Kim Il Sung was a great anti-imperialist leader of the country for nearly five decades, and played a major role in developing and industrializing the DPRK. People don’t believe me when I said that North Korea - after all the bombing during the Korean War - was an economic powerhouse in Asia in the 1960s on par with post-war Japan. South Korea wasn’t even remotely comparable to the North at the time.

I had written a comment about North Korea’s economy in this comment here if you haven’t read it and need some background information.

Kim Jong Il was really unfortunate to have inherited the country at the worst of times: 1994 was the start of the failures everywhere in the DPRK’s economy, starting from the collapse of the USSR, which the DPRK relied heavily on for fuel import and trade, then a series of unprecedented floods and droughts destroyed much of the crops and agricultural production in the country, all of which had rendered the DPRK at the time a politically highly unstable situation.

You can imagine why gripping on to political power was so important in the 1990s as their economy turned into complete mess, especially being able to witness what was happening to Russia in real time. It hasn’t been doing well since then but you can imagine any misstep is going to make the country far worse (think about all the other failed states across the Global South whose leaders had not been able to keep the society from descending into chaos).