Kim Il Sung Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! === Consolidating power === [[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-38870-0003, Berlin, Otto Nagel, Otto Grotewohl, Kim Ir Sen.jpg|thumb|right|Kim on a 1956 visit to East Germany, chatting with painter [[Otto Nagel]] and Prime Minister [[Otto Grotewohl]]]] With the end of the Korean War, despite the failure to unify Korea under his rule, Kim Il Sung proclaimed the war a victory in the sense that he had remained in power in the north. However, the three-year war left North Korea devastated, and Kim immediately embarked on a large reconstruction effort. He launched a five-year national economic plan (akin to [[Five-year plans of the Soviet Union|Soviet Union's five-year plans]]) to establish a [[command economy]], with all industry owned by the state and all agriculture [[Collective farming|collectivized]]. The economy was focused on heavy industry and arms production. By the 1960s, North Korea enjoyed a standard of living higher than the South, which was [[First Republic of Korea|fraught with political instability and economic crises]].<ref>{{cite book|title=The Making of Modern Korea|last=Buzo|first=Adrian|publisher=Routledge|year=2002|isbn=978-0-415-23749-9|location=London|page=140}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|title=Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History|last=Cumings|first=Bruce|publisher=[[W. W. Norton & Company]]|year=2005|isbn=978-0-393-32702-1|location=New York|page=434|author-link=Bruce Cumings}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/koreastwentieth00robi|title=Korea's Twentieth-Century Odyssey|last=Robinson|first=Michael E|publisher=University of Hawaii Press|year=2007|isbn=978-0-8248-3174-5|location=Honolulu|page=[https://archive.org/details/koreastwentieth00robi/page/153 153]|url-access=registration}}</ref> In the ensuing years, Kim established himself as an independent leader of [[World communism|international communism]]. In 1956, he joined Mao in the "[[Anti-revisionism|anti-revisionist]]" camp, which did not accept [[Nikita Khrushchev]]'s program of [[de-Stalinization]], yet he did not become a [[Maoism|Maoist]] himself. At the same time, he consolidated his power over the [[Communism in Korea|Korean communist movement]]. Rival leaders were eliminated. [[Pak Hon-yong]], leader of the Korean Communist Party, was purged and executed in 1955. [[Choe Chang-ik]] appears to have been purged as well.<ref name="crisis">Lankov, Andrei N., ''Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956'', Honolulu: Hawaii University Press (2004), {{ISBN|978-0-8248-2809-7}}</ref><ref>Timothy Hildebrandt, [http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/asia_rpt115b.pdf "Uneasy Allies: Fifty Years of China-North Korea Relations"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150224234236/http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/asia_rpt115b.pdf |date=24 February 2015 }}, ''Asia Program Special Report'', September 2003, Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars.</ref> Yi Sang-Cho, North Korea's ambassador to the Soviet Union and a critic of Kim who defected to the Soviet Union in 1956, was declared a factionalist and a traitor.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Lankov |first1=Andrei |last2=Selivanov |first2=Igor |date=22 October 2018 |title=A peculiar case of a runaway ambassador: Yi Sang-Cho's defection and the 1956 crisis in North Korea |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14682745.2018.1507022 |journal=[[Cold War History (journal)|Cold War History]] |volume=19 |issue=2 |pages=233β251 |doi=10.1080/14682745.2018.1507022 |s2cid=158492110 |access-date=18 February 2023}}</ref> The 1955 [[Juche speech|''Juche'' speech]], which stressed Korean independence, debuted in the context of Kim's power struggle against leaders such as Pak, who had Soviet backing. This was little noticed at the time until state media started talking about it in 1963.<ref name=Chung>Chung, Chin O. Pyongyang Between Peking and Moscow: North Korea's Involvement in the Sino-Soviet Dispute, 1958β1975. University of Alabama. 1978.</ref><ref name=French>{{cite book|last=French|first=Paul|title=North Korea: State of Paranoia|location=New York|publisher=St. Martin's Press|year=2014}}</ref> Kim developed the policy and ideology of ''[[Juche]]'' in opposition to the idea of North Korea as a [[satellite state]] of China or the Soviet Union. Kim transformed North Korea into what Wonjun Song and Joseph Wright consider a personalist dictatorship, where power was centralized in Kim personally.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Song |first1=Wonjun |last2=Wright |first2=Joseph |title=The North Korean Autocracy in Comparative Perspective |journal=Journal of East Asian Studies |date=July 2018 |volume=18 |issue=2 |pages=157β180 |doi=10.1017/jea.2018.8 |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]]|s2cid=158818385 |doi-access=free }}</ref> [[Kim Il-sung's cult of personality|Kim Il Sung's cult of personality]] had initially been criticized by some members of the government. The North Korean ambassador to the USSR, [[Lee Sang-jo|Li Sangjo]], a member of the [[Yan'an faction]], reported that it had become a criminal offense to so much as write on Kim's picture in a newspaper and that he had been elevated to the status of [[Karl Marx|Marx]], [[Vladimir Lenin|Lenin]], [[Mao Zedong|Mao]], and [[Joseph Stalin|Stalin]] in the communist pantheon. He also charged Kim with rewriting history so it would appear as if his guerrilla faction had single-handedly liberated Korea from the Japanese, completely ignoring the assistance of the [[Chinese People's Volunteers]]. In addition, Li stated that in the process of agricultural collectivization, grain was being forcibly confiscated from the peasants, leading to "at least 300 suicides" and he also stated that Kim made nearly all major policy decisions and appointments himself. Li reported that over 30,000 people were in prison for completely unjust and arbitrary reasons which were as trivial as not printing Kim Il Sung's portrait on sufficient quality paper or using newspapers with his picture to wrap parcels. Grain confiscation and tax collection were also conducted with force, which consisted of violence, beatings, and threats of imprisonment.<ref>{{cite web|last=Ri|first=Sang-jo|title=Letter from Ri Sang-jo to the Central Committee of the Korean Workers Party|url=https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114152|publisher=Woodrow Wilson Center|access-date=5 March 2014|archive-date=5 March 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140305210033/http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114152|url-status=live}}</ref> During the 1956 [[August Faction Incident]], Kim Il Sung successfully resisted Soviet and Chinese efforts to depose him in favor of pro-Soviet Koreans or Koreans who belonged to the pro-Chinese Yan'an faction.<ref name=Sino-SovietSplit>Chung, Chin O. ''Pyongyang Between Peking and Moscow: North Korea's Involvement in the Sino-Soviet Dispute, 1958β1975''. University of Alabama, 1978, p. 45.</ref><ref name=NKMajorPowers>{{cite journal|jstor=2643582|author1=Kim Young Kun|last2=Zagoria|first2=Donald S.|title=North Korea and the Major Powers|journal=Asian Survey|volume=15|number=12|date=December 1975|pages=1017β1035|doi=10.2307/2643582}}</ref> The last Chinese troops withdrew from the country in October 1958, which is the consensus as the latest date when North Korea became effectively independent, though some scholars believe that the 1956 August incident demonstrated North Korea's independence.<ref name=Sino-SovietSplit /><ref name=NKMajorPowers /> During his rise and consolidation of power, Kim created the ''[[songbun]]'' [[caste]] system, which divided the North Korean people into three groups. Each person was classified as belonging to the "core", "wavering", or "hostile" class, based on his or her political, social, and economic background β a system which persists today.{{citation needed|date=April 2022}} Songbun was used to decide all aspects of a person's existence in North Korean society, including access to education, housing, employment, food rationing, ability to join the ruling party, and even where a person was allowed to live. Large numbers of people from the so-called hostile class, which included intellectuals, land owners, and former supporters of Japan's occupying government during World War II, were forcibly relocated to the country's isolated and impoverished northern provinces. When years of famine ravaged the country in the 1990s, those people who lived in its marginalized and remote communities were hardest hit.<ref name=Kim-IlSungLegacy>[https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/04/13/north-korea-kim-il-sungs-catastrophic-rights-legacy North Korea: Kim Il-Sung's Catastrophic Rights Legacy] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190421002357/https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/04/13/north-korea-kim-il-sungs-catastrophic-rights-legacy |date=21 April 2019 }} 13 April 2016. [[Human Rights Watch]], 2016.</ref> During his rule, North Korea was responsible for widespread [[Human rights in North Korea|human rights abuses]].<ref>{{cite book|title=[[Black Book of Communism]]|page=564}}</ref><ref>[http://www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/Worst%20of%20the%20Worst%202012%20final%20report.pdf The Worst of the Worst: The World's Most Repressive Societies] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130607174811/http://www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/Worst%20of%20the%20Worst%202012%20final%20report.pdf|date=7 June 2013}}. [[Freedom House]], 2012.</ref><ref>[https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP10.HTM Statistics of democide β Chapter 10 β Statistics Of North Korean Democide β Estimates, Calculations, And Sources] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180911200456/http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP10.HTM |date=11 September 2018 }} by [[Rudolph Rummel]].</ref> Kim Il Sung punished real and perceived dissent through [[purge]]s which included [[public execution]]s and [[enforced disappearances]]. Not only dissenters but their entire extended families were reduced to the lowest songbun rank, and many of them were relocated to a secret system of political prison camps. These camps or ''[[Kwalliso|kwanliso]]'', a part of Kim's vast network of abusive [[Prisons in North Korea|penal and forced labor institutions]], were fenced and heavily guarded colonies in mountainous areas of the country, where prisoners were forced to perform back-breaking labor such as logging, mining, and picking crops. Most prisoners were held in these camps for life, and their living and working conditions in them were often deadly. For example, prisoners were nearly starved to death, denied medical care, denied proper housing and clothes, subjected to sexual violence, regularly mistreated, [[torture]]d and executed by guards.<ref name=Kim-IlSungLegacy /> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. 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