North Korea Undercover (7 page)

Next up is the chamber housing the glass box of God the Son, Kim Jong Il. It is the same stately gavotte around a corpse as performed for God the Father. Kim Two in death looks no less weird than when he was alive: why bow and scrape for a bad Elvis impersonator? Still, the robot conditioning kicks in, and I bow three times.

How do you embalm a stiff?
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First, gut your corpse, extracting the offal, heart, lungs and fiddly bits. You go in through the back, leaving the front of the body as intact as possible. You never know when the dear dictator’s loved ones or secret policemen want to pop by for one last kiss. Suck the blood out, pump in the
goo. It’s a witches’ brew of formaldehyde, acetous potassium, sodium chloride, glycerin and ethanol. The Russians are the masters of this sacred art, the Chinese less so. They pumped poor Mao so full of formaldehyde, he swelled up like a gigantic balloon, and then the tyrant went ‘Pop!’, oozing fluid from every pore. Oh dear.

You need to control the temperature and the humidity. Hence the glass boxes. Too hot, and the corpse rots. Too cold, and it freezes, then develops a kind of necrotic frostbite, and goes an unpleasant shade of green. Over about six months, the formaldehyde replaces the water in the stiff. The goo glues muscle tissue, producing that tell-tale fixity of flesh in an embalmed body. It’s a whole-body Botox treatment.

The Russian boffins who keep Lenin in the pink – on permanent display in Red Square since 1924 – are rumoured to freshen him up twice a week. The goo itself starts to go funny after a year and a half, so it has to be replaced, just like you would the engine oil in your motor. The goo leaks into the suits the stiffs wear, so they have to be changed every now and then, too. Lenin has a special pump in his chest, they say, to keep the goo at just the right viscosity, more treacly than treacle.

The two Soviet heroes who first kept Lenin pickled, Boris Zbarsky and Vladimir Vorobiev, both came to a sticky end. Vorobiev died in hospital under my sterious circumstances in 1937 – the year of Stalin’s Great Terror. Zbarsky was arrested by Stalin’s goons in 1952, released a year later but soon died of a stroke. Zbarsky’s son, Ilya, took over the family pickle factory and ran Lenin’s mausoleum until 1989, when he retired.

After Ilya, the new old man on the block was Sergei Debov, interviewed by Andrew Higgins of the
Independent
in 1993, at the
age of 73.
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Debov described pickling Stalin, no easy task in 1953. ‘They sent a car to collect me when he died and took me to the laboratory. My hands were shaking. He was dead but his body-guards still stood there watching everything we did to him.’ Debovand his colleagues did a good job on Stalin, embalming him for all eternity. Then Khrushchev read out the secret speech about Stalin being a mass murderer, and a few years on Stalin was removed and buried in the Kremlin wall.

Debov was particularly proud of his work on Ho Chi Minh. They did the job in 1969, inside a mountain, avoiding American bombs. Two transport planes flew in from Russia with air-conditioners and other equipment to preserve the corpse: ‘It was all very difficult. The war was on and there was nothing. Even distilled water had to be brought in from Moscow.’ Uncle Ho the waxwork still hangs out in his own mausoleum in Vietnam.

Uniting all six pickled great ones, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Ferdinand Marcos, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, is a sick religiosity that seeks, pharaoh-like, to continue life after death. The waxen sheen they all exude is proof of how fatuous that dream is.

The chambers leading away from Kim Jong Il’s waxwork boasted similar artefacts to those in the chamber after his dad: a royal train carriage, complete with desk and, on it, an Apple Mac Book Pro. Whatever effect seeing the Apple might have on ordinary North Koreans, to us it smacked of repugnant hypocrisy. Only Kim the Second was allowed to use the internet. What did Kim Two watch online? An intoxicating mixture of hard-core porn, some say, and something entirely different. One story goes that the
people who ran Lady Thatcher’s website noted that they had a regular follower from one IP address in North Korea. Who could it have been other than Kim Jong Il?

Gifts of obeisance from various entirely predictable banana republics were offered for our inspection. But also there was a plaque of some kind from Derbyshire County Council, sent in the late 1980s, when the prospect of world revolution made Derby blush and Chesterfield’sspire tilt yet more crookedly off-centre.

On the way out, two women wept openly. Was it just for show? Or, somehow harder to bear, did they really mean it? The devotion of the people to the state seems absolute. How can a nation be so in thrall to a regime that has led to the wholly unnecessary deaths of millions of its own people? Perhaps it is because they have been told a powerful fairy tale all their lives.

The fresh air seemed a gift. But even outside the house of the zombie gods, their baleful influence did not lose its hold over our minds. It was fine for us to walk in the grounds in front of the great palace. But a dozen or so workers rested on their haunches, hand-fixing paving slabs that were being repositioned and tidying up garden beds. We sensed by now that trying to photograph or film this scene of human imperfection would be unwelcome, would somehow break the power of the precious illusion. This is aland where just trying to capture the small-change moments of life places you in political conflict with the regime. Best not to bother... and then, yet again, the regime wins.

We got back on to the bus, crossed town and ended up at the Juche Tower, a great concrete prick jabbing at the sky, purposefully one metre taller than the Washington Monument, there to honour one of the regime’s proclaimed ideologies: Jucheism. The view from the top was striking, but not quite in the way the regime
would have liked. Ahead was the Taedong river, a bit wider than the Thames at Greenwich, which flows through Pyongyang, beyond that Kim Il Sung Square and the main party and regime buildings. But immediately behind was the east bank, grim grey blocks of flats, all copies of the same East German architect’s design, and single bungalows, poor, mean, miserable. To be fair, the air was clean. This was the first Third World capital I’ve been to with no smog. The North Koreans have solved the problem of pollution. There is no industry.

If anyone is tempted to get all soppy about North Korea’s green credentials, bear in mind the testimony of one defector who worked at a uranium processing factory:‘The trees next to the river died and so did all the fish.’ The workers’ hair fell out;blood used to seep out of the defector’s mouth.
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Health and safety does not exist in North Korea.

On, then, to an enormous plaza to inspect a vast concrete three pronged obelisk in the centre of Pyongyang, boasting a hammer, a sickle and a lithographer’sbrush etched against the sky. Hammer, sickle and brush are the symbols of workers in the factory, the fields and by brain, the totems of the Korean Workers’ Party. The words in concrete sang out: ‘Hail the Korean Workers’ Party – all the Korean People’s Unifier and Leader!’ No one sang back. Apart from our guides, no North Korean was present.

Remember in North Korea nothing is as it seems. The proclaimed ideology of the nation is not the real one. The national Stalinism represented by the Three Prongs is fake. So, too, is Jucheism, neatly skewered by one authority as a ‘stodgy jumble of banalities’.
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Jucheism and Kimilsungism both serve the personality
cult, by pretending that Kim the First was a great thinker – he was no such thing – but they are cosmetic stick-ons, like beauty spots or fake eyelashes. The realideology of the DPRK is racial purity. That’s perhaps why the regime has lasted so long, because what it believes in fits snugly with something in the North Korean psyche. To be fair, in a society so closed off from the outside world that few people know the Americans have walked on the surface of the moon, the chance of them realizing they have been told a big lie is slim. In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Mario Vargas Llosa’s warning – ‘Ideology is fiction that doesn’t realize it’s fiction’ – will never be given air-time.

The North Korean credo is a paranoid, racially pure Nazi-esque ideology. It has much in common with fascist thought. That is the considered judgement of Professor Myers, who studied first the ideology of Communist East Germany and now spends his time soaking up the belief system of the DPRK. For example, Myers cites a hugely popular novella of the 1950s, in which two American missionaries and their son kill a Korean child by injecting germs into the blood.

The old jackal’s spade-shaped eagle-nose hung villainously over his upper lip, while the vixen’s teats jutted out like the stomach of a snake that has just swallowed a demon, and the slippery wolf-cub gleamed with poison like the head of a venomous snake has just swallowed its skin. Their six sunken eyes seemed... like open graves constantly waiting for corpses.
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This stuff could have been lifted from the pages of Julius Streicher’s
Der Stürmer.

When the North and the South met at the DMZ in 2006, themedia were present to hear the small talk between two generals before the meeting proper started in private. The soldier from the South spoke about how quite a few farmers from his half were marrying foreigners. When the general from the North scowled at this, the southerner downplayed his remark, saying that such marriages were a mere ‘drop of ink in the Han river’ (the South Korean equivalent of the Thames). At which the general from the North spat out: ‘Not even one drop of ink must be allowed.’
¹⁰

Britain’s former ambassador to North Korea, John Everard, questions comparisons to Stalinism in his book
Only Beautiful, Please
, arguing the regime’s mainstay is ‘xenophobic nationalism rather than socialism. The closest Western analogue to the DPRK is probably Nazi Germany.’
¹¹
Pyongyang watcher Aidan Foster-Carter draws similar conclusions: ‘Read North Korean propaganda in German, and the emphasis on der Fiihrer and the triumph of the will suggest a very different (or is it?) totalitarian comparison.’
¹²

Christopher Hitchens, once vilified by George Galloway MP as ‘a drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay’ – nothing much wrong with any of that – and the best writer of English prose since Orwell, observed of North Korea: ‘I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it’sbeen a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man [Kim Il Sung] and Little Boy [Kim Jong Il] gradually mutated the whole state belief system into a debased form of Confucianism, in which traditional ancestor worship and respect
for order become blended with extreme nationalism and xenophobia.’

The question that troubles many Pyongyangologists is: how has North Korea survived long after, say, the state that Stalin built was dead? The answer, perhaps, is that North Korea has out lived the Soviet Union because it was never truly Communist in the first place, but owes its stability to its roots in Korean feudalism and racism. Also, Stalinism was itself not just about command economy and the personality cult, but borrowed heavily from Russian traditionalism and xenophobia, so the Kimist jump from thereto racism is not that big a leap.

‘Kimism’, by the way, is a termused by the Pyongyangologist Adrian Buzo as an umbrella description of the regime’s ideology in his sharply written book
The Guerilla Dynasty
,
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which he identifies as a blend of national Stalinism, xenophobia, ultra traditionalism and criminality. Kimism was forged, says Buzo, when Kim Il Sung was a freedom-fighter-cum-robber-baron in Manchuria in the few years up to 1940, when he escaped into Stalin’s Soviet Union. Buzo’s insights do not conflict with Myers’ judgement that the regime’s ideology is farright; they effectively support it.

But why Jucheism with its talk of self-reliance? Why still bother with the pseudo-Marxism of the Korean Workers’ Party, Three Prongs and all? Perhapsit’s a clever trick, a decoy. There are many people in the Western world who will give an anti-capitalist regime the benefit of the doubt; hardly anyone who will stand up for a nakedly racist state. So North Korea faces both ways: putting out
the old Workers’ Party rhetoric for external consumption, while telling its own people a different story of‘us against the foreigners’.

All racism is ugly, but there is something particularly abhorrent about racism even a child can sense, about a lisping tot doing elementary addition and subtraction by counting American corpses – the reason why, Breen reports, one foreign diplomat took her child out of a North Korean nursery.
¹⁴

On the third prong, the intellectual’s brush – in Western culture it would, of course, be a pen – Myers observes that the brush ‘has helped keep casual foreign observers from recognizing the DPRK’s intenseanti-intellectualism’.
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Western fears of minds being dumbed down by idiot TV and computer games are as naught compared with what happens in North Korea. If you belong to a nation where as a child you are taught lies about history at school, you are taught to spout banalities at university, where you cannot speak your mind, it’s going to make it virtually impossible to frame the thought, Is our system as good as they say it is?

So the Korean Workers’ Party’s Three Prongs is a big lie in concrete, while the real belief of the system is Nazi-esque racial purity with bolted-on bits of Japanese fascism and Stalinist mind-control. None of this, of course, was mentioned by or discussed with our minders.

Our party was thirteen-strong, including nine LSE students from all corners of the world, two Russians, two Swiss, a German, a Moroccan, an African American, an Australian and one Briton, and one alumnus, Hoe-Yeong, an unflappable Singaporean. In North Korea, the students were great company, politely cynical
about the regime’s nonsense, thoughtful, good fun. Two of the three BBC team had also been to LSE, my wife, Tomiko, and, going all the way back to 1977–1980, me. Tomiko – the name is Japanese, but she is British to the core – had been to North Korea with the LSE’s Student Union’s International Relations Club, which she ran, the year before. The odd man out was Alex Niakaris, analumnus of the University of Wales, half Greek, half Welsh, an odd combination but then he is an odd man in many ways. He was also our shooter-producer, his fiendishly difficult job to film everything that moved without appearing to do so. He did so with great good humour.