The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Fyodor Tertitskiy, author of “Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il Sung (Oxford 2025) – is the 467th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Identify the core characteristics of Kim Il Sung’s legacy.
In the book, I argue that the order Kim Il Sung built was based on six pillars: cult, control, secrecy, hierarchy, exploitation, and terror. All six are very much present in North Korea today. The three members of the dynasty – Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un – are worshipped daily, with every household displaying their mandatory portraits on the wall, and quotations from them included in every text. The state grants its citizens almost no access to foreign media, and something as banal as internet access is reportedly still permissible only with Kim Jong Un’s personal sanction.
As for secrecy, the state remains as opaque as ever – not only orders and statistics, but even local official press, such as Pyongyang newspaper Pyongyang Shinmun, are inaccessible to outsiders. Foreign tourists cannot walk a North Korean street without supervision.
The state enforces a rigid hierarchy: Pyongyangites carry different IDs from the rest of the country, non-party members hit a ceiling beyond which no career may progress, and many elite figures are sons or daughters of other elite figures.
Exploitation remains endemic – not only in labor camps but also in the army, where soldiers are routinely dispatched to collective farms, and in civilian life, where mass mobilization campaigns compel citizens to toil unpaid for months on end.
And then there is terror. Listening to foreign radio can earn one a sentence of forced labor. Extrajudicial punishments persist. The death penalty is widely used. This is Kim Il Sung’s legacy in action – alive, unrelenting and etched into every inch of the system.
Examine how Kim Il Sung shaped North Korea’s political culture and national identity.
If anything, Kim Il Sung ensured that no national identity would remain apart from absolute submission to the leader. Communist ideology and national pride alike were rendered subservient to the ever-present cult. This became painfully clear in December 2023-January 2024, when Kim Jong Un declared that Korean unification, once proclaimed a sacred goal, was no longer relevant. The people and the elite, long since terrorized into obedience, accepted the change without resistance.
Explain how Kim Il Sung structured the country’s leadership system to ensure his family would retain complete authority and power for three successive generations.
This required Herculean effort. In the 1950s, Kim Il Sung, through shrewd manipulation, purged the elite of disloyal elements and secured his political independence from the Soviet Union. By installing an exceptionally repressive system, he ensured that his word became law, and any disobedience would be met with the harshest punishment. This was the point at which he began preparing his son Kim Jong Il to take over.
What’s more, he allowed his successor to build an independent power base – Kim Jong Il had 20 years to prepare for his ascension. This normalized what had previously been unthinkable: dynastic succession. By the time Kim Jong Il selected his own son in 2009, it was already expected both inside and outside North Korea.
Analyze Kim Il Sung’s impact on North Korea’s current foreign policy under Kim Jong Un.
Although it was Kim Jong Il who transformed North Korea into a nuclear power, the atomic dream was born under Kim Il Sung – likely sparked by his fear of Douglas MacArthur’s suggestion to deploy nuclear weapons during the Korean War. It was during Kim Il Sung’s rule that North Korea began actively pursuing a nuclear program, laying the groundwork for what would become a central pillar of its strategic doctrine. The nuclear project that continues to cause international alarm – and will almost certainly persist as long as the Kim dynasty survives – can thus be traced directly back to the Great Leader himself.
The highly skilled North Korean diplomatic school – built on manipulating great powers, exploiting their rivalries, and achieving maximum results with minimal resources – also has its roots in Kim Il Sung’s era, when North Korean diplomats secured backing from both China and the Soviet Union.
One might argue that only two of Kim Jong Un’s policies – dispatching entire units to Russia to fight in Ukraine and renouncing inter-Korean unification – are distinctly un-Kimilsungist. To a striking extent, North Korea remains, as ever, a paranoid fortress engineered for self-preservation – and ultimately, a creation of Kim Il Sung.
Compare and contrast Kim Il Sung’s legacy with the legacies of China’s Mao Zedong and the former Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin.
Stalin and Mao’s legacies were largely dismantled by their successors. Within three years of their deaths, their nations were already transforming. By 1956, the Soviet Union had denounced Stalin’s excesses at the 20th Party Congress, begun mass prisoner releases and relaxed censorship. Three years after Mao muttered “I feel ill. Call the doctors” and breathed his last, Deng Xiaoping had purged Maoist hardliners, declared that 30 percent of Mao’s policies were wrong and launched China on a path of reform and openness.
In stark contrast, more than 30 years after Kim Il Sung’s death, North Korea still swears eternal loyalty to him. It remains ruled by his bloodline and, in most respects, continues as the hypermilitarized, impoverished, closed society with a terrorized population that he envisioned.
