How the Soviet Collapse Shaped North Korea

Benjamin R. Young: Everyday life in North Korea revolves around these institutions, and these institutions are based on the Soviet model, specifically the Stalinist model. And that, I think, is really key in understanding North Korea, and why it is the way it is today.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Welcome to Horns of a Dilemma, the podcast of the Texas National Security Review. I'm Sheena Chestnut Greitens, and I'm here today with our executive editor, Dr. Ryan Best. We're really pleased to have joining us today Dr. Ben Young, author of the article “Saving Socialism: What North Korea Learned from the Collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Ben is an assistant professor of intelligence studies at Fayetteville State University. He was previously a Stanton Foundation fellow in nuclear security at the RAND Corporation from 2024 to 2025. He is the author of two books, Guns, Guerrillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World, which is on my bookshelf behind me, and also the author of a new book, Reds, Revolutions, and Rebellions: How China, Cuba, and Vietnam Transformed Guerrilla Warfare.

He is widely published in articles on North Korea, East Asian politics, and US foreign policy in a range of academic journals. He holds a PhD in Asian history from George Washington University, an M.A. in History from SUNY Brockport, and a B.S. in History from SUNY Brockport also.

Ben, welcome to Horns of a Dilemma. It's really great to have you on the show.

Benjamin R. Young: Thanks for having me. I've been a big fan of the podcast and the publication for a while.

Ryan Vest: It's great to hear that, Ben. This is a great addition to the journal as well, and I'm really excited to look at this. As a Russia scholar, you know, listeners that have been listening to us for a while know I always like to talk about Russia. But I've looked at the fall of the Soviet Union from a lot of different perspectives, but I've never thought about how North Korea might look at the fall of the Soviet Union. And your article looks at this North Korean perspective and looks at the follow-on effects to other socialist nations. What inspired you to examine this issue from such a unique perspective?

Benjamin R. Young: Yeah. Thank you for the question. I think the thing that first motivated me to study this topic was I just kept hearing how much the Chinese Communist Party was obsessed with learning, and studying the fall of the Soviet Union. And of course, that's just partially because of China's economic rise, China's competition with the US as a near peer power.

But it also got me thinking about what some of these other socialist countries were thinking when the birthplace of state socialism suddenly collapsed. Do they think that this was the end of their republic? Were they even more adamant that their style of socialism was the most pure and that's why they were able to persevere?

So I think it really came from the lens of curiosity, because if the Chinese Communist Party studied this intensively, then these other party states must have as well, because we tend to forget that, you know, there were four other party states besides China that survived. You have Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea. And there's been a lot of studies about how China studied the collapse of the Soviet Union. A little bit about Cuba, but really not much about North Korea, Vietnam, or Laos studied the collapse of the Soviet Union.

So coming at this from a North Korea studies specialization, I kind of honed in on North Korea's publications, their state-run media, and how they interpreted the fall of the Soviet Union. And, much to my surprise, they studied this very, very adamantly. They didn't exactly take away the lessons I thought they would, for better or for worse. And so that kind of led me down a path of wanting to do this publication, and also tying it in with North Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons in the 1990s.

So I conducted most of this research while I was a Stanton Nuclear Security fellow at the RAND Corporation. And so that's kind of why I got motivated in this topic. And as someone who just finds the collapse of the Soviet Union bewildering in the frame of mind that there was this huge country, the birthplace of state socialism, and it suddenly collapsed seemingly overnight in a bloodless–it was basically bloodless–and I think that is really, really shocking. And I think it shocked the CIA back then, and it's even more shocking to me today that we have these party states that have never really renounced their ties to formal state socialism.

So it kind of combined a lot of my interests, my intellectual, and then I combined it with a really supportive fellowship at the RAND Corporation.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: That's great. I mean, one of the things I like about the article is that you really do engage with the evidence that we have, which, you know, we're used to thinking about and talking about North Korea as a black box. But, you know, you really looked at the sources that are available to try to get a handle on how North Korea interpreted the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And so I wanted to ask you, the core argument, or starting premise of your article, is that the collapse of Soviet communism did have a significant effect on the North Korean leadership and on North Korea's trajectory as a whole. So could you just walk us through that argument, how North Korea interpreted the Soviet collapse, and then why that became so important to Pyongyang's survival strategy in the 1990s in terms of ideology, security, and regime survival?

Benjamin R. Young: Yeah. So I basically break down my argument into three different lessons that the North Koreans took from the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first being a social political lesson that the North Korean regime needed to strengthen ideology, at all costs. That was imperative because they mainly placed the blame of the Soviet Union on the collapse of ideological fervor, and the belief in the ideology of the Soviet system. They thought basically that Western cultural ideas infiltrated the Soviet body politic, and that led to the collapse of the system overall.

And then, my second lesson that the North Koreans took from the collapse of the USSR was a military lesson, and that is you can never let your guard down, and you need to have nuclear weapons in order to actually uphold the preservation of the entire system. They basically thought the Soviet army got weak ideologically. Yes, they had a huge national defense budget, but they lost the ideological fervor, and the lesson that they learned is that they should never actually have their nuclear security umbrella underneath the yoke of a foreign country, because that foreign country could collapse overnight.

And so this is kind of one of the ways in which North Korea also articulated, that the new frontier of Marxist-Leninist theory was that the military, not the working class, was the vanguard of socialist construction, which is very unorthodox within traditional communist theory.

And then the last lesson that I took was that the collapse of the Soviet Union–a lot of that they placed singular blame on Mikhail Gorbachev. They basically thought he was a pro-Western lackey, a renegade, and that you can never have a renegade leader because they could actually take over the entire system and bring about its rapid collapse. And they said that because they have this hereditary system where it is basically a blood kinship where power is passed down from Kim Il-sung, to Kim Jong Il, and now Kim Jong Un, that this makes their system more revolutionary, more stable, and more actually pure in terms of socialist ideology.

And so that's not what I thought the lessons that they would take. I thought maybe they would think, "Oh, we should reform our economy. We, you know, the Soviets were spending too much money on their military. They had this foreign adventure in Vietnam that bankrupted them." That's not the lesson at all that they took. In many respects, they kind of doubled down on their Stalinism.

And I just found that very interesting because I think there is a common misconception that North Korea is unknowable, or that it is some sort of crazy leader in charge of the system. And I actually just found that North Korea, they thought the Soviet Union really betrayed its ideological path in 1956 with Khrushchev's secret speech. They thought that basically the Soviet Union, since the death of Stalin, really was not very communist anymore.

And so this also brings me back to one of the reasons why I wrote this article, and that was, I think there's a little bit too much scholarship or research right now on North Korea's ideological alternative sources besides communism. So, like, there's some scholars out there that think Confucianism had a huge impact on the North Korean leadership. There's some that actually think, like imperial Japanese far-right ideology, and even there's a recent book about how Christianity may have ideological roots in North Korea.

And I think we've gotten too far from what is obvious in front of us, and that is the party state, and that the everyday life in North Korea revolves around these institutions, and these institutions are based on the Soviet model, specifically the Stalinist model. And that, I think, is really key in understanding North Korea and why it is the way it is today.

Ryan Vest: Well, Ben as an, again, as a North Korea non-expert, one of the ideas in your article that really stuck out the most to me was this idea of Juche.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what Juche is, and how it describes North Korea's views on political self-reliance, economic self-sufficiency, military independence, and these other very North Korean ideals that it seems–this term seems to kind of bind them all together.

Benjamin R. Young: Yeah, there's been a lot of work done on Juche and what it means, what it doesn't mean, and there's some disagreements within the field of North Korean studies on Juche. As far as the North Koreans understand Juche, they kind of break it down into three different sectors: economic self-reliance, military self-defense, and political independence. And so as far as how they understood this within the scope and framework of the Soviet collapse, they basically understood Juche as a non-imported form of socialism, and the fact that they had, what they thought, was this organic grassroots form of socialism under the rubric of Juche, that is what allowed their system to persevere.

And so it became kind of a legitimating language and narrative that the regime built up. And the way I've kind of always understood Juche is that it, you know, means self-strengthening, self-reliance. And a lot of people will point out, "Oh, like North Korea, they've never really been self-reliant. They've had to depend on subsidies from the Soviet Union, and China, and yada yada." But to me, it's always, it's been always a utopian thought.

And every country has some sort of narrative or mythology. You know, even the US, we have a lot of narratives and mythologies around American exceptionalism that, you know, we're a city up on a hill. We spread democracy around the world. History is much more complicated than that, but that's the story we like to tell ourselves. And the North Koreans are no different. They like to tell themselves, "Oh, we've always been self-reliant. We've done everything ourselves," blah, blah, blah. You know, Kim Il-sung was the best leader ever. He personally defeated the Japanese imperialists. That's not the case at all. It's really the Soviet Red Army that defeated the Japanese imperialists along with the US.

So Juche, it's a utopian thought. And I think that we tend to kind of miss out on that, or not think of it in terms of utopian ideals. And so for the North Koreans, they kind of use the collapse of the Soviet Union as a way to say, "Hey, fellow North Korean citizens, we survived because we have Juche. And we need to believe more ardently in our system because our great leader brought this great thought to our people.

And even better, Juche is an advancement of traditional Marxist-Leninist theory because the birthplace of state socialism, the USSR, collapsed, and we need to take it into a new generation, a new direction. And who better than our great leader, Kim Il-sung? And then in 1994, he dies, and then Kim Jong Il. And Kim Jong Il introduces a new theory known as Songun, which is military first politics. That's kind of how Juche operated in the 1990s within the framework of the Soviet collapse.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: So I want to ask you about Songun in just a minute. But, before we do that, I wanted to ask you, you know, we've been talking so far largely about rhetoric, about the belief system, about ideology, and I wanted to ask you to link that to behavior.

So, how did North Korea's sort of self-identification as a fortress of socialism after the collapse of the USSR shape not just this sort of sense of historic mission, but also Pyongyang's domestic politics, and its foreign policy behavior?

Benjamin R. Young: Yeah. One of the things that the North Koreans did, that I thought was quite interesting, is that in 1992 they hosted this huge party or a conference of all these different communist parties. And China, Laos, and Vietnam didn't actually send any dignitaries to this event. But Pyongyang hosted this conference because they were basically announcing they're the new citadel of socialism in the world.

And this kind of counteracts, I think, a lot of the narrative that, "Oh, North Korea, they totally abandoned socialism. They could care less about the international proletarian movement." But, in fact, they were announcing to their citizens in state-run media, that they were the new vanguard of the global revolutionary movement and they were going to be internationalists in a new kind of way.

And so, you know, there's always this narrative as well that North Korea is a hermit kingdom, that it doesn't really ever emerge out into the international community, and I just don't think that's true. I mean, we see that even today with North Korean troops helping Russia in Kursk, and now North Koreans helping to rebuild some of these eastern Donbas regions in Ukraine that are now under Russian occupation.

And the thing is that North Korea has always been internationalists, they say this in their publications, but they don't want to operate in the Western international order or the US, "rules-based international order." They want to operate in their international order, which is really based on Pyongyang, Moscow, Beijing, Havana, you know, maybe Vietnam and Laos. But that's what they see the international order as, and they think that the West has too much power in the current international system, and they would like to reorient towards more of an anti-hegemonic, what you could call multipolar system. And I actually think that's what we are drifting into anyways–is a multipolar system. There's been a lot of research, of course, on the multipolar system, but I think that's inevitable we're going that way.

But in terms of what they were actually doing in terms of behavior, what we really see in the 1990s is North Korea rapidly developing their nuclear weapons program despite the fact that they lost a lot of Soviet subsidies. And in the mid-1990s, this is also when North Korea undergoes what is known as the Arduous March, which is a North Korean propaganda term for what is essentially a mass famine caused by gross mismanagement from the central government in North Korea.

Basically, they just ran out of money. They ran out of food. Their public distribution system failed, and there was an emergence of black markets. And as you know, Sheena, you've done a lot of research on this–the North Korean government didn't love these markets, but they had to allow this out of necessity just to allow the people to survive.

But meanwhile, over six hundred thousand people died in North Korea as a result of the famine. So the collapse of the Soviet Union, in terms of North Korean behavior–it didn't do what a lot of normal states would do. They didn't actually allow for economic reforms, opening up a free enterprise.

They basically doubled down on the military. They likely increased the military budget, which was already extortionate and excessive. And they basically allowed their public distribution system, which is really the torchbearer of a state socialist system, to become dysfunctional. And it's actually only in recent years that Kim Jong Un has revived the public distribution system, and he has really actually, to my surprise, really revived the command economy in North Korea. It'll be interesting to see where that goes.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: One of the other things North Korea did during this period that is kind of fun for listeners who are not aware is, you know, got into all kinds of state-sponsored organized criminal activity. They counterfeited the world's best $100 bills. They started using their state factories to manufacture really high-quality meth that they were basically wholesalers to organized crime groups across Asia. Some of that stuff is wild, but, yeah, not a conventional response to an economic crisis by any means. Anyway, Ryan, over to you.

Ryan Vest: Oh, yeah, certainly. Definitely. You know, Ben, you've already touched on it a couple of times, but I'd like to really dig into the meat of your article, of your argument.

As the North Korean leaders saw the Soviet collapse, what particularly did they believe had gone wrong with the Soviet Communist Party, with the Soviet Armed Forces, and this broader ideological cohesion of the Soviet system?

Benjamin R. Young: Yeah. So a lot of what the North Koreans understood in terms of the Soviet collapse, they didn't trace this singularly to like the 1980s or 1990s. They traced it back to Khrushchev, and they basically thought that the Soviet Communist Party had a bunch of leaders that engaged in what the Chinese would call historical nihilism. And that is essentially a fancy communist term for saying that you cannot talk poorly about your revolutionary ancestors, chiefly Stalin.

And this is something that Xi Jinping harps on a lot, historical nihilism, and it's something that the North Koreans engaged in as well. They didn't call it historical nihilism, but they were doing the same thing. And that is essentially that they thought it was a series of leaders that betrayed the ethos of the party. And then they saw this kind of decay and rot spread throughout the system.

And one of the things that they harped on is that in the 1990s, while the Soviet Union was being dismantled, they said that the Soviet Red Army was full of drunkards. And they said that while the party and the revolutionary system was being basically corroded from the inside, people were–the soldiers were actually drunk on the streets. So they really actually harped on drunkenness and alcoholism in the Soviet Union 1980s, which was a real problem. But they basically portrayed the Soviet Union as becoming a haven for homelessness, for drunkenness, alcoholism, and even domestic abuse. I saw some publications note that as well.

And for the North Koreans, the period of transition from the Soviet-led socialist world to now basically them being locked into an international system dominated by the US was really harrowing, because you also had the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994. But we also tend to forget that he was personally grooming Kim Jong Il to take power since the 1970s. So I actually don't think it was unstable, as a lot of people think, because Kim Jong Il was essentially the leader since I think about the early 1980s.

What I actually think was a much more unstable time in North Korean history was the transition from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un, because Kim Jong Un was very, very new to the upper echelons of ruling a brutal party state, and he was quite young. And so he didn't have the military credentials like his father did. And a lot of these military credentials are just kind of made up and fluff, but within these types of systems it matters, in terms of legitimacy.

And so one of the things that the North Koreans harped on, is that we're going to be this place of “Purity.” Purity in terms of we're not going to have drunkenness. Our military is not only going to be, you know, soldiers with guns, they're going to actually help construct buildings. And so when I actually went to North Korea in 2012, one of the things that really surprised me was that you saw the military doing non-military things. They were picking up stuff on the road. They were de-weeding, they were cutting grass, they were building apartment buildings.

And so one of the things when you go on these state-monitored trips in North Korea is you can't take pictures of the military. And I told my tour guide, "That's impossible. They're everywhere. They're doing things that our military would never do." They function almost more like National Guard/local police/community volunteers. So I told him, "That's impossible, so you just have to delete my photos at the end there because I'm just going to be taking photos." And at the end of the trip, North Korean minders, they do go through your photos, which I, you know, which was very jarring to me as an American.

But I think that behavior was really harped on in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, because they wanted their military to not just be the guys with guns, but be part of socialist construction. They wanted them to be present on the domestic front, helping people, you know, defending the country. And so I think that is something that is unique to North Korea. And also part of it is that North Korea has a 10-year military conscription. You have to be in the military for 10 years, all, you know, young, healthy males and females. And that is why North Korea has one of the largest standing armies in the world.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: So I actually want to pick up this discussion that we mentioned earlier about Songun and military first policy, because I do think it's really distinctive and important to understand in terms of how North Korea has conducted itself in the post-Cold War, or post-Soviet collapse period.

And so, you know, you mentioned earlier that the military first line really kind of departs from traditional Marxist-Leninist theory, which is more about the party and the working class, and North Korea is unique in elevating the military while retaining a Communist Party state, and a highly personalist dictatorship leadership structure. So, how did the North Koreans justify that shift to a military first ideology?

Benjamin R. Young: I think that this is one of the things that North Korea has always been pretty adept at, is being dynamic. There tends to be this conception of North Korea as being stagnant, as being kind of anachronistic. But what we actually see is North Korea has always been dynamic, not only in terms of their behavior and how to make money.

North Korea is one of the top cryptocurrency heist nations in the world now. But also in terms of how they're able to present a narrative to their public. And one of the things is that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they portrayed this as, “Oh, the Soviet Union collapsed because they got lazy.” They essentially betrayed the essence of the revolutionary system, in terms of the workers and peasants.

They no longer had power, and that too much of the power went to these bureaucrats. They called it bureaucratism, and this became kind of a bad word for the North Koreans in that terms of people became more selfish, and that we're going to be different because we actually have a new contribution to communism, and that the military is going to be the first vanguard of the system.

One of the ways in which North Korea was able to kind of substantiate this is that they said, unlike other states, revolutionary communist states, our country was first founded by the military, that Kim Il-sung and his band of guerrillas–they came before the party. And you might be thinking, "Who cares?" Like, this is just like crazy communist speak lexicon. Like, who cares? But for party states like this, the origins are very important. And they were able to basically say that Kim Il-sung's band of anti-Japanese guerrillas–they came before the construction of the Korean Workers' Party, because Kim Il-sung was so brilliant that he knew that you had to have a strong military.

Obviously, Kim Il-sung's band of guerrillas did not personally defeat the Japanese military. It was largely the Soviet Red Army. But this helped to present a narrative and provide propaganda fuel to the regime during periods of severe economic depression, during periods of external turmoil.

And so I always think that this is interesting because it actually became a way for North Korea to say, "Hey, you know, workers and peasants, I know things are bad. You're not getting public distribution anymore. You're not getting food and gifts from the party center. But we need to devote all of our resources to the military, specifically to the nuclear weapons program. Because if we don't, we're going to end up like these guys. We're going to end up like the Soviet Union."

And they actually also pointed out what was happening to Serbia. This was surprising to me. They spent a lot of bandwidth on talking about the US air bombing of Serbia, saying, "Hey, those guys over there in the former Yugoslavia, they're getting bombed to smithereens by the US and NATO because they don't have nuclear weapons. The only way you can guarantee your national sovereignty is by having nuclear weapons, having a nuclear deterrent." And the North Koreans, one of the things in terms of actually them being quite resolute is they understood the power of nuclear weapons, that it is the ultimate deterrent. And they rapidly sped up their nuclear enrichment program.

They lied to the US in the 1994 agreed framework. There's a whole bunch of books out there about the process. And so they were always looking to the international environment in terms of lessons to take. And so they were looking at the collapse of the Soviet Union, but we also tend to forget what was happening–you had the issue in the Balkans. You had Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, et cetera, et cetera. And they looked at those events saying, "Man, that's a mess over there. We don't want to be like that. We need nuclear weapons because the US/NATO is going to come in, take us over."

So some of this was paranoia, but some of this was also in terms of them thinking in terms of grand strategy. What is going to first preserve our system? And, and that they were, I think, probably correct in determining that it was nuclear weapons, as we can see now with Iran.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: It's really interesting to me because China and North Korea are both watching the fall of the Soviet Union. Both have thought really hard about the relationship between the party and the military, and they come to slightly different answers. That's a subject for another time offline, but I do think it's worth noting that North Korea's military first model is different than the Chinese model in which it's still very much a party army, and you don't have this idea of the military preceding the party.

So that even among, sort of the holdout socialist regimes that you mentioned earlier, the four or five left standing, North Korea has a sort of unique answer, and I find that fascinating.

Anyway.

Ryan Vest: It is fascinating. I mean, and one of the great things about this topic, Ben, is that it touches so many other things. It kind of infiltrates all of this study of North Korea, which, I mean, we could be here for the next three hours talking about all the different aspects of this.

But one thing I really did want to dig into more is in your article, you talk about North Korea's fear of Western cultural and information infiltration, and how that's affected the country. How did the Soviet experience shape North Korea's later approach to information control, internal discipline, and political succession?

Benjamin R. Young: One of the things that the North Koreans kept harping on is that they thought that there was this ideological pollution from the West that basically brought down the Soviet system. And when you actually narrow that down, what, you know, cultural pollution, what does that mean? And they left it kind of vague in their publications. But I think it was a range of things. I think it could be, you know, blue jeans. I think it could be jazz music. I think it could be even more big thought things like rule of law, human rights.

And they thought that basically this led to Soviet citizens not believing in the integrity of their system, wanting more, you know, "individual freedom." I'm not sure that's actually what brought down the Soviet system. But that's the lessons that the North Koreans took.

And so they talked about how you have to have a mosquito net. They talk about things in these kinds of almost parables, and they talk about how you had to have a mosquito net, in order to catch the pests from the West. And to me, this mosquito net, what they're trying to say is you need to have an information blockade. You cannot allow, you know, Times Magazine or Western journalists getting into North Korea because they're going to basically capture the minds and consciousness of our people.

And so that's one of the things that the North Koreans took from the Soviet system is that you cannot have Western ideas come into the country, because it's going to inevitably bring about a change in the system. And I think that's something that Kim Jong Un has actually learned. And I think the COVID pandemic was a really–they were very opportunistic in terms of them cracking down on South Korean dramas, DVDs, and so on.

In many ways, North Korea has kept up their mosquito net. They have not let ideas from the West. And for North Koreans, the West includes South Korea because they think of South Korea as a US Yankee colony, and that South Korea is not even Korean anymore, that it's just basically a US puppet state. Obviously, that's not true.

They have always been very opportunistic in terms of what's happening in the international environment. They're saying, "Oh, there's this, you know, really crazy virus. What we're going to do is for the next three years, close down our borders, be really harsh in terms of our information blockade, get rid of all the South Korean dramas, and build a border wall, a double border wall." And that's what they did during the pandemic.

And I think they learned that whenever an international event happens, something colossal like the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the COVID pandemic, you take advantage of it. You don't just go, "Oh no, what are we going to do?" You actually turn it in a different way, saying, "How can this benefit the party leadership, the party center?" So it's a very different way of thinking.

It's very brutal and repressive, but I actually don't think we can look at these regimes from a US or Western-centric perspective, because we are not understanding them on their terms. And I think we do the same with Russia, and we do the same with China, and we do the same with North Korea.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Can I ask a follow-up question about succession? Because we kind of threw succession in the end of that question, but I think it's a little bit different.

North Korea famously in the 1970s had defined hereditary succession as sort of feudalistic and inappropriate for a socialist society, and yet you look at them today and they are the, one of the only, I think the only socialist country to have pulled off not one, but two hereditary transitions of power, and there are rumors that they may be looking at a third with Kim Jong Un's daughter, Kim Ju-ae, which would be quite unusual in any authoritarian system for a number of reasons.

But is that just another example of this sort of flexibility and adaptiveness that you mentioned earlier, or kind of how do you pull that off?

Benjamin R. Young: Yeah. Well, the North Koreans, the way they kind of present it to their people is they're saying, "Oh, like this was an independent process. It definitely has nothing to do with the fact that it's from the same bloodline." This is how they first interpreted it, that, "Oh, you know, Kim Jong-il, he's this great military leader. He did all these great things. He earned this."

But we actually see a transition in terms of their regime narrative as they started to focus more on bloodline, the Mount Paektu revolutionary bloodline, and that you can only come from this pure bloodline, that they only have the credentials in order to lead the regime.

And so, yeah, as you said at the end there, it'll be interesting to see if Kim Jong Un can pull this off with his daughter, that she will be the first female leader of the North Korean government. I have doubts, but I also think that North Korea is quite savvy in terms of how they present themselves to the world, and having a woman leader could be very creative in terms of their soft power projection.

But in terms of going back to my article, you are right that they said that hereditary succession is feudalistic. It's a backwards practice. It's medieval. It's pre-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, which is the ultimate sin in communist speak. And so, the way they were able to kind of handle this is saying, "Hey, the Soviets, they lost the entire system because they didn't have hereditary succession. We know what we're getting. You know, we don't want a Gorbachev. We don't want a Trotsky. We're going to have our own guy in power. You know what he's going to do. He's going to keep the system afloat."

And so the North Koreans, besides harping on how much they hate Gorbachev, they also harped a lot about how much they hated Trotsky, that Trotsky betrayed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that you always had these renegades in the system. And what you need to do with the renegades in the system was what Stalin did. And what Stalin did was take an ice pick to Trotsky.

The North Koreans learned that you also need to be brutal, and so I think they have continued this. You see this with Kim Jong Un killing his half-brother in a brutal fashion in the Malaysian airport. You see Kim Jong Un also killing his uncle, not with, you know, perhaps artillery fire, Jang Song-thaek

And so, you know, the North Korean system, it's brutal because they think they have to be. They think in order to continue the preservation of the system, only brutality works, and this goes back to what they think is really their idol, and besides Kim Il Sung, that's Stalin. And I think that in order to understand North Korea, you have to understand Stalinism.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: So we're coming up on the end of our time, but I think we have a couple more questions we wanted to ask you, and one of those is just that because North Korea is so closed, there often are popular misconceptions about North Korea. What do you think are the biggest misconceptions that your article can help us think more accurately about?

Benjamin R. Young: Yeah. I think one of the biggest misconceptions, as I mentioned before, is that it's an anachronistic state that never changes. And I think my article tells us that the state does change, and it takes advantage of opportunities in the international realm to preserve and strengthen their regime consolidation.

Another thing that I think my article defeats this preconception of is North Korea as a hermit kingdom, that they never actually care about the world, that they're just like, you know, they live in caves and mountains, and they never come out. And I don't think that's true at all. I think that my publication history has always kind of mentioned that they've always been quite active internationally, maybe not in the way the US thinks it should be, but they are very much invested in learning from the outside world, and taking advantage of it.

And then the last thing, that I think my article talks quite a bit about, is the fact that North Korea really took time and effort into portraying themself as an extension of communism, that they weren't portraying communism, they were actually the most communist state, and that they were going to be the next citadel or the next fortress of socialism, that they were going to continue the global revolutionary movement.

And we might think "Oh, that's just rhetoric, that's just narrative,” but I don't think that's true. I think they actually take this quite seriously. And in recent years, Kim Jong Un has actually revived the term communism in his speeches, and you see the North Korean state-run media mentioning communism.

There was a period of time where they didn't mention communism at all. But we see this actually coming back into North Korea, propaganda speak. And I think that's very interesting.

Ryan Vest: So I'd like to wrap up just with one last question, Ben. As we look at everything we've talked about today, this understanding of how the fall of Soviet socialism has affected the way that North Korea sees the world and sees its place in the world–what are the implications that policymakers need to take away from this, or things from your article that can help decision-makers and policymakers in Washington better understand how we can deal with North Korea, and how we can develop better policies toward North Korea?

Benjamin R. Young: I think my thoughts about this probably aren't what a lot of people in the Beltway would like, but I think we need to totally get over CVID–you know, the complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization of North Korea. I think that is long gone. I think North Korea, they're never going to give up their nuclear weapons. And in order to engage in North Korea, some of their other problematic behaviors, like in terms of their hacking, their cryptocurrency heist, I think you need to start with actually talking to them about things other than nuclear weapons.

You know, nuclear weapons are kind of the elephant in the room when it comes to North Korea. But I think that window is gone. I think North Korea, I mean, they essentially won the game against the US in terms of securing nuclear weapons, and that's unfortunate, but, you know, North Korea is not also a crazy regime. They're not going to just blow up the world just because. So I think that in terms of understanding North Korea, we need to get over the fact that, you know, we essentially lost the game against North Korea in terms of their nuclear weapons development. They have nuclear weapons.

Now it's in terms of actually limiting their spreading of those nuclear weapons, in terms of their program getting even more robust, in terms of limiting their delivery systems. Because it's not just about having, you know, enriched uranium and plutonium. They're way above that now. They're way advanced.

And so it's in terms of actually limiting their abilities to not only have different delivery systems, which they're getting much better at, but also exporting these technologies to nefarious actors abroad. Because whenever North Korea has some sort of new military technology, we tend to also see this in other places. They are not above selling their weapons to anybody. And so, you know, we see this with North Korea selling artillery shells to Russia, and now they're selling their people to Russia to help with their operations in Ukraine.

So I think that, you know, when we talk about North Korea in terms of policy making and behavior, we need to be realistic and think about, you know, not utopian, "Oh, North Korea's going to get rid of their nuclear weapons, and that'll be great," because I think that's long gone. I think it's about actually limiting provocations and ensuring the stability of our allies in Northeast Asia and limiting the ability of North Korea to project power overseas, because it's very clear that they're becoming more comfortable with that.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Super interesting, and there's an ongoing debate, even in terms of whether or not China has backed off its previous commitment to the denuclearization of North Korea. It's certainly gotten less attention in some formal Chinese documents, although not all of them. But yeah, really interesting.

Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a really fun and interesting discussion.

Benjamin R. Young: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation as well.

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: Thanks for joining us on Horns of a Dilemma, the podcast of the Texas National Security Review. Our guest today has been Dr. Benjamin Young, author of the article, "Saving Socialism: What North Korea Learned from the Collapse of the Soviet Union," which as always can be accessed for free on our website. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen. You can always find more of our work at TNSR.org.

Today's episode was produced by TNSR Digital and Technical Manager Jordan Morning, and made possible by the University of Texas System. This is Sheena Chestnut Greitens and Ryan Vest. Thanks again for listening.