Kim Il Sung was the founder and long-ruling dictator of North Korea, the architect of one of the world's most rigid and isolated totalitarian states and the patriarch of the dynasty that still rules it. Born near Pyongyang during the Japanese occupation of Korea, he spent much of his early life in Manchuria, where as a young man he joined the armed resistance against Japanese rule, building a reputation as a guerrilla fighter.
After the defeat of Japan in 1945, the Soviet Union installed Kim as the leader of the new communist regime in the northern half of a divided Korea. He set about building a Stalinist state and consolidating absolute personal power. In 1950 he launched a surprise invasion of the South in an attempt to reunify the country by force, igniting the Korean War — a devastating three-year conflict that drew in China and the United States and ended in stalemate.
In the decades that followed, Kim ruled as an absolute dictator, building a vast personality cult that elevated him to near-divine status as the "Great Leader." He proclaimed the ideology of "Juche," or self-reliance, sealed the country off from the outside world, and maintained one of the most repressive systems on earth, with a sprawling apparatus of surveillance and prison camps.
He groomed his son, Kim Jong Il, to succeed him, founding a hereditary communist dynasty unique in the world. Kim Il Sung died in 1994 and was declared "Eternal President," his embalmed body preserved as a permanent object of state veneration.