Thomas Andrikus’s Reviews > The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia > Status Update

Not sure how the tracker says I've completed 21% when I barely even started, ages ago.
Anyway, I've been picking up this book again since yesterday and enjoying it so far

"So until the late 1960s even a well-informed and unbiased observer would not have many reasons to see the SKorean system as vastly preferable to KIS's version of nationalist Stalinism."
— p.63 (cont.)

"From available statistics, between the years 1945 and 1955 the number of people massacred for political reasons was actually larger in the South than in the North (a result of brutal anti-guerilla campaigns). The SK regime also had a less equal distribution of wealth and to a large extent was dominated by former pro-Japanese collaborators."
— p.63 (cont.)

"We shouldn't forget that KIS was imposing his system on a country whose population overwhelmingly consisted of the sons & daughters of premodern subsistence farmers. These people had never been exposed to democracy even in theoretical terms, and KIS's system seemed to be better than what they had experienced before—being at the mercy of a feudal absolute monarchy and then a remarkably brutal colonial regime"
— p.63

"Contrary to what has often been claimed, private markets were never banned in NK. They operated under manifold restrictions and were small in scale, but they existed nonetheless. However, The average NKorean of Il Sung's era seldom shopped at the market. Items on sale at marketplace were overpriced and usually seen as unnecessary luxuries". - p.36