How North Korea became Kim Il Sung’s Korea

How North Korea became Kim Il Sung’s Korea By Fyodor Tertitskiy On August 8, 1945, when the Soviet Union attacked Imperial Japan, Kim Il Sung was still a nobody. He, a mere captain of the Red Army hardly dreamed about leading a country. But 1945 was a truly momentous year for East Asia, when things changed so rapidly as they never had before. Japan was already crippled by the Americans, and the atomic bombardments, plus the fact that the USSR had joined the war, forced Tokyo to accept the inevitable. On August 15, Emperor Showa announced the surrender of the Empire, and for two more weeks the Soviet troops were busy accepting surrender of the Japanese military units stationed in the northern part of Korea. However, very soon, in August or September 1945 the USSR decided that a socialist state would be built in North Korea and this state was supposed to be completely controlled by the Soviet Union. The person who was de facto in charge of North Korea was Colonel General Terentiy Fomich Shtykov. He was a born in Belorussia and, being a protégé of the Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, rose to become a political officer of the First Far Eastern Front of the Red Army, achieving the rank of colonel general – the highest a political officer could gain. It was Shtykov who was overseeing the creation of the North Korean state.