Northern Comforts

IN THE EARLY 1990s, Kim Jong Il became the world's leading purchaser of Hennessy Paradis, a cognac legendary for its complexity and finesse. Paradis usually retails for a few hundred dollars a bottle, though in Kim's case bulk discounts may have applied: The North Korean leader--who, according to a former personal chef, has "an exceptionally discriminating palate"--was said to be spending $700,000 to $800,000 a year on it.

Such a liquor tab fits the sort of pathological decadence described by defectors and national leaders who have spent time with Kim. The same former chef reports being sent on shopping trips to Denmark for pork, Czechoslovakia for beer, and Uzbekistan for caviar.

A former Russian presidential envoy has described a 2001 state visit in which Kim traveled across the country in a private train stocked with crates of Bordeaux, flat-screen televisions, and a retinue of female performers. Live lobsters were flown in to await the train's chefs at points along the route.

It was therefore with a certain satisfaction that John R. Bolton, President Bush's UN ambassador, highlighted the ban on luxury imports that is part of the sanctions approved last week by the UN Security Council to punish North Korea for testing a nuclear weapon. The measure, Bolton suggested, might be "a little diet for Kim Jong Il."

As with most diets, there is some question as to how effective the ban will be. But whatever the effect, the UN resolution has managed to highlight the role Western luxury goods play in North Korea, a purportedly communist country with an impoverished, malnourished populace.

North Korea experts say that such goods aren't simply for Kim's bacchanalian lifestyle--even the most committed North Korean propagandist would be hard-pressed to claim that the Dear Liver could process several daily bottles of cognac, no matter how smooth. Instead, experts argue, expensive jewelry, fine wine, and performance automobiles are less indulgences for Kim than a currency used in a system of rewards for loyalty among the country's governing elite.

According to Bruce Cumings, a historian of Korea at the University of Chicago, North Korea is as much a patronage state as it is a police state. As an example, Cumings points to a recent mass celebration of the 80th anniversary of Kim Il Sung's Down with Imperialism Union, the predecessor to the ruling Workers' Party of Korea. Despite the country's severely straitened circumstances, "everyone that participates in that ceremony will get a wristwatch, a pair of shoes, a new television to take home, something like that. The leadership has always used consumer goods that are rare in the country to reward that sort of pageantry."

For the country's ruling class, though, the rewards are greater. On visits to North Korea, Cumings has seen not only Rolexes on government officials and fur coats on their wives, but leaders being chauffeured around in Mercedes-Benz sedans correlating to their rank: 200-model sedans for lower-level party bosses on up to the top-of-the-line S600 for the nation's leaders.

Han Park, a professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia who has visited North Korea more than 40 times, believes the relative prevalence of German luxury automobiles may be more coincidental. In his view, it simply stems from the country's "historical resentment" of major car-exporting nations like the United States, Japan, and South Korea.

There is, though, a precedent for Stalinist dictators doling out luxury cars as bonuses: Stalin himself. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of the biography "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," the Soviet leader used to personally decide which of the upper nomenklatura would be awarded Rolls-Royces and which would get Buicks. Record players and General Electric refrigerators were also popular prizes. "They would call these rewards the 'gift of the people,' i.e., of Stalin," Montefiore says, "and it was understood that the next day everything could be taken away and you could be nothing."

Few North Korea-watchers think Kim Jong Il's patronage powers will be severely threatened by the UN ban. His regime is already expert in the use of the black market and shell companies abroad, and the commitment of China, by far the country's largest trading partner, to enforcing the sanctions remains to be seen. At most, according to Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the forthcoming book, "The North Korean Economy," the ban will simply raise the price of such imports. "It's basically a tax on luxury goods for Kim Jong Il," he says.

And even if the ban were to be effective, everyone familiar with North Korea believes that, given the choice between more late-model Mercedes and a nuclear weapons program, the regime's preference will be clear. After all, there's nothing like a nuclear warhead to impress the neighbors.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.