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www.groovekorea.com / January 2015 48 Edited by Elaine Ramirez (elaine@groovekorea.com) INSIghT Communism was the core philosophy of North Korea — if it isn’t any longer, it at least was once. For Lankov, born in Lenin- grad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) in 1963, Communism was part and parcel of his upbringing, as common as the air he breathed. While the blends of the communism of North Korea and his home country were based on the same principles, they produced starkly different practices. He had what he described as a “perfectly normal” Soviet child- hood. His parents were divorced and he lived with his mother, who was a bus and tram driver. Bread, potatoes, fish and low-quality dairy products were always available, though fresh fruit and veg- etables were harder to come by. (He describes stories of Soviet citizens forming actual lines for bread as “Western propaganda.”) Their apartment was nearly free, their clothes shabby but inexpen- sivet. And there was education — plenty of education. “You have to give the Soviet system its due,” Lankov says. “It was quite serious about educating people. People were not en- couraged to ask about political events or questions, it’s true, but when it came to teaching basic stuff about astronomy, ancient history and so on, it was good.” “Communism,” Lankov says, “sought to produce a better so- ciety.” The Communists didn’t “need a God to arrange the world,” Lankov says. “We need to create a world which will be better, and our definition of a better place is a place where you have more material goods, more equality for everybody, and more technical knowledge — as they used to say, ‘an unstoppable advance of the arts and sciences.’” The Communist answer was to abolish private property and es- tablish a “real social democracy” among the working people. There was also a mass movement to in- culcate common people with high culture. “There was an assumption that, ideally, steelworkers and milkmaids in the countryside should enjoy Tchaikovsky and Beethoven,” Lankov says. “The average Soviet citizen was essentially force-fed, like these poor French geese, high culture.” The Soviet Union was born in 1917 and died in 1991. It was, Lankov reflects, “essentially an enlightenment project,” based on principles of reason and progress. “This is what people tend to for- get outside the Soviet Union, and what Communist sympathizers tend to overestimate.” This enlightenment project took hold in North Korea as well. Though it’s hard to detect much of the original Marxism in today’s In 1984, Lankov went to Pyongyang to study at Kim Il-Sung University. As an exchange student from Russia’s Leningrad State University, he had transferred into Korean studies, despite the fact that most Soviets didn’t think much of either Korea. “The assumption of South Korea was (that of) a brutal, pro-American, dirt-poor dictatorship run by some comical gener- als, and North Korea as a crazy Stalinist state, run by a family of madmen,” Lankov says. “This was a pretty common assumption.” Soviets thought of North Koreans, at best, as “a laughing stock, useful idiots,” maybe something like what Americans thought of the pro-Washington dictatorships in Latin America during the Cold War. North Korea was not the land of the mad that Lankov had ex- pected. He had a “mild security clearance” in Russia that allowed him to read a lot about North Korea beforehand. Soviet descrip- tions, he says, were “not much different from what the Chosun Ilbo now writes about North Korea.” “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 … cute children playing with their grandmothers, you know. Soldiers are present but clearly smiling; they’re not going to start shooting at a signal. It was normal.” But Lankov soon realized that “normal” was not a word to de- scribe North Korea. “When I talked to people who had been around, when I devel- oped some connections with some North Koreans who were will- ing to be relatively frank with me — which was difficult, but not impossible — it became clear: Yes, it’s a very brutal dictatorship, crazy with nationalism, really oppressive, the government comically inefficient and so on,” he says. He and his fellow students had relative freedom of movement within Pyongyang, but relative is the key term. “We could not get inside,” Lankov says. “Inside the regime?” I ask. “Inside buildings,” he says. They could go to shops and a few museums, but private homes, cinemas, most museums and public facilities of any sort were off-limits. His Korean-language class was in a classroom with only other Soviet students — there was no interaction with the North Korean students at all. Nor was there any study of the North Korean Juche ideology — the system of self-reliance — or Kim Il-sung Thought, or any other aspect of the North Korean system. “The Soviet embassy would have intervened,” he says. “And frankly, I don’t think the offer (to study Juche) would find many takers among the students, because we despised Juche. We all laughed at it, because it was rubbish.” “It was a wonderful, privileged life,” Lankov says of his time in North Korea, “in a golden cage.” Marx’s enlightenment experimentInside the golden cage ‘Nationalism is a wonderful drug, a wonderful narcotic, which makes running large groups of people far easier. Communists began to make very active use of this substance, and it led to a lot of distortions.’ Andrei Lankov