Book II: Russia's Web: A Global Strategy of Disruption

Part 11: Axis of Resentment - North Korea's Revival

Chapter 37: North Korea I: The Ghost of Juche: A History of Betrayal and Convenience

It is 1988, Pyongyang. A proud Soviet military advisor watches a massive parade of goose-stepping soldiers and clanking tanks roll through Kim Il Sung Square. He sees a loyal, if bizarrely eccentric, junior partner in the Cold War, a dependent buffer state, a communist kingdom his nation had created and sustained.

It is 1995. The Soviet Union is gone. The same man, now a low-level, demoralized functionary in the new Russian Foreign Ministry, reads a cable about the devastating famine in North Korea, a period the North Koreans call the "Arduous March." Moscow, desperate to curry favor with the West and South Korea, has cut off all aid and demanded hard currency for its goods. He feels a distant, abstract pity, but sees North Korea as a grotesque relic, a problem for others to solve.

It is 2023. He is long retired, watching the news in his Moscow apartment. The screen shows the grandson, Kim Jong Un, being welcomed as a crucial strategic partner by Vladimir Putin. He watches with a sense of profound, historical whiplash. The failed state his country had created, then abandoned to starvation, was now being courted as the savior of the motherland's great war. The betrayal had come full circle, replaced by an even more stunning convenience.

The Discourse 37: From Patron, to Pariah, to Partner

37.1 The Soviet Creation
The modern Russo-North Korean alliance is not a restoration of a long-standing friendship, but a pragmatic and deeply cynical reversal of decades of policy. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was, in fact, a direct creation of the Soviet Union. Following World War II, the USSR installed Kim Il Sung as the leader of its occupation zone in the northern half of the Korean peninsula and served as the primary patron, military founder, and economic lifeline of the new communist state throughout the Cold War. [CITATION 1]

37.2 The Post-Soviet Betrayal
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the new, pro-Western government of Boris Yeltsin all but abandoned its former client state. Russia's "betrayal" in the 1990s was profound: Moscow established diplomatic relations with South Korea, terminated all aid and subsidized trade with Pyongyang, and began demanding hard currency for its exports. This sudden economic shock was a primary contributing factor to the collapse of the North Korean economy and the devastating famine of the mid-1990s. [CITATION 2]

37.3 The Reluctant Enforcer of Sanctions
For two decades, from the mid-1990s through to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia largely treated North Korea as a pariah and a problem. Surprisingly, it often postured as a "responsible stakeholder" in non-proliferation. Russia repeatedly voted in favor of UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea's burgeoning nuclear and ballistic missile programs. This included key resolutions like UNSC Resolution 1718, passed in 2006 after the DPRK's first nuclear test, which imposed binding international sanctions. [CITATION 3] For years, Russia publicly supported and claimed to adhere to the very sanctions regime it is now systematically violating. [CITATION 4] This history of voting for sanctions serves to highlight the staggering hypocrisy of its current actions and the depth of its desperation.

References

1. Shlapentokh, Dmitry. Immigrants and the Making of Russian and North Korean Foreign Policy. The Edwin Mellen Press, 2017.

2. Bechtol Jr., Bruce E. "North Korea's military and its relations with the world." In Routledge Handbook of North Korean Politics and Society, edited by Kevin Gray and Lee Jae-Jin, Routledge, 2020.

3. United Nations Security Council. Resolution 1718 (2006) [On non-proliferation]. S/RES/1718, October 14, 2006. https://www.undocs.org/S/RES/1718(2006)

4. Gordon, Lincoln. "Russia in North Korea: More in Play Than You Think." Foreign Policy, July 3, 2017. https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/03/russia-in-north-korea-more-in-play-than-you-think-putin-kim-jong-un-trump-moon/