Andrei Lankov, The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia (New York: Oxford University Press), 304 pp., $27.95.

NORTH KOREA is routinely described as unknowable—“the most opaque country in the world,” according to William Keylor, a professor of international relations at Boston University. Not so for Andrei Lankov, whose new book, The Real North Korea, arrives just in time to inform our ignorance. Lankov, a history professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, South Korea, offers a highly readable book and a unique perspective that yields a knowledgeable, sardonic, acerbic and not entirely dispassionate view of North Korea. (In the interest of disclosure, I blurbed the book.) Lankov grew up in Leningrad’s last days, before it emerged again as St. Petersburg; thus, a fortiori, he lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. (As a young exchange student in Pyongyang in the 1980s, he became fluent in Korean. While this might seem to be a commonplace requirement, most of the American experts and pundits parading in our media do not know the language, and Kathleen Stephens, who served from 2008 to 2011 as the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, was the first and so far only ambassador there who was fluent in Korean.) Lankov therefore casts a knowing gaze on a country bending toward the same fate, in his opinion, as the Soviet regime he grew up in. But, as he avers, North Korea remains insistent on staving off this rendezvous with history.

We get fresh air on the very first page: “North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all odds.” The North’s alleged “irrational and erratic” behavior is carefully calibrated; its leaders “know perfectly well what they are doing.” Lankov even calls them “perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics that can be found in the modern world.” That might take things a jot too far. Joseph Stalin was of this same modern world, as were Cesar Chavez, Richard Nixon and Machiavelli’s irrepressible countryman, Silvio Berlusconi (whose unflagging buffoonery rivals Kim Jong-un’s). But Lankov’s point is well taken: the North emits bluster, brinkmanship and, from time to time, measured violence, but its leaders “have known where to stop.”

The author also dishes up a rare treat, mostly unfound in books of this genre: common sense and humility about the North’s future, a theme from beginning to end. Those looking for “silver bullets or magic potions” to solve the North Korean problem will not find them. And those who hope for the quick demise of “the plum and jolly looking young new Kim” might also reckon with his youth: if he lives to eighty-two as his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, did, he will still be around in 2065 (or 2066; experts assume he was born in 1983 but, alas, they don’t really know). Instead of clear-cut policy recommendations, by the end of the book Lankov offers up a number of melancholy and unsettling scenarios for the future—suggestions we will come to in due course.

Lankov is very good on the ubiquitous, top-to-bottom surveillance state created in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK); he calls it the world’s “closest approximation to an Orwellian nightmare.” Neighbors watch neighbors; innkeepers report every guest to the police; travel permits are required to move any distance within the country; and exit from the country is of course entirely prohibited without state permission. Lankov is a bit taken aback at the draconian reach of this system, noting that in Stalin’s time Soviet citizens could travel freely between city and countryside, even if changing domiciles required permission. A droll and mordant humor colors this section of the book, as Lankov, a former Soviet citizen, dwells on the ubiquitous neighborhood inminban (people’s group or unit) and tacitly imagines himself living under such heavy restrictions. But he does not tell the reader that these local organizations were, in the first instance, agencies of Japanese wartime control, that similar organizations and practices persisted in South Korea into the 1980s, that the North’s widespread norm of everyone surveilling everyone else was in place by 1946, and that a similar system emerged in China.

The author’s opprobrium also descends on the way in which family background exercises a lasting effect on individual life chances in the North, with everyone categorized into one slot or another, and the families of police or military officers who served the Japanese bringing up the rear. Thus, the entire society is organized around the citizens’ songbun, or family status, or at least this was the case until the late 1990s, when Kim Jong-il relaxed the practice. Lankov characterizes this as a caste-like system, but he does not remark on the caste-like system that marked premodern Korea. For half a millennium there, a few hundred aristocratic families monopolized not just the land and wealth but also the civil-service exams, which offered scant upward mobility. This is in contrast to neighboring China, where similar exams fostered at least a limited extent of upward mobility. Nor does he let the reader know that in South Korea, tens of thousands of families (and thus millions of South Koreans) were blacklisted because they were deemed to be from leftist, pro-North or antiregime families. That changed only after the militarists were overthrown in the late 1980s. Of course, the DPRK’s system is much worse and ongoing—and much less susceptible to resistance and dissent than was the South’s dictatorship. Lankov reports a chilling detail that I was unaware of: the confiscation and destruction of privately held foreign books in the late 1960s, most of them being Japanese and . . . Soviet.

This atrocity coincided with the full emergence of the two Kims and their nativist ideology. They ruled over a Communist country where even Pravda and China’s People’s Daily were unavailable. Back in the 1970s, I got a small grant from the New York–based Social Science Research Council to study the DPRK’s social sciences. It took only a few days in the Library of Congress to realize that there were none; the newly created Social Sciences Institute did put out a journal, but it was nothing but a mouthpiece for limitless mastication on “the great Juche idea,” the political thesis put forth by Kim Il-sung as the foundational philosophy of his regime. Soon nearly every trace of Marxism-Leninism (not to mention Stalinism) was subordinated to the reigning regime maxim that Kim Il-sung originated the DPRK and just about everything else—in Lankov’s words, he became “the greatest human being to ever live.”

Lankov rightly notes that open state terror is not so important in the North because so much preventive work has already been done, beginning with the two male faces first seen by the country’s babies: Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. This may be why the author does not dwell much on the prison camps that get so much foreign attention. Perhaps he sees the country itself as one big prison. But he also probes unexpected anomalies—for instance, when high officials are sent off to the camps with their families and then reemerge years or decades later in high positions. He briefly discusses the most famous product of these camps, Kang Chol-hwan, whose book The Aquariums of Pyongyang brought him much attention and an Oval Office visit with George W. Bush. But Lankov doesn’t mention that this same person somehow got into the most prestigious school in the country (Kim Il-sung University, of course), after spending ten years of his youth in the camp.

THE BOOK’S most affecting pages reveal a paradox that foreigners sense almost immediately but really have no way of explaining: “I could not help but find it remarkable,” Lankov writes of his years as a student in Pyongyang, “how ‘normal’ the daily lives usually were.” People were neither “brainwashed automatons” nor “docile slaves,” but fully realized human beings who were, as often as not, warm and good-hearted people. Their concerns were similar to those of the rest of us: falling in love, family, children’s educations, job promotions. “They enjoyed romance, good food, and good books, and didn’t mind a glass of liquor.” They also cared about health care, infant mortality and life expectancy. Mostly free national systems provided basic human services, which until the famine years put North Korea in the ranks of developed nations (life expectancy was seventy-two before the famine of the 1990s; now it is sixty-nine). Even today, child mortality is “remarkably lower than in many developing countries of a comparative economic level,” Lankov writes. Schoolchildren’s skills in basic literacy and numeracy are also at comparatively advanced levels. Moreover, in the past decade GDP growth has averaged 1.4 percent a year (not robust but steady), and even a shimmer of affluence is now noticeable in the capital.

Lankov asserts that the DPRK may be “one of the most idiosyncratic places in the entire world,” but unfortunately he doesn’t seem to appreciate fully the various idiosyncrasies of the regime, and he doesn’t spell them out with any completeness. Thus, he relegates the reigning ideology of this regime, the ever-trumpeted “Juche Idea,” to one sentence, saying that the best translation is not self-reliance, but “self-importance” or “self-significance.” In fact, this ideology bears traces of native neo-Confucian doctrine, particularly in its rejection of materialism in favor of a metaphysical idealism (it is more Hegelian than Marxist). As Cornell University scholar Victor Koschmann has shown, the discourse of “subjectivity” (shutaisei in Japanese, chuch’esong in Korean) has been a dominant concern of Japanese intellectuals throughout the postwar period as they have sought to understand how their country might be (or remain) modern and still reflect a unique Japanese essence. As to the words that do translate as self-reliance (charyok kaengsaeng), Lankov dismisses that ideology as a pale knockoff of Maoist doctrine; in fact, the Japanese deployed this term during the militarist period of the 1930s, when American embargoes forced them to fend for themselves. Its literal translation is “regeneration through one’s own efforts,” and I have seen it mostly in the Korean countryside, not in Pyongyang. But the nuance is the same: fend for yourselves, and don’t expect investment from the center.

North Korea approached its chuch’e-based idiosyncrasy, Lankov suggests, only after a period of outright Soviet dominance, where barely a word was uttered, barely a thing moved, without Soviet authorization. If Kim Il-sung first used the term chuch’e in 1955, it did not emerge full-blown as the raison d’être of the regime until the 1960s. Lankov is correct in this. But when Soviet troops were on the ground in the late 1940s, Kim used many nationalist synonyms to convey such sentiments as self-reliance, an independent economy and defense, and Koreans pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. The Korean People’s Army—not the Worker’s Party—was always the real basis of the Kim family’s power (here is the biggest idiosyncrasy: this is the most fully realized garrison state in the world). At this army’s inauguration in February 1948, thousands of its soldiers goose-stepped past a podium where only Korean officers stood, bereft of Soviet officials. Meanwhile, highly secret North Korean documents show that among hundreds of officers in the fledgling army, two-thirds had fought with the Chinese Communists either as guerrillas or in the ongoing Chinese civil war, imprinting Maoist concepts of people’s war into their consciousness.

In that same year, Kim’s favored ideologues smuggled Maoist doctrine in through the front door in the party’s lead journal, going so far as to plagiarize Mao’s famous “mass line” doctrine and putting the words in Kim’s mouth instead. From its start in 1946, the Worker’s Party was not the representative of a class (vanguard of the proletariat), but a “mass party” enrolling a huge percentage of the adult population. Nor was the land reform in 1946 another example of Soviet “people’s democracy” directives, as Lankov claims. Rather, it drew upon ancient Korean regeneration palliatives going back to “practical learning” scholars of the seventeenth century and upon contemporary land-redistribution strategies in nearby Manchuria, by then under Chinese Communist control. It was a land-to-the-tillers strategy that, compared to the bloody Soviet or Chinese experience, was relatively nonviolent. Landlords who were actually willing to work the land as farmers were given small plots outside their home county, thus breaking their age-old local power and, well, giving them a break. Most of them, however, ran off to the South.

I MENTION these examples because they reflect a flaw in this book—namely, a consistent tendency to interpret DPRK history in the light of the Soviet experience and especially its demise. This is unsurprising: Andrei Lankov is part of a generation that lived through an utterly unexpected rupture, perhaps the most singular unanticipated grand event of the last century. Harking back to the abject collapse of a global superpower, Lankov foresees a DPRK death rattle. He does not know when it will come but thinks it inevitable and most likely to happen—you guessed it—utterly unexpectedly. In the wake of the demise of Western Communism (save Cuba), Lankov cannot imagine how this regime can sustain itself and particularly how it can revive its economy. Such socialist economies are ipso facto inefficient, he argues, and thus doomed to fail. North Korea’s only way out is to mimic Chinese economic reforms. But that too will mean the end of this regime because it cannot stand the fresh brush with reality that would inevitably come with a genuine opening to the world.

Lankov shares another similarity with most Russian scholars and those who base their interpretations on Soviet documents. Like them, he inflates Soviet control over the direction of Korean affairs. (This is the opposite of the outlook of most Americans, who view themselves as innocent bystanders during post-1945 Korean history, save for the war years in the early 1950s.) It is a historical fact that Soviet troops left North Korea at the end of 1948, never to return. This contrasts sharply with the Soviets’ practice in Eastern Europe; 365,000 Soviet troops were garrisoned in East Germany, for example, when the Berlin Wall fell. Stalin, who famously dismissed the pope’s significance by asking how many divisions he had, never thought he could control satellites without troops on the ground. After the Soviet troops left Korea, Kim and his allies promptly proclaimed their state to be the inheritor of the anti-Japanese guerrilla tradition, not that of the USSR. In 1949, on the first anniversary of the North Korean army’s founding, Kim’s retinue went so far as to give him the moniker suryong, an ancient Korean term translated as “great leader.” This title, up until that point, had been reserved for Stalin. This was utter heresy in the Communist world of the time, but it remained Kim’s title until his death in 1994.

Strong evidence of this remarkably swift Koreanization is hidden away in the one concrete thing that General Douglas MacArthur carried back with him from his disastrous run-up to the Yalu River in 1950: thousands of archival boxes of secret North Korean materials, otherwise known as Record Group 242, “Captured Enemy Documents.” They reside in the U.S. National Archives, where they were declassified in 1977. Lankov does not appear to have used these materials, which accounts for some of his misinterpretations.

Nor does Lankov seem to grasp the salience of the new history pouring out of South Korea from numerous scholars since it democratized twenty years ago. He is quick to dismiss this history as the product of starry-eyed leftism or puerile anti-Americanism—and to chide these scholars for not using Soviet documents. Thus, the author makes much of Kim Il-sung’s membership in the Chinese Communist Party during his guerrilla days as “a junior officer in the essentially Chinese guerrilla force.” Here he seems to draw upon forty-year-old scholarship by Chong-sik Lee and Dae-sook Suh (both now retired from teaching at American universities). But South Korean scholar Han Hong-gu showed in his 1999 dissertation that upwards of 80–90 percent of what was officially the “Chinese Communist Party” and the guerrilla units in Manchuria were Koreans; that Chinese Communists arrested and nearly executed Kim (while the Japanese murdered his first wife, scholars believe); and that his sojourn in a Soviet-Chinese training camp along the two countries’ border near Khabarovsk in the last few years of World War II was far less influential on Kim and his subsequent regime than his decade-long anti-Japanese resistance. In slighting this history, Lankov chooses instead to focus on the Soviets’ tutelage of Kim and their subsequent puppetry.

It may strike readers as odd, but Soviet and Chinese Communist leaders who knew Kim Il-sung well could be just as bone-headed and ham-handed in their dealings with him as were American leaders trying to rid themselves of former allies such as dictators Ngo Dinh Diem, Rafael Trujillo or even South Korea’s first president, Syngman Rhee (against whom the United States considered fostering coups at least twice, in 1950 and 1953). Moscow and Beijing knew so little about Kim and his close associates—and so little did they understand their deep base in the DPRK’s huge land army—that the two supposedly allied capitals conspired with weak pro-Chinese and Soviet internal factions to overthrow Kim in 1956. Lankov downplays the external impetus for this failed gambit and seems to miss the historical reality that from 1945 onward there were no formidable rivals to Kim’s guerrilla group because it controlled the guns.

LANKOV NOTES correctly that Kim came out of the Korean War much strengthened in his leading position, but this war—so crucial for understanding Korean affairs then or today—gets little attention in the book. Koreans are portrayed decrying “American imperialist wolves,” but we get only a sentence on the three-year American incendiary-bombing campaign that razed every North Korean city and, according to U.S. Air Force statistics, was proportionally more effective at city busting than the World War II assaults on German and Japanese urban centers. One in four North Koreans died during the war, 70 percent of them civilians (compared to 40 percent in Vietnam). One of my guides on my first trip to the country, as companionable as anyone I met there, told me he had lost his brother to the American bombing. One wonders if Americans would forget, a couple generations later, having Washington or New York or Chicago reduced by 75 or 80 percent. Yet most Americans are blithely unaware of the real history of this “forgotten war.”

But not so the generals. Senior officers on all sides are still fighting that war. American war plans still say we would need half a million American forces in Korea to defeat an invading North—which is how many we had there in the fall of 1950, when we decided to march north of the thirty-eighth parallel. In 2006, Diane Sawyer of ABC News journeyed to North Korea and interviewed General Yi Chan-bok, who commands the demilitarized zone on the northern side. She asked how long he had been there. “Forty years,” he replied. She seemed amazed. General Yi has been getting up every morning to riffle through the enemy’s order of battle since the year Lyndon Johnson ordered the U.S. buildup in Vietnam to 550,000 troops. Literally millions of Americans have served in Korea and know the quotidian tension that hovers like a plague over the middle of the peninsula, yet so much of the writing about North Korea elides the American part of the equation. It’s as if the Americans were merely innocent bystanders.

Lankov’s account of the state system’s collapse in the early 1990s and the subsequent famine is cogent and accurate. Being forced to pay world market prices for oil cascaded North Korea into industrial decline and agricultural catastrophe, given how much chemical fertilizer it had been ladling on the fields. The author also is correct in estimating the dead from this crisis at five hundred thousand (deduced through the careful demographic scholarship of Daniel Goodkind and Loraine West), rather than the two million routinely tossed out in the U.S. media.

In portraying the contemporary standoff between the two Koreas, Lankov is thorough and accurate. He knows there is no military solution to the North Korean problem. The North would lose a war with the United States and the South. But any victory for America and South Korea would unleash overwhelming and probably insoluble challenges, including the daunting need to occupy the mountainous North, fending off the three to four hundred thousand crack troops in the DPRK special forces and guerrilla units, and actually governing. This last challenge, in turn, would generate cascading problems. For one, the South sees the North not as a country but as an antinational entity, its laws and practices null and void since 1945. Since then, it has maintained shadow provincial governments. (I remember attending a wedding in Seoul in 1968, and being introduced to the South Korean “governor” of North Hamgyong Province, which is in North Korea.) For another, the former landed gentry—an aristocratic elite that monopolized land throughout the five-hundred-year Choson dynasty (1392–1910) and subsequent Japanese colonial rule—regrouped in the South before and during the Korean War. Families still maintain land registers from their estates in the North. They would want to enforce them after unification, as other exiles have done in post-1989 Eastern Europe. Lankov argues strongly for retaining the land as it is in the North or perhaps selling it off to the farmers who work the cooperative farms, lest land squabbles unleash bloody internal strife. Finally, the Pyongyang elite fears the consequences of defeat: not just oblivion for their families and their histories—a terrible fate in a country with long genealogical memories—but trials and even executions.

Instead, Lankov urges engagement with the North and applauds the many gains that came when two successive South Korean presidents (Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun) pursued—with North Korean counterpart Kim Jong-il—a decade-long “sunshine policy.” The name itself was unfortunate, for it suggested a kind of softheaded engagement with an “axis of evil” power in the vein of perhaps a Jimmy Carter. And the concept couldn’t survive a five-year hard-line drumbeat against it from South Korea’s subsequent president, Lee Myung-bak. But Lankov shows that it worked, with years of “truly astonishing increase[s] in inter-Korean exchanges.” Its biggest legacy is the massive Kaesong industrial zone, where more than fifty thousand North Koreans work for a multitude of South Korean and foreign firms. That is the last surviving artifact of that brief period of North-South reconciliation.

LANKOV ENDS his book with a thoughtful and provocative rumination on what the future holds for the North and for the world it lives in. It is a pipe dream, he argues, to expect the DPRK to give up the plutonium and missiles that it appeared to forgo in two separate negotiations with the United States: first, the 1994 agreement that froze its plutonium facilities for eight years, and second, the agreement that Kim Jong-il and Bill Clinton were ready to sign in December 2000 to mothball the missiles (a formulation that George W. Bush quickly walked away from). The reason can be summed up in some important recent history. The North, writes Lankov, finds it difficult to deal with a country that agrees on a joint communiqué stating that neither party “would have hostile intent toward the other,” as both nations did in October 2000, and then places its partner in an “axis of evil” and threatens it with preemptive attack. A Democrat such as President Obama might have been able to go back to the status quo ante and rejuvenate these agreements, but the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi have rendered that all but impossible. As Pyongyang views recent events, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein got inspected, gave up his weapons of mass destruction and then was invaded. Qaddafi did likewise, was overthrown by an internal revolt supported by a multinational intervention and then was cruelly murdered. The North Koreans, looking at this history with a cogent logic, have resolved that this isn’t going to happen to them.

Nor is there much chance that sanctions will change North Korean behavior in the future any more than they have in the past. And there is little utility in Washington’s persistent belief that China should do the right thing and rein in the North Koreans. If China coddles and cajoles Pyongyang into good behavior, it faces inevitable North Korean extortion; if it hammers North Korea to end the current regime, it will face a flood of refugees into China, while South Koreans and Americans once again position troops at the Yalu River (this time for good). Americans kid themselves into believing that capitalist China is no longer run by hardened Communists. This idea ought to have been dispelled when former president Hu Jintao gave a secret speech lauding the DPRK’s political system (while excoriating its economic pratfalls) or when the newly ensconced president Xi Jinping also gave a secret speech praising the early Mao period, and demanding a return to strict Leninism. Xi asked, “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered.” That was exactly what Kim Jong-il said throughout the 1990s: by giving up on ideological indoctrination, the Soviets prepared their deathbed.

Washington and Seoul have no choice but to talk to the North Koreans, Lankov writes, and try to get what they can. He suggests this most likely would work along the lines of former Los Alamos head Siegfried Hecker’s suggestion that the current programs be capped through the “three no’s”—no more nukes, no better nukes and no proliferation. Given the North’s labyrinthine underground facilities, we will never locate every bomb anyway, and a small handful of nukes will provide security and deterrence for the leadership but be otherwise useless.

All people-to-people foreign exchanges should be pursued, Lankov argues, because they truly do influence those North Koreans lucky enough to participate—just as they did Soviet citizens from the 1950s onward. He also advocates efforts to use technology and social media to penetrate the population, not in efforts to overthrow the regime (a hopeless endeavor, he thinks), but to work toward a long-term future where the regime will be undermined from within. This will only happen after a prolonged period of North-South reconciliation, perhaps even through a confederal scheme whereby North Korean elites would retain their autonomy for some time. Here we become aware of our losses, because Lankov resuscitates ideas that former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung first voiced in his inaugural address in February 1998.

I was amazed on that warm and sunny day when I attended that inauguration (a good day for a “sunshine policy”) as President Kim mounted the podium and completely transformed South Korea’s strategy toward the North. He pledged to “actively pursue reconciliation and cooperation” with the DPRK, seek peaceful coexistence, and support Pyongyang’s attempts to improve its relations with Washington and Tokyo—in complete contrast with his predecessors, who feared any hint of such rapprochement. Kim explicitly rejected “unification by absorption” (which was the de facto policy of his predecessors), and in effect committed Seoul to a prolonged period of peaceful coexistence, with reunification put off for twenty or thirty more years. The key to a workable future, for Lankov and President Kim, is to let Koreans handle it. As Lankov puts it in contemplating the DPRK, “What can the outside world do? Frankly, not all that much.” Let’s call that hard-won wisdom.

Bruce Cumings is the chairman of the History Department at the University of Chicago and the author of Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Nicor. CC BY-SA 3.0.