From Farmhand to Master of the Country

President Kim Il Sung liberated Korea from the colonial rule of the Japanese imperialists and promulgated the “Law on Agrarian Reform” on March 5, 1946, thereby making peasants masters of land and the country.
In Korea at that time peasants accounted for over 80% of the population. Feudal landownership was dominant in the rural areas.
One spring day in 1946 the President visited a rural village in the suburbs of Pyongyang.
The rural committee of the village was occupying a house with tens of rooms that had been owned by a landlord.
The President entered a room and kindly talked with peasants to learn in detail how the agrarian reform was progressing.
Looking around the peasants present there, he asked who had had the hardest time in the past.
An official of the rural committee, indicating a peasant, told his name.
The President called the peasant to his side and warmly stroked his rough hands, asking in detail about his past life.
Told that his family had served as farmhands for generations, the President suggested allotting the landlord’s house to the peasant and distributing the best of the landlord’s land to him.
After a while, he came out of the room and took off the nameplate of the landlord from a gatepost and wrote the name of the peasant in large letters on a new nameplate and put it up on the gatepost.
The President told the peasant to live in the house better than the landlord and made his way to a field to be distributed to the peasant.
He wrote the name of the yesterday’s farmhand on a signpost and drove it into the ground.
After a while the President kindly took the peasant by the hand and got in his car to go to another village.
The story happened in the days of agrarian reform that made Korean peasants masters of land and the country.
President Kim Il Sung always found himself among the peasants, discussing all agricultural affairs with them.
In those days he formed relations with lots of peasants and brought them up into management board chairpersons of farms and deputies to the Supreme People’s Assembly.