Kim Il-sung

Kim Il-sung was the founder of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the head of state who ruled the country from its establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994. He was born Kim Song-ju near Pyongyang in 1912, while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule, the son of Protestant parents involved in independence activism.

His family moved to Manchuria in the 1920s, where he attended a Chinese-language middle school in Jilin and was briefly imprisoned for his involvement with a Marxist youth study group. He had no formal university education and instead joined Korean and Chinese communist guerrilla units fighting Japanese forces along the Manchurian border in the 1930s.

By the late 1930s he led a unit in the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, taking the nom de guerre Kim Il-sung, and a 1937 raid on the town of Pochonbo brought him modest fame among Koreans. After Japanese pressure pushed his unit into the Soviet Far East, he served as a captain in the Soviet 88th Brigade until the end of World War II.

Returning to northern Korea in 1945 with Soviet backing, he became premier of the new state in 1948 and led the country through the Korean War of 1950 to 1953. He developed the political doctrine of Juche, established a single-party system, and built a personality cult that continued through the rule of his son Kim Jong-il and grandson Kim Jong-un.

The Korean surname Kim, written with a Chinese character meaning "gold," is the most common family name on the Korean peninsula. The given name Il-sung combines elements meaning "sun" and "to become" or "accomplish."