“ACTIVE MEASURES”: THE SOVIET POLITICAL WARFARE IN THE LAST DECADE OF THE COLD WAR

Abstract

This work is intended to offer a detailed study of one of the numerous offensive approaches employed by the Soviet Union and the intelligence services during the last decade of the Cold War. Starting from the analysis of the concept of political warfare and what "active measures" means in the panorama of international relations, the thesis will examine a specific case of disinformation campaign that occurred in the early 1980s concerning a secret operation, codenamed “Operation Denver”, carried by the secret services of Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, KGB, with the direct support of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Stasi, and the Komitet za dăržavna sigurnost, KDS. From the numerous testimonies, from the previously inaccessible archival documents, and thanks to recent scientific studies in this regard, this work will subsequently focus on the analysis of the relationship between the numerous state and police intelligence services of the Soviet Bloc involved in this type of " active measures”, and how they spread internationally, what was their real purpose and the results achieved by these operations in the delicate context of the last decade of the Cold War.