A high school history teacher in the city of Khabarovsk in Russia’s Far East has founded an organisation to encourage young people to study Juche, North Korea’s official ideology of self-reliance, at the school where he works, Russia’s state-owned news agency TASS reported on Tuesday.
Vladislav Kushnirenko, who founded the Youth Organisation for the Study of Juche, said that the North Korean consul in the city, Lee Sen Il, had supported the founding of the group, the aim of which was to further develop bilateral relations between North Korea and Russia.
Kushnirenko said that the group had already organised three events for schoolchildren, including one where pupils discussed the first volume of With the Century, the autobiography of North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung, who created the Juche ideology.
Variously described as a quasi-religion, a deviation from Marxism-Leninism, and both a fascist and nationalist ideology, Juche emerged as a doctrine distinct from other communist ideologies in the 1970s as the personality cult of dictator Kim Il Sung reached extraordinary heights.
Among the research projects the group plans to undertake, according to Kushnirenko, are ones on the North Korean Air Force, the revival of Japanese militarism as a threat to Russia and North Korea, and the defeat of the United States at the Battle of Taejon in 1950.
“I’m trying to make the greatest contribution I can to strengthening relations between Russia and North Korea. The stronger the alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang, the closer the collapse of American imperialism will be,” Kushnirenko said.
In signs of ever-warming relations between Moscow and Pyongyang, Russia’s lower house of parliament, the State Duma, voted on 24 October to ratify a defence pact with North Korea that provides for “mutual assistance” if either country comes under attack.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed on Monday that North Korean troops had been deployed to Russia’s southwestern Kursk region, the first time North Korean soldiers have taken part in military operations outside their country.
Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told American news outlet The War Zone last week that 11,000 North Korean infantry troops were undergoing training in Russia’s Far East ahead of deployment to Ukraine, while South Korean intelligence reported on 18 October that Pyongyang planned to send up to 12,000 troops to bolster the Russian military in Ukraine.