I stayed at a North Korean summer camp. We polished statues and played a game where we destroyed the White House.

12.07.2024 - 19:30 / insider.com

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Yuri Frolov, 25, who in 2015 and 2016 attended North Korea's Songdowon International Children's Camp, where some Russian children will be sent this summer. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

When I was a kid, I remember watching a TV documentary about North Korea. Although I was very young, my perception of the country was that it was under siege by its capitalist neighbors.

I knew little; I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

I tried to find more information, so I subscribed to a group called "Solidarity with North Korea" on VKontakte — Russia's equivalent to Facebook.

In it, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation offered a chance to go to a North Korean children's summer camp for about $300.

That included food, accommodation, all the facilities, plane tickets, and everything else — really cheap for a 15-day trip.

I saw it as an opportunity to see North Korea for myself, so I asked my parents, who agreed to send me to Songdowon.

I traveled alone from St. Petersburg, where I grew up, to Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia, where I joined a group of other children and some Communist Party officials. At 15, I was one of the oldest; the others were 9, 10, and 11.

I was probably the only one traveling to North Korea to see this dystopia. The others seemed to see it as a chance to go to the beach or play in the playground inexpensively.

First, we spent two days in Pyongyang, where we were constantly supervised.

We visited many places, including Kim Il Sung Square and the war museum where they displayed captured American vehicles as well as the USS Pueblo, the American ship that was seized by the North Koreans in the 1960s.

They kept pushing us into supermarkets so that we'd spend some money.

What was funny was that it was really easy to buy vodka and cigarettes.

Some kids in our group, as young as 12, bought North Korean rice vodka, brought it back to the camp, and got extremely drunk on the first couple of nights.

Upon arriving at Songdowon, the staff was very welcoming, cheering us on while they stood in a long line.

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About five buses of children arrived. Though most of us were Russian, there were also groups of children from Laos, Nigeria, Tanzania, and China.

However, the North Korean children in the camp were quite segregated from us, and we only met them once on our last day.

I think that was deliberate, preventing them from talking with us about their experiences.

The summer camp had many activities, such as beach outings, sandcastle-building competitions, and swimming. However, it also had some really weird rituals.

We had to clean statues of North Korea's former leaders. One morning, we woke up