Maybe it is to save on energy costs? I imagine most citizens are used to it. Furthermore, if they have never experienced indoor heating, they would not see anything odd about it being so cold indoors.
Unable to log in to post this comment, but there is discussion in the comments about how nobody is smiling. One observer points out that although people in the US and Europe rarely smile on streets, nobody was even smiling in the wedding photo. I'd like to point that if you look at wedding photos from a lot of hispanic cultures from more than a few years ago, you won't see many people smiling either. "Say cheese" may…
Spot on. One should also keep in mind that when photography was something new and rare people also took it very seriously and didn't smile in the 'western' world. If you only get relatively few number of pictures taken over the course of your life you want to leave a respectable impression for the future generations. I'm not sure about how wide-spread and available photography is in NK but that might also have to do with this.
Everything looks like Eastern Europe in the 80s, except that, as many people noted already, nobody is smiling.
I saw some photos from Easter Europe before the Soviet Union fell, and the most striking difference to the West was lack of advertisements on every corner.