For most of us North Korea is a tragic enigma. We see little more than the occasional glimpse of Kim Jong Il and those endless military parades. What has your experience been?

I lived in North Korea for a year from 1984 to 1985. I went there from a relatively mild dictatorship which then existed in the Soviet Union. Of course, the USSR was an authoritarian state, no free elections, a lot of censorship and the like, but in terms of personal freedom it was a relatively free place. At this point in the Soviet Union, North Korea was seen as the embodiment of dictatorship, so I had very negative assumptions when I went there. I sort of expected to see robot-like people, goose-stepping on the streets, soldiers with automatic rifles standing at every corner. This was not the case. It appeared to be a perfectly normal country. I remember how surprised I was, in my first few days, that it did not look that terrible. Eventually I came to realise that it was indeed a very bad, very brutal dictatorship, but most people had a normal life nonetheless.

Were you able to draw any conclusions about life under the regime at this point?

I saw something important. First, when people live under a very oppressive regime they don’t usually think much about politics unless they are unlucky enough to be in a concentration camp, where they still think largely about getting food. Even if our lives are determined by politics, I don’t believe that we think of politics most of the time. People manage to lead normal lives in all kinds of societies, including North Korea.

You were in Pyongyang as an exchange student from Leningrad University. Did you come to Korea as a linguist?

No, always as an historian. In North Korea I began to feel interested, almost immediately, as to how the society developed. Why it reached such a grotesque level of social control and how in the past, for it is now very different, did people manage to live in an environment where the authorities never lost sight of them? It was not visible at once, but as I made such contacts and began to look around it became quite obvious. I began to study North Korea in the mid 80’s and I am still engaged in this study to this day.

Do you think there has been a big change since your first experiences in the mid 80’s?

Huge. It is a completely different country nowadays. This is often under-appreciated. North Korean authorities are doing their best to keep the façade of a non-changing country. When Kim Jong Il became the new leader of the country he said: “don’t expect any change from me.” Change has happened nonetheless, whether the government has wanted it or not. The changes have been very profound and remarkable. Unlike China, it happened against the government’s wishes. Up to the present day, the state has sought to put the genie back in the bottle. They want a return to the situation that existed in the 70’s and 80’s - to a perfect Stalinist state. At same time they are also trying to hide these changes, especially from outside visitors. When you arrive at Pyongyang it looks completely unchanged. My first visit was in 1984, my most recent in 2005. Externally, in these 20 years, it has not changed. The city looks the same but society is now completely different. Under Kim Il Song’s rule until the early 1990’s, North Korea was a perfect Stalinist state. It was a strange mixture of Confucian traditionalism, nationalism and Stalinism. Economically it was very Stalinist, based on total state property; even small private economic activity was discouraged or banned. In the 1990’s the old economy collapsed. It had been inefficient and only survived so long as the Soviet Union and China were willing to provide North Korea with aid. When the aid flow abruptly ended the result was economic disaster. The economy collapsed, with the partial exception of the military sector. In order to survive, the populace had no choice but to rediscover capitalism. It was market economy from below. Until this point people lived on government rations, there was almost no free trade, nearly total rationing of everything. This system was introduced in the late 1950’s and became all encompassing in the 1960’s. Change occurred largely because the government was no longer able to provide rations. Since the early 1990s people were forced to find ways to generate other, independent, means of income. Booming markets began to grow, there was smuggling, farmers began to work on their private plots, low-level officials, sometimes out of compassion but more frequently in search of bribes, began to turn a blind eye on all of this “bad” activity. To all intents and purposes, North Korea is no longer a perfect Stalinist economy. It is more like a country in central Africa, but with a bad and cold climate.