21/11/2021 05:16 How Soviet Russia Conducted ‘Ideological Subversion’ in Western Nations

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The coffin containing the remains of Yuri Andropov, former KGB chief and Soviet premier, is pulled
through Moscow streets during his funeral on Feb. 13, 1984. Andropov called the Soviets’ strategy of
ideological subversion in the West “the final struggle for the minds and hearts of the people.” (AFP via
Getty Images)

CANADA

How Soviet Russia Conducted

‘Ideological Subversion’ in Western
Nations
KGB spy who defected to Canada in 1970 exposed
USSR’s ‘war of communist world aggression’

By Michael Wing January 29, 2020

Updated: January 30, 2020    Print

The defection of Russian intelligence officer Igor Gouzenko, stationed at the Soviet
Embassy in Ottawa during and after the Second World War, is one of the highest-
profile cases of defection in Canadian history—even said to be the event that
triggered the Cold War.

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Gouzenko exposed the extent of the Soviet spy network in the West at that time,

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of infiltrating sleeper agents into target countries.

But some of the most chilling revelations came from another spy who defected to
Canada 25 years later, exposing how the Soviet Union set about creating chaos and
discord in the West—the fallout from which continues to be felt today.

Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB spy and state media propagandist who defected to
Canada in 1970, said ideological subversion—in other words, mass brainwashing—
was one very effective method used by the communist regime to undermine and
destabilize Western countries.

Bezmenov managed to escape from his post as an informant for the notorious
Soviet spy agency and was given a secret identity by the CIA and a new name:
Tomas David Schuman. He worked in several professions until finally becoming a
CBC Russian-language television correspondent in Montreal, broadcasting to the
Soviet Union as part of the CBC’s International Service.

He left that position in 1976, later claiming that the Soviets urged then-prime
minister Pierre Trudeau to pressure the CBC to remove him from his position.

In the 1980s, Bezmenov became known for his anti-communist interviews,

lectures, and books. His most famous book is “Love Letter to America,” a country
he described as “the most free, affluent, and just in today’s world,” and as such a
prime target of the Soviet “war of communist world aggression.”

He said the driving force behind the communist war of aggression was “ideological
subversion—the process of changing the perception of reality in the minds of
millions of people all over the world,” and what former KGB head Yuri Andropov
called “the final struggle for the minds and hearts of the people.”

Bezmenov expounded on this in a 1984 interview with American author and

documentary film producer G. Edward Griffin, saying the KGB actually only
devoted about 15 percent of its resources to intelligence-gathering.

“The other 85 percent is a slow process which we call either ‘ideological subversion’
or ‘active measures’—in the language of the KGB—or ‘psychological warfare,’” he
said.

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“What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to

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that, despite Virus
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information, no one is able to come
to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their
community, and their country.”

This is a “great brainwashing process” designed as a long-term four-fold strategy

that is “overt and open—you can see it with your own eyes,” explained Bezmenov.
The four stages are demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and finally,
normalization.

Demoralization
Essentially propaganda education, demoralization takes 15 to 20 years—the span it
takes to educate one generation by exposing them to “the ideology of the enemy,”
Bezmenov said.

“Marxist-Leninist ideology has been pumped into the soft heads of at least three
generations of American students, without being challenged or counter-balanced
by the basic values of Americanism (patriotism).”

Most people in the United States who graduated in the 1960s now occupying
positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and the
educational system are already demoralized, the ex-spy said. They are
“programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern,” and the
process is “complete and irreversible.”

“You cannot change their mind,” he said.

“Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is

demoralized is unable to assess true information. … Even if I shower him with
information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take
him by force to the Soviet Union and show him a concentration camp, he will
refuse to believe it.”

He noted that if one started educating a new generation today, it would take
another 15 to 20 years to “turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to
normalcy and patriotism.”

Destabilization

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Bezmenov explained that ideals such as social justice and equality no longer serve

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“It takes only two to five years to destabilize a nation,” he said.

The process involves radicalizing human relations to the point where people are
unable to resolve issues in a civil way, fracturing traditional relations into groups:
labour unions, women’s rights, racial tension, and so on. “As long as these groups
come into antagonistic clash … that is destabilization.”

He said the process of destabilization in the United States had progressed

surprisingly fast in the 14 years since he had defected.

Crisis
In the third stage, Bezmenov said that after society is destabilized, it collapses into
chaos, and inevitably the people will call for the government to step in to enforce
stability.

“Either a foreign nation comes in, or the local group of leftists, Marxists … a saviour
comes and says, ‘I will lead you,’” he said.

Crisis typically takes one of two forms: either civil war, an example being the PLO
insurgency in Lebanon that began in 1968, or invasion, such as the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan in 1979.

Normalization
Lastly, the subverting country finally seizes control of the target country with
forceful military overthrow; the chaos is stabilized, and the situation “normalized.”

Use of the term “normalized” in this way is ironic, Bezmenov said.

“When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ’68, comrade [Leonid]
Brezhnev said, ‘Now the situation is normalized.’ This is what will happen in the
United States if you allow all these schmucks to bring the country to crisis,” he
said.

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21/11/2021 05:16 How Soviet Russia Conducted ‘Ideological Subversion’ in Western Nations

“[There will be a promise of] all kinds of goodies and paradise on earth to
destabilizeBusiness CCP
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your economy, eliminate the principle

and to put a big brother government in Washington, D.C., with benevolent dictators
who’ll promise lots of things. Never mind if the promises are fulfilled or not.”

Media Manipulation
In “Love Letter to America,” Bezmenov said the U.S. media “is a willing recipient of
Soviet subversion,” the aim being to tear down traditional Western society and its
values.

“I know this because I worked with American journalists and correspondents in

Moscow while on the Soviet side, and after my defection to the West,” he said,
noting that the media landscape in the United States is “monopolized both
financially and ideologically by what are referred to as ‘liberals.’”

Promoting “non-issues” is one tactic, he said.

“An issue, the solution of which creates more and bigger problems for the majority
of a nation even though it may benefit only a few, is a non-issue. The main purpose
of non-issues and the devastating result of their introduction is the side-tracking of
public opinion, energy (both mental and physical), money, and time from the
constructive solutions,” he said.

“Soviet propaganda elevated the art of infiltrating and emphasizing non-issues in

American public life to the level of actual state policy.”

Another method Soviet subversion in American media and “one of the most
devastating,” he said, was the discrediting of those who had evidence of communist
crimes against humankind.

“In my own experience, communist defectors who have requested and sometimes
literally begged to have stories of their life in the Soviet Union told to the American
people via the major American media have been completely ignored.”

Michael Wing Follow

EDITOR AND WRITER

Michael Wing is a writer and editor based in Calgary, Canada, where he was born
and educated in the arts. He writes mainly on culture, human interest, and
trending news.

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