.