Kim Jong-il
Kim Jong-il ruled North Korea from July 1994, when his father Kim Il-sung died after forty-six years and the son who had been groomed for twenty took the state in the first hereditary succession in a Communist country, to December 2011, when he died of a heart attack on his train. In seventeen years the country suffered the famine of 1995-98, the Arduous March, that killed somewhere between six hundred thousand and three million people after the Soviet subsidies ended and the floods came and the public distribution system stopped. He put the army first, songun, and let the markets grow because there was nothing else. He tested the first nuclear device on 9 October 2006 and a second in 2009, and fired the Taepodong missiles over Japan. He met Kim Dae-jung in Pyongyang in June 2000 in the first summit of the two Koreas and Roh Moo-hyun in 2007. He took the American food and fuel of the 1994 framework and the six-party talks and kept the programme. He kidnapped Japanese citizens, which he admitted to Koizumi in 2002 to the country's astonishment. He was born in February 1941 in a Soviet army camp near Khabarovsk, where his father commanded a Korean battalion, or, in the official version, on the sacred Mount Paektu under a double rainbow. He grew up in the Pyongyang of the war, studied political economy at Kim Il-sung University, and rose through the party's propaganda department, where he ran the film studios and had the South Korean director Shin Sang-ok and the actress Choi Eun-hee kidnapped in 1978 to make better ones. He was named the successor in 1980, and ran the day-to-day state through the 1980s. He was believed to have ordered the Rangoon bombing of 1983 that killed seventeen South Korean officials and the bombing of a Korean Air flight in 1987 that killed a hundred and fifteen. The Dear Leader's image, the bouffant hair, the platform shoes, the khaki jumpsuit, the cognac and the Swedish blondes and the fear of flying, was the foreigners' joke and the regime's mystery. Behind it was a man who read everything, watched the satellite television and understood exactly what the state was. The stroke of August 2008 began the succession of his third son, who was introduced in 2010 as a four-star general at twenty-six. He died on 17 December 2011, the state said of overwork on a field guidance trip, and the country wept on television for a week. The body lies beside his father's in the Kumsusan palace, and the state he left, with a bomb and a famine, is the one his son has made more of.
- Lived: 1941 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: North Korean
- Roles: head of state, dictator
