Pyongyang takes literary potshots
at Moscow By Andrei Lankov
Have you ever heard of Katya Sintsova?
This beautiful Russian girl whose naive admiration
for capitalism and its debased "democracy" brought
ruin to her and her entire family? A girl whose
sorry and lamentable fate is so reminiscent of the
tragic fate of her country that deviated from the
true path of socialism?
Probably you have
not. And there is nothing surprising about that
since Katya Sintsova is a fictional (and highly
improbable) character who appears in a North
Korean short story, The Fifth Photo. This
short story was produced by a North Korean writer
called Rim Hwawon and is quite representative of
current North Korean writings about the collapse
of Soviet and Eastern European communism.
The story was unearthed by Dr Tatiana
Gabroussenko, who
belongs to a very small
number of people doing research into modern North
Korean culture and fiction.
North Korean
fiction is every bit as political as government
statements or newspaper editorials. North Korean
writers are supposed to be, first and foremost,
political indoctrinators and the government has
never been too shy to admit such a fact.
At the same time, as American professor
Brian Myers (another lifelong observer of North
Korean literature) noticed, fiction might be used
to convey messages that are politically too
sensitive to be put in official newspapers.
Newspapers are the voice of the state while
statements made by writers can easily be written
off as mere private/personal opinions (as if
personal opinion can appear in print in North
Korea).
Contrary to what is often
perceived in the West, relations between Moscow
and Pyongyang were never cordial (at least after
Joseph Stalin died in 1953) and at times verged on
hostility. In the late 1950s, North Korea broke
away from its initial reliance on the Soviet Union
and began to charter its own political course. It
tried to keep its distance from an increasingly
liberal Moscow.
In earlier times, when
North Korea had been far more dependent on the
Soviet Union, Soviet characters featured
prominently in works of North Korean fiction. They
were always presented in parental terms, as
protectors and liberators, as bearers of the
wisdom of mature socialism.
But things
changed in the early 1960s. In some stories (also
unearthed by Gabroussenko) Russians began to be
presented in a slightly less favorable light. In
some stories which appeared around 1960, Russians
were shown as less enthusiastic compared to their
North Korean comrades. They remained positive
characters, but their excessive cautiousness and
conservatism contrasted unfavorably with the
revolutionary zeal of the selfless North Korean
workers.
By the mid-1960s, stories
including Soviet characters disappeared. In the
early 1960s, relations between the Soviet Union
and the North hit an all-time low, never to
recover completely, and the Soviet Union ceased to
be a topic for discussion. Soviet characters
re-emerged in the late 1980s, and 10 years later a
number of works began to treat the theme at
length.
The major goal pursued by North
Korean writers (or rather their ideological
supervisors) was to explain to their readers how
and why the once mighty Soviet Union deviated from
the true path of socialism. They also should
demonstrate the scale of the sufferings inflicted
on the Russian people by their bad choices and the
treason of their leaders.
As Gabroussenko
remarked in her unpublished study of this
literature, Russians and Koreans have essentially
swapped places.
Originally in the 1940s
and 1950s, the Russians were portrayed in North
Korean literature as the leaders and the guides
helping their Korean comrades. But in the 1980s
and 1990s, it is the Koreans who were the shining
example, the embodiment of socialist virtues who
were looked on as advisors and as leaders.
Nowadays. Russians are conversely
presented as weak and naive but still basically
decent, noble human beings who flourish under the
wise and firm guidance of their North Korean
friends.
For example, in one of these
stories, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
plants a bomb on a US passenger airliner. The
reason for this operation (and as every North
Korean knows this is the type of operation the CIA
does frequently) is to kill a Russian scientist
who refused to cooperate with the US
military-industrial complex.
In the story,
the Russian and his fellow passengers were lucky
to have a North Korean on the same plane who takes
control of the situation and saves his fellow
travelers from another vicious American plot.
Of these stories, Rim's The Fifth
Photo is typical. Katya Sintsova is a
beautiful Russian girl who comes from a family
with impeccable communist credentials. Her
great-grandfather died a heroic death in 1919
during the Russian civil war, her grandfather
sacrificed his life fighting the Nazis and her
father was selfless and a hardworking party
bureaucrat of the Leonid Brezhnev administration
in the 1970s. Her brother also became a top
bureaucrat in the Moscow Party Youth committee and
was also equally selfless and hardworking.
One should not be surprised that such a
girl was accepted to a top university - not
because of her family connections and not because
of a phone call made by her daddy, God forbid! -
but due to her exceptional gifts in the arts. But
at university she came to be influenced by the
wrong ideas.
She begins to interact with
people whose ideological bent is less than
healthy, she even interacts with foreigners (the
latter behavior is seen by Rim as especially
outrageous). She is upset about the contents of
party meetings being so boring and she is overcome
by materialism and a lust for change.
A
lustrous American seduces her and she gets
pregnant and then has an abortion. Meanwhile, her
father dies with his last words being, "Long live
the Communist Party!" Katya loves him and feels
sorry about his death, but still considers him an
old fool. This is when she meets the book's North
Korean narrator to whom she tries to sell photos
from her precious family archive.
The
narrator is an example of flawless revolutionary
virtue, his daughter is free from all these
frivolous but dangerous ideas that have spoilt
Katya's life - the exemplary North Korean girl
dreams only of serving the party and leader
better. The narrator's sons are brave officers of
the Korean People's Army, always ready to fight
the US imperialists. They are even treated to the
highest honor imaginable - they were granted an
audience with the Dear Leader Marshall Kim
Jong-il!
But let's continue with Katya's
story. She travels overseas in search of her
American lover. An awful discovery awaits her, he
was not really an American, but the descendent of
an anti-communist Russian landlord family. Almost
a century before their lands were nationalized by
Katya's family and the vicious landlords' family
has spent all the time dreaming of revenge.
Katya's seduction was actually a part of a
plot aimed at the taking the lands back from the
farmers and giving it to landlords (what deep
symbolism).
Katya's sufferings don't end
with this awful discovery. While alone and
helpless in the brutal West she suffers a car
accident and she loses a leg. In order to survive
she becomes a prostitute whose serves perverts in
the city of Munich in Germany.
The message
of this story is simple and easy to understand:
Katya is Russia herself, she was lured into a trap
by Western propaganda and scheming descendents of
landlords, she was fooled into selling her great
heritage and she ended up a pitiful prostitute at
the bottom of the merciless capitalist heap.
The story is written to serve as a clear
warning to North Koreans not to listen to the
seductive voices from abroad and should remain on
guard against their enemy.
Does this
message work? Do reports about Russians suffering
under the yoke of capitalism have much impact on
North Koreans' vision of the world and themselves
within it? Probably it does - at least to some
extent, but whether this ideological construct can
survive the unavoidable clash with reality is
another matter.
Andrei Lankov is
an associate professor at Kookmin University in
Seoul, and adjunct research fellow at the Research
School of Pacifica and Asian Studies, Australian
National University. He graduated from Leningrad
State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history
and China, with emphasis on Korea. He has
published books and articles on Korea and North
Asia.
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