Dr Andrei Lankov is a professor at the Australian National University currently teaching (on sabattical ?) at 국민대학교 in Seoul. His resume list his main research interests as;

North Korean political and social history, with a special emphasis on the state’s formative periods (1945-1965) and the Soviet and Chinese policy toward the Korean Peninsula; the Modern Korean city and social and cultural aspects of modernization in Korea.

Last night he gave a lecture at the Royal Asiatic Society’s Correspondents Club lounge entitled, “The Death of North Korean Stalinism“. I was there with a few friends and I was most impressed.

Dr Lankov’s presentation basically centred around the changes that have been reported and that he has himself witnessed, broadly since the regimes’ inception post WW2 and more specifically in the last 10-15 years when, he posits, the ‘old school Stalinism’ which was previously running North Korea began to erode, to the point that he suggests the term ‘Stalinism’ is now not even applicable.

Of the numerous thought provoking points he made I would select these few as ’stand-outs’ for me, not necessarily because they are brilliant (though they no doubt are) but because they present a perspective of North Korean life which I had not come into contact with in any great depth before;

1. Dr Lankov asserts that since the early 1990’s the DPRK politic has been in slow decay from the old insular Stalinist distatorship toward a more ‘market oriented’ society. He noted a lack of internal resources to maintain exclusive state control over such activities which has led to a belated acceptance of them (markets were in the not so distant past illegal and while he acknowledges they are still not common they are not longer hounded out of existence). He further drew a parallel between China and the DPRK as China experienced (is experiencing ?) a similar freeing of its markets however a very important difference he noted was that the Chinese government led the push in that country (actively decriminalising such activities and then allowing their wide spread establishment) as opposed to the North Korean situation which is, he argues, the opssosite (the activities were ‘wide-spread’ and the government ran out of resources/desire to fight them)
2. Unification on the peninsula will not, in all probability, be a utopic solution to the current situation. Dr Lankov argues that in a reunified Korea Northerners would be second class citizens by virtue of their lack of (applicable) education (he notes their education system is in fact very good - just half of it is dedicated to learning geneologies and flawed histories). He elaborated more on other factors which would make it difficult for Northern residents to equip themselves successfully in the South, all of which were very compelling and painted a picture that a post-unified Korea will likely be a fairly unhappy/relatively unstable place for quite a while after. Overall he is not arguing that we avoid unification, just that we prepare for it as less of a joyous end to separation and more the beginning of a very hard slog.
3. The good Dr also made note of the manner in which the DPRK has been very effective at squeezing aid from its neighbours and ‘playing one side off against the other’ essentially forcing one side to pay to avoid North Korea joining the other. He elaborated further to say that the international community has a large role to play in effecting change in North Korea because as time is passing and the isolationist ‘bubble’ is starting to rot from inside foreign elements are gaining more and more influence (which ought to be used responsibly).

These were some of the main points I took away from his lecture (as well as a book and a contact person for perhaps some day soon furthering my Korean studies in North Korea). I do not claim to have presented any sort of adequate account of what was said but, for my feeble and uneducated mind, these points were food for thought (as was the whole night really).

On a more personal note it was a pleasure to meet oranckay and a few other local bloggers at this event (I’d never been called by my internet handle in real life before - quite novel), kinda makes me wish I had more than 3 weeks left in country to meet a few more, good people one and all.