How did I end up in North Korea and, broadly speaking, how did I end up doing North Korean studies? This is a question that the present author has been asked many times. Perhaps it is best to answer this question by talking about the Korean language, history and culture taught in the Soviet Union of the period 1945-91.

Soviet academia was organized in its own peculiar way. One of its features was a clear distinction between research centers managed by the lofty-sounding Academia of Science (in everything but name the “Soviet Ministry of Sciences”) on one hand and universities