Life under Communism: Aquariums of Pyongyang is a compelling firsthand account of life under North Korea's oppressive communist regime. (Book Review).

Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, by Kang CholHwan and Pierre Rigoulot, Basic Books: New York, 2001, 238 pages, hardbound, $24.00.

Aquariums of Pyongyang is a valuable eyewitness account of one of the most brutal and least-known Stalinist tyrannies of the past century. Originally published in France by coauthor Pierre Rigoulot (a contributor to The Back Book of Communism), this Basic Books translation recounts the 10 years author Kang Chol-Hwan suffered in a gulag at the hands of the North Korean gangster state.

Nine-year-old Chol-Hwan should have been an unlikely candidate for punishment by the Communist state. His grandmother had been an early Communist Party member and an anchor of the influential Chosen Soren (Korean Communist) exile organization in Japan, where she ran the organization's powerful Kyoto branch. His grandfather had used his considerable fortune in casino holdings to save the party from financial trouble.

Inside the Aquarium

When Chosen Soren waged a powerful propaganda campaign to get ethnic Koreans in Japan to return to North Korea in the post-war years, Chol-Hwan's family was swayed by the propaganda they helped to create. The North Korean regime engineered the repatriation campaign to get its hands on much-needed Japanese hard currency and consumer goods. The family returned to their ancestral lands in North Korea in the 1960s, and the grandparents were given positions of relative power within the Party in the capital district of Pyongyang. Though impoverished by modern Western standards (and the family's former lifestyle in Japan), the Kangs lived well compared to most North Korean families. Chol-Hwan was even able to start a little aquarium for some fish he acquired.

The family nevertheless lost its freedom. Like the fish in Chol-Hwan's aquarium, the family increasingly found itself under surveillance Chol-Hwan's horrifying account is a classic example that there is no security under a tyranny.

The Kangs suffered from a factional power struggle within the Party in 1977, when most of the Korean exiles who had returned from Japan after the Second World War were sent off to the gulags. The grandparents 'lifetime of faithful service to the Korean Workers' (Communist) Party counted for nothing when Chol-Hwan's grandfather was arrested and taken away to a labor camp in July 1977. He was never seen again. Chol-Hwan and his father, sister, grandmother, and uncle were all carted off to the Yodok camp several weeks later. Only Chol-Hwan's mother remained behind. She was forced by the Party to divorce her husband and told that her family was dead. The tragedy that befell the Kang family was not unusual; families of suspected counterrevolutionaries in Communist North Korea are customarily sent off to labor camps when one of the clan is fingered.