Sino-NK

Tertitskiy, Fyodor. Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung. London: C Hurst and Co, 2025. 352 pp. ISBN 978-0197800881.

Compiling a biography of Kim Il-sung has never been for the faint of heart. The challenges may be evident, but they are worth repeating: Kim’s childhood under Japanese occupation, his exile in China and then the USSR, the return to Soviet-ruled Korea, and his rise to power in the DPRK necessitate Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Korean language research. Perhaps more challenging, the gaps, distortions, and revisions by the DPRK which have rendered superficially basic biographical questions difficult or thus far impossible to determine: Where was Kim born? And when and why did he go into exile in Manchuria? Archives in China briefly opened in the 2000s mostly shuttered again soon after Xi Jinping became president in 2013, while those in North Korea remain off limits, confounding research problems. Elsewhere, archival red herrings have caused yet more confusion. Consider the biography of Kim composed by Nikolai Lebedev, former head of the Soviet civil administration in North Korea shortly after departing Pyongyang in late 1948, who claimed that Kim’s father died in incarceration, Kim himself was never imprisoned, and that the future North Korean leader moved to the USSR in 1942 – all apparently false.[i]

Author Fyodor Tertitskiy has spent recent years correcting such biographical errors via his prolific output of research on Kim, the foundation for Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung. His book comes more than 30 years after the death of the North Korean leader, and yet represents the only scholarly, book-length work on Kim since published, in English, outside of the DPRK itself. Whereas previous biographical attempts have too often recycled data points from North Korean hagiography while simultaneously criticizing North Korean distortions, Tertitskiy wisely demolishes most of what we know – or think we know – about the North Korean leader, and then builds back up from scratch his own nuanced portrait with pioneering research, and limited reliance on flimsy North Korean accounts.

Tertitskiy’s work shines in its core sections from when Kim flees Manchuria for the Soviet Union in the early 1940s, bolstered by extensive research in former Soviet archives. Here Tertitskiy leans on new sources including ‘The Personal File of Jin Richeng (Kim Il-sung)’, [ii] a document the author unearthed in the State Archive of Social and Political History in Moscow, the first known interview of Kim Il-sung with his would-be patrons, the Soviets. This document alone represents a leap forward, perhaps the most significant new archival find on Kim in recent decades.

The author’s additional advances relate to our understanding of how, why, and when Kim was chosen by the Soviets to lead the northern section of Korea, still among the key questions on the founding leader of the DPRK. In Chapter 5, ‘The New Beginning’, Tertitskiy relays a series of noteworthy Russian sources, including those from the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence of Russia, tracing the promotion of Kim as north Korean leader through increasingly senior offices of the Moscow government and military including that of Lavrenti Beria, former head of the Soviet secret police, and finally Stalin. In doing so, the author achieves by the far the most detailed explanation to date as to how the Soviets came to select Kim in 1945, surpassing in this aspect, for example, a longstanding scholarly benchmark on the formation of the DPRK, Robert A. Scalapino and Lee Chong-sik’s two-part study from 1972, Communism in Korea.

Another key strength of Accidental Tyrant comes in its illuminating asides, which illustrate the tone and nature of the regime Kim led in the north. These insights allow us to get beyond the North Korean leader’s carefully curated hagiographies in the pages of Rodong Sinmun and the series of increasingly fantastical biographies which followed soon after Korea’s division in 1945. Tertitskiy guides the reader, again through former Soviet archives, on how in mid-August of 1950, as the tide of the Korean War began to turn against the North, Kim’s secretary Mun Il told the Soviets he had never seen his boss “in such a state”, and that by the end of the same month Kim had started to admit privately he was unsure whether the DPRK could still win the war.

The book’s shortcomings are minimal. Tertitskiy, using a previously little-used Japanese colonial record, tells us early in the book that Kim and his family moved together from Korea to Baodaogou, on the Chinese side of the border with Korea, following the March 1^st Movement in 1919. Since the related source only mentions Kim’s father, Kim Hyong-jik, that the future North Korean leader may also have been present in Baodaogu at that time appears to be an assumption on the part of the author, or possibly a rare moment in which the author defers to North Korea-produced data (which has insisted since the late 1960s that Kim’s family exiled together, contradicting its previous accounts). Tertitskiy does not evaluate North Korean discrepancies in relation to the timing and circumstances of Kim’s exile from Korea to Manchuria, or how these may alter, or otherwise, current understanding on Kim’s early years and schooling. Nonetheless, Tertitskiy’s ability to generate new or underused sources from Kim’s pre-1945 period, including those neither Soviet nor Korean, is commendable.

Accidental Tyrant remains light on end notes, by the standards of academia, an apparent attempt to juggle the author’s considerable research on Kim with the demands of a readable, publisher-friendly manuscript. This represents both a negative and a positive. Those who have followed Tertitskiy’s high volume of  pioneering North Korea academic work will know that his book-length biography represents the culmination of years of research. The net result is an efficient prose which distils a wealth of new findings covering each stage of Kim’s life, in fewer than 400 pages. Yet Kim-literate readers are on occasion left hoping for more substance in the way of endnotes and explanations on the documents underpinning this work. Indeed, there is little in the way of discursive references from Tertitskiy’s archival work on former Soviet files.

Accidental Tyrant offers ample consideration of the post-Japanese period from 1945, the Korean War, subsequent purges, and then then rapid decline into totalitarianism as North Korea navigated its own path separate from the USSR and China from the late 1950s. Yet thereafter the pace of the book accelerates, with less attention given to the last two decades of Kim’s life. Again, the reader is left expecting – and wanting – more of the same level of detail to document and explain the latter stages of Kim’s 82 years. In this sense, Tertitskiy is perhaps a victim of his own success. Given former Soviet archives make up the foundation of this work, this fact is perhaps hardly surprising: Tertitskiy’s main body of sources date from the period of Soviet occupation between 1945 and 1948, and therefore the bulk of the book focuses on the periods before during, and after this narrow period.

Nonetheless, the result is a volume which offers unparalleled insights into the mid-life of Kim Il-sung, the period perhaps in which the DPRK leader most impacted Korean and global affairs, albeit with thin coverage and gaps in relation to his early and later life.

In sum, Accidental Tyrant is a significant and exciting work. Executing an archive research-based study of the North Korean leader at all immediately places Tertitskiy in rarefied academic company. That the author has achieved such significant progress regarding key biographical questions on Kim sets a new benchmark on his biography. Accidental Tyrant represents the closest thing to a complete account of Kim’s life that anyone has managed thus far, and as such should be considered definitive reading, and a significant achievement.

[i] Nikolai Lebedev, “Kim Il-sung, premier of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and vice chairman of the Central Committee of the Worker’s Party of Korea,” Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, fond 142, opis’ 540936, delo 1, ll. 1–4. This research was supported by the Korean Studies Foundation Research Support Project, Dongguk University.

[ii] Konstantin Tertitski, and Fyodor Tertitskiy, ‘The Personal File of Jin Richeng (Kim Il-sung): New Information on the Early Years of the First Ruler of North Korea,’ Acta Koreana, 22:1, 111-128.