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He has held that government post ever since, keeping down prospective rivals by a combination of ideological purges and secret police pressure. By the mid-'50s, he achieved control over the party as well. Kim has created a personality cult that rivals Mao Tse-tung's: his grinning, moonfaced visage adorns homes, offices, schools, government buildings and factories in true Maoist—or Stalinist—profusion. Kim has borrowed ideas from both Communist giants. His own Great Leap Forward, named the Chollima (Flying Horse) Movement, began with almost precisely the hoop-la that greeted Peking's 1958 Leap and suffered a similarly ignominious fate. From the Soviet dictator, he took the idea of the Stakhanovite worker —and that brutalizing concept is at the heart of North Korea's economy today.
The method has produced results. The nation's gross national product increased by an average 10% per year from 1962 to 1964, and is now running at about half that rate. Western Korea-watchers believe that there have been sizable gains in electrical power, coal and steel production and the chemical and cement industries. North Korea's growth might be more impressive if Kim did not feel it necessary to plow 31% of the G.N.P. into defense.
Life in North Korea is austere, humorless and regimented. While most reports indicate that there is enough rice to go around, other staples seem to be in short supply and consumer goods are tantalizingly expensive. The average worker in heavy industry makes some $30 a month, while Pyongyang stores offer readymade, synthetic-fiber suits for $19 to $27. Locally made wristwatches sell for $39, a sewing machine for $111. Plastic shoes are available at $2 a pair, but leather shoes cost $8 to $10. Pyongyang is a sterile, spartan city, studded with Russian-style buildings and almost totally devoid of Western-style night life.
Uneasy Friendships. Kim makes a fetish of self-reliance, and North Korea's relations with its two great Communist neighbors have been spotty at best. The Soviet Union liberated Kim's domain from the Japanese, yet North Korean textbooks barely mention the Russian role. In 1950, Chinese Communist troops rescued Kim's forces from probable extinction at the hands of the U.S., but a war museum in Pyongyang gives the briefest mention of Chinese assistance.
Between 1953 and 1960, Sino-North Korean relations were much warmer, and Peking extended an estimated $590 million in aid and grants to the war-ravaged country. In the early '60s, however, friendship turned to resentment, largely because of Chinese pressure on North Korea to side with Peking in the Sino-Soviet split. In 1965, Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin stopped off in Pyongyang on his way home from a visit to Hanoi. Apparently he struck a bargain with Kim II Sung, for Soviet aid increased sharply and Kim's policies began to lean away from Peking. In 1967, Soviet military aid to Kim's regime amounted to $75 million, and in the following year rose above that.