Kim Il Sung’s formal schooling ended in the eighth grade. After that, he lived in a realm of extremity, made up in equal measures of violence and Marxist-Leninist indoctrination, and he was convinced that with the right mix of these measures one could make one’s world as one wanted it to be. It was crush or be crushed. As he consolidated his control of the ruling Korean Workers Party in the late nineteen-forties, he set about lobbying his patron, Stalin, who had by then withdrawn Soviet forces from Korea, to consent to his taking over South Korea as well. Stalin urged Kim to be patient, but eventually gave him the nod. No sooner did the North begin to pour its army into the sleeping South, shortly before dawn on June 25, 1950, than Kim Il Sung proclaimed that the opposite had happened: America and its South Korean puppets had invaded, necessitating defensive action. Or, as the Party History Institute of the Central Committee put it, “Comrade Kim Il Sung, the ever-victorious iron-willed brilliant commander, military strategic genius,” went on the radio and called upon the Korean people “to rise as one in the sacred struggle for wiping out the U.S. imperialist armed invaders and their stooges.”

The North overran the South until America mustered a United Nations mandate to repel the aggression and drove the People’s Army back, overrunning the North all the way to the Chinese frontier, at which point Mao sent a million “volunteers” into the fight, and Stalin dispatched his air force and told Kim, who was ready to give up and sue for peace, to keep fighting. Three years and as many as three million war deaths later, Korea was right where it began: split along the thirty-eighth parallel. A cease-fire was signed, and a two-and-a-half-mile-wide demilitarized zone was carved across the peninsula along the line of partition. But there was no formal peace treaty. The Korean War had no winner, and fifty years later it is still not over.

Kim Il Sung declared victory nonetheless, and boasted of “inflicting an ignominious defeat on U.S. imperialism and its running dogs.” That was the line: North Korea had smashed the foreign invaders, killing three hundred and ninety-seven thousand American troops in the war (the actual number was thirty-six thousand), and, what was more, it had done so entirely on its own, “under the correct leadership.” The war was, in fact, a considerable victory for Kim Il Sung, but only domestically, insofar as it provided him with a pretext for tightening his control of the Party and the Party’s control of every aspect of his subjects’ existence. Throughout the nineteen-fifties, in purge after purge, people accused of harboring even a flicker of “anti-Party, counter-revolutionary” disloyalty risked being killed, or imprisoned (usually with their families) in labor camps from which most did not return.

It was Hitler who remarked that the masses “will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” The supreme fiction of North Korean propaganda, to which all other mystifications must conform, is the Kim dynasty’s account of the Korean War: attacked, defended, triumphant, unassisted. Surely, enough North Koreans saw enough of the war to know that it wasn’t so. Their young men had rolled into the South virtually unresisted, Seoul was captured in three days, then the Chinese were everywhere, Russian MiGs and their pilots had fallen from the sky, and exactly what had been attained? But who would risk being crushed to speak such memories?

“My husband told me that Seoul was empty when he marched through, and he thought that was strange because he thought the U.S. and South Korea started the war,” Lee Young-suk, a former North Korean nurse who escaped to China during the great famine of the nineteen-nineties, told me in Seoul. “Even though he was in the military he believed that.” Lee had reached the South after a grim ordeal as an illegal asylum seeker in China. At one point, her whole family had been arrested and handed back across the border to North Korean security agents, who singled her out for abuse because she was carrying a Bible. She had bribed her way out again with the rings from her fingers. Lee was small and strong, and her hands, which were in constant motion when she talked, were heavily stacked with gold rings—as a reminder and for security, should she find herself in such a fix again.

Although Seoul is just thirty miles from the DMZ, Lee finds it bewilderingly unfamiliar—hyper-modern, a sprawling megalopolis of more than ten million people (close to half the population of the North), a gray and hazy place of blinking neon reflecting dully off façades of steel and glass, an engine of wealth, churning with commerce and high-tech gadgetry, where children chatter on cell phones in the subway, where more homes have broadband Internet service than anywhere else on earth, where you can say and hear and see and do and buy pretty much anything and everything you please. As a defector, one of just three thousand North Koreans to have reached the South out of hundreds of thousands who escaped to China, Lee had been given her apartment in Seoul by the government, a tiny one-bedroom in a poured-concrete apartment block, where she lives with her seven-year-old granddaughter. Although the furniture was cheap and mostly secondhand—a fact she’d tried to disguise by draping it with lace—she could not get over the ease and abundance she had found in her old age. “I have everything,” she said. But when she recalled her life in North Korea her voice carried the anger of someone who has been robbed of everything.

Lee is sixty-seven years old. She had been a Party member since she was a girl, and her husband had retired from the Army in the early nineties as a high-ranking officer. Yet it was only when they reached China that they learned that the Korean War had been Kim Il Sung’s idea. “Our hearts broke when we realized we had given our lives to a lie,” Lee said. “Even until we crossed the border we kept our Party badges on, because we wanted to serve the Party.” Still, Lee hadn’t found it easy to let go of her beliefs. “I hated Americans, because of all that indoctrination in the North,” she said, and she had been frightened, in China, when her husband fell ill and some Americans turned up with medicine. “Invaders,” she had thought,“total villains.” But, she said, “it wasn’t true. They helped us a lot.” Lee had found solace in Christianity. Her apartment was cluttered with votive objects, and when she said, “I believed in the regime as if it had been a god,” she extended her hand toward a large poster of Jesus that hung over her bed.

Most modern dictators have been self-made men, and it is the particular affliction of North Korea that Kim Il Sung was a self-made deity. In his lifetime, state propaganda spoke of him as incomparable, omnipotent, and infallible—“the Clairvoyant,” Korea’s “sun,” “the perfect brain,” capable even of determining the weather (at least when it was good)—and in 1998, four years after his death, the constitution was revised to install him as “president for eternity.” His son, Kim Jong Il, rules as much as a caretaker as he does as an heir; he is described merely as the “central brain,” and “the morning star,” a lesser light reflecting the sun’s glow. In the early seventies, the North Korean Academy of Social Sciences expunged the definition of hereditary rule from its Dictionary of Political Terminologies—“a reactionary custom of exploitative societies,” “originally a product of slave societies,” “later adopted by feudal lords as a means to perpetuate dictatorial rule.” Yet even after he was publicly anointed successor to his father’s throne, in 1980, Kim Jong Il kept a low profile, tucked away in the regime’s secret nerve centers, the Department of Propaganda and Agitation and the Department of Organization and Guidance. Confucius said, “When your father is alive, observe his will. When your father is dead, observe his former actions. If for three years you do not change from the ways of your father, you can be called a ‘real son.’ ” The junior Kim earned that title. “Expect no change from me,” he said after the Great Leader died, and for once he has kept his word.