evidence: Vasilii Yakovlevich Matuzok had dreamed of fleeing the oppression of communism since his high school days in Moscow. At age twenty-two, he became a translator in the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang, capital city of dictator Kim Il-sung’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Almost as soon as Matuzok arrived in the Far East, he began planning his defection. His opportunity came on 23 November 1984. That day he joined a group of Soviet-bloc Europeans for a tour of the so-called "Truce Village" at Panmunjom. All Matuzok required for escape was a moment of inattention by his handlers. A quick sprint across the Military Demarcation Line would bring him to safety and freedom. [...] When the two sides signed the armistice in July 1953, the front lines (Main Line of Resistance, or MLR, in contemporary doctrine) bisected the Korean peninsula near the 38th Parallel, rising well north of the parallel in the east and descending below the parallel in the west. Following the Armistice, the ground contact line became the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), a de facto inter-Korean border. To preclude accidental violations of each side’s territory by the other, a four-kilometer-wide demilitarized zone (DMZ) insulates the MDL to this day. Inside the DMZ, numbered yellow signs posted every one hundred meters indicate the border. The signs identify the MDL in Korean and Chinese on the north-facing side, and Korean and English on the south-facing side.