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Tuesday November 24, 2009

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Past Event

A Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies and U.S.-Korea Institute Presentation

Turning Back the Clock: Attempts to Reclaim Control in North Korea after 2004

North Korea, Northeast Asia


Event Summary

The 1994-2004 period in North Korean can be seen as a time of de-Stalinization from below. In spite of the government's unwillingness to introduce meaningful reforms, the hyper-Stalinist system slowly disintegrated.

Event Information

When

Wednesday, February 11, 2009
3:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Where

Rome Auditorium
Johns Hopkins SAIS
1619 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC
Map

Contact: Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies

E-mail: CNAPS@brookings.edu

Phone: 202.797.6055

However, recent events clearly indicate that since 2004, the North Korean government has been trying to re-establish control over society and reverse the changes that happened in the decade after Kim Il Sung's death.

Transcript

ANDREI LANKOV: Well, first of all I would like to express my gratitude to Johns Hopkins University and to the Brookings Institution for sponsoring this event – for sponsoring my trip here and for sponsoring this presentation.

And then – well, it’s probably time to begin? And we’ll begin probably from how North Korea used to look for a few decades from maybe the late fifties to the early nineties, because I would say that Kim Il-Sung in many regards was more Stalinist than Stalin himself. He made his country into something Comrade Stalin probably dreamt of in his nights – sleepless nights but knew that it was impossible in such large and sparsely populated country as Russia.

Participants

Featured Speaker

Andrei Lankov

Korean historian and Associate Professor, Kookmin University, Seoul