# Infiltration, Demoralisation, Destabilisation, Crisis, Normalisation: the Bezmenov Model Under the Microscope

Four words, four time spans, one prophecy: the model of “ideological subversion” set out by Yuri Bezmenov in 1984 fits into one minute of video, which explains its success. Read in full, however, the text is stranger, more dated and more contradictory than its viral excerpts. It also contains an insight worth saving.

By Paul-Michel Manandise · 19 October 2026 · CEAS Editorial Cell - Paul-Michel Manandise

Translated from the French. Original published on CEAS: https://www.ceas.info/publication/modele-de-bezmenov-demoralisation-destabilisation-crise-normalisation

# Key findings

• Bezmenov himself describes ideological subversion as a “legitimate, overt and open” process that has “nothing to do with espionage”, and attributes most of the demoralisation to Americans themselves.
• The interview is a 1984 campaign document, targeting Walter Mondale by name; its central predictions did not come true.
• The “15% espionage, 85% subversion” split is presented by Bezmenov as an opinion; Boghardt reports that officers of the First Chief Directorate were expected to devote 25% of their time to active measures.
• The durations of the stages vary from one Bezmenov text to another, and no Soviet document describing these four stages has ever been produced.
• The model is unfalsifiable: any objection can be attributed to the “demoralisation” of the person objecting.
• The infiltration phase that I have proposed leaves documentable traces, but must be held to the same standard of proof.
• The insight worth saving — exhaustion rather than conviction — is documented by RAND (2016) and CAPS/IRSEM (2018).

# What the text really says

Let us go back to the transcript of the interview given to G. Edward Griffin. In it, Bezmenov describes a “great brainwashing process” that “goes very slowly” and is divided into “four basic stages” (quotations retranslated here from the author’s French).

In it, Bezmenov describes a “great brainwashing process” that “goes very slowly” and is divided into “four basic stages” (quotations retranslated here from the author’s French).

Demoralisation would take “fifteen to twenty years”, the time needed to educate one generation of students exposed to the enemy’s ideology. According to him, Marxist-Leninist ideology had been pumped into “at least three generations of American students”, whose 1960s graduates now held positions of power; they were “contaminated”, “programmed”, and the process was “complete and irreversible”.

Destabilisation would last “two to five years” and target “the essentials”: the economy, foreign relations, defence systems.

The crisis could come in “only six weeks”. Normalisation, finally, could “last indefinitely”. The word, he recalls, is borrowed from Soviet propaganda: after the tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, Brezhnev declared that the situation in “fraternal” Czechoslovakia had been “normalised”.

The Czechoslovak reference is the most solid element of the model. The rest calls for several remarks.

# First surprise: an “open” subversion

Social media see in it a clandestine plot. Yet in the same answer he states that ideological subversion is a “legitimate, overt and open” process that you can “see with your own eyes”, and that it has “nothing to do with espionage”. Further on, he specifies that demoralisation is mostly the work “of Americans on Americans”, for lack of “moral standards”.

The model therefore describes not so much a KGB operation as a moral and political judgement on American society from the 1960s to the 1980s, in which most of the work is supposedly done by internal forces: universities, the media, the counterculture. It is this shift that makes the model so easy to recycle: it allows social changes one disapproves of to be attributed to foreign “subversion” without having to demonstrate any foreign intervention.

# Second surprise: a text very much of its time

The interview is a campaign document in the literal sense. In it Bezmenov targets by name Walter Mondale, then the Democratic candidate in the 1984 presidential election, classed among the “benevolent dictators” who promise everything and would go to Moscow to submit to “a new generation of Soviet assassins”. He asserts that the United States is in a “total undeclared war” against “the world communist system or the world communist conspiracy”, and predicts that Americans have “literally a few years to live” unless the country wakes up.

None of this happened. Mondale lost, the USSR collapsed seven years later, and the United States experienced neither a six-week “crisis” nor a Marxist-Leninist “normalisation”. A model that predicts everything and whose central prediction failed should, at the very least, encourage caution.

# Third problem: figures without a source

The famous “15% espionage, 85% subversion” split is presented by Bezmenov himself as an opinion: “in my opinion, and the opinion of many defectors of my calibre”. He relies on no document. The archives give a different picture, even if they do not measure exactly the same thing: the historian Thomas Boghardt (Studies in Intelligence, 2009) reports that every officer of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate (foreign intelligence) was expected to devote 25% of his time to active measures.

The durations also vary: “six weeks” of crisis in the interview, two to six months in Love Letter to America, published the same year, according to the Wikipedia entry. These are rhetorical orders of magnitude, not a documented doctrine. No Soviet manual describing these four stages has ever been produced in support.

# Fourth problem: an unfalsifiable model

The core of the reasoning is as follows: a demoralised person is unable to assess true information. “The facts tell him nothing”, even if you shower him with proof, documents and photographs. The idea is powerful, but it has a logical flip side: if anyone who challenges the model can be labelled “demoralised”, the model becomes impossible to refute. Every objection becomes proof of the objector’s “contamination”. That is the very structure of conspiratorial thinking.

# A fifth phase: infiltration

I myself proposed, on this blog, to complete this scheme. In “The Five Phases of Ideological Subversion” (30 November 2025) and then “Infiltration, the first real phase of ideological subversion” (2 December 2025), I argued that Bezmenov’s four stages presuppose a prior phase, which I placed first: infiltration. I defined it as “the systematic and discreet introduction of individuals, or networks, or financial resources and preparatory ideological concepts into the vital machinery of the adversary’s society”. The Centre for Information and Analysis of the National Security of Ukraine, where I head the department of international influence and culture, had presented this reading as early as 20 October 2025.

The value of this addition is first and foremost methodological. Demoralisation can be decreed; infiltration leaves traces. Concealed funding, shell companies, networks of coordinated accounts, media outlets created to serve as relays: all of this can be documented through open-source intelligence and the analysis of financial flows.

The same standard of proof applies to my own model. Applied to identified actors and established financial circuits, infiltration is a category of investigation; applied without proof to ideas or cultural changes one disapproves of, it would fall back into the unfalsifiable trap described above.

# What deserves to be saved

Should we throw everything away? No. Bezmenov formulates an insight that research has, for its part, documented: the aim of certain influence operations is not to convince but to exhaust. To “change the perception of reality” to such an extent that, “despite an abundance of information”, nobody is any longer able to reach a conclusion.

In 2016, Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews of the RAND Corporation described contemporary Russian propaganda as a “firehose of falsehood”: high volume, multiple channels, rapid and repetitive dissemination, and indifference to consistency. The 2018 CAPS/IRSEM report reaches a similar conclusion: according to the interviews conducted by its authors, the main effect of manipulation “would not be to change opinions but to sow doubt and confusion”.

The difference is crucial. For RAND or CAPS, demoralisation is a possible effect, to be measured, of identifiable campaigns. For Bezmenov, it is a state of the entire society, decreed without measurement. The first makes action possible; the second only makes it possible to point at culprits.

To read Bezmenov in 2026 is to keep the question (how does a society lose the capacity to agree on facts?) and abandon the ready-made answer (it is the fault of the enemy within). The next post will examine what the KGB archives really say about “active measures”.

# Limitations & uncertainties

Bezmenov’s quotations were translated by the author from the English transcript (and are retranslated here from the French).
The comparison between 85% and 25% concerns quantities that do not measure exactly the same thing.
The summary of the durations taken from Love Letter to America comes from the Wikipedia entry.
The author is commenting here on his own five-phase model, which calls for particular vigilance on the reader’s part.

# Methodological note

Analysis based on the full transcript of the 1984 interview, the study by Thomas Boghardt (Studies in Intelligence, 2009), the RAND report by Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews (2016), the CAPS/IRSEM report (2018) and two posts by the author published in the Club de Mediapart (30 November and 2 December 2025). Quotations from English-language sources were translated by the author. Third post in series 1.

# Sources & references

1. Interview of Yuri Bezmenov by G. Edward Griffin (1984), full transcript: https://www.fisheaters.com/srpdf/bezmenovinterview.pdf
2. “Yuri Bezmenov” entry, Wikipedia (English), note on the model’s durations according to Love Letter to America (1984): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bezmenov
3. Thomas Boghardt, “Operation INFEKTION: Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign”, Studies in Intelligence, vol. 53, no. 4, December 2009: https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/1-Operation_INFEKTION_Soviet_Bloc_AIDS_Disinformation_Campaign.pdf
4. Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model, RAND Corporation, 2016: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html
5. CAPS/IRSEM, Information Manipulation: A Challenge for Our Democracies, 2018 (French edition): https://www.irsem.fr/storage/file_manager_files/2025/03/les-manipulations-de-l-information.pdf
6. Paul-Michel Manandise, “Les Cinq Phases de la Subversion Idéologique” (The Five Phases of Ideological Subversion), Club de Mediapart, 30 November 2025: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/1759733/blog/301125/les-cinq-phases-de-la-subversion-ideologique-par-le-colonel-paul-michel-manandise
7. Paul-Michel Manandise, “L’Infiltration, première phase réelle de la subversion idéologique” (Infiltration, the first real phase of ideological subversion), Club de Mediapart, 2 December 2025: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/1759733/blog/021225/linfiltration-premiere-phase-reelle-de-la-subversion-ideologique
8. Centre for Information and Analysis of the National Security of Ukraine, “The 5th phase… There are not 4 but 5 phases in ideological subversion”, 20 October 2025: https://mediarnbo.com/fr/2025/10/20/la-5eme-phase-trouvaille-historique-dans-la-subversion-ideologique-il-ny-a-pas-4-mais-5-phases-dans-la-subversion-ideologique/

Paul-Michel Manandise – CEAS, Centre Européen d’Analyse Stratégique – ceas.info

Original article: https://www.ceas.info/publication/modele-de-bezmenov-demoralisation-destabilisation-crise-normalisation