In 1984, Yuri Bezmenov, a former Soviet KGB officer turned defector, issued a chilling warning to the West. As a specialist in the USSR's propaganda and subversion, he revealed how Moscow's "active measures" were designed not only to mislead but to fundamentally destabilize societies from within. The West, convinced that victory in the Cold War would be purely military or economic, ignored his words. Yet Bezmenov understood what few in Washington or Brussels could grasp: the battlefield was psychological, cultural and moral.
Only a little more than decade later, Russian strategist Alexander Dugin gave these methods a new intellectual scaffolding. In his 1997 book The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, Dugin argued that the path to weakening the United States and NATO lay in fomenting chaos inside America's borders — igniting racial and social conflict, seeding distrust of institutions, and nurturing separatist or extremist movements. His program was nothing less than a blueprint for dismantling the West by exploiting its own fractures.
The Soviet–Palestinian Nexus
These ideas did not emerge in a vacuum. Already during the Cold War, the KGB had cultivated deep ties with Palestinian terrorist factions, trained operatives who were providing disinformation, and weaponizing the Arab-Israeli conflict for Soviet purposes. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), along with splinter groups, were not merely perpetrating anti-Israel terrorism: the PLO was a Soviet proxy, deployed both to weaken the Jewish state and inject anti-Israel and anti-Western ideology into Europe and America.
The propaganda of that era — casting Israel as a colonial aggressor, Palestinians as eternal victims, and the U.S. as the imperial puppet-master — was carefully crafted in Moscow and echoed through Arab capitals, European universities, and eventually American campuses. What some now call the "pro-Palestine movement" in the West is, in many respects, the residue of decades of KGB-backed manipulation. The cultural self-hatred, moral relativism, and selective outrage that dominate today's progressive circles were seeded by Soviet strategists who understood that eroding Western confidence from within could be more decisive than any tank battalion.
Ferguson, Baltimore and Beyond
The Kremlin's methods have been adapted to new technologies. In 2015, amid racial tensions in Ferguson and Baltimore, Russian operators unleashed waves of propaganda on American society. Social media became a weapon. Bots and troll farms targeted both sides of the divide, while inflaming white resentment, stoking black anger and encouraging confrontation -- even violence.
Moscow's tactics, steeped in "whataboutism," were based on highlighting America's imperfections while masking Russia's repression. Georgetown University Professor Dr. Mark Jacobson summarized it:
"Russia will overtly and covertly support organizations seeking secession or seeking to politically divide the United States, and they will covertly press protest movements to move towards the extreme and ultimately violence."
Playing Both Sides of the Street
Evidence of this "structured duality" can be found on the Russian-based Facebook page "Being Patriotic," which, before its closure, received 6.3 million "likes." The page also pushed pro-Trump rhetoric and hostility toward Black Lives Matter (BLM). Meanwhile, another Kremlin-controlled account, "Blacktivist," spread anti-police messaging and calls for retaliation, such as "Black people have to do something. An eye for an eye." That page, before it was shut down, generated 6.18 million "shares."
Between June 2015 and May 2017, Facebook identified roughly $100,000 in advertising spending tied to Russian operators — around 3,000 ads and 470 fake accounts. These "false amplifiers" were not fringe experiments; they were coordinated tools to manipulate American discourse around the most sensitive of issues: race, violence and justice.
The Blueprint for Civil Unrest
In 2018, the Dossier Center — an investigative group funded by exiled Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky — uncovered documents outlining even more ambitious schemes. One plan, titled "Development Strategy of a Pan-African State on U.S. Territory," proposed recruiting African-Americans, particularly those with criminal backgrounds or ties to radical groups, to foment large-scale unrest. "The infrastructure for this project already exists," Khodorkovsky later warned, stressing that American society remained dangerously susceptible.
The Troll Factories
At the operational level, the infamous Internet Research Agency (IRA) — Russia's troll factory — became the spearhead of these campaigns. Between just 2015 and 2017, its politicized posts reached more than 30 million users on Facebook and Instagram. Millions of Americans unwittingly shared, "liked," and commented on Kremlin-forged content, often amplifying falsehoods more widely than the mainstream reporting did.
Algorithms that reward outrage over truth became Moscow's best allies. Viral posts spread disinformation with an efficiency no Cold War-era propaganda organ could ever have matched. Silicon Valley unwittingly handed Russia the perfect conduit for digital warfare.
The Mutation: Wokism and Cultural Subversion
Russia's subversion did not stop at racial politics. The cultural issues that dominate the modern West — militant "Wokism," the supremacist drift of certain Black Lives Matter factions, the radicalization of LGBT activism into a vehicle for political extremism, the violent anarchism of Antifa, and the ideological intoxication of extreme left-wing groups — all fit the same Soviet blueprint.
Each is presented as a struggle for justice, but all converge on one common outcome: the erosion of Western cohesion, the delegitimization of traditional values, and the paralysis of democratic institutions. From gender ideology pushed in schools to mobs tearing down historical monuments, the fingerprints of a decades-long psychological war are evident. What began with the KGB's creation and sponsorship of radical Palestinian organizations has evolved into a kaleidoscope of identity-based movements that serve the same destabilizing purpose.
The Islamist Ride: Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, and Qatar
This ideological offensive was not left to Russia alone. The Muslim Brotherhood, Iran's revolutionary regime, and the emirate of Qatar eagerly seized onto the momentum of Soviet-inspired subversion. For the Brotherhood, the Soviet playbook of infiltrating institutions, exploiting grievances, and recruiting the young provided a ready-made method to expand its Islamist agenda inside Western societies. Iran, emboldened after 1979, injected the same anti-American, anti-Israel poison into both Middle Eastern conflicts and Western discourse, while Qatar weaponized its vast petrodollars to fund propaganda networks such as Al-Jazeera and to bankroll extremist movements. All three actors found common ground in using Israel as a permanent foil— a convenient lightning rod for outrage, hatred, and mobilization. By turning every regional or global grievance into an indictment of the Jewish state, they perpetuated the Soviet narrative while adding their own religious zealotry. In practice, this unholy alliance of Soviet legacy and Islamist opportunism amplified the West's inner divisions, nurtured identity politics, and corroded democratic confidence. The moral relativism of progressive elites, the selective outrage of campus radicals, and the obsessive fixation on "Palestine" are not organic: they are the downstream effects of decades of collaboration between Moscow's active measures and Islamist subversion, turbocharged by Qatari money and Iranian militancy.
The Obama–Biden Factor
Against this backdrop, the political rise of Barack Obama and the murky legitimacy of Joe Biden's presidency must also be examined. Obama's years in power coincided with the institutionalization of identity politics, the normalization of radical cultural agendas, and the tacit encouragement of movements such as BLM and Antifa. Biden's contested victory — perceived by millions as tainted by irregularities and corruption — as well as catastrophic governance, including surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, open unvetted migration, galloping inflation, China's spy balloon, fentanyl murders, farm purchases near military sites, discarding the China initiative that enabled prosecuting Chinese espionage and other crimes committed on American soil -- further undermined faith in America's democratic process.
Whether by design or incompetence, both leaders accelerated trends of division, victimhood culture, and the weakening of U.S. authority abroad. To America's adversaries, this looked like confirmation that the Soviet strategy had borne fruit: the West, hollowed out from within, was destroying itself without the need for a single foreign bullet.
The Present Danger
In recent months, senior Russian officials have doubled down on the theme, issuing scathing indictments of America's supposed systemic failures: "race, ethnic and religious discrimination, police brutality, bias of justice, crowded prisons, and uncontrolled use of firearms," according to the Russian Foreign Ministry. The irony is that Russia, one of the world's most authoritarian regimes, is lecturing America on human rights, but the propaganda works on people who do not know they are being manipulated, both at home and abroad.
The same ideological seed planted by the KGB through Palestinian proxies decades ago has matured into today's toxic blend of anti-Israel activism, anti-American resentment, and Western cultural self-loathing. The chant "From the river to the sea" on American campuses is not merely a student slogan; it is the echo of Soviet agitprop pouring across generations.
Charlie Kirk's Assassination: The Evil Illustration
The assassination of Charlie Kirk may be the darkest, most vivid illustration yet of the process described above. Kirk, a young conservative leader, vocal in the culture wars, was speaking publicly, inviting challenge and debate, yet was shot dead in front of thousands.
Kirk's assassination signifies more than just a tragic act of violence. It suggests that the ideological and political divisions, once artificially stoked by foreign adversaries such as the Soviet Union, the promotion of Palestinian proxies, the radical left's identity movements, the Islamist opportunism of the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and Qatar, and the decay of Western norms, have lately reached the point where any dissent is now life-threatening.
Charlie Kirk's death can be seen not merely as an isolated incident, but as the malignant fruit of decades of strategy — a strategy which cultivated communal fear, hatred, institutional weakness, and cultural decay as tools of geopolitical warfare. If the West does not address this threat now — not only to the forces outside but to the rot from within — free speech and democracy may be the next to fall.
Pierre Rehov, who holds a law degree from Paris-Assas, is a French reporter, novelist and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of six novels, including "Beyond Red Lines", " The Third Testament" and "Red Eden", translated from French. His latest essay on the aftermath of the October 7 massacre " 7 octobre - La riposte " became a bestseller in France.As a filmmaker, he has produced and directed 17 documentaries, many photographed at high risk in Middle Eastern war zones, and focusing on terrorism, media bias, and the persecution of Christians. His latest documentary, "Pogrom(s)" highlights the context of ancient Jew hatred within Muslim civilization as the main force behind the October 7 massacre.
