Almost all of the experts that seem to get so much press about Russia get it foundationally wrong. Some of this is because the defense industry pays people to think and write about these matters. That group would need an enemy to scare us no matter what, they would write about St. Kitts if there were no other nations available. Others write this way because of their ideology. Russia must be “expansionist”, and it does not matter that in 1989 NATO planned to fight Russia at the Fulda Gap in Germany, and now plans to fight them at the Suwalki Gap hundreds of miles to the east in Poland. Russian “expansionism” must be stopped!
No small part of this comes from the intelligence community and is then fed through defense publications and scattered to the media as facts. The narrative serves many purposes, both for-profit and political expedience. There are concerns that a realist can find in Russia generally, but the expression of irrational hatred is absurd. But most that write of this come at it from the ideological, social peer-group, and profit angle.
Not all. There exist more than one or two writers that promote the theory that the Soviet Union never died, it just went into hiding and Putin is a proto-Stalin. Assumably just awaiting global conquest before he activates the GULAGS. On the face of it, it sounds absurd, and it is, but they have arguments. There are videos and historical events they summon to support the case.
In the ideological and idealistic scribblings of true Marxists, back in the late 19th and early 20th century before any form of Marxism was implemented in any nation we can find ideas about a global communist revolution. The true believers believed this, and you can find idealistic, dogmatic, doctrinaire believers and their writing ever since that period. But the reality was different than idealism. True Marxism never took hold, not the idealistic type. Writers can reference these ideas, the ramblings of the intelligentsia that never held power, but what they wrote and what was written by true believers afterward was not necessarily proof of anything other than the ideas were there. Ideas that never manifested at all in the way Marx envisioned, not even in terms of how the revolutions would begin. Not to this point. And there is no proof that these ideas are reflective of anything in modern Russia unless one equates authoritarianism with scientific socialism and calls it a day. That is naïve, it is infinitely more complex than that.
There are the often misquoted and taken out of context statements by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, and modified and elaborated on in 1959 and 1961 that “We will bury you”. The Soviet Union had only recently rid itself of Stalinism and was searching for which parts of Marxism to revitalize and renew. His comments meant many things, and they were aligned with Communist party dogma and ideological beliefs in the superiority of their system. But this is not necessarily proof of a Soviet plan that survived the death of the Soviet Union.
Most of us have seen videos of Yuri Bezmenov outlining how Soviet officials planned to topple Western governments. When we look at the diagram that he laid out and template events over the last twenty years or so, it is possible to see a pattern. The crisis event of 2001 seems to fit perfectly with Bezmenov’s model. Logically it all fits. But what Bezmenov described was simply a methodology, tools, and techniques. The Soviets may have planned to use it, but that is no proof that the plan survived the death of the Soviet Union or that Russia is involved. We could assume that because Yuri told us the tools that Soviets developed (let’s call it a hammer), and we saw a hammer being used and can measure the effects of that hammer, that it certainly must be Russian; it has to be the cold dead hand of the Soviet empire now operating from a secret cave with Doctor Evil.
Does it have to be Russia? Could anyone have used those tools to achieve their own desired ends? The United States and Western powers have become very adept at using color revolution methodology in other nations, color revolution is a methodology that has many elements that Yuri described. The difference is a matter of time scale in what we observe in other nations and what we believe Yuri was correct about here. Why must it be the Soviets?
Why must it be the most complex, implausible, and unworkable explanation? The idea that our destruction has been caused by the Soviets ignores many things. It begins from a fatally flawed understanding of true geopolitics and concludes with ignoring several key historical facts. Who Russia is, why they are the way they are, why so many cannot help but want to see them as the enemy – all of that is complex. But it is infinitely simpler than believing that the Soviet Union never died, it just went into hiding and they are the enemy they always were.
The US and the West never needed a secret (external) Soviet plot to bring itself down after 1991. We had people right here doing that work long before, some in universities, others in seminaries, and more still in politics. We, the American people provided the perfect whiteboard for all this; us through our own sloth and ignorance. Some of the people that have engineered, often through plain greed and avarice, and occasionally through a quest for power are to blame.
These people certainly may have adopted tools from the Soviet Union, many of their followers may believe they understand and support Marxism, and their leaders may pay lip service to that in appeasement. But there is no Soviet plot. Our oligarchs are not ideologues, they are pragmatists after power. They do not owe their allegiance to a secret Soviet headquarters located somewhere, maybe down in Antarctica beside the NAZI base…maybe on the moon.
Ideas and tools take on a life of their own. We do not need complex and ridiculous theories and fear-mongering to explain that. We have a problem, many, but they are our problems for the most part.
It is ludicrous, absurd, childish fearmongering, and conspiracy crafting. It is an attempt to explain a thing that is happening, but we need a secret explanation for it to make it more palatable. The tools may have been forged elsewhere, radical believers may have said it will be so, but we need none of that to explain what has happened to us. We certainly should not allow such theories to taint how we diplomatically view Russia at present. To fall for the lies they all tell will only serve the purposes of our true masters. [When All Sing The Same Song]
I used hyperbole in the title, maybe the people that peddle these nutty theories do not believe there is a Soviet base on the Moon or Mars or Antarctica for that matter. Perhaps they believe the Soviet command structure just went underground in diaspora and still wields enormous power via an unseen hand. It is still an absurd logical leap to assume that the most rational explanation for what has happened and is happening to us must be a secret Soviet cabal. That it is impossible that methodologies developed by the Soviets are useful to other groups. There are many other much more reasonable and rational ways to explain the ideology present in the West, geopolitics, and the changes we see around us.
