By Andrei Lankov
Over the last decade or so, we have been sometimes told stories about the North Korean underground, its resistance groups and the samizdat that they publish inside the reclusive nation.
These stories appear to be relatively plausible ― after all, we know North Korea is a brutal dictatorship, and many such dictatorships in the past met some internal resistance (or such is what history textbooks usually say).
The present author, though, is rather skeptical about such claims. While some small resistance groups are likely to exist, the North Korean state is yet to face anything reminiscent of the anti-communist, pro-democracy movement which developed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, in the 1960s and ‘70s.
This docility is easy to explain, a fashionable French intellectual once said, “where there is power, there is resistance.” For him, power’s repressive qualities were probably expressed through denying him the right to participate in a talk show on a government TV channel. But when we are talking about real repressive power, it can easily stifle all resistance ― not forever, to be sure, but perhaps for decades.
The history of Stalinism provides us with very valuable examples of what truly repressive regimes can do. During the 20 years of High Stalinism (roughly 1933-53) in the Soviet Union, a few million people were slaughtered by the regime, but there were precious little signs of organized resistance of any sort.
In recent decades, Russian historians spent much time going through archives, but they have managed to discover but a handful of tiny resistance groups, all of which were politically inconsequential. There was no underground publishing either.
The resistance to Stalin’s regime existed only on the margins, in areas which (like the Baltic states, and the Lvov region in modern-day Ukraine) had recently been absorbed and where the government bureaucracy was still weak and popular fear did not have deep roots.
This docility can easily be explained: the Soviet people believed correctly that any attempt to challenge the government would be discovered almost immediately and all participants, as well as a number of their family members and friends would be killed, or dispatched to prison camps for a long period of time. However much the regime was disliked, resistance was seen as hopeless, futile and foolhardy.
A famous Russian poetess once told a story about her parents. Her mother was a committed Communist Party activist happily married to a military officer. The woman was shocked when her husband of many years, upon hearing about the death of Stalin in 1953, drank himself drunk in celebration and then proceeded to thank God (who he had hitherto denied the existence of) for Stalin’s death. She asked her husband why he had never expressed such sentiments in front of her before, to which he replied, “How could I have known that I could trust you?” Such is life under truly highly repressive regimes like Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Dissidents and dissenters appeared in the Soviet Union only after the regime underwent a dramatic liberalization in the mid-1950s. It is not widely understood in the West, but in the years 1953-64, the number of political prisoners decreased a thousand times, while the chances of being executed for non-violent anti-government activity dropped to virtually zero. In this new situation, protest remained risky but ceased to be suicidal, so first dissenters appeared and uncensored samizdat publications began to be copied in small but growing numbers.
North Korea still remains a highly repressive society. The ratio of political prisoners to the overall population is roughly the same as that of the Soviet Union at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953. One has to admit that the North Korean government has become markedly less repressive in the last couple of decades but it still remains the world’s most oppressive state. Therefore, one should not expect the existence of a significant political underground in such a country, and samizdat still remains a thing of the future.
Of course some caveats are necessary. For example, it seems that there are a number of small religious groups clandestinely operating within North Korea ― a catacomb church, if you like. A number of North Koreans use mobile phones to maintain contact with foreign and South Korean mass media, briefing journalists on the situation inside the country. There are known cases when politically subversive materials have been deliberately smuggled into and then copied in North Korea ― the advent of the digital era has helped a lot in this regard.
But the existence of such activities should not be overstated. Things will change sooner or later, especially if the North Korean elite shows itself to be unable or unwilling to control the situation with sufficient force. However, it seems that the time is not yet ripe for North Korean dissidents and underground publishers.
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.
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