ABSTRACT
The economic and political transformation of the Soviet Union has had a major impact on North Korea. The leadership in Pyongyang must be particularly concerned that, as a socialist country, North Korea is on the endangered species list. When the Soviet Red Army liberated the northern half of Korea from the Japanese in 1945, Stalin installed Kim Il-sung, a little-known Korean resistance leader, as the head of the northern government. For North Korea, the end of communism in the former Soviet Union was actually the third of the "communist shocks." The first came in 1989, when, one after the other, countries in Eastern Europe shed their old regimes and established diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea. North Korea still has a friend in China. North Korea has always been a closed society, intent on developing a socialist economy independent of both East and West.
