Moscow’s Ghost in the Machine

How Soviet Subversion Became the Blueprint for Today’s Culture Wars

There was a time when the Soviet Union genuinely believed it could win the world not through conquest, but through corruption—moral, cultural, and institutional. Its leaders may have worn the garb of revolution, but their genius lay not in building paradise, but in ruining others’ hope of it. They learned, with an almost surgical precision, how to find the stress fractures in Western societies and pry them apart. And when the Berlin Wall fell, we thought that meant they had failed. In truth, the men who built the wall simply walked through the rubble, swapped uniforms, and continued their work. The KGB became the FSB. The ideology of Marx was discarded, but the apparatus remained, now weaponised in service not of utopia, but of resentment. The poison had outlived the serpent.

That poison—what the Soviets called active measures—took many forms. In the early 20th century, the Comintern funded front groups across the democratic world, under the guise of peace and solidarity. By the Cold War’s height, Department A of the KGB was seeding forged documents, infiltrating Western movements, and promoting conspiracy theories like Operation INFEKTION, which falsely claimed the CIA had engineered HIV. Soviet involvement in Africa was no more idealistic: Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia—each became pawns in a chess game dressed in liberationist language but played for strategic gain. Even the peace movements in Europe were not spared. While many of these movements—including groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament—remained formally independent and often resisted overt Soviet control, the East German Stasi and Soviet-linked organisations such as the World Peace Council are known to have funnelled support and messaging into Western activist networks, blurring the line between organic protest and Cold War strategy.

These were not acts of belief, but of calculation. The Soviet Union had realised that liberal democracies were most vulnerable not to tanks or threats, but to doubt. If you could erode trust—between citizen and government, between races, between neighbours—the institutions would rot from within. And when the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world celebrated. But the rot remained. Former KGB officer Vladimir Putin declared the collapse the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the century. He did not mean that communism had failed. He meant that Russia had lost its empire. And empires, in their hunger, always find new weapons.

The modern Kremlin does not demand that Westerners believe in Moscow. It merely wants them to believe in nothing at all. This is the genius of nihilistic subversion: its goal is not to convince, but to confuse; not to persuade, but to paralyse. And in the twenty-first century, with the rise of social media, the field has expanded beyond measure. Troll farms based in St. Petersburg posed as activists on both sides of contentious debates, including those surrounding the #BlackLivesMatter protests, stoking anger in black and white Americans alike.[4] Facebook, under congressional scrutiny, confirmed that Russian disinformation had reached over 120 million people before the 2016 election.[5] Vaccine conspiracies, anti-Israel propaganda, radical environmentalism—all became instruments of chaos in a symphony conducted from abroad.

One tragedy in particular reveals the velocity of this new warfare. George Floyd’s killer convicted. Yet prosecutors presented no evidence of racial motive, and investigators found no pattern of racist behaviour. Nevertheless, within hours, an entire civilisation was put in the dock. #AbolishThePolice trended alongside #BlueLivesMatter. While direct evidence of Russian troll farms orchestrating both hashtags simultaneously remains inconclusive, there is well-established documentation that they sought to promote both pro- and anti-police narratives in order to intensify social division. Statues fell in Bristol. British schoolchildren were handed worksheets about their unconscious sins. Corporations began to mouth slogans in place of values. Amid the genuine grief, a new creed took root: the West was not merely flawed, but evil.

This creed bore fruit not just on the left, but on the right. In what can only be described as a mirror-image mutation, the so-called “woke right” emerged with uncanny speed, mimicking every tactic it claimed to despise: reified identity, ideological litmus tests, digital mobbings. It was not a rejection of leftist methods but a redistribution of them. And like their left-wing counterparts, the new reactionaries found themselves strangely drawn to old Marxist ideas—stripped of economics, but rich in resentment. They praised Horkheimer, echoed Marx’s critiques of alienation, and denounced liberal institutions as agents of cultural decay. In truth, they did not so much oppose the woke as envy them.

These movements, left and right, flourish not because they are wise, but because they are visible. Algorithms reward outrage; trolls feed the machine. As ethno-nationalist accounts explode across X, ordinary people begin to assume such views are common—and then adjust themselves to reflect the apparent norm. Thus propaganda becomes fashion, and fashion becomes fate. An illusion, repeated often enough, becomes reality. Consider, for example, the two accounts below, paying particular attention to their high number of followers and the short amount of time they have acquired them in:

This is not to deny that grievances exist. Grooming gang scandals, Islamist attacks, academic fraud—these are not figments. But the proper response to institutional cowardice is reform, not fire. The liberal tradition—imperfect, patient, often frustrating—is the only one in human history that has proven capable of reforming itself without bloodshed. The radicals forget this. Or perhaps they never knew.

As Orwell warned, tyranny begins with the erasure of memory. If we forget what the West has given us—the abolition of slavery, the codification of universal rights, the elevation of the individual over the tribe—we will come to believe that civilisation itself is a lie. And if we believe that, we will tear it down, expecting something better to rise from the rubble. Nothing will.

The revolution now before us wears many masks: CRT black, ethno-nationalist white, eco-red, conspiracist grey. But its essence is the same. It does not build. It devours. And if we fail to name the architect of this campaign—if we fail to understand that much of what now poses as rebellion is in fact the fulfilment of an enemy’s plan—we will lose far more than an argument. We will lose the very idea that the future might be better than the past.

The real revolution was engineered. And the engineer has a name.