The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), better known as North Korea, is a Stalinist dictatorship located in East Asia on the Korean peninsula. North Korea was founded on 9 September 1948 as a Soviet ally after negotiations for a united Korea failed, and the state was ruled by the communist guerrilla Kim Il-sung. Kim was a devoted pupil of Joseph Stalin, and North Korea attempted to reunite Korea by invading South Korea in 1950. The invasion led to the Korean War, which was concluded with a ceasefire after China intervened to save North Korea from a United Nations invasion.
In 1953, North Korea and South Korea agreed to a ceasefire to end the Korean conflict, but the two nations were still officially at war for several decades, and North Korea's Stalinist government survived the fall of Stalinism in the later 1950s. North Korea became isolationist, distancing itself from the rest of the communist nations in the world, and the government adopted the militarist and nationalist Juche ideology in 1972. North Korea's poor economy was caused by the prevalence of collective farms and state-run enterprises, and healthcare, education, housing, and food production were subsidized or state-funded. North Korea has been a totalitarian dictatorship since its foundation, with the education system teaching children to worship images of the ruling Kim family, to believe that America and Japan were North Korea's worst enemies, that the Americans caused the Korean War, and that North Korea was the greatest country in the world. From 1994 to 1998, 240,000-3,500,000 people died in a horrible famine, and the country still struggles to feed its people.
North Korea's Songun policy of militarism has led to North Korea maintaining a large military of 9,495,000 troops and reservists (the Korean People's Army), and North Korea has used Russian-made weaponry since its foundation. North Korea's demilitarized zone (DMZ) with South Korea has been one of the most dangerous regions of the world, with North Korean and South Korean/US troops occasionally exchanging fire. In addition, the KPA has laid mines and created machine-gun nests along the border to prevent any North Korean defectors from fleeing across the border.
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