How did I end up in North Korea and, broadly speaking, how did I end up doing North Korean studies? This is a question that the present author has been asked many times. Perhaps it is best to answer this question by talking about the Korean language, history and culture taught in the Soviet Union of the period 1945-91.

Soviet academia was organized in its own peculiar way. One of its features was a clear distinction between research centers managed by the lofty-sounding Academia of Science (in everything but name the “Soviet Ministry of Sciences”) on one hand and universities on another. People who worked at research centers were full-time researchers who occasionally bestowed their wisdom upon post-grads, whereas people at universities were supposed to concentrate largely on teaching, though a measure of research activity was expected and indeed required. In fact, the same distinction exists in North Korea, whose academic system is very similar to the Soviet Union of the 1950s.