This issue begins with an article by Andrei Lankov, who discusses the famine that devastated North Korea in the winter of 1954–1955 and the impact it had on Soviet–North Korean relations. The famine was mainly the result of North Korea's efforts to enforce agricultural collectivization, emulating the Stalinist model in the Soviet Union. The North Korean regime kept all information about the famine highly classified and prevented anything about it from being disclosed outside official circles in the Communist bloc. Soviet leaders, who were moving toward a denunciation of Iosif Stalin and a partial rapprochement with the West, were dismayed by the magnitude of what occurred in North Korea and urged Kim Il-sung to adopt a more liberal “new course” of economic reform akin to the programs they had pressured the East European countries to pursue in 1953–1955. Although Kim Il-sung did, at Soviet behest, implement some significant reforms, his...

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