20200113

Yuri Bezmenov, KGB defector, on leftist subversion of America - rare 2nd video interview (with transcription)

Yuri Bezmenov (r) interviewed by G. Edward Griffin (l) in 1970 on the
leftist, Marxist subversion of American society

Yuri Bezmenov was a KGB agent who defected to the United States at the height of the Cold War from his diplomatic posting in India. After rising through the ranks of the KGB, he became disillusioned with the Russian workers'- utopia and fled India dressed as a hippie.

After several years working a variety of jobs in Canada under an assumed name, he agreed to an interview with G. Edward Griffin due to the danger that he saw within the USA. This was the danger of demoralisation and subversion of society by leftist Marxist elements.

G. Edward Griffin interviews Yuri Bezmenov (Video courtesy of Oaken Embers Memoryhole.)


Timestamps:  0:00 -  PART 1
1:00 -  Biography & Introduction
4:13 -  Life Inside The Soviet System
6:10 -  Why Defect?
9:40 -  The View From Within Soviet Russia
10:30 - The Chances Of Change In Russia
12:18 - Bezmenov's Warning
13:55 - How To Defect
17:40 - Cover Blown In Canada
20:56 - Slideshow
27:05 - PART 2
27:30 - Slideshow continued
29:00 - Marriage
30:20 - The Job - Areas Of Activity
34:55 -  Working For Look Magazine
42:00 -  Why The Media Lies
43:50 -  Why Blacken The Name Of Defectors - Solzhenitsyn?
47:00 -  Racism, Liberals & The Soviet Union
49:00 -  The KGB's Views of Meditation :)
54:00 -  PART 4
54:30 -  Useful Idiots & Manipulating Influencers
1:02:28 - East Pakistan & Defecting
1:07:00 - End Of Slideshow | The Subversion Of The USA
1:17:00 - The Remedy
Transcription from Useful Dissident 2008 G. Edward Griffin: Our conversation is with Mr. Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov. Mr. Bezmenov was born in 1939 in a suburb of Moscow. He was the son of a high-ranking Soviet army officer. He was educated in the elite schools inside the Soviet Union and became an expert in Indian culture and Indian languages. He had an outstanding career with Novosti, which was the—and still is, I should say—the press arm or the press agency of the Soviet Union; it turns out that this is also a front for the KGB. One of his interesting assignments was to brainwash foreign diplomats when they visited Moscow. And he’ll tell us a little bit about how they did this, and how they planted information which eventually wound up in the press of the free world. He escaped to the West in 1970, after becoming totally disgusted with the Soviet system, and he did this at great risk to his life. He certainly is one of the world’s outstanding experts on the subject of Soviet propaganda and disinformation and active measures. Mr. Bezmenov, I’d like to begin by having you tell us a little bit about some of your childhood memories.

Yuri Bezmenov: Well, the most vivid memory of my childhood was [the] second World War, or to be more precise, the end of the second World War, when all of a sudden [the] United States, from a friendly nation which helped us to defeat Nazism, turned overnight into a deadly enemy. And it was very shocking, because all [the] newspapers were trying to present an image of belligerent, aggressive American imperialism. Most of the things that we were taught [were] that [the] United States is [an] aggressive power which is just about to invade our beautiful, free socialist country; that [the] American CIA is dropping Colorado beetles on our beautiful potato fields to eliminate our crops, and each schoolboy had a picture of [a] Colorado bug on the back page of his notebook, and we were instructed to go into collective fields to search for those little Colorado bugs. Of course we couldn’t find any. Neither [could we] find many potatoes, and that was explained again by the encroachments of the decadent, imperialist power.

The anti-American paranoia [and] hysteria in the Soviet propaganda was of such a high degree that many less skeptical people (or less stubborn) would really believe that [the] United States is just about to invade our beautiful Motherland, and some secretly hoped that it [would] come true.

Griffin: That’s interesting. Well, getting back to life inside the Soviet Union, or inside Communist countries in general: In this country, at the university level primarily, we read and hear that the Soviet system is different from ours, but not that different. And that there is a convergence developing between all of the systems of the world, and that really it doesn’t make an awful lot of difference what system you live under because you have corruption and dishonesty and tyranny and all that sort of thing. From your personal experience, what is the difference between life under Communism and life in the United States?

Bezmenov: Well, life is obviously very much different for [the] simple reason that the Soviet Union is state capitalist economically. It’s a state capitalism, where an individual has absolutely no rights, no value; his life is nothing; it’s just like an insect. He is disposable. Where[as] in [the] United States even the worst criminal is treated as a human being, he has a fair trial, and some of them capitalize on their crimes; they publish their memoirs in their prisons, and get handsomely paid by your crazy publishers.

The differences of course in the daily life are very various, depending on who were are talking about. In my own private life, I never suffered from Communism, simply because I was brought up in a family of [a] high-ranking military officer. Most of the doors were open for me, most of my expenses were paid by the government, and I never had any troubles with the authorities or with the police. So, in other words, I would say I enjoyed, or I had good reasons to enjoy, all the advantages of [the] so-called ‘socialist’ system. My main motivations to defect had nothing to do with affluence. It was mainly moral indignation, moral protest: rebellion against the inhuman methods of the Soviet system.

Griffin: Well, specifically, what did you object to?

Bezmenov: I objected, first of all, [to the] oppression of my own dissidents and intellectuals, and that was the most disgusting thing that I witnessed as a young man, young student, who was brought up at [a] very troublesome period in our history, from Stalin to Khrushchev, from total tyranny and oppression to some kind of liberalization.

Second, when I started working for the Soviet embassy in India, to my horror I discovered that we are millions [of] times more oppressive than any colonial or imperialist power in the history of mankind,