As the food shortage stabilized, Kim Jong-il felt he had been too tolerant during the crisis and that he had to reverse the tide of liberalization. The prisons burst at the seams with newly minted criminals—vendors, traders, smugglers, and scientists and technicians who’d been trained in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe—once-Communist countries that had betrayed Communist ideals. The regime was striking back at anybody who could possibly be a threat to the old status quo.
