Once again, the DPRK was NOT an impoverished country even after it was being bombed to shit! It was one of the fastest growing economies in Asia and fared closely with post-war Japan’s reconstruction. The DPRK in the 1960s had higher living standards than China, South Korea and other Asian economies that rose in the 1980s.

I wrote an entire comment here if you’re interested.

The reason the DPRK couldn’t pay off the Volvo debt was because of the 1972 drought in Europe that caused short falls in Soviet crop harvest. The “Russian wheat deal” resulted in the USSR spending heavily to purchase grain abroad on the international market, causing global grain prices prices to be inflated everywhere else. The DPRK, which as I had written on the linked comment, was severely lacking in food security and depleted much of its foreign reserves purchasing food in the early 70s with highly inflated price.

This was the reason why the DPRK couldn’t pay back Volvo. This was the reason why the DPRK would spend the next few decades going after a self-reliance policy (Juche can be roughly translated to something like “self-reliance”), trying to conquer nature and increase food production on a very cursed land that is the Korean peninsula, to much disastrous consequences.