dependence on the largesse of Moscow and Beijing. He cajoled his way out of trouble, pledging to make improvements to mollify their concerns. Kim also recognized that his patrons’ nervousness about North Korea’s stability, Pyongyang’s position as a bastion of Communism in East Asia, and the Sino-Soviet split in 1956 over doctrine and the two powers’ diverging geopolitical interests allowed him the freedom to maneuver and assert his autonomy. Driven by self-importance, nationalism, paranoia, and venal opportunism, Kim seized the occasion to fortify his rule and to set off on his own ideological course—what the professor of Korean studies James Person called an “indigenous version of Marxism-Leninism.”
BUILDING THE CULT OF KIM IL SUNG
In a 1955 speech, Kim introduced his concept of Korean-style socialism and began to indoctrinate the population in the notion of juche, roughly meaning self-reliance, aimed at solidifying his rule. For one, he used it to highlight his “Korean-ness” and the opposition’s impurity and presumed subservience to foreign powers and to bolster his self-declared position as the suryong, the unitary leader of North Korea. Second, juche justified hardships and motivated the people to work with greater zeal to rebuild the country after the war and channeled North Korean nationalism and xenophobia toward a worship of Kim as the defender of their way of life. Externally, Kim’s assertion of his country’s autonomy, but without breaking from the socialist camp, allowed him to pit Moscow and Beijing against each other, flattering and deferring to his more powerful neighbors when it was conducive to extracting more aid.
Juche and suryong as they have evolved seem like a hodgepodge of existing concepts: Christianity (Kim had come from a Christian family, reflecting the missionary presence in Korea), filial piety, the hierarchy and familial relationships of Confucianism, and Communism (especially Stalinism and the cult of personality). But at the same time, the intensely nationalist bent of Kim’s juche was a rejection of Stalinist internationalism, and his deification of the suryong shared commonalities with the imperial cult following the Meiji Restoration of the emperor that came to define Japan’s prewar and wartime nationalist ethos. These ideas also reflected Kim’s desire to create ideological and institutional walls to prevent outside interference and maintain his unitary leadership.
Perhaps Kim Il Sung’s view of the world as a hostile place was a belief he could not have escaped, given the environment in which he was raised. Born into imperialism, he never experienced a sovereign, independent Korea or a stable home life because of his parents’ early deaths. He knew hardship and deprivation, fear and uncertainty. In the struggle for national and individual survival—which often conflicted—it was difficult to know who was trustworthy. To outlast better-known and better-educated Korean nationalists, Kim had to coerce, cajole, steal, and kill on the political and military battlefields. He elevated his small circle of Manchurian guerrillas, endowing them with power and privilege, knitting together webs of political and military loyalty to ensure his primacy for the foreseeable future. Once in control, he restructured society and all aspects of its relationships, familial and institutional, to tighten his people’s bond to their leader.
Beginning in the late 1950s, Kim’s obsession with power and loyalty drove his regime’s efforts to categorize every citizen by their songbun, or background, putting them in three general groups—the “core,” “wavering,” and “hostile” classes—based on whether they were loyal revolutionaries (the core) or landowners, capitalists, or collaborators of Japanese imperialism. This project required multiple government investigations to check every individual’s background. These classifications were inherited and dictated what types of privileges one would be granted or denied. One’s caste decided where one would go to school, whom one would marry, where one would work. It would be unwise, for example, to marry someone from a lower category because that would taint one’s family and have an impact on the opportunities available to one’s offspring. Thus, it was in the individual’s interest to subsume personal desires and demonstrate loyalty to Kim in order to survive and thrive.
Yet in spite of the rigid classification system that Kim imposed on his citizens, he also believed education was an important tool for building a stable nation of followers devoted to him. From the very beginning, Kim focused on using education to craft regime narratives that elevated himself and his partisans, while teaching the masses proper socialist ideology. Over time, the education system focused less on Communism and shifted increasingly to the deification of Kim Il Sung, his family, and the guerrillas he fought alongside. The shift