Review: The Real North Korea, by Andrei Lankov

From the review:

The author, Andrei Lankov, knows a lot about North Korea. Lankov grew up in the Soviet Union and attended university during glasnost. But while all his buddies were wearing jeans and doing student exchange programs in Western Europe, Lankov got chosen to study at… sad trombone Kim Il-Sung University in Pyongyang. He’s been back many times since then, speaks fluent Korean, chats frequently with North Korean defectors, and now has a teaching position at a university in Seoul. But Lankov has one other very important quality: that peculiar Slavic combination of grim fatalism and bleak humor. An American might get huffy or moralistic writing a book about decades of mass slaughter. It takes a Russian to treat the same topic with a deadpan sense of irony, thereby resulting in a very depressing book that is also very funny.

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Lankov argues that through the crucible of famine and economic collapse, the world’s most totalitarian society seamlessly transformed into a surreal hybrid of totalitarianism and anarcho-capitalism. The farms are a good example. Approximately all of the food is now grown off-the-books, unauthorized, in the middle of the night and then sold by private dealers. But the truly demented part is that the vast, centralized state-run farms are still there, occupying all the good land, producing nothing, fully-staffed by slave-farmers who go through the motions all day, and then sneak off at night to grow food for sale in their private plots. But those private plots that produce everything are necessarily located in the worst and least productive soil, soil that the state has officially written off.

Or consider the factories. The black market economy that comprises the vast majority of North Korean GDP is dominated by women. This is a curious setup for such a fearsomely patriarchal society. But actually…it’s because the society is fearsomely patriarchal. The men are allocated jobs by the state. Many of those jobs are jobs in the factories. The problem is that the factories don’t actually exist anymore, and the machinery inside them has all been sold off for scrap metal. But the men have been assigned jobs, and the jobs are in the factories. So they sit in the rotting, empty shells of factories that haven’t functioned for decades, and that takes up a lot of their time. But the women, ah, the good North Korean woman is a housewife and a mother and a homemaker, which means she does not have a fake job in a fake factory, which means she can work a real job in a secret workshop in her house producing unauthorized goods, or buying and selling them in an unauthorized market.

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This “secret privatization” of the entire North Korean economy has been incredibly thorough. It’s estimated that around 80 percent of all goods and services in North Korea are provided in secret and in shadow. It’s capitalism as an extremophile species of lichen, colonizing the cracks and crevices of the official society, and keeping the whole system afloat. They are actually speedrunning the entire history of primitive accumulation leading to investment leading to the joint stock corporation. Large (secret) transportation companies now exist in North Korea and maintain unofficial roads forming an unofficial transit network. The trucks and buses are smuggled in from abroad, then “donated” to various government agencies, which then lease them back in exchange for kickbacks. In this way, they’ve reinvented the idea of funding government operations through corporate taxation in a hilariously roundabout way. There is a booming private restaurant scene.

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Lankov describes the North Korean elite as pervaded by a sense of dread — certain that their present trajectory leads to total destruction, but equally convinced that any deviation from it will only hasten the end. Like a mob boss who knows his odds of getting caught just keep rising, but also knows that any “retirement” will be a retirement to the grave. Yes, it is a cocytarchy. Perhaps this explains why defections from North Korea include not only peasants and slaves, but cadres at the very summit of power. For instance the current president’s older brother, Kim Jong-Nam, was once apprehended in Japan while traveling with his family under a false name with a Dominican passport. He claimed at the time that he only wanted to visit Disneyland, which is incredible if true, but I think it’s more likely that he wanted off a different crazy ride. And he did eventually get his wish. Kim Jong-Nam was assassinated with a nerve agent in 2017.