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Chapter 48: North Korea I: The Ghost of Juche: A History of Betrayal and Convenience

Pyongyang, April 1988. Major Anatoly Fedorov of the Soviet GRU stood on the VIP viewing platform in Kim Il Sung Square, the starched, high collar of his dress uniform an instrument of torture in the humid spring air. Below him, the world was a perfectly synchronized sea of humanity and steel, a spectacle of disciplined power so immense it bordered on the sublime. One hundred thousand civilian participants, each holding colored placards, formed a vast, living mural of a smiling Kim Il Sung. As the military parade began, the sound was overwhelming: the percussive, unified stamp of tens of thousands of goose-stepping soldiers, the deep, guttural rumble of tank treads on stone, the roar of the crowd chanting "Manse!" in hypnotic waves.

Anatoly felt a surge of pride, the proprietary satisfaction of an architect viewing his most ambitious, if strangest, creation. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was a Soviet project from its very inception, carved from the corpse of the Japanese Empire after the Great Patriotic War and entrusted to their man, the former Red Army Captain Kim Il Sung. He watched as a column of T-62 tanks—gifts from the Motherland—rumbled past, their cannons adorned with flowers, their engines spewing a familiar, acrid blue smoke. Anatoly saw in this display a loyal, if bizarrely theatrical, younger brother in the great communist family. The North Koreans were excessive, their cult of personality a grotesque parody of even Stalin’s most grandiose visions, but they were theirs. They were a dependable buffer state holding the line against the American imperialists and their puppets in Seoul, who were even now preparing for their decadent Olympic games. As a squadron of MiG-21 fighters, also gifts, screamed overhead, he allowed himself a thin smile and made a note for his report back to Moscow. The investment was secure. The junior partner, however eccentric, was strong and loyal.

Moscow, December 1995. The smell of pride was gone, replaced by the scent of decay, damp wool, and cheap cigarettes that permeated the peeling, dimly-lit hallways of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Anatoly, no longer a major but a demoralized, mid-level consultant on the "Korean desk," felt the chill of the unheated building seep into his bones. His military pension had been rendered nearly worthless by hyperinflation; his world, his country, his life's purpose, had vanished. His job now, under the ardently pro-Western Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, was to manage the "unfortunate relics" of the past. The biggest of those relics was a file stamped in red: DPRK - FAMINE ASSESSMENT. It was a file he was instructed, for all practical purposes, to ignore.

He opened it anyway, a morbid, private act of penance. The contents were not dry diplomatic cables, but translated reports from Western NGOs and, worse, grainy photographs faxed from a contact in Beijing. He saw images of hollow-eyed children, their bellies swollen from kwashiorkor, their limbs like twigs. He read the clinical, chilling descriptions of the "Arduous March," the poetic name the North Koreans had given to mass starvation. A part of him, the old Soviet part, felt a cold knot of guilt. It had been Moscow's deliberate decision, a centerpiece of Yeltsin's pivot to the West, to sever all aid, to recognize the wealthy South, to demand hard currency for the oil and grain that had been the DPRK’s lifeline. It was a calculated betrayal, the price of admission into the Western club. His younger, more ambitious colleague poked his head in the door. "Still reading about those fossils?" he sneered. "Forget them. The future is in Seoul, Anatoly. Samsung, Hyundai. That's the new reality." Anatoly nodded silently, closing the file. The younger man was right. It was pragmatism. Seoul had capital; Pyongyang had corpses. He pushed the file to the back of his drawer, burying the faces of the starving children under new reports about trade delegations to South Korea. He was helping to build the new, capitalist Russia. The past had to be buried.

Moscow, September 2023. Anatoly, now a frail octogenarian with a bad cough, sat hunched in the worn armchair of his cramped Khrushchyovka apartment, the television screen casting a flickering blue light on his face. He was watching the state news, a nightly ritual of reaffirming the new patriotism. Suddenly, the lead story made him sit bolt upright, his breath catching in his chest. The screen showed the olive-green armored train of the founder's grandson, Kim Jong Un, pulling into a station in the Russian Far East. The announcer’s voice, thick with contrived fervor, hailed the summit as a historic moment of anti-imperialist solidarity, a meeting of two powerful leaders standing against American hegemony. The screen showed footage of the North Korean leader—plump, dressed in a black Mao suit—being welcomed not as a pariah, but as a vital strategic partner by Vladimir Putin himself. A partner.

Anatoly’s mind reeled, the historical whiplash so severe it made him dizzy. The grotesque relic. The failed state they had abandoned to starvation to curry favor with the West. That was now the indispensable partner in the motherland's great war in Ukraine? He thought of the file, the pictures of the emaciated children from 1995. He thought of his colleague's sneering use of the word "pragmatism." And he thought of the endless news reports about Russia’s own "shell hunger," of their own soldiers dying for want of basic artillery. The betrayal had come full circle, replaced by an even more stunning convenience. They had killed the strange younger brother to impress a new friend. Now, their house on fire, they were crawling back to the brother’s ghost, begging for the rusty tools left in his cellar. "We let them starve to impress our enemies," he muttered to the empty room, "and now we beg their children to save us from them." The irony was so immense, so blackly comic, it felt like the punchline to a joke told by God himself at Russia's expense.

The Discourse 48: From Patron, to Pariah, to Partner

48.1 The Soviet Creation Myth
The modern Russo-North Korean alliance is not a restoration of a long-standing friendship, but a pragmatic and deeply cynical marriage of convenience, built upon the wreckage of a profound betrayal. To understand its current nature, one must first understand its origins. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was not an organic state; it was a direct creation of the Soviet Union. In the final days of World War II, the Red Army occupied the northern half of the Korean peninsula. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, seeking to establish a reliable buffer state against American influence, personally selected a minor Korean guerrilla fighter who had served as a captain in the Red Army—Kim Il Sung—to lead the new territory. As the historian Andrei Lankov has meticulously documented, the early DPRK was a classic Soviet satellite, its government, military, and initial five-year plans all designed and implemented by Soviet advisors. See [citation 1]. For the duration of the Cold War, Moscow served as the new state's primary patron, its chief military supplier, its ideological wellspring (before the invention of "Juche"), and, most critically, its economic lifeline through a steady supply of subsidized oil, grain, and industrial goods. It was a relationship of total dependency, of patron and client.

48.2 The "Arduous March" and the Politics of Abandonment
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this lifeline was severed with brutal finality. The new, pro-Western Russian government of Boris Yeltsin saw its relationship with the DPRK not just as a burden, but as an embarrassment, an obstacle to its primary foreign policy goal of integrating with the West. Under the guidance of Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, Moscow executed a profound and deliberate "betrayal." It established full diplomatic relations with the prosperous South Korea, terminated all grant aid and subsidized trade with Pyongyang, and began demanding hard currency—which North Korea did not have—for all exports. This sudden economic shock, combined with a series of natural disasters, was a primary contributing factor to the total collapse of the North Korean economy and the devastating famine of the mid-1990s, a period the DPRK grimly refers to as the "Arduous March," in which hundreds of thousands of people perished. See [citation 2]. This act of abandonment by its creator and patron seared itself into the psychology of the North Korean regime, vindicating its paranoid ideology of Juche, or self-reliance, and embedding a deep-seated conviction that no foreign power could ever be trusted.

48.3 The Reluctant Enforcer of Sanctions
For two decades, from the mid-1990s through to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia largely treated North Korea as a regional problem and a pariah. As Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile programs accelerated, Moscow often postured as a "responsible stakeholder" in global non-proliferation, primarily to maintain its great-power status and seat at the negotiating table. Strikingly, Russia repeatedly voted in favor of major UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea. This established a long, unambiguous public record of Russia officially acknowledging the threat posed by Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions. This includes not just foundational resolutions like UNSC Resolution 1718 (2006) after the DPRK's first nuclear test, but also UNSC Resolution 1874 (2009) and the even more stringent UNSC Resolution 2375 (2017), which severely curtailed oil exports to North Korea. See [citation 3]. Russia was not merely a voter for these sanctions; as a Permanent Member of the Security Council, it was a co-author and a legal guarantor of the very international containment regime that it would later unilaterally dismantle. See [citation 4]. This history is not merely a footnote; it is the essential context that illuminates the staggering depth of Russia's desperation and the stunning hypocrisy of its 2023 reversal. The pariah state it helped to contain has now become the patron state on which it depends.