Kim Il-sung

Kim Song Ju was born in Japanese-ruled Korea on 15 April 1912 and grew up in northeast China, where he joined anti-Japanese guerrilla groups as a teenager and the Chinese Communist Party in 1931. He fought with CCP-led units until 1942, when he was assigned to the Soviet Red Army and remained in the Soviet Union until 1945. After Japan's surrender and Korea's division, the Soviets installed him in the North, and in 1948 he established the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He authorized the invasion of South Korea in 1950, triggering a United Nations intervention led by the United States; the war ended in stalemate with a ceasefire signed in July 1953. Under his rule, North Korea became a centrally planned socialist dictatorship with close Soviet and Chinese ties, and by the 1960s had a slightly higher standard of living than the chaotic South - a gap that reversed in the 1970s as South Korea's economy surged and the North stagnated. Kim developed Juche, an ideology of independence and Korean nationalism that set him apart from Moscow, though the country still relied on Soviet subsidies until 1991, when their loss contributed to the famine of 1994. He died on