During the 1980s and early 90s, a somewhat unusual system of special stores allowed some residents of North Korea to purchase everything from chocolates and footwear to luxury products like Japanese electronics and French perfume.

This seemingly capitalist exchange existed for a simple reason: the government wanted to encourage its citizens to spend foreign currency in the DPRK, so it implemented a system modeled on similar shops in the Soviet Union selling high-quality goods in order to obtain hard currency – shops which existed despite a well-established tradition of agitprop disparaging Western money.

SOVIET INSPIRATION

Since the inception of the