Many years ago, when I had just started to study North Korean culture, I lost a bet to my much more experienced colleague Prof. Andrei Lankov. One day, we looked through the table of contents of an issue of the journal Choson Munhak (Korean Literature) and came across the title of a poem: “My First Love.” Prof. Lankov was positive that the poem must be about Kim Il Sung. To me, it sounded a patent nonsense. I knew that Kim Il Sung’s DPRK was often compared to Stalinist Soviet Union, and Soviet culture of the 1930s-1950s for all