3D model pending
190 × 258
Case file · Britain, the United States, France, Poland · 1981–2026
The demoralisation of Western societies, Britain and the United States first, read through Yuri Bezmenov’s four stages by a man born in the Polish People’s Republic who has lived in Britain since 2003. It follows the laws, rules and movements that changed what a person may say, do and refuse, from martial law in Poland to the curfews in Paris in October 2026.
The road runs from 1981 to October 2026
Reader’s note · who writes this, and on what grid
This file reads Western societies, Britain and the United States first, through one model: Yuri Bezmenov’s four stages of ideological subversion. Its subject is a process, not one man’s life. Bezmenov said the first stage works through schools, universities, churches and the press, so the chart below sets his stages against the revolutions in American media, from network television to the phone in every pocket. I was born in the Polish People’s Republic, was a child under martial law, and have lived in Britain since 2003; my own dates run through the file as one thread, marked as mine. I write in October 2026, during the curfews in Paris. Each entry has a dated log with sources; the paragraphs around it are my reading of that log.
Yuri Bezmenov (1939–1993) studied Indian languages in Moscow and worked for the Soviet press agency Novosti in India, which he described as a cover for the KGB. He defected in New Delhi in 1970 and settled in Canada. In 1984 he set out a model of ideological subversion in an interview with G. Edward Griffin and in lectures, and said that in the United States the first stage was already complete, after about 25 years. The model has four stages, each with a duration:
Limits. Bezmenov gave testimony, not research. Historians of Soviet disinformation, for example Thomas Rid in Active Measures (2020), document such operations from archives; Bezmenov’s timetable is his own and has not been tested that way. The dates in this file are my mapping onto his grid, not his predictions, and the chart below shows where they fit and where they do not. Nothing here claims that one agency planned the events of 2003–2026.
Medium, from launch to nowBefore the fileStages as this file dates themEnd of the stage as Bezmenov predicted it
Revolutions in media · USA
Network televisionThree networks · TV debate 1960
Cable news, talk radioFrom CNN, 1 June 1980
The webPublic from 6 Aug 1991
Social networksFrom MySpace, Aug 2003
The smartphone feedFrom the iPhone, Jun 2007
Short video by algorithmDouyin 2016, TikTok 2018
Generative AIChatGPT, 30 Nov 2022
Subversion · as this file dates it
Soviet UnionTo 26 Dec 1991
Bezmenov’s own datingThe United States, by 1984
1 · Demoralisation2003 to Oct 2017 · MySpace to #MeToo
2 · DestabilisationOct 2017 to Mar 2020
3 · Crisis23 Mar to 7 Jun 2020 · lockdown to the statues
4 · NormalisationJun 2020 to Sep 2026
Crisis in FranceFrom 18 Sep 2026
Each medium runs from its American launch to now, and none has replaced the ones before it: since 1980 a new one has arrived every 4 to 12 years. Bezmenov dated the first stage in the United States himself (Bezmenov 1984); the later dates are this file’s mapping onto his grid. Launch dates: US media.
Soviet film posters, 1927–1929
The Soviet state sold its revolution on paper. Nikolai Prusakov drew this poster for the Georgian film Pervyi kornet Streshnev (The First Cornet Streshnev) in 1928. My parents’ generation grew up under the same pictures. Scrolling takes it apart.
Cut-outs: N. Prusakov, 1928
1848–2026 · The books behind the file
The movements that changed Western societies refer back to these authors, from the Manifesto of 1848 to the decolonising university of the 2020s. Seven epochs, the last of them the witnesses; beside each, more books from the same years, coloured by school.
MarxistFeministLGBTQDecolonial and raceCulture and mediaCountercultureCriticsTestimony
Epoch I · 1848–1924
The class war, the vanguard party and the seizure of the state.
Marx · Lenin · Trotsky
The Communist Manifesto (1848, with Friedrich Engels) · Capital, volume 1 (1867)
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Capital grows from the unpaid labour of workers. A proletarian revolution will abolish private property and, in time, classes and the state.
What Is to Be Done? (1902) · Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) · The State and Revolution (1917)
Left to themselves, workers reach only trade-union demands; a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries must lead them. The old state is to be smashed and replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat. In power from 1917: the Cheka, the Red Terror, one-party rule.
Terrorism and Communism (1920) · The Permanent Revolution (1930) · The Revolution Betrayed (1936)
The revolution must spread from country to country or die. As commissar for war he defended the Red Terror and the militarisation of labour; in exile he blamed Stalin’s bureaucracy for betraying the revolution. Killed on Stalin’s orders in Mexico in 1940.
Epoch II · 1926–1961
Power held through culture: Gramsci’s hegemony, Münzenberg’s front organisations, Bernays’s engineered consent, Beauvoir’s Other, Fanon’s colonised mind.
Münzenberg · Gramsci · Bernays · Beauvoir · Fanon
Workers International Relief (1921) · Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (1924) · The Brown Book of the Reichstag Fire and Hitler Terror (1933)
The Comintern’s propagandist in the West. From Berlin, and from 1933 in Paris, he ran illustrated papers, film companies and a chain of front organisations, from the League Against Imperialism (Brussels, 1927) to the World Committee Against War and Fascism (1932), which drew in writers and scientists who were not communists. He called them Innocents’ Clubs
. He broke with Stalin, was expelled from the German party in 1939, and was found dead in a wood near Saint-Marcellin in October 1940.
Prison Notebooks (written 1929–1935, published from 1948)
A ruling class holds power by consent as much as by force: cultural hegemony, the common sense taught by schools, churches and newspapers. In the West revolutionaries must first win a war of position
inside culture and its institutions.
Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) · Propaganda (1928) · “The Engineering of Consent” (1947)
Freud’s nephew, and the propagandist on the other side. Propaganda opens: The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
On Easter Sunday, 31 March 1929, he had young women walk down Fifth Avenue smoking what he called torches of freedom, for the American Tobacco Company. In his memoirs he wrote that Goebbels had used Crystallizing Public Opinion.
The Second Sex (1949) · The Mandarins (1954)
One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Man is taken as the norm and woman is defined as the Other; femininity is taught, not given. In 1971 she wrote the Manifesto of the 343, in which French women declared that they had had illegal abortions.
Black Skin, White Masks (1952) · The Wretched of the Earth (1961, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre)
A psychiatrist from Martinique who worked in French Algeria and joined the FLN, its independence movement. Colonial rule enters the mind of the colonised, and decolonization is always a violent phenomenon
. He is read today in decolonial and critical race studies.
Epoch III · 1945–1975
Hiroshima in 1945, the Soviet bomb in 1949, thirteen days over Cuba in October 1962, Vietnam until 1975. The generation that won the war raised its children under the bomb; the children answered with flowers.
Kennedy · Ginsberg · Hayden
Why England Slept (1940) · Profiles in Courage (1956) · Inaugural address (1961)
The first president born in the twentieth century. On 20 January 1961 he said the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace
. In October 1962 he faced Khrushchev over Soviet missiles in Cuba for thirteen days. When he was shot in Dallas on 22 November 1963 there were some 16,000 American advisers in Vietnam.
Howl and Other Poems (1956) · “How to Make a March/Spectacle” (1965)
The Beat poet whose Howl was seized as obscene and cleared by a San Francisco judge in 1957. In 1965 he proposed that marchers against the Vietnam War bring masses of flowers to hand to police, press, politicians and onlookers: the birth of flower power. In January 1967 he chanted at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, the prelude to the Summer of Love.
The Port Huron Statement (1962, Students for a Democratic Society)
Its main author, at 22. The statement begins with a generation raised in modest comfort, housed in universities, uneasy about the world it is to inherit, and asks for participatory democracy. Hayden went on to organise in Newark, to the Chicago Seven trial of 1969–70 (the convictions were overturned), to marriage with Jane Fonda, and to eighteen years in the California legislature.
The Depression and the war. They built the post-war institutions, and the bomb.
Korea, McCarthy and the Cold War; schoolchildren taught to duck and cover.
The draft, Vietnam, flower power and 1968. By the 1990s they ran the universities, the newsrooms and the parties.
Punk, Thatcher and Reagan, the end of the Cold War, the first home computers.
Taught by Boomers at school and university; 9/11, the crash of 2008, social media.
The smartphone in adolescence: Epoch VI.
Epoch IV · 1962–1984
From the factory to the campus: students, minorities and the theory of power. From Beijing, Cairo and Tehran: the Little Red Book and the revolt against the West.
Marcuse · Hall · Foucault · Derrida · Deleuze · Mao · Qutb · Al-e Ahmad · Shariati · Bezmenov
Eros and Civilization (1955) · One-Dimensional Man (1964) · Repressive Tolerance (1965)
Consumer society absorbs the working class, so the revolutionary subject moves to students, minorities and outsiders. Liberating tolerance
means intolerance towards the Right. A Frankfurt School exile, he became a teacher of the 1968 New Left.
“Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1973) · Policing the Crisis (1978, with Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts)
Gramsci brought to Birmingham: culture is where consent is won and lost. A television message is encoded by those who make it and decoded by viewers who may read it against the grain. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, he ran the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from 1968 to 1979 and in January 1979 coined the word Thatcherism.
History of Madness (1961) · Discipline and Punish (1975) · The History of Sexuality, volume 1 (1976)
Power works through knowledge: psychiatry, medicine and criminology define the normal, and prisons, clinics and schools observe, measure and correct. The panopticon trains people to watch themselves.
Of Grammatology (1967) · Writing and Difference (1967) · Specters of Marx (1993)
Deconstruction: a text has no fixed meaning outside language. Western thought ranks paired opposites, speech over writing, presence over absence, and deconstruction overturns the ranking.
Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both with Félix Guattari · Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990)
Desire produces rather than lacks; networks without a centre, the rhizome, against the hierarchy of the tree. In 1990 he described the coming societies of control: no walls, but codes, passwords and data that follow a person everywhere.
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the Little Red Book (1964) · “Problems of War and Strategy” (1938)
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
The Great Leap Forward of 1958–1962 ended in a famine in which, by Frank Dikötter’s count, at least 45 million people died early. From 1966 the Cultural Revolution set Red Guards on teachers and children on parents. In the West the Little Red Book became a campus accessory: in 1967 Bobby Seale and Huey Newton sold copies at Berkeley to buy guns for the Black Panthers, and in 1970 Sartre took over the Maoists’ banned paper in Paris to keep it on the streets.
The America I Have Seen (1951) · In the Shade of the Qur’an (from 1954) · Milestones (1964)
An Egyptian teacher who studied in the United States from 1948 to 1950, in Washington, Greeley and California, and came home repelled by its materialism and its morals. He ran the Muslim Brotherhood’s propaganda section. In Nasser’s prisons he wrote Milestones: every existing society, Muslim ones included, lives in jahiliyya, pagan ignorance, and a vanguard must end it by preaching and by jihad. He was hanged on 29 August 1966. Through Ayman al-Zawahiri his books reached al-Qaeda.
Gharbzadegi, “Westoxification” (1962)
A Tehran writer who joined the communist Tudeh party after the war and left it in 1948 over its loyalty to Moscow. His pamphlet took a word from the philosopher Ahmad Fardid and diagnosed Iran with a disease caught from the West: machines, imports and imitation in place of its own crafts and faith. Khomeini took up the message; “neither East nor West” became a slogan of the 1979 revolution.
Lectures at the Hosseiniyeh Ershad, Tehran (to 1972) · Red Shi’ism · Marxism and Other Western Fallacies
A doctorate in Paris in 1964; work with the Algerian FLN; an anthology of Fanon translated into Persian; an arrest at a demonstration for Patrice Lumumba. Back in Tehran he preached a revolutionary “red Shi’ism” against the clergy’s “black” one, and made a slogan of the old saying every day is Ashura, every place is Karbala
. After eighteen months in solitary confinement he left for England in 1977 and died in Southampton on 18 June. He is called the ideologue of the Iranian revolution, and its Fanon.
Love Letter to America (1984, as Tomas Schuman) · interview with G. Edward Griffin (1984)
Ideological subversion in four stages: demoralisation (15–20 years, one generation of students), destabilisation (2–5 years), crisis (as little as six weeks), normalisation. A demoralised person, he said, can no longer judge true information.
Epoch V · 1986–2026
Rudi Dutschke’s 1967 phrase for the long march through the institutions: gender, race and decolonisation become university subjects.
Butler · Arday
Gender Trouble (1990) · Bodies That Matter (1993) · Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024)
Gender is performative: it is made by repeated acts, not given by nature, and sex too is read through it. Gender Trouble became a founding text of queer theory and of gender studies in the university.
Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy (2018, edited with Heidi Safia Mirza)
In 2023 Cambridge made him professor of the sociology of education, the youngest Black professor it had appointed. His subject was race and the decolonising of universities.
In July and August 2026 a researcher and then the Telegraph, the Guardian and the Times alleged plagiarism in his PhD thesis and later work, and questioned claims about his life. He acknowledged mistakes in his early work, which he linked to his autism and to poor supervision. A panel at Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded the PhD, found honest and reasonable error
, not deliberate plagiarism. On 5 August Cambridge opened an investigation and he resigned, saying this should not be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me
. He died on 14 August 2026, aged 41. His family, and many politicians and unions, criticised the coverage as racist or disproportionate.
Epoch VI · 2007–2026
The iPhone went on sale in 2007; Instagram opened in 2010, the year the iPhone 4 put a camera on the front. A generation born from 1997 met adolescence through a screen, where a good opinion could be shown in a second and at no cost.
Twenge · Haidt · Bartholomew
Invisible Children’s film about a Ugandan warlord. Tens of millions watched it within a week. Joseph Kony is still at large.
sharesA bucket of ice water on camera for ALS: $41.8 million to the ALS Association between 29 July and 21 August.
challengesAn art director’s three words, posted an hour after the attack on Charlie Hebdo; more than 5 million uses by the Friday.
usesIn 24 hours 4.7 million people on Facebook used it, in some 12 million posts.
postsMillions of black squares on Instagram. Activists said they buried the protest information under #BlackLivesMatter.
squaresiGen (2017) · Generations (2023)
A psychologist at San Diego State University who works from large surveys of the young. Around 2012, the year smartphones passed half of Americans, teenage loneliness and depression began to climb together. She named those born from 1995 iGen: safer, more tolerant, less happy, and in her words unprepared for adulthood.
The Coddling of the American Mind (2018, with Greg Lukianoff) · The Anxious Generation (2024)
A social psychologist at New York University. With Lukianoff he argued that campuses taught the young to treat words as violence and themselves as fragile; then that a “great rewiring of childhood” between 2010 and 2015, from play to the phone, made a generation anxious. He asks for no smartphones before high school and no social media before 16.
“The awful rise of ‘virtue signalling’”, The Spectator, 18 April 2015 · The Welfare State We’re In (2004)
A British journalist who named the habit of saying the right thing in public to show oneself good, at no cost: hating the right newspaper, changing a profile picture, posting a hashtag. The Guardian credits him with coining the phrase; within a few years it was a standing insult in every argument online.
Epoch VII · 1918–2026 · The witnesses
The other shelf: books by the people the systems in this file sent to the camps. From 1929 to 1953 some 18 million passed through the Soviet camps. China’s laogai followed, and in 2014 a United Nations inquiry put North Korea’s political prisoners at 80,000 to 120,000.
Solzhenitsyn · Shalamov · Herling-Grudziński · Ginzburg · Wu
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) · The Gulag Archipelago (1973) · Harvard address (1978)
An artillery captain arrested at the front in February 1945 for criticising Stalin in letters to a friend: eight years in the camps, then exile. Khrushchev let Ivan Denisovich appear in Novy Mir in 1962. The Archipelago came out in Paris in December 1973; in February 1974 he was arrested and expelled. Nobel Prize, 1970. At Harvard in 1978 he told the West that the most striking thing about it was a decline in courage.
Kolyma Tales (written 1954–1973; full Russian edition London 1978; USSR 1987)
Arrested in 1929 for spreading Lenin’s testament, the letter that warned against Stalin: three years at Vishera. Arrested again in 1937 and sent to the gold mines of Kolyma until 1951. For him the camp was a wholly negative school that no one should ever see. He died in a Moscow psychiatric home in January 1982, five years before his stories could be printed in his own country.
A World Apart (1951, introduction by Bertrand Russell) · Inny świat
A Polish student caught by the NKVD in March 1940 near Grodno, trying to cross to Lithuania: sentenced as a spy, two years in the camps at Yertsevo and Kargopol near Arkhangelsk. Freed in 1942 to join Anders’ army, he fought at Monte Cassino. His book appeared in London in 1951; in communist Poland it circulated only underground.
Journey into the Whirlwind (1967)
A communist teacher and journalist in Kazan, arrested in February 1937: eighteen years of prison, Kolyma camps and exile. Her son, the future novelist Vasily Aksyonov, was four and went to a home for the children of enemies of the people. Her memoir could not be printed in the Soviet Union; it came out abroad in 1967.
Laogai: The Chinese Gulag (1992) · Bitter Winds (1994) · Troublemaker (1996)
A geology student in Beijing branded a counter-revolutionary rightist for what he had said in the Hundred Flowers campaign, arrested in 1960: nineteen years in twelve laogai camps, “reform through labour”. In the United States from 1985 he founded the Laogai Research Foundation and went back in secret to film the camps; arrested in 1995, he was sentenced to fifteen years and expelled.
1848–1979 · Events and texts
1848Book
Marx and Engels: The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
1871Event
72 days of revolutionary government in Paris. In the final week the Communards set fire to the Tuileries Palace and the Hôtel de Ville.
1902Book
The revolution is to be led by a party of professional revolutionaries, a vanguard acting on behalf of the workers.
1917Book
So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.
Six weeks after the October Revolution his government founded the Cheka.
1920Book
A defence of the Red Terror and of the militarisation of labour.
1929Notebooks
A ruling class holds power through cultural hegemony: the common sense taught by schools, churches and the press. Written in a fascist prison until 1935.
1944Book
Central planning needs coercion, and coercion promotes the people most willing to use it.
1949Paris
The future Pol Pot studies radio-electronics in Paris on a scholarship from 1949 to 1953 and joins the French Communist Party.
1965Essay
Tolerance should be withdrawn from movements of the Right and extended to movements of the Left.
1967Book
In the same year in West Germany, Rudi Dutschke proposes the long march through the institutions
.
1968Event
Students pull up the cobblestones for barricades and write Sous les pavés, la plage
on the walls.
1975Event
On 17 April the Khmer Rouge empty Phnom Penh. Money, markets, schools and religion are abolished. About 1.7 million people are dead by January 1979.
1975Book
Bentham’s panopticon as the model of modern power: the prisoner never knows when he is watched, so he watches himself.
1979Book
The postmodern defined as incredulity toward metanarratives
.
1932 · Gerasimovka, Urals · Pioneer hero No. 1
The story made him Pioneer hero No. 1. Schools, songs, statues and streets carried his name until the end of the Soviet Union. The lesson for every child was plain: loyalty to the state comes before loyalty to the family. He is often called a Komsomol member; at 13 he was of Pioneer age.
Historians later took the story apart. Yuri Druzhnikov’s Informer 001 argued that the OGPU, the secret police, shaped both the case and the myth. Catriona Kelly’s Comrade Pavlik (2005) found little documentary evidence that the boy denounced his father at all. The story was useful whether or not it happened.
In the PRL my parents’ generation kept the second language for home for this reason. In Britain in 2019 one complaint from a member of the public about Harry Miller’s posts on Twitter brought police to his workplace and a “non-crime hate incident” onto police records. In 2020 the High Court ruled that the police action unlawfully interfered with his freedom of expression.
Denounce the heinous crimes of the renegade and traitor Lin Biao!Workers, peasants and soldiers accuse Lin Biao two years after his death in 1971.
1948–1992 · USSR · China · East Germany
To the hero-pioneer Pavlik Morozov.
Denounce the heinous crimes of the renegade and traitor Lin Biao!The poster is printed beside the painting: a public accusation, with the crowd behind the accuser.
1937 · Paris International Exposition
A factory worker with a hammer and a collective-farm woman with a sickle, 24.5 metres of stainless steel, stood on top of the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition, facing the pavilion of Nazi Germany. The statue now stands at VDNKh in Moscow.
In the same two years, 1937 and 1938, the NKVD shot 681,692 people. The ideal and the record were made by the same state.
The 3D statue in the top-right corner turns through 360 degrees over the length of this page and comes forward in this section. Model: “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (Рабочий и колхозница)” by pkotelnikova5 on Sketchfab, CC BY.
1973–1981 · Kuwait, Tripoli, Islamabad, Tehran, Mecca, Kabul · Before the file
I was born after these years, and they shaped the Europe I moved to. The embargo of October 1973 quadrupled the price of oil and moved money from the importing countries to the Gulf states and Libya.
1979 was the turning year. Khomeini took power in Tehran in February, students seized the US embassy in November, gunmen seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca two weeks later, and the Soviet army entered Kabul at Christmas. According to historians such as Yaroslav Trofimov, the Saudi state answered the siege by tightening religious rules at home and spending more on religious missions abroad.
The Western left read the Iranian revolution as a liberation. Michel Foucault, whose portrait stands in the index above, reported from Iran for Corriere della Sera in autumn 1978 and wrote of a “political spirituality”. Iran’s communist Tudeh party backed Khomeini. In 1983 it was banned and its leaders arrested; in 1988 its members were among the main targets of the prison executions. The red–green alliance of the keffiyeh section below has this precedent.
In Afghanistan the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan armed the mujahideen against the Soviet army through the 1980s.
Routes of the hijackings, 1968–1977 · Natural Earth
1968–2000 · Algiers, Jordan, Lod, Munich, Vienna, Entebbe, Mogadishu, Rome · Before the file
The terror of the 1970s in Western Europe was mostly secular and left-wing. The Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades and the Japanese Red Army called themselves anti-imperialist and Marxist-Leninist. They trained in Palestinian camps, worked with the PFLP and drew on the Soviet bloc. According to KGB files copied by Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB recruited the PFLP’s operations chief Wadi Haddad in 1970, under the codename NATSIONALIST, and shipped weapons to his group, including a consignment handed over at Aden in May 1975.
Their handbook was Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla (1969): provoke the state into repression so that the population turns against it. West Germany answered with new laws and the Stammheim trial. The population did not turn.
Log
1981–1989 · Poland · Before the file
I was born in the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa in the 1980s, in the years of martial law and ration cards. The state followed Lenin’s model: one party, one line in every newspaper, a censorship office on Mysia Street in Warsaw, and the Służba Bezpieczeństwa keeping files on neighbours.
Children learned two languages early. One was spoken at home. The other was spoken at school and on the evening news, Dziennik Telewizyjny. Czesław Miłosz called the habit of living in both Ketman. Nobody had to explain the rules, and everyone knew who wrote them: the Party.
The second lesson of the PRL came in 1989. The system ended at a round table and a ballot box, without a shot. On 8 May 1989 an independent daily, Gazeta Wyborcza, went on sale.
1983–1992 · New Delhi, Moscow, East Berlin, Harare · Before the file and Stage 1
The KGB called the work active measures, aktivnye meropriyatiya. Bezmenov called it ideological subversion. The AIDS story is the best-documented case: Western historians call it Operation INFEKTION, and the Stasi file name was “Denver”.
Mosfilm lettering and Spasskaya Tower: illustration generated with ChatGPT (gpt-image) after the Mosfilm studio ident, cut into elements for this file
17.07.1983 · New Delhi
AIDS may invade India: mystery disease caused by US experiments
An anonymous letter. The paper had been set up under the auspices of the KGB resident in New Delhi.
30.10.1985 · Moscow
Panic in the West or What Is Hiding behind the Sensation Surrounding AIDS
Valentin Zapevalov quotes Patriot as a foreign source.
09.1986 · Harare
Jakob Segal, Lilli Segal, Ronald Dehmlow: HIV was made at Fort Detrick
47 pages, circulated on the eve of the Non-Aligned summit.
1987 · 25 languages
The story has run in over 200 periodicals
Boghardt, Studies in Intelligence, 2009.
19.03.1992 · Moscow
Primakov: the KGB ran the AIDS campaign
The head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, to students in Moscow.
The method had four steps: plant the story in a friendly paper abroad, quote that paper at home as a foreign source, add a scientist, and let others repeat it. The campaign was admitted only after the state that ran it had gone, and by then the story no longer needed the KGB.
Mbeki’s doubts were not a KGB operation. I put them here because they show what disbelief in medical evidence costs once it reaches a government.
1newspaper, New Delhi, 1983
80countries · 200+ periodicals · 25 languages, 1987
1948–2024 · Rome, Paris, London, Munich, Tehran, Santiago, Manila
Disinformation was not a Soviet monopoly. In the PRL people listened to Radio Free Europe’s Polish service through the state’s jamming; until 1971 the CIA paid for it. The agency that paid for honest news in Polish also paid for invented news in Tehran and Santiago.
My reading. Both blocs lied. The difference is in what came after. The US Congress investigated the CIA in 1975–76, and the CIA released its own history of the Iran coup in 2013. The KGB’s AIDS campaign was admitted only after the Soviet Union had ended, and most KGB foreign-intelligence files are still closed. The US military’s campaign in the Philippines was exposed by a news agency, not by a hearing.
Bezmenov · Stage 1 of 4
Bezmenov’s first stage takes 15 to 20 years, the time needed to educate one generation of students. In his description, schools, media and culture shift a society’s values until people can no longer weigh facts for themselves. In this file it runs from 2003, the year MySpace opened, to October 2017 and #MeToo: one generation of students, the first raised on social networks. I arrived in Britain the same year.
Predicted 15–20 years · In this file 14.8 years
Log
2003 · United Kingdom · Stage 1
I came to Britain in 2003, a year before Poland joined the European Union. I came for work, and for a country that looked, from Poland, like the opposite of the PRL: a parliament older than most states, newspapers nobody had to approve, and a common law that left people alone unless they did harm.
The first thing I noticed was the cameras. In 2002 researchers estimated 4.2 million CCTV cameras in Britain, about one for every fourteen people. Nobody minded. The cameras recorded, and only a person could watch the tape.
The surveillance I knew from home was of another kind. At the Berlin Wall at least 140 people were killed between 1961 and 1989. On 16 December 1981 a ZOMO riot-police platoon shot nine striking miners at the Wujek mine in Katowice. In 1989 the Stasi ran about 189,000 unofficial informers and held suspects at Hohenschönhausen, where interrogators used isolation and sleep deprivation. Those systems watched in order to punish. The British cameras of 2003 only recorded.
Log
2004–2016 · United Kingdom · Stage 1
In the PRL the rules had an author. In Britain the new rules arrived through HR departments, training modules, university codes and charity guidance. Nobody signed them, and nobody could be voted out over them.
I had no objection to two men marrying. My objection began when tolerance, which asks you to leave people alone, became affirmation, which asks you to say particular words. At work I recognised the second language from home.
The Soviet state had its own feminism, ordered from above: in 1926 Adolf Strakhov’s poster told the emancipated woman to build socialism. The reading lists in Britain came from Paris: Foucault on power, Derrida on texts, Lyotard on the end of grand narratives, Beauvoir’s one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman
. The method came from Gramsci: change the culture and the institutions, and politics follows.
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.
I knew this rule. In the PRL it was called the Party line. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann described its effect in 1974 as a spiral of silence: people who think they hold a minority view go quiet, the view looks smaller, and more people go quiet. In 2020 more than four in ten Americans reported self-censorship, about three times the share of the McCarthy era.
Courts and evidence later pulled part of it back:
Soviet film poster, 1926 · Oxford Dictionaries, 2016
In November 2016 Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as its word of the year: circumstances “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. Grigory Borisov and Nikolai Prusakov drew this poster in 1926 for the Soviet release of the Danish film Himmelskibet, Journey to Mars. Scrolling takes it apart.
Cut-outs: G. Borisov and N. Prusakov, 1926
Log
2010–2018 · Timothy Snyder, Yale · Stage 1
Bloodlands covers the ground I come from. Poland lies in the middle of Snyder’s map: the German death camps stood on its territory, the Soviet famine of 1932–33 struck its eastern neighbour, and the book counts the dead of both regimes in one record.
This file and Snyder’s 2018 book share a title. He describes a “politics of eternity” that replaces the future with a cycle of threats from the past, and he finds its sources in the Kremlin: Ilyin, the war in Ukraine from 2014, the internet campaigns of 2016. My entries follow the pressure from inside Western institutions. The two readings meet in his tenth lesson.
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.
Log
1992–2017 · New York, Oxford, Washington · Stage 1
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Three descriptions of one person: Arendt’s subject who cannot tell fact from fiction (1958), Bezmenov’s demoralised student who can “no longer judge true information” (1984), and Oxford’s public moved more by feeling than by fact (2016). What changed in 2016 was speed. The KGB needed four years to get its AIDS story into 80 countries. Content from the Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg reached about 126 million Americans on Facebook between 2015 and 2017.
Log
2013–2022 · London, Cambridge, Washington · Stage 1
Cambridge Analytica sold campaigns psychological profiles built from Facebook data. What was proven is the data collection: about 270,000 people agreed to a quiz, and the data of up to 87 million people, most of them the quiz-takers’ friends, was taken. I have seen no evidence that the profiles changed votes.
The lesson I take is the cost. A Soviet campaign needed agents, newspapers and years. A data firm needed a quiz app and a platform that until 2015 let apps collect data about their users’ friends.
Soviet film poster, 1929 · United Kingdom and United States, 2016
Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg drew this poster for Dziga Vertov’s film Man with a Movie Camera in 1929: a woman falling between skyscrapers, a ring of credits where her body should be. Scrolling takes it apart.
Cut-outs: G. and V. Stenberg, 1929
Log
2016–2019 · United Kingdom, United States · End of Stage 1
I watched 2016 from Britain: the referendum in June, Trump in November. Many of those who lost blamed Russian trolls and Cambridge Analytica. The record is narrower. Russia did interfere: the GRU stole the emails, the Internet Research Agency ran the accounts. The intelligence agencies made no assessment of what it did to the result, and Mueller did not establish coordination with the Trump campaign.
The Internet Research Agency aimed most at African Americans, the audience the KGB’s AIDS story had worked on thirty years before. Post-truth did not begin in 2016. This part of the file ends here, a year before Stage 2.
Bezmenov · Stage 2 of 4
Bezmenov’s second stage takes two to five years. The economy, the law, institutions and relations between people are unsettled. In this file it runs from the first #MeToo reports in October 2017 to the lockdown of March 2020.
Predicted 2–5 years · In this file 2.5 years
1918The Decline of the WestOswald SpenglerCultures grow, then harden into civilisations; the West, he argued, had entered its late age of money, mass cities and Caesarism. Spengler 1918
2006LondonistanMelanie PhillipsMulticulturalism and official tolerance, she argues, let London become a base for Islamist radicals. Phillips 2006
2022An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the WestKonstantin KisinA Russian-born British comedian defends Western freedoms and criticises the habit of running the West down from inside. Kisin 2022Main irregular routes into Europe, simplified · base map: Natural Earth
2015–2026 · European Union and United Kingdom
Six routes, drawn as you scroll. Frontex counted 1.83 million irregular crossings at the EU’s external borders in 2015 and about 178,000 in 2025. The map zooms to each route in turn and ends at Paris and the Channel.
2015–2016 · Turkey, Greece, the Balkans
From the Turkish coast to Lesbos and the other islands, then north through North Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and Austria to Germany. Germany registers 476,649 asylum applications in 2015. The EU–Turkey statement of 18 March 2016 closes most of the route.
2014–2025 · Libya, Tunisia, Italy
From Libya and Tunisia to Lampedusa and Sicily: 66,318 crossings in 2025. The International Organization for Migration counts more than 33,000 people dead or missing in the Mediterranean from 2014 to 2025.
17–18 May 2021 · Morocco and Spain
Spain’s enclave on the African coast is closed by a double fence. In two days in May 2021 about 8,000 people, 1,500 of them minors, entered Ceuta from Morocco, most of them swimming around the breakwater at Tarajal beach. Spain sent soldiers to the beach.
2020–2025 · West Africa, Canary Islands
From Senegal, Mauritania and Morocco to the Canary Islands, up to 1,500 km of open ocean. Frontex recorded 18% more arrivals on this route in 2024 than in 2023, while most other routes fell.
2021–2025 · Belarus and Poland
In 2021 Belarus flies migrants to Minsk and pushes them to the Polish border. Poland completes a 5.5-metre steel barrier along 186 km on 30 June 2022, and on 27 March 2025 suspends the right to claim asylum at that border.
2018–2026 · France and England
The small boats leave from the beaches between Dunkirk and Boulogne for Kent, with camps behind the dunes. 41,472 people crossed the Channel to England in 2025, and more than 200,000 since 2018.
October 2026 · Paris
Tents in the north of the city, people walking north towards the coast, police in the streets, and the curfew orders of this month. This is where the route of the file ends.
2015–2026 · European Union and United Kingdom
Wir schaffen das(We can do this).
I am a migrant myself. I moved to Britain in 2003, and Poland joined the European Union in May 2004. The routes on this map are a different process: arrivals that no state chose or counted in advance, organised by smugglers and, on the Belarus border, by a government.
Each route moves when another closes. The Aegean route of 2015 fell after the EU–Turkey statement of March 2016; Libya, the Atlantic and the Channel took the traffic. The International Organization for Migration counts more than 33,000 people dead or missing in the Mediterranean from 2014 to 2025.
Poland, the country I left, took in more than a million refugees from Ukraine in 2022 and at the same time built a wall on the Belarus border. Both decisions were the state choosing who enters.
* 2026 to 24 September: 18,565, provisional. Home Office figures as reported; more than 200,000 people since 2018.
Frontex detections at the EU’s external borders, rounded to the nearest thousand; 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023 as first published. A detection is not a person: in 2015 many people were counted once entering Greece and again entering Hungary from Serbia. 2025: about 178,000, the lowest since 2021.
31.08.2015 · Berlin
“Wir schaffen das.”
Angela Merkel at her summer press conference. Germany registers 1.2 million asylum applications in 2015 and 2016.
Paris · 2015
Je suis Charlie
Warsaw · 2015–2025
Nie
Sweden · Muslim share of the population
Pew Research Center estimates and projections, 2017.
Nigeria and the Sahel · 2009–2024
350,000
deaths in north-east Nigeria from the Boko Haram insurgency by the end of 2020, direct and indirect (UNDP).
Log
2017–2018 · United Kingdom and United States · Stage 2
The abuse was real, and Weinstein was convicted in Los Angeles in 2022. What changed for everyone else was procedure. An accusation published online acted as a sentence before any hearing, and “believe victims” became an instruction to institutions.
Britain had already tested that instruction. In December 2014 the Metropolitan Police called Carl Beech’s claims of a Westminster paedophile ring “credible and true”. Officers searched the homes of Field Marshal Lord Bramall and of Lady Brittan, widow of a former home secretary. Nobody was charged. In July 2019 Beech was jailed for 18 years for perverting the course of justice and fraud.
Managers adapted the way people adapted in the PRL: they withdrew from contact that could be reported.
Log · 1985–2025
promoting homosexuality, is repealed in England and Wales.
LGBT ideology.
womanin the Equality Act means biological sex.
1985–2025 · Poland and United Kingdom · Stages 1–4
I grew up in a state that kept files on gay men. The Militia called the operation Hyacinth and the files became known as the pink files. Britain went the other way while I lived there: in 2003 it repealed Section 28 and in 2004 it gave same-sex couples civil partnership. I count both as the liberal order working. The state stopped telling adults what they could do.
The change I object to came later and had a different subject. It moved from what adults may do to what everyone must say, and from adults to children. The Tavistock clinic prescribed puberty blockers on evidence that the Cass Review later found weak; the government has since banned them outside research. Poland showed the opposite reflex in 2019, when councils declared their towns free of an ideology. In both cases an institution set out to settle what people believe.
Bezmenov · Stage 3 of 4
Bezmenov’s third stage can take as little as six weeks: a sudden emergency in which ordinary rules are suspended. In this file it runs from the lockdown of 23 March 2020 to the fall of the Colston statue on 7 June 2020, and it returns in France in September 2026.
Predicted up to 6 weeks · In this file 11 weeks
Log
2020–2022 · England · Stage 3
On 23 March 2020 I heard a sentence I had last heard as a child in Poland: you may leave your home only for permitted reasons. Derbyshire Police flew a drone over walkers in the Peak District and published the footage.
Masks became law on buses and trains, then in shops. In 2023 a Cochrane review of community trials concluded that masks “probably make little or no difference” to influenza-like or COVID-like illness. Cochrane’s editor-in-chief then said the review could not show whether wearing a mask reduces a person’s own risk. A 2022 Johns Hopkins working paper estimated that lockdowns in Europe and the US reduced COVID-19 mortality by 0.2 percent on average. That estimate is disputed.
Vaccination never became a general legal duty in England. It became a condition of employment for care-home staff, and a pass for nightclubs and large events. On paper the choice was free. In practice the wrong choice cost a job or a ticket.
The rules did not bind the people who wrote them. In April 2022 Boris Johnson became the first sitting prime minister found to have broken the law, fined over a gathering in Downing Street.
The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.
Log
2020 · Minneapolis and Bristol · Stage 3
The killing of George Floyd was a crime, and the officer was convicted of murder in 2021. Within two weeks the protest crossed the Atlantic and changed its subject, from American policing to British history.
I was told that I carried white privilege. The category was new to me. I came from a country that had been partitioned, occupied and governed from Moscow, and I arrived in Britain to do the work on offer to Eastern Europeans. Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist states the new rule plainly: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”
The Sewell report concluded in 2021: “We no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities.” A UN working group condemned it within weeks.
The Khmer Rouge called 1975 Year Zero: history restarted by decree. Pulling down a statue is not a massacre. It rests on the same claim at a smaller scale: the people who hold the street decide what the past was. In September 2022 the Court of Appeal ruled that a protest defence cannot cover significant damage to property.
1895–2022 · Bristol · Stage 3
Statue: HJ Mitchell, 2019, CC BY 4.0 · placards: Caitlin Hobbs, 2020, CC BY 3.0 · M Shed: Adrian Boliston, 2021, CC BY 2.0
Bezmenov · Stage 4 of 4
Bezmenov’s last stage lasts indefinitely. The emergency is declared over, and the tools built for it become ordinary. In this file it runs from summer 2020 to September 2026, when the crisis returned in France.
Predicted indefinite · In this file 6.3 years so far
Kino-Eye, 1924 · Symphony of a Great City, 1928
“I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.” Dziga Vertov wrote it in 1923, and Alexander Rodchenko drew the eye for Vertov’s film in 1924. A century later the machine also names the people it sees.
Cut-outs: A. Rodchenko, 1924; G. and V. Stenberg, 1928
Log
2018–2026 · EU and United Kingdom · Stage 4
GDPR protects me from the shop more than from the state. Article 23 lets governments restrict data rights for national security, defence, public security and the prevention of crime. Citizens received a consent banner on every website. The state received a compliance industry and the habit of licensing every use of information.
The Online Safety Act made platforms legally responsible for what their users say, and the EU’s Digital Services Act did the same across the Union. In January 2026 ministers said digital ID would not be compulsory for citizens. Digital right-to-work checks remain the plan.
Faces come next. The Met plans fixed cameras on street furniture in the West End and drones in every London borough. In 2003 the cameras recorded. In 2026 they recognise.
The research is public. In 2013 Kosinski, Stillwell and Graepel showed that Facebook likes predict sexual orientation, religion and political views. Wang and Kosinski (2018) classified sexual orientation from face photographs, and a 2019 replication reached similar results. Kosinski (2021) classified political orientation from the faces of 1,085,795 people, correct in 72 percent of liberal–conservative pairs. Kosinski, a Polish-born psychologist, published the work as a warning. Steven Feldstein counted at least 75 of 176 countries using AI surveillance in 2019. His article on it is titled The Road to Digital Unfreedom.
Paris · 17–26 October 2026
Illustration: masked protesters throwing stones, a line of riot police, a burning car and fires across the roofs, drawn from the reported events of 17 October 2026.
Case file · France · October 2026
550,000marchers, 17 October
2,700arrested, 17–22 October
1,314arrested, 24–25 October
70,000police and gendarmes, 24 October
File updated 27.10.2026
Log · 18 September – 26 October 2026
18.09–26.10.2026 · France · Crisis, second round
The communist youth movements marched with the students: the Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France and the Union of Communist Students, next to the CGT, the French Communist Party and La France Insoumise. Hammer-and-sickle graffiti appeared on the walls. A fifteen-year-old in Lens lost a hand to a police stun grenade.
In May 1968 students in Paris pulled up the cobblestones and wrote Sous les pavés, la plage
on the walls. In 2026 teenagers in masks throw stones at the riot police again. The texts are still on the shelf: Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis.
The state answers in its own language: curfews, protest bans, and a promise from the President to ban “illegitimate” protests and require approval for the rest. Amnesty International called the police force disproportionate. On 26 October the Prime Minister offered classes of 28, 3,600 teaching posts and the end of Parcoursup in 2028; the lycée unions kept their dates for 31 October and 5 November. Both sides of the street ask for more state. They disagree about who should run it.
In the 1980s I was born into a country under curfew. In October 2026 I read the curfew orders for Paris.
1969–2026 · Riyadh, East Berlin, London, Paris
a country of moderate Islam that is open to all religions and the world.
I have worn the shemagh in Saudi Arabia, as a guest wears his host’s dress. In Riyadh it is clothing. In London and Paris the same pattern is carried as a political sign, next to the red flags of the communist youth.
Arafat’s movement was secular and nationalist, and the Soviet bloc armed it. Hamas is Islamist. On European streets both are carried under one flag by a left that rejects religion and nationalism at home. Its critics call this the red–green alliance.
Ledger · 1848–2026
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
Marx and Engels, 1848.
In November 1957 Mao announces that China will overtake Britain in steel output within fifteen years. The posters of 1958 promise harvests too heavy to carry and 10.7 million tonnes of steel in a single year.
Died in China’s famine, 1959–1961
15–45 million
deaths in the Chinese famine of 1959–1961. Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone counts 36 million; Frank Dikötter estimates 45 million. Much of the steel of 1958 came from backyard furnaces and could not be used.
In the Soviet Union about 18 million people passed through the Gulag between 1930 and 1953.
Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) taught Western universities to read their own history as a record of empire and slavery. Rhodes Must Fall spread from Cape Town to Oxford in 2015. In June 2020 protesters in Bristol threw Edward Colston’s statue into the harbour.
Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833. From 1808 to 1860 the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron freed about 150,000 Africans from slave ships.
Saudi Arabia abolishes slavery
1962
Saudi Arabia abolishes slavery, 129 years after Britain. On the Arabian Peninsula slavery stays legal long after Europe: Qatar abolishes it in 1952, Oman in 1970. Mauritania follows in 1981.
In 2021 the International Labour Organization counts 27.6 million people in forced labour worldwide, with the highest rate in the Arab States. Migrant workers in the Gulf are tied to their employers under the kafala system.
Qatar presents itself as a partner in progress. Its foundation brings American universities to Doha. AJ+, Al Jazeera’s English video channel for young Western audiences, reports on racism, gender and LGBT rights. Saudi Arabia buys into European sport through its Public Investment Fund, Newcastle United included, in 2021.
Qatari money to US universities
$7.7 billion
in gifts and contracts from Qatar to US universities since 1986, the largest foreign source in the US Department of Education’s disclosure data.
September 2020: the US Department of Justice orders AJ+ to register as an agent of Qatar. December 2022: Belgian police seize about €1.5 million in cash in the Qatargate inquiry into bribery at the European Parliament; Qatar and Morocco deny involvement, and in February 2026 an appeal court lets the prosecution proceed. Qatar Papers (2019) documents €71 million from Qatar Charity for 140 mosque and Islamic-centre projects in Europe.
At home both states keep the death penalty and criminalise sex between men. Saudi Arabia executed at least 356 people in 2025, a record, 240 of them for drug offences.
The sexual revolution promised freedom from shame and from the state’s interest in private life. Paris, May 1968: Il est interdit d’interdire
(It is forbidden to forbid).
UK adults on porn sites in one month
29%
of UK adults online, about 13.8 million people, visited pornography sites in May 2024 (Ofcom). Children first see pornography at 13 on average, one in ten by the age of 9 (Children’s Commissioner, 2023).
From 25 July 2025 the Online Safety Act requires age checks by face scan or ID. Ofcom reports visits down by almost a third and daily VPN users doubled to about 1.5 million. The state left private life in the 1960s and returned to it with an age check.
We would like to see net immigration in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands.
David Cameron, January 2010.
Wir schaffen das.
(We can do this.) Angela Merkel, 31 August 2015.
Net migration to the UK in one year
944,000people
net migration to the United Kingdom in the year to March 2023, the highest on record; 204,000 in the year to June 2025 (ONS).
Germany registers 1.2 million asylum applications in 2015 and 2016 and from September 2024 checks all its land borders.
I think we can turn the tide within the next 12 weeks.
Boris Johnson, 19 March 2020. Four days later the stay-at-home order is set for review after three weeks.
England under Covid law
16 monthsof legal restrictions
from the first stay-at-home order on 23 March 2020 until England lifts its last legal restrictions on 19 July 2021, after three national lockdowns.
1917 25 October, old style · the Bolsheviks take the Winter Palace, Petrograd
2026 24 October · 70,000 police and gendarmes deployed across France after a week of student-led protests
London, Paris · 2019–2026
On 25 February 2019 Home Secretary Sajid Javid banned Hezbollah as a whole: Britain could no longer distinguish
its banned military wing from its political party. Hezbollah flags had been reported at London’s annual Al-Quds Day march. The keffiyeh and the red flag of the student left now walk in the same column.
Generated illustrations, not photographs · Z-Image via Higgsfield, 27 October 2026 · RUSI 2019
Paris, Pisa, Berlin · a fear, not a record
No fire has touched the tower of Pisa. This is the picture I carry when I read the curfew orders. Notre-Dame burned by accident on 15 April 2019 and reopened on 7 December 2024. Limoges city hall burned on 17 October 2026.
Generated illustration, not a photograph · Z-Image via Higgsfield, 27 October 2026
Moscow, St Petersburg · 1991–2026
The KGB was dissolved in 1991. Its trade passed to the SVR, the FSB and the GRU, and to contractors. In February 2018 a US grand jury indicted the Internet Research Agency of St Petersburg for running fake American accounts; in July 2018 it indicted twelve GRU officers for the hack of the Democratic Party. Bezmenov’s demoralisation now runs on social media feeds.
Generated illustration, not a photograph · Z-Image via Higgsfield, 27 October 2026 · IRA indictment 2018 · GRU indictment 2018 · Mueller 2019
October 2026 · Stage 4 · Normalisation · after Ya. Ruklevsky’s poster for Oktyabr, 1927
Bezmenov’s last stage is normalisation: the crisis is declared over, and what it produced is called normal. From October 2026 I see two routes. Both are already under construction, and France elects a president in spring 2027.
Route A · Planned state
Already proposed or in force:
Planning leads to dictatorship because dictatorship is the most effective instrument of coercion and the enforcement of ideals.
Endpoint: the state owns the decision
Route B · Technocratic state
Already built or legislated:
Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.”
Endpoint: the system owns the record
Where the two routes meet
Ryszard Legutko, a Polish philosopher who lived under communism and later sat in the European Parliament, argues in The Demon in Democracy (2016) that liberal democracy and communism share the same habits: faith in progress, the engineering of society and impatience with the past. On route A the citizen asks the state for permission. On route B the citizen asks the system. On both, the citizen asks.
Such systems end when enough people stop speaking the second language in public. In 1989 that was enough.
Filed 24 October 2026, the day 70,000 police and gendarmes were deployed across France
Public Sénat on the taxe Zucman · L’Avenir en commun · Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 · COM(2023) 369 · Hayek 1944 · Deleuze 1990 · Legutko 2016
Index · Источники · the evidence of the file
Books, testimony, research papers, laws, court judgments and reporting cited in the entries above, grouped by subject. Reporting on France covers events up to 24 October 2026.
The books the page argues with, from Marx and Lenin to Beauvoir, Fanon, Hall, Butler, Arday, the Invisible Committee and Schwab. Cited in the source texts, the heads and most entries.
Spengler, O. (1918–1922). Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 2 vols. English: The Decline of the West (1926–1928). Knopf.Phillips, M. (2006). Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within. Gibson Square.Kisin, K. (2022). An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West. Constable.Pavlik Morozov’s story and its retellings; Vertov’s camera-eye manifesto and the film posters cut up across the page; Arafat at the UN and in East Berlin; the portraits in the heads row.
The child who reports his parents, from the Soviet hero Pavlik Morozov to Zhang Hongbing, who denounced his mother in 1970, and the Stasi’s unofficial collaborators. Cited in the Pavlik Morozov entry and the heads row.
Counts of crossings, asylum claims, border fences and deaths on the routes into the EU and across the Channel, and the map data behind the migration chart. Cited in the migration band and the map.
Each row sets a promise beside an outcome: communism and the Chinese famine, anti-slavery and slavery in the Gulf, Gulf money in Western institutions, sexual liberation and age checks, migration targets, and the pandemic rules. Cited in the ledger near the end of the page.
Credits for the Soviet film posters, Mukhina’s statue and the 3D model that turns in the corner.
Martial law in Poland, the death tolls of communist states, and Bezmenov’s account of subversion, the frame for the four stages.
Peer-reviewed studies and polls: self-censorship, face recognition, CCTV, the workplace effects of #MeToo, and the reviews of lockdowns and masks.
UK and EU legislation, court rulings and government reviews on equality, speech, data, online safety, digital ID and policing.
Measured rates of false sexual-assault reports, prosecutions for false rape allegations, and surveys of dating and singleness after #MeToo. Cited in the #MeToo entry.
The Berlin Wall dead and Wujek; EU migration routes; Operation Hyacinth, Section 28 and gender law; the Djokovic judgment; the Colston photographs; the Chinese posters used in the #MeToo entry; the type.
Newspaper, agency and broadcast reports. The France reports cover the student protests, riots and curfews up to 24 October 2026; figures are the Interior Ministry’s unless marked otherwise.
The oil embargo, the Iranian revolution, the siege of Mecca and the Soviet war in Afghanistan, with the texts of Qutb, Khomeini and Gaddafi. Book covers: Open Library.
Trofimov, Y. (2007). The Siege of Mecca. Doubleday.
Coll, S. (2004). Ghost Wars. Penguin Press.
Afary, J. and Anderson, K. B. (2005). Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. University of Chicago Press. press.uchicago.edu
Kepel, G. (2000). Jihad: expansion et déclin de l’islamisme. Gallimard. English 2002.
Barber, B. R. (1995). Jihad vs. McWorld. Times Books. First an essay in The Atlantic, March 1992.Hijackings, the Red Army Faction, the Japanese Red Army, Munich, Entebbe and the Moro kidnapping, and the Eastern bloc’s support for them.
Operation INFEKTION and Soviet active measures, and the CIA’s own cultural and media operations, from the Congress for Cultural Freedom to Chile and the Sinovac campaign.
Background cards and the 711–1830 timeline under the migration charts.
Launch dates for the media chart under the reader’s note, and the two writers quoted in the Language appendix.
Snyder and Arendt on truth and power, the history of the word post-truth, the Facebook data case and the official inquiries into 2016.
The cooperation of the far left and Islamists that its critics call the red–green alliance, from the Socialist Workers Party’s strategy of 1994 to the march of 2003 and the Respect party; the ban on Hezbollah in Britain and the Al-Quds Day march; and the credit for the generated illustrations near the end of the page.
Cohen, N. (2007). What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way. Fourth Estate.
Berman, P. (2010). The Flight of the Intellectuals. Melville House.For the heads and shelves added to the source texts: the propagandists of Epoch II, Beijing, Cairo and Tehran in the New Left, the Bomb and the Flower, Gen Z and the witnesses of the Gulag.
All from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, where each is marked as having no known restrictions on publication (the three Petrograd prints of 1917: no known restrictions in the United States). Cropped, levelled and toned for the cover; the red tiles are this file’s own years.
End of file · 24 October 2026
Facts are dated and sourced; the interpretation is the author’s. Illustrations are drawn in code or cut from Soviet and Chinese posters of 1926–1974 and from photographs credited in the sources.
Appendix · Язык · the words of the file
Bezmenov’s first stage works through words before it works through laws. Here the file counts its own: every word in the entries above, then every word in the sources list, set as mosaics as you scroll. Common English words such as the, of and and are left out. Your browser makes the tally when the page opens, so it follows every revision of the file.
“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.”
Counting…
Counting…
