The Promised Land

The Promised Land
How bad is North Korea? People there want to be sent to Siberia.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, August 9, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

Perhaps Russia's President Vladimir Putin does not realize quite how utterly weird a spectacle he has been staging these past two weeks--extending a royal welcome to North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong Il, the dynastic "great leader" of the world's most diehard communist state.

Seen from America, the whole business looks not only strange but sad, especially when we think of the many ordinary Russians who keep trying to build normal lives, despite such blasts from the past.

Traveling in a 21-car armored train across Siberia to Moscow and St. Petersburg--and now chuffing his way back home to Pyongyang--Mr. Kim with his Stalinist cavalcade has shut down Russian rail stations and tied up traffic (something he can't do in his own capital, because there is no traffic). He has been feted at a grand banquet in the Kremlin and escorted to Red Square to lay a wreath before the pickled corpse of Lenin, a throwback moment that Mr. Putin chose to embellish for his guest by resurrecting dead Lenin's old honor guard. On Saturday, Messrs. Putin and Kim held a summit at which they confirmed their shared interest in missile technology, and from which they emerged to tell the world that they have big plans for peace, justice, prosperity--and maybe even electricity.

Whatever Mr. Putin is trying to prove, he has done an excellent job of reminding us all that the Kremlin has a long history of placing its money on very bad bets. It was Stalin's Soviet Union that at the end of World War II installed Mr. Kim's father, Kim Il Sung, as the first "great leader" of North Korea. That soon led to the Korean War. In the half century since, Soviet communism finally imploded; South Korea has become rich and democratic, North Korea has become a font of refugees foraging in China for food. Kim Il Sung died in 1994, and was replaced but not much improved upon by the train-traveling Kim junior, who was known as "dear leader" during his father's reign.

Emblematic of the whole eerie and historically freighted connection now developing between Mr. Putin and Mr. Kim are the reports filtering out of their recent talks that these two leaders plan to expand North Korean logging operations in Russia. That might sound innocuous. But, having dropped in on some of these North Korean logging camps in 1994, while reporting for The Wall Street Journal, I can tell you that they involved de facto slave labor back then--and the signs, as well as the continuing concerns of Amnesty International, suggest that they still do. (While the camps have always been "closed" to outsiders, you could clandestinely visit them if you looked like a local Russian.)

Officially, North Korea has run logging operations in the Russian Far East since Soviet days, starting with a deal struck in 1967 between Leonid Brezhnev and Kim Il Sung. Russia supplied the remote, inhospitable forest land, plus the fuel and transportation. North Korea shipped in the lumberjacks, rotating them through in three-year stints, accompanied by North Korean security agents. The two countries sold the lumber abroad for hard currency and shared the take. Those were the days of Soviet labor camps, and the North Korean hellholes didn't much stand out. It was all just one big busy gulag.

Then came the 1991 Soviet collapse, and Russia began to democratize. Suddenly, the North Korean camps stood out as totalitarian enclaves in a much freer landscape. There was a tussle within the Russian government, pitting concern for human rights against a desire to keep raking in easy lumber money. Money won. The North Korean-policed and -staffed logging camps were scaled back, but they still exist.

That's not the oddest part of the story. When I went to see some of these camps firsthand, seven years ago, I expected to find that the inmates--totaling then about 15,000--had been sent there as a punishment for "crimes" in North Korea, much as Russians had been sent to the gulag. Certainly conditions in the North Korean camps were brutal. The loggers had pitiful rations and flimsy clothes and they lived as prison laborers in places where midwinter temperatures sometimes drop to 50 degrees below zero. If they tried to defect, North Korean secret police would hunt them down and, by various accounts, torture or even execute them.

What I learned, however, was that conditions back home in North Korea were so bad that the loggers saw Siberia as the promised land. Faced at home with such miseries as Pyongyang's "let's eat two meals a day" food-conservation crusade of the early 1990s, North Koreans were bribing Pyongyang authorities for what they saw as the privilege of coming to work in these camps. From there, they could make small business deals impossible in totalitarian North Korea, selling goods such as furs, firewood and bootleg vodka to the local Russians. And for some of these North Koreans, it was the only chance they might ever have to defect--something the Russian authorities sharply discouraged, but the loggers, at huge risk to their lives, kept attempting by the dozens.

One of these asylum-seekers described to me how he viewed the miserable markets of small-town Siberia: "The markets were all full of goods, and I could just choose whatever I wanted." He added, "There's more freedom here, and that called to my heart."

Since I spoke with some of these loggers seven years ago, conditions in North Korea itself have gotten worse. Pyongyang's unrelenting collectivist policies have spurred a famine that over the past five years has killed between 600,000 and one million people out of a North Korean population of some 21 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

One has to wonder if Mr. Putin, in all his focus on the pomp and geopolitical ploys involved in hosting Kim Jong Il, has got the business of modern nation-building entirely backward. Here's a thought: He should kick out the North Korean secret police; tell their boss, Great Leader Kim, that he's history, and so is his 21-car armored train; and open not just a few slave enclaves but his whole country to asylum-seeking North Koreans who view even Russia--God help them--as the promised land. That might sound strange to Mr. Putin. But if the aim is to turn Russia into a nation that might someday truly rival America, it would be a lot less weird than toasting Kim Jong Il in the Kremlin.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."