March 29, 2024
Evergreen

How North Korea became Kim Il Sung’s Korea

A Soviet officer had much to do with the critical early decisions in the nation's history

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.

COLONEL GENERAL SHTYKOV AND HIS NORTH KOREA

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