Flying Saucer, Wikimedia Commons
This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire
By Emzari Gelashvili
How the Soviet Union, Russia, and China Have Systematically Subverted the United States — And What the Results Look Like
On May 1, 2026, in Chicago, Americans marched through the streets carrying portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. They raised red flags bearing the hammer and sickle. They distributed copies of the Communist Manifesto to children. American Communist Party members carried signs declaring “The Future Belongs to the Working Class” and openly called for revolution. They called it a protest for workers’ rights.
In the same week, New York City’s first openly Marxist mayor, Zohran Mamdani — who had spent years calling Donald Trump a fascist — sent his representatives to Washington to request federal financial assistance. The city he now governs faces tens of billions of dollars in budget shortfalls. The fiscal architecture of the greatest city in the world is collapsing under the weight of policies he championed.
None of this is coincidental. None of it is organic. And none of it is new.
I am a former intelligence officer of the Georgian Ministry of State Security. In 1996, I reviewed surviving KGB operational archives in Tbilisi — documents that Russian operatives had attempted to destroy before Georgian security forces could secure them. What I saw in those archives, and what I have watched unfold in the United States over the past three decades, are not two separate stories. They are one story, told in two languages.
I. The Blueprint: What the KGB Archives Actually Said
The first thing those archives made clear was a resource allocation figure that has never left me. Of all funds and manpower expended by Soviet intelligence outside Soviet borders, no more than 10 to 15 percent went to conventional espionage — recruiting sources, stealing military blueprints, the operations that dominate Western imagination. The remaining 85 percent went to what the documents called active measures: the systematic, patient, generational erosion of a target society from within.
This was not a peripheral program. It was the primary program. And its primary target, consuming the largest single share of that 85 percent, was the United States of America.
KGB officers who subsequently defected to Western intelligence services described four sequential stages of the active measures program: Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, and Normalization. The target areas were named with specificity: religion, education, media, culture, law enforcement, family structure, racial relations, and labor. The methods and intended results were documented in operational planning documents that I reviewed independently in Tbilisi — arriving at the same conclusions the defectors had reached from the opposite direction.
The Demoralization stage — requiring 15 to 20 years, the time needed to educate one generation — targeted six domains simultaneously. Education was to be stripped of mathematics, physics, and languages, replaced with social grievance curricula and ideological conditioning. Media was to be monopolized and redirected toward non-issues until citizens could no longer distinguish signal from noise. The family unit was to be deliberately weakened. Racial tensions were to be artificially amplified — the operational documents explicitly described weaponizing race to produce division and hatred. Law enforcement institutions were to be systematically discredited. Religion was to be politicized until genuine faith lost social authority.
Of all funds expended outside Soviet borders, 85 percent went to active measures — the systematic, generational erosion of a target society from within. The primary target was the United States.
Destabilization would follow — not through armies but through the target society destabilizing itself. Crisis would be the short, violent culmination. Normalization — the installation of a new political order — would complete the sequence.
The Soviet Union dissolved on December 25, 1991. The program did not. Russia’s security services — the FSB, SVR, and GRU — inherited running operations, established networks, and ideological infrastructure already embedded inside American universities, media organizations, and civil society. They did not rebuild. They continued.
II. Russia vs. China: Two Approaches, One Objective
To understand the Russia-China alignment of today, one must understand its origin: the Soviet Union was not merely Russia’s predecessor. It was the architect and primary instructor of the global subversive apparatus that both Moscow and Beijing now operate.
Russia operates as a declining power with urgency. Its methods are often loud, disruptive, and focused on immediate polarization: disinformation campaigns, amplification of political extremes, election interference, and proxy conflicts. Russia’s goal is to generate chaos now — to fracture American society along existing fault lines and accelerate institutional collapse.
China, by contrast, plays a slower, deeper, and more patient game. China’s Ministry of State Security was built directly on the KGB model in the 1950s — with Soviet advisors, Soviet training manuals, and Soviet organizational structures. Their strategy is a potent synthesis of ancient wisdom and revolutionary subversion: Sun Tzu plus Lenin equals Mao’s blueprint. Sun Tzu argued 2,500 years ago that the highest form of warfare is to destroy something valuable inside your enemy’s country before your enemy perceives you as a threat. The KGB absorbed this as doctrine. It taught that doctrine to its Chinese partners. Today the MSS executes it with greater patience, economic sophistication, and technological integration than its instructors ever achieved.
The student has surpassed the teacher in methodology, if not yet in results. Where Russia’s operations generate immediate noise, China’s reshape the operating environment over decades — silently, structurally, and with the resources of the world’s second-largest economy behind them.
III. The Domestic Amplifier: Cloward-Piven and the 1966 Convergence
In the spring of 1966 — precisely the period when Soviet active measures departments were, by their own operational timelines, systematically cultivating Western academic institutions — two Columbia University professors published an essay that would become one of the most consequential documents in American political history.
Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, husband and wife, members of the Democratic Socialists of America, published “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in The Nation magazine. It was not a policy proposal. It was, as David Horowitz subsequently characterized it, “a strategy for forcing political change through orchestrated crisis.”
Their argument was explicit: the American welfare system left millions of eligible recipients unclaimed. A mass enrollment drive could deliberately overload local and state welfare bureaucracies, triggering fiscal crises that would compel the federal government to replace fragmented assistance with a guaranteed annual income — a structural transformation of the American economic order. They treated the poor not as individuals deserving opportunity but as instruments of political leverage. By flooding welfare offices, activists could produce “bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments.”
The results were measurable. Between 1966 and 1975, welfare caseloads surged dramatically. In New York City, roughly one in seven residents relied on public assistance by the mid-1970s. In 1975, New York City went bankrupt. The strategy had a fifty-year track record before Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor.
Whether this convergence with Soviet active measures doctrine was coordinated or coincidental, the blueprint and the domestic amplifier were pointing in identical directions at the same moment in history. The KGB called for fiscal destabilization through amplified social crisis. Cloward and Piven called for fiscal destabilization through amplified welfare dependency. The outputs were identical. The intended beneficiary was the same restructuring of American political life.
The 2020 “defund the police” movement and the organized immigration caravans of recent years represent the contemporary evolution of the same destabilization mechanics — new vectors, same doctrine, consistent outputs.
IV. Russia’s Documented Operations
Russia’s post-Soviet subversive operations are documented in court records, congressional testimony, and FBI briefings — a public record that understates the full scope of activity, since only detected operations appear in public documents.
A Russian national operating under the direction of a Kremlin-connected official infiltrated the National Rifle Association and Republican political circles between 2015 and 2018, establishing private communication channels for Russian interests inside the institutional infrastructure of American conservatism. She pleaded guilty to violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 2018.
In 2012, the FBI delivered a direct briefing to a sitting member of Congress: Russian intelligence operatives were attempting to cultivate him as an agent of influence. He was never charged. The briefing itself speaks to how seriously the U.S. government assessed Moscow’s penetration of American political power.
Russia’s information operations have spent years amplifying political polarization inside American society — not to persuade Americans of any particular viewpoint, but to convince them that no viewpoint can be trusted, that institutions are corrupt beyond repair, and that national cohesion is a myth. The objective is not persuasion. It is exhaustion.
V. China’s Documented Penetration
If Russia’s operations are loud and fast, China’s are silent and generational. The documented cases represent only what has been publicly confirmed — the visible fraction of a far larger program.
Linda Sun rose from Director of Asian American Affairs to Deputy Chief of Staff under two New York governors. In September 2024, the Department of Justice indicted her on charges of acting as an undisclosed agent of the People’s Republic of China, money laundering, and visa fraud. The 64-page indictment alleged that she blocked Taiwanese diplomatic delegations from government events, drafted official gubernatorial proclamations favorable to Beijing, and shared internal government documents with PRC representatives. She and her husband received kickbacks financing a $3.6 million home, a Ferrari, and luxury goods. (EDNY Case 1:24-cr-00346.)
Senator Dianne Feinstein, then chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was briefed in 2013 that her personal driver — a man who had worked for her for approximately twenty years — had been identified as an asset of Chinese intelligence, reporting to the MSS through the San Francisco consulate. Twenty years. The personal driver of the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Eric Swalwell spent years on the House Intelligence Committee warning Americans about foreign election interference. In 2020, it was reported that a Chinese national operating on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security — Christine Fang — had infiltrated his 2014 congressional campaign, helped organize fundraising, and placed a staffer in his congressional office between 2011 and 2015. The FBI briefed Swalwell in 2015. The Chinese operation required no further action on Beijing’s part: in 2026, Swalwell withdrew from the California governor’s race following sexual assault allegations and announced he would leave Congress entirely.
In March 2026, a Stanford University student testified before Congress that the FBI had informed her she was being physically monitored on campus by agents of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese intelligence is now conducting physical surveillance of dissident students on American university campuses — openly enough that the FBI is aware of it, and it continues.
The Confucius Institutes, present on over 100 American university campuses, provided structured access to academic institutions. The Thousand Talents Program recruited American researchers — many with security clearances — to transfer technology to Chinese institutions, often without disclosure. These are not fringe operations. They are the systematic implementation of KGB doctrine, adapted and refined by the student for the 21st century.
VI. “No Limits”: The Convergence
In February 2022, days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping declared a partnership with “no limits” and “no forbidden zones.” Whether their parallel pressure on American institutions constitutes explicit operational coordination or two powers pursuing compatible agendas simultaneously, the cumulative effect is identical: sustained, compounding stress on American institutions at every level, from every direction, simultaneously.
When Russia’s war in Ukraine consumes American diplomatic bandwidth and depletes military industrial capacity, China operates with greater freedom. When China’s economic leverage constrains American policy options, Russia benefits from reduced American strategic attention. The two powers need not synchronize every operation. They need only pursue their respective agendas simultaneously — which they are doing.
VII. The Results: From Blueprint to Political Reality
The KGB blueprint called for the amplification of racial tensions to produce division and hatred. Examine American racial discourse over the past fifteen years — not as a problem being solved but as a wound being kept permanently open, institutionally funded, and politically amplified — and consider whether the result matches the prescription.
The blueprint called for the discrediting of law enforcement and security institutions. Senator Bernie Sanders called border enforcement “inhumane.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for the abolition of ICE. The Biden administration oversaw the entry of over 8 million unvetted migrants across the southern border between 2021 and 2024 — a population movement that Cloward-Piven mechanics anticipated as a fiscal and institutional destabilization vector. President Obama’s administration expanded welfare dependency to record levels. The blueprint anticipated these results.
The policy platforms of Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani — democratic socialism, Medicare for All, open borders, defunding of law enforcement — are not evaluated here as evidence of foreign agency. They are presented as a measurement: of how completely the demoralization stage has succeeded in producing a political class whose instincts align, with remarkable precision, with the intended outputs of a program documented in Moscow decades before most of them were born.
And then there is New York City, 2026. Zohran Mamdani — the first openly Marxist mayor of the city that Cloward and Piven targeted fifty years ago — governs a municipality facing tens of billions in budget shortfalls. He has turned to Donald Trump, whom he called a fascist, for federal financial rescue. The city went bankrupt in 1975 under the Cloward-Piven strategy. Under its first Marxist mayor, it is approaching fiscal crisis again. The strategy has a consistent track record.
New York City went bankrupt in 1975 under the Cloward-Piven strategy. In 2026, its first Marxist mayor faces the same fiscal collapse — and has turned to the president he called a fascist for rescue.
VIII. The Witness Who Left
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was born in Moscow and raised in Leningrad. His family fled the Soviet Union specifically to escape socialism — its surveillance, its suppression of individual initiative, its subordination of the person to the state. They came to the United States because it represented the opposite of what they had left.
In recent years, Brin publicly criticized California Governor Gavin Newsom’s economic policies, relocated to Nevada, moved significant business operations out of California, and formally registered as a Republican — departing the Democratic Party whose direction he found incompatible with the values that brought his family to America. His concern was direct: the system his family came to escape was becoming visible again in the country they had come to.
This is not the assessment of an intelligence analyst. It is the assessment of a man who knows what socialism looks like from the inside — who watched its mechanisms operate on his family — and who recognizes its patterns when he sees them developing in a new context. The co-founder of Google, born in the Soviet Union, formally leaving the party that campaigns on democratic socialism — because he knows, from primary experience, what those words mean in practice.
IX. What the Evidence Requires
The marchers in Chicago carrying portraits of Stalin and Mao are not foreign agents. They are not receiving operational direction from Moscow or Beijing. Most are sincere Americans acting on beliefs they hold genuinely — beliefs formed through educational institutions, media environments, and political frameworks shaped, over decades, by the active measures program documented in the archives I reviewed in Tbilisi.
This is the entire point of the methodology. The most effective subversion operation is one whose targets never know they are targets. When KGB defectors described the completion of the Demoralization stage, they were explicit: once the process is finished, those who have been demoralized cannot be reached by evidence. Their epistemological framework — the mechanism by which they process reality — has been altered. The infection has become part of the host.
Neither Russia nor China is omnipotent. Russia is a declining petrostate whose military failures in Ukraine have exposed serious structural weaknesses. China faces significant economic headwinds and a severe demographic crisis. Neither is invincible.
But the pattern of aligned pressure on American institutions — documented in KGB archives, in courtrooms, in congressional hearings, in the fiscal collapse of American cities, and in the streets of Chicago on May Day 2026 — is real, sophisticated, and ongoing. It does not require the marchers to know who wrote the blueprint. It only requires the blueprint to keep working.
In 1966, Cloward and Piven published their strategy in plain English in a national magazine. In the 1990s, KGB defectors delivered detailed debriefs to Western intelligence services describing the active measures program and its intended results. In 1996, I found the operational documents in a partially burned archive in Tbilisi that confirmed what the defectors had said. The evidence has not been hidden. It has been available, in public, for decades.
The decisive question for the United States is no longer whether the blueprint exists. It is whether America will recognize what it has produced — and demonstrate the strategic clarity, institutional resilience, and national unity required to secure its future — before the final stages complete themselves.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former Member of the Georgian Parliament (2008–2012) and former senior official in Georgia’s Ministry of Defense, Ministry of State Security, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he focused on countering Russian and Iranian intelligence operations. He publishes geopolitical and national security analysis at emzargelashvili.substack.com.
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