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47 I n meeting professor Andrei Lankov for the first time, he reminds you less of a tenured professor of Korean studies and more of Warner Bros’ Tasmanian Devil. He was running late for our appointment, but made up for it by immediately insisting we drop all pleasantries of introduction. He whirled around his office making tea, finding chairs, posing for pictures and, in a charming touch of Russian hospitality, slicing up a single cookie four ways so we would all have something to eat. Lankov speaks in a rapid, Russian-accented, but otherwise fluent, English. When he gets on a tangent about something, it’s very difficult to interrupt him. “When the Communists took power,” he says at breakneck speed while searching for tea, “they wanted a better future for every- body and they had this kind of classical pro- gressive approach. They wanted to educate the masses. They did not care about current cultural relativism and all this kind of leftist (philosophy). Probably they would have been sent to face a shooting squad by any practic- ing Leninist years ago, as a reactionary.” Lankov is one of the world’s foremost ex- perts on North Korea. The Stalinist theme park, East Asia’s last absolute monarchy, the paranoid race-state — all these expressions have been used to describe the place. In the past 15 years he’s written five books on North Korea in English, plus several more in Russian, and contributes regularly to Al-Ja- zeera English and the Korea Times. Flavors of communism, North Korean and Russian, are leading preoccupations for him. He has been very successful as a pundit and academic, and one who is critical of many of his colleagues for not speaking adequate enough Korean to really understand the system. “I mean, can you imagine someone writing about, say, the French Revolution, who cannot read Napoleon’s letters to Josephine?” he asks. “This person would be laughed out of court, if this is the right English expression.” Yet he says it happens all the time in Korean studies. Lankov has seen North Korea from both the inside and out. While living in the country he was given a “golden cage” view of the system, and since then he’s broken out of it and labored to give the world a clearer view of the country. It’s one of paranoid enigma and failed utopian experiment. “The North Korean government says, ‘We know how to make a better world,’” Lankov says. “And they do not. And this is a major problem.” Andrei Lankov deciphers the North Korean regime and its illusions Breaking out of the golden cage Story by Dave Hazzan / Photo by Adam Czelusta ‘I was prepared to go to a country which was like a Hollywood picture of a dictatorship. You know, gray skies, small rain, soldiers with machine guns at every corner, maybe somebody hanging off the lampposts — sort of an exaggeration of course. But you come and you see and it’s quite beautiful — beautiful sky, wonderful girls. … It was normal.’ Andrei Lankov