The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps
Prisoners’ Testimonies and Satellite Photographs
PREFACE
Anne Applebaum
In 1929, when Stalin’s Politburo first began to discuss the expansion of the concentration camp system that eventually became known as the gulag, there were almost no objections. According to the protocols of the commission set up to examine the matter, a few of the Soviet Union’s leaders did worry that it would be difficult to set up prison camps in the far northern region of the country. A few also wondered whether it would be possible to build roads and railroads to those distant places. No one, then or later, worried that conditions would be too harsh or that too many people would die. In the end, only one possible problem was taken seriously: that the system might look bad abroad. “The bourgeois foreign press,” one commissar complained, might claim that “instead of building a penitentiary system intended to reform prisoners through corrective labor, we’ve put up [secret police] fortresses.”
In other words, the Politburo never worried that the camps were bad, but some did fear that they might look bad. That fear continued to nag at Stalin’s henchmen, as well as their successors. In the early 1930s, the Soviet Union went to great lengths to disguise the number of prisoners working in its logging camps, in order to discourage foreign boycotts of Soviet timber. In 1931, the writer Maxim Gorky was commissioned to write a book — The Canal Named for Stalin — that described, in glowing terms, the White Sea Canal. The canal had been constructed by some 100,000 prisoners working in the most primitive conditions imaginable. The book was intended to convince foreigners that Soviet prisoners had been enlightened by the experience. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s — and indeed throughout the 1970s and 1980s — the Stalinist regime laid on elaborate propaganda tours for foreign delegations, inviting them to see how well prisoners lived. Model prisons were constructed especially for such visitors.
At the same time, the regime did its best to hide the real truth about the camps, concealing both the vast geographic extent of the slave-labor system, as well as the enormous numbers of prisoners involved. From 1918, right up until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, Soviet leaders did everything possible to hide their prisons and labor camps from the outside world. They feared both that the Soviet Union’s international reputation would be damaged if the truth were known, and, more importantly, that the revelation about life in the camps would undermine the regime’s legitimacy at home. If the “bourgeois foreign press” got hold of the evidence, after all, then it would be far harder for the Soviet Union to portray itself as progressive, as enlightened, and as the font of international revolution.
In the fullest possible sense, the contemporary leaders of North Korea are the intellectual and moral descendants of these Stalinists. From the testimony presented so vividly in this volume, it is clear, first of all, that the North Korean camps were built according to a Stalinist model, and that they continue to be run that way. Documents have already come to light proving that the Soviet Union sent advisers to China in the 1950s to help the Chinese organize labor camps. This volume provides strong evidence that something similar happened in North Korea. As in Stalin’s time, North Koreans are arrested for trumped-up political “crimes,” such as reading a foreign newspaper, singing a South Korean pop song, or “insulting the authority” of the North Korean leadership. As in Stalin’s time, North Korean prisoners — even children — are given ludicrous and impossible work “quotas” to fulfill and are subjected to brutal, irrational punishments. And, as in Stalin’s time, North Korea’s leadership doesn’t want anyone to know any of these details, since such revelations not only will damage their foreign reputation but also put their own regime at risk.
This, of course, is precisely why the full documentation of the North Korean camps is so important and why this report, compiled with such care and precision, is so significant. Painstakingly, David Hawk and the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea have compiled an enormous amount of information, including not just the numbers of prisoners and the locations of camps but also the details of camp life — the winter cold, the numb fingers, the workplace accidents — that make the stories more vivid. Those details are also what make this report so powerful.
Some, of course, will avoid reading it, fully knowing that if they do read it, they will have to change their tactics, or at least think differently about the political problems posed by North Korea. Certainly after absorbing such details, it will be more difficult for Americans or Europeans to sit down and negotiate, coldly, with their Korean counterparts and not mention human rights violations. South Koreans, when they know the details of life in the North, will also find it more difficult to argue in favor of appeasing the Northern regime. If these stories filter back to the North Korean police and administrators, those officials too will find it more difficult to justify their own behavior, or to claim that they don’t know what is really happening in the country’s concentration camps. And if the full truth about the camps becomes known to the wider population, then whatever support remains for the state constructed by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il will begin, even more decisively, to ebb away.
This is not to say that words can make a dictatorship collapse overnight. But words certainly can make a dictatorship collapse over time, as experience during the last two decades has shown. Totalitarian regimes are built on lies and can be damaged, even destroyed, when those lies are exposed. The greater and more detailed evidence that can be provided, the more damage the truth can do.
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