Кеңес және Ресей арнайы операциялары

Term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services

Active measures (активные мероприятия) is a term used to describe political warfare conducted by the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. The term, which dates back to the 1920s, includes operations such as espionage, propaganda, sabotage and assassination, based on foreign policy objectives of the Soviet and Russian governments. Active measures have continued to be used by the administration of Vladimir Putin.

Active measures were conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services and secret police organizations (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, and FSB) to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing revised assessments of it. Active measures range "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". Beginning in the 1920s, they were used both abroad and domestically.</blockquote>

According to the Mitrokhin Archives, active measures was taught in the Andropov Institute of the KGB situated at Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) headquarters in Yasenevo District of Moscow. The head of the "active measures department" was Yuri Modin, former controller of the Cambridge Five spy ring.

Soviet secret services have been described as "the primary instructors of guerrillas worldwide". According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, KGB General Aleksandr Sakharovsky once said: "In today's world, when nuclear arms have made military force obsolete, terrorism should become our main weapon." He also claimed that "Airplane hijacking is my own invention". In 1969 alone, 82 planes were hijacked worldwide by the KGB financed PLO. Some of the active measures were undertaken by the Soviet secret services against their own governments or communist rulers. Russian historians Anton Antonov Ovseenko and Edvard Radzinsky suggested that Joseph Stalin was killed by associates of NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, based on the interviews of a former Stalin bodyguard and circumstantial evidence. According to Yevgenia Albats' allegations, Chief of the KGB Vladimir Semichastny was among the plotters against Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, which led to the latter's downfall. KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov reportedly struggled for power with Leonid Brezhnev. The Soviet coup attempt of 1991 against Mikhail Gorbachev was organized by KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov and other hardliners. and Georgia. During the 2006 Georgian Russian espionage controversy, several Russian GRU case officers were accused by Georgian authorities of preparations to commit sabotage and terrorist acts.

The highest ranking Soviet Bloc intelligence defector, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa claimed to have had a conversation with Nicolae Ceaușescu, who told him about "ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill": László Rajk and Imre Nagy from Hungary; Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej from Romania; Rudolf Slánský and Jan Masaryk from Czechoslovakia; the Shah of Iran; Muhammad Zia ul Haq, President of Pakistan; Palmiro Togliatti from Italy; John F. Kennedy; and Mao Zedong. Pacepa also discussed a KGB plot to kill Mao Zedong with the help of Lin Biao organized by the Soviet intelligence agencies and alleged that "among the leaders of Moscow's satellite intelligence services there was unanimous agreement that the KGB had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy." The second President of Afghanistan, Hafizullah Amin, was killed by the KGB's Alpha Group in Operation Storm 333 before the full scale Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Presidents of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria organized by Chechen separatists, including Dzhokhar Dudaev, Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, Aslan Maskhadov, and Abdul Khalim Saidullaev, were killed by the FSB and affiliated forces. Other widely publicized cases are murders of Russian communist Leon Trotsky and Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov by NKVD. There were also allegations that the KGB was behind the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in 1981. The Italian Mitrokhin Commission, headed by senator Paolo Guzzanti (Forza Italia), worked on the Mitrokhin Archives from 2003 to March 2006. The Mitrokhin Commission received criticism during and after its existence. It was closed in March 2006 without any proof brought to its various controversial allegations, including the claim that Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy and former President of the European Commission, was the "KGB's man in Europe." One of Guzzanti's informers, Mario Scaramella, was arrested for defamation and arms trading at the end of 2006.

In "Operation Trust" (1921–1926), the State Political Directorate (OGPU) set up a fake anti Bolshevik underground organization, "Monarchist Union of Central Russia". The main success of this operation was luring Boris Savinkov and Sidney Reilly into the Soviet Union, where they were arrested and executed.

The Islamic anti Soviet Basmachi movement in Central Asia posed an early threat to the Bolshevik movement. The movement's roots lay in the anti conscription violence of 1916 that erupted when the Russian Empire began to draft Muslims for army service in World War I. In the months following the October Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in many parts of the Russian Empire and the Russian Civil War began. Turkestani Muslim political movements attempted to form an autonomous government in the city of Kokand, in the Fergana Valley. The Bolsheviks launched an assault on Kokand in February 1918 and carried out a general massacre of up to 25,000 people. The massacre rallied support to the Basmachi who waged a guerrilla and conventional war that seized control of large parts of the Fergana Valley and much of Turkestan. The group's notable leaders were Enver Pasha and, later, Ibrahim Bek. Soviet Russia responded by deploying special Soviet military detachments masqueraded as Basmachi forces and received support from British and Turkish intelligence services. The operations of these detachments facilitated the collapse of the Basmachi movement and the assassination of Pasha.

Following World War II, various partisan organizations in the Baltic states, Poland and Western Ukraine fought for independence of their countries, which were under Soviet occupation, against Soviet forces. Many NKVD agents were sent to join and penetrate the independence movements. Puppet rebel forces were also created by the NKVD and permitted to attack local Soviet authorities to gain credibility and exfiltrate senior NKVD agents to the West.

According to Stanislav Lunev, GRU alone spent more than $1 billion for the peace movements against the Vietnam War, which was a "hugely successful campaign and well worth the cost". However, the KGB's widespread attempts at influence in the United States, Switzerland, and Denmark targeting the peace movement were known, and the World Peace Council was categorized as a communist front organization by the CIA. and that they used the Soviet Peace Committee to organize and finance anti American demonstrations in western Europe. The Soviet Union first deployed the RSD 10 Pioneer (called SS 20 Saber in the West) in its European territories in March 1976, a mobile, concealable intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) with a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) containing three nuclear 150 kiloton warheads. The SS 20's range of was great enough to reach Western Europe from well within Soviet territory; the range was just below the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II (SALT II) Treaty minimum range for an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Tretyakov made further stated that "[t]he KGB was responsible for creating the entire nuclear winter story to stop the Pershing II missiles,"

According to intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, the KGB in Britain was unable to infiltrate major figures in the CND, and the Soviets relied on influencing "less influential contacts" which were more receptive to the Moscow line. Andrew wrote that MI5 "found no evidence that KGB funding to the British peace movement went beyond occasional payment of fares and expenses to individuals."

Active measures have continued in the post Soviet Russian Federation and are in many ways based on Cold War schematics. Russia's alleged disinformation campaign, its involvement in the UK's withdrawal from the EU, interference in the 2016 United States presidential election, and its alleged support of far left and far right movements in the West, has been compared to the Soviet Union's active measures in that it aims to "disrupt and discredit Western democracies". In testimony before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the US policy response to Russian interference in the 2016 elections, Victoria Nuland, former US Ambassador to NATO, referred to herself as "a regular target of Russian active measures." The introduction of the Internet, specifically social media offered new opportunities for active measures. The Kremlin affiliated Internet Research Agency, also referred to as the Information Warfare Branch, was established in 2013. This agency is devoted to spreading disinformation through the Internet, the most well known and prominent operation being its part in the interference in the 2016 US presidential election. According to the House Intelligence Committee, by 2018, organic content created by the Russian IRA reached at least 126 million US Facebook users, while its politically divisive ads reached 11.4 million US Facebook users. Tweets by the IRA reached approximately 288 million American users. According to committee chair Adam Schiff, "[The Russian] social media campaign was designed to further a broader Kremlin objective: sowing discord in the U. S. by inflaming passions on a range of divisive issues. The Russians did so by weaving together fake accounts, pages, and communities to push politicized content and videos, and to mobilize real Americans to sign online petitions and join rallies and protests."