Walking along Field Paths through His Lifetime

President Kim Il Sung always found himself among the people. He walked along the field paths through his lifetime, regarding farming as the mainstay of the country.

Immediately after the country's liberation, he read the age-old desire of peasants who made up the majority of the country's population and enforced the agrarian reform to make them owners of land and masters of the country. He wrote the name of a farmhand on the nameplate and put it up at the gate, saying that a farmhand who had much trouble should live in a former landlord's house. He helped the peasants who were transplanting rice seedlings, full of joy, on their paddy fields for the first time. Such legendary anecdotes could be heard everywhere in the countryside in the days of building a new democratic Korea.

He gave much thought to the building of a better rural community while going among the peasants to teach them and learn from them. In the grim period of leading the Fatherland Liberation War (June 1950-July 1953) to victory, he went to the fields to help the peasants in their farming and matured his plan of materializing agricultural cooperation.

After the war, too, he continued to visit the farms to ensure that the socialist transformation of the rural economy was carried out in a short time in accordance with the actual conditions of the country and the intention of peasants. Consequently, a fundamental change took place in the appearance of the countryside and the peasants' status under the new system where the root of exploitation and oppression of every description had been eradicated.

His ideal, however, was very high.

The President sat together without ceremony with peasants on a straw mat to discuss the farming and examined a crop on a maize field under the sizzling sun.

Seeing the trial run of a rice-seedling transplanter on a field one year, he was very pleased over the fact that the peasants became freed from backbreaking toils and lingered on there.

He continuously visited paddy and dry fields in remote and seashore villages and along the demarcation line. In the course of this, he wrote the work titled Theses on the Socialist Rural Question in Our Country, a great programme for socialist rural construction, and created the Juche-oriented farming method.

Under the banner of the rural theses the country's rural economy developed in a modern and multilateral way and the farmers were able to exalt their dignity and honour as the socialist agricultural workers.

During the days when Kim Il Sung visited farm villages, he always took care of the farmers' living with fatherly affection. When he paid a call on a farmhouse, he was concerned about the temperature of the rooms, bedclothes and the water tap, sideboard, pots and cauldrons in the kitchen and discussed how to make a better living.

Thanks to his meticulous care, civilized farm villages with modern dwelling houses, educational and cultural welfare establishments were built all over the country.

The Korean people look back with deep emotion upon the great image of the President who walked along field paths across the country including the Yonbaek plain at the advanced age of 80 and visited the Kumdang Cooperative Farm in Onchon County and the fields on the outskirts of Pyongyang on the sultry days of June 1994, the last days of his great lifetime.

The noble ideal and wish of Kim Il Sung who intended to turn the whole countryside into modern socialist rural community have now come true everywhere on this land thanks to the energetic leadership of Kim Jong Il.

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