Kim Il Sung (Kim Il-song; b. 1912), president of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the general secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea. He is also the first member of the Presidium of the Politbureau of the Central Committee and the chairman of its Military Commission. He is the only leader the North Koreans have known since the establishment of the republic in September 1948 and is known as the "supreme leader" and the "sun of the nation". During the nearly four decades of his absolute rule in the northern half of Korea, he has developed a political thought known as chuch'e, a concept of self-reliance.

Kim was born Kim Song-ju, the eldest of three sons of Kim Hyong-jik and Kang Pan-sok in Man'gyongdae, near P'yongyang. His younger brother Ch'ol-ju died early and his youngest brother Yong-ju served him in North Korea until the mid-1970s. Kim Il Sung married twice. His first wife, Kim Chong-suk, bore him two sons and a daughter. The elder son, Jong Il (Chong-il), is now the most powerful political figure after his father, and he will most likely succeed him to the leadership position in North Korea. The other son died in a swimming accident while still young. His first wife died in September 1949 while giving birth to a stillborn baby. Kim was married to his present wife, Kim Song-ae, in 1962, and it is believed that he has four children from his second marriage.

Kim attended Ch'angdok Elementary School in P'yongyang and moved to Jilin, Manchuria, and attended a Chinese school called Yuwen Middle School. His formal education ended at about tenth grade when he was arrested and jailed for subversive activities related to a local Communist youth organization. He joined various anti-Japanese guerilla groups in Manchuria, eventually becoming a member of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, a Chinese Communist guerrilla group in the Dongbei (Manchuria) region. Kim fought in this army unit from about 1935, rising in the ranks and becoming one of its unit commanders in 1941, when the Japanese expeditionary forces drove the guerillas from Manchuria. Kim fled to an army camp near Khabarovsk in the Russian Maritime Province, where his guerrilla forces were regrouped and retrained by the local Soviet armed forces to be used in the event of a Soviet campaign in the Far East.

Kim returned to Korea in September 1945 with the Soviet occupation forces, and he was picked by them to head the Provisional People's Committee in February 1946. In the wild scramble for power among the returned revolutionary groups, Kim and his partisan guerrillas emerged victorious. Kim became chairman of the local Communist Party and was elected premier of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in September 1948. In his effort to reunify the divided country militarily, he launched an attack on the Republic of Korea in the south in June 1950, starting the Korean War. The Korean War was not only a fratricidal civil war; the united Nations forces there were pitted against the Chinese Volunteer Army as well. In any event Korea remained divided after the conclusion of the war three years later.

In the aftermath of the war, Kim successfully used the opportunity to purge his political rivals, and took on the task of reconstruction of North Korea which had been devastated by the war. He launched three-year, five-year, and seven-year national economic plans to rebuild his country, and in the process he established an unchallengeable position by eliminating all rival factions, replacing them with his partisan guerrillas.

When the Sino-Soviet disputes intensified, Kim became increasingly nationalistic, and began to follow an independent and self-reliant policy. Kim sided with the Chinese during the first half of the 1960s to stave off a Soviet attack on North Korea, and became reconciled with the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1960s, when the Chinese began to attack Kim during the latter part of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Kim subsequently joined and promoted the nonaligned movement in earnest, and began to build up his own personality cult, even trying to project his leadership role in the nonaligned movement. He is referred to not only as the supreme leader but also as a "match-less patriot, national hero, ever-victorious and iron-willed commander, one of the genius leaders of the international Communist movement and workers' movement."

On the domestic front Kim was virtually free to formulate and implement any policy he desired. By proclaiming a new constitution in December 1972, Kim reorganized his government and shifted his power center from the control mechanism of the Party to the operation of the government. While entrusting the daily operations of the Party to his son, Kim became president of the Republic and headed a newly created supercabinet, the Central People's Committee. With the gradual thaw in the relationship between the United States and China, Kim agreed to a direct dialogue with South Korea, advancing his own policy and formula for peaceful reunification of Korea, but the dialogue soon broke off owing to the irreconcilable differences between the two systems. In the mid-1970s, Kim began to train his son to take over the operation of the Party, and by the time of the Sixth Party Congress in October 1980, he had all but anointed his son as heir to the mantle of power in North Korea.

Kim is credited with developing the idea of chuch'e, a self-reliant and creative application of Marxism and Leninism to the specific conditions unique to Korea. Under this principle of self-reliance Kim formulated what is known as the monolithic ideological system. This system encompassed the thought of self-reliance in ideological stance, independence in political work, self-sustenance in economic endeavors, and self-defense in military affairs. The idea is also known as Kim Il Sung Thought.

Kim has written many essays and made many speeches, and his writings are collected in four different editions of his work. The latest collection, known simply as the Works of Kim Il Sung, was published in 1979, and it was scheduled to be completed in time for his seventieth birthday in April 1982, but the publication is still continuing. As the absolute ruler of North Korea, Kim will no doubt continue his rule as long as he lives.