this is really pathetic, but those North Koreans may actually have better living conditions in a Russian Labor Camp than back home
The North Koreans owed a lot to the Russians. When the gulags began to wind down, they had to do something.
Lumber operations were considered “death camps” in the gulag system. Few could survive the work but lumber was vital to the Soviets and they had a lot of it.
I read about it many years ago. USSR contracted the logging operation out to NK and let them run it as they want. Still, there was a fierce competition in NK to get even the lowest ranking job in those logging camps because the pay was much better than in NK (and nearly free by USSR's standards.) In Siberia a nearest village could be hundreds of miles away; there would be no local police there, ever. So NK was just told to do the job and police itself, making sure that all the workers are accounted for. I'm sure NK had armed guards - not just to keep workers in, but primarily to keep the wildlife out. I guess it was theoretically possible for a NK worker to escape on a lumber train, but to get a job in USSR you had to have a proof of citizenship (the domestic passport, usually) so a runaway would have little chance of getting a legal job; with private business being prohibited in USSR, chances for an illegal job were nearly nonexistent.