Kim Jong Il

Kim Jong-il was the second Supreme Leader of North Korea, ruling from the death of his father Kim Il-sung in July 1994 until his own death in December 2011. Official North Korean accounts place his birth on Mount Paektu in 1942, while Soviet records show his birth in the village of Vyatskoye near Khabarovsk, Russia, on 16 February 1941.

Educated at Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang, he joined the Korean Workers' Party in 1964 and rose through the Propaganda and Agitation Department, where he supervised the production of revolutionary operas and films and authored treatises on cinema theory. Designated his father's successor at the 1980 Sixth Party Congress, he was named Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army in 1991.

Kim assumed power amid a famine that killed several hundred thousand North Koreans between 1995 and 1998 and led the country through the collapse of Soviet aid. He declared the songun, or military-first, policy as state doctrine and oversaw the country's first nuclear weapons test in October 2006.

He met South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in 2000 in the first inter-Korean summit and President Roh Moo-hyun in 2007. Kim died of a reported heart attack on a special train in December 2011 and was succeeded by his third son, Kim Jong-un.

The name Kim is the most widespread Korean family name, written with a hanja character meaning "gold," while the given name Jong-il combines characters meaning "upright" or "correct" with "sun." Family name precedes given name in Korean order. The full name was assigned to him at birth and is masculine in usage.