REVIEW: The Real North Korea, by Andrei Lankov

The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia, Andrei Lankov (Oxford University Press, 2014).

In the 1980s, Japan experienced a crisis of disinformation. For years, there had been mysterious disappearances of Japanese people with no known history of mental illness, drug addiction, or gambling debts. All kinds of people — men and women, young and old, just suddenly vanishing without a trace. Many theories were put forward to explain the puzzle (for instance, some believed it was alien abductions), but the most widespread, pernicious, and dangerous view was that North Korea was responsible. There were people who claimed to have actually seen teams of North Korean commandos lurking on beaches, nabbing random passers-by, and bundling them into waiting submersibles just off the coast. This was obviously crazy. Products, no doubt, of atavistic xenophobia and reactionary sentiments. The Japanese media, government, and academic authorities put a lot of effort into refuting this dangerous disinformation throughout the 1980s and 1990s…which made them look real silly when in 2002 Kim Jong-Il issued a formal apology for the abductions and ordered the surviving captives returned to Japan.

This has always felt like the ur-North Korea story to me, because it has a little bit of everything. First of all, it’s delightfully madcap — they KIDNAPPED RANDOM PEOPLE on BEACHES using SUBMARINES and they did it for DECADES. Second, it’s full of bizarre irony. The North Koreans got away with this scot-free until, in a gesture of goodwill and altruism designed to improve relations with Japan, they fessed up and tried to make things right…at which point everything blew up in their faces and had the exact opposite effect. But third and perhaps most important, beneath the cartoonish antics and the bumbling diplomacy, there is thoughtful rationality at work. And that is perhaps the most important message of this book — everything the North Koreans do, including the stuff that seems crazy, perhaps especially the stuff that seems crazy, is actually deeply considered, strategic, and rational. These aren’t crazy people, these aren’t aliens, these are people with a very strange value system and a very strange situation, and if you put yourself in their shoes, all of their actions make a ton of sense.

Does that sound like good news? It’s actually very bad news.

Before we get to all that, though, let me tell you about this book. The author, Andrei Lankov, knows a lot about North Korea. Lankov grew up in the Soviet Union and attended university during glasnost. But while all his buddies were wearing jeans and doing student exchange programs in Western Europe, Lankov got chosen to study at… *sad trombone* Kim Il-Sung University in Pyongyang. He’s been back many times since then, speaks fluent Korean, chats frequently with North Korean defectors, and now has a teaching position at a university in Seoul. But Lankov has one other very important quality: that peculiar Slavic combination of grim fatalism and bleak humor.¹ An American might get huffy or moralistic writing a book about decades of mass slaughter. It takes a Russian to treat the same topic with a deadpan sense of irony, thereby resulting in a very depressing book that is also very funny.

Lankov starts with a whirlwind tour of the early years of the North Korean state. The official histories all informed me that the Ever-Victorious Generalissimo was born to poor Korean farmers,² so I was surprised to learn that actually he was born to a moderately affluent family of schoolteachers, doctors, and Christian activists in Northeastern China. Similarly, my DPRK handlers had always taught me that the Eternal President spent the 1940s leading daring guerrilla raids into Korea (with his pregnant wife) from the holy slopes of Mount Paektu,³ so I was shocked by Lankov’s claim that he was actually chilling in Russia at a military base near Khabarovsk. Finally, I had always assumed that the Great Leader drove out the Japanese himself via the indomitable Juche spirit of the Korean people, but Lankov has the temerity to suggest that he was installed by the Soviet army instead.

Okay, so maybe Kim Il-Sung had a little bit of foreign assistance… Okay, maybe more than a little, maybe the Sun of the Nation was hand-picked by Soviet officers who also wrote the North Korean constitution, wrote all of the initial laws, and selected the precise geographic and social composition of the nascent North Korean parliament. Who cares, the important thing is that they picked poorly. Kim Il-Sung was dangerously independent, not interested in being a mere puppet, and immediately began triangulating between the Soviets and the Chinese. After all, there were things to admire about both systems — he appreciated the ideological austerity and florid personality cults of Maoism, but loved the Stalinist emphasis on centralization and heavy industry. No matter, he could pick the best aspects of both systems and combine them here, in Korea. He could build paradise.

And he could begin from a wonderful starting point. The North had a fraction of the population of the South, but it was blessed with abundant mineral resources and was quite rich and urbanized by the standards of early 20th-century Asia. Remember that the architects of Japan’s postwar industrial policy had originally been colonial administrators in Manchuria and Korea. Their legacy was a vast capital stock of heavy industry, mines, and factories — later expanded upon by the Soviets. There was more than enough here to deliver on Kim Il-Sung’s promise to the peasantry that they would “eat boiled rice and meat soup, dress in silk, and live in houses with tile roofs.”

The quest for perfect communism was also assisted, ironically enough, by the fact that only half the peninsula was heading that way. In the first years of the two Koreas, the line of demarcation between them was very poorly guarded. This resulted in a vast demographic sorting, analogous to India’s partition, but far more thorough. Many of the most idealistic and educated South Koreans, who tended to harbor leftist and communist sympathies, headed North to create a worker’s paradise. This further added to North Korea’s human capital. Conversely, a torrent of former landlords, entrepreneurs, and Christian activists fled South. So unlike in many Eastern European countries, the natural opposition exiled itself en masse, resulting in a much more homogeneous society and regime.

This was a pretty nice starting point, and then the Korean War and some subsequent purges enabled Kim to complete what may be the most perfect totalitarianism ever constructed. The model was Stalinism, but without all the dangerous liberality and the other compromises that crept into Soviet government over time. So for instance, in the Soviet Union under Stalin it was legal to buy food at a market. Not so in Korea under Kim, where all food would be distributed via a state rationing system. And while it was expected of Soviet graduates that they would go on to find a job, in the DPRK all jobs would be allocated by the authorities.

Another way in which Stalin was dangerously liberal was his approach to punishing dissent. A curious fact about North Korea is that it has an almost premodern caste system called songbyūn, Songbyūn is inherited via the paternal line, and if you have “good songbyūn” then your life is pretty much made from the day you’re born — you will receive a good education, good work assignments, and extra rations.⁴ If you have “bad songbyūn,” on the other hand, you are a despised slave, your life will consist of grinding labor and constant humiliations, and you will live and die with the knowledge that your descendants will suffer this too. What determines if you have good or bad songbyūn? Pretty much just what your male line ancestors were doing in 1945. There are vanishingly few ways to change songbyūn in either direction, but one of those few ways is via acts of disloyalty to the state. So a North Korean tempted to dissent has to reckon with the fact that not only will he likely be condemned to torture and execution, but his descendants will be degraded to the status of human cattle. Not just his children and his grandchildren. All of his descendants. Forever.

Similarly, it’s a well known fact within North Korea that if you commit a crime that gets you sent to a prison camp, your entire family will be sent there as well, which is a good bit stricter than Stalin ever got. This actually once led to a severe breach of North Korea’s legendary censorship regime. In the 1980s, a communist South Korean college student named Im Su-Gyong defected to the North, made a bunch of speeches, then publicly walked back across the DMZ where she was immediately arrested and imprisoned by South Korean authorities. The North made a big deal of her martyrdom, and aired interviews with her tearful family conducted by the South Korean media. This was an enormous mistake. The interviews electrified the country, but for the wrong reason. Here was a political criminal, condemned and imprisoned, and her family were not only free, but giving interviews to the press. In an instant, a huge number of people in the North suddenly became aware that South Korea ran in a very different way from what they were used to (and very differently from what they had been told), and it took the authorities decades of repression to clean up the aftermath.

Anyway, while he was building utopia inside of his country, Kim had to reckon with an increasingly hostile world outside. Relations with the Soviet Union got very strained after the death of Stalin. Kim admired Stalin as a great man, even if one marred by sentimentality, but his successors were a dangerous pack of bleeding-hearts. So Kim ordered all student exchanges to be cancelled, all Soviet advisors sent home, and all North Korean husbands to divorce their foreign wives (who were promptly expelled from the country). But just when the “pivot to China” was nearly complete, Mao kicked off the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Kim watched in horror as his neighbor descended into antinomian chaos. Before long, young Chinese Red Guards were openly criticizing Kim as a “neo-feudal ruler” (imagine), and so North Korea expelled the Chinese ambassador in turn.

As a result of all this, North Korea embraced an “equidistance” policy of diplomatic balancing, wherein it used a combination of ambiguity, guile, and blackmail to squeeze escalating economic concessions out of its now mutually-hostile sponsors. The Sino-Soviet split made this strategy extremely effective. Both sides wanted North Korea friendly to them, but above all they wanted it not to be friendly to their opponent. So North Korea was able to maintain a dollar auction where they continuously demanded that each side increase their bribes or else they’d go over to the other side. Over time, these bribes…I’m sorry, this “aid” came to constitute a majority of the North Korean economy.

It was a great system. Kim Il-Sung had discovered an infinite source of funding that would allow him to return his focus to building paradise on earth. The problems came when in quick succession: the Soviet Union collapsed, the new Russian state took a much more friendly stance towards the US and its South Korean satellite (remember those days?), Deng’s China became friendly to the US too, and worst of all the Russians and the Chinese became friendlier with one another. Suddenly, neither side had any interest in bribing North Korea anymore, massive quantities of economic assistance evaporated overnight, and the country plunged into economic collapse and famine.

Everybody looking on expected the North Korean state to collapse, like many communist regimes across Eastern Europe just had. But they did not reckon with the perfect society that Kim Il-Sung, now on his deathbed, had built. Despite all advanced technological inputs vanishing, despite social organization regressing to iron age levels, and despite mass starvation of the kind most of the world hasn’t seen since Norman Borlaug,⁵ the state clung on. The sublime machinery of oppression was able to maintain its icy hold even as something close to an apocalypse unfolded. But that isn’t to say that nothing changed. The songbyūn and the prison camps and the Kim family cult all remained the same, but under the surface some big things were happening.

Imagine that you are a North Korean prison guard (that’s some good songbyūn!). For years you’ve been supervising the slave laborers at one of the massive 1930s-style collective farms that grow all the food for the country. Your orders are clear. You need to maintain order, maintain proper veneration of the Dear Leader, maintain physical and spiritual hygiene. But lately the supply of old Soviet fertilizers has run out, and the farm isn’t producing anything. Your orders are clear. It doesn’t matter that scratching at the unyielding ground is now fruitless, the slaves must continue to do it. But…if a few of them, after spending all day pointlessly failing to grow food in your collective farm, then sneak away at night and do a little extracurricular farming up in the mountains, and if they happen to give you some of the food that they produce… Your orders are clear. Maintain order, maintain proper veneration of the Dear Leader, maintain physical and spiritual hygiene. It doesn’t say “stop people from growing unauthorized food in the middle of the night” anywhere. Your orders are clear.

Lankov argues that through the crucible of famine and economic collapse, the world’s most totalitarian society seamlessly transformed into a surreal hybrid of totalitarianism and anarcho-capitalism. The farms are a good example. Approximately all of the food is now grown off-the-books, unauthorized, in the middle of the night and then sold by private dealers. But the truly demented part is that the vast, centralized state-run farms are still there, occupying all the good land, producing nothing, fully-staffed by slave-farmers who go through the motions all day, and then sneak off at night to grow food for sale in their private plots. But those private plots that produce everything are necessarily located in the worst and least productive soil, soil that the state has officially written off.

Or consider the factories. The black market economy that comprises the vast majority of North Korean GDP is dominated by women. This is a curious setup for such a fearsomely patriarchal society. But actually…it’s because the society is fearsomely patriarchal. The men are allocated jobs by the state. Many of those jobs are jobs in the factories. The problem is that the factories don’t actually exist anymore, and the machinery inside them has all been sold off for scrap metal. But the men have been assigned jobs, and the jobs are in the factories. So they sit in the rotting, empty shells of factories that haven’t functioned for decades, and that takes up a lot of their time. But the women, ah, the good North Korean woman is a housewife and a mother and a homemaker, which means she does not have a fake job in a fake factory, which means she can work a real job in a secret workshop in her house producing unauthorized goods, or buying and selling them in an unauthorized market.

Or consider the embassies. The North Korean diplomatic corps has some important jobs — monitoring and occasionally kidnapping defectors, blackmailing other countries into sending foreign aid, laundering state assets into overseas bank accounts, etc. As branches of the government, North Korean diplomatic missions naturally receive a share of the budget so they can conduct these activities. The problem is that ever since the crisis of the 1990s, the budget is completely made up and the North Korean government has no money or resources. So the overseas embassies have to fend for themselves, and must fund their operations creatively. Options they’ve explored have included smuggling liquor and cigarettes, drug dealing, and the production of extremely high-quality counterfeit banknotes. It’s believed that at one point the majority of all untaxed liquor in Sweden was flowing through the North Korean embassy.

This “secret privatization” of the entire North Korean economy has been incredibly thorough. It’s estimated that around 80 percent of all goods and services in North Korea are provided in secret and in shadow. It’s capitalism as an extremophile species of lichen, colonizing the cracks and crevices of the official society, and keeping the whole system afloat. They are actually speedrunning the entire history of primitive accumulation leading to investment leading to the joint stock corporation. Large (secret) transportation companies now exist in North Korea and maintain unofficial roads forming an unofficial transit network. The trucks and buses are smuggled in from abroad, then “donated” to various government agencies, which then lease them back in exchange for kickbacks. In this way, they’ve reinvented the idea of funding government operations through corporate taxation in a hilariously roundabout way. There is a booming private restaurant scene.

The North Korean government occasionally tries to crack down on all of this, and it’s very important to understand why. It’s not, as you might assume, because they’re true-believing hyper-Stalinists who are ideologically offended by the existence of capitalism. No, the reason they don’t like it is because it’s making their society richer and more functional.

Yes, you need to read that again. There’s a naive theory that most people implicitly believe, that revolutions happen when people are at their most downtrodden and just can’t take it anymore, so they rise up to overthrow their oppressors. The North Korean regime understands, along with Crane Brinton, that it’s just the opposite. The most dangerous moment for any despotic society is the moment of reform.

Imagine a society with two rules. Rule #1: Everybody must administer extremely painful electric shocks to themselves every 5 seconds. Rule #2: Anybody violating Rule #1 shall be executed. Anybody discussing violating Rule #1 shall be executed. Anybody who was aware that somebody else violated Rule #1, or discussed violating Rule #1, and did not immediately denounce them shall be executed. Anybody impeding the implementation of Rule #2 shall be executed.⁶

This society doesn’t seem optimal, but once it really gets rolling, it might be hard to change it. First of all, it will be very difficult to form a conspiracy to change the rules, because it takes a lot of people to form a successful conspiracy, but the more people who know about a conspiracy, the more likely it is to be discovered. The second reason it will be difficult to form a conspiracy is that everybody is administering extremely painful electric shocks to themselves every 5 seconds, which is distracting and not conducive to careful planning. So the two rules are meta-stable, they might last forever unless some outside force comes and disrupts them. But if the foolish rulers of the society decide to reform, or liberalize, or partially relax these rules, then it sharply increases the chance that the whole thing collapses.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a lot like the society where people administer extremely painful electric shocks to themselves every 5 seconds. The ruling class believes, probably correctly, that any relaxation of their grip, any improvement of conditions, any mercy to their suffering people, would be a sort of collective suicide. They must continue to brutalize their populace, because they are riding the tiger and now cannot get off. They also believe, again with some good reason, that if they ever are overthrown, the vengeance enacted on them will be bloody. And the number of people who feel this way is huge — one of the sadistically genius things about the North Korean regime is the sheer mass of people who it turns into collaborators. If you add up all the officials, all the camp guards, all the families with good songbyūn, we are talking about millions and millions of people who very reasonably expect that if they take their boot off the neck of the nation, then they will meet an unpleasant end.

Lankov describes the North Korean elite as pervaded by a sense of dread — certain that their present trajectory leads to total destruction, but equally convinced that any deviation from it will only hasten the end. Like a mob boss who knows his odds of getting caught just keep rising, but also knows that any “retirement” will be a retirement to the grave. Yes, it is a cocytarchy. Perhaps this explains why defections from North Korea include not only peasants and slaves, but cadres at the very summit of power. For instance the current president’s older brother, Kim Jong-Nam, was once apprehended in Japan while traveling with his family under a false name with a Dominican passport. He claimed at the time that he only wanted to visit Disneyland, which is incredible if true, but I think it’s more likely that he wanted off a different crazy ride. And he did eventually get his wish. Kim Jong-Nam was assassinated with a nerve agent in 2017.

It all raises an interesting question: how should we feel about bribing dictators to retire? There are probably many tyrants who know that their odds of survival aren’t great, and who might be persuaded to leave office peacefully if the rest of the world could credibly commit to giving them a life of peace and luxury forever after.⁷ People would hate it. Our sense of cosmic justice would totally be offended. But could you get over that if it meant millions fewer corpses in the prison camps of North Korea? Fortunately it doesn’t matter what you think, because we are heading in the opposite direction. The last dictator who tried to quasi-retire, Muammar Gaddafi, gave up his WMDs, and then promptly became the recipient of a NATO air campaign before being sodomized to death by US-backed “moderate rebels.” If that’s how we reward good behavior, then it’s not very surprising that North Korea keeps building more nukes.

So if bribing the guy at the top is out, how do we hasten the end of Kim Il-Sung’s paradise on earth? Lankov points to the vast portion of the regime iceberg that’s just below the waterline — the soldiers, guards, informers, petty officials, workplace commissars, and so on. There are a vast number of these people, the people with good songbyūn, because keeping a totalitarian society running is a huge job! Today these folks are totally loyal to the regime for two reasons — first, as we’ve discussed, they feel in their heart of hearts that if change ever comes they’ll be the first against the wall. But second, and surprisingly, they don’t actually know how bad things are. Relative to the rest of the world, that is. They know what North Korea is like, they live and breathe it every day, and it’s their job to keep it that way. But from birth they are bombarded by full-spectrum propaganda assuring them that the rest of the world is exactly the same. Yes, many of them suspect that that’s exaggerated, but by and large they have no idea how much.

There are ways to chip way at both of these sources of loyalty, but again Lankov points out that they’re unlikely to be popular because they look like “rewarding bad behavior.” To fight the first problem, you need to make these people feel both like the Kim dynasty will not be replaced by a chaotic power vacuum, and like the successor regime will shelter them from the wrath of the people they once oppressed. Lankov suggests that China can help a lot with this, by encouraging the replacement of the current government with a new, Chinese-backed dictatorship that is still authoritarian, but less flamboyantly murderous. This new regime might resemble the “developmental dictatorships” that once controlled Taiwan and South Korea. Most importantly, it could keep employing all the same enforcers below the very top.

The second problem is even easier to fight — the absolute information cordon around North Korea is already slowly dissolving, and every bit of additional economic integration with any of its neighbors hastens that process. For example, when the left is in power in South Korea, they love to create special economic cooperation projects with the North: factories and resorts and economic zones and the like, built by South Korean corporate giants but staffed by North Korean slaves workers and with the profits going to the North. Conservatives in both South Korea and the United States despise these projects, because they look like giving free money to murderous thugs. To be clear, they are giving free money to murderous thugs. But Lankov points out that each one of them unavoidably contaminates North Korea with a lot of dangerous and difficult to control foreign memes. In some sense, the most dangerous foreign meme of all is the existence of South Korea, free and prosperous, mere miles away. Alas, South Korea has among the lowest birth rates on planet earth, and may not exist for very much longer, so the North may get the last laugh on that one.

Lankov’s idea of attacking the regime via the loyalty of its enforcers points to a general problem with totalitarianism. It really does take just a tremendous amount of work to keep millions of people sufficiently terrorized and in line. There are propagandists, secret police, guards, spies, torturers, etc. And then there are all the less glamorous occupations: the officials who hand out the food rations, the officials in charge of the next five-year plan, and so on. All of these people need to be kept on-side, which means you, the dictator, need to care for them and their families, need to give them a good quality of life, need to make sure they aren’t too easy to subvert. This in turn can become a major economic drag, which means you need a larger population or greater productivity. But a larger and more complex economy requires additional surveillance and control to prevent it from developing in dangerous ways, which increases the number of officials required. And all of this assumes that your enemies don’t have some other way of subverting the loyalty of your servitors. It’s also a natural check on how crazy you can be. Hitler and Zhang Xianzhong were both charismatic guys, but by the end nearly everybody had left their sides.

All of which is why we may soon be entering a golden age for truly psychotic totalitarian regimes. The Kim Il-Sung of the future won’t need an army of peasants expecting tile roofs if he has an army of killer robots, and ChatGPT is much cheaper than a full-time propaganda minister. Depending on how good AI gets, it will sharply reduce the number of people required to run an effective regime. In the limit, you can imagine a single mad king with no human servitors at all, just a computer as his grand vizier.⁸ There would be no limit to how brutal or crazy this guy could get, no limit to what he could do to his populace for fear of triggering a revolt amongst his own bodyguards. He would also be able to read the minds of dissidents. A singularity is another word for a black hole from which there is no escape. Kim Il-Sung was born a century too early. In another few decades the Eternal President might really have been able to build his eternal paradise. Sweet dreams.

1. His tone reminds me of nothing so much as my old Bulgarian coworker.

2. Actually the official North Korean histories of the Kim Dynasty make the remarkable claim that despite being of impeccable dispossessed peasant stock, the Kims had nevertheless been secret leaders of an underground anti-Japanese movement for generations.

3. This is very important, because if the Great Leader weren’t secretly in Korea in the 1940s, then his son the Dear Leader would not have been born on Korean soil. Fortunately, North Korean officials have since discovered the “Paektu Camp” where the Dear Leader was born, and have turned it into a (mandatory) site of pilgrimage.

4. Dare we dream that it might even be “boiled rice and meat soup” every day?

5. Reading about the North Korean famine is really surreal. A huge percentage of the population starving to death for no reason at all, completely at the mercy of the vagaries of the weather. Then it gets even more surreal when you realize that it’s the opposite which is the exception, and that most of history was like that.

6. Yes, Rule #2 is recursive. What’s it to you? I’ll bet you a nickel that the US Code contains implicit or explicit self-referential loops.

7. As always with crazy ideas like this, you should worry about second-order effects. In this case, however, I’m not very worried about creating a perverse incentive. If your goal is early retirement, there are easier means than by taking over a country and causing a humanitarian catastrophe in the hopes that somebody bribes you to leave.

8. This is one reason that “AI alignment” doesn’t seem like the most important issue to me. Sure, it will reduce the probability that we accidentally destroy the world, but it doesn’t do much for the probability that somebody deliberately destroys the world…or creates Hell on earth.