Kim Jong Il and the Making of North Korea's Hermit Kingdom

On Christmas Eve 1991, Kim Jong Il, the heir of North Korea's ruler since 1948, Kim Il Sung, became the new commander of the country's military. This was a vital step in preparing for Kim's succession once his father died. However, just two days after Kim's appointment in 1991, the Soviet Union, North Korea's longstanding ally, was dissolved. How would Kim Jong Il choose to rule North Korea after he succeeded? Would he open the country up to reform in the post-Cold War era or become even more isolated on the world stage? This is the story of Kim Jong Il, the second leader of North Korea.

The man known to history as Kim Jong Il was born most likely on the 16th of February 1941 at Voroshilov near Ussuriysk in the far south-eastern corner of Russia. This is what Soviet records of the time indicate. This evidence aside, North Korean state propaganda has claimed for decades that he was born on the 16th of February 1942 at the Paektusan Secret Camp on Paektu Mountain on the Chinese-North Korean border. This was while the country was under Japanese rule during the Second World War. The 1941 date is almost certainly correct and the 1942 date was only

selected later, to try to claim for propaganda reasons that Kim was born in Korea itself, not Russia. His name in his earliest years was Yuri Kim, a partly Russian name. He was later given the name Kim Jong Il. Kim's father was Kim Il Sung. At the time of Kim Jong Il's birth, he was a communist partisan fighting against the Japanese occupation of both Korea and large parts of China. Partisans like Kim Il Sung received training in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, hence Kim's probable birth in south-eastern Russia in 1941. His father would subsequently go on to become the leader of communist North Korea in 1948, establishing a Kim

family dictatorship there which still prevails over three-quarters of a century later. This means it is the oldest family dictatorship in the world. Kim's mother was Kim Jong-suk, the first wife of Kim Il Sung. They had met in China in the mid-1930s when Kim was there as an anti-Japanese fighter. Kim Jong Il was their eldest son. Another son drowned in 1948 in his childhood years, while their only daughter, Kim Kyong-hui, was born in 1946 and is still alive today. Kim was born in the middle of the most important twenty-year period in the modern history of the Korean Peninsula. Korea was not always divided into two nations.

It was unified for thousands of years and was extremely stable. The Joseon Dynasty, for instance, had ruled the Korean Kingdom for over 500 years between 1392 and 1897. That was a period of remarkable stability at the end of which Korea became known as the Hermit Kingdom on account of its isolationism. Matters changed dramatically as the Joseon Dynasty came to an end. The Empire of Japan was rapidly modernising and began asserting itself around the Far East, claiming control of Taiwan from the Chinese and establishing Korea as part of its sphere

of influence as the nineteenth century came to a close. In 1910 Korea was directly annexed by the Japanese. It remained part of the Empire of Japan for 35 years. The country was only finally liberated in August 1945 as the Second World War came to an end. By then the Soviet Union had invaded Manchuria to the north and so the Korean Peninsula was divided between a communist North Korea and a western-aligned South Korea, which was ruled over by military strongmen and the army down to the 1980s. Kim was one of many former communist partisan leaders who had fought against the Axis

powers from the Balkans in the west to Korea in the east who became a communist leader once the war ended. In September 1948 he became the first Premier of North Korea. Less than two years later, he invaded South Korea in an attempt to unify the peninsula under his rule. He believed, based on the experience of the non-intervention of western powers as the Nationalists were defeated by the Communists in China in 1949, that the US and its allies would not intervene either to save South Korea. He was wrong in that calculation and the Korean War followed after a United

Nations force spearheaded by the US, launched an expedition to reclaim South Korea. Peace of a kind was achieved in 1953 when a ceasefire was agreed to but North and South Korea remain theoretically at war with one another to this day. Meanwhile, having lost the war to conquer South Korea, Kim's father turned to consolidating his control over North Korea from 1953 onwards. Owing to these background events, Kim Jong Il's upbringing was tumultuous, while the circumstances of his life changed greatly between when he was a child and when he entered his adult

years. For instance, he started out his life in the middle of the Second World War and moved between Russia and Korea in line with his parents' role in the resistance movement against the Japanese occupation of Korea. Later his life became more settled in North Korea in the second half of the 1940s but then, with the outbreak of the Korean War, Kim was on the move once again. The conflict involved several invasions of both South and North Korea and the capture of major cities. Pyongyang fell to the United Nations expeditionary forces on the 19th of October 1950

after the counter-invasion of North Korea. All of this meant that Kim's first twelve years of life were unstable and his education was sporadic and regularly interrupted until after the Korean War ended in 1953. The details of where he was during these years are uncertain. For instance, some biographies assert that Kim spent most of the years of the Korean War in China for his safety. Official North Korean accounts assert that he remained in North Korea, a claim that was made so as not to make it seem as though Kim Il Sung had sent his own family out of

the country during the war. Kim's childhood was also overshadowed by the death of his younger brother in 1948 and then his mother the following year, from an ectopic pregnancy. Kim began his political career in 1961 when he joined the Workers' Party of Korea. It must be kept in mind that the Kim family was not yet then, the kind of quasi-royal, dictatorial family which it has since become. While Kim's father was the ruler of North Korea, he was not yet an absolutist dictator. That shift only occurred in 1967, after an attempt to displace Kim Il Sung, led by a cohort of senior veterans of the Second

World War known as the Kapsan Faction, was crushed. Kim Jong Il played a senior role in the investigations and purges that followed the Kapsan Faction Incident. As part of this he was put in charge of the Propaganda and Agitation Department. This department had evolved out of the Soviet propaganda division that had been installed in North Korea in the autumn of 1945 after the occupation of the northern half of the peninsula. Under North Korean administration, it was responsible for disseminating and managing the government's propaganda, which after the Kapsan

Faction Incident, started to become increasingly synonymous with Kim family propaganda. Kim's time as head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department coincided with a shift from using radio, posters, statues and printed material to spread the propaganda of the regime, to adopting film as a new method of indoctrination. Kim immediately had to deal with a problem. Amongst the Department's leaders was a politician named Kim To-man, who had sanctioned the production of a film called An Act of Sincerity. This portrayed Choe Chae-ryon,

the wife of Pak Kum-chol, the leader of the Kapsan Faction, in a very positive light. Kim had Kim To-man removed from the Propaganda and Agitations Department as a consequence. Kim then went on to play a more direct role in film and theatre production in North Korea. For example, he is listed as the director of a 1971 propaganda opera named Sea of Blood. It was set in the 1930s, the era of the Japanese occupation of Korea, and exemplifies the Juche ideology that had become a key part of Kim Il Sung's time as leader of the country. Juche literally means 'subject' and

combines elements of Marxist-Leninism alongside distinctly Korean ideas. By the time Sea of Blood premiered in 1971, the cult of leadership of Kim Il Sung had become absolutely central to it. This was just one of many films and plays which Kim Jong Il oversaw the production of, in the 1970s. He also published a book entitled On the Art of Cinema in 1973, in which he laid out his "seed theory", which argued that all directors and contributors to films in North Korea should operate from a single seed of an idea that was based around a piece of the regime's propaganda. Kim's infamous fascination with films and DVDs can be traced to his time as head of the Propaganda and Agitation Department.

Kim's formal recognition as his father's successor occurred in stages. Many historians trace Kim's ascent as the designated heir to his father to as early as the 25th of May 1967 during the Kapsan Faction Incident, when Kim Il Sung gave a speech before the party leaders, in which he criticised so-called 'revisionists' within the party and called for continuity of the revolution, a subtle indicator that Kim Jong Il should succeed him one day. It was notable that Kim gave his first major public speech before the party leaders the very next day. Nonetheless, while the Kapsan

Faction Incident and these speeches might have laid down a marker that Kim Jong Il was the heir designate, it was only through incremental measures in the 1970s and 1980s that it was made clear to the nation at large, that Kim would succeed as ruler of North Korea in due course. By 1971 he was being referred to in official state propaganda as the 'adored leader', a not so subtle shift in language, which further indicated the intention that he would succeed one day. In 1974 the Workers' Party Central Committee was informed that Kim was the successor designate to Kim Il

Sung and in the years that followed Kim Jong Il took over more and more of the daily operations of the party. Finally, in 1977 an official statement was made to the nation, that Kim was to take over the running of the country once his father was gone. Thereafter, Kim consolidated power in his hands in the 1980s, making sure that all rivals, notably his uncle, Kim Yong-ju, who had been considered as a possible alternative heir back in the early 1970s, were sidelined. Throughout these years, Kim had a growing family. It was an unorthodox one and even today,

decades later, the exact nature of it is hard to disentangle. He is believed to have had long-term relationships with at least five women. One of these, Kim Young-sook, was his official wife between 1974 and his death in 2011. She was the daughter of a senior military officer and the union was decided upon by Kim Il Sung. They had two daughters together in 1974 and 1976. This is the clearest element of Kim's complex personal life. He is also understood to have had an earlier wife, Hong Il-chon, whom he married in 1966 and divorced in 1969. Some studies

question if this was ever a formal marriage. On top of this, Kim had several lengthy relationships with other women. It would not be accurate to simply state that these were affairs. Instead, these were more like concubines in an informal system of polygamy. For instance, there is speculation that Kim married one of his mistresses, Song Hye-rim, in a kind of informal marriage before he was married to Kim Young-sook. Song Hye-rim was a successful North Korean actress in the 1960s and 1970s who had come into Kim's orbit as part of his work with the Propaganda

and Agitation Department. They had two children, including a son, Kim Jong-nam, who was born in 1971 and who, as we will see, was considered to be his father's chosen heir until around 2001. Kim formed another relationship again in the mid-1970s with Ko Yong-hui. They had three children together in the 1980s, two sons, Kim Jong Chul and Kim Jong Un, and a daughter, Kim Yo Jong. It is a sign of how secretive North Korean society is, as well as due to the lack of accurate records, that their dates of birth are largely unclear, but, broadly speaking, they were born between 1981

and 1987. These children, as we will see, became the most important over time in the succession struggle. Their mother died in 2004, following which another of Kim's mistresses, Kim Ok, who had been his secretary for many years, became a prominent mistress. They are also understood to have married, even though Kim's formal wife, Kim Young-sook, remained alive and they had apparently never divorced, albeit they were estranged. North Korea's politics were shifting during these years. Not only did the Kim family solidify their hold over the government;

they did so by cementing the position of the military at the heart of the administration. This was already a feature of Korean life going back to the very end of the Second World War. It was given greater emphasis in the 1970s and 1990s by Kim's father and presaged the formal adoption of the Songun system by Kim in the mid-1990s, as we will see. As the Cold War became more tense again in the 1980s, and as South Korea experienced a great economic boom based on its diversification into electronics and technology, North Korea responded by reasserting its commitment to totalitarianism.

Censorship and surveillance were expanded accordingly. On the international stage, Kim Il Sung attempted to expand North Korea's diplomatic ties around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. It is important to remember when considering Kim Jong Il's later time as leader and his son, Kim Jong Un's tenure as dictator of the country, that North Korea was not always as isolated as it has been in modern times. During the Cold War, North Korea had many ties to nations in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and even in Latin America. Incidents like the attempted assassination of the

South Korean President, Chun Doo-hwan, by North Korean operatives while he was visiting Rangoon in Burma on the 9th of October 1983 aside, Kim Il Sung was able to leverage the country's diplomatic connections to benefit the nation economically through both inward and outward trade in the 1970s and 1980s. The collapse of these diplomatic connections in the 1990s would shape Kim Jong Il's time as ruler of North Korea. In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became the new head of the Soviet Union. He was a different type of Russian leader, in part because he was born

in 1931 and came from a younger generation who had come of age in the prosperous Soviet era in the 1950s and 1960s. He set out to reform the Soviet system, which had stagnated economically in the 1970s and 1980s, but his planned gradual and limited reforms escalated in the late 1980s into a much more populist reform movement in the Warsaw Pact nations, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. After revolutions here and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the contagion spread to the USSR itself. It collapsed in 1991 and the new Russian Federation was formed, while major

component parts of the former Soviet Union like Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan became independent countries. This had existential implications for North Korea and the Kim regime. In response, Kim's father sought to reinforce the state's adherence to the Juche ideology he had developed after the Second World War and refused to engage in either the kinds of political reforms seen in Russia, or even the economic and market reforms that China had undertaken since the late 1970s to open up their economy to the world. This left North Korea badly isolated on the world stage in the 1990s.

This was the era of the Pax Americana that followed the Cold War, 'the American Peace', when democracies were proliferating everywhere and former dictatorships in Africa, Asia and the Middle East were facing the prospect of either reforming or being locked out of the new unipolar international system. The aged Kim Il Sung was unwilling to bend to the new order and so North Korea's economic and political situation deteriorated very quickly in the first half of the 1990s without the kind of former aid it had relied upon from the Soviet Union.

Kim Il Sung died on the 8th of July 1994 at 82 years of age. The line of succession was well established and Kim Jong Il succeeded his father, at first in a somewhat informal capacity, and then from October 1997 as General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea. He signalled his intention to retain the system established by his father immediately by creating the Songun in 1994. The Songun, which literally means 'military-first', was an ideology that placed the military at the very heart of North Korean life. It was promulgated by Kim within months of taking

power and was enshrined as part of his policy framework in 1995. At first it might appear as constituting a split with his father. Kim was affirming that he was now in control and that Songun was a new ideology that would shape how he ran the country. In reality, though, there was not much that was new here. North Korea had been a highly militarised society since the Second World War and it had only partially demobilised after the Korean War. Conversely, the 1970s had actually seen the most intense expansion of the military since the war.

There was a further expansion post-1994, but it was numerically inferior to the growth of the 1970s. Hence, the Songun policy was more of an effort to reaffirm the military nature of the regime in a post-Soviet world. What Kim was saying was that the communist totalitarianism of the Cold War era might be over, but he intended to rule as a military dictator nonetheless. Lip service has also continued to be paid to the allegedly communist nature of the regime in North Korea. People in North Korea in 1994 and 1995 must have known why the new leader of the country needed to

try to reaffirm his control over the country even while continuing along the same path established by his father. When Kim came to power in 1994 and decreed the creation of the Songun system, the country was mired in economic crisis and descending into a catastrophic famine. This was all connected to the changes that began as the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War came to an end. The political and economic realignment in Eastern Europe had devastating consequences for North Korea and its trade, agriculture, industry and supply systems.

Economic data always involves an element of estimation when it comes to the history of North Korea, as there are no accurate statistics provided by the regime. This issue aside, it is estimated that North Korea's GDP contracted by an average of between 4% and 5% annually in the 1990s. That meant that by the late 1990s, the North Korean economy was half the size it had been a decade earlier. The country's agriculture sector was hit especially badly. The flow of industrially-produced fertilizers and pesticides from the Soviet Union dried up,

a lack of oil and gas led to regular power cuts that also impacted on agriculture, which in the modern world is reliant on electricity at every stage of production. On top of this, cheap imports of grain from places like Ukraine were no longer available, as that country and Russia were going through their own brutal economic crises in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. Finally, these systemic problems were compounded by a series of alternating floods and droughts in North Korea in the 1990s. Famine was setting in already in 1994. It peaked in 1996 and 1997.

Because of the secretive nature of North Korean society, there is an unusual lack of consensus about the death toll from the North Korean famine of 1994 to 2000. The lower estimates, which are unrealistic, suggest around a quarter of a million deaths. The upper estimates are that three and a half million people died, which would have constituted around 15% of the population. The true figure probably lies between half a million and one and a half million people. Kim's response to the economic crisis and famine was to simultaneously avoid admitting that it was

even happening for propaganda reasons, while at the same time adopting a suite of largely ineffective measures to try to address it. For instance, the government did not frame this as a famine. Instead, it was referred to as the Arduous March in line with a propaganda approach which had been adopted in response to the developing economic crisis in the final year of Kim Il Sung's time as ruler. The name echoed the Long March which had saved the Chinese communist cause back in the mid-1930s during the Chinese Civil War. The name was designed to suggest that the North Korean

people were struggling together towards some brighter future rather than suffering through a catastrophic state-created crisis. Beneath this veneer of a calm yet difficult struggle, Kim's government attempted to put in place measures to increase the food supply. Above all, they looked after the elites within the regime, meaning that supplies were re-routed to the capital, Pyongyang. Soon the government made it known that it would accept international aid, and many Non-Governmental Organizations or NGOs began delivering food into North Korea. This was

nowhere near enough, though, and the famine did not generate the kind of international headlines that it otherwise might have at a different time. This was because it overlapped with a succession of international crises elsewhere in the world, notably the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and the ensuing Congo Wars. The famine was compounded in the mid-1990s by the failure of the food distribution system, a method of distributing resources according to whether a person or family was an industrial worker in the

cities or an agricultural worker. Industrial workers and other groups like the military and government officials were given preferential treatment in the distribution system, while those who were unable to work were at the bottom of the pyramid. Preferential treatment took the form of receiving a larger daily allocation of cereals and basic foodstuff. This system of preferential treatment had exacerbated famines in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and in China in the late 1950s and it also worsened the catastrophe in North Korea in the mid-1990s. Eventually the

system collapsed altogether as Kim's government was unable to meet even basic demands. As this happened, a huge black market in foodstuffs and other necessities developed, undermining the system of state-run supply that had existed in North Korea for half a century. Crime spiralled and the government also struggled to manage the border in the strained circumstances. For instance, several hundred thousand North Koreans are estimated to have absconded over the northern border into China during the famine years after they determined that it was better

to take their chances fleeing the country, than to remain and face death from starvation. The illegal economy that developed in North Korea between 1994 and 2000 would remain a feature of the country's economic system throughout Kim's time as leader of the country. Today North Korea is viewed as a pariah state that has very little interest in being welcomed back into the wider community of nations, instead relying on its nuclear weapons programme to ensure that the regime cannot be toppled by any outsiders. However, there was a real opportunity

in the late 1990s and early 2000s for North Korea to forge a path towards peace and economic development. Kim and his government looked on at the rest of the world flourishing economically in the aftermath of the Cold War, which stood in such stark contrast to the famine and stagnation of North Korea, and decided briefly that they should try to reconcile their nation with the new US-dominated world order. Thus, what is known as the Sunshine Policy was adopted by Kim's government in 1998. The primary goal of this was to ease tensions with South Korea and try to

foster economic co-operation. Talks opened over loosening restrictions along the demilitarised zone and there was even speculation about trying to officially end the war, which theoretically was still underway. There was only ever one ceasefire agreed to in 1953. Business ventures were launched between the two nations with a lot of public fanfare. Kim's government hoped that the economic success of the South might start to diffuse to the North. There was even a remarkable diplomatic event at the Summer Olympics in 2000 in Sydney, Australia,

when athletes from both North and South Korea marched together under the Korean Unification Flag, which had first been used at more minor sporting events in the early 1990s. Gradually, though, the Sunshine Policy was abandoned. The American War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks of September 2001 did not help affairs, as North Korea was regularly cited by President George W. Bush as part of what he termed the 'Axis of Evil'. The South Korean government felt pressure to step back from the negotiations and the Sunshine Policy gradually went into abeyance.

With the failure of the Sunshine Policy, Kim doubled down on North Korea's nuclear strategy as a means of guaranteeing the long-term future of the regime. North Korea began its nuclear programme in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, but back in the 1950s and 1960s this was about building civilian nuclear reactors for research and energy generation. The Soviets aided them with technical knowledge, but Moscow was not going around the world arming countries with nuclear weapons during the Cold War, no matter how close an ally they were. North

Korea's nuclear programme was consequently very limited for a lot of Kim Il Sung's time as leader. The first small nuclear reactor was completed at Yongbyon in 1965 under Soviet supervision. It was only capable of using low-enriched uranium to produce medical isotopes and for research purposes. Later the North Koreans used the technical expertise they had obtained and tentatively initiated a nuclear weapons programme in the 1970s. This was a stop-start initiative. In 1985, for instance, Kim Il Sung had agreed to sign the Treaty on the

Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and in the 1990s the government had agreed with South Korea that it would step back from trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction if the South removed the large stockpiles of US nuclear weapons which had been maintained in the southern country since the 1950s. That strategy was incrementally abandoned in the 1990s and in the early 2000s, Kim ordered his ministers, the military and the country's nuclear scientists to begin accelerating their work to acquire a nuclear-capable weapon.

Kim's nuclear weapons programme developed swiftly in the 2000s, as large parts of the necessary elements for building a nuclear weapon were already in place in North Korea when Kim decided to commit to the policy of acquiring nuclear capabilities. The regime already had nuclear capabilities of the kind found in dozens of countries today, but it now started enriching uranium up to weapons-grade level. It also ejected International Atomic Energy Agency observers from the country in the early 2000s and in 2003 Kim declared that North Korea was leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In another period of modern history

this might have led to a US military intervention to prevent the regime acquiring nuclear weapons, such as happened in 2025 when Iran accelerated its nuclear weapons programme. However, a unique set of circumstances prevailed with North Korea in Kim's time. Firstly, the US and its allies were preoccupied with two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Secondly, there was a fear that Kim could reignite the war against South Korea if any effort was made to try to intervene directly in North Korea's affairs. Finally, and most significantly, US intelligence at the time, and

general world opinion, was of the view that North Korea already possessed a few nuclear weapons. This made western nations extremely reluctant to countenance any attempt to engage in regime change or to deter Kim's nuclear weapons programme in another way. Nonetheless, North Korea was only publicly confirmed to have acquired nuclear weapons capability in 2006 after Kim's military carried out its first underground nuclear weapons test at Punggye in the northeast of the country on the 3rd of October. The regime has carried out numerous further underground tests which

are often only detected as a result of seismic activity. In tandem, Kim began a programme to build ever more powerful ballistic missiles which could strike swiftly at targets in South Korea, Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific Ocean. By the end of his rule, North Korea had become virtually impregnable to regime change. The risk of even attempting this would be far too great. Kim and his ministers were more than aware that accelerating the country's nuclear weapons programme and actually testing a weapon of mass destruction would lead to the imposition of new, much heavier sanctions by the international community. Moreover,

the world of the early-to-mid-2000s was very different to what it is two decades later. China was not yet as confident on the international stage as it is today, while Russia was only beginning to recover from the crisis of the 1990s. Neither country could ignore sanctions against North Korea in quite the way, they do today. Economic reforms were therefore needed by Kim's government to try to put the country on the road to self-sufficiency. The measures initiated met with limited success. For instance, there were sporadic attempts to introduce market reforms that allowed private property and private trade. This had worked in

China because it began producing goods which it could sell to the rest of the world in the 1980s, 1990s and beyond. The same did not apply to North Korea. A complete recall of the official currency, the won, and the introduction of a new version of the currency was implemented as well in 2009 to try to address inflation and curb black market activity. This had only a minor impact in a country where a lot of black market trade is in the form of barter. In the end, the regime turned to everything from crime to slave labour to nascent cyberattacks to try to raise capital

for the inner circle while the wider country remained impoverished, with frequent electricity blackouts even in parts of Pyongyang. Kim's personality was constantly scrutinised in the 2000s. For instance, he became infamous worldwide for his fascination with cinema and was rumoured to have the world's largest collection of films on VHS and DVD. The estimated size of the collection was rumoured to be over 20,000. It was claimed that he spent hours every day watching films. Action films, like the James Bond series, were, by all accounts, amongst his favourite

films. In a book published under his name in 1987, The Cinema and Directing, he had stated that "The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature. As such it is a powerful ideological weapon for the revolution." It's unclear exactly how James Bond was critical to the revolution in North Korea. Kim's carefully cultivated image was also well known. He wore green, quasi-military fatigues regularly and was often seen wearing his signature sunglasses. Kim liked the finer things in life, even as his nation remained desperately poor.

He was also known to be fond of expensive brandy, French wine and cigarettes. There was a paranoid element to him also. Kim lived in constant fear of being poisoned and had his meals tested before he consumed them. While his eccentricities meant that Kim was frequently depicted as a figure of amusement in the western world, notably in the 2004 puppetry comedy film, Team America: World Police, there was a ruthless dictator underneath the visage. North Korea continued to operate as arguably the world's most secretive and repressive state in the 2000s, while Kim's image adorned public places all over the country, particularly in Pyongyang,

as part of his cult of the leader. Dissenters were arrested and sent to North Korea's truly appalling prisons, where sanitation was non-existent and torture was routine. Even Kim's fascination with the big screen could have terrible consequences. Back in 1977 he had sanctioned a mission to kidnap South Korea's leading director of the time, Shin Sang-ok. Kim believed that Shin could be put to work in the North to improve the quality of the regime's films. On the 11th of January 1978, while he was visiting Hong Kong, Shin and his wife were kidnapped and taken to North Korea. He spent

four years in a North Korean prison existing on rice and water before being released in 1982. Even then, Shin spent another four years directing seven films for the North Korean government before he and his wife were finally able to escape, while in Vienna to promote his last film for the regime, Pulgasari, in 1986. Kim's peculiar love of the cinema was even more unusual than tales of his vast DVD collection suggest. North Korea, the issue of the succession was a much more open question than it had been when Kim Il Sung was the dictator of the country. For around twenty years between 1974 and 1994

it had been reasonably evident to all interested parties that Kim would succeed his father when he died. The same was certainly not true with Kim's children. He had numerous offspring from multiple relationships. The children who were in the contest to succeed him were all from relationships with his mistresses or concubines, not his wife as it would be understood under western marriage law. For the first seven years of his tenure, it was believed that Kim Jong-nam, his son via his relationship with Song Hye-rim, would succeed Kim. He was his eldest son and as

he grew up, he was considered to have a similar temperament and personality to his father. The idea that he would succeed Kim one day persisted until 2001. Then, in May that year, Kim Jong-nam was arrested after arriving in Japan with a fake passport with the intention of visiting Disneyland in Tokyo. The incident embarrassed his father and in the aftermath of it, Ko Yong-hui, commenced a co-ordinated campaign to promote her children in the line of succession. Her two sons and daughter were young in the early 2000s and so it was their mother who must have led this campaign.

Strangely, as the 2000s progressed, it was Kim Jong Un, the younger of the two brothers, who won the succession contest. As with so much within North Korea, there was secrecy around these developments. Nevertheless, it is evident that 2009 was the key year when Kim promoted Kim Jong Un to a number of positions and signalled within the party that he was his chosen heir. Had events transpired slightly differently Kim Jong Chul, Kim's eldest son with Ko Yong-hui and Kim Jong Un's elder brother, could well have become the third ruler of North

Korea. He had been the unofficial heir until the announcement in 2009, and Kim nearly died before the announcement was made. Although an attempt was made to disguise his deteriorating health, there is no doubt that he suffered from serious health issues in 2008. A conspiracy theory even holds that Kim died in 2003 and an impersonator had been filling in for him thereafter. In April 2008 he did not appear for the Olympic torch relay in Pyongyang. Four months later, on the 15th of August, he is understood to have suffered a stroke. This left him bedridden for

weeks and the most advanced doctors in China were flown into the city to attend to him. On the 9th of September 2008, the 60th anniversary was celebrated of the creation of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the formal name for North Korea. This was also the anniversary of the formal accession of Kim's father as leader of the nation back in 1948. It was therefore highly unusual that Kim did not attend the ceremony. He is understood to have suffered a second stroke in October and there were concerns that he might not survive,

albeit the details of these events have been patched together from anonymous reports and the accounts of defectors. An alternative theory that emerged in 2009, was that he was suffering from pancreatic cancer. The regime did not admit that anything was wrong and instead released photos of a healthy Kim in early November 2008 that were most likely taken before his health crisis. Kim recovered in the winter of 2008, though he was clearly unwell even after he began making public appearances again. Photos from the spring and summer of 2009, for instance, show a man who

had lost a drastic amount of weight. This included his appearance at the National Defence Commission on the 9th of April 2009 when he was re-elected as the Chairman of that body. He had also seemingly lost a large amount of his hair in a matter of only months. It was surely no coincidence that Kim Jong Un was confirmed as his heir in a more public manner at this time. To this day it is not 100% clear what had happened, but Kim did make a sharp recovery in the second half of 2009. By 2010 he was well enough to undertake an international visit to China and then to Russia in 2011. On

the 28th of September 2010 he was re-elected as General Secretary of the Workers' Party. However, his underlying health conditions had not abated fully and on the 17th of December 2011 Kim suffered a massive heart attack while taking a morning train from Pyongyang to a site outside the city. This at least was the official version of events. South Korean intelligence stated that he might have died in bed from unknown causes after a further deterioration of his health, and that the story of his passing released to the public was intended to present an image of

a hardworking leader setting off on his day's work when he died. He was either 69 or 70 years of age, depending on which date of birth, either 1941 or 1942 was accurate. His funeral was held eleven days later and his body was preserved for interment at the vast Kamsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang. There it is on public display along with his father's remains. The line of succession was firmly in place when Kim died in 2011 and Kim Jong Un's accession as the new leader of North Korea took place seamlessly, with state news channels announcing

his succession during the same broadcasts in which they announced the death of Kim Jong Il. For several years after he became leader, Kim Jong Un, who was only in his mid-twenties when he became the third ruler of North Korea, was believed to be a weak character and it was thought that the military was really in charge of the country. That assessment was proven to be incorrect. In the mid-2010s, Kim Jong Un took a number of steps that demonstrated his ruthlessness. For instance, in August 2016, Jong Un had two former ministers, Hwang Min and Ri Yong-jin,

executed. They had become possible fulcrums of dissent and Kim made an example of them. The two men were executed using anti-aircraft guns, which are essentially a form of artillery. Six months later, on the 13th of February 2017, he had his older brother, the one-time heir, Kim Jong-nam, assassinated using a nerve agent while travelling through Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. He had been living in exile since 2003. These actions cemented Kim Jong Un's position as leader of North Korea and made it evident to anyone who thought otherwise,

that he was firmly in control of the country. Later in 2017, North Korea tested its most powerful nuclear weapon yet, claiming that it was a hydrogen bomb. International assessments of the magnitude of the earthquake caused by the underground detonation appeared to substantiate that this was a thermonuclear weapon of some kind. The following year, North Korea engaged in diplomatic negotiations with the administration of US President Donald Trump. These led nowhere and North Korea has since aligned itself even more closely with Russia and China. The

country continues to be run as a highly secretive kleptocracy and military dictatorship headed by the Kim family. Given the nuclear capabilities which it acquired during Kim Jong Il's tenure as dictator it is unlikely that the system there will be overthrown anytime soon. Kim Jong Il was born into a world of violence in 1941 and lived in and around violence throughout the rest of his life. The difference was, when he was born in the middle of the Second World War, Korea was the victim of Japanese violence, whereas for most of his life it was the Kim family who

oppressed their fellow North Koreans. He grew up as his father was securing power in the north of the peninsula with the aid of the Soviets, after the war with the Japanese ended and then during the ensuing Korean War between 1950 and 1953. It was not pre-ordained that Kim Jong Il would become the next ruler of North Korea. In the 1950s and 1960s, the country was far from the family dictatorship it subsequently became. It was only gradually from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s that Kim was promoted within the government and positioned to become his father's successor. When

he did ascend to become the second leader of North Korea in 1994 the country was descending into a terrible economic crisis and famine. This crisis, combined with the changed global political circumstances in the years after the end of the Cold War, briefly opened a window for Kim to change course and to initiate reforms that could have made North Korea a more open state that sought to rehabilitate itself on the international stage. The Sunshine Policy indicates that he did temporarily consider this course of action. Ultimately, however, he turned away from

this option, with the framing of North Korea as part of the 'Axis of Evil' in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States playing a role in this too. As a result, Kim turned to an intensified nuclear weapons programme as the means of ensuring the security of the regime and his family's rule. His decisions have led to the North Korea of the twenty-first century, one of the most isolated countries in the world, ruled over by a family dictatorship that combines an ideology centred on kleptocracy and military authoritarianism. Nonetheless, there is no denying

the success of Kim's nuclear programme. The regime that his son now rules over cannot be displaced by the US or any other power for fear that an invasion could trigger a nuclear attack on the city of Seoul, Tokyo or even the West Coast of the United States. Thus, in his 17 years as ruler of North Korea, Kim Jong Il cemented the rule of the Kim family in the world's strangest nation. What do you think of Kim Jong Il? Did he foolishly throw away an opportunity to end North Korea's isolation in the early twenty-first century, or was he driven towards a more aggressive nuclear programme because of wider geopolitical issues?

Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.