Word: kim
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This time, it's personal. The first fall of Communism, in 1989 and 1990, was institutional. Now, the death of Kim II Sung has marked the beginning of a second decline, one based entirely on the personalities that built the Communist monoliths of the world...
Meanwhile, the regimes of Kim, Fidel Castro and Deng Xiaoping lived on in relative silence. Kim's death might have been expected to throw his nation into furor. The problem with that theory is simply that he and his government had been planning for the event for years. The ascension of Kim II Sung's son, 52-year-old Kim Jong Il, has been a foregone conclusion for years...
...Kim Jong Il hardly has a smooth path into power; he's not very well known, appears infrequently in public and all of his credibility stems from his father. North Koreans might embrace him, but only as an impulsive reaction built on years of conditioning. Despite Kim Il Sung's atrocious and violent purges of his enemies, many North Koreans always saw him as a godlike figure of immobile strength. After almost half a century as undisputed leader of a xenophobic nation, such devotion on the part of the public is not surprising...
...Kim's death comes at a crucial time in the determination of North Korea's place in the global balance of power. No one could have expected Kim's death to happen so suddenly, especially on the heels of North Korea's progressively easing stance on its nuclear program. If Kim Jong Il indeed makes a smooth transition to the leadership of his country, he will have to deal immediately with the nuclear conflict. Few foreign leaders have met with or even seen the younger Kim, and yet he will have to confront the United States and the United Nations...
...starting point. For this assignment we turned to Matt Mahurin, a master of photo-illustration (using photography as the basis for work in another medium, in this case a computerized image). Mahurin had done numerous other TIME cover portraits in the same genre, including the one of Kim Il Sung two weeks earlier...