Excellent pieces on North Korea by Dr. Andrei Lan’kov. He lived in Pyongyang in the mid-1980s as an exchange student. Being Soviet, not Western, and knowing Korean, he probably had a better insight into the real life of the incredibly isolated (by elaborate government design) country. Lan’kov now teaches Korean history, culture and language at Australian National University in Canberra.
(Initial link via Ilya Vinarsky via Glosses. Also check out the root directory, North Korean Studies.)
Side note. On the staff page, his publications are listed thus:
His publications include: From Stalin to Kim Il Sung (Londong, 2002); Korean Works and Days (Moscow, 2000, in Russian); Factions and Political Conflicts in 16-18thCentury Korea (in Russian) (Petersburg, 1995); Political History of North Korea (in Korean) (Seoul, 1995); and, Under the Roofs of Pyongyang (Seoul, 1991).
What is “Londong”? Is it just London misspelled or some exotic place/publishing house I haven’t heard of? Sounds quite Korean to me.
Well, it looks like the book was published by Rudgers University in New Jersey, so the mystery remains.
Side note 2. Googling for “londong”, I came across this Mongolian site.