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The North Korean authorities were aware that dangerous information could penetrate the country not only via media like radio or print but also through unsupervised personal interactions between the North Koreans and foreigners. They therefore took care to reduce such interaction to a bare minimum. North Koreans have always been aware that close contacts with foreigners outside one’s clearly defined official duties would be seen as dangerous.
When the present author lived in Pyongyang in the mid-1980s, we Soviet exchange students had to deal with an impressive array of restrictions placed on our daily lives. Sometimes these restrictions (like, say, a ban on visiting movie theaters) were hard to explain, but the overall underlying tendency was clear: authorities strove to eliminate possibilities for uncontrolled interactions between ideologically contaminated Soviet students and North Koreans. We were not allowed to attend classes together with North Korean students. We could not visit private homes, nor could we go to certain museums. In an interesting twist, foreigners were not allowed to enter into the catalog rooms of major libraries. Needless to say, most adult North Koreans would avoid personal contact with us.
Finally, in a truly Orwellian twist, the North Korean authorities took care to isolate the populace not only from the foreign media but also from the official publications of earlier years. All North Korean periodicals and a significant number of publications on social and political topics were regularly removed from common access libraries and could only be perused by people with special permissions. With periodicals the removal was done automatically, with all newspapers published more than 10 to 15 years ago being made inaccessible for the laity. This rule was obviously introduced to ensure that the changes in the policy line of the regime would remain unnoticeable to the populace. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s, the government did not want the average North Korean exposed to the paeans Kim Il Sung used to deliver to the great Soviet Army and Comrade Stalin during the 1940s. Nor did they want them aware of the harangues against “Soviet revisionism” that were common in the Korean press of the early 1960s.
A COUNTRY OF CAMPS
Kim Il Sung’s regime was brutal, but one of its most peculiar features was emphasis on the prevention of ideological deviation rather than open state terror. People who expressed ideologically unwholesome ideas were first dealt with through the institutions of “organizational life” and/or the inminban system. A majority of the people were fully aware that they could be the object of surveillance at any moment, so they knew better than to break the rules or express the slightest doubts about official ideology. Nonetheless, political persecution was still very much a part of life in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. After all, with all the advantages of unceasing surveillance and control, arbitrary arrest and the institutionalized use of violence were also important for maintaining internal stability.
As a result, North Korea had an extensive system of prison camps whose number of inmates was estimated to be some 150,000 in the early 1980s. Actually, the figure remained stable through a few decades: in 2011 the number was thought to be 154,000, though larger estimates have been suggested as well.25 The above-mentioned figures are estimates based on analysis of aerial photos and testimony from prison camp survivors and former guards, since the government of North Korea has—predictably—never admitted the existence of the prison camp system, let alone published official statistics about its scale.26
The above-mentioned figures indicate that during the late Kim Il Sung era, some 0.6 to 0.7 percent of the country’s population were political prisoners. To put things in the proper perspective, this is slightly higher than the ratio of political prisoners to the general population of the Soviet Union in the last years of Stalin’s rule. Indeed, the North Korean system of persecution owed much to Stalin’s model, but it also had some peculiarities that likely developed under the influence of Mao’s China.
To start with, the system is unusually secretive. The macabre tradition of show trials, so typical of Stalin’s Soviet Union, was discarded by North Korea’s policy makers long ago. The last show trial in North Korean history took place in December 1955, when Pak Hon-yǒng, founder of the Korean Communist Party and most prominent first-generation Communist, was sentenced to death as a spy of Japan and the United States. From then, Kim Il Sung’s victims began to disappear without a trace; the government simply did not bother informing the public that some prominent dignitary was found to be a lifelong South Korean saboteur or American spy (if such reports were issued at all, they were classified and targeted only lower reaches of the elite, not the population at large). In some cases, the disappearance did not mean death—years later, the person would make a sudden comeback, without any explanation of his/her long absence.
There are some indications that as a rule, a political criminal in North Korea is not even present at his/her own trial and does not know the term he/she is supposed to serve. The person is normally intercepted by the security agents at work or on a street, taken to an interrogation facility (they are not allowed to notify anybody at the time of arrest), and then shipped to the camp. This is a major difference with the USSR, where even in the worst times of Stalin-era purges, a mock trial—lasting 10 minutes or less—was deemed necessary to keep up appearances. When the condemned met an overworked execution team, the victim at least became aware of which political crime he or she had allegedly committed. David Hawk remarked that “forced disappearance” might be a more suitable way to describe what is normally referred to as “arrest” in North Korea, and he might be right.27 In North Korea only common criminals have the luxury of a formal trial, however biased and unfair.
Unlike the former USSR and most other countries, in North Korea there is a clear separation of the camps that handle the common criminals and the camps reserved exclusively for political prisoners. The latter are known as kwanliso, and currently there are six such camps in operation (in the past, there were about a dozen of them, but in the course of time some were closed while those remaining grew larger).
Another remarkable feature is the North Korean repressive system of family responsibility, created in Kim Il Sung’s era but much relaxed in the late 1990s when Kim Jong Il ascended to power. According to the system, if someone was arrested for a political crime, his entire family—technically speaking, all people who shared his household registration address and were his relatives—would be placed in a prison camp, but not with the criminal himself. This is another difference with Stalin’s justice: under Stalin, only family members of the most significant victims of the purge were sent to the camps, while under Kim Il Sung this was a standard procedure, routinely applied even to families of relatively minor political criminals.
Actually, the family responsibility principle might be counted among factors that contributed toward the regime’s stability. While the repressive system in North Korea remains very secretive, it has always been public knowledge that if somebody says or does something politically improper, not only the culprit but his entire family disappears. People who might risk their own life are understandably deterred by the realization that their entire family will pay a terrible price as well—including, perhaps, yet-tobe-born descendants.
A typical example of the family responsibility principle is the fate of Kang Ch’ǒl-hwan, arguably the best-known of all former inmates of the North Korean system. Kang was sent to Camp 15 together with his family in 1977, when he was only seven years old, and remained there for 10 years. The reason for his imprisonment was an old conflict between his grandmother, a former activist of Chongryon, and Han Tǒk-su, the notorious leader of ethnic Koreans in Japan, who enjoyed significant political clout in Pyongyang. The Kang family joined those Koreans who chose to return to the “Socialist Motherland,” and his grandfather, a successful businessman, contributed significant amounts of money to the construction of the Kim Il Sung mammoth statue on Mansudae Hill. However, as soon as the family entered North Korea, Han decided to settle old scores, and they were all sent to a camp�
�only Kang Ch’ǒl-hwan’s mother, being a daughter of a successful North Korean spy, was spared. Children are common in these camps, so schools are operated for them, with political police personnel acting as teachers (Kang Ch’ǒl-hwan, for instance, himself graduated from such a school).28
This story is interesting in another regard, too: while it was Kang’s grandmother whose nationalist-cum-revolutionary zeal placed the family in trouble, the major punishment was inflicted on Kang’s grandfather, a rather apolitical businessman. This is a remarkable, albeit paradoxical, reflection of the deeply patriarchal nature of North Korean society, where men might be held responsible for the serious misdeeds of “their” women—on the assumption that the man, being the natural boss of the household, must keep an eye on everything that happens there and stop any improper activities.
Inside the camps, there are zones with differing regimes: the softer “zones of revolutionization” and the stricter “zones of absolute control.” In the latter, prisoners are deprived of the right to live with their families and are subjected to prisonlike conditions. It is assumed they are never released.
On the other hand, “zones of revolutionization” are relatively mild by the standards of Gulag-style prison camps. Such zones are believed to exist only in two camps—Camp 18 and Camp 15. Inside these zones inmates are usually allowed to stay with their families and live in individual houses or family quarters. They go to work and then are free to move within the assigned zones, somewhat spared the regimented existence usually associated with a prison. Model prisoners might even be allowed to have children—of course, those children still remain with their parents inside prison fences. In exceptional cases prisoners might even be allowed to write letters home, but this is very rare (such leniency reportedly existed only in Camp 18). In most cases, however, the inmates are completely cut off from the outside world, so their friends and relations do not know what has happened to them—and, being conditioned by the experience of life in North Korea, they know better than to ask too many questions. The most important difference between the two zones of the North Korean prison camps is that people can be occasionally released from “zones of revolutionization”—and this is the reason why we know so much more about these zones than about the “zones of absolute control.”
It seems that as a rule, family members of a political criminal are released when the main culprit dies—but nobody knows this for sure. Normally, the main culprit is sent to a different place, ostensibly the “zone of absolute control” from which he has almost no chance of emerging alive.
The camp routine consists of 10 to 12 hours of backbreaking labor, followed by boring indoctrination sessions. There is one day of rest per month, and inability to meet quotas is punished by beatings as well as the reduction of food rations. Even full rations are barely sufficient for physical survival, however, and consist almost exclusively of poor-quality corn.
To make sure that no deviation, let alone dissent, will remain undetected, the North Korean political police, known as the Ministry for Protection of State Security (MPSS), have an extensive network of informers. Defecting officers of the MPSS, some of whom I know personally, claim that under normal circumstances there is supposed to be one informer for every 50 adults in the entire population. If this instruction is followed, it means that some 250 to 300,000 North Koreans are now paid police informers—and many more have had such experience at some point in their lives.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO KIM IL SUNG
So what was the worldview that common North Koreans were expected to hold? What were the ideas and assumptions that had to be protected from the corrosive influence of uncontrolled and uncensored information from the outside? A look at the North Korean ideology of Kim Il Sung’s era would reveal a peculiar mix of Leninism and Maoism, heavily spiced with rather extreme forms of nationalism and Confucian traditionalism.
Perhaps the most striking part of the North Korean “ideological landscape” from the late 1960s was a personality cult of Marshal (eventually Generalissimo) Great Leader Kim Il Sung, the Sun of the Nation, the Ever-Victorious General. Initially, his cult was patterned on the cults of Mao and Stalin, but by the early 1970s it took on dimensions that were unprecedented in the modern world.
Apart from its intensity, Kim’s cult had one peculiar feature that made it somewhat different from the cults of other Communist leaders. Mao and Stalin were presented officially as the successors of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as the best disciples of the dead Communist sages. In other words, they were just the most recent among the incarnations of Marxist wisdom and omniscience. The visual representation of, say, Stalin’s standing were oft-reproduced group portraits where Stalin’s profile was superimposed next to those of Marx, Engels, and Lenin—obviously, in order to demonstrate their equality in ideological terms. In China, another version of the same group portrait was also popular, with Chairman Mao superimposed on Stalin so that the image simultaneously depicted the five alleged founding fathers of Chinese-style Communism.
Kim Il Sung was never presented in such a way. North Korean propaganda of the early 1950s sometimes referred to Kim Il Sung as “Stalin’s loyal disciple,” but this was done in the times when the alleged primacy of the Soviet Union still remained a core element of the regime’s ideological discourse. Such references disappeared by the late 1950s.
In later eras, some ideological indebtedness to Marx and Lenin was begrudgingly admitted, so their portraits could sometimes be seen in North Korea as well (it seems that the last publicly displayed portrait of Marx was removed in April 2012, when the country celebrated the dynastic succession of Kim Jong Un). But these references were to a large extent intended for overseas consumption—devices used to placate visiting dignitaries from other Communist countries or to forge better ties with politically useful Western progressives. For domestic audiences, Kim Il Sung was not presented as an heir to, a disciple of, or the recipient of the guidance of any foreign leader, philosopher, or thinker. He was the founding father in his own right, the creator of the “Immortal Juche Idea” and the Greatest Man in the Five Thousand Years of Korean History. “National solipsism” (to borrow the words of Bruce Cumings), the tendency to see Korea as the decisive element of the entire world system, has always been an important feature of the North Korean worldview, so this later statement essentially implied that Kim Il Sung was the greatest human being to ever live.
Since 1972, all North Koreans above 16 years of age were required to sport a badge with Kim Il Sung’s visage when they left their homes. Kim Il Sung portraits needed to be placed at every office and every house; from around 1980 portraits of his son and successor Kim Jong Il were displayed alongside the father (in the 1990s, the portrait of Kim Chǒng-suk, Kim Il Sung’s wife and Kim Jong Il’s mother, was added). There were (and still are) complex regulations that prescribe how the pristine condition of the sacred images should be maintained. If the portraits were damaged, such an incident would be carefully investigated and the people responsible for the maintenance of the portraits would be punished if found guilty of neglect. The North Korean media was (and still is) full of stories about the heroic deeds of North Korean citizens who willingly sacrificed their lives to save portraits of the Great Leader and his son.
Kim Il Sung’s statues were erected across the country, with the largest statue being built on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang in 1972 (it is 22 meters high and initially was gilded with gold leaf). The statues were made centers of elaborate rituals. For example, on the Great Leader’s birthday and some other major official holidays, every North Korean was supposed to go to the nearest statue and after a deep bow lay flowers at the feet of the great man’s visage.
Names of Kim Il Sung and, eventually, Kim Jong Il are to be typed in bold script in North Korean publications (Kim Jong Un’s name began to be typed in bold in late December 2011, a few days after his father’s death). Every major article needs to start with a proper quote from either Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il. No exception is ma
de for purely academic publications, including, say, works of liquid state physics or molecular biology. Fortunately for scientists, in his long life Kim Il Sung delivered many speeches and signed many articles, so a proper quote can always be found.
The list of titles of Kim Il Sung and his immediate family members was formalized in the 1970s. Thus, every North Korean knows how to distinguish between the “Great Leader” (Kim Il Sung) and “Dear Leader” (Kim Jong Il) and is also aware that “three Great Generals of the Paekdu Mountain” are Kim Il Sung, his wife Kim Jong Suk, and their son Kim Jong Il. After Kim Jong Il’s death and the ascendency of his son, Kim Jong Un, the latter was given the title of “Supreme Leader.”
Official propaganda established that the Kim family had played a major role in the last 150 years of Korean history. For example, in the 1970s schools began to teach North Korean students that the March 1st Uprising of 1919, the largest outbreak of anti-Japanese, pro-independence sentiment, started in Pyongyang (not in Seoul, as actually was the case) and that its major leader was, of course, Kim Il Sung’s father Kim Hyǒng-jik. They also claim that Kim Il Sung, then merely seven years old, took part in the March First rally. In real life Kim Hyǒng-jik, like a majority of the educated Koreans of the era, was indeed sympathetic toward the independence movement and was even briefly detained for participation in anti-Japanese activities. Nonetheless, he was by no means a prominent activist, let alone a leader, of the nationalist movement.