On April 25th, NK Net’s third lecture in their North Korea Human Rights speaker series featured the well-known North Korea watcher and commentator, Dr. Andrei Lankov. Begining his lecture, Lankov explained that if someone were to look up “North Korea” on the Internet, they would immediately learn that the country is an “irrational, unpredictable, idealistically driven Stalinist dictatorship.” He took issue with this description, pointing outthat the country’s leadership as being actually “highly rational, generally predictable, hardly Stalinist,” summizing that in general, “they basically know what they are doing.”

Lankov continued by talking about the North Korean leadership’s ultimate goal, which he summarized as “wanting to die in their beds at a very old age.” He said that the current leadership has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Interestingly, because Kim Jong-un is much younger than his colleagues at the upper echelons of North Korea’s government, Lankov pointed out that he might not prescribe to the same ideal. However, because Kim Jong-un lacks a personal support base in the government, Lankov reminded the audience that he would have to rely on the support of his father’s advisors. He suggested that the younger Kim would therefore continue his father’s policies for the first few years because they “worked perfectly well.” As evidence of this, Lankov pointed to the recent smooth transition of power in North Korea, noting that there was “no sign of challengers and no new faces, everything went as expected.”