Reviewer Willem Marx Interviews Fyodor Tertitskiy, Author of Accidental Tyrant
“The regime Kim built is so repressive that, in the modern world, it might warrant a category of its own—below the average dictatorship.’’ —Fyodor Tertitskiy
The word tyranny (tyrannos) comes down to us from ancient Greece in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, but as a form of monarchy, it didn’t earn its sinister reputation until many decades later when Plato and Aristotle both recognized it as the worst constitutional model of all—based in large part on the 405 to 367 reign of Dionysus I, in Sicily, who just may own the title of history’s most ruthless and violent tyrant.
So, with today’s featured book focusing on the reprehensible Kim Il-sung of 20th century North Korea, we’d like to give you just a hint of Dionysus’s treachery.
Named the supreme chief of the Republic at the age of twenty-five through trickery, Dionysus quickly sought to rid Sicily’s west of the Carthaginians, and early on met with some success—thanks to a devastating pestilence forcing the Carthaginians to sign a peace treaty favorable to the Greeks. In the ensuing years, Dionysus fortified his power in Syracuse but then decided to lay waste to several prosperous Greek towns in Sicily’s northeast as a way to consolidate power. Turning his attention back on Carthage, Dionysus had his best run of luck yet, but couldn’t help but to also attack numerous other Greek settlements on the Italian mainland as well as in Sicily. For a new low, when money ran short, he headed east to plunder Delphi—which didn’t go so well—but he proceeded to raid other sacred temples throughout Greece of golden mantles from statues, silver and gold tables, vases, and crowns, and 57,000 pounds of silver (1000 talents) from a temple in Caeré or Agylla.
We could go on, but let’s end with Dionysus’s end. A megalomaniac through and through, he long fancied himself a great poet, even as his poems were twice hissed off the stage during recitations at the Olympic Games. Miraculously, in Athens, one of his tragedies earned the top prize and in the debauch and celebrations that followed with his friends, he drank and ate so piggishly that he lost consciousness and soon died. Dionysian indeed.
Fyodor Tertitskiy’s splendid biography of enfant terrible Kim Il-sung, Accidental Tyrant, landed a starred review from Willem Marx in the biography feature of Foreword’s March/April issue, prompting us to set up the following conversation about the lows a man will go to retain power. The other four biographies from that spread also offer great reading potential (PDF). For a link to your free digital subscription to Foreword Reviews, click here.
North Korea occupies a strange place in the public imagination: it’s a country that launches threatening missile tests and subjects its population to unimaginable repressions, yet even the simplest details about life there are vague and more or less unknown. How would you introduce North Korea to someone with no knowledge of the country and explain its importance in today’s world?
If one were to find positives in the way North Korea is governed, one might argue that Kim Il-sung’s system did manage to provide basic medicine and universal secondary education. However, South Korea’s example demonstrates that the country could have fared immeasurably better. The regime Kim built is so repressive that, in the modern world, it might warrant a category of its own—below the average dictatorship. One could imagine a classification system reading: democracy, hybrid regime, dictatorship, and North Korea.
Rights most of the world take for granted—such as Internet access, international travel, and communication, watching foreign films and series, listening to the music of one’s choice, practicing religion, or expressing mild frustration with the government in private—are brutally and systematically denied there. As of now, the system appears stable, with no signs of reform or weakening. Even if the regime were to collapse or undergo radical change, the consequences would persist long beyond the fall of the Kim Il-sung’s heirs. Decades of oppression and isolation from the modern world would leave its people struggling to reintegrate into it.
Can you tell me a little bit about the origin of your project? Where did the idea and impulse to write a biography about Kim Il-sung come from?
This decision was, in fact, rather spontaneous. It originated from a conversation with a colleague about the type of book on North Korea that would be worth writing. One suggestion was a biography of Kim Il-sung, as Suh’s seminal 1988 work, Kim Il-sung: The North Korean Leader, was written before the end of the Cold War and the opening of the Eastern Bloc and its archives, rendering it outdated. If memory serves, this discussion occurred in February 2019.
I found the realization that Kim Il-sung spent the early part of his life as a refugee particularly fascinating. Is there one, or perhaps several aspects of Kim Il-sung’s biography that you find central to understanding him as a figure? Additionally, is there a particular fact about his life that cracked open a new perspective for you?
One often overlooked aspect of Kim Il-sung’s life is his service in the Soviet military from 1942 to 1945—a period that immediately preceded his rise to power. For Kim, the austere conditions of a Soviet rear unit during a time of extreme scrap-the-barrel mobilization for the war with Nazi Germany still offered far greater security and prosperity than his years fighting the Japanese in Manchuria. In 1945, he witnessed firsthand how the Soviet system accomplished in less than eight days what he and his guerrilla comrades had failed to achieve in eight years: the defeat of Imperial Japan.
It is little surprise, then, that many aspects of his rule reflected his own experiences in the Soviet military. The extreme level of military mobilization, the absence of a clearly defined term of service, the ever-watchful secret police, the expectation that both military and civilian organizations be self-sufficient, and even the relative lack of emphasis on Communist ideology all bear the imprint of this formative period.
At a research level, I’m curious about the experience of hunting for information in different languages and different national archives. Did you find that the portrait of who Kim Il-sung was varied from country to country? I’d love to hear a little about these different national perceptions of North Korea’s founder.
I suppose it varied somewhat, depending on a country’s connection with North Korea. In South Korea, perceptions are shaped largely by the Korean War, the testimonies of escapees, and later research on Kim Il-sung’s armed struggle against Manchuria. In China, where freedom of speech is severely restricted, private conversations sometimes compare Kim to Mao and North Korea to an exaggerated version of Mao-era China. That said, their styles of governance differed—Mao frequently redelegated authority amid a chaotic swirl of loyalist mobs, whereas Kim had little tolerance for any initiative from below.
In the Soviet Union, Pyongyang’s grotesque propaganda heavily influenced perceptions of Kim Il-sung, and even in today’s Russia, “North Korea” is often invoked much like 1984—as shorthand for totalitarian dystopia. Meanwhile, in Japan, disproportionate attention is given to the issue of abductees—Japanese citizens kidnapped by Pyongyang. While this crime is relatively minor compared to Kim Il-sung’s vast catalogue of atrocities, the emotional response is understandably stronger when the victims are perceived as one’s own.
During the Cold War, English-speaking countries paid little attention to North Korea, regarding it as just another communist state. Kim Il-sung was not seen as particularly different from Hồ Chí Minh, Enver Hoxha, or Fidel Castro. Only towards the end of his life, when the DPRK’s nuclear ambitions became clear, did the West start treating it as a serious security threat—an isolated rogue state that had suddenly become impossible to ignore.
The one common thread across all these countries, however, would likely be the motives of the regime’s supporters, which are almost entirely rooted in radical anti-Americanism. Whether in South Korea, China, the Soviet Union, Japan, or the West, the regime has long been defined by its vehement opposition to the United States.
I was struck by a passage in your description of the Korean War, “The war immediately led to a change in Kim Il-sung’s status: the press started calling him ‘Leader,’ a title previously reserved for Lenin and Stalin.” This is just one of the many instances in which we see language and official names playing a huge role in the regime. Other obvious examples being the meaning of Kim Il-sung’s own name. Can you speak a little bit about how language and naming are used as tools by the dictatorship?
One thing George Orwell got wrong in his depiction of totalitarian regimes is their alleged tendency to abbreviate important concepts. In reality, such regimes often prefer to encapsulate these ideas in heavily standardized sobriquets, which are then relentlessly drilled into the population’s consciousness until they are memorized by heart. For example, in 1984, instead of abbreviating “English Socialism” as IngSoc, it would be more realistic for the Ministry of Truth to broadcast something like “English Socialism is the guiding truth of our era, the great thought formulated by Big Brother, the eternal doctrine of the Party that shapes all thought and action” on every telescreen, day in and day out.
In the case of North Korea, this practice became firmly entrenched around 1970. Since then, every citizen has known that Kim Il-sung is “the Great Leader,” the Party is “the Glorious Workers’ Party of Korea,” the Army is “the Undefeatable Strong Army of the Revolution,” and so on. These repetitive, grandiose titles are designed to create a kind of mental imprint, to make the regime’s slogans and ideologies not just familiar but instinctively internalized.
You describe North Korea’s foreign policy as exploiting any perceived advantage immediately, “long-term consequences be damned.” This shortsightedness seems at odds with the startling endurance of the regime Kim Il-sung founded. How do you square these two things? Today, with it’s growing relationship to Russia, would you say North Korea is operating with short or long-terms goals in mind?
The key to reconciling these two seemingly contradictory tendencies in North Korea’s approach to power lies in the regime’s unyielding focus on survival. While individual decisions may appear impulsive or opportunistic, the overarching goal—the perpetuation of the regime—remains constant. North Korea views international relations not as a means of stability or development, but as an ongoing struggle for leverage, where any temporary advantage bolsters its capacity to endure.
North Korea benefits significantly from its geographical position, sandwiched between China, Russia, and South Korea. During the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s–80s, Pyongyang was convinced that both Moscow and Beijing would prefer to sponsor them, an unreliable partner, rather than risk North Korea aligning with the other side. This belief proved accurate. North Korean leaders understood that the People’s Republic of China would always need a buffer state between itself and a US ally—South Korea—and that Beijing would rather tolerate their unreliability than risk a chaotic collapse or the presence of American military bases on the Yalu River. To this day, their calculation has been vindicated.
Currently, the revived alliance between Russia and the DPRK is driven by Putin’s ongoing war in Ukraine. Pyongyang is actively supplying the Russian military with ammunition and, in an unprecedented move, has even sent its own soldiers to fight. The primary goal of this cooperation appears to be short-term profit maximization, as most other forms of collaboration remain low-scale. North Korea has not begun to produce anything that would hold long-term interest for the Kremlin once the war in Ukraine concludes.
Willem Marx
