North Korea: Thousands of North Koreans are working in Russia in near slave-like conditions, writes Daniel McLaughlin who was in Vladivostok recently
The sharply dressed Russian reluctantly lowers his mobile phone. "You don't need to talk to the workers. You never need to talk to the workers. You can talk to us if you want to use them."
Exasperated, he returns the phone to his ear and walks back up the steep staircase. The security guard swings the heavy metal door closed and slides a bolt firmly into place.
Outside, three floors up, the two dusty North Koreans have disappeared. They had stepped out briefly on to the unfinished stone balcony, exchanged a few words and looked out towards the Pacific Ocean across the rooftops of Vladivostok.
Then they had gone back through the bare window frame and the sound of construction had begun again. They stayed outside long enough to confirm in halting Russian where they were from, that there were four of them inside and that they were builders who might be available for hire.
There are many hundreds of North Koreans for hire in Vladivostok, a port city and north-east Asian entrepot in Russia's Far East. Local newspapers teem with adverts simply offering: "Koreans - for building and repair work" and a phone number to call. It is invariably a Russian who answers, locals say. You never speak to the North Koreans.
One Vladivostok resident says she regularly orders North Koreans when she wants repair work done around her house.
"I asked for just one worker, so I would feel safe with him around," she said, "but they told me that never happens. They aren't allowed to work alone."
It is a story you hear repeated around town, along with commendations for how hard the North Koreans work, how they never complain and how little their labour costs. In comparison, local wisdom says, Chinese workers are lazy and haughty.
Few people in Vladivostok seem interested in how the North Koreans got there or what they think of Russia or of their impoverished Marxist homeland.
Pyongyang ran up huge debts to Moscow during the Soviet days and has found an unorthodox way of repaying its old Communist ally. "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-Il has dispatched thousands of his countrymen to Russia's Far East to work in near slave-like conditions on city building sites and remote logging camps.
Alexei Starichkov, director of Korean studies at Vladivostok's Far Eastern State University, says Russian firms sign deals for cheap labour with North Korea. Those who not employed on a specific job at any one time are hired out for cash. That goes into the pockets of their minders from Pyongyang or of Russian middlemen.
He says the workers receive a pittance for work that can last for 12 or more hours a day and they return late at night to dilapidated hostels or sleep in the buildings they are renovating.
At all times, the North Korean "brigades" are supervised by members of their country's security services, which enjoy a reputation akin to that of the Soviet- era KGB, or by compatriots who are considered unfailingly loyal to the bizarre personality cult built by Kim since he succeeded his father as leader in 1994.
In Vladivostok, a city which mixes elegant mansions with jarring tower blocks as it descends to the Golden Horn bay, North Koreans occasionally walk in small groups around town. They speak little Russian and quickly withdraw into nervous silence when a stranger engages them.
For all that, North Koreans crave the opportunity to work here, even on the logging teams a thousand miles north of Vladivostok, where the high security, Spartan conditions and ideological indoctrination are reminiscent of Soviet labour camps.
"It's a privilege for them to be selected for work in Russia and they send most of what little money they earn home," says Mr Starichkov.
Some North Koreans without the impeccable ideological record, the good connections or the good fortune to be chosen for work abroad, try to find other ways out of a country where malnutrition is commonplace and any opposition to rigid Marxism and hero-worship of the portly bespectacled Kim is forbidden.
"Our frontier with North Korea is just too tight to sneak through, so most of them try and get in via China. Maybe four or five a month try it, but 99 per cent of them get caught," says a former Russian border guard officer.
A member of the security services for 14 years, he speaks on condition of anonymity, after a colleague was fired for talking to the Western media two years ago.
"They are usually poorly dressed and hungry and say they are just looking for a better life," he says of the North Koreans he has dealt with on the remote border marked by what Russians call the Tumannaya or Foggy river.
"They kneel down and beg us not to send them back - they ask us to give them to the Chinese rather than their own people - but what can we do?" He says Russian border guards know that North Koreans have been shot for treachery after being sent home.
Mr Starichkov agrees that very few North Koreans make it illegally across the border. Despite the grinding conditions of their life in Russia, he says few try to escape their minders and risk being sent home in disgrace.
"The consequences for them and their families would probably be very serious," he says. "And where would they go? For them, it's great to live and work here."