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Two communist states, two different
worlds
By Andrei Lankov
Many
people are surprised to learn that back in Soviet times, the
people of the USSR looked at North Korea pretty much like
Westerners did (and still do now). In the Soviet Union of the
1970s and 1980s, North Korea was widely perceived as a
grotesque, destitute and brutal dictatorship, an object of
widespread disdain and ridicule. When comparing their lot with
that of the North Koreans, Soviet Russians saw themselves as
free and prosperous - and, one must admit, with good reasons.
I have found a number of times that these observations
are surprising for the average Westerner, for whom Leonid
Brezhnev's Soviet Union and Kim Il-sung's North Korea are
bracketed as "communist states". But this obscures the fact
that not only did living standards differ wildly among
supposed communist states, but that the level of social and
political control could be very
different
in different communist societies - at least as long as we are
talking of the post-Stalin era.
Born in 1963, I myself
grew up in the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union, where the memory of
Josef Stalin's rule was beginning to fade (my parents were
toddlers in the worst years of Stalin's terror). The Soviet
Union I knew, while by no means an affluent or democratic
state, was remarkably superior in economic and political terms
to Kim Il-sung's North Korea.
Virtually none of my
Western interlocutors - including many historians and
political scientists - has ever answered correctly a seemingly
simple political question: "How many political prisoners were
there in Brezhnev's Soviet Union?" Most Westerners I have
asked suggested figures in the range of tens and even hundreds
of thousands (we must keep in mind that the total population
of the USSR at the time was around 250 million).
The
actual figure, which always surprises, was in the region of
1,000 (yes, one thousand) political prisoners who were
incarcerated at any given time. To make things clear, we are
not talking about official statistics, which were of course
grossly manipulated. Rather, these figures are based on the
once-classified internal data of the KGB, as well as on the
materials of the dissident human-rights community in the
Soviet Union itself.
To be more specific, throughout
the five-year period of 1971-75, the Soviet authorities
incarcerated 893 people on political grounds. In the
subsequent period of 1976-80, the total number of prison
sentences decreased to 347. To put this in a different way,
this means that in the late 1970s, in the average year the
number of political arrests in the Soviet Union was 26 per 100
million population (yes, twenty-six per one hundred million,
that's not a misprint).
This should not be construed
as meaning that the Soviet Union was a liberal democracy. It
was a repressive state that did not tolerate any opposition
activity, but since Stalin's death the incarceration of a
political opponent came to be seen by the authorities as a
measure of the last resort. There were subtler but also
efficient ways to ensure that majority would remain docile.
To take just one example, the Soviet state completely
controlled both employment and promotion, and this meant that
any involvement with opposition groups would severely limit
employment possibilities - a dissident or a dissident's
sympathizer would work only at low-skill, low-pay occupation,
and his or her family was also likely to be discriminated
against. Nonetheless, in the USSR of the 1960s and 1970s one
would run little risk of being sent to jail for occasionally
speaking ill of the Communist Party or its general secretary
himself.
North Korea in this regard has always been
very different. Actually it remained similar to the USSR of
Stalin's period - when the number of political prisons nearly
at any given moment exceeded a million, and where almost a
million people were formally executed for political crimes.
Worse still, a significant portion of Stalin's political
prisoners were no enemies of the state in any sense: they were
imprisoned largely because the security apparatus had to
fulfill allocated quotas for political prisoners.
In
Kim Il-sung's era, a North Korean could wind up in prison even
for a slight lack of enthusiasm for the Great Leader himself.
So one should not be surprised to hear that North Korea has an
unusually high number of political prisoners, numbering in the
range of 150,000 at their peak under Kim Il-sung. As far as we
know, it was not common for people to be arrested just meet
quotas, but there was another peculiarity: Until the 1990s,
the entire family of a political prisoner would be shipped to
a concentration camp. In this regard Kim was harsher than even
Stalin, since the "family responsibility principle" in the
Soviet Union of the 1930s was applied only to the families of
the most prominent error victims.
And, of course, in
North Korea any joke about the Great Leader or his successor,
Dear Leader Kim Jong-il - if reported to the authorities by
the ever-present police informers - meant arrest, torture and
either execution or long years in one of the world's worst
prison systems. In the Soviet Union under Stalin, such a joke
would produce similar results, but in the subsequent decades
it could, at worst, slightly damage career prospects (or, much
more likely, had no consequences whatsoever).
Another
very common Western misperception is the widespread belief
that Soviet citizens under Brezhnev were not allowed to travel
freely in their own country. It is possible that this comes
from numerous restrictions that were imposed on foreigners,
who indeed were expected to apply for travel permission when
they left their designated areas of residence. But for the
average Soviet person, traveling across the country was not
difficult. Admittedly, there were a few areas that were closed
to individual travel - these were largely areas near the
border, as well as some cities with numerous military
facilities, such as Vladivostok. But these areas were few and
far between, so people could travel freely (but, admittedly,
there were many more restrictions when it came to moving house
permanently).
But North Korea under Kim Il-sung was
very different. North Koreans were (and technically still are)
required to apply for official permits if they wanted to
travel outside the county or city of their residence.
There had to be valid reasons for issuing a travel
permit, unless the person went on official business. Usually,
the application was first authorized by the party secretary in
one's work unit and then by the so-called second department of
a local government (these departments were staffed with police
officers). A travel permit clearly specified the intended
destination and period of travel, and it had to be produced
when purchasing a ticket or standing overnight in an inn or
with friends. A trip to some special areas, such as the city
of Pyongyang or districts near the Demilitarized Zone,
required a special type of travel permit that had to be
confirmed by the Ministry of the Interior - and such
"confirmed number permits" were exceedingly difficult to get.
These restrictions still exist formally, but are in
practice frequently ignored. It is still especially difficult
for people from the provinces to go to Pyongyang, so many
North Koreans only go to the "revolutionary capital" on
organized school trips in their teenage years.
Another
area where the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s differed
greatly from North Korea was access to information from
overseas. North Korea is probably the only country in the
world that has outlawed the private ownership of tunable
radios. All foreign publications of a non-technical nature,
including books and periodicals from fellow communist
countries, are kept in a special section of the libraries, so
that only people with the proper security clearance can access
them.
This was not the case in the Soviet Union, where
after Stalin's death tunable radio sets were perfectly legal
and could be bought even in a remote village. It is true that
foreign broadcasts in Russian and, for that matter, other
languages of the Soviet Union were frequently (but by no means
always) jammed. But listening to such broadcasts was perfectly
legal, though dubious by official standards. Indeed, it became
a common pastime by the late 1970s when, according to some
estimates, about a quarter of families listened to a foreign
broadcast at least once a week (and these estimates agree well
with my own memory).
Foreign publications were subject
to a heavy censorship in the Soviet Union, so books that
contained remarks critical of communism or the Soviet system
would also be kept in a special part of the library.
Nonetheless, works of Western fiction were present in large
libraries and were even legally sold in foreign-literature
bookshops - as long as such works were not too harsh in their
attitude toward the Soviet brand of communism (none of George
Orwell's novels were on sale, of course).
Western
periodicals of leftist inclination were also sold freely in
large cities, and I still remember how in the early 1980s
twice a week I bought the most recent issue of the Morning
Star, the British Communist Party newspaper. It was expensive,
to be sure, but it was sold - and, contrary to what one might
think, this newspaper was not always sycophantic when it came
to the Soviet foreign and domestic policies.
Another
important misconception about the Soviet Union is that
everything was rationed. Indeed, many items were always in
short supply and in the Leningrad of my youth in the 1970s one
would need an impressive amount of skill and connections to
buy, say, a few rolls of toilet paper. And bananas were sold
twice a year, each time to those who were willing to spend an
hour waiting in a queue. Nonetheless, the basics - sugar,
milk, potatoes - were available cheaply and easily.
Rationing in the USSR was abolished in 1947 and began
to creep back only in the late 1970s when the local
authorities began to introduce it to protect scare items from
being bought by outsiders (much to the dismay of the central
authorities).
In North Korea, rationing was first
introduced in 1946, and from 1957 all basic foodstuffs could
only be obtained with the proper ration coupon. In 1957 the
private trade in rice and other cereals was banned, so cereals
(by far the most important sources of calories in the diet of
the average North Korean) could be distributed by the state
alone. By the late 1960s, a monetary retail economy had all
but disappeared. Shops no longer sold items; rather they
swapped items for ration coupons. Money lost any value and
only after the death of Kim Il-sung did things change.
The exact size of the ration depended on one's job;
the average working adult received a grain ration of 700 grams
a day, a housewife would be given merely 300 grams, while a
person doing heavy physical work (a miner or, say, a
jet-fighter pilot) was eligible for the highest daily ration
of 900 grams.
Rationing in North Korea was not about
grain alone. Other foodstuffs were rationed as well: soya
sauce, eggs, cabbage and other basic ingredients of the
traditional Korean diet. Meat was distributed irregularly, a
few times a year, usually before major official holidays, but
fish and some other kinds of seafood were more readily
available. In autumn there might have been occasional
distribution of apples, melons and other fruits.
All
this was rightly seen by the Soviet people as a nightmare, a
sign of a hopelessly dysfunctional economy. Not that the
Soviet economy was dynamic, but the Russians of the 1970s were
appalled by the idea that one would need a ration ticket to
buy a few noodles.
Therefore we should not be
surprised that in the 1960s and 1970s North Korean visitors to
the USSR saw it as a society of material abundance and
freedom.
Remarkably, a majority of Soviet citizens
would not have seen things that way. For them it was the
countries of the developed West that were the natural
benchmarks for prosperity and freedom - and the USSR was
lagging well behind those countries. This gap eventually
sealed the fate of the Soviet system. But nevertheless, in the
1960s and 1970s the USSR and North Korea were worlds apart,
and both sides were aware of the dramatic differences between
these societies.
Andrei Lankov is an
associate professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, and
adjunct research fellow at the Research School of Pacific and
Asian Studies, Australian National University. He graduated
from Leningrad State University with a PhD in Far Eastern
history and China, with emphasis on Korea. He has published
books and articles on Korea and North Asia.
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