http://nationalinterest.org/print/bookreview/lifting-the-vei...

We get fresh air on the very first page: “North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all odds.” The North’s alleged “irrational and erratic” behavior is carefully calibrated; its leaders “know perfectly well what they are doing.” Lankov even calls them “perhaps the best practitioners of Machiavellian politics that can be found in the modern world.” That might take things a jot too far. Joseph Stalin was of this same modern world, as were Cesar Chavez, Richard Nixon and Machiavelli’s irrepressible countryman, Silvio Berlusconi (whose unflagging buffoonery rivals Kim Jong-un’s). But Lankov’s point is well taken: the North emits bluster, brinkmanship and, from time to time, measured violence, but its leaders “have known where to stop.”

The author also dishes up a rare treat, mostly unfound in books of this genre: common sense and humility about the North’s future, a theme from beginning to end. Those looking for “silver bullets or magic potions” to solve the North Korean problem will not find them. And those who hope for the quick demise of “the plum and jolly looking young new Kim” might also reckon with his youth: if he lives to eighty-two as his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, did, he will still be around in 2065 (or 2066; experts assume he was born in 1983 but, alas, they don’t really know). Instead of clear-cut policy recommendations, by the end of the book Lankov offers up a number of melancholy and unsettling scenarios for the future—suggestions we will come to in due course.

Lankov is very good on the ubiquitous, top-to-bottom surveillance state created in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK); he calls it the world’s “closest approximation to an Orwellian nightmare.” Neighbors watch neighbors; innkeepers report every guest to the police; travel permits are required to move any distance within the country; and exit from the country is of course entirely prohibited without state permission. Lankov is a bit taken aback at the draconian reach of this system, noting that in Stalin’s time Soviet citizens could travel freely between city and countryside, even if changing domiciles required permission. A droll and mordant humor colors this section of the book, as Lankov, a former Soviet citizen, dwells on the ubiquitous neighborhood inminban (people’s group or unit) and tacitly imagines himself living under such heavy restrictions.

THE BOOK’S most affecting pages reveal a paradox that foreigners sense almost immediately but really have no way of explaining: “I could not help but find it remarkable,” Lankov writes of his years as a student in Pyongyang, “how ‘normal’ the daily lives usually were.” People were neither “brainwashed automatons” nor “docile slaves,” but fully realized human beings who were, as often as not, warm and good-hearted people. Their concerns were similar to those of the rest of us: falling in love, family, children’s educations, job promotions. “They enjoyed romance, good food, and good books, and didn’t mind a glass of liquor.” They also cared about health care, infant mortality and life expectancy. Mostly free national systems provided basic human services, which until the famine years put North Korea in the ranks of developed nations (life expectancy was seventy-two before the famine of the 1990s; now it is sixty-nine). Even today, child mortality is “remarkably lower than in many developing countries of a comparative economic level,” Lankov writes. Schoolchildren’s skills in basic literacy and numeracy are also at comparatively advanced levels. Moreover, in the past decade GDP growth has averaged 1.4 percent a year (not robust but steady), and even a shimmer of affluence is now noticeable in the capital.