Gorbachev’s Gaslighting – Hoodwinking Western Media

“The only difference between Gorbachev and Stalin is Stalin is dead.” – Jeanne Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations remarks to Berkeley protesters. 

 “In World War II, 405,399 Americans died because Neville Chamberlain fantasized that Hitler was a friend. We must not repeat such a mistake.” – Disinformation by Ion Mihai Pacepa, 2013. Communist defectors like Bulgarian Secret Police Lt. General Pacepa (the highest-ranking member of the Communist Party to ever defect to the United States) and every person who has actually lived under communism are constantly amazed at how easily, in some cases, the “West” (the U.S. State Department and main stream media) are hoodwinked or in many cases are consciously complicit with communist subterfuge.

            Gorbachev was given the Nobel Peace Prize for his “democratic peace efforts.” Well, they gave one to Obama too, who, more than any other president of the United States, incited racial turmoil.  So, what’s a “Peace Prize” from the Nobel Foundation worth these days? For an answer to that question read Pacepa’s explanation on how the Communists define glasnost:

“You probably think Mikhail Gorbachev invented the concept of glasnost to describe his effort to lead the Soviet Union “out of its totalitarian state and toward democracy, to freedom, to openness.” If so, you are not alone. All of the media and most of the “experts,” even in Western defense establishments, believe that too – as does the committee that awarded Gorbachev the Noble Peace Prize. Even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica defines glasnost as “Soviet policy of open discussion of political and social issues. It was instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s and began the democratization of the Soviet Union.” Merriam-Webster agrees. And the American Heritage Dictionary defines glasnost as “an official policy of the former Soviet government emphasizing candor with regard to discussion of social problems and shortcomings.”

            But in fact, glasnost is an old Russian term for polishing the ruler’s image. Originally it meant, literally, publicizing, i.e., self-promotion. Since the sixteenth century’s Ivan the Terrible, the first ruler to become Tsar of All the Russias, all of that country’s leaders have used glasnost to promote themselves inside and outside the country.

            In the mid-1930s – half a century before Gorbachev’s glasnost – the official Soviet encyclopedia defined glasnost as a spin on news released to the public – meaning “the quality of being made available for public discussion or manipulation.”

            Thus, back in the days when I was still a member of the KGB community, glasnost was regarded as a tool of the black art of dezinformatsiya, and it was used to sanctify the country’s leader. For communists, only the leader counted. They used glasnost to sanctify their own leaders, and to induce hordes of Western leftists to fall for this scam.

            Glasnost is one of the most secret secrets of the Kremlin, and certainly one of the main reasons for still keeping the KGB’s foreign intelligence archives hermetically sealed. The Cold War is over, but the Kremlin’s glasnost operations seem to be still en vogue. In August 1999, only days after Vladimir Putin was appointed Russia’s prime minister, the KGB’s dezinformatsiya machinery, capitalizing on the fact that he had spent many years in Germany, started portraying him as a Europeanized leader. The fawning stories neglected to mention that he had been assigned to East Germany, a Soviet satellite at the time. Putin spent his “europeanizing” years stationed at the East German Stasi (intelligence) headquarters. The local Soviet-German House of Friendship – headed by Putin for six years had been in fact a KGB front, and that the undercover KGB officers running it had simply worked out of operational offices at the Leipzig and Dresden Stasi headquarters. Yet, even today, the Kremlin still reverentially implies that Putin’s experience in Germany was similar to that of Peter the Great, allowing him to absorb the best of European culture.

            At the end of the 2001 summit meeting held in Slovenia, President George W. Bush said: “I looked the man [Putin] in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.” Unfortunately, even President Bush was deceived by glasnost. Putin consolidated Russia into an intelligence dictatorship, not a democracy. By 2003, more than six thousand former officers of the KGB, who had framed millions as Zionist spies and shot them, were running Russia’s federal and local governments. Nearly half of all top governmental positions were held by former officers of the KGB. It was like democratizing Nazi Germany with Gestapo officers at its helm.

            “Let the gullible fools believe you want to perfume your communism with a dab of Western democracy, and they will clothe you in gold.” Yuri Andropov told me when he gave me the glasnost plan to make Ceausescu popular to the West. Ceausescu began by renaming the Supreme Soviet as “Parliament,” then staged a simulated economic decentralization, instituted dual candidates for local elections, and announced a campaign against corruption and drunkenness.

            The truth is, the Western media are quite easily manipulated, for they often craft their stories from press releases and tend, on the whole, to be indiscriminate about the nature and reliability of their sources. Almost no one stepped up to check the facts and contradict us.

            In 1982, Yuri Andropov, the father of the modern Soviet dezinformatsiya era, became ruler of the Soviet Union and glasnost became a foreign policy as well. Once settled into the Kremlin, the former KGB chairman hastened to introduce himself to the West as a “moderate” communist and a sensitive, warm, Western-oriented man who allegedly enjoyed an occasional drink of Scotch, liked to read English novels, and loved listening to Beethoven and American jazz. In reality, Andropov did not drink at all, for he was already terminally ill from a kidney disorder. The rest of the portrayal was equally false – as well I know, having been quite well acquainted with Andropov.

            In the brief span left to him, the cynical Andropov focused on projecting his new image and promoting his protégé’, a vigorous and callous young professional communist who was busy honing the same moderate image for himself – Mikhail Gorbachev.

            Gorbachev introduced himself to the West exactly as Andropov had: a cultured sophisticate and aficionado of Western opera and jazz. The Kremlin has always known that this picture holds particular charm for the gullible West.

            Gorbachev is thought to have been recruited by the KGB in the early 1950s while studying law at Moscow State University, where he spied on his foreign classmates. After graduating, Gorbachev interned at the Lubyanka, the state security headquarters, where he came under Andropov’s influence. Andropov got Gorbachev appointed to the Soviet Politburo, and one Gorbachev biographer describes him as Andropov’s “crown prince.”

            In December 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev went to Washington, I had the weird déjà vu feeling of watching a reenactment of Ceausescu’s last official visit to the United States in April 1978. I had prepared and directed that visit, and during its actual performance I accompanied Ceausescu. After formal ceremonies, official document signing, and the requisite exchange of fancy dinners, Gorbachev again followed in Ceausescu’s footsteps by turning on the charm for members of Congress and high-level American businessmen. Both groups have often made themselves useful to foreign despots. [see: Trading with the Enemy by Charles Higham, 1984.]

            At the beginning of 2001, Gorbachev was still publicly asserting that his glasnost (for which he had been given the Nobel Prize and named “Man of the Decade” by Time magazine) was “leading the country out of its totalitarian state and to democracy, to freedom, to openness.” In March 2002, however, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had prominently endorsed glasnost in the 1980s, cast the first doubt on Gorbachev. She conceded that “the role of Mikhail Gorbachev, who failed miserably in his declared objective of saving Communism and the Soviet Union, has been absurdly misunderstood.” 

            “Glasnost really means lying, and lying is the first step toward stealing and killing. As for “moderate,” every member of the KGB has hands drenched in blood.”  –  Disinformation by Ion Mihai Pacepa, 2013; Chapter 2 p. 12-21, Chapter 3, p. 22; 

Years ago, I was staying at a hotel near the front gate of Ft. Benning, Georgia. I was attending my youngest son’s graduation from Airborne training. I pinned my jump wings on his chest. That morning at the hotel’s breakfast I spied an attractive blonde in running attire and sat a discreet distance from her. I asked where she was from. She said she had immigrated to the U.S. from Latvia. I asked what she thought of Gorbachev and his glasnost. “You’ve heard of the Tiananmen Square massacre by the Chinese government?” she asked. “Yes, of course.” I replied. “When Gorbachev was being regaled as the “great democratic Russian leader” he ordered Russian tanks to run over demonstrators in front of the Latvian Parliament. I lost family and friends to Gorbachev’s “great democracy.”

            Gorbachev had the unfortunate timing of birth to occupy the leadership of the communist Soviet Union at a time when it was imploding under its own economic entropy. The CIA did not miss the fall of the Iron Curtain. They reported all the indicators well in advance of its actual demise. The directors of the CIA sanitized the information during the Presidents’ Daily Brief to enable the political-military-industrial complex to justify trillions in defense contracts. This included SDI the “Star Wars” program of which only one percent was spent on SDI (see The Great Deformation by David Stockman). The other 99 percent was spent vastly building up land and sea forces to enable the government to “export democracy” to countries who had no concept of nor any intention of adopting it.

            Ronald Reagan was the hero in the fall of Communism – certainly not Gorbachev. Reagan’s advisors tried convincing Reagan not to utter the phrase “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” A University of Arizona retired history professor told me he was teaching English to university students in Poland when Reagan made that speech. He saw the seismic shift in Eastern Europeans’ lives upon hearing Reagan challenging communism. It was that speech that gave them the hope – then the courage – to challenge the Soviet Union for their independence. Until then, no previous U.S. president had indicated any desire to support serious challenges to the Soviet Union’s oppression of Eastern Europe. Since those presidents were swallowing the glasnost swill to the point of saving the Soviet Union’s economic ass with immense shipments of wheat and exorbitant loans, there was no point in the oppressed challenging the status quo.

     Reagan changed that. He supported his rhetoric with funds to Solidarity and intelligence warning the independence leaders of impending raids by their communist government agents.

            Today, on the day of his death, Western media continues – every hour on the hour -to idolize and promote the façade of Gorbachev’s “democracy” – almost as big a Lie as the COVID pandemic. More fake news.

See also:

• The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, 1997 by Stephane Courtois, Andrzej Paczkowski, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Magolin. All French recanted communists who documented the truth of communism to prevent a communist candidate from becoming president of France. 
• How Democracies Perish by Jean-Francois Revel, 1983
• Trading with the Enemy: An Expose’ of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949 by Charles Higham, 1983