‘Our mission is to smother negativity with positivity!’: Why Russians enjoy traveling to North Korea

Screenshot from YouTube channel Radiocat of the video “КНДР: О ЧЕМ МОЛЧАТ БЛОГГЕРЫ? Новая реальность Северной Кореи 2024” made by one of the bloggers who visited North Korea from Russia. Fair use.

This article was originally published in the online magazine Baikal People. Global Voices is republishing a translated and edited version, with permission.

In February 2024, after a four-year hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, North Korea reopened its borders to tourists from Russia. Over the course of a year, about 1,500 people visited the country. A group of tourists from other countries were allowed for a visit in February 2025 but were once again denied entry in March 2025.

The first group of Russians to visit North Korea after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions flew out on February 9, 2024. The group consisted of 98 people: not only tourists, but also journalists, representatives of travel companies, and students from a youth sports school for Olympic reserves.

In 2023, Kim Jong Un visited Russia in his personal armored train. His meeting with President Vladimir Putin at the Vostochny Cosmodrome was described by North Korea’s Central Telegraph Agency as an “epochal event” After this, Russia’s minister of foreign affairs recommended tourism in North Korea to Russians.

Alexander Fedosov was in the first group of tourists. He hadn’t expected the Masikryong ski resort to be so “modern.” It has ten wide slopes of varying difficulty and length, as well as enclosed gondola lifts. One distinctive feature: North Korean songs constantly playing through loudspeakers. Some visitors complained that they were always accompanied by identically dressed North Korean skiers on the slopes. Tourists could move around freely within the resort but could not leave, as the area was fenced off.

The tourism sector in North Korea has been developing for several decades. According to Korean studies expert and Kookmin University professor Andrei Lankov, the country’s first travel agency for tourists from socialist countries was established in the late 1950s. Relations between the USSR and North Korea were tense in the 1960s and 70s, so Soviet citizens rarely visited, but in the 1980s, a few hundred Soviet tourists per year were granted trips to North Korea through trade union or Komsomol (Young Communist League) channels. A similar number of visitors came from East Germany, Bulgaria, and other socialist bloc countries.

Between 1998 and 2008, South Korean tourists were allowed to visit North Korea. A special tourist zone, Kumgang, was built near the border for them. According to Andrei Lankov, the project was subsidized by the South Korean government. At the time, South Korea was led by “left-wing nationalists” who viewed North Koreans as “poor relatives in need of help.” When the government in Seoul changed, the project was shut down.

For one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world, tourism is a source of foreign currency. Kim Jong Un, who took power in 2011 and was educated in Switzerland, a European tourist hub, tried to attract “Western” travelers to North Korea. The Masikryong ski resort was built in 2014 as part of this effort. However, due to the limited number of flights to North Korea (only available through Russia and China), strict regulations for visitors, poor roads, and a lack of diverse entertainment, the country was only able to attract around 5,000–7,000 “Western” tourists annually, including Russians. The situation worsened after the 2017 death of United States citizen Otto Warmbier, which led the US to ban its citizens from traveling to North Korea.

Tourists are not required to surrender their phones at the border, but all electronics — including cameras and video equipment — must be declared. Officials do not check photos or videos upon departure, but, upon entry, border guards inspect any books brought in. Literature about North Korea published outside the country, as well as religious books, are strictly prohibited.

Most tours include several days in the capital, Pyongyang, the first city tourists see upon landing in North Korea.

Tourists note that Pyongyang’s roads are traveled not only by buses but also by cars — Russian, Chinese, and even Japanese, despite tense relations with Japan. On the streets, one can see women in fur coats and people using smartphones, though North Koreans do not walk around absorbed in screens. The country has its own messaging apps, social networks, and internal internet, but residents cannot access the global web.

Tour guides and translators are the only North Koreans with whom tourists can interact closely. Groups are typically accompanied by two people: a woman guide from a North Korean travel agency and a man security officer. According to Andrei Lankov, being a translator in North Korea is an elite profession. Working with foreign tourists grants access to tips — sometimes in foreign currency — special stores with scarce goods, and the opportunity to travel frequently, staying in hotels that even wealthy North Koreans view as “the pinnacle of extravagant luxury.”

Tourists are not allowed to explore the city on their own. According to Inna Mukhina, general director of tourist agency Vostok Intour, this rule exists because visitors do not know the city or the language, and the schedule is already packed. Foreigners are taken to museums, metro tours, mountains, seaside locations, circus performances, and various enterprises. All tour programs are approved at the government level.

Rumors circulate among tourists that at some point, a few Russians attempted to walk back to their hotel from a bar on their own. After this incident, tourists are now required to sign an agreement stating they must remain with their group at all times. Generally, those who stray from the group are not punished, but North Korean guides who fail to monitor them may face consequences.

Tourists are not allowed to shop alongside North Koreans. Instead, they are taken to special stores where they can buy souvenirs with foreign currency, including books about North Korea, paintings, embroidery, cosmetics, alcohol, and sweets. Some visitors were particularly struck by the North Korean version of Lego, which allows users to build a rocket launcher.

Forty-one-year-old aviation blogger Viktor from Veliky Novgorod visited North Korea in October 2024 not only for the exotic experience but also to create content for his YouTube channel. Videos from North Korea garnered record views on his channel — for example, a video about the Pyongyang metro was watched by 4.9 million people. Throughout 2024, several travel bloggers, food content creators, and aspiring YouTubers visited North Korea, and all of their North Korea-related videos topped the charts.

A new guideline issued by a tour company after a tourist attempted to leave their group includes several points instructing travelers on how to portray the country: “Only upload photos and videos to media and social networks that contribute to the positive development of tourism in North Korea.”

North Korea has a strict set of rules: those who follow them can live in relative safety. By the standards of a very poor country, healthcare and education are fairly developed. At the same time, kindergarten children must bow to portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il after lunch. Law enforcement agencies conduct unexpected nighttime apartment inspections multiple times a year — to check whether the portraits in homes are being properly maintained and whether televisions have been altered to receive Chinese channels.

Many tourists drew parallels between North Korea and the Soviet Union, whether real or imagined. One traveler compared the country to the world of the video game Atomic Heart, set in an alternative USSR where robots were mass-produced.

“North Koreans are genuine. When you talk to them, to these guides — it’s clear they’re connected to the KGB — but in their eyes, in everything about them, there’s a human sincerity that we no longer have. We had it in the USSR. Modern people are probably more plastic, less real, and as a pastor, I couldn’t help but notice this,” says Evgenii Petrov, tourist from Blagveschensk. He would like to help North Koreans somehow, though he understands that’s unlikely.

In North Korea, Russian tourists are invited to lay flowers at a monument to Soviet soldiers who died fighting to liberate Korea from Japanese occupation in 1945. Guides eagerly sing old Soviet songs with tourists, and a cake is always presented for birthdays.

Russia is considered a land of freedom and prosperity in North Korea — and Koreans know this firsthand, as hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have worked as loggers and laborers in Russia and shared their experiences with compatriots.

For Russian visitors, North Koreans even wrote a song to make bus rides less dull. The chorus, sung by the guides and the tourists in unison, was as follows: