Few scholars of North Korea would dare evoke the word “real” when it comes to describing what life and politics are like in this small, yet dangerously bellicose nation, still deeply mired in the delusions and rivalries of a bygone era. The self-validating word, therefore, has traditionally been reserved for eyewitness accounts usually either produced by those who were able to escape from the North or penned by a handful of foreign visitors who managed to spend any considerable amount of time in the country. In Andrei Lankov's case, it is, in fact, both—his latest book builds on his firsthand experience living in the DPRK during the mid-1980s as an exchange student from the former Soviet Union, as well as on numerous interviews he conducted with event participants and escapees from the North currently living in Seoul.
As a result, Lankov's latest book is necessarily part history, part ethnography, attempting to bridge a gap between the political and the mundane in how we think about North Korea. The Real North Korea challenges the popular misconception that Pyongyang's actions—both domestically and on the world stage—are by definition hopelessly irrational and illogical. Lankov, by contrast, argues that North Korean leaders 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” (pp. xi–xii). The book is thus intended to reveal the inner logic of North Korean behavior and explain the regime's current survival strategy to both specialists and a broad general audience.
Spanning the entire breadth of North Korea's history from its founding following the country's liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 until the present day, Lankov's latest account does a fine job synthesizing a rich body of recent Korean- and English-language scholarship—both primary and secondary—into an easy and enjoyable read free from specialized jargon and abstruse terminology. The book consists of six chapters plus an interlude covering almost any aspect of North Korean history in a loosely chronological order.
Chapter 1—the longest one in the book—recapitulates North Korean history up until the 1990s, the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of a new geopolitical order in the world and region in its momentous wake. It narrates the liberation of northern Korea from Japan by the Soviet army, the founding of the DPRK, inter-Korean relations, including the Korean War (1950–53), the rise of Kim Il Sung's personality cult and the inauguration of a national political ideology of Juche, which Lankov translates here as “self-importance” (p. 67), and a number of other important issues in North Korean history.
The rest of the book largely focuses on the period from the 1990s until the present, delving into the logic ensuring North Korean survival as seen from the results of both its dubious domestic policies and its controversial diplomatic maneuvers of the past few decades. The final two chapters offer policy advice on how to deal with the North and a thoughtful analysis of possible unification scenarios along with an assessment of their chances for success or failure. In the interlude, Lankov presents his musings on what the future may hold for Pyongyang. Although usually the province of political scientists and policy analysts, predicting the future, in Lankov's case, becomes necessarily more historically retrospective than purely theoretical, showing us some possible long-term implications of Pyongyang's various actions.
Lankov's story is greatly enriched by ample references to parallel or related events in the former Soviet Union and other socialist countries around the world, including China, as well as South Korea. The work's deliberate comparative angle no doubt adds an extra layer of complexity and nuance to our current understanding of historical processes in North Korea, putting many domestic developments in much broader regional and global contexts. Another valuable feature of The Real North Korea is that along with the main storyline the book also identifies and presents a number of fascinating additional narrative threads that otherwise often get buried within the sea of more “important” details or get dismissed as historical trivia of little relevance. Lankov, instead, highlights several such promising themes that cannot be yet fully developed into separate chapters and places them in sidebars alongside the main text, masterfully juxtaposing these notes with his primary presentation of facts throughout the entire book.
Lankov makes a compelling case for Pyongyang's twisted logic, succeeding in demystifying the inner and outer workings of the North Korean society and state, proving that even North Korea is no stranger to reason. Drawing on his vast personal knowledge of life under socialism and decades of closely following North Korea, Lankov shows us how individuals and society at large come to co-exist with and learn to operate under increasingly dysfunctional socioeconomic and political systems once set in place by the state and now proving too costly and painful to dismantle. The Real North Korea is a welcome addition to a growing number of historical studies on contemporary North Korea in English, which would serve well as an introductory text for courses with Korea and East Asia content, in general, and would be indispensable, in particular, for any class dealing with North Korea.
