According to this year’s National Intelligence Worldwide Threat Assessment and Senate testimony by top-ranked intelligence officials, Americans can expect Vladimir Putin’s Russia to continue its efforts to aggravate social, political and racial tensions in the United States and among its allies.
So, to best prepare for future Russian assaults, we should look to the past and study the mind-set of the Cold War K.G.B. — the intelligence service in which President Putin spent his formative years. The history of the brutal Soviet security services lays bare the roots of Russia’s current use of political arrests, subversion, disinformation, assassination, espionage and the weaponization of lies. None of those tactics is new to the Kremlin.
In fact, those tactics made Soviet Russia the world’s first “intelligence state,” and they also distinguished it from authoritarian states run by militaries. Today’s Russia has become even more of an intelligence state after Mr. Putin’s almost 20-year tenure as its strongman. In the U.S.S.R., the party ruled. It was only after the rise in the 1980s of Yuri Andropov — Mr. Putin’s role model and mentor — that the K.G.B. became the state’s most important institution. Then, a decade after the Soviet Union fell, Mr. Putin rose to power and recruited many of his former K.G.B. colleagues to help rebuild the state. The result is a regime with the policies and philosophy of a supercharged secret police service, a regime that relies on intelligence operations to deal with foreign policy challenges and maintain control at home.
