History of North Korea
When Soviet troops entered Pyongyang, they found a local People's Committee established there, led by veteran Christian nationalist Cho Man-sik.
[26] Kim established the Korean People's Army (KPA) aligned with the Communists, formed from a cadre of guerrillas and former soldiers who had gained combat experience in battles against the Japanese and later Nationalist Chinese troops.
The North Korean army, by contrast, had benefited from the Soviet Union's WWII-era equipment, and had a core of hardened veterans who had fought either as anti-Japanese guerrillas or alongside the Chinese Communists.
However, from the very beginning Stalin made it clear that the Soviet Union would avoid a direct confrontation with the U.S. over Korea and would not commit ground forces even in case of major military crisis.
During its brief occupation of southern Korea, the DPRK regime initiated radical social change, which included the nationalisation of industry, land reform, and the restoration of the People's Committees.
According to Bruce Cumings, the North Korean forces were not routed, but managed a strategic retreat into the mountainous interior and into neighboring Manchuria.
[52][53] Pak Hon-yong, party vice chairman and Foreign Minister of the DPRK, was blamed for the failure of the southern population to support North Korea during the war, was dismissed from his positions in 1953, and was executed after a show trial in 1955.
[58] Kim Il Sung had initially been criticized by the Soviets during a previous 1955 visit to Moscow for practicing Stalinism and a cult of personality, which was already growing enormous.
The Korean ambassador to the USSR, Li Sangjo, a member of the Yan'an faction, reported that it had become a criminal offense to so much as write on Kim's picture in a newspaper and that he had been elevated to the status of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Stalin in the communist pantheon.
He also charged Kim with rewriting history to appear as if his guerrilla faction had single-handedly liberated Korea from the Japanese, completely ignoring the assistance of the Chinese People's Volunteers.
In addition, Li stated that in the process of agricultural collectivization, grain was being forcibly confiscated from the peasants, leading to "at least 300 suicides" and that Kim made nearly all major policy decisions and appointments himself.
Li reported that over 30,000 people were in prison for completely unjust and arbitrary reasons as trivial as not printing Kim Il Sung's portrait on sufficient quality paper or using newspapers with his picture to wrap parcels.
[62] Like Mao in China, Kim Il Sung refused to accept Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and continued to model his regime on Stalinist norms.
[65] Kim told Alexei Kosygin in 1965 that he was not anyone's puppet and "We ... implement the purest Marxism and condemn as false both the Chinese admixtures and the errors of the CPSU".
[71] The crew were held captive throughout the year despite American protests that the vessel was in international waters, and they were finally released in December after a formal US apology was issued.
The Nixon administration found itself unable to react at all, since the US was heavily committed in the Vietnam War and had no troops to spare if the situation in Korea escalated.
[77] With the fall of South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese on 30 April 1975, Kim Il Sung felt that the US had shown its weakness and that reunification of Korea under his regime was possible.
Kim visited Beijing in May 1975[78][79][80] in the hope of gaining political and military support for this plan to invade South Korea again, but Mao Zedong refused.
[84] It developed strong ties with the regimes of Bokassa in the Central African Republic, Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea, Idi Amin in Uganda, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Gaddafi in Libya, and Ceausescu in Romania.
North Korea's desire to lessen its dependence on aid from China and the Soviet Union prompted the expansion of its military power, which had begun in the second half of the 1960s.
[107] However, following the world 1973 oil crisis, international prices for many of North Korea's native minerals fell, leaving the country with large debts and an inability to pay them off and still provide a high level of social welfare to its people.
[113] In 1983, North Korea carried out the Rangoon bombing, a failed assassination attempt against South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan while he was visiting Burma.
[117] The bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 in 1987, in the lead up to the Seoul Olympics, led to the US government placing North Korea on its list of terrorist countries.
[124] The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 deprived North Korea of its main source of economic aid, leaving China as the isolated regime's only major ally.
By this time, in the early 1990s, Kim Jong Il was already conducting most of the day-to-day activities of running of the state, being appointed Supreme Commander of the Korean Peoples' Army in December 1991 and Chairman of the National Defence Commission in 1993.
According to Ashley J. Tellis and Michael Wills, this amendment was an indication of the unique North Korean characteristic of being a theocratic state based on the personality cult surrounding Kim Il Sung, granting leaders titles with "legal" power after their deaths.
In addition to this, after the collapse of global Communism in the early 1990s and the economic crisis and mass famine that continued, North Korea found itself in a very precarious international position.
In essence, Songun politics gives great priority to military affairs and ensuring the Korean People's Army (KPA) as the main force in construction and development.
[152] On 12 June 2018, Kim met American President Donald Trump at a summit in Singapore and signed a declaration, again affirming a commitment to peace and denuclearization.
[158] Starting in January 2020, the North Korean government took extensive measures to block the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, including quarantines and travel restrictions.
