KGB Defector Yuri Bezmenov 1985 Interview – Idealogical Subversion

Not from Putin directly. There were a lot of actions taken by the Russian government which just imply it. High ranking Russian officials that booked reservations for restaurants in Kyiv the week after the invasion, troops taking their dress uniforms instead of food, a pre-scheduled propaganda essay that was accidentally released on the 28th which retained language implying that Kyiv had already been taken and so forth.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/09/russia-putin-propaganda...

Whilst I do not have a YouTube link, I do have seen several Russian pundits imply that Ukrainians would capitulate in 3 days, Russia just has to sneeze their way and they'd keel over, etc.

There’s not, it was actually General Milley who put this number out there and the media and social media ran with it as if it were an official Kremlin statement.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/gen-milley-says-kyiv-could-fall-w...

I hate talking about downvotes but it is really odd that you're being downvoted for asking for a source. Source are requested all the time on this website, and only in certain cases do they get downvoted like this. Hopefully your comment won't be gray in a few hours when more people participate in the thread.

I would like to see a source as well, because I want to see sources for all claims I encounter online. Why should I trust a random person on a website?

There are reports of captured Russian war plans. Im not sure where i read about it but War on the Rocks and Michael Kofman are credible experts.

I dont actually remember the details of the plan but It was something like:

Massive armor convoy sent to Kyiv alongside the rapid capture of Hostomel airport and a then a giant airlift of troops towards a point very much close to Kyiv.

The disdain the commenter is showing for the Russian invasion plan is misplaced however. Most contemporary reports (Post battle of Kyiv) say that the Ukrainians were indeed caught by surprise, that Russian cyberwarfare managed to take out Ukrainian AA allowing for the helicopter Assault at Hostomel and that although Ukraine was sucessful It was a close call and losses were heavy.

Again you have to Dig a bit to avoid the propaganda narratives. The race to Kyiv was actually a Very Very close battle according to what we know now.

The whole 3 days to Kyiv was actually an overstatement. I believe it was more 13 days to capture Kyiv, 2-3 months for the whole country excluding the West which Russia didnt believe It could occupy without heavy resistance. But thats just written out from memory and i might be wrong on the details.

I believe that the Russian expectation was something similar to 2014, where initial Ukrainian resistance just collapsed or was innefective.

Yes, they even posted premature victory piece:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60562240

Link to actual russian piece: https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20...

The US had many of the same expectations about victory in the second Iraq war.

The Party Secretary of Leningrad even commissioned Dmitri Shostakovich to compose celebratory music for the occasion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suite_on_Finnish_Themes

It was set aside but was later rediscovered and was first performed in 2001 by a Finnish orchestra.

Except that the Finnish Winter War was eventually a defeat for the Finns, due to the overwhelming force of the Red Army despite its horrendous losses. Finland in fact lost more from the war than it would have lost had it simply accepted Stalin's original territorial demands. I still defend their fighting spirit, but it's a bad moral example for the current war, because one hopes the Russians don't eventually win.

russians claimed two days. Here Margarita Simonyan https://twitter.com/ruinwanderer/status/1622142324015878144

As with everything you indeed can not generalize for an entire population. - I’m in the same boat as you with my Russian friends and acquaintances :)

basically my feeling when I logged into Experian today

they are offering a service where they would attempt to erase your identity from a list of data aggregators, lest that info is used by "bad actors"

gee i wonder who gave those aggregators my info in the first place...

"would be a real shame if any of them used your unlocked credit score.... oh you have to pay to lock that too :^) "

One should ask, though, what makes improvement impossible.

300k mobilized in a population of 143 million, so about 2 per thousand.

He might simply live in region that mobilized less. Of live abroad. Most of mobilization happen in poor peripheral regions. Moscow and surrounding mobilizes much less.

Because he lives in America, and drinks at the same bar as me, and we have mostly amicable arguments. He tells me what he sees on Russian telegram. I believe he sincerely believes this propaganda. And I think he doesn't feel comfortable telling most other people here his opinions (although as I often point out, he will not be arrested or punished here for having a dissenting view, as he would be in his home country). I'm not someone who's into "canceling" people, so I listen and respond to his topics. I hear him out and give him my views and we argue. A lot of it comes back to his view that the West is not as good as Russia, even though when we talk about the details (like not getting arrested for free speech) he admits that it's better in some ways, but says that without strong central leadership the West is morally falling apart, (even though he chooses to live here)... I think he partly wants to convince an American, but partly he just wants to understand our point of view.

[edit] based on your other posts down the chain, I think you're implying he's what we'd call a "chickenhawk". I won't confirm or deny that I think the same thing. To me it would be unhelpful to attack his personal lack of bodily commitment when I'm trying to argue historical reality and I'm one of the few Americans in his orbit who probably can. He can, of course, go to anyone else and be told to put his ass on the line if he believes X, Y and Z, so it wouldn't help the conversation.

This was excellent. Thank you. I'm going to try to get my Russian "debate partner" to watch it, although it's probably pointless.

Sure there is. I mean, there's no ideology that promises a better future for the common man, like communism, but ideology there is; Imperialism, glory of the motherland, a peculiarly Russian variant of "Manifest destiny", power of the state, domination of lesser peoples, etc. Fascism, if you like.

Contemporary Cheka is a direct continuation of the predecessors though?

The promised ideology may have been revised and revised again, but in practice the implementation of authoritarianism seems pretty stable.

Obama far more than Bush.

Absolutely. As s teen in the 80s I was shocked the USSR collapsed as everything around me made them out to be this huge Russian bear that could kill us at any moment. Granted I was in the Midwest then away from 24h news cycle, and much closer to missile silos and military bases so perhaps that made a difference.

>But we, George W Bush really, then underestimated Russia in the 2000s.

True, but then Obama really fucked it up with "reset". And that was after Georgia War.

He literally said Communism and USSR are going to take other the world unless the last free country (USA) stops them. 4 years later his entire country fell apart. Almost all of the satellite countries have ran from Communism and Russian ideology except Belarus.

He also said we had serval years to live on until we would have no where to defect to, except maybe Antartica.

Another comment was all the wealthy businessmen are hanging themselves by trading with USSR and they would pray to be killed but probably sent to Alaska, presumably to a Gulag after USSR takes over.

> If you listened to the entire interview, I don’t know how you managed to mentally substitute the term “Russia” for the term “Marxism-Leninism” for 15 entire minutes. The man is talking about ideological subversion. It’s not about nationalism.

He's an ex-KGB spook talking about the actions of a foreign government. Of course it's about nationalism. Said ideological subversion is there to serve the needs of the USSR. He even talks about the "Soviet military complex" that will take over if the US doesn't realize what's happening quickly enough.

So said ideology is being propagated to create a crisis that would then allow a foreign state with hostile interests to take over.

> Bezmenov already says in 1985 that the ideological program had succeeded beyond all expectations and that Americans were doing most of the work for them.

Yes, and living in 2023, we can see he was full of it. Nothing had succeeded. The USSR fell apart, and the current US doesn't have anything approaching a proper left wing, let alone anything resembling Marxism.

Soon after that interview, Gorbachov went to the US and had his jaw drop watching a normal supermarket. Even the highest of positions in the USSR had little clue of what was happening in the US back then. They were very far from having the access needed to spread any kind of ideology through entire generations.

> That, coupled with the collapse of the USSR, would allow that leftist ideology to mutate into the forms we see today.

No, that's the evidence of that he was wrong.

He says it takes three generations to reveal, so 80/90s being the start of subversion makes perfect sense.

I think it would explain even better why everyone tries to shoehorn their least favorite thing about "the other side" into every conversation about manipulation by state actors. Case in point.

The two PC terms are not related. In the start of the last century political correctness was about the correct adherence to ideology. The modern PC is a describer coined by us conservatives to label progressive political goals.

Soviet "political correctness" was about protecting the state from any criticism, American "political correctness" is about understanding systems of oppression from the standpoint of the oppressed.

Couldn't be more different.

≥ Poseidon system[3] which is a 100mt radioactive tsunami fully autonomous doomsday weapon

No where on that page does it say it is automated or carries 100mt. The only place it mentions tsunami is where it discredits the idea this weapon could cause one.

Thanks.

That’s an almost like a sci-fi plot. It doesn’t fit from my lay perspective though. Putins miracle weapons seems like Hitlers - a PR exercise for the masses. The performance of the Russian military has been so pathetic it’s surely caused huge rethinks in many quarters.

> "The Perestroika Deception"[1] in which he says that Perestroika is a strategic retreat because the Soviets know they are too far behind technologically to have any hope of defeating the west. They will however use that retreat to acquire modern technology and improve their economy so they can ultimately conquer the west.

Such generations lasting grand conspiracies just sound too fanciful to take seriously. I think the simpler explanation is that, yes, like the communists before him, Putin is a Russian imperialist. And rumor has it that Putin hates the communists with a fiery passion, for screwing up the grand Russian empire. Putin is doing his best to rekindle the empire, just using a more traditional authoritarian/fascist approach rather than relying on communist ideology.

Much of the old ways of working, the propaganda, supporting all kinds of nutjob groups in foreign countries, etc etc., 'maskirovka' if you like, dating back to tsarist times, continued through the communist era and is still a tool in the arsenal they use. No change here.

As for doomsday weapons with no defense against them, they have existed since the 1960'ies or so in the guise of ICBM's.

What career? He died a few years after this interview.

Elsewhere in this thread you say he shouldn't be listened to because he's a defector and would naturally be opposed to the USSR. So you're doing exactly the same thing that you criticise other people for.

That's like saying, "by your logic, we should never cross the road, because we can't possibly look both ways enough times!"

On the contrary. Many of those people are now tenured professors and deans of universities, which Bezmenov said were specifically and overwhelmingly targeted by this strategy. Guess which ideology most universities lean on - the ideological uniformity and persecution of different viewpoints has reached an extreme level there.

I see your point, I used this expression to emphasize the fact that it is not some abstract theory but something we are actually experiencing right now. I prefer not to give examples as these are the very issues that split our society and make some of the most heated discussions leaving everybody bitter and upset.

> "cultural marxism" is a far right antisemitic conspiracy theory

The Frankfurt School was real, not a "conspiracy theory". "Cultural Marxism" was originally used to refer to the Frankfurt School and its intellectual heirs by (left-leaning) academic Trent Schroyer, in his 1973 book The Origins and Development of Critical Theory – long before the term had any currency on the right. And they really have been a significant influence on left-of-centre academia in the humanities and social sciences, which in turn has been a real influence on the broader culture (especially at the somewhat elite level of establishment journalism, NGOs, etc)

Do a lot of people on the right overstate and exaggerate that influence, or offer overly simplistic accounts of it? Yep. But, this "it's a conspiracy theory" meme seems to be responding to that with its exact opposite, intentional understatement and denial.

And "far right antisemitic" seems to be an exercise in guilt-by-association: Are some people who talk about this far-right or antisemitic? Yes. Are they all? No. Is the idea in itself (however true or false it may be), that "the Frankfurt School has had an outsized influence on contemporary progressivism", inherently "far right" or antisemitic? No.

That's not to say I like all this "cultural Marxism" talk – I hate how it treats "Marxism" as a dirty word. It's so cringeworthy when right-wingers (Americans seem especially prone to it) do that. That's not to say I agree with Marxism, or deny that in practice it has caused a lot of mayhem, suffering, evil. But I'd much rather listen to the kind of right-wingers who can see the good in Marxism, even the common ground people on the political right can find with Marxists – I think Compact magazine is a good example of this, which started when two conservative Catholics and a Marxist got together to talk about what they had in common, and ended up founding a magazine to continue that conversation.

But to me, "cultural Marxism is a far right antisemitic conspiracy theory" ends up coming across as just as much a brain-dead talking point as "cultural Marxism" itself so often is.

> Defectors are notoriously unreliable: they tell their host country whatever they want to hear

This is almost word-for-word the same rationalization employed by the people who denied the Cambodian genocide.

> This has nothing to do with Reagan. Bezmenov defected to Canada.

And the interviewer is an American. They're talking about American conditions. Where he defected isn't that important within that context. Additionally, he moved to Los Angeles a couple of years before this interview was conducted. Specifically to have an easier time connecting with his audience.

He defected to Canada, but in 1970. The interview in the 1980s took place during the Reagan administration. The gp's argument is that there was a market for Bezmenov's just-so explanations, due in part to Reagan's policies. Anti-Soviet sentiment in the US was also high at the time, due to the USSR's brutal invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

The more serious criticism in my view is that not many of Bezmenov's specific allegations have been well-corroborated since, although a great deal of information about the KGB became available, eg the Mitrokhin archive - although parts do remain classified (by the UK).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive

The CIA helped him defect and change his name. Years later, he appeared on TV in the US repeating neoconservative talking points in the 80s. But I guess he was just your ordinary Canadian.

Without any doubt, if this snipped from Wikipedia is true:

> After graduating in 1963, Bezmenov spent two years in India working as a translator and public relations officer with the Soviet economic aid group Soviet Refineries Constructions, which built refinery complexes.

Soviet citizens could not freely leave the country. All travel was subject to very strict background checks several generations into your family tree to verify loyalty to the state, and travel groups had KGB informants attached to them to keep an eye out for any suspicious behaviour.

Not to mention such foreign assignments, which were under total KGB control. Either he worked directly for KGB or had a curator from KGB. Independently going abroad and working there was unthinkable.

Given that he did public relations and was probably visible more than most Soviet staff, his posting to India should be pretty easy to verify through contemporary newspapers, photos from public events and other similar sources. His major at Moscow State University is also easy to verify and it's a well-known fast-track into intelligence work.

From the downvotes I can infer what kind of people you all believe in

It's about belief systems that have been invented by someone. There's no separating the belief from the inventor