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  Actually, the late 1960s were a period of grave crisis in the relations between North Korea and China. Ambassadors were recalled and tensions on the border mounted—much later, in May 1984, Kim Il Sung recalled in his confidential talk with East German leaders how much patience was necessary to deal with Chinese soldiers intruding into the North Korean territory.12 In a telling sign, Kim Il Sung even asked Moscow to use Soviet air space for air travel by the North Korean official delegation, openly expressing fear that North Korean planes might be intercepted and forced to land by the Chinese.13 The Chinese Red Guard groups openly criticized Kim Il Sung, describing him as a “neo-feudal ruler” living a life of luxury and self-indulgence.14

  In the early 1970s North Korea finally switched to the “equidistance” policy, which continued until the early 1990s. It was essentially a diplomacy of balancing between two mutually hostile sponsors, China and the Soviet Union. North Korean politicians and diplomats discovered that the new situation of Sino-Soviet rivalry, in spite of ingrained instability, gave them remarkable political opportunities as well. With a measure of guile, they could extract aid from both sponsors without giving much in return.

  The aid was increasingly important: in spite of the frenzy of ideological campaigns, from the late 1960s the North Korean economy, once the most advanced in continental East Asia, was sliding toward stagnation. Without a constant influx of foreign aid, North Korea would probably become economically unviable.

  Neither Moscow nor Beijing had illusions about North Korea. They knew perfectly well that they were being manipulated, but still saw no viable alternative to providing Pyongyang with aid. Partially, their policy was driven by the need to keep North Korea as a stable buffer zone protecting both China’s Northeast and Russia’s Far East against the US military presence in Japan and South Korea. However, to a larger extent, the rival Communist giants were paying North Korea for remaining neutral in their own quarrel. Of course, both Moscow and Beijing preferred to see Pyongyang join their side unconditionally, but since that was not going to happen, they were at least determined not to let North Korea join the opposite camp. Thus, with remarkable skill North Korean diplomats squeezed aid from their two quarreling benefactors without making excessive concessions to them.

  In the early 1970s, North Korea tried to rid its economy of dependency on Moscow and Beijing, and began to borrow heavily on the international market. At that time, immediately after the oil crisis of 1973, Communist regimes were considered to be exemplary debtors while the international market was awash with newly arrived petro-dollars. Therefore, securing loans was not that hard. Probably, North Korean leaders hoped to use this additional income to overcome the slowdown that was taking hold of their economy. The scheme did not work: the loans were wasted on a number of prestige-boosting and/or ill-conceived projects, with Pyongyang soon refusing to pay interest. Between the years of 1979 and 1980, North Korea became the first Communist state to default. This left them with significant debt—in 2007, $600 million in principal plus $1.2 billion in accrued interest.15 Their foray into the world of high international finance ended in debacle and seriously damaged North Korea’s credit ratings.

  Around the same time, during the mid-1970s, more unseemly incidents began to occur. With increasing frequency, North Korean diplomats and officials were discovered traveling with large amounts of expensive contraband, illicit drugs, and counterfeit money.

  In late October 1976, the Norwegian police caught North Korean diplomats selling 4,000 bottles of smuggled liquor and a large quantity of smuggled cigarettes. In those days, the Scandinavian governments imposed exorbitant taxes on alcohol, which made the importation of tax-free liquor an extremely profitable business. Pyongyang officials transported large quantities of tax-free liquor and cigarettes inside diplomatic luggage. It was estimated that the DPRK Embassy in Norway sold liquor and cigarettes with a black market value of some one million dollars (in 2011 prices, this would be at least three times that amount).

  After the incident involving Norway and Denmark, the same network was discovered in two other Nordic countries—Finland and Sweden. The scale of operations in Sweden was probably the largest, and the affair was widely discussed in the local press. One night, mischievous Swedish students put a sign reading “Wine and Spirits Co-op” on the entrance of the DPRK Embassy—to the great annoyance of its inhabitants.

  Soon afterward, the North Korean authorities began to deal with far more dangerous substances. In May 1976 the Egyptian customs officials discovered the presence of hashish in luggage belonging to a group of North Korean diplomats—the first in the long chain of incidents of this type. The North Korean operatives even drew knives, but were overpowered by the Egyptian officers. Their diplomatic passports ended up saving them from prosecution. A similar incident then occurred in, of all places, Norway. In October 1976 the North Korean diplomats were caught handing a large amount of hashish to local drug dealers. In the subsequent decades, North Korean officials and diplomats were again occasionally found smuggling drugs in various parts of the world.

  Apart from narcotics, North Korea also seemingly began to produce and disseminate high-quality counterfeit US dollar bills (the so-called supernotes), albeit in this case the evidence is largely circumstantial.16

  It is often speculated that these smuggling operations were related to the new attitude toward the North Korean missions overseas: once the economic slowdown made its mark in the mid-1970s, the missions had to follow the self-reliance principle. In effect, North Korean embassy officials now had to pay for their own expenses from the funds its staff somehow earned.

  It seems, however, that contrary to a popular misperception, these illegal activities never developed into major hard currency earners. Even from the regime’s point of view, smuggling and counterfeiting did more harm than good: these incidents made the North Korean government look odious without bringing in much income. In the early 2000s there were signs that these activities were finally downscaled, but one wonders why this did not happen earlier.

  Another bizarre feature of North Korean foreign policy of the 1970s was their spy agencies’ strange taste for abductions. These operations began earlier: in the late 1950s, North Korean intelligence attempted the abduction of a number of dissenters from the USSR. Not all operations were successful; Ho Chin (Lim Un), a young poet and dissenter, managed to escape from his kidnappers and was granted asylum in the USSR, where he eventually became a prominent journalist and historian. But not all were so lucky. A young North Korean musician was kidnapped by North Korean agents from downtown Moscow and was never seen again. This led to a major crisis in relations between Moscow and Pyongyang, with the Soviet Union expelling the North Korean ambassador—another event with few parallels, if any, in the entire diplomatic history of the Communist bloc.

  In the late 1970s the major targets of these operations were Japan and South Korea. Unlike earlier incidents, these kidnappings did not target dissenters or defectors. Abductees were average men and women off the street. In many cases it seems that the abductions were opportunistic, with North Korean commandos taking any person who was unlucky enough to stroll along some Japanese beach where the commandos were lying in wait. Indeed, these abductions were so bizarre that many reputable journalists and scholars (overwhelmingly—but not exclusively—of leftist inclinations) in the 1980s and 1990s wasted tons of ink insisting that North Korea had nothing to do with the strange disappearance of Japanese citizens in the 1970s.

  These people were made to look foolish by Kim Jong Il himself. In 2002 Kim Jong Il admitted responsibility for the abductions and ordered the return of a number of survivors back to Japan. This was obviously done to improve relations with Japan, but produced a completely opposite outcome. Accusations that had been often perceived as the fantasies of the Right were suddenly proven to be completely correct, and the Japanese public exploded. The Japanese government demanded the immediate return of all abductees. In response, the North Korean authorities
stated that all survivors had been returned home, with any additional abductees having already died (this was in 2002). Few believed this statement, and as a result the trade and exchanges with Japan, once quite important for the regime, were completely frozen.17

  Thus, the North Korean leaders were paradoxically punished for their rare attempt to be honest and admit past wrongdoings. No doubt they have learned their lesson and from now on will probably think twice before admitting to more of their past misdeeds.

  Obviously, the Japanese were abducted to take advantage of their native language skills and their knowledge of Japanese daily life in order to train the North Korean agents. For example, Yaeko Taguchi, a former hostess kidnapped in 1978 (she was then aged 22), trained Kim Hyǒn-hǔi, a North Korean intelligence agent whose cover was to be a Japanese national. This decision to rely on the abductees was rather strange since the North Korean authorities could count on the enthusiastic support of a number of people who spoke Japanese as their first language and had firsthand knowledge of modern Japan. Those people were members of Chongryon (Chosen Soren), a powerful pro-Pyongyang group of Koreans in Japan.

  Some 700,000 ethnic Koreans lived in Japan in the early 1950s. Most of them arrived there in the 1930s and early 1940s, either in search of a better livelihood or forcibly relocated by the colonial authorities as providers of cheap labor. In 1951 ethnic Koreans were formally deprived of Japanese citizenship. In Japan the ethnic Koreans were subjected to considerable discrimination and were kept in unskilled or semi-legal occupations. This ensured their affinity with the Japanese Left, but eventually it was pro-Pyongyang leftist nationalists who succeeded in organizing them.

  In the late 1950s a majority of ethnic Koreans in Japan opted for North Korean citizenship, even though only a tiny minority of them had come from what became North Korea after 1945. Those “overseas citizens of the DPRK” created the aforementioned Chongryon.

  During the late 1950s and early 1960s pro-Pyongyang activists successfully persuaded many ethnic Koreans to “return” to the North. These returnees numbered an impressive 93,000, an overwhelming majority of whom had never previously lived in the country to which they now moved. They wanted to escape discrimination and contribute toward the building of a perfect new society in their native land. North Korean propaganda had lured the returnees, but, as the recent research shows, Japanese right-wing groups also promoted the migration in the hope of reducing the number of people they saw as a “fifth column” within Japan.18

  Most of the returnees were gravely disappointed by the destitution they saw upon arrival. They soon realized, however, that there was no way back. Stuck in a destitute police state, they (and their children) now found themselves in a strange position: they were simultaneously privileged and discriminated against. On the one hand, the returnees were seen as ideologically unreliable. On the other hand, most of them received money transfers from Japanese family members who were wise enough not to go to the Socialist Paradise. This allowed them to enjoy a life that was affluent by North Korean standards. It was permissible for the returnees to ask relatives back in Japan for money as long as the letters included an obligatory eulogy to the Leader and his system.

  Remittances began to dry up in the 1990s, with predictably grave results for the second- and third-generation returnees. The main reason for this was the generational shift. The immediate relatives of the returnees began to die out, and the next generation had no inclination to send money to people they had never met. Around the same time, Chongryon membership began to dwindle, too, with the younger generations of ethnic Koreans either accepting Japanese citizenship or switching to a South Korean passport. Nonetheless, until the early 1990s money transfers from Japan were a major source of income for Pyongyang.

  WOMEN’S WORK?

  Soviet Communism, as well as its local variants, had a strictly male face. The top Communist bureaucrats of the 1960s and 1970s are remembered as aging males in badly tailored suits. Indeed, women were remarkably underrepresented at the apex of Communist power.

  This was not always the case. In the early 1900s, revolutionary Marxism was arguably the most feminist of all major ideologies of the era. It did not limit itself to demands for legal gender equality, but went one step further by demanding full economic and social equality for men and women.

  In the Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s, there was, for all intents and purposes, an affirmative action program. The exploits of female pilots, engineers, and military officers were much extolled by the media.

  However, this was to change in the late 1930s, when the government of Stalin’s Russia discovered the political usefulness of the traditional family and the values associated with it. From then on, while the importance of female labor in the workplace was not disputed (and, indeed, continued to be encouraged), the primary social function of women was to be wives and mothers.

  When Soviet troops brought Communism to Korea in 1945, it was in its most nationalist and antifeminist stage. Some measures to bring about gender equality were enforced, however, including the 1946 Gender Equality Law, which abolished concubinage, eased restrictions (mainly social in nature) on divorce, and enshrined female property rights in law.

  That said, North Korean female participation in higher-level politics remained low. Out of some 260 cabinet ministers between 1945 and 2000, a mere six were women. It was a common assumption in the Kim Il Sung—era North Korea that women should not aspire to have careers in politics or administration. The common wisdom was that a girl should look for a proper husband and, if possible, for a job that would leave her enough time to fulfill her primary duties as a mother, wife, and daughter-in-law.

  Actually, work was not seen as a necessity. Unlike other Communist nations, the North Korean state was quite positive in its attitude toward women who wanted to become housewives. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe of the 1970s, a full-time housewife was a very rare creature, while in the North Korea of the same time, maybe up to one-third of all married urban women stayed at home (no exact statistics are available).

  Unsurprisingly, there were few female faces among the top leadership. In the 1940s and 1950s, North Korea had a small number of female politicians who were essentially left over from the earlier period of heroic (and feminist) revolutionary Marxism. The most remarkable of them was Pak Chŏng-ae (born Vera Ch’oe), once a Soviet intelligence operative and later a Politburo member and ardent supporter of Kim Il Sung. The latter did not save her from being purged in the 1960s, however.

  Another example was Ho Chŏng-suk, daughter of prominent leftist lawyer Hŏ Hŏn. She herself fought in the Chinese Civil War, even becoming a political military commissar of a regiment. In North Korea, she rose to the position of justice minister, and in this capacity oversaw the initial stages of North Korea’s Great Purge. In the 1960s, however, Ho Chŏng-suk was pushed out of top-tier politics and relegated to ceremonial positions.

  From around 1960, virtually all women in top political positions in the North got their power as a result of being members of the ruling Kim family. For instance, there is Kim Sŏng-ae, the second wife of Kim Il Sung. She obviously had some political aspirations in the 1970s, but her ambitions were cut short by the rise of her stepson Kim Jong Il, who had her sidelined. Another important woman of the Kim family is Kim Kyŏng-hŭi, Kim Jong Il’s younger sister—one of the regents assisting Kim Jong Un in the first months of his rule.

  In North Korean society at large, the relative power of women increased dramatically after the collapse of the state Socialist economy. In the 1990s males were expected to continue attending to their nonfunctioning plants, while women, who were—or could easily become—housewives, were free to engage in the manifold activities of the nonofficial economy. As a result, women became the major breadwinners in the majority of North Korean families.

  The increase in income predictably produced a remarkable change in the gendered division of labor as well as in gender relations in general (hence, for example,
a rise in the number of divorces initiated by women). In the countries of Eastern Europe, the collapse of state Socialism generally led to a massive decline in gender equality. Conversely, in North Korea, the years of crisis led to the empowerment of women—at least the ones who did not perish in the famine.

  DEALING WITH THE SOUTH

  The Korean War did not end in a peace treaty. Only an armistice—a ceasefire—was signed in 1953. Tellingly enough, the ROK government refused to become a signatory of the document. The actual reasons were complicated, but officially they reasoned that the ceasefire was tantamount to the semi-recognition of the North Korean state.

  Until the late 1960s, any foreign government had to choose which Korean state it should maintain diplomatic relations with. If a foreign nation granted diplomatic recognition to Pyongyang, it meant the immediate and automatic severance of diplomatic ties with Seoul (and vice versa). This principle was quietly revoked in 1969, and since then it has become possible for a foreign government to maintain diplomatic relations with the two Korean states simultaneously.19 However, the conflicts between these two states remained frozen and unresolved.

  For the first few years after the armistice of 1953, North Korea’s government did not show much interest in South Korean issues. Kim Il Sung was too busy rebuilding the economy and eliminating real and potential rivals within the top leadership. It was also assumed that no revolution was likely to break out in South Korea, where leftist forces were wiped out by police terror and self-imposed exile (the majority of prominent North Korean leftists fled to the North, just to be exterminated there in the purges of the 1950s). Apart from that, Kim Il Sung understood that the Soviet Union was not going to approve of any major attack on South Korea—and with a large US presence in the South, such an attack would be suicidal at any rate.