Inside, the stadium was packed with what North Korean officials later told us was more than 100,000 people. On the field, arrayed before us, were tens of thousands of performers dressed in brightly colored outfits and carrying red flags. Almost all of this vast multitude was strangely silent, like set pieces in a vast diorama, as if waiting for our arrival. Those of us who had been making tired wisecracks about maybe getting the World Series results up on the scoreboard–we reporters had arrived with Albright earlier this morning at 7 a.m, after 18 hours of travel–just shut up and gawked. We were seated at a specially prepared dais some 100 feet above the field. A few inutes passed, and again there was only the noise of hundred thousand people breathing. Then, suddenly, in walked Albright and Kim Jong Il, the Mao-suited “Great Leader” of this communist nation of 21 million people. Kim is an odd-looking fellow, pudgy and bouff-haired, and not much taller than the diminutive secretary. But you wouldn’t know it from the reaction. Instantly loudspeakers began blaring the leader’s soaring anthem and the entire audience stood and erupted into torrential applause and shouts, every black-suited Korean craning toward Kim, each trying to out-clap the other. As one, the performers on the field surged forward, cheering and jumping up and down in front of him.
Then, as if by the flick of a single master switch, the song ended, the cheering stopped and the lights dimmed. Kim and Albright sat down next to each other. What followed was at once awesome, a little terrifying, and probably the best halftime show in any stadium anywhere (I’ve seen enough Super Bowls to know). For an hour some 100,000 acrobats and dancers performed, with a degree of precise synchronization that would have made Bob Fosse envious, themes from the 55-year history of their glorious “revolution.” (This was actually the Soviet installation of Kim Jong Il’s father, Kim Il Sung, in 1945 though few North Koreans know that.) Thousands of legs and arms moved in near-perfect unison; hundreds of petite, rouge-cheeked girls no more than seven or eight years old did multiple handsprings to the tune of such numbers as “The Leader Will Always Be With Us” and “My Country Under the Sunshine of the Party.” Acrobats slid along ropes hundreds of feet above the performers, or were catapulted across half the length of the stadium onto nets. Barely anyone missed a step. “Perhaps there’s something to be said for collective action after all,” I thought. “Only a totalitarian state could bring this off.”
At the far side of stadium, vast images of the great moments of the revolution flashed and shifted before us. It was only several minutes into the show that many of us realized that this entire portion of the stadium consisted of what officials later said was 50,000 performers, each holding a book of colored placards in his hand. By turning the placards in tight array per the instructions of a conductor, this multitudinous cast pulled off amazing tromp d’oeil feats. They created giant ocean waves and flashes of lightning in the “raging sea of difficulty” faced by the revolution. They depicted tractors plowing up fallow earth to defeat the 1997 famine, and a global map of the “54 occasions” that Kim Il Sung had to visit his erstwhile communist friends (almost all gone now) abroad. Thematically, it was ridiculous, of course; pictorially, it was brilliant, and in spite of myself I began to feel that the North Koreans were a pretty good bunch. “You should take this show on the road,” I whispered deferentially to my official government minder, Li Wong Su.
During the performance–which has been put on for North Koreans three times a week since Oct. 10, the anniversary date–I was only about 40 feet from Kim, and watched him chatting amiably with Albright and Amb. Wendy Sherman, the Secretary’s senior-most North Korea handler. Both Albright and Sherman applauded the performances along with Kim, including a paean to the nation’s missile and nuclear program, which the United States has been trying to shut down in exchange for normalizing relations with the once-hostile nation. (This bit featured scores of sequined schoolgirls each tossing what appeared to be a red-ball “nucleus” in the air). Afterward Albright had only one thing to say, according to her spokesman: “Amazing.”
It was an apt description of Albright’s visit as well. Only several years ago, in 1994, North Korea nearly went to war with South Korea, a staunch U.S. ally, for the second time since 1950. Only a few months ago, U.S.and Korean contacts were limited to secret missions and third parties, and North Korean state media continued to describe the United States in harsh, Cold War terms. But today Albright carried a letter to Kim Jong Il from President Clinton, whose visit in the next two months she is trying to set up–a truly dramatic departure for a president who, at the beginning of his term, described the border between north and south as the “scariest” in the world. The secretary, in a banquet toast Monday night, said that “the road to fully normal relations remains uphill”–the U.S. still lists North Korea as a terrorist-sponsoring state–“but as we are starting to discover through our visits, distance is no barrier to closer ties.
Indeed, perhaps the oddest thing about watching tonight’s performance was to know (as the North Koreans don’t) that the Great Leader Kim is, quite plainly, a desperate man. His Soviet and East Bloc friends are gone. His Chinese sponsors are pressuring him to open up. His million-man army is rusting away in a socialist wasteland where, only a few years ago, hundreds of thousands of people and perhaps more starved to death in terrible famine exacerbated by the shuttering of fertilizer plants, power and other industry. The very themes that he was trying to impress upon his people in tonight’s spectacle–“juche,” or self-reliance, and the glories of Korean socialism–he has little choice, down the line, but to junk entirely in practice. North Korea is today an economic disaster. It is a nation kept afloat on a program of food and other international aid–including a $360 million emergency operation launched in July 1999 to feed some 8 million people. For all the moves Kim has made to buddy up to the U.S. and to South Korea, he has made only miniscule efforts to free up his economy. To do so, apparently, would mean to admit to his own people what the rest of the world already knows–that his glorious show tonight was just that, merely a show. And that hour-long entertainments inside a stadium provide scant escape to those suffering the reality of the revolution outside.
