The Lubyanka building (former KGB headquarters) in Moscow, photo via Wikimedia CommonsBESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 796, April 15, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Soviet “deep state” survived the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It is back with a vengeance.
The Soviet Union was not vanquished by the West in the Cold War. It simply disintegrated in the late 1980s, the result of cumulative failures. A military defeat or a popular insurrection might have resulted in the elimination of its seventy-year-old totalitarian infrastructure and superstructure (the Soviet “deep state”). A mere collapse, however, had very different consequences.
Beyond the abandonment of the Eastern European …read more