Kim Il Sung

Soviet records released after 1991 showed Kim pressing Stalin for approval to attack South Korea, with Chinese approval also required. That evidence undermined North Korea's defensive account of the war and complicated the opposite picture of Kim as merely executing a plan devised in Moscow. He appears as an active advocate within an unequal alliance. The documents clarify the decision for the June 1950 offensive without reducing the peninsula's earlier conflict, or the later international war, to the intentions of a single leader.