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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The charm of dictators has been known to reduce the hardest men to jelly. I remember a tough-minded Japanese photographer returning from Pyongyang in the nineteen-seventies still aglow from the experience of Kim Il Sung's "warm handshake." Similar reports have come from some of those allowed into Hitler's mesmerizing presence: warm handshakes and piercing eyes appear to go with the position.
Bradley K. Martin, whose "Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty" (St. Martin's; $29.95) is the heaviest tome to appear in English on the subject, has spent decades penetrating the mysteries of North Korea. He paints a grim picture in exhaustive detail, backed by many first-person accounts. But, though he is no apologist, he is perhaps fair to a fault. "There might be two sides to the story," he cautions. Kim Il Sung possessed "considerable personal charm that only increased with age and experience." The same goes for his son: "I would describe him as an often insensitive and brutal despot who had another side that was generous and--increasingly as he matured--charming."
Since North Korea is such an isolated and secretive place--the Bhutan of Stalinism--hard facts are not easy to come by. But we know a few things. To begin with, Kim Il Sung, whom the Soviets installed as head of state in 1945, was responsible for starting the Korean War, which may have caused as many as a million civilian deaths. In addition to the toll exacted in the North by American bombing raids, many civilians were massacred by the Communists for ideological reasons. After the Korean War ended in the ruin of his country, Kim Il Sung, to deflect the blame, had tens of thousands of people purged, sending many to prison or hard-labor camps. Christians and Buddhists who had not already fled to the South were persecuted in large numbers, and many were killed. To cleanse his own ranks of possible rivals, Kim had many of his most intimate and loyal associates arrested and tortured. As Jasper Becker notes in "Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea" (Oxford; $28), four hundred and fifty thousand out of six hundred thousand Party members were investigated and punished for "violating Party rules." The Great Leader's policy, to be memorized by prison guards, was that anyone who opposed, or could conceivably be opposed to, Kim's absolute rule would be singled out for "eradication."
By the time Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader, took over from his father as the absolute ruler of North Korea, the country was a slave society, where only the most trusted caste of people were allowed to live in sullen obedience in Pyongyang, while vast numbers of potential class enemies were worked to death in mines and hard-labor camps. After Kim Il Sung's death, in 1994, the regime suspended executions for a month, and throughout the following year it committed relatively few killings. Since this was at the height of a famine, largely brought on by disastrous agricultural policies, hundreds...
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