North Koreans dislike when outsiders refer to their country as “North Korea.”

They prefer the official title, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), as it represents Pyongyang as the true, legitimate Korean government. Yet, according to Western standards, North Korea is neither “democratic” nor a “republic.” So how did this totalitarian state and hereditary dictatorship acquire this contradictory title?

As the Soviet Union expanded its influence into Eastern Europe in the early 1940s, Moscow created the idea of “people’s democracies” in order to distinguish new Leninist republics from previous bourgeois regimes, but at the same time reaffirming the Soviet