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Introduction: A victory of survival When the guns fell silent along the Imjin and the Yalu in July 1953, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) had survived—but only just. The Korean War had levelled cities, annihilated industrial plant, uprooted millions, and killed perhaps a tenth of the peninsula’s population. From that near-ruin, Kim Il-sung and the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) set out to rebuild a socialist state that would be more centralized, more militarized, and more ideologically disciplined than before the war. Between the armistice and the end of the 1970s, North Korea constructed an all-encompassing party-security apparatus;…