The troubled Russia-North Korea
alliance By Andrei Lankov
SEOUL - Back in the 1970s, when I was a teenager
in the then Soviet Union in my native Leningrad, many
barbershops stocked copies of Korea magazine, a lavishly
illustrated North Korean propaganda monthly. What was
such a publication doing in the barbershops? The answer,
I suspect, would be quite embarrassing for its editors:
it was subscribed to in order to amuse the patrons who
were waiting for a haircut.
The magazine was
heavily subsidized by Pyongyang, so its annual
subscription rate was dirt-cheap while its content was
both bizarre and funny. Thus the magazine, which was
published to inspire worldwide love and admiration for
the Great Leader and his son and successor, the Dear
Leader, was often (I would say from my experience, in
most cases) subscribed to by people who saw it as a
laughingstock and opened its pages only to make fun of
the Great Men. The North Korean propaganda appeared very
weird to the Russians - not least because it looked like
a grossly exaggerated version of their own official
propaganda. The grotesquely bad Russian translation of
the texts also provided unintended comical effects.
This remarkable magazine is warmly remembered by
ex-Soviet people of middle age, many of whom still can
easily quote more weird sentences from memory. Sets of
this venerable monthly are kept by some Russian
families, and there are even a couple of Russian
websites where sarcastic webmasters have collected
particularly bizarre and/or comical quotations from
Korean propaganda materials (see, for example,
http://kimirsen.by.ru and
http://www.aha.ru/~zentsov/korea.htm).
All this
took place in the 1970s when the Soviet press still
occasionally extolled the virtues of the "easternmost
socialist country". But this was an official policy.
Common people had quite different opinions on this
matter - and, for a change, their views were not that
much different from the actual views of the government,
even if grand strategy made the usual diplomatic lies
unavoidable.
Of course, nobody could do research
on how foreign countries were perceived by the Soviet
public: in a communist society everybody was supposed to
adore the official allies and hate the official enemies,
switching one's emotions according to ever-changing
international alliances. Nonetheless, it is possible to
provide a brief and impressionistic review of how the
Soviet/Russian view of North Korea has evolved from 1945
to 2004. In a nutshell, North Korea's image evolved from
that of a "heroic country" to that of a "comical and
weird Stalinist theme park" - and then went halfway
back.
Until 1945, Korea was not well known in
Russia. It began to feature prominently in Soviet media
only after 1945, when a number of Soviet journalists
were dispatched to North Korea to write about a newly
acquired junior ally. The journalists produced the usual
set of sugary stories about the great gratitude the
Koreans allegedly felt toward their Soviet liberators as
well as about the enthusiasm with which they were
engaged in the socialist construction.
The
Korean War, of course, boosted interest in things
Korean. According to the official Soviet version, the
war was started by the "US imperialists and their South
Korean puppets", and North Korea was portrayed as a
victim of international aggression. Horror stories about
US atrocities flooded the press as well.
The
participation of Soviet military pilots in dogfights
over Korea was not admitted at that time, but rumors
about their deeds circulated widely and inspired much
admiration for "our boys" (as a matter of fact, the
Soviets believed - and Russians still sincerely believe
- that they had the upper hand in the air war in Korean
skies and "taught the Yankee a good lesson"). Few if any
Soviet people had sympathy for the Americans, seen as
"aggressors". However, most Soviet people did not care
much about Korea, unless they were afraid that the
Korean War would lead to an all-out nuclear
confrontation. In spite of all the officially professed
internationalism, the average Soviet man or woman was
not terribly interested in the "Orient", and treated it
with a measure of paternalistic arrogance.
Soon
after the end of the Korean War, references to North
Korea nearly disappeared from the Soviet press. This
silence had political explanations: from the late 1950s,
Kim Il-sung was building his "juche-style"
Stalinism while the original Stalinism was being
dismantled in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR). Moscow was unhappy about such developments, but
was unwilling to express its disapproval openly since
critical statements would have led to further
deterioration of its already strained relations with
Pyongyang. The government-controlled press could write
neither bad nor good things about North Korea. Thus
newspapers largely remained silent and only occasionally
published something positive about, say, a new Pyongyang
stadium.
In spite of this official blackout,
rumors about North Korea circulated widely among
educated Soviet people. They were aware of Kim Il-sung's
deification, police omnipresence, and strained relations
with Moscow. To a large extent, the North Koreans
damaged their own standing by flooding the USSR with
exceptionally bad propaganda, the above-mentioned Korea
monthly being the most notorious.
After Josef
Stalin's death and Nikita Khrushchev's reforms of the
late 1950s, the Soviet people began to discuss political
and social questions again - not in the press, of
course, but in the privacy of their kitchens and
bedrooms. A new generation of Soviet intellectuals
looked at North Korea with great unease. For them,
Pyongyang embodied everything that was wrong about the
communist system. It appeared a caricature of the USSR.
Unlike the West, where many intellectuals toyed with
Maoism and similar versions of the extreme left,
virtually nobody in Soviet intellectual circles of the
1960s or 1970s felt positive toward either Mao Zedong
nor Kim Il-sung. The memories of Stalin's terror were
too fresh to make the East Asian Stalinists appear
attractive.
Of course, the Soviet intellectual
world of the 1960s and 1970s did not consist of
liberal-minded intellectuals alone, even if the latter
dominated educated discourse. There were also hardliners
and nationalists, hawkish admirers of a strong state. In
this group, however, North Korea also did not enjoy much
popularity. The hardliners were probably quite happy by
Kim's Stalinist policies, but they did not like his
intense nationalism or his anti-Russian tendencies.
Officialdom, including a majority of diplomats
and Leonid Brezhnev himself, was not fond of Pyongyang
either: they disapproved its brutal and inefficient
Stalinism and they also saw it as an unreliable, costly
and scheming ally.
From around 1970, more daring
journalists even made hints at more sensitive topics -
such as Kim's personality cult or lingering militarism.
The hints had to be subtle, but when a Soviet television
audience of the late 1970s saw how North Korean
kindergarten kids enthusiastically performed a dance
called "My Heavy Machine-Gun", the bizarreness of the
situation was for everybody to see. No doubt such an
effect was intended by the producers of that
documentary.
The official "wall of silence"
collapsed around 1988, but this did not result in much
surprise or shock. People knew already. The press
basically reran the stories that had circulated as
rumors since long before.
Moscow's foreign
policy in the first post-Soviet years was based on the
assumption that Russia should join the Western world
unconditionally, and thus North Korea was seen as a
partner both doomed and embarrassing. Its immediate
collapse was widely expected.
Kim Il-sung died a
peaceful death in 1994, and the widely expected violent
collapse of his regime never happened, but even this
non-event produced some good literature in Russia. Lev
Vershinin, a historian and a good writer, authored
Endgame, a novel that described a violent
collapse of an imaginary communist dictatorship. The
country of the novel had features that reminded readers
of Romania, Cuba and North Korea at the same time. Even
geographic names were deliberately mixed against all
laws of linguistic history, so that the capital of this
imaginary country had the Korean-sounding name of
T'aedongan and the place of the Stalinists' last stand
was called Munch'on. Around the same time, Igor
Irteniev, arguably the most popular Russian satirical
poet of the 1990s, mockingly wrote of an event everybody
expected to take place soon: "I still cannot sleep
without a sedative / in the darkness of the night / when
I imagine what happens to Kim Il-sung / in the
blood-stained hands of the executioners."
But
this mood began to change around 1995 when new voices
came to be heard in Russia as well. These voices
presented a more positive approach to North Korea.
This reflected the general change of mood in
Russia. A large and increasing part of its population
began to see the US-led West not as a friendly force but
as a crafty rival, preying on Russia's weakness. The
pro-Western enthusiasm of the early 1990s waned and was
replaced by deep suspicions - not only in government
offices but also in the popular psyche. Thus the
geopolitical opponents of the West, the assorted "pariah
states", began to attract some sympathy in Russia, and
unabashed national egoism came to be seen as the only
rational strategy.
Official policy toward North
Korea also began to turn around. By 1997-98 it became
clear that Pyongyang would not collapse any time soon,
so the restoration of working relations with North Korea
was a necessity, especially against the backdrop of
Russia's efforts to develop a more independent political
line. In academic articles, the critique of North Korea
was toned down and augmented with a critique of the
alleged Western insensibilities in dealing with this
very peculiar society.
It's worth noticing that
the human-rights issue does not play a major role in
Russian foreign policy. A period of idealistic
enthusiasm in the early 1990s proved to be short, so few
people in Russia take seriously statements about human
rights. Neither the Russian government nor the Russian
public shows any enthusiasm for crusades in the name of
human rights in distant lands. It is well known that
North Korea is notorious for its disregard for human
rights, but Russians could not care less. Their position
is simple: first, it is North Korea's internal affair;
second, if North Koreans themselves live under such a
regime, who are we to pass judgments on their behalf?
And there are of course people who are sincere
admirers of the Kims' regime, even if their numbers are
small. For some Russian leftists, the regime is seen as
a living example of communist resilience. They did not
question the right of the government to starve half a
million or a million people to stay in power. They
either deny the facts (half a million dead? Washington's
propaganda, of course!) or present the deaths as
voluntary sacrifices made by the patriotic Korean
people. But actually Korean domestic politics is not
very important to the Russian Pyongyang-worshippers: it
is the "anti-imperialist" stance of North Korea that
really matters for the Russian left.
Fortunately, the general Russian public is still
skeptical of the North Korean regime and does not harbor
many illusions about its true nature. But nobody in
Russia wants to build policy on the basis of ideology
these days. Russians have had enough of ideology over
the past century, so now they prefer interests, pure and
simple. And to remind themselves of the past, many
people still look through old, slightly yellowed pages
of Korea monthly.
Dr Andrei Lankov is
a lecturer in the faculty of Asian Studies, China and
Korea Center, the Australian National University. He
graduated from Leningrad State University with a PhD in
Far Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea,
and his thesis focused on factionalism in the Yi
Dynasty. He has published books and articles on Korea
and North Asia. He is currently on leave, teaching at
Kookmin University, Seoul.
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