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Korean Activist, Ex-Supporter of North, Plots His Next Move

SEOUL — In the 1980s, Kim Young-hwan was a legend among South Korean student activists. His widely read pamphlets converted legions of students into firebomb-hurling agitators against the U.S.-allied military dictatorship in the South. They celebrated the North Korean leader Kim Il-sung and his “juche,” or self-reliance, doctrine and helped make anti-Americanism a centerpiece of the student movement — a legacy that continues to resonate in South Korean politics today.

By 1991, the world was changing: the Soviet bloc was crumbling and South Korea was evolving into a democracy. But Mr. Kim clung to his belief that North Korea remained a bastion of ideological purity and the guiding light for Korean unification. So when, in violation of South Korean law, he secretly visited North Korea to meet Kim Il-sung, he had exalted expectations of the man he had lionized as a guerrilla fighter during Japanese colonial rule and a postwar nation-builder.

The reality was crushing.

“Kim Il-sung was gregarious and very good at making people feel at ease,” Mr. Kim said in a recent interview, recalling his two meetings, totaling five and a half hours, with the North Korean leader at his mountain villa. “But, however much I tried, I couldn’t engage him in any serious discussion of juche. It finally hit me that the old man didn’t know very much about the ideology created in his own name....

Read entire article at NYT