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.

[PhilDragoo]

[SpaceBar]

See tag line

See post #2.

[neverdem]

The Vanguard of the Polar Bears

This is the first pic that I remember in which the magazine was removed.

[Marathoner]

The remarkable part is the complete transformation of the democrat party into the true Communist Party of America, although some other group officially holds that title to deflect suspicion away from the true standard bearers. While Europe openly recognizes their communists, ours hide like cockroaches behind the "D" label and vehemently deny their true affiliations when confronted.

+1(in fact, changed my tagline to reflect this)

[rogue yam]

ping

[JasonC]

Nope - my comment was and is entirely correct, your fevered imagination is just more entertained by gloom and doom nonsense. But nonsense is all it is.

[FormerACLUmember]

Now THAT is funny! I hope the people of Massachussets loudly boo Obama in Ceausescu style on Sunday.

[Tawiskaro]

[genetic homophobe]

Please excuse my ignorance. What is BFL?

[runninglips]

People will mock me for saying this but.....Medved is not what he says or appears to be. There is something not quite on the up and up with this man. He can persuasively fend off any criticisms, he effectively mocks anyone with just an inkling of the worldwide conspiracy, but that feeling of chewing on tinfoil remains.

[Wingy]

Bump For Later. More or less a placekeeper so I can find this thread easily for a more detailed perusal.

[RoadTest]

When are you going to get your head of of the sand?

[CowboyJay]

We need to kill the idea. The mistake of the right is that they have done little to export ideals of liberty or to proselytize them. We must combat the left who expand their movement by converting people to their religion by doing conversions of our own.

That is absolutely true. We should have continued to evangelize liberty. After the Wall fell, there was no specter of Eastern Bloc communism to scare the West back to sanity. Perspective was lost, and 'democracy' is held up as some fundamentally just incorruptible form of government with no potential for tyranny. The concepts of moral authority and constitutional limitation got lost in the shuffle as the demos cheered on centralization of power. Huge red flags should have gone up when GWB started spouting off about the 'kinder, gentler nation' followed by the Clintons with their '3rd Way' nonsense. Instead, the 'social justice' dogma became the guiding principle of western government. Even more sinister is the tendency now toward supranational governing bodies.

The scariest thing is not how tyrannical and rigid the 'Third Way' has become, but just how politically stable it is. As a tool for preserving order at any cost, perpetuating privilege, and stifling dissent it seems unsurpassed.

The worst have indeed gotten on top. If they don't overreach and start killing people by the millions, they look to be there for quite some time. So long as we have bread and circuses, the masses seem prepared to suffer the inevitable slide in personal affluence and liberty that must accompany this form of government.

As for Russia - not Communist anymore. The bottle may still read 'Coke', but the formula has been changed. Authoritarian? Yes. But that power is no longer being thrown around in the name of Marx. More of a 'trains run on time' brand of fascism if anything. Hayek considered this the logical product of a disillusioned collectivist state.

[Kabud]

You just said it: brand of fascism if anything.

Cant agree more: kremlin in fact conscientiously turned to national socialism of Hitler type.

It was in development for some time and now they got it right:

expect genocidal wars

[CowboyJay]

National-socialism look-alike, IMO. More ‘Il Duce’ than ‘Mein Fuhrer’, and more fake than anything. Georgia was a staged show of force. Just enough to keep the West on their toes, and show any internal rivals that Putin is not to be messed with. Don’t get any sense of real ideological conviction or utopianism coming from him. He and his buddies aren’t interested in anything much beyond accumulating personal wealth, driving nice cars, and keeping up the obligatory dozen or so mistresses. The majority of Russians are positively sick of mass movements.

I think the real danger is a concerted effort between Russia and China to drop us to our knees, economically. We’ve been triangulating them against one another for decades. China depends on manufactured exports, and still needs us around for another 5-10 years. Russia does not.

[Red6]

Because there is no “Evil Empire” that owns real estate, has a flag and leaders banging shoes on tables screaming they will bury us, some no longer see the threat. However, the idea of communism/socialism in actuality is not confined to some concept of a national border or flag.

Communism/socialism is today as alive as it was in the past, in fact the number of people who see virtue and merit in this paradigm have risen since the fall of the wall in 1989 and there are many examples to prove this. The dangers of centralization, of the statist thinking and governance/economic model are today as strong as ever with possibly only the Great Depression as a rival.

Because there is no enemy that is associated with this system of economic and de facto political/religious thinking which opposes and threatens us, this dogma is not seen as a threat to our republic, freedom and way of life. This again can be paralleled in history, where many Americans were in love with the idea of National Socialism until we went to war with the Nazi’s....... Ford, Charles Lindbergh.....many liked the idea of National Socialism until this idea was associated with the bad guy. Certain ideas are catchy, and when there is no branding and/or negative association attributed to them, the gullible who are easily persuaded by the rhetoric of class warfare, theories all based on some concept of social conflict convince themselves that they have a personal net benefit in believing the lie they are being sold.

[savedbygrace]

Here’s my surprised face:

{:-O

[gwilhelm56]

**The ideology is alive and well in thousands of hatcheries known as liberal arts departments...**

Fake its own death, NO ... but like all SCUM .. It cannot die it just coagulates into another form. As long as there are simpleminded “Useful Idiots,” that will continue to look for their Utopia, will always find their “BIG BROTHER!”

The simpleminded are mostly in the “Environmental Movement,” as AlBore has reminded us, that “you Can fool Some of the people ALL of the TIME”

As for an example of pure “Communism”, read Governor Bradford’s Journal of the Plymouth Plantation ..1620 Massachusetts. So the first Thanksgiving was THANKS to GOD, for killing the communistic experiment before it killed the entire colony.

[Canedawg]

“The NWO is coming to life right before our eyes....and it’s Marxist...”
***

Yep. The biggest obstacle to the implementation of the NWO was American Exceptionalism and the USA’s status as a superpower. Ozero’s administration is trying to dismantle and remove that obstacle.

[GenXteacher]

Perhaps. Perhaps also that it is a secretly managed transition that has gone out of control of those who set in motion. Perhaps they pretended to collapse, and while pretending, actually did so. (That would be a typical Soviet screw-up.) Meantime, their agents in the West continued their work- undermining capitalism and inserting their poisonous doctrines until the West eventually becomes communist of its own will.