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Activists love to say that everything is political. Whether this is true in general, I know not, but primary school math textbooks in North Korea clearly are.
THE SILVER LINING IN A SOCIAL DISASTER
This description of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea might appear extremely unappealing to an inhabitant of a developed liberal democracy, or even an aspiring liberal democracy; indeed it is fair to say that in the 1960s Kim Il Sung managed to create a society that was arguably the closest approximation to an Orwellian nightmare in world history—and then maintained this society for nearly 30 years.
Most people whose lifelong experiences are very different probably imagine that the average North Korean would constantly feel restive and dissatisfied when living under such a regime. However, this was not the case. When living in North Korea myself, I could not help but find it remarkable how “normal” the daily lives usually were. North Koreans of the Kim Il Sung era were not brainwashed automatons whose favorite pastime was goose-stepping and memorizing the lengthy speeches of their Leaders (although both these activities had to be a part of their lives). Nor were they closet dissenters who waited for the first opportunity to launch a pro-democracy struggle or studied subversive samizdat texts (and not only because samizdat simply could not possibly exist in such a thoroughly controlled system). Neither were they docile slaves who sheepishly followed any order from above.
Of course, there were zealots as well as dissenters and people broken by the system but, on balance, the vast majority of North Koreans did not belong to any of these categories. Like most people of all ages and all cultures, they did not normally pay too much attention to politics, even though the state-imposed rituals were performed and obligatory statements were delivered when necessary. People in Kim Il Sung’s North Korea were mainly concerned about much the same things people in other societies focused on. They thought about their families, they hoped to get a promotion, they wanted to educate their children, they were afraid of getting sick, they fell in love. They enjoyed romance, good food, and good books, and didn’t mind a glass of liquor. The political and ideological was more prominent in their lives than in the lives of the average person elsewhere, but it still did not color most of their experiences.
On top of this, in the 1950s and 1960s the promises of Kim Il Sung’s national Stalinism did look attractive to many North Koreans. Had they possessed the benefit of hindsight they would have probably had second thoughts about their initial enthusiasm for—or, at least, acceptance of—the system. The grave consequences, however, did not become apparent until it was too late.
Indeed, for the average North Korean living in the 1950s Kim Il Sung’s system did not look uninviting. It assured modernity and economic growth (first in industrial output and then in living standards). It vowed to maintain material equality while opening avenues of social advancement to people of humble origins. It promised to deliver justice to pro-Japanese collaborators whom the average Korean of the colonial period hated. This system was not democratic, to be sure, but its nondemocratic nature was probably seen only as a minor impediment by the majority.
We should not forget that Kim Il Sung was imposing his system on a country whose population overwhelmingly consisted of the sons and daughters of premodern subsistence farmers. These people had never been exposed to democracy even in theoretical terms, and Kim Il Sung’s system seemed to be better than what they had experienced before—being at the mercy of a feudal absolute monarchy and then a remarkably brutal colonial regime.
Information from the outside world did not hint at the existence of attractive alternatives elsewhere. The developed West had unsavory associations with colonialism and at any rate was too far removed and little known to be a viable object of emulation. South Korea until the late 1960s did not constitute a particularly attractive alternative, either. Contrary to what many ideologically biased historians claim nowadays, even at its lowest ebb the South Korean regime of Syngman Rhee was remarkably more permissive than its North Korean counterpart. Nonetheless, it was brutal—from available statistics, between the years 1945 and 1955 the number of people massacred for political reasons was actually larger in the South than in the North (a result of brutal anti-guerrilla campaigns). The South Korean regime also had a less equal distribution of wealth and to a large extent was dominated by former pro-Japanese collaborators. So until the late 1960s even a well-informed and unbiased observer would not have many reasons to see the South Korean system as vastly preferable to Kim Il Sung’s version of nationalist Stalinism.
At the time, even the material situation did not look so bad to the average North Korean. In the early 1960s tens of thousands of ethnic Koreans from China fled to North Korea to escape famine and chaos resulting from the Great Leap Forward and the other insane experiments of Chairman Mao. Those refugees were granted housing and assigned work by the North Korean authorities. A man who was part of this exodus recently recalled his surprise at walking into a North Korean shop for the first time and discovering plastic buckets of various shapes and sizes for sale. Everybody could buy these wonderful items without coupons, and there was not even a need to queue!
If compared with other countries of similar income levels, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea demonstrated a measure of success in such areas as secondary education and health care. Propaganda exaggerated these successes, but they were real nonetheless.
Just before the famine of the 1990s, life expectancy in the North peaked at 72, only marginally lower than the then life expectancy in the much more prosperous South. According to the 2008 census results, which are largely seen as plausible by the foreign experts, life expectancy at birth seems to be 69 years nowadays.31 This is some ten years shorter than in the South, but still impressive for such a poor country.
In 2008 child mortality in North Korea was estimated by the World Health Organization at 45 per 1,000 live births. This is a bit higher than China, but remarkably lower than in many developing countries of a comparable economic level. For example, in Chad the child mortality was 120 per 1,000, and, if the CIA estimates are to be believed, Chad and North Korea have roughly similar levels of per capita GDP (actually, there are good reasons to suspect that the CIA estimates of the North Korean GDP are inflated, so the actual contrast might be even more dramatic).
These achievements appear to be even more of a paradox if we take into account the serious and systematic underfunding of North Korean health-care facilities, even at the best of times. Most hospitals occupy derelict buildings with small crowded rooms, and their equipment is roughly the same as that used by Western doctors in the 1950s, if not the 1930s. Access to good drugs was also very limited. Doctors definitely did not constitute a privileged or well-paid group in North Korean society: medical professionals in the North were no different from average white-collar clerical staff in their social standing and income.
Surprisingly, the primary reason for these remarkable achievements might have been the very ability of the government to control everyone with little or no concern for privacy. These are the essentials for a police state, but they can be very conducive to maintaining public health through the use of preventative medicine.
The entire population of Kim Il Sung’s North Korea were subjected to regular health checks. The checks were simple and cheap—like, say, chest X-rays, but they helped to locate medical problems at the early stages. The checks were obligatory, and no North Korean could avoid an inspection, since the entire state machine saw to it. The same was the case with immunization. A Western doctor who frequently goes to North Korea with aid missions put it nicely in a private talk with the author: “For a health care professional, a police state is a paradise. I came with my medical van to a North Korean village, the local official blew a whistle, and in 10 minutes everyone in the village was waiting in front of our van. Every single person! No excuse was tolerated, and nobody dared to evade us. In other developing countries it was so different!”
Even the low salaries of doctors
were not necessarily a bad thing. This allowed the rather poor state to support a large number of medical doctors—32.9 physicians per 10,000 persons, roughly the same rate as in France (35.0) and significantly above the US level (26.7).32 A relative shortage of nurses should be taken into account—North Korean doctors often have to perform tasks that in other countries are usually done by nurses. Nonetheless, the number of doctors is impressive.
This emphasis on cheap prophylactics and easy availability of basic—not to say primitive—health care is what made the North Korean achievements possible. After all, people of younger ages seldom die because of some chronic conditions that require expensive treatment: untreated appendicitis is much more likely to kill somebody in his or her 40s and 50s. Complicated diseases usually develop at an advanced age, while at earlier stages the majority of the threats to life come from seemingly minor ailments that can be easily treated if identified early enough, and if there is a doctor nearby.
Of course, even in the best of times there were serious problems with high-end medicine. The North Korean health-care system worked well when it dealt with fractured bones of tractor drivers or pneumonia among infantry soldiers, but it was poorly equipped to treat more complicated conditions. More sophisticated surgery was available only in the exclusive hospitals for the regime’s top brass (like Ponghwa clinic in Pyongyang). The lesser orders were (and still are) left to their sorry fate if they were unlucky to catch something serious, with the status of the physically and mentally handicapped being especially low.
Education—above all, primary and secondary education—was another area where a North Korean–style police state scored a remarkable success. Like basic medical care, primary education doesn’t cost that much—especially if one can afford large class sizes and doesn’t care about sophisticated equipment. After all, for running a village primary school one needs a building, a blackboard, and a reasonably qualified teacher; one also needs to make sure that more or less all children of school age will attend school. The North Korean state has managed to sort out these issues.
Not to a small extent the emphasis on education is driven by ideological concerns since intense ideological indoctrination is an integral part of schooling. Significantly, the most important school subjects of the North Korean curriculum are “the revolutionary history of the Great Leader” and “the revolutionary history of the Dear Leader.” However, one should not reduce the entire contents of North Korean education to the level of indoctrination and brainwashing: the average North Korean child acquires good skills in basic literacy and numeracy as well.
In regard to college-level education, the results are far more mixed. North Korean college students might be motivated, but the shortage of funds and excessive ideological controls are adversely influencing their performance (with a handful of military-related fields being an important exception). Some of the problems were structural, but many others were related to the persistent shortage of funds and resources. These shortages became progressively acute as time passed.
Indeed, the major problem of the North Korean state and North Korean society was a gradual economic slowdown. This became obvious around 1970. The official media kept insisting that the economy was growing by leaps and bounds, but the North Korean people could easily see from their own experiences that this was not the case. The system looked so attractive in theory and briefly seemed to work well, but in the early 1970s began its slow downhill slide.
THE BIRTH OF JUCHE, THE RISE OF THE SON, AND THE SLOW-MOTION DEMISE OF A HYPER-STALINIST ECONOMY
To solidify its newly acquired autonomy in regard to both China and Soviet Russia, the North Korean regime felt compelled to invent an ideology of its own. This ideology came to be known as Juche. The usual explanatory translation of the term is “self-reliance” but this is misleading. A better translation would be “self-importance” or “self-significance,” that is, the need to give primacy to one’s own national interests and peculiarities.
The Juche Idea was first mentioned by Kim Il Sung in a 1955 speech but remained marginal until the mid-1960s, when it was remodeled into the official ideology of the North Korean state. As a doctrine, it remained imprecise and vague, so one cannot help but agree with Brian Myers’s remark: “a farrago of Marxist and humanist banalities that is claimed to have been conceived by Kim himself, Juche Thought exists only to be praised.”33
The North Korean ideologues failed when in the 1970s they attempted to market the Juche Idea across the globe, but domestically it worked fine. The Juche Idea was presented as the highest and most up-to-date brand of progressive ideology worldwide. It justified the superiority of the North Korean leadership, who now could confront the Soviet and Chinese ideological pressures by stating (or, at least, hinting) that the Juche Idea was inherently superior to both Maoist and post-Stalinist versions of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. Actually, it was superior to Marxism itself. Kim Jong Il made things clear in an article first written in 1976:
Both in content and in composition, Kimilsungism is an original idea that cannot be explained within the framework of Marxism-Leninism. The Juche idea which constitutes the quintessence of Kimilsungism, is an idea newly discovered in the history of human thought. However, at present there is a tendency to interpret the Juche idea on the basis of the materialistic dialectic of Marxism. […] This shows that the originality of the Juche idea is not correctly understood.34
These statements might have massaged Kim Il Sung’s ego—he was surely pleased to fancy himself a great theoretician of the world significance, a person in the same league as Marx, Confucius, and Aristotle. However, these boastful claims served pragmatic functions as well. When North Korean propagandists marketed Juche as a philosophy superior to good old Leninism, they created a doctrinaire justification for Pyongyang’s political independence from Moscow and other self-proclaimed guardians of Marxism-Leninism.
In domestic politics, the most remarkable peculiarity of the period between 1965 and 1980 was the rise of Kim Jong Il, son of Kim Il Sung by his first wife, Kim Chǒng-suk. Kim Il Sung’s unprecedented decision to designate his son as a successor made North Korea the world’s first Communist monarchy. This was understandable: Kim Il Sung could see what happened in the Soviet Union, where immediately after Stalin’s death the late strongman came to be bitterly criticized by the people who were once seen as his most trusted lieutenants. Kim Il Sung also obviously took note of Chinese experience, where Chairman Mao’s designated successor, Lin Biao, could not even wait until the Chairman’s natural death and tried to hasten the process by staging a coup. Kim Il Sung, who in the early 1970s was rumored to be seriously ill, therefore needed to find a successor whose legitimacy would be dependent on that of Kim Il Sung himself and who hence would be unlikely to use his newly acquired power to destroy Kim Il Sung’s legacy. The choice came naturally: like countless powerful men in human history, Kim Il Sung decided that his son Kim Jong Il would become the perfect candidate for such an important job.
The rise of Kim Jong Il began in the late 1960s, when he was put in charge of the cultural sphere. Later, in 1974, he became a Politburo member and finally, in 1980, at the 6th Congress of the Korean Workers’ Party, he was officially pronounced successor of his father.
Young Kim Jong Il had a reputation as a playboy (not entirely undeserved) and initially was not taken seriously by foreign analysts, who often predicted that Kim Jong Il would not outlive his father for too long, at least politically. However, neither a string of stunning girlfriends (often dancers or movie stars) nor a well-known predisposition for vintage French wines and expensive Swiss cheese (not to mention first-rate sushi) prevented Kim Jong Il from becoming a charismatic politician and shrewd manipulator who eventually proved to be a match for his ruthless and street-smart father. He needed these skills, to be sure, since the time of the power transfer (which began in the mid-1970s) was also the time when the North Korean economy began its slow-motion decline.35
At the time of the Korean p
eninsula’s partition, the North effectively got a massive endowment. From approximately 1930 the Japanese Empire began to invest in Korea on a grand scale. At the time, Korea was seen as a natural rear base for the future advance of the Empire into China, and nobody in Tokyo dreamed that Korea could become an independent nation again. As a net result, by 1945 North Korea became the most industrially advanced region in East Asia outside of Japan. Meanwhile, the southern half of the Korean peninsula remained an underdeveloped agricultural region.
By 1940 what would soon become Kim Il Sung’s “People’s Paradise” produced 85 percent of metals, 88 percent of chemicals, and 85 percent of all electricity in Korea at that time.36 The Hamhǔng chemical plant was the world’s second largest and the power generators of the Yalu River hydro-power stations so impressed the Soviet experts in 1946 that they disassembled the machines for the purposes of reverse engineering. Needless to say, the massive US air raids during the Korean War destroyed a significant part of this sophisticated infrastructure. Nonetheless, many industrial facilities survived the war or were quickly repaired and put back into operation in the 1950s.
Making comparisons between a market economy and a centrally planned one is a notoriously tricky and imprecise business. In the particular case of the two Koreas the case is made even more complicated by the secretive nature of the Pyongyang regime: beginning around 1960, virtually all economic statistics were classified, and this remains the case at the time of writing. The only exception is population statistics and some data about food production that, since the 1990s, were occasionally provided to major international agencies. Everything else about the state of the North Korean economy is guesswork. Regardless, nobody doubts that until the mid-1960s (at the very least) in terms of basic macroeconomic indicators the Socialist North was ahead of the Capitalist South. Some scholars have argued that this superiority persisted well into the 1970s even though to the present author this statement seems to exaggerate the economic power of the North.