.jpg/dims/resize/740/optimize) |
A long time ago back in the mid-1980s, I had an unusually frank talk with a North Korean. He said, ''I hate our officials, but I want to become an official because they are the only people who live well here".
Almost three decades have passed since I had this conversation with my North Korean peer. Nevertheless, it appears that this attitude remains largely unchanged. Officials might be the object of suspicion and envy, but their careers still remain by far the most attractive path for socially ambitious North Korean youngsters.
In this regard, North Korea is quite different from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe of the late communist era. In these countries, one could easily become successful without openly cooperating with the regime. Frankly, most Soviets and Eastern Europeans did not care, since they did not see their own governments' as universally oppressive and thus they did not see collaboration with the regime as something shameful in and of itself.
There were, though, people who did not want to have anything with the ruling regimes. Such people could usually build a successful career without doing what they considered to be morally questionable. In the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s, one could aspire to become an academic, a scientist, medical doctor or artist.
All these jobs were socially very prestigious ― perhaps more than the job of being a political police inspector, or a party official charged with ideological indoctrination. In such non-political jobs, one still sometimes had to pay lip service to the official ideology, but no systemic collaboration with the regime was necessary or expected.
In due time, these non-regime intelligentsia became the fertile ground for the emergence of political descendent. In some cases, the collapse of communism meant that more prominent and politically active elements within such groups became political leaders.
However, a sad irony of this is that such a non-regime group of thinking people has not been allowed to develop in North Korea. Unlike their peers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the North Korean leadership paid remarkably little attention to the pure aesthetic value of the arts and did not see the humanities as an area where scholars were supposed to search for universal truths.
Rather, for them, both the arts and the humanities were merely the maidservants of the regime. Thus, artists had to produce ever more marvelous works that glorified the greatness of the party and its leaders, while historians were expected to look for (and where necessary, invent) proof of the eternal glory of the Korean nation and the party's greatness.
Admittedly, scientists and engineers are accorded somewhat greater freedom in North Korea, but they are still far more tightly controlled than their Soviet peers once were. One should remember that the guiding mind of the Soviet nuclear weapons development program was also to become the leading Soviet dissident. His transition to anti-regime activist got underway while he was still at the apex of power within the Soviet scientific establishment.
While in North Korea the ideological deviations of nuclear physicists are treated with some lenience, one should not expect that anyone resembling Andrei Sakharov would survive more than a few hours within the North Korean system.
What this means is simple: virtually everybody-who-is-somebody in North Korea has to actively collaborate with the regime. This is an important and sad fact, and will have a significant impact on North Korea if and when the Kim dynasty falls. It also means that young North Koreans, so long as Kim Jong-un remains in charge, if they want to be successful and relatively affluent, until very recently at least, had no alternative but to strive to become an official. This is because it was simply the only game in town.
Things have admittedly changed substantially in the last 20 years due to the introduction of limited markets in the country. Markets today provide some avenue for social advancement. It is significant that such avenues can be utilized by people with "bad social backgrounds" who once had no career prospects whatsoever and had to content themselves with lives of drudgery at the bottom of North Korean society.
However, official careers remain highly attractive for those with the chance of succeeding socially. Even in private business activities, there is a sort-of glass ceiling: people who do not have good connections with officialdom seldom can successfully build large private businesses.
This situation does not bode well for the future of North Korean society. North Korea today simply lacks people who have experience but who are not contaminated by a life of collaboration with the Kim dynasty.
Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. You can reach him at anlankov@yahoo.com.
![[ANALYSIS] Tesla, BYD's price cuts unnerve LGES, Samsung, SK](https://img.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/thumbnailV2/b1cf8ba68d474cb69352bfe7ea9d14f0.jpg/dims/resize/178/optimize)
![[INTERVIEW] How ATEEZ achieved worldwide success](https://img.koreatimes.co.kr/upload/thumbnailV2/c7723b56dde94eb4b260950d368fe8fb.jpg/dims/resize/178/optimize)
