Why Russians Like Traveling to the 'Hermit Kingdom'

“It’s an indescribable feeling to be sitting in the central grandstand watching as tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are dancing and singing together,” said Alexei Bogatryov. “It’s such a rush, a thousand percent. It lifts your spirits and gives you a great sense of unity.” Bogatyryov was one of hundreds of Russian tourists who greeted the 2025 New Year on Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square.

In February 2024, after a four-year interruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) reopened its borders to Russian tourists. Since then, approximately 1,500 Russians have visited the country. For now, tourists from no other country are being let in.

On the evening of December 31, tens of thousands of North Koreans gathered in Pyongyang’s central square. Most of them were watching from grandstands as young couples danced in synchronized circles below.

Here is how the festivities were described in the North Korean newspaper The Pyongyang Times (the only English language newspaper published in the DPRK):

The participants danced to the tune of songs “Let’s Love Our Country” and “Oh Party, It’s Thanks to Your Care” with ardent reverence for the respected fatherly Marshal Kim Jong Un who is bringing about miraculous victories and prosperity to be immoral [sic] in the history of the country with his extraordinary political calibre and gigantic leadership practices…

At midnight, “on behalf of the workers, peasants and intellectuals, model working people of the capital city courteously hoisted the national flag amid the solemn playing of the national anthem of the DPRK.”

Bogatyryov, a 38-year-old St. Petersburg entrepreneur, said he visited North Korea to see for himself the country about which he had heard so many contradictory opinions online. The celebration on Kim Il Sung Square, the standard setting for military parades and rallies, was part of a five-day package tour. Around 11 p.m., his group was escorted into the grandstand “like a government delegation and brought to the front row.”

Alexei said that the music made “his legs break into dance on their own.” The North Koreans around them were waving little flags and shouting words of encouragement at the performers, who waved back in response.

How is Switzerland any better than this?

The first group of post-COVID Russian tourists to visit North Korean set out on February 9, 2024. Among them, “not appreciating the importance of the event,” was 36-year-old Angarsk businessman Alexander Fedosov. He likes to travel to unusual destinations with his friend and had been, for example, to Zambia, Tanzania, and Mongolia. They had noticed a social media post saying that North Korean ski and snowboarding resorts were being opened to Russian tourists. It just took a few hours for the friends to make their decision, book a tour, and buy their tickets to Vladivostok (for now, that’s the only Russian city with flights to Pyongyang). They sent their passports to a Vladivostok travel agency to handle their visa applications and everything went smoothly from there.

The group of 98 included not just tourists but also journalists, tour company representatives, and children from an “Olympic Reserve” school, one of the schools established in Soviet times to train future Olympians. Alexei Starichkov, head of Primorsky Krai’s Agency for International Cooperation, was also on the flight. In an segment aired on Russia’s Channel 1, he said that the border was re-opened “only as the result of agreements reached at the highest levels, between the leaders of our countries.”

Indeed, Kim Jong Un made a visit to Russia in 2023, traveling in his personal armored train. His meeting with President Vladimir Putin at Vostochny Cosmodrome was described by North Korea’s Central Telegraph Agency as “an epochal event.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later made a statement encouraging Russian tourists to visit North Korea. To finalize the details of an agreement, the governor of Primorsky Krai, the only Russian region that shares a border with the DPRK, traveled to the country in late 2023.

Fedosov said he didn’t expect the Masikryong Ski Resort, where the tourists were taken, to be as “modern” as it was, with ten broad trails of varying lengths and levels of difficulty and enclosed gondolas lifts. One notable feature of the resort, he said, was the continuous blaring of North Korean songs from loudspeakers. Some vacationers complained that they were constantly followed down the slopes by uniformly dressed North Korean skiers, but Fedosov did not notice anything like that. Visitors were allowed to move around the resort freely, but they could not leave it: the territory was walled off, mountainous, and separated from the closest town, Wonsan, by 40 kilometers of bumpy roads.

The hotel looked new, Fedosov said, but its décor was about 20 years out of date: lots of wood and flowing lines instead of concrete and right angles. Alexander was struck by how unprepared the staff was for foreign tourists. For example, no one seemed to know how much a ticket to visit the hotel swimming pool should cost: the price was marked in North Korean wons, and foreigners are never given local currency. They are expected to pay for everything using hard currency.

Based on a video released by blogger Ilya Voskresensky, who was part of the first group, there were also problems with the sale of trail tickets. Voskresensky criticized the safety of the fences along the trails and the fact that vacationers were allowed to ski after sunset, since it’s fairly standard practice to shut down ski lifts before dark. Fedosov said he didn’t notice any of that, remarking, “I think that everything went very well for the first time. If our fellow citizens were getting ready to work at some resort and foreigners came for the first time, they wouldn’t just be unready to sell lift tickets – they simply wouldn’t open the resort.”

“The time travel appeal”

The DPRK has been developing its tourist industry for several decades. According to Andrei Lankov, a professor at South Korea’s Kookmin University, North Korea’s first tour company opened in the late 1950s to welcome travelers from socialist countries. In the sixties and seventies, relations between the USSR and DPRK were tense, so Soviet citizens rarely visited the country. But in the 1980s North Korea started seeing several hundred Soviet tourists visit each year, primarily group tours arranged through labor unions or the Young Communist League. A similar number visited from East Germany, Bulgaria, and other socialist camp countries.

There was even a period between 1998 and 2008 when South Korean tourists could visit the DPRK. A special tourist zone was built for them, the Mount Kumgang Tourist Region, not far from the border. Lankov said that the project was subsidized by the South Korean government. At the time “left-wing nationalists” headed the South Korean government, and they viewed North Koreans as their “poor relatives in need of help.” The project was shut down when Seoul elected a new government.

For North Korea, one of the world’s most sanctioned countries, tourism is an important source of hard currency. Kim Jong Un was educated in Switzerland, a major European tourist center, so when he came to power in 2011, he sought to attract “Western” travelers. The Masikryong Ski Resort was built with this goal in mind. But, due to the resort’s challenging location (the only flights to the DPRK were via Russia and China), strict restrictions on what tourists could do and where they could go, poor roads, and rather ho-hum entertainment opportunities, the country managed to draw no more than a few thousand “Western” tourists each year, including Russians. The 2017 death of American tourist Otto Warmbier didn’t help.^[1] Shortly thereafter, the US prohibited its citizens from visiting the DPRK.

One category of tourists traveling to North Korea was Chinese citizens coming to visit the graves of their ancestors who died fighting in the Korean War.

“The Chinese are drawn to the DPRK by an atmosphere that reminds them of the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong. For them, it’s got time travel appeal. The second factor is that tourism to North Korea is cheap, especially if you live close to the border,” said Lankov.

Lankov does not understand why the border has yet to be reopened for Chinese tourists. Most likely, he said, this “gesture shows the special nature of relations with Moscow.”

“I expected North Korea to be drab, backwards, and gray.”

Of the eleven Russian tourists who traveled to North Korea and were interviewed for this article, most said they expected tourism to be tightly controlled: “One step out of line and you’d be shot.” In fact, the rules governing foreign tourists aren’t nearly so strict.

When tourists enter the country, their phones are not taken away, but they do have to declare every electronic item they are bringing in, including cameras and video cameras. And no one checked on the way out what these tourists had photographed or filmed. But border guards definitely review any books travelers are carrying, since no literature about the DPRK published outside the country is permitted. The same goes for religious literature.

“I had a stack of printed pages – information about the tour. A man who knew a bit of Russian came and checked what was written on every page,” Bogatyryov said.

It’s a popular myth that tourists will be shown staged scenes of North Korean life. But according to Lankov, that would be too expensive: “Why bother? It’s simpler to just take tourists to the nicest places.”

On most tours, several days are spent seeing the capital, Pyongyang, the first stop for any tour group. “I’d been expecting North Korea to be drab, backwards, and gray, I don’t know, lots of old Soviet-type buildings,” said 35-year-old Muscovite Marina Godina. “But in Pyongyang I didn’t see any old buildings whatsoever, just modern skyscrapers. It’s a modern metropolis, you know, a sort of mini Hong Kong.” Godina, who works for an energy company and has visited 67 countries, said she decided to visit the DPRK in October 2024 after prices increased on tickets to South Korea.

The tourists reported seeing not just busses on the streets of Pyongyang but also cars, including models made in Russia, China, and Japan. They also saw women in fur coats and people with smartphones, although North Koreans don’t walk around staring at their screens. The country has its own messaging apps, social media, and internet, but North Koreans don’t have access to the worldwide internet. Godina said she wanted her guide to send a North Korean song to her phone, but that proved impossible. The tourist couldn’t access the local internet without a special SIM card, and her tour guide’s phone didn’t have Bluetooth.

Interestingly, most ordinary North Koreans don’t have the same access to their own country’s capital city as Russian tourists do. They need special permission to enter both Pyongyang and the coastal city of Rason. Moving to Pyongyang is possible only if you are transferred there for work, but, according to Lankov, that almost never happens. Almost everyone living in Pyongyang was born there. Being exiled from the city is seen as a painful form of punishment.

Tour guides, who also serve as interpreters for visitors, are also the only North Koreans that tourists are able to interact with to any meaningful extent. Two people normally accompany each tourist group: a woman from a North Korean tourist company and a man from the state security service.

Lankov said that it is very prestigious to be an interpreter in the DPRK. Working with foreign tourists provides access to hard-currency tips and to stores that sell products unavailable to ordinary North Koreans. It also offers the opportunity to travel throughout the country and stay at resorts that even affluent North Koreans would consider “the epitome of luxury.”

Guidance included on the website of Vostok Intur (Vostok=East, and Intur is short for Inostranny turist or “foreign tourist”), the first Russian travel agency to be accredited by the DPRK after the pandemic, instructs tourists to refrain from asking their guides “provocative questions,” although it offers no examples of what would be considered “provocative.” According to the tourists interviewed for this article, not everyone exercised such self-restraint. Among questions asked were: Why, if he is so beloved by the people, does Kim Jong Un need such heavy security? What crimes could land you in prison in North Korea? and Why does the North send balloons carrying trash to South Korea? The guides studiously avoided answering such questions.

Tourists are not allowed to walk around the city on their own. The excuse for this given by Vostok Intur Director Inna Mukhina was that tourists don’t speak the language, and the tour schedule leaves little free time. Tourists are taken to museums, the metro, the mountains and the sea, circus performances, and to see various businesses. The itineraries are approved by the central government, but if there are specific requests, the North Korean partners can try to get them approved, assuming they are submitted before arrival.

“If we ask that an equestrian club be added, sure, they add an equestrian club. Now it’s summer, golf season, and we would like golf to be available for the tourists,” Mukhina said.

And Mukhina pushed back against the idea that tourists are unable to interact with locals. In Pyongyang, Russian tourists are usually taken to a beer bar, or to do karaoke at resorts where North Koreans are also vacationing. “They clink their glasses of beer. Our folks sing, these folks applaud. Then the interpreter walks up, and they can have a conversation. ‘Do you have a family?’ ‘Do you have children?’ ‘What do you do for a living?’ Ordinary, everyday questions.”

“Unsanctioned meetings with foreigners”

The tourists interviewed for this article, including those who visited the Pyongyang beer bar, said that either they didn’t interact with any locals or that the interaction was limited to simple exchanges of greetings. But those who traveled outside Pyongyang said they did encounter groups of North Korean vacationers. According to a 46-year-old Protestant pastor, his group played volleyball with some North Koreans at a seaside resort. They even cooked their own national dishes together, but that was with hotel employees who did not speak Russian.

A rumor circulated among the tourists that once a few Russians decided to walk from the bar back to their hotel. The “runaways” were caught. Although they suffered no penalties, groups stopped being taken to the beer bar. Mukhina confirmed that some tourists had gone AWOL but would not go into detail. After the incident, tourists were asked to sign a document stating that they were only allowed to move around with the group. As Lankov said, tourists who leave their group aren’t usually punished, but their guides are likely to suffer consequences for lettering their charges slip away.

Tourists are also not allowed to shop alongside North Koreans. They are taken to special stores where they can buy souvenirs for hard currency: literature about the DPRK, pictures, embroidery, cosmetics, alcohol, candy, and North Korean “Legos” that can be used to build replicas of missile launchers. “Of course, there was no sense of freedom,” said Bogatryov. “It felt constraining that everything was on a schedule, that you couldn’t go out for a walk on your own. One outing we had was along the Street of Scholars: fifteen minutes and then back in the bus. Then again, that’s more or less what people went there to experience.”

Better than in Africa

Viktor, a 41-year-old aviation blogger from Veliky Novgorod said he visited the DPRK in October 2024 not just for its exoticism, but also to film some content for his YouTube channel. He produces videos of flights on rare airplanes, and Air Koryo, the only company that flies in and out of North Korea, uses Soviet-era planes. Before the pandemic, North Korea organized tours for aviation buffs. Viktor was particularly excited to fly on a 45-year-old Il-62 for the first time. “I was amazed to see what good condition the plane was in. They probably spent days cleaning it. Everything in the bathroom sparkled,” he said.

His videos from North Korea have garnered a huge number of views. For example, his film showing the North Korean metro has been viewed 5.2 million times, and an hour-long video showing his entire travels there has over 2.8 million views. Several Russian bloggers – some just starting out; others specializing in travel or food – visited North Korea in 2024, and everything they posted from their travels has done well. Vostok InTur’s website even promotes the DPRK as a destination not only for historians and political scientists, but also “fans of unique travel” and “bloggers, journalists, and photographers.”

“We want bloggers to come, and, once they return from the country and have fresh impressions, to tell everything about it that you won’t hear from Western media,” said Mukhina. “Because Western media make the country sound very bad. We want to turn that on its head! We want to show that the country is worthy of attention, respect, that it is a country that develops, lives by Juche^[2] ideas, doesn’t envy anyone else, and isn’t expecting help from anyone! It’s a normal country.”

To Viktor’s surprise, he said he was allowed to film practically everything. Limitations primarily related to images of “the Leader.” They could only be photographed at their full height. If a tourist takes a picture of themselves with a monument in the background, they must stand up straight and refrain from striking silly poses. They also are not allowed to film people in uniform, people who are engaged in physical labor, or military equipment that is on display in certain museums. When traveling in busses, tourists are asked not to take pictures out the windows of any construction sites or certain other places.

The instructions provided by the tour company after the group of tourists “escaped” include several provisions devoted to the ways in which travelers should talk about the country. In particular, they said:

The first and most important rule is to refrain from sharing negative material, condemnation of the DPRK or its social and political regime, as well as the supreme authorities, on social media, the media, and through other publicly available sources of information… Circulate through the media and social media only those photographs and video materials that promote the positive development of tourism to the DPRK.

When in doubt, tourists are told to check with their tour operator. If these rules are violated, “appropriate measures will be taken, including the involvement of the competent authorities.”

Mukhina said these instructions are a way of reminding tourists that they are in the country as “guests” and not there “to look for dirt, but with a positive attitude.” There are no legal consequences for posting negative reviews of the country, but tour operators are hoping that travelers will “follow their conscience.”

On social media, you can find photographs of North Koreans in military uniform posted by Russian tourists after they return home, as well as photos taken inside museums, which is technically not allowed. Godina said that their group was not allowed to take pictures from atop the 170-meter Juche Tower, the monument to the Juche Idea, the state ideology developed by Kim Il Sung, since previously a tourist had posted a picture of an “unattractive” building taken from there. In reality, many tourists manage to sneak pictures of the view. Taking photos inside planes flying to the country is also prohibited, but, according to vlogger Viktor, tourists whipped out their smartphones as soon as the stewardesses left the cabin.

Viktor’s videos attracted comments expressing views from opposite angles: some accused the posts of serving pro-North Korean propaganda; others expressed fear that the North Koreans would somehow get back at him, even in Russia. Viktor said he was surprised to see how different people have reacted to his films, which included no commentary. He has posted videos of a Pyongyang celebration (the group was taken to an annual event on Kim Il Sung Square celebrating the Workers’ Party of Korea) and of remote country roads. So he would have an opportunity to film more flights, he chose a tour that included trips to the mountains and the coast. He also managed to film through the bus window and capture footage of rural life, including people laboring without machinery out in the fields. The roads were all unpaved, and there were almost no cars.

“Have you ever seen a dirt road being chalked? I had never seen such a thing, but there, it’s everywhere. That sort of road has no stone and is a little dusty on top. And the North Koreans sweep all that, working by hand. If holes develop, they fill them with pebbles and sand and tamp it down,” Viktor said.

“The women sit there in their headscarves (in the fields) puttering around in the dirt, picking up one straw at a time to make a haystack. You’re truly back in the 1940s. And back then I think we’d see some sorts of combines in Soviet films, but here there’s nothing like that,” said Godina, who was on the same tour as Vladimir. She recalled seeing corn cobs laid out on rooftops in the countryside. As Lankov wrote in his book, North of the DMZ, corn is the cereal grain that most of the rural population subsists on, while rice is considered food for the rich.

The trip left Viktor with mixed feelings: he said he felt elated (“I finally went there! I flew on an IL-62!”), but at the same time he felt sad to see how North Koreans live.

Diana Davydenko, who heads the marketing department for the second tour company to be accredited by the DPRK, Project Pyonyang, said she thinks that people apply a double standard to North Korea: “Tourists who fly to the Maldives see fashionable hotels and have no idea how the locals live. They don’t know what salaries they make.”

Lankov attributes North Korea’s negative image to several factors. He mentioned the country’s almost comically clumsy propaganda and its hostile relationship with the United States. “And attitudes are largely shaped by the American media,” he said.

“When people talk about North Korea, many of the negative points they make could just as easily apply to other poor countries,” Lankov added. “One Swiss businessman who worked in North Korea for many years and has criticized me at times, accusing me of Pyongyangphobia, makes the point that, for a simple person living in the DPRK, things are better than in most African countries. There, I agree with him. If you go to North Korea, you don’t have to worry that you’ll be taken and shot at some checkpoint. While in Africa that is a very real threat you’d better keep in mind.”

In the DPRK there is a clear system of rules, and if you follow them, you can live a relatively secure life: health care and education are reasonably well developed – by the standards of a very poor country. Then again, kindergarteners have to bow to portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il after lunch every day, and the police are supposed to conduct surprise nighttime inspections of apartments several times a year to make sure those same portraits are hanging and well cared for and that televisions haven’t been rigged so that Chinese stations can be viewed. People from other countries find that repugnant.

“They live nestled in the bosom of the state”

The DPRK has loomed large in the imagination of Anna Andreyeva since she was a child. Her father participated in scientific sea expeditions and once spent time in North Korea. He told her that he had never seen a place where the grass was greener, the sea bluer, and the sand so yellow. Andreyeva a 60-year-old retiree in Vladivostok, has therefore always had a strong desire to visit the country. She got her chance in 2024.

For more than 20 years, Andreyeva had been taking hiking vacations all over the world. In the spring of 2024, “Katyusha,” the first-ever hiking excursion to North Korea, was organized. Andreyeva learned of the opportunity through “Ginseng,” a Vladivostok hiking club she belongs to.

Not only did she hike 18,000 steps to the top of Mount Sahyang, not far from the Russian-Korean border, but her group was also taken to swim in the sea, on an excursion to a children’s boarding school, and to a poultry farm. Andreyeva said she felt she was being transported back in a time machine to her youth: simply dressed but smiling and polite people, spotless streets, tales from the guides of free healthcare and housing, and food without “harmful chemicals.” When she returned home, she wrote a poem to describe what she had experienced:

Мы были в удивительной стране —
Последний мировой оплот социализма!
И просто очень завидно всё ж мне —
Они живут, не зная реализма.
Всё строго здесь: учёба, спорт, работа.
Вожди за всем следят и направляют.
Везде присутствует народная забота,
И песни, и стихи их восхваляют.
Не видно здесь ни нищих, ни бродяг.
На улицах порядок, чистота.
Кусты цветов везде на улицах стоят,
И натуральная природы красота.
Конечно люди скромно все живут,
Фигуры стройные, улыбчивые лица.
Жильё бесплатно им дают
И могут все всегда лечиться.
А я смотрю и чувства раздирают-
Мы тридцать лет назад вот так же жили.
Где та спираль развития? Не знаю…
Вернуться в ту страну, где счастливы мы были!

We visited a wondrous and great country –
The world’s remaining home of socialism!
And I still feel a sense of simple envy –
They live a life that’s free of realism.
It’s strict here: work, athletics, education.
The leaders oversee and guide it all.
Care for the people is their prime vocation.
Their praise ever resounds in verse and song.
No homelessness or beggars can be seen.
The world outside is orderly and clean.
Flowering shrubs are everywhere you turn,
And nature’s beauty everywhere is seen.
To live a humble life the people learn,
Their bodies fit and slim, their faces glow.
Their housing is provided without cost,
And lack of healthcare they will never know.
Regarding them I feel a sense of loss –
We too lived that way 30 years ago.
That spiral of development? Where’s it gone?
If just those happy days again would dawn!

“Yes, I envy them. They live nestled in the bosom of the state,” Andreyeva said. “The government takes care of them. They might not know about the real world. Thank God they don’t know all these horrors! Just look how much filth spews out of our televisions, the internet, all that Europe, America, all that. It’s a nightmare. They don’t know any of that.”

She said that, growing up on the ideas of communism, she finds it hard to live in the modern capitalistic world, where half her pension is spent on rent.

Many of the tourists experienced associations with the Soviet Union, real or imagined. For example, one woman compared the DPRK to the world depicted in the video game Atomic Heart, a sort of alternative USSR featuring robots. The women traffic directors posted at intersections also brought back memories. Then there were the mandatory visits to the monuments to Kim Il Song and Kim Jong Il, where they were invited to lay flowers if they wished. There were also nostalgia-provoking stops at the Palace of Creativity – where they could see North Koreans singing, dancing, playing musical instruments and children embroidering – and the Museum of Victory in the Fatherland War of Liberation.

“There, for example, we were told how South Korea attacked the North, although common knowledge has it the other way around,” Godina said. “They say that they were attacked, but North Korea was organized in a way that they were prepared to counterattack within 90 minutes and two days later had taken Seoul.”

Unlike Andreyeva, Godina said she started to feel a sense of claustrophobia at the thought that, if she were a North Korean, she would not be able to leave the country. Then again, as Andreyeva said she saw it, it is the North Korean’s good fortune that they have nothing to which they can compare their way of life. She herself is unable to live “so naively.” Among those interviewed for this article, just one expressed a hypothetical desire to live in North Korea for a time – the Protestant pastor.

“The North Koreans are real people,” he said. “When you talk to them, to those guides, you understand that they’re tied to the KGB, but in their eyes, for all of them, there is this human sincerity that is often missing here. We had it in the USSR. People today, they are more plastic than real, and I, as a pastor, can’t help but notice that.” He said he would like to help the North Koreans, although he understands that most likely isn’t possible.

The guides spoke rather openly about some aspects of their life in the DPRK. For example, tourists noticed that their meals were abundant: there are always several courses, including fish and meat. Andreyeva asked her guide whether locals eat the same way.

“She said, ‘Of course not. I eat meat twice a week. Since I,’ she said, ‘am well paid as a translator. Because a lot of people eat rice, maybe a bit of seafood from time to time, or maybe a root-vegetable salad.’”

Nonetheless, this did not detract from Andreyeva’s opinion of the country: the country may be poor, but everyone is equal. “They have the same lives, educations, and healthcare.” Also, Andreyeva said she didn’t see any homeless people in rags.

According to Lankov, North Korea was a country of socialist equality until about the early 1990s. Today, the country has a privileged segment of semi-legal entrepreneurs and the party nomenklatura.^[3] Furthermore, even at the party level, it is recognized that the standard of living in the countryside is much worse than in cities, to say nothing of the capital.

Inevitably, no foreigner will never know for sure whether a North Korean reveres the Kim family or not. “We shouldn’t think that Koreans are stupid. Some of them are thoroughly convinced by the official ideology. And some hate it. Most of them… well, remember the Soviet era. Did Soviet people believe the official ideology? Well, some parts of it, yes, and others, no. It’s the same in North Korea.”

A song of Kim and Putin

In 2024, 1,500 Russians visited North Korea. That represents a higher annual rate than before the border was closed: just under 2,000 Russians traveled to the DPRK over the three-year period of 2017 through 2019. Primorsky Krai’s Agency for International Cooperation estimated that the flow of Russian travelers to the DPRK will reach 10,000 per year, admittedly a small number when compared to other countries. More than 6 million Russians are estimated to have flown to Turkey in 2024, their top destination. And, by comparison, almost 200,000 Russians visited “unfriendly” South Korea, a 25 percent increase over 2023.

There are a few logistical problems hindering the massive expansion of Russian tourism to North Korea: the only direct flights are from Vladivostok, which means that people living in central Russia have to spend money on a cross-country plane ticket. That said, Mukhina reported that Far Easterners living relatively close to the border make up only 40 percent of visitors so far. The cost of tours listed on Vostok Intur’s website, which include the flight from Vladivostok to Pyongyang, is comparable to trips to Thailand and Vietnam, and range from R90,000 for a four-day historical tour to R170,000 for eight days at the recently built seaside resort of Wonsan Kalma plus a trip to the capital.^[4] A bus tour to Rason and cross-border travel by train over the Tumen River is less: R40,000, but it doesn’t include a visit to Pyongyang, which is much farther south.

According to Alexander Osaulenko, director of the TURPOMOSHCH Association of Foreign-Travel Tour Operators, logistical problems is what makes travel to the DPRK so expensive. The scarcity of flights and limited travel options within Korea keep prices elevated. It is also hard for both tourists and tour companies to fully understand exactly what product the DPRK can offer.

“We need informational tours, we need the country itself to promote North Korea as a destination on various professional forums and exhibitions,” Osaulenko said.

Dmitry Artyunov, general director of Art-Tur, said he feels that working with the DPRK presents too many difficulties. Travelers have to be told in great detail exactly what they can and cannot do in the country, and they must be warned to bring whatever cash they’ll be needing – there won’t be any ATMs for them to use once they arrive. He’s said he has also had problems communicating with his contacts on the North Korean side: it can take a long time to get a response to emails, and those responses are likely to be in broken Russian (neither their Russian nor English – the usual lingua franca among travel professionals – is very good).

“Of course, tour managers figure they can sell ten tours to Thailand in the time it will take them to set up one to North Korea. And our tourists have already begun to file lawsuits when something doesn’t go right,” Artyunov said.

Osaulenko said he feels that all these difficulties can be gradually overcome. The question is: Will the DPRK want to overcome them?

“There is a lot of negative information about North Korea, but there are also positives. And our task is to drown out the negatives with the positives. All the tourists who have gone there with us only bring back positives,” Mukhina said.

“Our citizens don’t yet know how much we are loved in Korea!” said Moscow tour operator Diana Davydenko.

Russian tourists traveling to North Korea can lay flowers at a memorial to Soviet soldiers who died fighting to liberate Korea from Japanese occupation in 1945. And guides will eagerly join tourists in singing old Soviet songs. Contemporary Russian pop music – Gazmanov and Shaman – is played in cafés. If a tourist has a birthday, a cake will be produced; even if the Russian tour operator forgot to give advance notice of the event, the Korean partner will have made note of the birthday on their paperwork.

“You get a real ‘wow effect’ from these tours; you’re treated not as a tourist, but as a guest of honor. People are so kind and friendly to you,” said Maxim Kononenko, a 35-year-old videographer from Khabarovsk.

Lankov said that North Korean guides are unlikely to express unfriendliness toward tourists from any country. At the same time, North Koreans really do see Russia as a country of freedom and prosperity, and the Koreans have some first-hand evidence to back this opinion up: hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have spent time in Russia working in logging enterprises or as laborers,^[5] and they tell their fellow citizens what they saw there.

“The son of a famous North Korean writer and playwright repressed for his pro-Soviet views who miraculously escaped with his mother said something similar in his day,” Lankov added. “He said that, for his parents, Moscow was their Paris. In other words, the same role that a city like Paris played in the imaginations of Soviet people back in the sixties or seventies is played by Moscow in North Korea.”

Bogatyryov, who returned from the DPRK in January, said that North Koreans even composed a song to entertain them during bus trips. The chorus goes like this:

Будем вместе мы,
Будет счастлив мир,
Ким Чен Ын — ПутИн,
Путин — Ким Чен Ын.

We’ll be together,
The world will be happy,
Kim Jong IN – PutIN
Putin – Kim Jong In.^[6]

At first, Bogatyryov told us, the guide sang the song solo. But once the tourists relaxed a bit, they all joined in, singing the song several times a day during long drives.

This article originally appeared in Russian in Lyudi Baikala.