Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Over the years, rumor among the Pyongyang elite had it that Kim had sired a number of children by women other than his deceased former wife and her successor as first lady. Besides unacknowledged wife Han Song-hui, “so many more had his children,” one high-ranking defector told me.

  Sometimes, as in the case of Han, Kim set up his children’s mothers in their own households. In other cases the women married men who gave the children their names. Regardless, Kim continued to take an interest in his offspring from liaisons old and new. Because inquiring into the Fatherly Leader’s personal lifestyle was an absolute taboo, “only the children of his two official wives are known,” said the former official. “Even high officials don’t know the head count of youngsters being brought up privately in the mansions.”17

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  It should come as no surprise that such an enthusiastic patriarch would become one of the world’s premier nepotists. Kim Il-sung provided jobs for a stupefying number of relatives in addition to his offspring. His female cousins on his father’s side did “well in the regime, for example, as did their husbands. Cousin Kim Jong-suk (same name as Kim’s second “wife, but a different person) became vice-chair of the Korean General Occupational Federations and chief editor of Minju Choson, organ of the administrative council. Her husband was Ho Dam, who served as vice-premier and foreign minister. Kim Il-sung’s cousin Kim Shin-sook became deputy director of the Academy of Social Sciences and an official of the Democratic Women’s League. Her husband, Yang Hyong-sop, rose to become a member of the party politburo and secretariat and chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly— the parliament.18

  Kim Il-sung gave a vice-presidency of the country to Kang Ryang-uk, the former Methodist minister who was a cousin of his maternal grandfather and who had taught him at Changdok School. In the united-front facade that Kim erected early in his rule, Kang was supposed to represent the moderate, noncommunist forces that had allied themselves with the communists. Besides heading the token opposition Korean Democratic Party, other assignments before his death in 1983 included a vice-chairmanship of the General League of Trade Unions. Joining Kang as a vice-president was Pak Song-chol, who was Kang’s son-in-law. Thus, of three vice-presidents serving during that period, only one was not a relative of Kim Il-sung’s. Pak was also made a member of the party politburo and chairman of the Central People’s Committee.19

  Kim Il-sung’s first cousins included Kim Chang-ju, who rose to become vice-premier, and Chang-ju’s brother Bong-ju, who became chairman of the Profession League Central Committee. They were the sons of Kim Il-sung’s uncle Kim Hyong-rok—his father’s younger brother, who had stayed home to farm, taking over as head of the Mangyongdae household. Hyong-rok’s third son, Kim Won-ju, was a State Security Department officer whose assignments included rooting out disloyalty to the regime among students at the ultra-elite Mangyongdae School. Won-ju’s son Myong-su became a State Security official; Myong-su’s brother Myong-ho, a colonel in the People’s Army. Kim Byoung-il, another State Security official (in charge of inspecting the evidence brought in by investigators in loyalty cases), was married to a niece of Kim Il-sung.20

  It was an exaggeration but not too far from the truth to say, as did one high-level defector, that “the topmost officials have to be relatives,”21 Son Sang-pil, who was ambassador to Moscow, was a relative on Kim Il-sung’s mother’s side. Kim Kyong-hui, Kim Jong-il’s sister, became a member of the party Central Committee and the Supreme People’s Assembly. Her husband, Chang Song-taek, also became an influential official who carried out sensitive missions for his brother-in-law.

  Kim Il-sung’s last wife, Kim Song-ae, became chairwoman of the Korean Democratic Women’s Union. Kim Song-ae gave birth to Kim Il-sung’s second set of acknowledged children. Her eldest child, daughter Kim Byong-jin, married Kim Kwang-sop, who became an ambassador to, among other countries, the Czech Republic. Kim Song-ae’s first son, Kim Pyong-il, became ambassador to Bulgaria, Finland and Poland.

  Hwang Jang-yop, the highest ranking North Korean defector, wrote of his great respect for Kim Il-sung during the years 1958–1965, the period when Hwang was working directly under Kim as party secretary for ideology. Kim “was cruel to his political enemies but generous to his colleagues and subordinates,” Hwang said. “The only thing I felt uncomfortable with was that he put too much trust in his relatives and too much value in their opinions.”22

  Kim Il-sung’s closest guerrilla comrades also were entitled to practice nepotism. Choe Yong-gon and Kim Il, before they died, were numbers two and three in the regime, and their wives were then party Central Committee alternate members. So was Choe’s cousin, Choe Chong-gon, who also became director of the air force’s General Political Bureau.23

  Kim Il-sung himself, during the purge of Pak Hon-yong’s followers in 1952, attacked as “petty bourgeois” the formation of factional groupings based on “kinship, friendship, connections with the same school or common regional origins.”24 But a more tolerant take on nepotism is made to issue from the mouth of no less a figure than Kim Jong-suk, Kim Il-sung’s beatified second wife and the mother of Kim Jong-il. As a young, still unmarried woman in the guerrilla band, she supposedly opined that it was inevitable, at least at the village level, for relatives to work together. The important thing, she was quoted as having instructed a communist youth group, was to keep such kinship relations from influencing one’s work.25

  One need only look into Korean history, though, to find the Confucian patterns that repeated themselves in the hereditary North Korean ruling class that Kim Il-sung built. The yangban were the hereditary noble class of scholar-official-landlords under the Yi Dynasty, which reigned from 1392 to 1910. One Western diplomat specializing in things Korean saw “a modern-day parody” in what he called North Korea’s “communist yangban class.”26

  As if not yet satisfied with the number of relatives he had to choose from for his appointments to official posts, Kim Il-sung early in his rule expanded the pool by playing father to the country’s orphans. It was in December of 1950, after meeting a woman whose husband had been killed in action and who was now struggling to raise their four children alone, that Kim decided the state would rear “orphans and all the children the parents thought it difficult to bring up because of many children,” he later wrote in his memoirs. Kim gave the orders to build schools for the children of “patriotic martyrs” in every province. As a result, he said, “all the orphans grew up quickly and warmly in the bosom of the country and the people. Though numerous parents were victims, the orphans were never crying nor roaming through the streets.”27

  The orphans’ schools also gave Kim Il-sung a group of intense loyalists who, as Bai Song-chul told me during our train-ride conversation in 1979, looked upon Kim as their father. That was particularly true of the graduates of the Mangyongdae School for the Bereaved Children of Revolutionaries, which produced much of the country’s military, intelligence and internal security elite. Kim set up the school near his ancestral home in 1947. It was to receive the children of fallen revolutionaries who had asked him “with their dying breath” to “educate their children and train them into fine revolutionaries after the independence of Korea.”28

  Whether they had really asked that or not, in Korean cultural terms Kim was no doubt correct to assume that helping to continue their lineage and make their children their elite “successors” was what those martyrs would have wanted him to do in repayment of their sacrifice. Take the case of Ryang Se-bong, an independence fighter killed in a trap set by Japanese agents. The regime sent Ryang’s son through the elite school at Mangyongdae and gave him a political job with an air force unit. When the son, too, died in a plane crash, Kim “feared that Commander Ryang’s lineage might be broken.” Fortunately, there was a grandson, but he was crippled with polio. The party saw to his education, and he became a writer who “creates literary works in bed. He has two sons and a daughter.”29

  Kim told in his memoirs of having “dispatched many
officials to various places at home and in northeast China to find the bereaved children of revolutionaries. At that time hundreds of such children came home from China. Some of those children … have now become members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of our Party.”

  Several of Kim’s family members were eligible to attend the Mangyongdae School. Son Kim Jong-il—qualified, I suppose, by the loss of his former-guerrilla mother—enrolled there. Another pupil was a daughter of Kim Hyong-gwon, the hot-tempered uncle of Kim Il-sung who had fought the colonialists and died in a Japanese prison. “I thought I would bring her up with all care to succeed her father,” Kim wrote. Alas, she was killed later in a Korean War bombing raid.30 He expanded the school’s mission to include children of Korean War dead, as well as the offspring of North Korean agents killed in the South before and after the war. From the 1960s, those target groups declined in numbers. The school widened its admissions net, while still focusing on training a future elite. As that proved more and more to be a family elite, the descendants of prominent figures in the regime had an edge in gaining admission.

  Others who enrolled at orphans’ school are reported to have been Kim’s unacknowledged children. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that the education of his own children as well as younger relatives was a factor in his decision to establish the school at Mangyongdae. Fortuitously or not, the North’s constitution decreed an end to discrimination against illegitimate children.31 Ultra-loyal to Kim as a result of the combination of blood ties and training, some of his youngsters are said to have grown up to form a sort of bastards’ honor guard. Assuming positions in important party and state organizations, they helped to run the country while functioning as the eyes and ears of their father—and, later, of their half-brother, Kim Jong-il. While “no one can be treated quite on the level of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il,” a former elite official told me, those offspring “get preferential treatment because they are royalty even if illegitimate.”

  Few names have been known for certain, even by other members of the elite, as this has been one of the ultimate taboo subjects in North Korea. As I shall relate later, however, I was told the identity of one man described as probably the most powerful, at the time, of Kim’s unacknowledged children. Another, much younger man, apparently Kim’s illegitimate son, was reported to have begun work in the party propaganda bureau.

  Watching the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, starting in 1956, and later observing the abortive revolt by Mao Zedong’s designated successor, Lin Biao, in China, Kim Il-sung became determined to name his own flesh and blood as his successor.32 The idea was not only to guard against posthumous insults but also, within his lifetime, to avoid challenges to his power from nonfamily underlings impatient to take over. “Think about it,” one former official of the regime said to me. “Who would let go of such a lifestyle and give up his regime?”

  Even Kim Il-sung had to know that his succession plans would be seen as a betrayal of his communist ideals. (Recall his schoolboy criticism of Korea’s feudal Yi Dynasty.) Indeed, Hwang Jang-yop, who became the regime’s chief ideologue in 1965, believed that Kim Il-sung “probably did not have the intention of turning over power to his son from the beginning.” Hwang at that stage was impressed by the senior Kim’s “sense of democracy in trying to be fair to all children, regardless of-whose offspring they were.”

  But as Kim’s “personal dictatorship continued and its political foundation strengthened,” Hwang recalled, “he became over-confident, believing that he could do anything he liked. More and more he came to regard the government as his personal property.”33 Hwang added: “In a situation where all means of production actually belong to the Great Leader, the economy itself naturally serves the interest of the Great Leader before all else. The national economy is nothing more than the household economy of the Great Leader. North Korea’s economy exists first and foremost to serve the Great Leader.”34

  In one post-defection article, Hwang recalled having heard Kim Il-sung utter “relatively humble remarks” during the time when they had worked closely together. The senior Kim, for example, said: “I wasn’t a big part of the partisan struggle against the Japanese” and “I never dreamed back then that I would become the leader of North Korea.”35 In Hwang’s view, however, “North Korea, with the vestiges of feudalism still maintaining a stronghold on society, was from the very beginning a hotbed for a personality cult. Personal dictatorship was established more firmly in North Korea than in any other socialist country.” In the first stage, that involved simple emulation, “under Soviet supervision,” of Stalin’s cult.

  After Kim consolidated power, he made his surviving younger brother a very high official. Kim Yong-ju joined the party Central Committee in 1961, was named party secretary for organization and guidance in 1962 and advanced to full membership in the politburo and number six ranking in the entire regime in 1970. At that time he was viewed abroad as likely successor to his elder brother as top leader.36

  In the official Kim family mythology, Yong-ju is described as having spent his childhood in terror, fleeing search parties. Kim Il-sung wrote in his memoirs that, while he himself battled Japanese troops, the Japanese authorities hunted for Yong-ju as part of their attempt to pressure rebels. They distributed photographs of the youngster, Kim Il-sung said, so “my brother had to roam aimlessly, under a false name and by concealing his identity, about cities and villages all over the three provinces of Manchuria and even in China proper.”37

  Yu Song-chol gave a somewhat different account, in which Yong-ju was a guerrilla for a time but fled to China and got a job in a Japanese store there—after Kim Il-sung told him it was his duty to survive and carry on the family line. Yu said Yong-ju was in Hawaii during the 1940s but returned to North Korea after liberation.38

  In Pyongyang, high-ranking officials lived in special neighborhood enclaves. Those mimicked the exclusive communities Soviet officials had established in the city after liberation, with their own schools, shops and hospitals.39

  Kim Yong-ju lived in the Mansu-dong neighborhood. (His next-door neighbor was Choe Yong-gon, a former anti-Japanese fighter who reached the number two position in the regime.)

  Kim Yong-ju sired at least one houseful of children who grew up to take prominent posts in the regime, including son Kim Bong-ju, who became a party Central Committee member. One former high-ranking North Korean official who defected to South Korea told me in an interview that Kim Yong-ju “has lots of kids. They’re in all departments of government—good jobs, of course.” In a country where few people could be satisfied with the quantities of food they got to eat, “all his sons and daughters are very very fat—real heavyweights.40

  In the early 1970s the regime dropped a very clear official hint that a close relative would become Kim Il-sung’s successor. The 1970 edition of North Korea’s Dictionary of Political Terminologies had included this critical definition:

  Hereditary succession is a reactionary custom of exploitative societies whereby certain positions or riches may be legally inherited. Originally a product of slave societies, it was later adopted by feudal lords as a means to perpetuate dictatorial rule.

  The definition failed to appear in the 1972 edition of the dictionary.41

  Some defectors have reported that Kim Il-sung’s wife, the former typist Kim Song-ae, hoped her brother-in-law would win the succession. She favored Kim Yong-ju not because she was on friendly terms with him (she was not) but, apparently, simply because he was of the older generation. That meant his tenure might be short and afterward there might still be a chance at the top job for Kim Pyong-il, her own elder son. Pyong-il, Kim Jong-il’s stepbrother, was too young to be considered at that time.

  It’s quite possible, though, that Kim Il-sung never seriously considered his brother as his successor. Actuarial tables, after all, would have given the brother only a few years to rule beyond Kim Il-sung’s own life span. For Kim Il-sung, who wanted to perpetuate his system and ideolo
gy, picking a significantly younger man probably-would have seemed the sound choice. But as a consummate strategist he would not have let everyone know his decision until he had laid the groundwork.

  In the meantime, palace intrigues raged in which the object was to gain Kim Il-sung’s favor. A principal means of doing so was flattery. The contenders, a former high official related, “went crazy trying to idolize Kim Il-sung in order to display their loyalty to him.”42 They certainly knew the way to the Great Leader’s heart. Constantly assured of his godlike attributes, Kim became a caricature of the classic potentate. It seems there was nothing he did not consider himself entitled to. Feeding his enormous appetites and ego provided full-time and never-ending work for those around him.

  Such a lofty being could not, for example, partake of the ordinary food that was rationed out to ordinary mortals. Kim Il-sung had to have special orchards and greenhouses and farms producing his food. His rice grains were polished individually to make sure he would get not a single bad grain. According to one former Pyongyang-based foreign diplomat, there was a rumor among the people that Kim’s special apple trees were watered with a sugar solution—an otherwise unthinkable luxury in a country-where sweets were very rarely available.

  It could not have been easy finding ways to flatter Kim Il-sung further, but it seemed that every year brought something new. Kim Jong-il reportedly dreamed up the idea of having delegates to 1970’s Fifth Congress of the Workers’ Party wear lapel badges adorned with a likeness of the Respected and Beloved Leader.43 By the time I visited in 1979, all citizens were wearing them. Some were simple, round pins while others showed Kim’s portrait against various backgrounds. I asked a hothouse manager whether the difference in badges indicated difference in status of the wearers. Oh, no, he replied; the badges served only to “highly revere our Leader and wish him good health.” Fifteen years later, a defector gave me a different version: “You can tell someone’s status by looking at his Kim Il-sung portrait badge. For high officials of the party, the portrait appears against the background of a red flag. Some people want to seem important, so they buy badges that indicate higher status than they possess. Of course if you are caught …44