It is hard to believe that money is money in any planned economy. Lenin was in his writings opposed to inflation and saw paper money as a means used by the bourgeois capitalists to enrich themselves (from here). Nonetheless his ideological heirs employed wide range of methods to rob workers (inflation, forced loans etc) and Soviet Union almost half of its lifespan relied on rationing. The demise of the Soviet system corresponded to flourishing Black Market and you can see examples of propaganda posters against street "speculants".
The North Korean Won is an example of such nominal currency. Paper tokens might play an important role in underground economy for purposes of economic calculation and coordination the same way Iraqi currency played after Americans destroyed Iraq Central Bank. On this 5 Won bill we can see issuance date 1998. Barbara Demick in her book "Nothing to envy : ordinary lives in North Korea" gave us some numbers to understand price scales. For example:
The black-market price of rice would hit 200 won per kilo by the end of 1998.
In 1998, the UN started humanitarian mission to supply North Korea with food because if multi-year famine. 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans had died as a result of the famine, as much as 10 percent of the population. Reasons are multiple, not to say that in the same 1998 the government made test rocket launches. The 5Won bill is interesting also due to atomic symbol and today we know that North Korea all this time was busy producing nuclear weapons. The price for these armaments is obvious. Barbara Demick tells the story:
Mrs. Song’s son was a strong, fit young man, the spitting image of his father but more athletic, more muscular, and at five foot nine, taller. He needed a lot of fuel to survive. When at first his body fat disappeared, he looked as lean and taut as a marathon runner, but eventually the muscle, too, was consumed, turning him into a cadaver. In the cold winter of 1997-98 when the temperatures dropped below freezing, he caught a bad cold that turned into pneumonia. Even with his weight loss, Nam-oak was too heavy for Mrs. Song to carry to the hospital—there were no ambulances working by now—so she went herself and explained his condition. A doctor wrote her a prescription for penicillin, but when she got to the market she found it cost 50 won—the same price as a kilo of corn. She chose the corn. Nam-oak died in March 1998, alone in the shack. Mrs. Song was at the market again scrounging for food. He was buried on a hill above town, next to his father’s grave, close enough that it was visible from her home. The Railroad Management Bureau was able to provide a coffin, as it had for Chang-bo.
For sale on Simple Auctions