Kim Il-sung - Communist and Guerrilla Activities

Communist and Guerrilla Activities

There is much controversy about Kim's political career before the founding of North Korea, with some sources claiming he was an imposter. Several sources indicate that the Kim Il-sung name had previously been used by a prominent early leader of the Korean resistance. Grigory Mekler, who claims to have prepared Kim to lead North Korea, says that Kim assumed this name while in the Soviet Union in the early 1940s from a former commander who had died. According to Leonid Vassin, an officer with the Soviet MVD, Kim was essentially "created from zero." For one, his Korean was marginal at best; he'd only had eight years of formal education, all of it in Chinese. He needed considerable coaching to read a speech the MVD prepared for him at a Communist Party congress three days after he arrived. However, historian Andrei Lankov has stated that the claim that the name Kim Il-sung was switched with the name of the “original” Kim is unlikely to be true. Several witnesses knew Kim before and after his time in the Soviet Union, including his superior, Zhou Baozhong, who dismissed the claim of a “second” Kim in his diaries. Historian Bruce Cumings argues that the assertion Kim was an imposter parallels the North's propaganda that he singlehandedly defeated the Japanese. The official version of Kim's guerrilla life is believed to be heavily embellished as a part of the subsequent personality cult, particularly his portrayal as a boy-conspirator who joined the resistance at 14 and had founded a battle-ready army at 19.

The following details of his career are therefore disputed.

In October 1926, Kim founded the Down-With-Imperialism Union. Kim attended Whasung Military Academy in 1926, but when later finding the academy's training methods outdated, he quit in 1927. From that time, he attended Yuwen Middle School in Jilin up to 1930, where he rejected the feudal traditions of older generation Koreans and became interested in Communist ideologies; his formal education ended when he was arrested and jailed for his subversive activities. At seventeen, Kim had become the youngest member of an underground Marxist organization with fewer than twenty members, led by Hŏ So, who belonged to the South Manchurian Communist Youth Association. The police discovered the group three weeks after it was formed in 1929, and jailed Kim for several months.

In 1931, Kim joined the Communist Party of China. (The Communist Party of Korea had been founded in 1925, but had been thrown out of the Comintern in the early 1930s for being too nationalist.) He joined various anti-Japanese guerrilla groups in northern China. Feelings against the Japanese ran high in Manchuria, but as of May 1930 Manchuria was not occupied by the Japanese. On May 30, 1930 a spontaneous violent uprising in eastern Manchuria arose in which peasants attacked some local villages in the name of resisting "Japanese aggression." This unplanned reckless and unfocused uprising was easily put down by the authorities. Because of the attack, the Japanese began to plan an occupation of Manchuria. In a speech before a meeting of Young Communist League delegates meeting on May 20, 1931 in Yenchi County in Manchuria, Kim warned the delegates against such unplanned uprisings as the May 30, 1930 uprising in eastern Manchuria.

Four months later, on September 18, 1931, the "Mukden Incident" occurred in which a relatively weak dynamite explosive charge went off near a Japanese railroad in the town of Mukden in Manchuria. Although no damage occurred, the Japanese used the incident to send armed forces into Manchuria and appoint a new puppet government. In 1935, Kim became a member of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, a guerrilla group led by the Communist Party of China. Kim was appointed the same year to serve as political commissar for the 3rd detachment of the second division, around 160 soldiers. It was here that Kim met the man who would become his mentor as a Communist, Wei Zhengmin, Kim’s immediate superior officer, who was serving at the time as chairman of the Political Committee of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. Wei reported directly to Kang Sheng, a high-ranking party member close to Mao Zedong in Yan'an, until Wei’s death on 8 March 1941.

In 1935 Kim took the name Kim Il-sung, meaning "become the sun." Kim was appointed commander of the 6th division in 1937, at the age of 24, controlling a few hundred men in a group that came to be known as “Kim Il-sung’s division.” It was while he was in command of this division that he executed a raid on Poch’onbo, on 4 June. Although Kim’s division only captured a small Japanese-held town just across the Korean border for a few hours, it was nonetheless considered a military success at this time, when the guerrilla units had experienced difficulty in capturing any enemy territory. This accomplishment would grant Kim some measure of fame among Chinese guerrillas, and North Korean biographies would later exploit it as a great victory for Korea. For their part the Japanese considered Kim to be one of the most effective and popular Korean guerrilla leader. Kim was appointed commander of the 2nd operational region for the 1st Army, but by the end of 1940, he was the only 1st Army leader still alive. Pursued by Japanese troops, Kim and what remained of his army escaped by crossing the Amur River into the Soviet Union. Kim was sent to a camp near Khabarovsk, where the Korean Communist guerrillas were retrained by the Soviets. Kim became a Major in the Soviet Red Army and served in it until the end of World War II.