Kim visit evokes Stalinist past

He arrived like a cold wind from the past, riding an armored train and bearing a bouquet of flowers to lay at Lenin's Red Square mausoleum.

Kim Jong Il, leader of North Korea, the world's last Stalinist state, embarked on his week-long homeward rail journey from Moscow Tuesday, leaving roiled emotions in his wake and a host of questions over why the Kremlin chose to grant such a warm reception to the strange dictator of a tiny Asian hermit state.

For many Russians, it was as if they'd seen a ghost. Mr. Kim came - and left - by means of a slow, 21-car sealed train that plodded across Russia's 9,000 kilometer breadth, sowing pandemonium as stations were shut down in its path, onlookers shoveled away by security, and local rail traffic snarled for hours. Such a Stalinesque mix of arrogance and paranoia has not been seen in Russia, at least in such grand proportions, for decades.

"All this goes far beyond the hassle caused by closing off roads when our own president is traveling," noted the liberal daily Vremya MN. "Why should we have to go through this for a foreign leader?"

The Russian media has treated Kim's ongoing visit as a bizarre curiosity, zeroing in on his fondness for meals of "celestial cow" - roast donkey - and other oddities.

But for Russian liberals, the cheery bear hug and cordial respect given the North Korean leader by President Vladimir Putin at a weekend Kremlin meeting was a dangerous, even scary, signal. "The world may view Kim as something weird and exotic, but we recognize him as our own creation," says Alexei Kara-Murza, a political scientist at Moscow State University.

"He is a walking, talking reminder of our own Stalinist past. It's very hard to understand why Putin, a former KGB man, would want to be saddled with this kind of symbolism."

A group of eight human rights activists were arrested and "warned" by Russian authorities Monday after attempting to demonstrate against Kim's visit. Russia's state media also failed to cover claims by human rights organizations that North Korea repays its debts to Moscow by sending indentured laborers to work in Russian far-eastern logging camps and mines.

"The comic aspects of Kim's visit are not important," says Mr. Kara-Murza. "It is the reverberations of a secret police regime, which Russia is befriending at a time when the security forces are rising to power in our own society."

North Korea is the last of the USSR's post-World War II satellites to have gone untouched by sweeping democratization and market reforms. Kim's father, Kim Il Sung, was handed his job by Joseph Stalin in 1945, after the Soviet Army occupied Pyongyang.

Even as the Soviet Union reformed, and later collapsed, North Korea remained frozen in time. At his death in 1994, Kim Il Sung bequeathed the country like a fiefdom to his son.

Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin cut off aid to North Korea and generally ignored the place. But Putin has baffled Russian and international observers by courting Kim and even treating him like a partner.

Kim and Putin signed a joint declaration lambasting US plans to break with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and demanding American troops be withdrawn from South Korea. Moscow agreed to help rebuild North Korea's dilapidated rail network, and fix up a few Soviet-built factories.

Russian experts say talk of military cooperation between the two former allies is greatly exaggerated. According to one estimate, North Korea is set to spend less than $10 million annually on Russian arms, or barely enough to purchase a few ageing T-80 tanks.

"It's very hard to understand why Putin chose to issue a ringing declaration about world affairs with Kim as his partner," says Svyatoslav Kaspe, an expert with the independent Russian Public Policy Center. "When it comes to calculating national power, the more client states you have, the bigger you are."

For Russian nationalists and the still-powerful Communists, the message carried by Kim is one of fresh inspiration. "North Korea has survived. It still shows it can stand on its own feet, and refuses to bend to the power of the dollar," says Alexander Prokhanov, editor of the far-right nationalist newspaper Zavtra.

The US State Department has put North Korea at the top of its list of "states of concern" that might one day pose a nuclear missile threat to North America.

Some experts say Putin's main interest in the visit was to get Kim to renew a vow made last year to halt his missile-development program until 2003, while Russia tries to blunt American plans to build a missile defense shield aimed at warding off future attacks from countries like North Korea.

Russia insists that effective diplomacy is a better defense than expensive high-tech weaponry. "Putin's ability to talk to North Korea is seen as a trump card in Russia's hand," says Sergei Kazyonnov, an expert with the independent Institute of National Security and Strategic Research in Moscow. "Russia is the only country that can deal with countries like this, and so we are an important player in the search for a new global security order."