North Korea, that closed Stalinist bastion of a nation, is fighting a losing battle against the inexorable infiltration of foreign culture, enabled by outside technology.

Interesting reports have been filtering out of North Korea which point to the probability that the iron hand of oppression is finally having its fingers pried away, finger by finger.  It is very evocative of that which happened in eastern Europe as the USSR slowly disintegrated and imploded:

The construction of cellular relay stations last fall along the Chinese side of the border has allowed some North Koreans in border towns to use prepaid Chinese cell phones to call relatives and reporters in South Korea, defectors from North Korea say. And after DVD players swept northern China two years ago, entrepreneurs collected castoff videocassette recorders and peddled them in North Korea. Now tapes of South Korean soap operas are so popular that state television in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, is campaigning against South Korean hairstyles, clothing and slang, visitors and defectors have said.

"In the 1960's in the Soviet Union, it was cool to wear blue jeans and listen to rock and roll," said Andrei Lankov, a Russian exchange student in the North at Kim Il Sung University in 1985, who now teaches about North Korea at Kookmin University here in the South. "Today, it is cool for North Koreans to look and behave South Korean, as they do in the television serials. That does not bode well for the long-term survival of the regime."

For the USSR, which tried to control content and communication, it finally became impossible to keep the culture of the rest of the world from filtering in and having an effect on the masses of people.  It inexorably and profoundly changed the way the people behind the Iron Curtain viewed their world and their situation.  It created a yearning and a longing which finally resulted in a tide of freedom which washed away the supports of the "Evil Empire".

It appears, by these reports, that the same thing may be happening in North Korea.  Things that were formerly unthinkable are now appearing as fairly commonplace: 

Halfway through a video from North Korea, the camera pans on a propaganda portrait of Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader, magnificent in his general's dress uniform with gold epaulets. Scribbled in black ink across his smooth face is a demand for "freedom and democracy."

If genuine, the graffiti speaks of political opponents willing to risk execution to get their message out. If staged, the video means that a North Korean hustler was willing to deface a picture of the "Dear Leader" to earn a quick profit by selling it to a South Korean human rights group.

Either way, the 35-minute video is the latest evidence that new ways of thinking are stealing into North Korea, perhaps corroding the steely controls on ideology and information that have kept the Kim family in power for almost 60 years.

If you follow North Korea at all you know how tightly controlled that country has been in the past.  The defacing of "Dear Leader's" picture would have been unthinkable a mere 5 years ago.  To have that defacement show up on a video would have been deemed impossible. 

This doesn't mean the same people aren't in charge and aren't trying to maintain the status quo:

 Reviewing North Korea's political elite, "we see no big change," said Noriyuki Suzuki, director of Radio Press, a Japanese government monitoring service that focuses on the North Korean media.

But it does mean real trouble for that ruling elite, because it appears the unrest is coming from a formerly docile public.  The public appears to adopting a more activist attitude.  That attitude is being fed by increasing contact with the outside world by average North Koreans:

"But the bigger worry for him should be not in the core part of his power structure, but any move of distrust or dissatisfaction with the regime among the general public," Mr. Suzuki said, referring to Mr. Kim. He cited a recent joint editorial published in North Korea's three most important newspapers "strongly warning against the flow of information from outside the country, warning against the inflow of capitalist elements through travel outside."

In the recording studio of a radio station here, Seong Min Kim, a former North Korean Army captain who is now the director for the South Korean radio station Free NK, explained how Chinese cell phones in North Korea have enabled him to nurture sources there.

"He just dials 0082 to get the Korean-speaking Chinese operator, then makes a collect call to here," Mr. Kim said of one source. The prepaid cell phones are usually paid for by journalists in South Korea, he said, and the North Koreans go along largely out of curiosity or to try to make business deals. He added: "They are getting more and more tech savvy. Now they are asking for cell phones with cameras attached."

At a human rights confererence here on Feb. 15, defectors estimated in interviews that about one-third of the defectors in South Korea regularly talk to family members back in North Korea, calling owners of prepaid Chinese cell phones at a prearranged time.

Obviously the regime wants to "discourage" this sort of contact, and are taking extreme measures to do so.  But dissidents have also adapted:

 To counter this, North Korea has reportedly started border patrols using Japanese equipment that can track cell phone calls. Reporters tell stories of their contacts who only make calls from their private garden plots in the hills, burying the cell phone in the ground after each call.

The cell phone phenomenon is much easier to localize and control.  The VCR phenomenon, however, has spread throughout North Korea, and has made the government react in its predictable and repressive manner.

 "They [VCRs] are within the reach of the average family," said Dr. Lankov, who regularly interviews recent defectors. "They watch, almost exclusively, smuggled and copied South Korean movies and drama. Only a few weeks after airing here, they will go throughout North Korea."

More than showing middle-class family lifestyles, which can be staged in a studio, the soap operas also provide images of a modern Seoul - the forest of high-rise buildings, the huge traffic jams, the late-model cars.

With such images showing a stark contrast with primitive conditions in North Korea, Mr. Kim ordered the formation of a special prosecutor's office last November to arrest people who deal in South Korean goods, largely videotapes, or who use South Korean expressions or slang, analysts in South Korea say.

To crack down on home viewing of imported videotapes, the North Korean police developed the strategy of encircling a neighborhood in the evening, cutting off electricity, then inspecting players to find videotapes stuck inside, according to Young Howard, international coordinator of the Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights, a Seoul-based group. Recent defectors have also told Mr. Howard that police cars with loudspeakers have patrolled neighborhoods, warning residents to maintain their "socialist lifestyle" and to shun South Korean speech and clothing and hairstyles, he said.

Combined with other changes, this infiltration of outside ideas and images is beginning to take its toll on the draconian regime built by the Kims:

Inside North Korea, social, political and economic controls have been eroded by two other changes over the past decade: private markets and a breakdown in travel restrictions, Dr. Lankov said.

"You have private money lenders, you have inns, you have brothels, you have canteens," he said, adding that most North Koreans survive through a combination of foreign aid and a fledgling private economy.

Draconian controls on internal travel and on travel to China have been breaking down, he said, and hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have traveled to and from Korean-speaking areas of China, exposing them to a thriving market economy and more South Korean television broadcasts.

"They are gradually learning about South Korean prosperity," Dr. Lankov said. "This is a death sentence to the regime. North Korea's claim to legitimacy is based on its ability to deliver the worker's paradise now. What if everyone sees that it is not delivering?"

The human yearning for freedom lives in even the most oppressive of places.  And as more fuel is added to that yearning it will become larger and larger.  If you've followed North Korea over the years, you'll know these changes are monumental.  They signal the beginning of the end for the existing regime, just as jeans, rock-and-roll and western movies helped grease the skids for the USSR's eventual slide into oblivion.

The only remaining questions are when this collapse will take place, and when that finally happens, will those leaders who will go down with that evil regime, do so relatively quietly or lash out at the rest of the world in a final fit of rage at the loss of their power?