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subsequent years. There were also the people who came back with Kim Il Sung, the former guerrillas who spent the war years in the Soviet Union. 3
    It was the latter group that would have by far the greatest impact on Korea’s future, but initially it appeared to be the least significant. Those former guerrillas were survivors of a heroic but small-scale and ultimately futile armed resistance to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s. After the resistance collapsed around 1940, the survivors fled to the Soviet Union, where they were enlisted into the Soviet Army and retrained for a future war against Japan. Ironically, the victory against Japan was so swift that these people could not directly participate in the last decisivebattle with the Japanese empire. Nonetheless, even after the sudden end of the hostilities, the Soviet military authorities found a good use for these men (and few women). The Chinese and Korean ex-guerrillas were sent home on the assumption that they would be useful advisers and intermediaries serving the Soviet occupation forces.
    Kim Il Sung was one of these former guerrillas. Efforts of North Korean propaganda-mongers and the power of hindsight have combined to ensure that historians tend to exaggerate his political significance in the years prior to 1945. Nonetheless, by the time of Korea’s liberation, Kim Il Sung was probably already seen as an important leader—in spite of his young age and, admittedly, somewhat unheroic looks (a participant of the 1945 events described to the present author his first impression of the would-be Sun of the Nation and Ever-Victorious Generalissimo in less than flattering terms: “He reminded me of a fat delivery boy from a neighborhood Chinese food stall”).
    The events of 1945–1946 are a convoluted story, but to simplify it a bit we can say that Kim Il Sung was finally chosen by the Soviet military as the person to head the Communist regime that was to be built in North Korea. The reasons behind this decision may never be known with complete certainty, but Kim Il Sung seemingly had a combination of biographical and personal traits that made him seem a perfect choice to Soviet officials. He was a reasonably good speaker of Russian and his military exploits, though grossly exaggerated by propaganda of later days, were nonetheless real and known to many Koreans. It also helped that Kim was a native of North Korea and was never related to the crowd of Comintern professional revolutionaries and ideologues whom Stalin despised and distrusted.
    Kim Il Sung was born in 1912 (on the day the
Titanic
sank, April 15) under the name Kim S ǒ ng-ju—he adopted the nom de guerre Kim Il Sung much later, in the 1930s. In their attempts to create a perfect biography for the Ever-Victorious Generalissimo, Sun of the Nation, North Korean official historians tried to gloss over some inconvenient facts of his family background and to present him as the son of poor Korean farmers. This is not quite true: like the majority of the first-generation Communist leadersof East Asia (including, say, Mao Zedong), the future North Korean dictator was born into a moderately affluent family with above-average income as well as access to modern education. Kim’s father, a graduate of a Protestant school, made a modest living through teaching and practicing herbal medicine while remaining a prominent Christian activist.
    Kim Il Sung himself graduated from high school—an impressive level of educational attainment for a Korean of his generation (only a small percentage could afford to take their education that far). Most of his childhood was spent in Northeast China, where his family moved in 1920.
    With his good education, Kim Il Sung could have probably opted for a conventional career and become a well-paid clerk, businessman, or educator. He made another choice, however: in the early 1930s he joined the Communist guerillas who fought the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
    The North