New Lies for Old

Trust the script and you serve the playwright. In New Lies for Old, former KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn contends that “liberalization,” “splits,” and even dissidence inside the Communist bloc were not accidents but staged maneuvers. His thesis: the West mistook theater for rupture, feeding a deception program that shaped policy, secured concessions, and disguised long-range strategy.

Golitsyn contrasts Western “Kremlinology” with his own forensic method — treating speeches, reorganizations, and reforms as designed artifacts rather than evidence of weakness. He tracks patterns of disinformation, from “weakness and evolution” to “facade and strength,” and reveals how events like de-Stalinization and the Shelepin reforms built infrastructure for deception.

Case studies dominate the center of the book: the Yugoslav, Albanian, and Sino-Soviet “splits”; Czechoslovakia’s 1968 “democratization”; the rise of dissidents such as Sakharov; Eurocommunism’s supposed independence. Each, Golitsyn argues, carried tactical utility — winning Western aid, easing pressure, or widening Soviet reach abroad.

In the final phase, he reads Poland’s Solidarity, Sino-Soviet dual maneuvering, and Andropov’s rise as coordinated steps toward convergence and global leverage. His prescriptions are blunt: stop feeding the masquerade, cut technology transfers, isolate manipulated “independent” parties, and speak directly to captive peoples.

Disputed yet eerily predictive, New Lies for Old endures as a manual for decoding regimes that rule by mask and mirror. The warning is simple: confuse choreography for chaos, and you fund your adversary’s plan. (1990ed, 412pp, pb)