ABSTRACT
If Western writers are to be believed, the thirty-three-year-old Kim Il Sung was virtually unknown to the Korean people when he returned to his home country in the company of the Red Army of the Soviet Union in October 1945. Some even claim that Kim Il Sung was not his real name but one that he had taken from a famous fighter in the resistance against the Japanese occupiers.1 Nevertheless, the Pyongyang Times wrote of the enormous expectations with which ‘the greatest leader that our people have known for the last several thousand years’ was greeted by the massed crowds on his homecoming. He was described as ‘the incomparable patriot, national hero, the ever victorious, brilliant field-commander with a will of iron’ and as ‘the country’s Great Sun that swept away the dark clouds of national suffering’. His greeting to the people ‘was also a blessing to Korea’s Mother Earth’ and: ‘He was a man equipped with such exceptional powers that popular legend told of how he mowed down the enemy like withered leaves in the autumn just by looking at them, and could make dead branches come into blossom by smiling at them.’
