Quotes from Andrei Lankov

To not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.

To not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.

It has often been suggested that Chinese-style, market-oriented reforms are the solution to the North Korean problem.

Some people believe that North Korean decision makers can be lured or blackmailed into starting reforms, while others hope that they will finally come to their senses and do the right thing for their people as long as the outside world stops meddling in their affairs.

North Korean rulers do what they are doing not because they are "evil" or driven by some delusionary ideologies, but rather

because they sincerely believe that their current policy has no alternatives, and that any other policy choice will bring ruin to them and their families.

This is good news indeed, since North Koreans are now gradually getting used to the idea that their houses are highly valuable. This might help them when/if the two Koreas unify. North Korean cities are liable to be flooded with swarms of rich South Korean real estate dealers looking to take advantage of North Korean naivety in real estate matters. Hopefully, if the North Koreans learn a thing or two about the real estate trade beforehand, they will be less vulnerable to such machinations.

The reasons for the failure of the Leninist economic model have been studied thoroughly and in the case of North Korea they were essentially the same as elsewhere: distorted price information, lack of incentives for innovation and quality improvement, and an ingrained inability to handle data efficiently.

While in Europe aspiring Communists were motivated, above all, by the desire to ameliorate social injustices, the East Asian version of Communism had both social and nationalist dimensions. In the 1920s and 1930s, in the era when Kim Il Sung, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh were young idealists, Communism in East Asia was widely seen as a shortcut to the national revival and modernity, a way not only to solve social problems but also to leapfrog past stages of backwardness and colonial dependency.

For example, until 1972 Seoul (not Pyongyang!) was constitutionally the capital of the DPRK. Concurrently, the ROK government still appoints governors to the provinces of North Korea. Incidentally, the joint offices of these five governors are located not far from the university where this book was being written—and these offices are bustling with bureaucratic activity every time I visit.

North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all odds. North Korea is essentially a political living fossil, a relic of an era long gone.

North Korea is a small country with few resources and a moribund economy. In spite of all this, however, it has managed to survive and successfully manipulate larger players, including an impressive number of the great powers.

North Korea's alleged penchant for irrational and erratic behavior is illusionary: the North Korean leaders actually know perfectly well what they are doing. They are neither madmen nor ideological zealots, but rather remarkably efficient and cold-minded calculators, perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics that can be found in the modern world.