September 9 this year marks the 76th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the glorious motherland of the Korean people.

On this occasion, the Korean people are recollecting with deep emotion the immortal revolutionary career of President Kim Il Sung (April 15, 1912—July 8, 1994) who devoted himself to establishing a genuine people's government.

During the anti-Japanese armed struggle, Kim Il Sung set forth the unique line of building a people's government and established a people's revolutionary government in the guerrilla bases or liberated areas.

In the early 1930s when he came back to Wangqing after expeditions to north and south Manchuria, he found that complaints were heard in different parts of the guerrilla zone.

Following the slogan of the immediate introduction of socialism, the authorities of the guerrilla zones proclaimed the abolition of private property, and brought all personal property and real estate under communal ownership. Everything was communalized, from land and provisions to the farming tools and implements such as sickles, hoes and pitchforks. After this sweeping introduction of communal ownership, they subjected all the inhabitants of the guerrilla zone—men and women, young and old—to the new order of communal life, communal labour and communal distribution.

Such ultra-leftist policy caused irreparable vacillation and chaos in the guerrilla zones. At this juncture, when the destiny of the guerrilla zones and the Korean revolution was at stake, Kim Il Sung took up the gauntlet and set out to overcome the policy’s leftist deviation and create a new form of government.

He exposed the irrationality and harmfulness of the leftists’ assertions and policy through repeated arguments with them, and held serious discussions with military and political cadres on establishing a people's government in the guerrilla zones.

At the discussions, he stressed the need to establish a united-front government, a people's revolutionary power based on a worker-peasant alliance.

In his reminiscences With the Century , Kim Il Sung wrote: “They believed that the form of people’s revolutionary government we chose suited to east Manchuria, where Koreans were the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants, was ideally suited to the character of the Korean revolution which was directed at democracy and against imperialism and feudalism, and that it met the requirements of the people.”

In a bid to implement the line, he saw that a people's revolutionary government was set up for the first time in the Gayahe area, Wangqing County, and visited Sishuiping in the Gayahe guerrilla zone on March 18, Juche 22 (1933) to preside over a meeting to establish the people's revolutionary government in the Fifth District, Wangqing.

The people in the guerrilla zones heartily welcomed the birth of a new government that championed their interests.

Afterwards, this type of government, genuine power of the people, sprang up in most of the guerrilla zones along the Tuman River in a short span of time under his wise leadership.

The people’s revolutionary government established in the flames of the anti-Japanese struggle was the embryo and prototype of the DPRK which was founded after the country’s liberation on August 15, 1945.

With the establishment of the people’s government that inherited the people’s revolutionary government, the Korean people became the genuine masters of the state and society who held power in their hands for the first time in history, and could speed up the building of a new society with a powerful weapon of the revolution and construction.

Ham Kwang Hyok