Did Communism Fake Its Own Death in 1991?

American Thinker ^ | January 16, 2010 | Jason McNew

[neverdem]

In a bizarre 1984 book, ex-KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the liberalization of the Soviet Bloc and claimed that it would be a strategic deception. Let's examine the facts.

In his spy book Wedge, Mark Riebling claims that "of Golitsyn's falsifiable predictions, 139 out of 148 were fulfilled by the end of 1993 -- an accuracy rate of 94 percent" [1]. Riebling's statistic, compiled from Golitsyn's 1984 book New Lies for Old, has been used in several other books and articles (including here at AT) since Wedge was first published in 1994.

New Lies for Old is not light reading, and all of Golitsyn's predictions appear in the last two chapters, some 327 pages in. Golitsyn began drafting the manuscript in 1968 [3], completed it in 1980 [9], cleared the CIA in 1982 [2], and then finalized and published it in 1984 with seven additional pages [10].

Golitsyn published his second book, The Perestroika Deception, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This book contained further analysis of the liberalization, in addition to previously classified memoranda submitted by Golitsyn to the CIA. The two books must be read together to get a complete picture of Golitsyn's thesis.

Despite taking 22 years to write and publish New Lies for Old, Golitsyn nonetheless asserted that "the substance of the argument has changed little since 1968" [4]. Put simply, Golitsyn's argument was that beginning in about 1960, the Soviet Union embarked on a strategy of massive long-range strategic deception which would span several decades and result in the destruction of Western capitalism and the erection of a communist world government. Throughout his works, he refers to this future event as "convergence" [5]. On page 339 appears a series of Goltisyn's predictions:

The "liberalization" would be spectacular and impressive.  Formal pronouncements might be made about a reduction in the communist party's role:  its monopoly would be apparently curtailed.  An ostensible separation of powers between the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary might be introduced.  The Supreme Soviet would be given greater apparent power, and the president of the Soviet Union and the first secretary of the party might well be separated.  The KGB would be "reformed."  Dissidents at home would be amnestied; those in exile abroad would be allowed to return, and some would take up positions of leadership in government.

Sakharov might be included in some capacity in the government or allowed to teach aboard.  The creative arts and cultural and scientific organizations, such as the writers' unions and Academy of Sciences, would become apparently more independent, as would the trade unions.  Political clubs would be opened to nonmembers of the communist party.  Leading dissidents might form one or more alternative political parties

There would be greater freedom for Soviet citizens to travel.  Western and Unitized Nations observers would be invited to the Soviet Union to witness the reforms in action.

Golitsyn concluded that "the deceptive liberalization will be accepted as genuine and spontaneous and will be blown up out of all proportion by the media" [11].

These fifteen predictions are from just one page and most foretelling of events then ten years away. I chose to cite this particular page because many of the readers here at AT would be able to readily identify these claims empirically as true or not true. Of particular note are Golitsyn's predictions of separate legislative, executive, and judicial powers -- Americans would naturally embrace such a move by the Soviets wholeheartedly (and without asking questions). Making such claims about the Soviet Union in 1980 was no less absurd than would be making similar claims about North Korea today.

Foretelling the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, Golitsyn wrote:

One cannot exclude that at the next party congress or earlier, Andropov will be replaced by a younger leader with a more liberal image who will continue the so called "liberalization" more intensively [6].

In a July 1984 memo to the CIA, Golitsyn writes: 

The Soviet strategists may replace the old leader, Konstantin Chernenko, who is actually only a figurehead, with a younger Soviet leader who was chosen some time ago as his successor -- namely, Comrade Gorbachev. One of Gorbachev's primary tasks will be to carry out the so-called liberalization [12].

Comrade Gorbachev took office as leader of the Soviet Union the following year.

Golitsyn also gave clues on the eventual replacement of Boris Yeltsin, describing the Chechnyan crisis "not as a likely cause of a military coup, but as a possible planned prelude to a change of government" [13]. Yeltsin resigned unexpectedly on New Year's Eve in 1999, installing then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to the Russian presidency. Putin was elected just months later, riding a wave of Russian nationalist sentiment stemming from renewed hostilities in Chechnya.

Critics will rightfully point out that the timeframes in Golitsyn's books are wrong -- he postulated the emergence of a radical left U.S. government around 1992 and "convergence" by about 2000 [14], and he states throughout his works that NATO would be dissolved, causing U.S. forces to leave Europe. He also predicted a military alliance between the U.S. and China [7]. Taken as a complete work, however, Golitsyn got most of it right.

So how did Golitsyn do it? He explains it this way:

The assessment has been based partly on secret information available only to an insider; partly on an intimate understanding of how the communist strategist thinks and acts; partly on knowledge of political readjustments, the use of strategic disinformation, and the extent of KGB penetrations of, and influence on, Western governments; and partly on research and analysis, using the new methodology, of open records of Soviet and communist developments over the last 20 years [8].

There is other evidence that corroborates Golitsyn's thesis. In his 1982 book We Will Bury You, Czech defector Jan Sejna also claimed the Berlin Wall would be torn down and the Warsaw Pact dissolved for reasons of deception [15]. Additionally, there are the 1992 and 2005 Mitrokhin Archives. More recently, weird 25-year-old videos of another KGB defector detailing a decades-long process of purposeful U.S. demoralization by Soviet intelligence services have appeared on You Tube.

Jeff Nyquist, an independent writer and the author of the worst-selling book Origins of the Fourth World War, seems to be the only Western journalist who not only noticed but paid much attention to Golitsyn. Nyquist has written hundreds of articles discussing both Golitsyn's thesis and the slow moral and economic decay of America. Nyquist and Golitsyn both dedicated books to J.J. Angleton, who in 1954 founded the CIA's counterintelligence division.

The present moral and economic bankruptcy emanating from Washington, D.C. and plaguing America portends something far more dangerous than the unintended consequences of electing so many ideological flunkies with bad educations and misguided ideals. The purpose of warfare is not to kill and maim your enemy; it is his social, economic, political, and religious reorientation. Somewhere Sun Tzu is smiling, and it isn't at America.

Jason McNew is a 36-year-old IT professional. He can be contacted at jasond@mcnew.org.

[Smokin' Joe]

Yep.

[Cacique]

The short answer is yes. Communism and socialism is the crappy idea that refuses to die. Not because it doesn’t work, but because most humans refuse to use logic and think in terms of envy and schadenfreude and use communism to articulate it.

[GenXteacher]

“There is no evidence of “pretending to collapse” in the late 20th century USSR. There is evidence of an actual collapse. There is also evidence of attempt at reform (glasnost and perestroyka) that got out of Kremlin’s control, but that is not the same as pretending.”
Like I said- perhaps they screwed up and actually collapsed. I think it not beyond possibility. The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.

“People who lead us to serfdom are not agents of Komintern. They are homegrown idiots, community organizers with lust for power, and apparatchiks who enable them, who might occasionally borrow an idea or two from Lenin and Trotzky.”
The ones that exist now, perhaps. I find it not impossible that the ones who they got their ideas from had an altogether more insidious agenda. For example, we know FDR’s administration had actual communists in it (Alger Hiss, anybody) and Yalta was a full-on sellout. We know that Marxism is and has been pretty prevalent in academia for decades- where it was placed to influence our elite classes to the point where it would become their ideology. My theory is that Stalin’s dissolution of the Comintern was a smokescreen, and that it simply went underground to infiltrate the West. Then the original infiltrators died off, went rogue, or otherwise began to deviate from the plan, but not entirely. Like robots, they continued the course they set out on, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, they simply continued onward. The useful idiots they created are still with us, indeed, they are the dominant orthodoxy in academia and the media now.

“For example, many, possibly a majority, of Americans want socialized medicine, banking and education, a solid majority wants the pension system run by the state, nearly all want separation of church and state. These are all building blocks of marxism, but people who want them are not marxists, let alone agents of a foreign power. They simply want a free lunch, a naturally occuring human condition.”
Marx’s ideology is no less dangerous or evil regardless of what fools are being manipulated with it. I also see no reason to separate the stooges from the manipulators. This is all assuming I am right of course. I would greatly be pleased to be wrong, but as the years pass I think that less likely.

[annalex]

The mass denial in Americans these days, well, I don’t believe it is all organic

In a healthy society institutions exist that would abate the worst instincts of the mob. The Church, the institutions of learning, the courts, tradition -- political or otherwise, -- would work on nurturing the sense of justice and the sense that there is no free lunch. No such thing as free education or free health care or free defense system exists. The society is as prosperous as it is virtuous. A hundred years ago everyone in America knew that, -- it was axiomatic. The country did very well.

We now have instead institutions of liberal subversion: economic miseducation, rabid secularism, militaristic theory of national grandeur, cult of sexual promiscuity working overtime to cater to the worst instincts that exist in the fallen man.

If national salvation is to be found in anything, it will be found in this nation abandoning the left wing institutions of power. The FreeRepublic.com provided the model of abandoning the institutions of mass media. Something similar needs to happen on the mass scale with regards of the educational and political system. Unless the Tea Party movement manages by some miracle to recapture and to rebuild the American political system in the coming two election cycles, the future of American conservatism is underground.

[annalex]

Yes, with that I agree. Indeed, there is a leftwing culture that now has a life of its own. It exists because it caters to an instinct, just like prostitution of thievery exist because they cater to certain instincts. The people in the leftwing institutions do not need to plot or get the morning fax from the Komintern: it is organic to them.

What I disagree is the scenario suggested by Golitsyn, that the KGB had a secret meeting and decided, “let’s pretend we collapse and through that take over the world”. Instead there were forces both inside and outside of the KGB that produced the collapse.

How do I know? Well, I don’t have a fly on the wall somewhere but I grew up in the collapsing Soviet Union and I observe it genuinely collapse. It collapsed ideologically, but it also collapsed on some elemental level: electricity stopped, water ceased to be drinkable, no work was done anywhere unless stimulated by the black market, 90% of the male population was fall-down drunk by 5 pm. You cannot fake that.

And we know why: because socialism cannot work. It is an economic fact that it should fail. So it failed. It is not complicated.

There is another trasformation that occurred in the 70s and 80s: the ideological state of the USSR became instead an imperial state. The roots of it are in the victory in the Second World War: an empire fell into Stalin’s lap thanks to FDR’s and Churchill’s graces. Gradually, the ideological marxist edge was gone. The marxist ideology was supplanted by military imperialism. Now THAT part is alive and well under Putin. It is probably stronger now than in the 70’s because Russia has lost so much of its geopolitical power, so people do genuinely believe that they are under a military threat. This Russian imperialistic nationalism is not going anywhere. There was an opportunity to cure it with a form of international trial for crimes of the Soviet System, similar to the Nuremberg trials, but that opportunity was missed.

[RJS1950]

The Russians and the other communists did not “declare” communism to be dead; the American press and dumb-ass politicians in the west declared that communism was dead. Even democrats in this country did not declare it dead.

[Boucheau]

“A hundred years ago everyone in America knew that, — it was axiomatic. The country did very well.”

Did it ever!

Well said.

Only one issue with what you stated. It’s communist subversion, not liberal subversion.

Liberalism/socialism is only the tool that will NECESSARILY lead to communism—like night follows day.

The loud voices today (liberals) will be silenced tomorrow.

Once those on the “right” have been marginalized, the war begins between the left and the hard left, and the hard left will win.

The communists are ingenious in their subversion. As they have been saying for a very long time, they will use “liberalism” to slowly weaken the US and eventually dominate.

If we don’t stop liberalism/socialism, we cannot stop the communists.

They don’t, and won’t, call it communism, but a pile of sh*t is still a pile of sh*t by any other name.

[annalex]

Liberalism is broader. People sometime point out that “communism” under its strict definition was not even practiced in the Soviet Union. It was always an ideal society that the Soviet Union was supposedly “building”. Under communism, money would disappear, people would be all to the one moral altrustic people who work for the common good and then take what they want from the store.

Most leftists today laugh at the idea, as of course everyone should, so if one calls them “communist” it is easy for them to shrug off the label.

Similarly some posters on this thread called Putin “communist” when they really meant “militarist” or “autocratic” or “imperialist”.

[Boucheau]

“People sometime point out that ‘communism’ under its strict definition was not even practiced in the Soviet Union.”

Of course they say that, FRiend! That is because communism CANNOT BE ACHIEVED—it kills everyone long before it ever reaches its goals.

They don’t have a leg to stand on.

That’s my point in all of this. To me, they are trying to KILL US!

Consciously...on purpose? No, but the universe doesn’t care about their good intentions. If you rob a man of his ability to fend for himself AND to defend himself from his would-be-captors/owners, then you have killed him.

At that point, it’s only a matter of time until mass graves are needed.

“Most leftists today laugh at the idea, as of course everyone should, so if one calls them ‘communist’ it is easy for them to shrug off the label.”

WHY is it “easy” today? It wasn’t easy fifty years ago. What has changed?

You are letting them muddy the waters—the waters being your mind.

YOU/WE must define the terms, not them. They will kill you with words if you let them.

To a communist: your mind is the prize.

This is the subversion, FRiend. They are a very real threat in this department.

You can poo-poo me ‘til the cows come home, but I know how they work.

My dad used to say that: “The biggest obstacle to learning something new is what you already know.”

The biggest threat to Americans right now is that so many are arrogant, and irrationally confident in the infallibility of this country.

The ideas that form our laws are the ONLY thing that keep us free. Guess what they are attacking DIRECTLY?

“it [the constitution] does not say what the government can do on your behalf.” This is all you need to know about Obama. When I first heard him say those words I literally got chills and goose bumps. My heart sank. I knew we were in big, big trouble.

“...on your behalf.” That’s ANYTHING the he/they decide is good for you. Hello?! The “common good”, anyone? A blank check on your existence, anyone?

Those words alone merited a bloody revolution to prevent his rise to power—he’s anti-American, and in broad daylight.

You are not superior in any way to other human beings on this planet and you will fall to communism just the same. What, was everyone in Germany, or Russia stupid? Genetically inferior?

How could so many millions fall prey to communism?

It is the Siren call of Siren calls—and it stands like a giant before us ready to stomp us out of existence.

Previous generations feared and loathed communism for good reason. They watched from a distance as the communists ran over nations and peoples overtly.

Right now, they are in the White House. Only now, they must operate covertly.

Call me extreme/alarmist, or whatever, but don’t you think we should err on the side of great caution when it comes to our freedom?

Shouldn’t we look upon those who lead us with suspicion when they have done SO MANY THINGS that communists would do?

The ideology is precisely the same—all you’re missing are the red flags, the tanks, and death camps. They can’t do those things here yet.

But they can convince you that they don’t exist, and slowly turn you against yourself, and do it all “...on your behalf.”

[The_Reader_David]

Nope. Communism is dead. The totalitarian impulse is still very much alive, but the only real going concerns, from the PRC to the Obama administration are fascist (leaving aside the bizarre morphing of “people’s democracy” into a form of hereditary monarchy in North Korea and Cuba.)

Experience has drilled the critiques of central planning of Hayek and vonMises even into the minds and hearts of would-be central planners who have never read even a precis of the work of any Austrian school economist.

Putin and Pravda warn America of the dangers of socialism and go unheeded—even though as now constituted Russia is fascist, though less obnoxiously so than China or Obama’s vision for the U.S. The Chinese fascists (who still call themselves “Communists” but aren’t really) cling to state atheism, but in Russia it’s been jettisoned for a revival of the old Byzantine symphony of powers between Church and state (which is its present form is more robust than at any time since Peter “the Great” subordinated the Russian Church to the state).

Communism has been consigned to the dustbin of history—both shown to be unworkable by trenchant critique, and defeated in practical terms. The problem is, fascism, is ultimately more dangerous: while an affront to human dignity and freedom, and sub-optimal in terms of its provision for human material needs (capitalism being better), unlike Communism, it is workable long-term (as Franco’s Spain and Peronist Argentina showed—though the latter gave a really good case for its sub-optimality).

[nw_arizona_granny]

Thanks for the ping.

[annalex]

One should define the terms correctly. Communism is an ideology that combines common ownership of all property, withering away of market interchange, deep transformation of the character of man, witherign away of the state and withering away of religion. That is the definition.

One can make an argument that the Soviet Union represented “Real Communism”: a deeply repressive militaristic command system.

It is more accurate to say that the Soviet Union was simply another aggressive totalitarian system that for historical accidental reason adopted some elements of marxism to justify the oppression.

Another aggressive totalitarian system might adopt corporatism, tribal mythology and anthropological darwinism as the justification for its existence.

Yet another might make representative democracy, mass round-the-clock entertainment and moral relativism its distinctive fig leaf.

These are superficialities. The underlying mechanism is still the same: a ruling class has formed, which finds ways to fool the people into trusting them with power, which they then abuse.

[Boucheau]

“...withering away of the state”

Communism?

[annalex]

Yes. Marx taught that the state is to wither away, and Lenin agreed and elaborated on this.

The theory is that initially, when people are still not properly configured to communist worldview, there will be people who cling to private property or don’t work without compensation. For that reason, the state is necessary in the stages leading to communism, but communism itself is a society where there is no need for the state. Light moral correction is provided fraternally in the society of likeminded people, and serious immorality is not possible because the society already offers everything a reasonable person might want.

Don’t laugh.

[Boucheau]

Ah, yes.

I’m not laughing.

Well, it is laughable.

[annalex]

For example, see

The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State (The State and Revolution)

So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.

Did Rand say that? No, Lenin did. Every dictator says his diktat is temporary.