Fyodor Tertitskiy

Kim Il-sung was the enigmatic architect of North Korea. His life is an extraordinary tale of improbable success: once a barely educated guerrilla fighter, he rose to lead the nation at the young age of 33. Against all odds, he established a horrifyingly stable dictatorial regime, one that still struggles to provide for its people, yet could obliterate Hollywood, Silicon...

A briskly written primer on the North Korean decisions, foreign interventions and accidents of fate which have both threatened and, ultimately, preserved the country's dictatorship. This nimble tour through North Korea's history revisits sixteen knife-edge moments when collapse, reform or war nearly shattered the Kim dynasty. Structured in four acts from the peninsula's partition in 1945 to Kim Jong-un's 2020...