Life under Communism: Aquariums of Pyongyang is a compelling firsthand account of life under North Korea's oppressive communist regime. (Book Review).

Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang CholHwan and Pierre Rigoulot, Basic Books: New York, 2001, 238 pages, hardbound, $24.00.

Aquariums of Pyongyang is a valuable eyewitness account of one of the most brutal and least-known Stalinist tyrannies of the past century. Originally published in France by coauthor Pierre Rigoulot (a contributor to The Back Book of Communism), this Basic Books translation recounts the 10 years author Kang Chol-Hwan suffered in a gulag at the hands of the North Korean gangster state.

Nine-year-old Chol-Hwan should have been an unlikely candidate for punishment by the Communist state. His grandmother had been an early Communist Party member and an anchor of the influential Chosen Soren (Korean Communist) exile organization in Japan, where she ran the organization's powerful Kyoto branch. His grandfather had used his considerable fortune in casino holdings to save the party from financial trouble.

Inside the Aquarium

When Chosen Soren waged a powerful propaganda campaign to get ethnic Koreans in Japan to return to North Korea in the post-war years, Chol-Hwan's family was swayed by the propaganda they helped to create. The North Korean regime engineered the repatriation campaign to get its hands on much-needed Japanese hard currency and consumer goods. The family returned to their ancestral lands in North Korea in the 1960s, and the grandparents were given positions of relative power within the Party in the capital district of Pyongyang. Though impoverished by modern Western standards (and the family's former lifestyle in Japan), the Kangs lived well compared to most North Korean families. Chol-Hwan was even able to start a little aquarium for some fish he acquired.

The family nevertheless lost its freedom. Like the fish in Chol-Hwan's aquarium, the family increasingly found itself under surveillance Chol-Hwan's horrifying account is a classic example that there is no security under a tyranny.

The Kangs suffered from a factional power struggle within the Party in 1977, when most of the Korean exiles who had returned from Japan after the Second World War were sent off to the gulags. The grandparents 'lifetime of faithful service to the Korean Workers' (Communist) Party counted for nothing when Chol-Hwan's grandfather was arrested and taken away to a labor camp in July 1977. He was never seen again. Chol-Hwan and his father, sister, grandmother, and uncle were all carted off to the Yodok camp several weeks later. Only Chol-Hwan's mother remained behind. She was forced by the Party to divorce her husband and told that her family was dead. The tragedy that befell the Kang family was not unusual; families of suspected counterrevolutionaries in Communist North Korea are customarily sent off to labor camps when one of the clan is fingered.

At Yodok, the motherless nine-year-old boy and his younger sister endured beatings from guards and their "teachers." The Communists frequently executed those attempting to escape. And the camp-supplied diet of 500 grams of corn per day guaranteed death by starvation or malnutrition-induced pellagra unless supplemented by snakes, mice, and salamanders found or trapped by prisoners in the fields they worked. Prisoners could only avoid frostbite in the minus 20[degrees] F winters by stripping the rags off the dead. And if a woman became pregnant, she was force to abort her baby.

"School" for camp children consisted of several morning hours of memorizing the speeches of "great leader" Kim IlSung and an occasional propaganda film. The students would ordinarily use the films to catch some sleep between the propaganda sessions and the heavy labor in the afternoons. Chol-Hwan noted that the propaganda films often turned out to be counter-productive when the students actually paid attention. "The fierce struggle of Kim Il-Sung's partisans and the cruel treatment meted out to them by the Japanese were supposed o arouse our sympathy, but they wound up doing the opposite....The dungeons, brutalities, in-humane guards, and meager food supplies depicted on the screen didn't move us; we were living these things every day. Except our misery wasn't inflicted by [foreign] enemies but by our own compatriots!"

By sticking close to his family and not making trouble, Chol-Hwan and his family won release from the camp after 10 years. Once released, Chol-Hwan amassed a tidy sum by selling gifts on the black market obtained from his Japanese relatives. Since he had bribed the local party officials with some of these gifts, he was able to purchase a transistor radio and listen to South Korean stations in secret. "We liked listening to the Christian programs on the Korean Broadcasting System," Chol-Hwan recalled. "The message of love and respect for one's fellow man was sweet as honey to us. It was so different from what we were used to hearing." Despite the bribes, word came that Chol-Hwan was under surveillance and likely to be arrested again and sent back to the camp. He and a friend fled the country, by way of China, to South Korea.

Communist Hypocrisy

Chol-Hwan poignantly observes that the North Korean regime is the pinnacle of the very things its official propaganda condemns: systemic corruption; greed for property; and a rigid class system. "Relations follow a strict hierarchy" in North Korea, Chol-Hwan noted with amazement. But in South Korea, "we are all equal!" Kim Il-Sung's regime was nearly as class oriented as the old Hindu caste system in India. "In North Korea, children of peasants are destined to remain peasants. They are systematically prevented from climbing the social ladder and can only advance by joining the army or by greasing a lot of palms -- an option that presupposes having connections abroad."

The party leadership also spawned a materialistic culture marked by rampant bribery. "The regime that never tires of denouncing capitalism has birthed a society where money is king -- more so than any capitalist society I have visited." Despite this insight, Chol-Hwan never indicated any awareness that this was the plan all along. "This is all very revealing of North Korea's present situation and its inevitable slide from communism to capitalism," he noted. Chol-Hwan even seems to imply, wrongly, that there is a contradiction between the quest for money and Communism -- a common misperception. Money has long been used as a form of power. After reading The Communist Manifesto, one necessarily concludes that Marx's agenda was a sophisticated program for tyrannical government power rather than the "withering away of the state." It is a pity that Chol-Hwan didn't perceive that Communist ideology in North Korea performed exactly as originally designed by Marx, where ideology is deployed primarily as moral justific ation for gangster rule. But he did understand that this was exactly how Kim Il-Sung used Marxism. Because his book is fundamentally a compelling biographical story documenting that a gangster state abused him and his countrymen, these broader insights are not essential to the book. Aquariums of Pyongyang is an important expose of one of the worst tyrannies in human history.