When Elena Berman, a Soviet citizen and the wife of the North Korean dramatist So Man Il, prepared to give birth to her son in a Pyongyang maternity hospital in 1959, she had a very unusual concern.

It was not the insufficiency of the doctors’ skills or the lack of necessary medical equipment (curiously enough, she found these to be quite satisfactory), but the permanent exhaustion of the nurses.

In her private notes, Elena wrote: “These girls were intern students, emaciated by constant hunger, endless political study sessions and meetings. Finding a minute, when doctors left they used to fall