Note: I see that this little essay is starting to get some hits from Russia, which is great. If you are Russian and know something first-hand about conditions in Russia during the period in question here, I would love to hear from you. Either leave a note in the comments below or e-mail me at the address on the About Roborant page. In either case, you may be as anonymous as you like.

---

In 1984 G. Edward Griffin released a documentary titled Soviet subversion of the free press, a conversation with Yuri Bezmenov and through the magic of YouTube, snippets of that documentary are available on the web today. Now, as far as I can tell, G. Edward Griffin is a little bit odd. He's championed some questionable cancer cures and written books about monetary conspiracies and all sorts of odd stuff (there's a page about him here: G. Edward Griffin Totally Explained, but really, it doesn't do all that much explaining). Still, you can't deny the video and he lets Bezmenov rant in his own words. Here's the snippet we're interested in today:

In case the link goes bad or the video gets taken down (Update: it has been up and down and moved all around, but a lot of it seems to be available here also), here's a quote from the interview: Bezmenov says, "A group of twelve people arrived in the USSR from the United States to cover the 50th anniversary of the October Socialist Revolution in my country. From the first page to the last page it was a package of lies. Propaganda clichés which were presented to American readers as opinions and deductions of American journalists. Nothing could be farther from the truth. These were not opinions, these were not opinions at all – they were the clichés which the Soviet propaganda wants American public to think that they think."

Also, don't miss Bezmenov when he talks about demoralization and about Marxists, Useful Idiots. Heck just search YouTube for "Bezmenov", you'll get several videos and all make the most amazing, unlikely claims. On the other hand, I can't prove any of the claims are wrong.

When I saw this video, I was a little bit skeptical. It's pretty fantastic to imagine that a magazine, read and trusted by millions of Americans (published in Des Moines, Iowa, for goodness' sake), could be completely fooled into acting as a propaganda mouthpiece for the USSR right at the height of the cold war. Armed with another vital tool of the information age –eBay– I set out to find this issue of Look and see it for myself. By amazing luck, there it was, the October 3, 1967 issue of Look, for sale cheap. Once it arrived I busily set out to see if Bezmenov was talking through his hat or bragging.

I won't try to make this suspenseful; that would be a cheap trick to keep you reading. Bezmenov was bragging (mostly). Clearly, those folks at Look fell for Soviet propaganda in a big way. I don't think they meant to, they just couldn't help themselves. Amazingly, their own articles have plenty of facts that make their own conclusions questionable. Let's take it a step at a time.

The issue is titled, 50 Years After The Revolution That Changed The World and this whole issue of Look is devoted to the Soviet Union. There are about fifteen articles, from a general overview of the USSR in 1967, to a look at Soviet education, to a tour of a Soviet city, to fluff like a photo spread of Russian babes in furs and a discussion of Russian caviar. Sprinkled in it are skeptical sentences, a few "buts" and the odd raised eyebrow. There's no questioning, however, that the whole issue is relentlessly upbeat about what a great up-and-coming place the Soviet Union was. Interestingly, while there are lots of references to "the revolution that changed things forever" (using almost the exact same words each time), there is no actual history of the revolution in this issue. This seems strange, until you think about how you might go about putting the 1917 Revolution in a rosy light. It's not that the revolution didn't have noble aims, it's just that the actual events were messy and unpleasant –the last thing they wanted to put in this issue.

Look had a feature called "Behind the Scenes" that ran near the front of each issue. In this episode they chose to lead off this feature this way:

When American journalist Lincoln Steffens returned from a mission to Russia in 1919, two years after the revolution that shook the world, he said, "I have been over into the future, and it works." Now, a helf-century after the fall of the Romanovs and the triumph of Lenin, Look has gone over to the Soviet Union to see how well things are really working out there.

This is pretty telling, when you consider that Steffens himself had lost his enthusiasm for communism by the time he wrote his memoirs in 1931. That quote is now widely regarded as a great example of someone who drank a little too much of the Soviet Kool-Aid.

The first little article is about learning the Russian language from a quick immersion course from Berlitz. It's interesting, but not about the Soviet Union at all, so we'll skip it. Next, we come to the main article, "The Soviet Union After Fifty Years". Here's the lede:

It works. Ponderously, fitfully, unevenly. But 50 years after the revolution that changed the world forever, the system it fostered wheezes with life. We strain to hear the sounds of discord and seize on every setback; but it's time to ponder some disconcerting realities. Grumps there are, and struggles– bitter struggles fought by angry, frustrated men. Yet, implausible as it seems to us, most Soviet citizens think they have a good thing going for them. They feel safe. They don't worry about hunger or loneliness or calamity. Raised in a controlled environment, they are without objective measure, but by their own meager reckoning of what constitutes freedom, most of them now feel free. Political terror has shriveled. The indices by which men everywhere gauge progress are rising. To the average Soviet citizen, no conceivable space spectacular planned for the jubilee year could surpass the importance of what is happening on earth. Barring the unexpected, 1967 will be the greatest year ever for Soviet industry and a fat one for agriculture, long the Communist jinx. ... If an honest democratic election where held in the Soviet today –involving legitimate alternatives, sufficient time and opportunity for their exposure and the assurance that those elected would serve– the Communist party would win. This is not speculation. It is a conclusion based on on-the-spot observation and interviews by ten Look editors and photographers whose journeys through the Soviet Union for this issue totaled more than a year.

Of course, we now know that it never really "worked" and it would collapse completely a bit more than twenty years after this issue came out (and the word "gulag" doesn't show up anywhere in there, does it?). Funny that they don't mention that, while 1967 might have been a "fat" year for agriculture, the Soviet Union was still a net food importer, especially of grain. Imports of US grain would actually reach their peak in the early 1980's, fifteen years after this upbeat appraisal of Soviet agriculture. Solzhenitsyn was still under quasi-arrest (and his work suppressed), so it's hard to see how "political terror" had "shriveled". Despite the hints of some "space spectacular" involving cosmonauts (the only area denied Look reporters, so they said), there were no big Soviet successes that year, except the docking of two unmanned spacecraft: Cosmos 186 and 188. Of course, we now know that the Russian people bitterly hated their government (not their country, their government). We also know how the Ukrainians and Estonians feel today (and how quickly they voted themselves out of the Soviet Union when they had the chance), and they were part of the Soviet Union when the article was written. But it was true that they weren't likely "lonely": hard to be lonely when you share an apartment with two other families.

The last sentence is the real kicker. It's not "speculation", it's a "conclusion"! These people had to be "trying to please their hosts" as Bezmenov puts it, there's no other way to figure it. Robert Heinlein went to the Soviet Union in 1960, for example, and wrote a series of articles about how they were shown only what the Soviets wanted them to see and blocked from conversation or contact with regular Soviet citizens. Everyone they talked with, they came to learn, was a "minder" of some sort, making sure they were fed the Party line. If Heinlein, a science fiction writer on vacation, could see through the song and dance, why couldn't the Look editors? They must have been, as Bezmenov claims, thoroughly vetted and selected for the job. They already had their articles written in their heads before they ever set foot in the Soviet Union. They saw what they intended to see.

The next article is about tension between the Soviets and China. The article is long and detailed and generally pro-Soviet. They conclude, "In all likelihood, the Chinese Communist initiatives in raising territorial issues are a part of a general political-warfare campaign against the Soviet Union." And also, "At the very least, the Chinese and Russians [sic] will continue to face each other across their long boundary with anxious watchfulness." In other words, "nothing to see here, just the Chinese making a lot of noise, move along."

The next article starts with a Norman Rockwell painting –literally. The picture shows rows of well-dressed, orderly, healthy school children staring intently towards the front of the class where we see a bust of Lenin (not Stalin). Most of them wear the red scarves of the Young Pioneers, the party apparatus for the youth. Rockwell injects his usual touch of humor by having one kid looking out the window, but my guess is that there wasn't a single kid who dared to look out the window when American journalists were present. The gist of the article is that in old-style Soviet classrooms, very, very little individualism was allowed. Individuals were taught to give themselves up to the group; the group is everything. In new-style Soviet classrooms, they've learned to allow for individualism and independent study. How they arrived at these conclusions is open to question. Not a single Soviet official is quoted in the article. In fact the article quotes no authority of any sort. My guess is that the "backgrounders" Bezmenov spoke of came into play. The journalists were fed the Party cliche and they went for it like a trout hitting a fly.

The next article is about Jazz artist Charles Lloyd and how he was almost denied the right to play at a Soviet jazz festival in Tallinn. Evidently the crowd prevailed when the Ministry of Culture tried to keep him offstage because of "American bombing in Vietnam". Lloyd tried to make it into a problem of race, but it's not clear from the article what was really happening behind the scenes. This article seems pretty factual and without bias one way or the other.

Moving along, we come to an article called "From Stalin to Kosygin: The Myths and the Realities", by W. Averell Harriman, who had been the American ambassador to the Soviet Union. The article is a long and dry account of his relations with various Soviet leaders over the years. The article seems fairly positive about the Soviets, but I think Harriman just told his own story fairly straight.

Next is a bit of fluff called "Friendship is Climbing a Soviet Mountain". Look journalist Chris Wren climbs Mt Gumachi and lives to tell about it. All you need to know is the bit at the end: "I think maybe I've learned something. It's comfortable to dismiss everything in a foreign land as different. But when we climb a mountain, or share something less spectacular, we stumble upon the disturbing truth that we are so much alike." Not what I would call first-rate writing, even for Look magazine in 1969 (more like a student blog entry from 2003).

Continuing on, we have an article based on polls called "We Don't Know Much About Each Other". The Soviet poll was supposedly conducted by the Novosti Press Agency, which was the official Soviet press agency (and the agency who set up the Look visit in the first place). There's no reason to think they even ran a poll at all. I suspect they just set up a list of what they wanted us to think and let it go at that, who was going to check on them? For example, their survey claimed that forty percent of Soviet students had read more than 20 US books, by authors like Hemingway, Salinger, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Updike. Given what we now know about Soviet censorship, this seems extremely unlikely. We'll never know either way, so we just have to move on, there wasn't anything particularly interesting in the article anyway.

"Three Weeks in a Russian Town" is up next. It's interesting that they use the term "Russian" all over the place, when they should be saying "Soviet" to everything except things specifically tied to Russian ethnicity. I don't know if this was a subtle propaganda ("Russia" sounds so much less dangerous than "Soviet") or just poor writing. The town they chose to visit was Bratsk (pictures and description here). Bratsk was obviously the choice of the Soviet propaganda machine. It was a new city, built in the 1950's to house workers building the Bratsk dam and hydroelectric plant (the largest in the world at that time). The workers lived in newly built apartment buildings and earned the highest wages around. It was certainly the showpiece of Soviet cities at this time. Yet this article, more than any other in the magazine, refutes most of the "It works" premise. The town was ugly, living quarters were cramped and the inhabitants lived a very meager lifestyle compared to the US or Europe.

All through the article, we see how it doesn't "work". Wages were far lower than US or European standards. Living spaces were microscopic: 75 square feet per person - about the size of a US bathroom at the time (they must have had communal bathrooms). The reporters stayed in a hotel that had no hot water during their stay –until it mysteriously came on for the last morning of their trip. There are discrepancies about income in the story: a couple supposedly living on $4,000 per year can't save up to buy a $5,500 automobile in a few years (and the Soviets didn't allow consumer credit, everything was cash and carry). Clearly the automobile was set dressing for their visit. While the reporters do mention the stark ugliness of the city, they don't harp on it. Apparently, however, it was really, really ugly – so ugly that they're still talking about prettying it up fifty years later. If you take a look at a section of modern-day Bratsk in Google Maps, you can see that many buildings are still connected by dirt paths rather than streets or sidewalks (here is another block of dirt-connected flats – for comparison and here is a similar view of some fairly dilapidated student housing at the University of Texas: note the sidewalks and parking lots and the attempt to make the buildings look different from each other). The reporters don't seem to have mingled freely with the citizens, instead they were toured around to selected households and visited the same people multiple times during their visit.

In a little sidebar article, we have a serious look into the "Jewish Question" and the USSR. The article is titled "Fred Yusfin: The Jew who had never heard of Yom Kippur"; there is no writing credit on the article. Basically, the article says, "Jews aren't persecuted in the Soviet Union – hell, they aren't even very Jewish anyway." Here's a quote from a non-observant Jew named Fred Yusfin who thinks things are fine for Jews in the USSR:

I don't understand Soviet Jews who would like to emigrate to Israel, but if they want it, I think we should let them. Yes, I know of the reputation abroad of the Soviet Union and the Jewish question. I think this reputation is entirely incorrect. I don't believe the charge that Jews are kept from responsible jobs.
...
What would happen to me if I wanted to practice as a Jew? I can't imagine myself in such a position. Temples? Rabbis? Matzos? Prayer books? I believe that the introduction of these facilities is artificial. New values are being accepted by all the modern Jews.

My first thing was to wonder how this man, who has never even heard of Yom Kippur, would know about "the reputation abroad of the Soviet Union and the Jewish question". Since the Soviet Union was famous for keeping foreign opinions from its citizens, how would such a delicate morsel of information about international opinion slip through to someone entirely uninterested in the question? This whole little article is first class hogwash.

Next up is a bit of fluff about "Russian Furs". It's an excuse to dress up some hot Russian babes in furs and take their pictures. We'll just move on. Next is yet another waste of time, a biting, hard-news story about the unbelievable quality of "Russian Caviar".

On to page 105 and an article called "KGB". Now we're getting to nitty gritty, now we're going to see some hard hitting, right? Well, kinda. We start with the story of KGB operative Bogdan Stashinsky (short article here) and his murder of a Ukrainian newspaper editor in 1957 using cool spy technology. This was, of course, old news at the time. Next we see this:

Since then, Big Brother's methods have mellowed a bit. There are fewer incidents of terror abroad. At home, the knock on the front door at midnight is gone, and fear is fading from people's lives. Despite that, the KGB continues, the most extensive authoritarian police force in the world.

The article goes on to say both how good they are, but also how silly they are for buying information they could get for free. "They could back a truck up to the Government Printing Office and get what they want, in many cases, but they seem to skulk around corners for it" says "one American".

Got that? Just some big, lovable nuts those KGB men. Not dangerous at all. They're just a "police force", not an intelligence agency. Even in the Soviet Union no one is afraid of them anymore. The piece runs on for a page and, after a story about eating some evidence, concludes, "KGB men need strong stomachs." Ha, ha, get it?

"Around the Arts in the Soviet Union" is the title of our next article. It's a survey of statements from various artists. It's a veritable Soviet Love Fest. All of the statements are either the usual blather of artists or praise of the Soviet system and its cultivation of the arts. Except one. There is a letter from Alexander Solzhenitsyn "addressed to, but not read at" the Congress of Soviet writers. Solzhenitsyn was in big trouble at the time (for One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle which had been seized in 1965), but I suppose that this material was provided by the Soviet hosts who didn't mind its inclusion, since no one in the Soviet Union was ever going to have access to Look. The article is made up entirely of published papers (except for Solzhenitsyn's critical one which was not published), so everyone is being good, lest they wind up like Solzhenitsyn.

Two skippable articles come next. One is about the manager of a great Soviet nuclear reactor and the other is about a great, life-saving Soviet doctor. Thankfully, our next article is our last. It's called "Along a Russian Road", and it's the story of a journalists 2,035 mile automobile trip through the Soviet Union. The article wants the reader to believe that, in 1967, a journalist could just rent a car and hit the open road in the Soviet Union. There is no mention of any "minders" or "translators" provided by the government: "Now, the Soviet Union beckons with a selection of highways and will even rent you the car." They could have rented a car with a driver, but they chose not to. I'm sorry, I call bullshit on this. There's no way this happened. If this would have been possible, half the cars in Russia would have been rented by American CIA "journalists" who would have fanned out all over the country. My guess is that these guys, writer Christopher Wren and photographer Douglas Jones, were very carefully toured along an approved route and shown just what the Soviets wanted them to see. All it takes to make what really happened into what this article said happened, is for the journalists to just not mention their "tour guides".

Well, that's it. Was this whole issue of Look "a package of lies", as Bezmenov said? Well, yes and no. I doubt there were many knowingly told, outright lies in the whole issue. The lie is in those things carefully not said and those things exaggerated a little or put in an especially good light or glossed over. Questions not asked (Vietnam isn't even mentioned in an article about the KGB – would any competent journalist not mention Vietnam in an article about the CIA at the time?). So no, it wasn't a package of lies. It was something much more subtle and much more worth bragging about.

Anyone can successfully lie to you, but you'll eventually get the facts and quit trusting them. Much greater skill goes into telling you most of the truth, while shading and coloring the facts to make them seem to support a message that they don't. The essence of this article is "these people are no danger to the United States." That was emphatically not true at the time. Hell this was less than five years after the Cuban Missile crisis and during the midst of what we now know was a massive buildup in Soviet military capacity (detailed in Robert M Gates' excellent book From The Shadows –my review here). This was a propaganda coup of enormous value. This, along with a thousand other coups like it, lead directly to all of those protests in Europe in the 1980's over Reagan's missiles. By then, "everyone knew" that they Soviet Union was run by a bunch of misunderstood men who drank too much vodka but didn't really mean anyone any harm (look at how Gorbachev was feted in US media). This was one successful maneuver in a long war of such maneuvers.

We're lucky that communism and centrally-planned economies are such a bad idea. If the Soviet Union hadn't been beaten by economics, it certainly wouldn't have been beaten at espionage or force of arms. Bezmenov deserves his bragging rights.

Update: It's also interesting to note that we are just now discovering (along with the Russian citizens themselves) the amazing degree to which the whole idea of the Soviet Union as a "superpower" was a joke. Even at its height, true Soviet GDP was about a tenth of the United States GDP. The US could overwhelm them by spending 5% of GDP on its military. Only by careful lies, deceptions and playing off of US military planners perfectly willing to overestimate their strength were they ever able to play the "superpower" card.

Update II: The movie Man on a String went by this weekend on TCM. It stars Ernest Borgnine as a Russian-born Hollywood producer who is wooed by a Communist agent into spying for them (in return for getting his father out of Russia), caught by the US and turned into a counter spy against the Soviets. The movie is based on the real-life story of Borris Morros, who was caught spying for Russia and turned into a double agent. If you've listened to Bezmenov, the story of the movie makes lots of sense. Borris Morros was just the sort of person that Bezmenov claims they were instructed to co-opt: influential, but lightweight. Useful Idiots, in Bezmenov's parlance. People who would be slowly induced to do larger and larger things against their country until there was no turning back. I found a copy of Morros' book, My Ten Years as a Counter Spy on ABEBooks and ordered it. If any of it bears mention here, I'll update again.

Update III: The book came in and it was an interesting read. Parts of it play into this essay about historical revision of the Cold War. Morros was recruited in the oldest, simplest way: help us or we kill the family you have left in Russia. His story mostly fits the Bezmenov mold, but it's hard to say how many others there were like him. I've found a couple of others and they're mentioned in the essay at the link.

Update IV: Eric Raymond has more on this in his excellent post on Gramscian damage. He's a smart guy who knows what he's talking about.