KGB defector predicted Russia-China realignment, like '1984' author - analysis

Eliyahu Tulshinski

July 11, 2023

China's 180 degree turn from a heavily militarized border with Russia to joint military drills with them and “Long live friendship” slogans was predicted in George Orwell's cautionary tale 1984, as noted by Frontline News in “The new Russia-China alignment: Orwell's three super-states prediction in formation stage?"

Orwell, who based his prediction on an understanding that the Sino-Soviet split was a staged conflict which would conclude without a real war, was joined in his expectations by the highest ranking defector in Soviet history, Anatoliy Golitsyn.

A true defector

Golitsyn served as a senior analyst in the NATO section of the KGB's Information Department in the late 1950s when a long-range strategy was developed in which the Soviet Union would fake its own funeral (while keeping loyal “former” communists in charge) to obtain not just America's acquiescence to the strengthening of communism globally, but its active support.

As Frontline News previously reported, Golitsyn was a very different kind of defector:

Unlike establishment-aligned Soviet defectors who conduct national tours and appear on television, Anatoliy Golitsyn never made public appearances. Following his defection in 1961, he resided in a secret location for the remainder of his life. Golitsyn escaped from his Finnish residence during a white-out snowstorm that made it impossible for his colleagues in the KGB to track him, his wife and their daughter as they fled to the US embassy, during their perfectly timed Christmas visit.

More than 50 KGB agents secretly living in the West were quickly assigned with both discrediting and assassinating him. Meanwhile, the Soviets canceled every upcoming meeting that had been scheduled with high-ranking agents, knowing that Golitsyn was disclosing their identities. [Emphases added].

The CIA blocked Golitsyn from publishing his book New Lies for Old, warning the West to not be duped by the coming claim that communists have lost control of Russia, until 1984 (coincidentally the title and setting of Orwell's book). In it, Golitsyn lays out a simple formula for detecting a fake Russian defector, or "plant" — notice the extent to which they provide information about the Soviets' disinformation campaign:

[I]t is common practice for the communist security and intelligence services to send provocateurs [plants] abroad under this guise to act as channels for disinformation . . .

The good faith of Western secret sources or of defectors from the communist side is not therefore automatically established by the fact that they produce quantities of information on military, economic, scientific and technical, or counterespionage subjects or that they give vent to spectacular denunciations of communism. A more important criterion is what they have to say on communist long-range policy and the use of disinformation.

The number of communist leaders, officials, and intellectuals who have full knowledge of the scope and scale of the disinformation program is very limited, but the number who participate in one or other of its aspects is very large. Most secret sources or defectors, if they have genuinely transferred their allegiance to the West, should have something of value to say on current communist techniques in this field even if they themselves do not realize the full significance of their own knowledge. [Emphases added; pp. 61, 95].

Russia, in fact, has been led by “former” communists like the former head of the FSB (now KGB) Vladimir Putin. But few Soviet defectors have met Golitsyn's criterion of explaining the significance of Russia's disinformation campaign, unlike the Simpsons, who at least satirized it.

Sino-Soviet split

The Soviet Union, which armed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in their insurrection against the pro-West Chinese Nationalist Party, claimed, in 1956, to have broken its alliance with the CCP due to supposed nuanced differences in how to implement Marxism–Leninism.

Golitsyn considered the West naive for believing the sudden split and the subsequent militarization of the border between the nations to be anything but misinformation. Just as the US was beginning to address the question, “Who lost China?” and to consider the danger posed to the world by a fairly monolithic communist polity, the supposed split between the two leading communist nations caused Americans to drop their guard and even warm up to a supposedly moderate Soviet Union relative to their “adversary” China.

Scissors strategy

Golitsyn warned against exactly this reaction, explaining that the Sino-Soviet split was designed to allegorically place the US in the middle of the two blades of a scissor. Because the State Department reaction is that the US must choose to support one side (one blade), the two blades strengthen each other as the US moves from opposing both to supporting one.

The Sino-Soviet split would help to build up the moderate image of both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1960s, to the advantage of their strategic political rapprochement with the advanced and developing countries . . .

[The split's] overall objective can be defined briefly as the exploitation of the scissors strategy to hasten the achievement of long-range communist goals. Duality in Sino-Soviet polemics is used to mask the nature of the goals and the degree of coordination in the communist effort to achieve them. The feigned disunity of the communist world promotes real disunity in the noncommunist world. Each blade of the communist pair of scissors makes the other more effective. The militancy of one nation helps the activist detente diplomacy of the other.

Mutual charges of hegemonism help to create the right climate for one or the other to negotiate agreements with the West. False alignments, formed with third parties by each side against the other, make it easier to achieve specific communist goals, such as the acquisition of advanced technology or the negotiation of arms control agreements or communist penetration of the Arab and African states.

In Western eyes the military, political, economic, and ideological threat from world communism appears diminished. In consequence Western determination to resist the advance of communism is undermined. [Emphases added; pp. 147, 182].

Golitsyn cited an analyst who, unlike the State Department, examined the evidence for a Sino-Soviet split and found it to be an invention:

Natalie Grant, well-versed in the history of the Trust [a previous short-lived, alleged liberalization of the Soviet Union], went further, suggesting that "a careful study of the material forming the alleged grounds for concluding that there is a serious Sino-Soviet conflict proves the absence of any objective foundation for such a belief. . . . [A]ll statements regarding the existence of a serious disagreement between Moscow and Peking on foreign policy, war, peace, revolution, or attitude toward imperialism are an invention. [Emphasis added; p. 80].

The friendship displayed between the two nations today thus fails to reflect any substantial change, regardless of how it appears to the outside world. Like Orwell's readers, Golitsyn's followers would also expect a cosmetic change in their relationship, in line with the defector's prediction that the scissors strategy would be replaced by a new partnership appearing as "one clenched fist":

At a later stage the communist strategists are left with the option of terminating the split and adopting the strategy of "one clenched fist." [P. 182].

Consequences

After officially accepting that the massing of troops and skirmishes along the Sino-Soviet border as genuine proof of a disjointed enemy, the State Department advocated replacing anti-Communist Taiwan's seat on the UN Security Council with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Before long, most favored nation trade status, the move of American factories to China and reverse engineering by CCP controlled companies stealing US technology, had China replace the US as the world's largest economy.

Bigger picture

The increasing strength of communist China comes not just as the nation ends the “scissors strategy” and officially enters a warm friendship with a Russia controlled by “former” communists, but as those “former” communists rebuild their empire, all according to plan, as reported by the The Independent.

Yevgeniy Primakov, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, said in Moscow that, apart from the three Baltic Republics, the other 12 former Republics which belonged to the Soviet Union would largely reunite.

Thus, over the years, Russia has reoccupied some former Soviet republics while also downplaying alleged splits within the communist world. In 2000 Russia absorbed Belarus into the Union State, in 2008 it reoccupied some Georgian territories, in 2014 Russia annexed the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol and annexed four Ukrainian oblasts in 2022 into the “Russian Federation.”

Is the rest of Ukraine next?

Ukraine

While Russia cements its alliance with China, it claims to be at war with Ukraine. Ukraine is seen as the representative of the US led super-state in Orwell's division of the world (the other two super-states being led by China and Russia), since America's push to incorporate Ukraine into NATO was the supposed spark that led Russia to invade Ukraine.

This new permeation of the super-state alliances fits with Orwell's statement, "In one combination or another, these three super-states are permanently at war.” (p. 235) And, again, it's an event predicted by Golitsyn as well, since the “liberalization” of the Soviet Union, being staged, would be followed by a reunification of most of the former republics of the union, as a Russian official warned shortly after the alleged Soviet collapse:

Putin may indeed plan to annex the remainder of the former Soviet republic Ukraine. More importantly, though, he plans to drain the West of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and of weapons, knowing he can rely on the communist controlled leaders of Ukraine to distribute the funds and arms as the communists see fit, as reported by Frontline News:

[M]any of the oligarchs who hold substantial sway over the government are actually “former communist big wigs from the Soviet time” who were given preferential treatment to allow them to make business deals unavailable to those unaffiliated with the communists.

Orwell vs. Golitsyn

Orwell saw fake wars as an end in and of themselves, destroying the wealth that would otherwise be generated by technological advances and thus preserving the class structure that relies on an economic underclass. The dystopian future described in 1984 thus has three socialist super-states eternally engulfed in otherwise meaningless wars.

None of the three super-states ever attempts any manoeuvre which involves the risk of serious defeat. . . .

[N]o fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas. . . .

[N]o invasion of enemy territory is ever undertaken. [Pp. 246-247].

Orwell did not benefit from Golitsyn's writings, though, having died 34 years before Golitsyn published his first book. While Golitsyn agreed that staged wars were useful if not indispensable to communist strategy, he did not see them or the regional governments that communists advocate as the end game.

The ultimate goal of communists, he warned, was for regional governments to give way to one world government in which war would only be practiced by that world government against the world population. He therefore defined their ultimate goal as “[t]he creation of a world federation of communist states" (p. 337); something to be accomplished with Chinese partnership:

Similarly, current and future Western aid for Russia will fail to deflect the Russian leaders from their long-term objectives of world hegemony which they will continue to pursue in concert with the Communist Chinese. [Emphases added; p. 165].

Resistance to such a federation correlates with the standard of living in the non-Communist world. As Western economies and levels of freedom are reduced to levels closer to those of communist nations, resistance wanes. Said another way, economic destruction and infringement of constitutional rights may be seen by American communists and their supporters as a necessary step towards the world socialist state they desire, be it a global medical police state or some other variant of misery.

Please see our previous articles on Russian and Chinese deception: