The date was 28 December 1955. Kim Il-sung delivered a speech: “On Eliminating Dogmatism and Formalism and Establishing Juche in Ideological Work” (Kim 1981). Where, and even exactly when, the speech was delivered remains subject to debate, such is the opacity and rewriting of history that is central to the way North Korea acts to this day. But the importance of the speech cannot be overstated. Kim criticized North Korea's rigid application of Soviet-style socialism, which he thought was unsuited to the domestic conditions that the only recently divided Korea was facing. At the time, the Workers’ Party of Korea was already becoming divided between a pro-Soviet faction, a pro-Chinese faction, known as Yanan, and younger communists who were mainly pro-Korea and closer to Kim himself. The North Korean leader had avoided taking sides, until his speech of December 1955.

In his speech, Kim also introduced the idea of Juche, often translated as self-reliance. Even though the exact meaning of Juche wouldn't be laid out until decades later, introducing this term pointed to arguably the most important development in North Korean history: the idea that Kim himself was responsible for a new, nationalist ideology on which his rule would be based. Less than a decade after the division of Korea and following a disastrous attempt to reunify Korea by force, there were certainly many groups within North Korea who would have liked to remove Kim from power. The North Korean leader, however, did not seek to ingratiate himself with these groups, never mind share power. Following the speech, the Kim government engaged in a brutal purge campaign and launched the Chollima Movement, an industrialization programme that the regime made sure to link to Kim himself. From then on, it would be clear that the country and the leader were indivisible.

Almost 70 years after he introduced the concept of Juche in public for the first time, one of Kim Il-sung's grandsons rules North Korea. Juche continues to be Pyongyang's guiding ideology, at least in theory. And unlike all other communist regimes in history, North Korea has only been ruled by only one family espousing a single ideology that puts nationalism above all else.