AS THE YEAR 1990 OPENED, THE BERLIN WALL HAD BEEN reduced to chunks of rubble hawked by souvenir vendors in a soon-to-be-reunited Germany. The Soviet Union was being wrenched apart at the seams. Mao Zedong’s face was an iconic image on kitschy watches that American tourists bought in Beijing. The former Communist dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, not coincidentally a close personal friend of Kim Il-sung’s, had recently been executed by a firing squad. Statues of Lenin were being pulled off their pedestals and smashed to pieces. Communist Party cadres around the world were gobbling up Big Macs for lunch and washing them down with Coca-Cola. In the hermit kingdom of North Korea, however, life carried on as it always had. To the extent that North Korea’s censors allowed in reports of communism’s demise, they were watered down and twisted with a distinctive spin. As far as the Rodong Sinmun was concerned, the troubles elsewhere in the Communist bloc were due to the inherent weakness of the people.
