Hwang Jang-yop

Hwang Jang-yop (; 17 February 192310 October 2010) was a North Korean politician who served as the Chairman of the Supreme People's Assembly from 1972 to 1983 and was largely responsible for crafting Juche, the state ideology of North Korea. He defected to South Korea in 1997, the highest-ranking North Korean to have defected. Early life and education Hwang was born in Kangdong, South Pyongan Province, during the period of Chōsen. He graduated from the Pyongyang Commercial School in 1941, and then went to Tokyo in 1942 to attend Chuo University's law school; however, he quit two years later and returned to Pyongyang, where he taught mathematics at his old school. He joined the Workers' Party of Korea in 1946, soon after its founding; from 1949 to 1953, he was sent to study at Moscow University in the Soviet Union,. Upon his return to North Korea, he became head lecturer in philosophy at Kim Il-sung University. He would later ascend to the presidency of that university in April 1965. Career Sometime in the late 1950s, Hwang discovered a 1955 speech, On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work, in which Kim Il-sung said, "Juche means Chosun's revolution" (Chosun being the traditional name for Korea). At the time, Kim wanted to develop his own version of Marxism-Leninism, and Hwang was largely responsible for developing what became known as "the Juche Idea." As part of this, he helped scrub all of the paeans to Joseph Stalin that had been typical of Kim's speeches in the 1940s and early 1950s. He also supervised the rewriting of Korean Communist history to make it look like Kim had been the founder and leader of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea from its inception.