Authors: Andrei Lankov
Official propaganda always blames subsequent events on these rains, which are described as “a once a century natural calamity.” The rainfall was indeed heavier than usual, but it is worth noting that the same rains produced almost no impact on the agriculture of South Korea, where the only notable result of the alleged “unprecedented natural calamity” was a marginal increase in the price of cabbage and onions. For the North, the floods of 1995–1996 were the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
In order to feed its population, North Korea needs 5.0–5.5 million metric tons of grain (the exact figure is a subject of some debate between experts). Until the early 1990s the North Korean farmers managed to produce that much. Then the situation began to deteriorate. Deprived of fuel, electricity, and fertilizer, and manned by workers who had little incentive to care about the future harvest, the system collapsed. The 1996 harvest was a mere 2.5–2.8 million metric tons—half of what would have been enough to keep the population fed.
For the average North Korean this collapse of agriculture meant a sudden termination of the PDS (public distribution system), which had been the major or even the only source of food for the North Koreans
since 1957. From 1993 to 1994, rations were increasingly delayed and/or delivered only partially. The delays began in more remote areas of the countryside, but soon spread to major cities. After the floods, the PDS rations almost completely stopped. Even the privileged population of Pyongyang was issued partial rations, and there were periods (for example, in 1998) when distribution completely failed. Outside of Pyongyang only party cadres, police personnel, military officials, and the workers at military factories continued to receive their rations, and even those privileged groups did not necessarily receive full allowances in the years between 1996 and 2000.
For the average North Korean, this was a disaster. A twice-monthly trip to the grain distribution center was as normal as a weekend drive to a supermarket for an American family. Famine would ensue, and soon took on disastrous dimensions.
The number of people who perished in the Great North Korean Famine of 1996–1999 will probably never be known with absolute certainty. Some NGOs put the number as high as three million whilst the North Korean government in confidential communications with certain foreign guests put the figure as low as 250,000. The first estimate is clearly a serious exaggeration whilst the second is a face-saving underestimate. At the time of writing, there have been two serious attempts to estimate the scale of this disaster impartially. In 2001 Daniel Goodkind and Loraine West concluded that excessive deaths most likely numbered between 600,000 and one million in the period from 1995 to 2000.
2
In 2010, analyzing officially published results of the most recent 2008 North Korean population census, Pak Keong-Suk estimated that excessive deaths reached 880,000 in the 1993–2008 period, with the loss of about 490,000 being attributable to mortality increase, about 290,000 to fertility decline, and about 100,000 to outbound migration and its effect on fertility.
3
In 2011 Goodkind and West (together with Peter Johnson) revised their earlier estimates of excess deaths downward to 490,000.
4
Even if we accept the lowest estimate of 450,000–500,000, it still means that some 2.5 percent of the entire population perished in the disaster. This is roughly equal to the ratio of Chinese farmers who perished from
starvation during the Great Leap Forward of the early 1960s. In other words, it was the largest humanitarian disaster East Asia had seen for decades. Nevertheless, the majority of North Koreans survived the famine. They did so by creating new ways of life, socially and economically. In essence, the North Korean people rediscovered capitalism while the North Korean state had little choice but to relax its iron grip over the populace.
T
HE
S
ORRY
F
ATE OF
K
ATYA
S
INTSOVA
Have you ever heard of Katya Sintsova? The beautiful Russian girl whose naïve admiration for capitalism and its debased “democracy” brought ruin to her and her entire family? A girl whose sorry and lamentable fate is so reminiscent of the tragic fate of her country, which deviated from the true path of Socialism?
Katya Sintsova is a fictional (and highly improbable) character who appears in a North Korean short story, “The Fifth Photo.” This short story was produced by a North Korean writer named Rim Hwawon and is quite representative of the current North Korean writings about the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European Communism.
As Tatiana Gabroussenko remarked in her soon-to-be published study of this peculiar kind of North Korean fiction, in the 1940s and 1950s the Russians were portrayed in North Korean literature as the leaders and guides helping their Korean comrades. In the 2000s, however, it is the Koreans who are the shining example, the embodiment of Socialist virtues, who are looked upon as advisers and as leaders. Russians are nowadays conversely presented as weak and naïve but still basically decent, noble human beings who flourish under the wise guidance of their North Korean friends.
For instance, in one of these stories the CIA plants a bomb on a US passenger airliner. The reason for this operation (and as every North Korean knows this is the type of operation the CIA does frequently) is to kill a Russian scientist who refused to cooperate with the US military-industrial complex. In the story the Russian and his fellow passengers
were lucky to have a North Korean on the same plane. The North Korean takes control of the situation and saves his fellow travelers from another vicious American plot.
Of these stories, Rim Hwawon’s “The Fifth Photo” is quite typical. Katya Sintsova, its main character, is a beautiful Russian girl who comes from a family with impeccable Communist credentials. Her great-grandfather died a heroic death in 1919 during the Russian Civil War, her grandfather sacrificed his life fighting the Nazis, and her father was a selfless and hardworking party bureaucrat of the Brezhnev era. Her brother also became a top bureaucrat in the Moscow Party Youth Committee and was also equally selfless and hardworking.
Katya was accepted to a top university due to her exceptional gifts in the arts. But at the university she fell under the spell of the wrong ideas.
She began to interact with people whose ideological bent was less than healthy, and she even interacted with foreigners (the latter behavior is seen by Rim Hwawon as especially outrageous). She is upset about the contents of party meetings being so boring and she is overcome by materialism and a lust for change.
An American seduces and impregnates her, after which she has an abortion. Meanwhile, her father dies, his last words being “Long live the Communist Party!” Katya loves him and feels sorry about his death, but still considers him an old fool. This is when she meets the book’s North Korean narrator, to whom she tries to sell photos from her precious family archive.
The narrator is an example of flawless revolutionary virtue, and his own daughter is free from all the frivolous but dangerous ideas that have ruined Katya’s life—the exemplary North Korean girl dreams only of serving the Party and Leader better. The narrator’s sons are brave officers of the Korean People’s Army, always ready to fight the US imperialists. They are even treated to the highest honor imaginable, being granted an audience with the Dear Leader Marshal Kim Jong Il.
Katya, meanwhile, travels overseas in search of her American lover. An awful discovery awaits her: he was not really an American, but the
descendant of an anti-Communist Russian landlord family. Almost a century before their lands were nationalized, the vicious landlords’ family has spent all their time dreaming of revenge. Katya’s seduction was actually a part of a plot aimed at taking the lands back from the farmers and giving it to greedy and cruel landlords.
Katya Sintsova’s sufferings don’t end with this awful discovery. While alone and helpless in the brutal West, she suffers a car accident and loses a leg. In order to survive she becomes a prostitute serving perverts in the city of Munich.
The message of this story is simple and easy to understand: Katya is Russia herself. She was lured into a trap by the Western propaganda and scheming descendants of landlords, she was fooled into selling her great heritage, and she ended up a pitiful prostitute at the bottom of the merciless capitalist heap. The story is written to serve as a clear warning to North Koreans, who should not listen to the seductive voices from abroad and should remain on guard against their enemy.
In postfamine North Korea the old state-run and state-owned economy was replaced by a great multitude of private economic activities usually associated with what is described as a “black market”—somewhat misleadingly, as we shall see below. It was recently estimated that between 1998 and 2008, the share of income from informal economic activities reached 78 percent of the total income of North Korean households.
5
However, as said above, North Korea’s social transformation is rather different from near-contemporaneous developments in China and the former Soviet Union in that it was neither initiated nor endorsed by the authorities. For political reasons to be discussed later, Kim Il Sung’s socioeconomic system still remains an ideal for the North Korean elite. Nonetheless, this commitment does not go beyond words most of the time: the elite lack the resources and resolve that would make a revival of Kim Il Sung’s “national Stalinism” possible.
When rations suddenly stopped coming, people began to learn ways to cope with the new situation—the only alternative being death by starvation. For farmers the most natural reaction was to start growing their own food. This was not that easy because, unlike their Chinese counterparts, North Korean bureaucrats showed no inclination to disband the notoriously inefficient state farms. The state farms’ fields were therefore usually guarded, preventing farmers from using the best arable land for their production. A majority of farmers had to look for alternative places to farm for themselves.
North Korea is a mountainous country and thus it is not too difficult to find a steep slope that is not used for regular agriculture. A quick look at satellite pictures shows the presence of numerous small fields of irregular shapes and sizes located in the mountains. These are
so’to’ji
(literally “small fields”), the private plots of North Korea’s farmers and inhabitants of smaller towns. Generally, the further away one lives from major administrative and political centers, the easier it is to develop such a field. In more remote parts of the country, so’to’ji now produce more than half of the harvest but the nationwide average seems to be close to 20 percent.
While farmers were working on their illicit plots, the urban population reacted to the new situation by discovering private commerce. Most urban families began by bartering household items for food, but soon switched to trade and household production. Beginning in 1995, huge markets began to grow in North Korea’s cities. They became the focal point of economic life in the country. Millions of North Koreans, women in particular, began to earn the family’s income through trade and household handicraft production.
Women make up the majority of North Korea’s market operators. Market vendors in North Korea are by no means the kind of street toughs one might encounter in the black markets of other countries. Instead, they are largely housewives and mothers who make and sell to keep the family alive.
This is partly due to North Korean society itself. For decades, the North Korean state required every able-bodied male to be employed by a state enterprise. Married women of working age, however, were allowed to stay at home as full-time housewives.
When Kim Il Sung’s system began to fall apart in the early 1990s, men continued to go to work. People expected that sooner or later things would return to what they thought of as “normal”—that is, to the old Stalinist system. They knew from their experience that people who have at one time shown disloyalty to the state—for instance, those who collaborated with the South Korean authorities during the Korean War—were assigned a bad s
ǒ
ngbun. Thus, not only those people, but also their children and grandchildren, faced many official restrictions. Men believed that it would be wise to keep their “official” jobs for the sake of the family’s future. On top of these class anxieties, men also faced massive pressure from the state’s lower officials. An absentee worker ran real chances of being sent to a prison for a few months of “labor reeducation.”
The situation for women was markedly different. They had spare time, and their involvement with private trade was seen as politically less dangerous—precisely because of the patriarchal nature of a society where only men really mattered. In some cases women began by selling household items they could do without. Eventually, these activities developed into larger businesses, and today some three-quarters of North Korean market vendors are women.
As one would expect, soon thereafter, in the late 1990s, more successful businessmen (or rather businesswomen) moved from retail trade to wholesale trade. In many cases they were the members of once discriminated-against groups who benefited most from the new situation. For example, until the 1990s, it was a major handicap for any career-minded North Korean to have relatives overseas. In the 1990s the opposite suddenly became the case. Relatives overseas, especially in China, could often provide small amounts of capital (quite large by then North Korean standards), give sound business advice, or even create a formal or informal joint venture.
A typical story is of my acquaintance, a young school teacher who, in the early 1990s, was asked by visiting Chinese relatives to buy them a large quantity of dried fish. She discovered that in merely a few days she earned well over her official
annual
salary, and decided to become a professional trader. Being a woman, she could leave her job without repercussions.