¹⁰ See the introduction in Geyer, Michael and Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Based entirely on secondary sources, the historical context briefly dealt with in chapter 3 is unpolished, and ridden with typos, ambiguous statements, and inaccuracies, for example “community party” instead of communist party (p. 53); “Japan imposed a feudal [sic] economic structure” (p. 53); “Kimilsungists…distrusted intellectuals and actively purged them…” (p. 54); Korean Workers' Party merged the North and South Korean branches “in 1946” rather than 1949 (p. 55); inconsistent dates for the various party congresses; etc.

¹² As the authors themselves acknowledge, refugees do not represent a random sample of the North Korean population but a particularly disaffected segment of North Korean society that chose to leave. The northeast provinces are overrepresented as the worst affected areas of the famine and in close proximity to the border with China. Refugees are also prone to exaggerate their education, occupation and social status as a way to enhance their value in South Korea.

¹³ Surveys were administered entirely in Korean by the authors' South Korean research partners as the authors themselves lack the requisite language skills. North Korean press materials used by McEachern were translations from the original Korean by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, renamed the Open Source Center in 2005.