A rare glimpse into a solitary, single-minded nation
Only last month North Korea brusquely rejected the latest call for bilateral talks with its U.S.-supported neighbor, South Korea. That gesture was characteristic of one of the most self-enclosed and xenophobic Communist countries in the world. North Korea has, however, opened its doors to a rarely admitted visitor, a reporter from a U.S. news organization. TIME's Peking Bureau Chief, David Aikman, sent this report:
There are only two ways to enter North Korea by commercial airliner: from China and from the Soviet Union. The symbolism is apt. For the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as it is called, most closely resembles the China of the late 1960s or the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin. North Korea's President Kim Il Sung, 71, is in fact the last surviving Communist leader installed by Stalin, and commands an idolatry that borders on the pathological.
The cult of Kim's personality dominates the capital, Pyongyang (pop. 1.8 million). With its broad streets, tree-lined parks and bucolic riverbanks, the city is in many respects attractive. But virtually all its public buildings are monumental paeans in stone to the "Great Leader," constructed in a style that might be called Marxist Triumphalism. Dominating the skyline is the Tower of the Juche Idea, a 561-ft. stone column topped by a 66-ft. torch that glows at night. Across the Taedong River is the 600-room Grand People's Study Hall, a new national library. Near by is the Arch of Triumph, a 198-ft. marble landmark that comfortably straddles a five-lane avenue.
Despite such public grandeur, the modern nation of 20 million strikingly conforms to Korea's ancient reputation as the "Hermit Kingdom." Though the library boasts a capacity of 30 million volumes, it has only four listings under "United States," the most recent a 1975 edition of U.S. Pharmacoepia. No foreign publications are on sale in Pyongyang. And at the Potonggang, the capital's newest hotel, foreigners are kept under almost constant surveillance.
This isolation is doubtless intensified by the lunatic extremes of the Kim cult and the Juche Idea, a somewhat opaque notion that stresses that the masses are the agents of revolution and man is master of everything. The result is government by total mobilization. Kindergarten children march, singing, to school; construction workers march, singing, to work. The Muscovite subway stations, all marble and murals, offer glass-framed copies of the party daily, Rodong Sinmun, on every platform. Meanwhile, at the Mansudae Art Theater, a multimillion-dollar showpiece groaning with chandeliers, the revolutionary opera Song of Paradise climaxes with the cast, assembled before a huge red sun, singing, "His grateful love has given us eternal life/ We shall relate his everlasting love from age to age."