This ties well into the "three days to Kyiv" expectation at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russians really did think that Ukraine had been subverted to a degree that it would just roll over and die; that leadership would run away and local resistance would be limited to disorganized pockets that riot police could suppress, but their informants and agents just stole the money and reported what the Kremlin wanted to hear. Calling the invasion a "special military operation" shows how it was thought of as a special operation by intelligence services instead of conventional war.
But Zelenskiy responded with "I need ammo, not a ride", and instead of unarmed protesters, Russian riot police convoys driving into Ukraine were met by Armed Forces of Ukraine.[1]
But the U.S. did win quickly in the second Iraq War. It rapidly crushed the Iraqi armed forces on all fronts and in all combat scenarios and quickly occupied the entire country with minimal military losses. The post-invasion/occupation insurgency was a different story, partly caused by massive U.S. administrative blunders, but the initial invasion/war was nothing like the current Ukraine-Russia conflict, or the 1940 Winter War with Finland.
And Ukraine... I've been unable to find any meaningful and direct quote from Russian military/political leaders stating they expected to immediately capture the city, but you can find plentiful US sources predicting exactly that:
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"The sources said that the initial US assessment from before the invasion – which anticipated that the Ukrainian capital would be overrun within one to four days of a Russian attack – remains the current expectation." [1]
"Milley (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) told lawmakers during closed-door briefings on Feb. 2 and 3 that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine could result in the fall of Kyiv within 72-hours, and could come at a cost of 15,000 Ukrainian troop deaths and 4,000 Russian troop deaths." [2]
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It seems that the narrative largely swapped to this all being Putin's plan once it didn't work as out like our military/intelligence agencies expected.
Putin didn't say it, but then he said he's not planning any invasion anyways. Here you can see various Russian tv personalities, we well as Lukasgenko, saying just that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SuR7axsnUjw
And here is Sharij, a pro Russian journalist from Ukraine that's extremely popular, mocking all the reports of destruction of Russian forces on the first day and believing all the Russian lies, such as having destroyed all the anti aircraft systems of Ukraine:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7gO6vuI2-BQ
You must also understand that in Russian culture it was common to mock Ukrainians as dumb farmer hicks, while thinking of themselves as highly technologically advanced.
> You must also understand that in Russian culture it was common to mock Ukrainians as dumb farmer hicks, while thinking of themselves as highly technologically advanced.
Where did you get this info from? My experience growing up in USSR (in areas that are now Russia and Ukraine) was totally different. Ukraine had a reputation (well deserved) as a major tech hub. Most of Soviet space industry (military for one) was there -- rockets, missiles, rocket engines, electronics. Kyiv University was one of the major places of learning rivaling MGU (Moscow State University). People from all over the Soviet Union were fighting nail and tooth to be allowed to move and live in Kyiv. Yes, there were folk-jokes (anekdoty) about Ukrainians like about anybody else. This does not reflect in any form upon the fact that Ukraine was very highly developed republic within USSR. 3 out of 7 leader of USSR were Ukrainians (Khrushchev - 8 years, Brezhnev - 18 years in power, Chernenko - 2 years). Ukraine has always been a force to recon with.
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.
Sure, just the loss of life in that war was severe for a small country.
I am, however, only talking about the Russian assumption of the ease of victory, where reality ended up being very different (7,000-9,000 Russian soldiers dead in a week in that one battle), and the evidence of it in the form of the musical instruments etc for the parade.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It's a common cliché. General Aleksandr Lebed claimed during Russia's 1991 intervention in Moldova that his tanks would be able to capture Bucharest in just 7 hours.
> This ties well into the "three days to Kyiv" expectation at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This is actually a great example of our own propaganda at work. This "Three Days" quote came from one of our Generals, not from Russia.
Putin's statements from early on are all widely available (with English transcriptions) and they do not in anyway sound like the words of someone expecting to annex Ukraine into Russia in short order.
Which raises the question - why were we all fed this story? To what end?
The claim is that the Russian government said they would take Kiev in 3 days which of course was not a claim ever made. IN fact, nothing close was ever said. It was a a US general (Milley I believe) who popularized the "3 days to take Kiev" meme.
It came from us, not them. So why do you think we've been told otherwise?
It's crazy. I know a Russian guy who is exactly like this; I debate with him all the time. Almost every night. About the war. Bluntly invested in winning, regardless of what the system looks like; even admitting that it's a terrible system; using weak arguments for why people need structural dominance, while simultaneously arguing in favor of "the people" - (and using a historical American failings as a way to draw false equivalences). It's all chess when you grow up somewhere with nothing to gain. Or another way of saying it is, it's possible for a polity to never improve itself but give the illusion of relative improvement, if it can poison its enemies down to its own level or lower. This, unfortunately, is the same mentality we're dealing with now.
[edit] Even so, he still betrays that curious overconfidence in the power of central planning...
The over-confidence in clearly irrational positions, the bluster and bluffing and bullying are all coping mechanisms for what their brains detect as cognitive dissonance. "How can my life be so bad, dreary, miserable, and inadequate?" "It must not be my situation, but it must be everyone else, so I will fight everyone else, as I can't change my situation." Rather than improve their own lot, they seek to destroy other's, because improvement is so difficult, if not impossible, and destruction is just so much easier.
What I mean is, when dealing with an irrational or antirational person, who is behaving this way because other kinds of action are impossible, we should ask what constrains them. If they are not actually in control of their circumstances, then we can't really pooh-pooh their irrationality because they are not free to choose.
We like to assume that we are all masters of our own circumstances and can deal with any obstacle or misfortune by adjusting ourselves to match it, but this presumes a degree of autonomy that does not always exist in fact.
Well just from my own personal research (which is not nearly as thorough as I'd like), structurally any central power structure receives little benefit from division of labor and the main driver that allows it to work and greese the wheels are corruption, which generally promotes oligopoly or monopoly.
Then you have the economic calculation problem, inability to adjust to shortages because the economy is not self-moderating, low to zero visibility (and shame) so responsible parties may not communicate to enact change rapidly or admit there's a problem until its had significant cost.
Generally speaking, there is also a lot of indoctrination, and many who grow up in those places see the only solution to failures of socialism as more socialism because it failed because there simply wasn't enough, and it is after all about the group over the whole with identity politics.
Improvement is impossible because failures can't be acknowledged or reconciled rationally.
Structurally over time its a fundamentally unstable system as people age out of positions of power, newer generations may not be properly educated (they all drink the same coolaid).
Rational pragmatic and constructive thought is kind of a requirement to improve.
There's also usually a good portion of the population used as disadvantaged labor that supports an aristocratic elite.
I believe you, and as a counterpoint I've known many Russians and they uniformly were _not_ like the Russian guy you know. Those I knew expressly mocked the incompetence of letting essentially mobsters pretend to run a country (their country). It reminded me of a much larger scale version of old mobster tales from big cities in the US, long before my time.
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.
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.
But none of his principles implies he should go fight to war. He wants Russia win, but wanting particular outcome does not imply joining army. There is nothing special about that either. I wanted ISIS to loose, I never joined any legions. I want Ukraine to win, but I am not going there to fight either.
If he claimed that not going is wrong, then he would be hypocrite. But it sounds more of "I want Russia to win and I accept human sacrifices along the way. That sux for them, but it is what it is" sort of attitude. Not exactly admirable, but also does not imply he should be volunteering.
Interestingly, announcement is on the VK (Russian analog of Facebook) page of Concord - a media company owned by Prigozhin. This how "siloviki" (power players) communicate with the masses.
A friend of a friend is exactly like this. Extremely skewed opinions on 'facts'. Whenever I meet them I avoid any topic to do with politics or the war, I just don't have the time or patience, they are too far down the rabbit hole.
An American lady I know, her elderly mother was to the same extreme with Trump in the US... Social media and propaganda is a curse.
Modern Russian propaganda is not all that similar to anything the Soviet Union was interested in. There is no serious ideological backbone to it. It's all about putting out multitudes of conflicting narratives, giving people the "choice" to latch onto the ones they sympathize with most closely, and undermining the very concept of truth, democracy etc. "alternative facts", if you will.
Timothy Snyder's description is more accurate to what goes on in the modern day state of Russia.
Also the CIA questioned Bezmenov and found that he couldn't answer questions that he ought to know the answers to, about basic things like who his chain of command were.
> Modern Russian propaganda is not all that similar to anything the Soviet Union was interested in. There is no serious ideological backbone to it. It’s all about putting out multitudes of conflicting narratives, giving people the “choice” to latch onto the ones they sympathize with most closely, and undermining the very concept of truth, democracy etc. “alternative facts”, if you will.
The USSR had a core of ideological propaganda, but its geostrategic influence operations were more flexible than its core propaganda.
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.
What motherland can be offered to the about 30% of non ethnic Russians? Just more of the corrupt same.
How would motherland that follows a victory (even what constitutes victory is not defined by the Russian government) differ from the motherland the follows some other outcome?
Sure, it's corrupt shit, no argument there. And really, what's being offered for the other 70% if not pain and suffering, for the make believe goal of glory of the tsar? Sure, they might be treated a lot better than the non ethnic Russians, but it's not paradise for them either.
Modern Russia is fundamentally not the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, at least according to its own mythology, was an instantiation of communist ideology. Modern Russia is not an ideological state in the same way; if it's motivated by anything, it's base nationalism.
Now fuck Russia and all, but this guy is convinced that Russia managed to worm into American consciousness in the mid 80s, to the point of raising an entire generation of people who believe what Russia wants them to believe.
That just doesn't add up to me. Now not being American I don't know what things were over there, but at least I can recall that in the 80s and 90s, Russians were the standard bad guys in Hollywood movies, and the Cold War, and McCarthyism is somewhere in that timeline as well. Nothing much seems to indicate this "demoralization" step got anywhere close to actually happening.
It also seems very unlikely that at that point in history, USSR would have enough access to the US to raise entire generations that thought the things the USSR wanted them to.
I think it's more likely he was just opportunistically feeding the fears prevalent at the time he was speaking.
> Now fuck Russia and all, but this guy is convinced that Russia managed to worm into American consciousness in the mid 80s,
It was a mid-80s interview; he us saying USSR did that 2-3 generations prior to the interview, which would be about the birth of the USSR. Most plausibly, the Soviet influence in the early 20th century international labor movements would be the main channel, though there would be other avenues where this was attempted. There certainly were in the 1980s influences from that that had become self-sustaining and organic, reinforced by continuing influence efforts, but I wouldn’t describe it as an overwhelming success.
It’s possible that the internal perception (whether top-down propaganda or just the result of Soviet intelligence community resume-burnishing by self-promoting bureaucrats) overstated the success, such that the perceptions of a defector would be that they were stronger than they were – or its possible that an defector who was ideologically opposed to his old regime would deliberately overstate the case to try to marshal the US against it before it actually got as bad as he described it.
(Its pretty clearly a strategy the USSR had, and that Russia continues with, arguably, more success than the USSR ever had, but that’s…well documented in other sources which don’t have nearly as dire a description of the level of success it had in the 1980s.)
I agree about the 80s. If anything, we viewed them as a bigger threat than they really were, our defense industry in particular. But the USSR fell apart in 1989 and Russia was a spent force in the 90s. We bought Ukraine’s nukes with money because we could. But we, George W Bush really, then underestimated Russia in the 2000s.
So I suppose that getting Putin to sign off on Gaddafi’s removal was part of that fuckup. Libya was a Russian satellite and Russia has a veto at the UN Security Council.
Given the two dumb wars that Obama was saddled with, I thought he navigated things pretty well.
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.
You're misrepresenting that conviction you allege he has though.
(Commonly called out as a "straw man" argument here.)
The original post here is pretty vulnerable to both misunderstanding and misinterpretation of that sort.
Something like the lecture video rglover linked (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35099311) gives a clearer and more concrete description of the subversion process, and to some extent Bezmenov's view on how far it had progressed in a few nations at that time.
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. It’s about the propagation of leftist ideology.
McCarthyism was in the 1950’s and by the 80’s had already been “discredited” as some sort of witch hunt.
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. That, coupled with the collapse of the USSR, would allow that leftist ideology to mutate into the forms we see today.
I’m not entirely convinced Yuri is telling the truth here, but I thought it would be useful to clarify and perhaps steelman what he is saying, and what that would imply to us in 2023.
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.
> Of course it's about nationalism. Said ideological subversion is there to serve the needs of the USSR.
The ideology did not exist to serve the needs of the USSR; the USSR existed to serve the needs of the ideology. You can tell because Marxism was a ideological current for decades before the USSR, and because it regrettably persists decades after the fall of the USSR.
The USSR exerted a centralized dominance over that ideology--as early as the Spanish Civil War, Soviet-backed groups were purging rival leftist factions on the Republican side. To a less brutal degree, the US has exerted a similar centralized dominance over the liberal democracies of the world.
I think it is more of a coincidence. It is was not and is not KGB fault that US colleges are filled with every stripe of "ist" from your garden variety Maoist to Trotskyiest to some normalized now America is DEVIL repent NOW types. Whoever was responsible for what he says if he is still alive is probably completely dumfounded by Americans taking down Lincoln statues and destroying monuments to abolitionists who fought against slavery. I mean holy shit did we do KGB good job or what? (for the record I do not think they had anything to do with it, empire rots from the core)
To say the American people were full of Marxism in the 80s and 90s is completely made up. I would say today is closer to what he was taking about than the 80s every were.
> He says it takes three generations to reveal, so 80/90s being the start of subversion makes perfect sense
He was saying it takes 2-3 generations to the point where it is internal and self-sustaining, and that that had already been achieved in the 1980s in America.
Whenever I interact with russian or pro-russian elements the story remains the same.
They deny that they're doing any wrongdoing.
If you give them video evidence that they're doing something wrong they deny the evidence is real.
If the evidence has undeniable proof they either say the victims deserved it (like the video where they killed civilians around hostomel or the one where a ukrainian family and their dog gets gunned down with no warning).
As a final cope they can also retreat to "Well america did it too".
Bezmenov's claims are not corroborated by any other agents, nor was he ever a high enough position to have learned of them. There also are no hints of them within the Russian archives, which have been used to corroborate a variety of real KGB activities based on claims of defectors, like creating fake KKK threats to drum up racial tension during civil rights.
Like most public defectors of the era, he's a bullshitter.
Summary of near-14-minute video, since I certainly wished someone else had posted one to help me decide whether to watch:
Says the KGB works mainly at ideological subversion of the enemy society, not James Bond stuff. This has 4 stages:
- Demoralization. Slow, takes at least a generation to take hold or be reversed. U.S. is 3 generations in, graduates have positions of influence, and now it's mostly done by Americans to Americans.
- Destabilization. 2 to 5 years.
- Crisis. 3 to 6 weeks. E.g. in Central America at that time.
- Normalization.
KGB considers it total war, and we should too. Americans should unify behind stopping their government from aiding communism. Education system especially important.
(There wasn't really anything more specific, it was TV. I would've liked specifics on not just the claimed strategy, but how much real effect they had on mid-20th-C. U.S. education and culture. Of course there's only so much one defector would know.)
It would certainly explain how "political correctness" a soviet concept made it into the american public consciousness far more than other nations of the world.
Edited: Since I'm being downvoted.
Political Correctness wasn't really a thing until around the 80's, the same time period as the cold war. It really is acommunist term. The term "political correctness" first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Yuri is saying the KGB was enacting total war decades ago, and that it takes several generations to see the change.
When you can see over the course of 30 years, how political correct seeped into the american consciousness, yet somehow skipped over many other parts of the world.
I think it's worth looking into, and thinking critically.
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.
I guess I'll weigh in with my lived experience as a teenager at the time of the interview. I would've told you (maybe a few years later) "political correctness" in the U.S. started as an ironic term among lefty types with a sense of humor about their own milieu, which resonated more widely and got taken as ammunition and shortened to "PC" by more righty culture warriors.
Now just how much this Western lefty culture was influenced by deliberate influence ops, that's the question I was hoping to learn about from this interview.
> I would've told you (maybe a few years later) "political correctness" in the U.S. started as an ironic term among lefty types with a sense of humor about their own milieu, which resonated more widely and got taken as ammunition and shortened to "PC" by more righty culture warriors.
Similar to "woke". A term used with semi-seriousness, later coopted and weaponized by political opponents.
Political Correctness in the soviet union was very similar to what we have today.
The "Girl Boss" stuff pushed by Sheryl Sandberg is eerily similar to Stalin's "New Soviet Woman".
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.
In 2023, disagree heavily.
Political Correctness is a way prevent open conversation and debate.
The Biden admin constantly reorients attacks on them as attacks on women or the LGBT community.
Political Correctness is used to shut down criticism of the modern American State.
Wars are now pitched as femininist, see afghanistan.
That is the right wing perspective, yes. And i'm sure PC is used at times cynically to deflect real criticism, that doesn't change the origins or original meaning I described. This alongside "wokeness" is simply acknowledging how much of our everyday speech and action rob certain members of society of their voice and agency, and trying to address it. Addressing it is a hard and imprecise process, but it's worth doing imo.
If even it engenders a near constant stream of culture war backlash. America wasn't great for far too many Americans in the past, that needs to change.
There is a good book on a different defector, Oleg Antonovich Gordievsky.
The story is excellent - The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War.
There is an eerily prophetic work by the high-ranking Eastern European military defector Golitsyn called "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.
Only one analyst, J.R Nyquist has been taking this stuff seriously, and he was ignored. In fact, the idea that Russia could rise from the ashes was considered paranoid right-wing conspiracy for much of the last 30 years. He has been pretty prescient about the war in Ukraine and developments in Russia over the last 20 years. They have rearmed and have some crazy weapons now like the hypersonic missiles[2] that we have no defense against and the Poseidon system[3] which is a 100mt radioactive tsunami fully autonomous doomsday weapon designed to foil any attempt by the west to win a nuclear war with anti-ballistic missile technilogy.
> "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.
I think this thing of theirs is supposed to beat the current systems as Mach 10 is fast. It seems to be getting though in Ukraine but I am not an expert and Russia makes all sorts of claims. If it’s weapons work, it would be beating it’s smaller neighbour.
I think Russia knows that this is a war with NATO for world hegemony and it is going to last a very long time. Maybe a decade or more. Thus, what's the best way to conserve resources and deplete the enemy? Just sit in defensive positions with good logistics and shell while the Ukranians send more and more cannon fodder and the west slowly runs out of armaments. Eventually, they'll send the polish recruits. Then they'll send the rest of Europe, and finally American troops. That's why Russia is going slowly here and not getting out over their skis with the advance.
I think China was supposed to not back Russia, but they reneged on the deal. That's the critical thing that went wrong with the western war effort and why Russia's economy did not collapse as was expected.
This is one view, the other is that the Russian military and its supplies have been decimated, it’s military smashed and the west has spent a fraction of a fraction of its reserves and none of its armies.
Do you really think that Russia isn’t trying to advance?
China may come out in the best position, but surely that’s the best that the non western world can hope for?
Russia isn't trying to advance. They withdrew in Kherson in an orderly fashion because they believed the supply lines were too vulnerable. The Ruble did not crash vs. the U.S dollar. In fact it strengthened for a while and it's back to its long-term average[1]. Anecdotal reports from inside Russia from average Russians that I read on other forums seem to show that there is not a lot of economic stress.
Yes, but that wasn’t a victory, its was a loss. The earlier retreats were complete collapses.
What would you describe the carry on in the Bakhmut region as? That’s chewing up Russian resources at a far higher rate than the western ones, and for a ruined town of little strategic significance.
This [1] is a map of the war. To locate Bakhmut, find the most critical section of the war and go to the center of it. You will be at or near Bakhmut. Alternatively, locate highway 32 ("H-32") and follow it straight to the frontline. The battle for that city has been going on for about 8 months now; the rhetoric about it being strategically irrelevant only began once the tide began shifting.
But I think the real meaning of Bakhmut is not about its strategic value. What really wins battles, and wars alike, is morale. This is why things like propaganda and disinformation plays such a significant role. You try to keep your own side's morale high, while doing everything to break that of the enemy. If we imagine war only in terms of strategy then it's very possible that something like defense in depth [2] would be optimal for Ukraine. It's a massive country with lots of well fortified locations. Let the Russian forces overextend and suffer severe casualties advancing on ever fresh fortifications.
But the problem is morale. Each time you fall back you suffer a morale loss, and each time the enemy achieves victory they receive a morale boost. And in Bakhmut this has become critical. Both sides have suffered immense losses there, and so the ultimate conclusion of that battle is going to have a tremendous impact on morale. I think this is the main reason there's so much dispute on the proper strategy. You have to measure an immeasurable (morale/morale impact) in order to determine the proper action, all the while balancing this against the reality on the ground.
≥ 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.
The part about it somehow discrediting the idea that detonating a nuclear weapon under the ocean would cause a tsunami is why it's often a good idea to check sources, and not take Wikipedia at face value. From the source they cite: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-doomsday-weapon-subma...
"A well-placed nuclear weapon of yield in the range 20 MT to 50 MT near a sea coast could certainly couple enough energy to equal the 2011 tsunami, and perhaps much more," Rex Richardson, a physicist who researches nuclear weapons, told Business Insider in March, referring to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 15,000 people in Japan.
"Taking advantage of the rising-sea-floor amplification effect, tsunami waves reaching 100 meters in height" — about 330 feet — "are possible," he said."
If the point is to kill people, a 20-50MT weapon killing just 15,000 people is a pretty dismal failure. The 16kT Hiroshima attack killed about 100,000.
We don’t need more inventive ways of killing people, we have plenty of options already.
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.
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.
You have to be out of your mind to believe HN is full of "FSB shills". Really, that kind of accusation ought to be banned on HN (and in fact, the posting guidelines strongly urge you to avoid them).
Let me reiterate: it's entirely possible for intelligent, honest people who are not "FSB shills" or CCCP agents or North Korean moles to disagree with people here on matters related to Russia, China or North Korea. Or Cuba. Or Venezuela. Or whoever the US is ideologically at war with.
Accusing others of being spies and shills is the stupidest of ad hominem attacks.
PS: defectors, especially Soviet ones, have a poor track record and were very, very unreliable. Some are thought to have been Soviet plants with the goal of triggering paranoia and witch hunts. Others were self-aggrandizing liars.
Shills exist, but not everyone in the universe other than you is a shill. This produces a difficulty in people's minds because people think in absolutes. They prefer to either ignore the existence of shills, or choose to believe that everyone who disagrees with them is a shill. The truth is somewhere inbetween, but it takes work to thinks things through on an individual level.
Hasn't a lot of this guy's rhetoric and credentials been debunked over and over as a bit hyperbolic. I mean... the guy made a career out of selling fear?
I've done a lot of googling on this guy and either the truth is scrubbed, or I'm landing on soviet propaganda, OR there's not much evidence that he even worked for the KGB. The guy was a journalist and played up this narrative in order to get the attention of the public eye. I'm not saying that everything he said was bullshit. Do nation states at odds actively try to stabilize each other? Of course. But seems to me like he was more of a creative story teller than anything else.
Yeah, don't put too much stock in this guy's words. Being a defector, flipping 180 degrees and becoming the USSR's biggest and most popular detractor is a no-brainer. But sadly, he could have said that the KGB had pink bunny guns and traveled around on marshmallow clouds and many on the right would lap it up, because it fits a political preconception.
You're literally saying he shouldn't be listened to because he's a defector. You're not engaging with anything he said, just writing him off for being a defector. That is really stupid.
And you're saying that we should listen to defectors, for no reason whatsoever. Or are you saying that we should listen to defectors, because they are defectors? In that case, how is that different from what you accuse me of?
BTW, what I actually said is that we shouldn't blindly believe defectors, because there are compelling reasons for them to stretch the truth. See the difference? There are three ways we can treat a story: We can choose to believe it, we can ignore it, or we can choose to disbelieve it. You wouldn't believe my "pink bunny guns" example, would you? So you're already doing what I suggest, we just differ in degree.
For e ti's shocking how much people are in denial about this. In spite of us seeing with our own eyes that this strategy is being deployed and it works, it works depressingly well. In spite of that, many people I know try to dismiss the video, the speaker, and the main message conveyed by it. It is as if we got blind by our own request.
I have no doubt that Russia engages in a lot of shenanigans today.
However that back in 1985, what this guy is saying about the USSR managing worm into the US to the point of raising an entire generation that thought what the USSR wanted them to think -- that to me seems extremely dubious.
There may be a kernel of truth there -- yes, the KGB may have had such a strategy, and it might have been successfully executed in some cases. What I highly doubt is that it actually did work on the US in 1985.
You have to consider a conflict in priorities there. This guy defected. He burned every bridge there was to burn back home, and that means he desperately needs to ingratiate himself with where he ended up instead, and given that McCarthyism was right around that time it doesn't take a genius to latch on that.
Also, let's be serious here. This is almost 40 years ago. Many people of importance from back then are now dead or retired. If this interview has anything to do with modern reality it's more by accident than anything.
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.
Asserting that everyone is "seeing it with their own eyes" is kind of weird, since you can only see with your own eyes. It's a certain kind of solipsism that I'm personally getting rather tired of.
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.
It is strange how this interview is currently used. Clearly Bezmenov alleges that the subversion tactics were promoting original left-wing causes since the 1960s:
He cites Hippie culture, pilgrimages to India, cultural marxism, etc. Basically everything that Reagan did not like.
Now the ruling party are Democrats, and apparently the same interview is used to prove current Russian disinformation, i.e. (alleged) right wing propaganda.
Meanwhile even the Pentagon currently implements the original (alleged) left wing culture war subversion tactics.
So which is it? Has Russian disinformation pivoted to right wing and the Pentagon is behind the curve? Or is the whole Russian disinformation issue overblown?
Clearly the original subversion items are pushed by the corporate and state woke-washing agenda. So they are apparently good now.
I don't see how right wing propaganda could help Russia, since in important foreign policy matters Democrats and Republicans are fundamentally the same. Evan Trump has armed Ukraine.
> "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.
The historical Frankfurt School was quite socially conservative and far from what is now described as "woke". The actual issue with the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory is not that the Frankfurt School somehow didn't exist; it's that they were, quite simply, not involved in the kind of conspiracy that they're sometimes clumsily accused of. Did Western radicals rip off some broad ideas from the Frankfurt School back in the 1960s and 1970s? Of course they did; and "Marx, Mao, Marcuse!" was even a common slogan at the time. But really, the bulk of their idealogical memeplex was coming from Marx and especially Mao (as influenced by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four), whilst they mostly ignored what Marcuse would've said.
If we want to debate exactly how much influence the Frankfurt School had - that’s the kind of thing about which reasonable people can disagree-although I still think it had greater influence than you do. See https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/just-becaus...
For me, the big issue is that labelling one side of the discussion as a “far right antisemitic conspiracy theory” is not conducive to having a nuanced historical debate about the topic, instead it is an attempt by one side to shut the discussion down. It is true that some voices in the debate verge on the conspiratorial, or are antisemitic - it is wrong to smear everyone on the same side as that though. Zubatov, who I link to above, is writing in a respectable (right-leaning) Jewish magazine, and I’m guessing is quite possibly Jewish himself - he might be wrong, but I don’t think it is fair to accuse him of promoting a “far right antisemitic conspiracy theory”
I do agree a lot of criticisms from the right turn historical left(-ish) thinkers into caricatures - to give a different example, Foucault. While many want to blame him for contemporary “wokeness”, I think if he were still alive today, he’d be far more critical of it than supportive-especially the censoriousness and corporate entanglements of so much of it. While he was unapologetic about his own same-sex sexual desires, at the same time he criticised “homosexuality” as a historically contingent cultural construct-which is a long way from how most of the contemporary LGBT movement views it. All that said, while many on the right are guilty of this, it wouldn’t be fair to say they all are.
The Tablet article you link to engages in a regrettably common misconception of what Marcuse was actually up to with his Repressive Tolerance. The point there was not to defend society against anything ideologically problematic, but merely to push the very notion and social norm of a "managed", fad-driven discourse to its breaking point. That's why it was proposed to favor the most strongly censored and unfashionable ideas at any given time and strive to platform them everywhere, even irrespective of their actual merits. It's quite simply a "chaos monkey" approach to the whole problem of what we now call communication 'filter bubbles' and 'echo chambers'-- or pretty much the trollish 4chan model under a different name. It's really sad that more people don't give Herbert Marcuse the credit he is due for that whole idea.
Anyway, the broader point is that Zubatov is not taking a very nuanced view of the historical Frankfurt School here, and critically he's missing their loosely socially-conservative leanings - something that scholars seem to broadly agree on, and a key reason to dismiss purported links between the School and what often passes today as "radical" or sometimes as "socially progressive" thought.
Does Zubatov misunderstand Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School more broadly? Maybe you are right that he does.
But even if he does – that's a long way off being a "far-right antisemitic conspiracy theory". People, on both left and right, misread history (and especially intellectual history) all the time. Just because someone's got their history wrong, doesn't make them a "conspiracy theorist", much less a "far-right antisemitic" one.
> and critically he's missing their loosely socially-conservative leanings - something that scholars seem to broadly agree on, and a key reason to dismiss purported links between the School and what often passes today as "radical" or sometimes as "socially progressive" thought
I don't think that necessarily follows. Coming back to what I said about Foucault – on the one hand, it is true that attempts to blame Foucault for "wokeness" tend to greatly oversimplify him. On the other hand, I don't think the right has any monopoly on misreading him – I think a lot of people on the left are guilty of reading him in overly simplistic ways, and if one was to claim that some of the excesses of contemporary progressivism have their (partial) origin in left-leaning misreadings of Foucault–that doesn't seem so implausible to me. But if that might be true of Foucault, might not it also be true of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School?
This interview keeps coming up, and I don't really understand why. It's utterly uninteresting. Bezmenov had an inconsequential role in the KGB. He was not privy to any large-scale details.
Bezmenov defected in 1970. After his defection would not be privy to any new information. The interview is from 1984 and not 1985 as the title purports. Ultimately, the claims in this video are categorically false. We can observe this in two ways.
First, after the collapse of the USSR no information on these efforts was revealed. Bezmenov claims 85% of the KGB's efforts are spent on this supposed program of ideological subversion of the American public. And yet, we have seen no documents. No intelligence from the US side. Nothing.
Second, he claims the subversion was put in place to change the schooling system and thus indoctrinate the next generation. Keep in mind that this program would've had to be in place by 1970. And quite a few years earlier than that too since, again, Bezmenov was not a particularly privileged member of the KGB. And if we were to assume the program is real the changes should blindingly obvious in hindsight. But in fact, there are none.
So we must look a little closer at Bezmenov - why would he claim these things, and why does the interview keep resurfacing?
At the time of the interview there was a great panic around communist influence across the country. We're in the middle of Reagan's first term as president. Reagan was hawkish on perceived communist sympathies, just like the rest of the Republicans and the mainstream American right-wing. The market for people claiming that the ideological foundations of their political rivals is grounded in communist indoctrination. They wanted to hear how homosexuality becoming more accepted, a call for racial equality, and a general anti-establishment attitude was, in fact, Soviet indoctrination of the schooling systems.
Bezmenov earned his living peddling what this large group of conservatives wanted to hear, and that is where his lectures and this interview come in.
Today we see claims of "cultural marxism" and "post-modernism" infecting universities, and thus infecting the minds of the very late cohort of millenials and the early cohort of Gen Zs. It's the same dance of comfort we saw in the 80s playing out again. The interview isn't someone predicting the future because of some special insight. It's someone playing into the 80s "culture war" and people recognizing that a similar "culture war" is happening again today. A "culture war" that will continue to happen as long as societies continue to evolve and re-evaluate their collective values.
This has nothing to do with Reagan. Bezmenov defected to Canada.
His role in the KGB was so inconsequential that he saw the files of journalists who were slated for executed come revolution. Got it. I'm sure everyone could freely access those.
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).
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.
> 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.
> So we must look a little closer at Bezmenov - why would he claim these things, and why does the interview keep resurfacing?
Bezmenov isn't even alone in this. Defectors are notoriously unreliable: they tell their host country whatever they want to hear; in this case, because he correctly read the prevailing fears of the Reagan era. He is not the only Soviet defector who told inconsistent or outright false stories.
Maybe, but unfortunately it cannot be used as a strike against it.
The Cambodian genocide happened.
Defectors are notoriously unreliable and many Soviet defectors told falsehoods their host country wanted to believe. (This doesn't mean every defector is unreliable, or even that everything an unreliable defector will say is false -- it just means what it means, that defectors are unreliable as a category.)
Sometimes defectors are unreliable. Other times, defectors provide reliable information which people choose to dismiss or ignore because it doesn't fit with their presuppositions.
> First, after the collapse of the USSR no information on these efforts was revealed.
On the contrary, quite a bit of evidence about these "active measures" campaigns was later found in the Mitrokhin Archives. Thing is, ideologies tend to take on a life of their own long after their original cause has subsided. The current "post-modern" woke discourse in the Western world can be understood as essentially a zombie variant of precisely the sort of KGB indoctrination Bezmenov talks about, cross-mutated with the highly successful memeplex of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" from China. (For better or for worse, Mao Zedong was greatly admired by radical youths in the 1970s and 1980s; and the Cultural Revolution - doing away with everything that's too old, traditional and counter to revolutionary goals - was very much credited to him at the time. Of course, we have since learned that the story was more complicated than that.)
Did he even work for the KGB? Where does this claim originate? Wikipedia says he worked for a Soviet press agency, but I don't see a good source that documents his involvement with KGB that doesn't ultimately track back to himself.
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.
It gets reposted because it confirms the biases of right-wing posters and is an easy way for them to farm positive engagement and feel like they have some special insight into current events.
Detailed explanation from former CIA analyst Frank Snepp about how the newspapers and magazines you were taught to regard as mainstream and reliable have always eagerly served as disinformation megaphones for the CIA and the US Security State. That's still true. [1]
Sure, the Soviet Union has free speech, just like in America.
In the US, you can stand in front of the White House and yell, "Down with Reagan," and it's fine. Moscow is like that too. You can stand on Red Square and yell, "Down with Reagan." No problem at all
I think you mean that the US banned Russian media companies that are controlled by the Kremlin. If there is something that we in the west would call a "free press" in Russia then those would not be banned. That's my take anyway.
You can still access Новая газета from US. Although this may change since their rights are continually being decreased in Russia where they are based. Anyway my point is that your claim is false.
And, I think if you look around a little you'll find access to outside information and options to distribute it way harder in Russia.
Also, the lies they serve are hilarious: just today I saw a video with one of the chief propagandists claiming on TV that people in the UK hunt squirrels for food :-)
I also have such a friend but only because it was near the end of hell week (or what you guys call it, my memory is a bit hazy what exact words he used 25 years ago), not because Russian sanctions made any starve :-)
Even worse, the US is about to ban TikTok. At first I thought they were only going to ban it for government and contractor devices, but it seems now that it will be banned for everyone. I don't use TikTok and probably never will, but how is this bill even constitutionally legal? I understand the concerns about data collection, but the USG seems more concerned about WHO is doing the collecting rather than the collecting itself. If the concern is about the propagation of "disinformation", Amendment I of the US Constitution prohibits this sort of censoring. During WWII, allied troops in the South Pacific listened to "Tokyo Rose" with no interference from the USG. That was back in the day when US citizens did not need to be told what to think by their government.
The Soviet Union had a strict censorship regime that the west referred to as "The Iron Curtain." China has "The Great Firewall" now. What will the world soon be calling ours?
Take my word for it, I am no fan of the CCP. That said, if you research the matter, you'll find that every major Chinese (PRC) company has CCP board members. Should they all be banned? It's not possible to prosper in the corrupt PRC business environment without CCP connections. Jack Ma's recent experience should be a lesson for all.
> A dozen US senators unveiled legislation on Tuesday called the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act. The bill does not target TikTok specifically for a ban.
The bill does not target TikTok specifically for a ban. I don't see the problem.
I mean all the rainbow stuff is crippling our society from an objective perspective.
If a war broke out, historically tried philosophies and objectively useful skills will take precedence.
If you see how fragmented the younger generations are based on materialistic criterias you'd think it's a psyop operation to divide the nation up to the polarized state we're in. Almost nothing getting done with stalemates up the wazzouu.
But Zelenskiy responded with "I need ammo, not a ride", and instead of unarmed protesters, Russian riot police convoys driving into Ukraine were met by Armed Forces of Ukraine.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12qWthUM_II (Riot helmets and shields are clearly visible.)