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  Every able-bodied North Korean male was required to work for the state, and this requirement was enforced with great efficiency. Between 1956 and 1958 small private workshops were nationalized, while all farmers were pressed to join agricultural cooperatives. These “cooperatives” were essentially state-run, state-owned farms in all but name. Farmers worked for the same standard 700g daily ration, the only difference being that in their case rations were distributed not twice a month, as was the case in the cities, but rather once a year, soon after harvesting.

  The forced switch to state farms was a common feature of nearly all Communist states, but the North Korean state farms had some peculiarities. Most significantly, farmers were allowed only tiny private kitchen gardens. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, a farmer usually had a private plot whose size might exceed 1,000 m2, but in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea private plots could not exceed 100 m2, and not all farmers were allowed to have plots even of such a small size. The assumption was that farmers, being deprived of any additional source of income and calories, would have no choice but to devote all their time and energy to toiling in the fields of the state.

  This is very different from the Soviet prototype. Soon after the forced collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, Soviet farmers’ individual plots still provided more than half the country’s total production of potatoes (a major source of calories in Russia in those days) and a significant share of other vegetables. Nor did this situation change much in subsequent decades: in the early 1970s Soviet consumers obtained more than 60 percent of their potatoes and eggs from the private agricultural sector, which also produced 40 percent of their fruit, vegetables, meat, and dairy products.22 A similar situation could be observed in Communist Vietnam, where farmers were allocated merely 5 percent of the total land to be used as their private plots. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, farmers in North Vietnam earned between 60 and 75 percent of their income from the private cultivation of these “5-percent plots,” even though the plots were not officially allocated fertilizer or other state-supplied resources.23 Farmers of North Korea were deprived of this option from the very beginning: obviously, the policy planners believed that the farmers would be more productive on the state fields if they were not distracted by the temptations of working their own land.

  Unlike the USSR where people were usually expected to look for jobs themselves, the North Korean system didn’t tolerate such dangerously liberal behavior. After graduation from high school, all North Koreans were assigned to their jobs. Those who were seen as both academically smart and politically reliable would be allowed to sit for college entrance exams. Changing one’s job was possible, but had to be approved beforehand by the authorities and required much paperwork (the only exception being women, who often became full-time housewives after marriage).

  One of the most striking peculiarities of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was the extent to which the daily lives of its citizens were monitored by the authorities. Even Stalin’s Russia appears to be a relatively liberal place if compared to the North Korea of the 1960–1990 period. The government strove to control every facet of an individual’s life, and these efforts were remarkably successful.

  The place of residence could be changed only with the approval of authorities, normally in cases when real or alleged needs of the national economy would require somebody to be allocated to a new job in a different place. Women were an exception since they were allowed and indeed were expected to move to the husband’s abode after marriage.

  Not merely longtime residence but also short-term travel had to be approved by the authorities beforehand. A North Korean was not allowed to travel outside his or her native county or city without a special travel permit, to be issued by local authorities. The only exception was that a North Korean could visit counties/cities that had a common border with the county/city where he or she had official household registration. If found outside his or her native county without a proper travel permit, a North Korean was arrested and then “extradited” back home for an investigation and appropriate punishment.

  There had to be valid reasons for issuing a travel permit, unless the person went on official business. Usually, the application was first authorized by the party secretary in one’s work unit and then by the so-called second department of a local government (these departments were staffed with police officers). A travel permit clearly specified the intended destination and period of travel, and it had to be produced when purchasing a ticket or when one stayed overnight either in an inn or with friends. A trip to some special areas, like the city of Pyongyang or districts near the DMZ, required a distinct type of travel permit that had to be confirmed by the Ministry for the Interior—and such “confirmed number permits” were exceedingly difficult to get.

  Incidentally, the “travel permit” system set North Korea apart from other Communist countries. Being a native of the Soviet Union, the present author was surprised to discover the average Westerner’s belief that the Soviet citizen once needed official permits to travel domestically. This was not the case in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union (and for the vast majority of the urban people, it was not the case even under Stalin). There were areas within the Soviet Union that were closed to the average traveling person, but these areas were few and far between. The right to reside in a city of one’s choice was restricted indeed, but short-term domestic travel was essentially free in the former USSR.

  In the enforcement of the domestic travel control, as well as in the general surveillance, a special role was played by a peculiar North Korean institution known as an inminban or “people’s group.” These groups still exist, even though their efficiency as surveillance institutions has declined since the early 1990s.

  A typical inminban includes 20 to 40 families. In neighborhoods consisting of detached houses, that is, in the majority of North Korean neighborhoods, one inminban includes all inhabitants of a block, while in apartment buildings an inminban includes all families sharing a common staircase (or two to three adjacent staircases if the building is not so large). Inminban membership is, essentially, inescapable: every North Korean of any age or sex belongs to an inminban.

  Each inminban is headed by an official, always a woman, usually middle-aged. Her duties are numerous. Some of these duties involve the neighborhood maintenance routine (garbage removal, for example) while many others are related to surveillance. The inminban heads are required to learn about the incomes, assets, and spending habits of all of their charges in their respective inminbans. The present author once interviewed a number of former inminban heads for a research project and was surprised to hear most of them cite a statement they probably heard often during their training sessions: “An inminban head should know how many chopsticks and how many spoons are in every household!”

  The police supervise the inminban’s activites. Every inminban is assigned to a “resident police officer” who regularly meets its head (actually, her appointment must be confirmed by this officer). During such meetings an inminban head must report suspicious activities that have come to her attention.

  The inminban also plays a major role in enforcing control over people’s movement. Every evening the inminban head is required to fill in a special register where she records all outside visitors who intend to spend the night in her inminban. If a relative or friend stays overnight, the household must report this to the inminban head, who then checks the person’s ID (if the overnight visitor comes from outside the city or county, his/her travel permit is checked as well). A few times a year, specially assigned police patrols, accompanied by an inminban head, conduct a midnight random check of households, just to make sure that all people spending the night there have registered themselves properly. Additionally, they check the seals on the radio sets, making sure the tuning system remains disabled, so that the set cannot be used for listening to foreign broadcasts.

  Alongside the inminban system, there was (and still technically exists) another ubiquitous system of surveillan
ce and ideological indoctrination—the “organizational life.” The underlying assumption of the “organizational life” is that every North Korean has to belong to some “organization” that both controls and directs his/her social activities. To simplify the picture, virtually all North Koreans are expected to join the Party Youth organization at the age of 14; a minority of them might then join the ruling Korean Workers’ Party. Contrary to rather widespread belief, party membership in itself is not a privilege: actually, the KWP rank and file is often subjected to even stricter demands than the general populace. However, during Kim Il Sung’s era, party membership was much coveted by the upwardly mobile and ambitious, since it was a necessary prerequisite for any social advancement (only KWP members were eligible for promotion in nearly all cases).

  Those who were not lucky enough to join the KWP remained in the Party Youth organization until they turned 30 and then became members of the Trade Union organization at their workplace (farmers entered the Agricultural Union instead of the Trade Union). Even housewives are not left outside this ubiquitous web of surveillance and indoctrination: if a woman quits her job after marriage, she automatically becomes a member of the Women’s Union, where she would conduct her “organizational life.”

  It was important that every single North Korean was a member of one of the above-mentioned five “organizations” at his/her workplace, and also a member of the inminban in his/her neighborhood. Technically, this is still the case, even though the significance of the system declined in the 1990s.

  The “organizational life” usually consisted of frequent and soporifically long meetings. Typically there were three meetings every week, each lasting one or two hours. Two meetings would be dedicated to ideological indoctrination: their participants were lectured on the greatness of their Great Leader Kim Il Sung and his family, the glorious achievements of the Korean Workers’ Party, and the incomparable triumphs of the North Korean economy. The diabolical nature of US imperialism and sufferings of the destitute and oppressed South Korean population were also discussed frequently (as we’ll see below, however, in the recent decade the sufferings of South Koreans are being presented in a slightly different light).

  One of the three weekly meetings is, however, quite different from the other two. It is known as a “Weekly Life Review Session” but better recognized under the descriptive translation as a “Self-Criticism and Mutual-Criticism Session.” Such a session usually meant that every participant (that is, every North Korean above the age of 14) was supposed to give a brief report about the misdeeds and unsound actions of him/herself in the week under review. Concurrently, another member of the same “organization” is expected to criticize the particular person for the same or different misdeeds. Of course, in real life these sessions are somewhat akin to theatrical performances, since people are street-smart enough to not admit anything that might lead to serious consequences. Typically, individuals would admit to being late for their shift or not being diligent enough in taking care of portraits of the Great Leader (surprisingly, the latter is seen as a minor deviation). Nonetheless, these self-criticism and mutual-criticism sessions help to keep the population in line and in some rare cases even lead to the exposure of significant ideological deviations.

  One of the truly unique features of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was a reemergence of hereditary groups, each one having a clearly defined set of privileges and restrictions. In this regard, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea was surprisingly reminiscent of a premodern society, with its order of fixed and hereditary castes (or “estates” as they were sometimes known in pre-modern Europe). Starting from 1957 the authorities began to conduct painstaking checks of the family background of every North Korean. This massive project was largely completed by the mid-1960s and led to the emergence of what is essentially a caste system.

  This system is known to the North Koreans as sǒngbun. According to the sǒngbun system, every North Korean belongs to one of three strata: “loyal,” “wavering,” or “hostile.” In most cases people are classified in accordance to what the person or his/her direct male ancestors did in the 1940s and early 1950s.

  Children and grandchildren of former landlords, Christian and Buddhist priests, private entrepreneurs, and clerks in the Japanese colonial administration, as well as descendants of other “suspicious elements” (like, say, courtesans or female shamans) are classified as part of the “hostile” strata. This involves a great deal of discrimination. For example, people born in the hostile caste cannot be accepted to prestigious colleges or reside in major cities—even if they are culprits’ great-grandchildren.

  Conversely, people whose direct male ancestors greatly contributed to the establishment or defense of the Kim family regime are considered members of the “loyal” stratum. This privileged caste includes prominent officials, descendants of fallen heroes of the Korean War, and others whose deeds are lauded by the regime. As a rule, only members of this stratum are eligible for the most prestigious jobs.

  Another rule is that one cannot change not only one’s own place in this hierarchical system but also the place of one’s children. Only in exceptional cases can a humble “bad sǒngbuner” be reclassified and promoted—for example, it would help if she or he saves a portrait of Kim Il Sung from a flooded house or does something equally heroic.

  Sǒngbun is inherited through the male line; the present author knows one family whose wife is a descendant of revolutionary guerrillas and hence has an exceptionally good sǒngbun. Nonetheless, her husband is the progeny of a minor landlord, and hence children of the couple (incidentally, one of the most perfect, long-married couples I’ve seen in my life) were not eligible for admission to good colleges. Such unequal marriages were unusual: like any other stratified society, in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, the young and, especially, their parents were not enthusiastic about “marrying down.” Marriages, therefore, were usually concluded between the families of roughly equal social standing—and, indeed, countless times my North Korean interlocutors cited sǒngbun as an important, even decisive, factor in the choice of a marriage partner.

  The sǒngbun system might appear blatantly unjust to somebody with modern (or postmodern) sensibilities, but it is surely an efficient way to keep people in line. In Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, every aspiring dissenter knew that it is not only he or she who would pay dearly for an attempt at resistance. Potential challengers were aware that their immediate family would remain the target of discrimination for generations. Needless to say, this made people even less willing to change the system.

  All Communist regimes believed (and with good reason, one must admit) that their populace should be kept isolated from unauthorized knowledge of the outside world, but few if any of these regimes could rival North Korea in maintaining a self-imposed information blockade. This exceptional reclusiveness was a result of North Korea’s peculiar and vulnerable position as a divided state.

  When the severe self-isolation policies were first introduced around 1960, the regime probably did this to make sure that the North Korean people would not be influenced by the dangerously liberal ideas emanating from the “revisionist” Soviet Union. However, it was the fabled “economic miracle” in the South that became the major source of political anxiety for North Korea’s leaders from around 1970. The ruling elite understood that the average North Korean should be kept unaware of the affluence enjoyed by his/her brethren under an alternative social and political system. As time went by, the gap between the two Koreas grew, as did the political importance of maintaining the strictest self-isolation regime.

  North Korea was the only country that banned the use of tunable radios in peacetime. From around 1960 onward, all radios officially sold in North Korea had fixed tuning, so that only a small number of official North Korean channels could be listened to. If one bought a radio in a hard-currency shop or brought it from overseas (which was legal), the owner had to immediately submit the radio to police, where a technician would permanently disabl
e its tuning mechanism. Since a technically savvy person can easily repair a radio that has been set to one station, all privately owned radio sets had to be sealed. During the above-mentioned random household checks, the inminban heads and police were required to make sure that these seals remained unbroken.

  This presents a remarkable contrast with the Soviet Union, where, after Stalin’s death, listening to foreign broadcasts—even those deemed to be “subversive” in nature—became a perfectly legal activity. In the Soviet Union, the foreign stations were frequently jammed, but this jamming was ineffectual outside major cities, while high-quality shortwave radios could be freely purchased in the Soviet shops. A 1984 research project stated that in an average week some 14 to 18 percent of adult Soviet citizens listened to the Voice of America, 7 to 10 percent to the BBC, and 8 to 12 percent to Radio Liberty.24 Incidentally, such decadent permissiveness surprised North Koreans. I remember the shock of a minor North Korean official who learned from me (in the mid-1980s) that it was perfectly legal to listen to foreign broadcasts in the USSR. Stunned by such outrageous liberalism, he asked: “And what if the programming is not ideologically healthy?”

  In the late 1960s, the authorities undertook a massive campaign aimed at the physical destruction of the foreign books (largely Soviet and Japanese) that were then privately owned by the North Koreans. In libraries, all foreign publications of a nontechnical nature were (and still are) to be kept in a special section, with only people possessing a proper security clearance allowed to peruse them. Remarkably, no exception was made for publications of the “fraternal” Communist countries: Moscow’s Pravda and Peking’s People’s Daily were deemed to be potentially as subversive as the Washington Post or Seoul’s Chosun Ilbo.