Maybe, but there's also an inherent counterintelligence asymetry between a liberal democracy and a totalitarian police state (which is why in a liberal democracy, the counterintelligence services are often trying to simulate a totalitarian police state.)
It has a high standard of living so it's easier to recruit someone to be willing to live here for long periods of time.
It's not uncommon for someone to have a social circle made up entirely of people they've only known a few years. This seems to be much less the case in other places in the world, especially Russia.
It's much more culturally heterogenous so it's easier for someone to blend in.
You could just as easily argue it in the opposite direction, it is much easier to co-opt the corrupt Russian government than it is to co-opt the less corrupt American government. An individual corrupt unaccountable person of interest in a totalitarian police state is far more valuable than an individual corrupt person of interest that is being watched like a hawk by the public in a liberal democracy.
I think a much more reasonable explanation for why government organizations are always trying to become more totalitarian is simply that the officials would rather have more power than less power. The only difference between here and there are the checks placed on them to limit what they can do.
Note that I was referring to the explanation of the relative success of US vs. Soviet placement/detection of agents (from context, intelligence officers, not assets, though “agent” can mean either); Russia’s current government and the Soviet government aren't the same thing.
> I think a much more reasonable explanation for why government organizations are always trying to become more totalitarian
That's not the effect I was explaining or, even, at that level of generality, one I'd agree exists.
Can you give a cold war example of America effecting who ran russia that is as dramatic as the Trump story in the other direction?
The real activity was on Facebook groups, viralizing anti-immigration and far-left news, controling the narritive on 4chan pol and /r/the_donald, and botted up - and downvote brigades.
It was so blatant it was visible to a non-expert on information warfare like me.
The people doing this probably got paid about as much as a paid advertisement.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/11/wikilea...
I suspect we will see more of this sort of thing as the investigation continues, but of course, the investigation isn't over yet. My point is just that it was a lot more than 4chan and facebook.
There is a long history of foreign interventions in elections being catastrophic; I recently read Herman's "1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder" - and he claims that there is pretty solid evidence that Lenin was bankrolled by Germany in very impactful ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Russian_presidential_elec...
It ain't even close.
But when someone else answers the question, (read the rest of the thread) there's no need to answer it again.
> Yelzin.
That's...not a Cold War example.
The US interfering in the 1996 Russian election to install 'our guy' stands as a preposterous, ridiculous overt interference with Russian politics on a scale which the Russians can never hope to achieve.
I am not going to vote for any politician who thinks allowing the same sort of thing to happen to the USA is in any way okay.
(I mean, from a completely neutral sense, I get what they are saying... but I'm not completely neutral; I don't think any of us are. Leaving aside that I think you can make a reasonable argument that the USSR was, even for those who lived there, a bad thing, (though I'm obviously biased on that point.) I do think it's reasonable to expect your political leaders to take steps to prevent your country from being taken over by a foreign power.)
Edit: neutrality and clarity
How do you feel about the interference of Israel, Saudi Arabia and China in US elections? Because they've certainly subverted US democracy a lot more than the integral of all Russian/Soviet interference with US elections over all time (China being a very junior partner, but still pretty obviously doing so in ways the Russians don't). Shucks, any one of them interfered more in the last election more than the Russians ever have.
It appears that there is a federal investigator on the case, so I suggest we watch what comes of that.
Russia was called “Russia” during the Cold War (for that matter, in the West, informally, so, frequently, was the Soviet Union.)
> The US interfering in the 1996 Russian election to install 'our guy'
“Our guy” had been installed in the Russian Presidency long before he became our guy, while the Russian Federation was still part of the USSR. Whatever interference happened in ’96 wasn't to install anything.
> overt interference with Russian politics on a scale which the Russians can never hope to achieve.
Well, yeah, overt interference, to even have a hope of not being wildly counterproductive, requires establishing a certain level of goodwill with the target population.
There said, the recent Russian covert (though not so much as to withstand much scrutiny) intervention in Western (not merely US) politics has been on a broader scale, and more successful at driving outcomes, than anything either side did, during or after the Cold War, in the 20th Century.
Unlike the conspiracy theory that $20k in allegedly Russian purchased FB ads (or whatever the insane idea is this week) is why a reality TV star won the presidency.