Dragons are created in great rivers and sprawling lakes, storm clouds and typhoons. Only such sources are expected to produce their imperious demeanor and withering hauteur. And yet every so often, out of an ordinary wellspring, a dragon claws its way into the world.
Kim Il Sung was a nobody when he arrived at the port of Wonsan on Sept. 19, 1945, at the end of World War II and the beginning of chaos on the Korean peninsula. He had lived the previous five years in obscurity in the Soviet Union and returned to his native land dressed in the uniform of a Soviet army captain. Some people did not even believe he was who he claimed to be. Kim Il Sung? Wasn't that the name of a famous guerrilla? Didn't he die fighting the Japanese in Manchuria years before? Could this fleshy 33-year-old be that same hero? Soon, however, no one would deny him the name. When he died last week of a heart attack brought on, according to Pyongyang, by "mental strain," Kim had not only outlasted such totalitarian contemporaries as Stalin and Mao -- both of whom were his protectors and his dupes -- but was also the first communist leader to pass on his authority dynastically. As absolute master of his impoverished half of the peninsula for 46 years, he ignited one war, threatened the same again and again, and finally caused a flurry of global nervousness as he flouted the rules of nuclear nonproliferation.
He was born Kim Song Ju on April 15, 1912, the son of peasants in what North Koreans now call the cradle of the revolution: Mangyondae, an idyllic spot southwest of Pyongyang. The family had settled there after Kim's great- grandfather, a tenant farmer, was assigned by his rich landlord to keep up the owner's family graves. Those plots have been replaced by shrines to the genius of Kim Il Sung, as much of Kim's youth has been replaced by legend. At the age of 17, for example, he was supposedly teaching fourth-graders the basic doctrines of Marx and dialectical materialism. Little is said about his family's move to Manchuria, which was then occupied, like Korea, by Japan. The truth would not have been in keeping with Kim's official cult of Korean identity and national self-sufficiency. In official history, Kim was always the Korean partisan, the Korean communist stalwart, ever on the Korean front. But his guerrilla days were spent with anti-Japanese militias set up by the Chinese. And the name Il Sung, a common one among the fighters, may have been bestowed on him by comrades in one of those Chinese-led armies.
Kim Il Sung got his chance to refashion himself when he fled Manchuria for the Soviet Union in 1939 or 1940, as the Japanese Imperial Army was trouncing the Chinese guerrillas. He was assigned to the Khabarovsk Infantry Officers School and given a captain's commission along with command of the Soviet-led ethnic Korean battalion. In Khabarovsk he married Kim Chong Suk, who had joined Kim Il Sung's guerrillas in 1935 and had followed him into exile. After the Soviets entered the war in 1945 and occupied Japan's northeast Asian territories, Kim and 66 fellow officers were sent to Wonsan to form the core of a North Korean high command. It was then, according to former high-ranking Soviet officials, that Kim was selected by local Soviet commanders as Moscow's choice to become Korean leader.