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propaganda, however, dwelt increasingly on the virtues of Koreanness.10 The translation of foreign works was reduced, and the performance of Soviet plays forbidden altogether.11 An East German diplomat reported home that all successes were “portrayed as accomplishments of the Korean workers ‘without foreign’ assistance.”12 He also noted that the party’s educational activities were “not oriented toward studying the works of Marxism-Leninism.”13 Instead the purity of the Korean bloodline was stressed. Women who married Eastern European aid workers were accused of “betraying the race”.14 Anyone perceived to have emotional ties to the outside world became suspect. In 1956 Kim purged his party of its Yenan and Soviet-Korean factions, replacing these old communists with comrades-in-arms from his guerilla days.15

Meanwhile the regime was pushing through a collectivization of agriculture that went too far even for Moscow’s liking. In 1958 the DPRK began emulating China’s Great Leap Forward campaign of radical industrialization with its own Ch’ǔllima or Thousand-League Horse Movement, the symbol of which was a Pegasus-style winged horse.† Christians were rounded up and sent to prison camps. Such policies, executed at a time when Eastern Europe was “thawing,” conveyed to the West the misleading image of a hard-line Stalinist state. In fact they were perfectly compatible not only with North Korean nationalism, which perceives the child race as innately collectivist, but also with Kim Il Sung’s insatiable desire to maximize internal security. Whether the Soviet model would improve the nation’s standard of living was never the issue; on the contrary, Kim appears to have been wary of feeding his people too well. In a meeting with East Germany’s Erich Honecker in 1977 he said that “ ‘the higher the standard of living climbs, the more ideologically lazy and the more careless the activity’ of the people is,” a statement that, as Berndt Schäfer has remarked, “no East German leader could have gotten away with making.”16 Balazs Szalontai notes that Kim Il Sung “consistently preferred economic ‘corrections’ that did not loosen the regime’s control over society to those which did.”17

Nikita Khrushchev and Kim Il Sung

The regime had other reasons for imitating Soviet models. It needed to distinguish itself from a far more populous Korean state which would otherwise have enjoyed a superior claim to legitimacy, and to ensure the continued inflow of economic, diplomatic and military support from abroad. East European diplomats had, however, already begun reporting home about the xenophobia in Pyongyang. Some were cursed and pelted with rocks by children on the street. Koreans who had married Europeans were pressured to divorce or banished from the capital. (Internally the East German embassy compared these practices to Nazi Germany.)18 One Soviet wife of a Korean citizen was beaten unconscious by provincial police when she attempted to travel to Pyongyang.19 In 1965, the Cuban ambassador to the DPRK, a black man, was squiring his wife and some Cuban doctors around the city when locals surrounded their car, pounding it and shouting racial epithets.20 Police called to the scene had to beat the mob back with truncheons. “The level of training of the masses is extremely low,” a high-ranking official later told the shaken diplomat. “They cannot distinguish between friends and foes.”21 This was precisely the mindset that the regime sought to instil.

FROM THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION TO KIM IL SUNG’S DEATH, 1966-1994

Relations between Beijing and Pyongyang worsened in 1966 when China’s leader launched the Cultural Revolution. Kim evidently worried that Mao fever might infect his own people, which in turn might encourage Beijing to attempt a coup or an invasion. This was no mere paranoia; Chinese troops did indeed make a few provocative incursions across the North Korean border.1 Kim’s first response was to tighten internal security even further. After a census in 1966, DPRK citizens were divided according to their family background or sŏngbun into