Great dynasties of the world: The Kims of North Korea

Ian Sansom on a tenacious family of dictators
Kim Jong-il
Kim Jong-il. Photograph: AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Pity the poor dictators: even they find it difficult to hand on wealth and power from generation to generation. The Somozas managed three presidents over 40 years in Nicaragua – Anastasio Somoza García; Luis Somoza Debayle; Anastasio Somoza Debayle – before the Sandinistas kicked them out in 1979. The Duvaliers, "Papa" and "Baby", tyrannised Haiti for almost 30 years. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad is currently hanging on to power, bequeathed to him by his father. The Mubarak dynasty has come to a shuddering halt in Egypt. And things aren't looking good for a smooth succession for Saif Gaddafi in Libya. This makes the world's longest-reigning dictator family, by a long shot, the Kims of North Korea.

In the western media, the ruling Kim, Kim Jong-il, is often depicted as a figure of fun: a bequiffed, cognac-swilling, platform shoe- and shades-wearing buffoon who loves Hollywood movies and once kidnapped a film director to make a communist Godzilla. Bradley K Martin, in his book Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader (2004), comes closer to the truth when he compares Kim and his family to the troglodyte Morlocks in HG Wells's novella The Time Machine, monstrous beings who live underground and feed on the Eloi.

The first of the dictator Kims was Kim Il-Sung, born on 15 April, 1912, in Pyongyang. Kim's father died when he was 14 and his mother when he was 16. He fought with Korean partisans against the Japanese and in 1940 fled to the Soviet Union, where he became a major in the red army. As Adrian Buzo notes in The Guerilla Dynasty: Politics and Leadership in North Korea (1999), the history of North Korea has been decisively shaped by Kim's time in Russia. "In Stalinism, Kim saw a model for the rapid construction of a modern industrial nation-state under the aegis of a revolutionary party, capable of expelling all vestiges of imperialism from the Korean peninsula."

Kim also saw firsthand how one might become a ruthless dictator.

After seizing power in 1948, Kim styled himself as a kind of North Korean Stalin. According to Bradley K Martin, he presented himself not only as North Korea's great leader and liberator, but also as the country's "leading novelist, philosopher, historian, educator, designer, literary critic, architect, industrial management specialist, general, table tennis trainer ... and agriculture experimenter." It was, of course, all guff. And what wasn't guff was Juche, Kim's homemade, half-baked political philosophy, which promotes a unique Korean self-reliance, guided by a great leader. "Man is the master of everything and decides everything," declared Kim. In other words, he was the master of everything and decided everything.

Kim died in 1994, aged 82, and was succeeded by his eldest son, Kim Jong-il. (Kim is one of the most popular surnames in Korea). It had been expected that, in turn, Kim's eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, would be named heir presumptive, but he seems to have fallen out of favour after being arrested in 2001 trying to enter Japan on a fake passport in order to visit Tokyo Disneyland. It is now assumed that Kim Jong-il's successor will be his third son, Kim Jong-un, who has recently raised his political profile by being made a general in the people's army.

In her book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009), the journalist Barbara Demick writes: "If you look at satellite photographs of the far east by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea." The country has a chronic lack of fuel and food. North Korea, writes Demick, "is simply a blank." In truth, it has been effaced by one family.