Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung by Fyodor Tertitskiy

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'Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung' by Fyodor Tertitskiy

'Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung' by Fyodor Tertitskiy

In establishing the first Communist dictatorship, Vladimir Lenin had no intention of founding a dynasty. His heir, Josef Stalin, never considered leaving the Kremlin to his son, and China never endured Mao Jr. Only North Korea fostered a Communist dynasty, thanks to the regime’s founder, the “Beloved Leader,” Kim Il-sung. Upon his death in 1994, he passed the country to his son, Kim Jong-il, whose inevitable devise led to the rule of North Korea’s current tyrant, Kim Jong-un.

Fyodor Tertitskiy calls Kim Il-sung “an accidental tyrant” because there was nothing preordained about his rise to power. He received a high school 101 education in Leninism and never became a master theoretician. During World War II he was an officer of no distinction in the Soviet army’s Far East sector. When the Red Army seized the northern half of the Korean peninsula in 1945, Stalin decided to establish a client state. Kim wasn’t top of anyone’s list but attracted notice as the only Korean Communist leader actually born in Korea.

Disaster is one word for what followed. Against Stalin’s advice, Kim launched the Korean War in a bid to take the whole peninsula. Without Soviet arms and Chinese troops, Kim would have been swept from power in a war that took one million lives and left the borders little changed. His relations with his benefactors were often fraught, his poorly-planned economy barely functioned as he imposed a narcissistic cult of personality and a threadbare quasi-ideology—along with a virtual caste system and a brutal assault on thought. “The heartbreaking fate of tens of millions of innocents whose lives were twisted and brutalized by the will of this man remains the most important and lasting legacy of Kim Il-sung,” Tertitskiy concludes. Accidental Tyrant is perhaps the most thoroughly researched account available on Kim’s unfortunate regime.

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