Is Kim Il Sung the object of the greatest personality cult in human history?
Certainly, history has seen its fair share of remarkable personality cults: Take Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceaușescu, or Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov. Turn back the clock and you could throw in Augustus Caesar, the Pharaohs of Egypt, Louis XIV.
Still, Kim Il Sung stands above the rest, when you consider population, duration, and intensity. Stalin and Mao presided over far larger populations than Kim, and their personality cults may have momentarily reached similar degrees of intensity, but in durability and intensity, none can hold a candle to North Korea’s state founder and his successors, who have kept the personality cult alive for eight decades and counting.
(Or perhaps it’s a religion? Some have posited that, even assuming 20% of the population secretly opposes Kimist rule, that still means twenty million followers—more than the world’s roughly sixteen million adherents of Judaism.)
Stalin oversaw a population of 150 million but was the unquestioned dictator for a shorter span of time—from 1929, when he was in his early fifties, until his death in 1953, a span of a quarter-century, with the cult of personality really hitting its zenith after 1945.
Mao became leader of China in 1949, also when he was in his fifties, and oversaw a personality cult that lasted until his death in 1976—again, roughly a quarter-century. Even so, his cult is not generally regarded to have taken off in earnest until the Cultural Revolution in 1966, burning brightest for three or four years before its later repudiation.
Both Stalin and Mao, following their respective deaths, were followed by Nikita Khrushchev and Deng Xiaoping, who actively reined in their predecessors’ cults.
Kim Il Sung, by contrast, took power at thirty-three, ruling for half a century. While his cult was initially subsidiary to Stalin’s, the first statues of Kim began going up in 1949—and today number in the tens of thousands. The Song of General Kim Il Sung, penned for the great man in 1946, became the country’s de facto national anthem. The cult was absolute.
Most crucially, Kim Il Sung—warily eyeing Khrushchev and Deng’s precedents—ensured power was bequeathed to his son and then his grandson, ensuring that his adulation would endure, without any leavening or moderating, for decades after his death.
Louis XIV famously declared, “L’État, c’est moi,” equating his own person with the state. But though he ruled for decades over roughly as many people as in North Korea, he didn’t have the surveillance and propaganda network that the Kim family had at its disposal.
To a degree that France’s Sun King could only imagine, Kim Il Sung embroidered himself into the rituals and psyche of the state, such that, by the end of his life, the nation could proclaim itself “Kim Il Sung’s people,” erasing any distinction between North Korea’s exalted founder and his subjects.
Also posted on LinkedIn.