The “Mixed” Culture of Eastern Europe: A Vision of Future for North Korea?
Hearing about Kim Jong Il passing away almost immediately after a visit to the remaining Soviet architectures (with their red star decorations intact) on the streets of Vilnius and taking a clunking ride on the old Soviet era train carriages of the Warsaw-Krakow “Intercity Express,” was by all means, a surreal experience. Combined with reviews of some video footages of surprisingly genuine-looking mass mourning (more like mass crying) sessions in Pyongyang, and it seems like we are back at the old Second World. Indeed, even as the Baltic states and Poland, former bastion of Stalinist communism, transformed themselves into orderly capitalist economies and took up the membership (and the principles) of the EU, the physical and emotional signs of the socio-economic order that ruled the land barely twenty years ago are still very much deeply rooted and difficult to eradicate. Like their parents and grandparents, people here still emerge from their old Soviet concrete apartment blocks to