Book Review: North Korea: Caught in Time – Chris Springer with Balazs Szalo

Ford, G. (2012). North Korea: Caught in Time by Chris Springer with Balazs Szalontai, Asian Review of Books, 30 July.

Caught in Time is a collection of 150 pictures of North Korea—most never published before—in the dozen years between 1945 and 1957. These were discovered by Springer in two Hungarian State archives. The large majority were sourced from the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) with the addition of a handful from nameless Hungarian diplomats posted to Pyongyang—all set in context by a splendid introductory essay by Balazs Szalontai.

These photos were designed by the KCNA to shape an agenda. They are a cocktail of doctored and posed, staged and re-enacted, photo-opportunities and photo-journalism and it is impossible to be entirely sure which is which. No matter: they are revealing in both giving an insight into the previously unseen world of this long decade in the North and illustrating how Pyongyang wanted to be seen. Despite their official origins, with the retrospective evolution of history, many would be “unpublishable” today in the North.

Szalontai explains the asymmetrical horrors of the Korean War. The North lost more than 1.1 million people to battle and bombs, disease and hunger. The civil war was transformed after Washington’s intervention into one where poorly armed troops faced the latest hi-tech military hardware. They held their own only at an immense human cost. The North’s civilians, unlike those in the South, faced incessant carpet-bombing and napalm for years while the East coast port of Wonsan endured 861 straight days of naval shelling. Washington totally dominated sea and sky, save for a small pocket of airspace in the North-West where Russian pilots and planes flew strictly limited missions from Chinese airfields.

During the war, typhus and cholera, meningitis and TB revisited the North. In the last six months of the war, more died of TB than at the Front and—at its conclusion—250,000 surviving soldiers had contracted the disease. Both during the war and after, famine stalked the land, driven by economic collapse, the trade deficit and natural and unnatural disasters as the U.S., in the last stages of the war, destroyed hydroelectric power stations and irrigation dams. Hundreds of thousands died as the civilian population was left at the mercy of the U.S.—and there was none [none what?].

The battle and bombs are prominent in Springer’s selection; epidemic and famine are missing. The photos overlap to cover both sides of the war: reconstruction and education, politics and culture. It is here that the magic of politics makes people vanish in a back to the future world.

One picture of the liberation of Seoul has Stalin’s portrait smiling down from the trams, yet in a subsequent version he’s gone missing. Kim Tu Bong—the North’s titular Head of State in 1953—is later airbrushed out of photo of Kim Il Sung’s signing of the Armistice, which itself disappears from view as the war’s outcome is increasingly narrated as victory rather than draw.

There are also ghostly appearances of today’s non-persons. Vice-Premier Pak Hon Yong, the pre-war leader of the South’s communists who was executed after the war as a U.S. spy, makes a showing, as does Choe Chang Ik speaking at the 3rd Party Congress that directly led to his death and the purge of his faction.

All in all, Caught in Time is a valuable window into a North few have seen before. The propaganda posters are there along with monuments to the Soviet liberation of Korea in 1945, U.S. POW’s marching in the streets of Pyongyang to protest the war—even although only seventeen eventually chose to stay behind—and western communists investigating alleged U.S. biological weapons.

But what shines through is the individuality of the ordinary North Koreans portrayed. Both Washington and Pyongyang have conspired together to portray the North as the ultimate collective society and consequently tried to make its citizens invisible. Here Springer, by accident or design, exposes these attempts to hide the essential humanity at the heart of this much abused people. For this, he is to be thanked.