How Soviet Subversion Outlived the Soviet Union
"…The theory of subversion did not begin with the KGB. It did not begin with Marx or Lenin. It began 2,500 years ago with the Chinese philosopher and military strategist Sun Tzu, who served as an advisor to several imperial houses and whose thinking would eventually become the philosophical foundation of Soviet active measures doctrine.
Sun Tzu's central argument was deceptively simple: armed conflict is the most counterproductive, barbaric, and inefficient means of defeating an enemy. The highest form of warfare, he argued, is never to fight at all — but to destroy something valuable inside your enemy's country before your enemy even perceives you as a threat. The ultimate objective: make your enemy look at your system, your civilization, your ambitions, and see not a threat but an alternative. Something desirable. Something worth emulating.
When that moment arrives, you can destroy your enemy without firing a single bullet. This is the essence of subversion. This is what the KGB taught in every academy and military institution across the entire Soviet period. It is what the Russian Federation's security services teach today.
The KGB archives I reviewed made the resource allocation explicit: of all funds and manpower expended outside Soviet borders, no more than 10 to 15 percent went to conventional espionage — stealing weapons blueprints, recruiting military sources, the James Bond scenarios that dominate Western imagination. The remaining 85 percent went to subversion. Not spies. Not saboteurs. Something quieter, slower, and infinitely more destructive.
This distinction matters profoundly. Western analysts, Hollywood screenwriters, and self-styled Kremlin experts have spent decades fixating on the 15 percent while ignoring the 85 percent. That misdirection was itself part of the plan…"
"…In 1984, a KGB officer named Yuri Bezmenov — who had defected to the West over a decade earlier under the pseudonym Tomas Schuman — sat before an American interviewer and described, in precise detail, the Soviet subversion program targeting the United States. He described four sequential stages: Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, and Normalization. He named the target areas. He named the methods. He named the intended results.
Almost no one listened.
Twelve years later, reviewing KGB documents in Tbilisi that Bezmenov had never seen — documents that had never left Soviet Georgia — I found the same blueprint. Independently. From the primary source. Bezmenov was not speculating. He was reading from a manual that still existed, in fragments, in a partially burned archive on the other side of the world. We were looking at the same operational doctrine from opposite ends.
Below is Bezmenov's own chart, which he published under his pen name Tomas Schuman. Every element it contains was present in the KGB materials I reviewed in Tbilisi in 1996…"
Bezmenov's blueprint targeted religion — through politicization, commercialization, and replacement with alternative movements until genuine faith loses social authority. Look at the trajectory of American religious life over the past four decades and decide what you see.
It targeted education — prescribing the replacement of mathematics, physics, and languages with social grievance curricula, permissiveness, and ideological conditioning. Look at what American children are being taught in 2025 — including materials on gender identity and sexuality introduced to elementary school children — and decide what you see.
It targeted media — calling for monopolization, manipulation, and the flooding of public discourse with non-issues until citizens cannot distinguish signal from noise. Look at the American media landscape, at the concentrations of ownership, at the asymmetric treatment of political figures, and decide what you see.
It targeted culture — prescribing false heroes and corrupted role models until genuine standards of excellence collapse. Look at who American culture celebrates and decide what you see.
It targeted law and order — calling for the systematic delegitimization of police, military, and justice institutions. Look at movements that demand defunding law enforcement, at campaigns to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, at the portrayal of law enforcement in contemporary American media — criminals sympathetic, officers pathological — and decide what you see.
It targeted the family — prescribing its breakup as the primary mechanism for eliminating citizens' loyalty to the state. Look at American family formation rates, at campaigns targeting parental authority over children's medical decisions, at the medical interventions now being performed on minors — including irreversible surgical and hormonal procedures — in the name of gender identity and decide what you see.
It targeted racial relations — explicitly calling for the amplification of racial tensions to produce, in the document's own words, hatred and division. Look at how race has functioned in American public discourse over the past fifteen years — not as a problem to be solved but as a permanent wound to be kept open — and decide what you see.
It targeted labor relations — calling for the replacement of negotiated compromise with permanent class antagonism. Look at how American labor politics has evolved, at who benefits from permanent conflict between workers and institutions, and decide what you see.
And then look at the streets.
Movements presenting themselves as organic expressions of American conscience — Antifa, Black Lives Matter, No Kings, campaigns to abolish ICE, the aggressive promotion of transgender ideology in schools, the celebration of gender transition for children — look at all of them through the lens of a blueprint written in Moscow decades before most of their participants were born.
I am not telling you these movements are KGB operations. I am not accusing their members of being foreign agents. Many are sincere Americans acting on beliefs they hold genuinely.
I am telling you that they match, with remarkable precision, the desired outputs of a subversion program that was documented, resourced at 85 percent of Soviet external intelligence budgets, and specifically targeted at the United States. The blueprint called for exactly these results. The results arrived on schedule.
You decide what that means.
The Question America Has Not Yet Asked
Bezmenov ended his 1984 lecture with a warning that was ignored for forty years. I will end this article with the question his warning implied — the question that American institutions, American media, and American policymakers have still not seriously asked:
If a foreign power spent decades and the majority of its intelligence resources systematically targeting your religion, your education, your media, your culture, your law enforcement, your family structure, your racial relations, and your political institutions — and if that program was documented, described publicly by a defector, and confirmed independently by a former intelligence officer reviewing primary source materials on the other side of the world —
At what point does the evidence become impossible to ignore?
The Soviet Union is gone. The blueprint survived. The operation was handed over and continued. The question is not whether subversion happened. The question is whether America will recognize it before the final two stages — Crisis and Normalization — complete themselves.
I found the blueprint in a partially burned archive in Tbilisi in 1996. Yuri Bezmenov found it in Moscow in the 1960s and tried to tell you in 1984.
The blueprint was always there…"
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Armand
