Shtykov's support for Kim Il Sung was crucial in his rise to power, and the two persuaded Stalin to allow the Korean War to begin in June 1950.

[4] Through direct access to Joseph Stalin, Shtykov became the "real supreme ruler of North Korea, the principal supervisor of both the Soviet military and the local authorities.

As the preeminent representative of the Soviet Union's political authority over the nascent North Korea from October 1945 until December 1950, Shtykov's legacy was to aid the Kim family's rise to power.

The war they started freed Kim from Soviet domination; China intervened following North Korea's poor military performance in the early autumn.

As political commissar of the Far Eastern Front, Shtykov assisted Marshal Kirill Meretskov in accepting the surrender of Japan in northern Korea on August 19, 1945.

As member of the Military Council for the Primorskiy District, Shtykov frequently visited Pyongyang and communicated to Zhdanov and Stalin about developments on the Korean Peninsula.

Without any Korean input, the generals decided "the exact distribution of seats among the parties, the number of women members, and, more broadly, the precise social composition of the legislature.

Shtykov supported Kim Il Sung and Pak Hon-yong's 31 May 1949 proposal to create a Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland to advocate for peaceful unification of North and South, noting that Syngman Rhee's likely refusal would damage his legitimacy among the Korean population.

Shtykov suspected that Rhee would attack the North by June 1950, and backed the DFUF "to slow down southern aggression, cultivate alliances with anti-Rhee forces in the South, and make the West appear opposed to North-South unification."

After the victory of the People's Republic of China in the Chinese Civil War Kim persistently lobbied the Soviets to support a Northern-led violent unification of the peninsula.

He served as Chairman of the State Control Commission for the Council of Ministers of the Russian Soviet Federal Republic before dying on vacation in 1964.

While the war did not end in the capitulation of the American-backed South, it did allow Kim Il Sung to secure effective North Korean independence from the Soviet Union.