100 years of fake communist collapses
In Did the Soviet Union fake its own funeral? we presented the story of the most unique man to ever walk out of the KGB and into the CIA - a man who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union and how it would take place. He warned that the "collapse" was only for public consumption. The same people would still be in charge, albeit calling themselves former communists.
It’s been done before
According to defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, the perestroika of the late 1980s was not the first liberalization of communism planned from the outset to eventually be reversed. In 1921 Vladimir Lenin ordered the (temporary) opening of Russia’s economy to privatization and foreign investment as part of his New Economic Policy (NEP). This liberalization extended beyond the economic realm, with Russian communists dropping much of their violent rhetoric and stating their wishes for peaceful coexistence while renaming their dreaded secret police OGPU (just as the KGB was later renamed) and appearing to give a more independent status to conquered states like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine by making them constituent republics within the new federative entity called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
The NEP did in fact attract foreign dollars at a time when the communists faced the possibility of real collapse. The West wholeheartedly believed in Soviet liberalization only to be taken by surprise just seven years later when the Soviets canceled the NEP and began quickly re-nationalizing the manufacturing, agricultural and retails sectors.
All the bases covered
Golitsyn points out that the communists took actions to guarantee the smooth reversion to full socialism and the concomitant loss of individual freedoms.
In 1921, as the NEP was being launched, the OGPU created inside Soviet Russia a false anti-Soviet organization, the Monarchist Alliance of Central Russia. It had once been a genuine organization, founded by Czarist generals in Moscow and Leningrad but liquidated by the Soviet security service in 1919-20. Former members of this organization, among them Czarist generals and members of the old aristocracy who had come over to the Soviet side, nominally led the movement. Their new loyalty to the Soviet regime was not in doubt, for they had betrayed their former friends in the anticommunist underground. [Emphasis added].
With the false threat of an anti-Soviet organization in place, the Soviets fulfilled Lenin’s stated goal of the NEP, "We are taking one step backward to later take two steps forward." Golitsyn concludes,
The NEP was officially ended by Stalin in 1929 with what was called "a socialist offensive on all fronts." The concessions to foreign industrialists were canceled; private enterprise in the Soviet Union was prohibited; private property was confiscated; agriculture was collectivized; repression of political opposition was intensified. The NEP might never have been.
Second fake democratization
The New American sums up Golitsyn’s analysis of yet another staged liberalization within the Soviet Union.
In January 1968, a so-called “liberal” faction within Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party, led by Alexander Dubcek, temporarily took control of the country. In his 1984 book New Lies for Old, former KGB agent Anatoliy Golitsyn claimed that it was a carefully-plotted trial run aimed at determining if the West would actually fall for the fantasy that a totalitarian communist country could spontaneously switch to “democracy” under the leadership of supposed “reformed” Communists and their collaborators.
According to Golitsyn, the ploy had been planned in the late 1950s, prior to his defection to the West, and was brought to an end without exposing the supposed “democratization” when, after seven months, Warsaw Pact troops invaded, ousted Dubcek, and installed a Stalinist regime. Indications that something was fishy included the nonviolent nature of the invasion (Dubcek and his colleagues did not resist) and the fact that neither Dubcek nor his key advisers were executed nor given lengthy jail terms. To the contrary, Dubcek was given a plush job as a forestry manager in Bratislava. [Emphasis added].
Third fake
After President Kennedy's assassination, Golitsyn was able to meet with the head of the CIA and the head of its counterintelligence unit to directly brief them about the Soviets’ long-range strategy. Significantly, this included the creation of the disinformation department to prepare for the future staged collapse of the Soviet Union. If they had any doubts about his predictions, the proof would eventually be in the pudding as the USSR launched perestroika in the late 1980s.
Ukraine
If the Soviets faked their collapse, then Russia and the Ukraine may still answer to the same masters. The Ukraine war would then need to be completely re-examined.
See our previous article in this series:
Did the Soviet Union fake its own funeral?
And check in for the continuation of this series as we answer these questions:
How accurate were Golitsyn’s predictions?
Does the US fund ‘former’ communists?
Is the Soviet Union reoccupying the former Soviet republics one by one?
Who’s really in charge in Russia?
Who’s really in charge in Ukraine?
Is the Ukraine war a controlled conflict?
How should the West respond to the Ukraine war?
