Interviewer: The Soviets use the phase, “ideological subversion”. What do they mean by that?

Bezmenov: Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate overt and open. You can see it with your own eyes. All you have to do, all the American mass media has to do is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes and they can see. There’s no mystery. There’s nothing to do with espionage. I know espionage intelligence gathering looks more romantic, it sells more deodorants through their advertising, probably. That’s why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond type of thrillers. But in reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all! According to my opinion, and the opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures, (2 Russian words, активные something, I couldn’t catch it) in the language of the KGB, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality of every American to such as extent that in spite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.

It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages, the first one being demoralization. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which is required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of your enemy. In other words, Marxism / Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least 3 generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism.

The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already, for the last 25 years, actually it’s over fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is being done by Americans to Americans thanks to a lack of moral standards. As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter any more. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures, even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him a concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it until he’s going to receive a kick in his fat bottom. When a military boot crushes his, then he will understand, but not before that. That’s the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.

The next stage is destabilization. This time, the subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption, whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby, it doesn’t matter anymore. This time, and it takes only from 2 to 5 years to destabilize a nation, what matters is essentials, the economy, foreign relations, defense systems. And you can see quite clearly that in some areas in such sensitive areas as defense and economy, the influence of Marxist / Leninist ideas in the United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it 14 years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process will go that fast.

The next stage of course is crisis. It may take only up to 6 weeks to bring a country up to the verge of crisis. You can see them in Central America now.

And after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure and economy, you have a period of so called normalization. It may last indefinitely. Normalization is a cynical expression born from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ’68, Comrade Brezhnev said, “Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized!” This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all these smucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind of goodies and a paradise on earth, to destabilize your economy, to eliminate the principle of free market competition, and to put a Big Brother government in Washington D.C. With benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale who will promise lots of things, never mind whether the promises are fulfilled or not.