Few scholars of North Korea would dare evoke the word “real” when it comes to describing what life and politics are like in this small, yet dangerously bellicose nation, still deeply mired in the delusions and rivalries of a bygone era. The self-validating word, therefore, has traditionally been reserved for eyewitness accounts usually either produced by those who were able to escape from the North or penned by a handful of foreign visitors who managed to spend any considerable amount of time in the country. In Andrei Lankov's case, it is, in fact, both—his latest book builds on his firsthand experience living in the DPRK during the mid-1980s as an exchange student from the former Soviet Union, as well as on numerous interviews he conducted with event participants and escapees from the North currently living in Seoul.
As a result, Lankov's latest book is necessarily part history, part ethnography, attempting...
