Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet defector who once served as a KGB propagandist, described the method as plainly as anyone could: “Demoralize a society by erasing its history. Destabilize its institutions until no one knows who to trust. Exploit a crisis and push the public into chaos. Then normalize a new reality where lies feel as ordinary as the air we breathe.”
This was not metaphor. It was the doctrine of “active measures,” a long-term campaign to undermine enemies without firing a shot. The stages—demoralization, destabilization, crisis, normalization—were not theory. They were practice. Declassified archives and the Mitrokhin files show how the Kremlin exported forged documents, supported front organizations, and trained militants in the Middle East and Europe.
“The record shows this wasn’t abstract theory.”
In 1975, the Soviets pushed United Nations Resolution 3379 through the General Assembly, declaring that Zionism was racism. Though repealed in 1991, the propaganda victory was achieved: Israel’s existence was equated with apartheid on the world stage. At the same time, the KGB funneled resources to the Palestine Liberation Organization, printing pamphlets in Prague and Moscow that framed Israel as a colonial aggressor. The Mitrokhin Archive describes Soviet support for European radicals like the Red Brigades, who echoed anti-Israel and anti-U.S. slogans.
The strategy worked. By the 1980s, antisemitic tropes—Jews as media and finance manipulators, Zionism as colonialism—were embedded in Western academia and activism. What began as Soviet agitation outlasted the USSR itself.
“Those same mechanics are visible today—only faster, sharper, and amplified by platforms designed to reward outrage.”
Iran and Russia have inherited the skeleton and given it new flesh. Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center reported that both states ran coordinated influence operations during and after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, seeding disinformation across X, TikTok, and Telegram. The viral “All Eyes on Rafah” poster—AI-generated and shared hundreds of millions of times—embodied the demoralization stage, collapsing complexity into outrage.
The measurable results are stark. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2024 audit recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States—the highest ever. Fifty-eight percent were tied directly to opposition to Israel or Zionism. The playbook is not academic theory; it lives in hate-crime statistics.
“The playbook doesn’t need the truth to win—it only needs to dominate the first 24 hours.”
On October 17, 2023, an explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital was immediately blamed on Israel. Within hours, headlines declared it a massacre of hundreds. Protests flared across the world. Social media feeds swelled with posts branding Israel a child-killer. But subsequent forensic analysis—including by Human Rights Watch—found the blast was most likely caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket. The correction arrived too late. The damage was permanent.
This was the crisis stage in practice: seize a flashpoint, flood the narrative, and let the correction drown in the tide.
“Look closer at who drives these frames.”
Jackson Hinkle has become the most prominent of the new digital agitators. At just 24, the former California activist reinvented himself on X, climbing to over 3.5 million followers. He has interviewed Hamas officials in Doha, praised Vladimir Putin, and referred to Gaza as a genocide backed by Western complicity. He has raveled to Moscow and appeared at events alongside Russian officials, fueling suspicions of direct Kremlin ties. His monetization on Rumble and X premium programs shows how outrage is converted into income. Hinkle embodies the destabilization stage: targeting U.S. and allied consensus on Israel by reframing the conflict through Kremlin and Tehran talking points.
Sameera Khan plays a different role. A former RT America correspondent, she has a history of defending Stalin’s gulags and posting pro-Soviet memes before rebranding herself as a pro-Palestinian voice. Today she mocks nonviolent activists like CodePink as “LARPing” and praises armed resistance as the only effective solution . With over 230,000 followers, Khan contributes to demoralization by eroding confidence in peaceful protest and presenting militant resistance as both legitimate and necessary. Her amplification of Iranian and Russian narratives—criticizing the IAEA as an Israeli tool, praising multipolar alliances—ties her to a broader state-aligned agenda.
Maram Susli, better known as “Syrian Girl,” is an older but no less effective node. A Syrian-Australian chemist turned YouTuber, she has long defended Bashar al-Assad and dismissed reports of his chemical weapons use as Western propaganda. Her appearances on RT and PressTV (Iranian state media) cement her as a conduit for state narratives. During the Gaza war she blended her Assad advocacy with anti-Israel messaging, portraying the conflict as another “NATO-Zionist” conspiracy. Susli personifies normalization—saturating digital spaces with anti-Western frames until they appear natural, not ideological.
Sulaiman Ahmed, a UK-based commentator with over 700,000 followers, operates at the crisis level. His posts often feature graphic videos of dead or injured children, framed with captions accusing Israel of genocide. He repackages breaking events with certainty long before investigations are complete, as with the Al-Ahli hospital blast, where he amplified early claims of Israeli responsibility. By flooding the information space at moments of chaos, Ahmed helps lock in outrage before facts emerge. His monetization on X prior to losing his blue check in late 2024 shows the business model behind the crisis pillar.
Plestia Alaqad represents a more complicated figure. A Gaza-born photojournalist, she gained millions of Instagram and TikTok followers documenting life under bombardment. Before that, she worked in HR at StepUp Agency, a Gaza marketing firm with an opaque UK registration that dissolved in 2025. Alaqad’s footage is authentic, and her book The Eyes of Gaza captured worldwide attention, but her training with Press House Palestine—an NGO partially funded by Western governments but long accused of Hamas sympathies—positions her within a pipeline of narrative-shaping media. Alaqad functions in the demoralization stage: humanizing Palestinian suffering while subtly reinforcing frames of Israeli illegitimacy, which are then amplified by RT-aligned outlets.
Together, these figures form an ecosystem. Hinkle destabilizes consensus with overt pro-Kremlin narratives. Khan demoralizes by discrediting nonviolence and legitimizing militancy. Susli normalizes Assadist and anti-Israel propaganda until it feels ambient. Ahmed exploits crises in real time, monetizing outrage. And Alaqad provides the emotive imagery that primes audiences for all of it. None of them act alone. Each fits into a structure that mirrors the four pillars Bezmenov described.
“They are not outliers. They are the modern agents of influence, witting or not.”
They are backed by a chorus of activist groups. CodePink organizes ceasefire marches and campaigns for boycotts. Students for Justice in Palestine create “Popular Universities for Gaza” on American campuses. The Communist Party USA frames the war as imperialism and defends Russia and Iran. None of these groups are proven foreign agents, but their outcomes mirror the aims of active measures: fracture Western support for Israel and make hostility to Zionism an ordinary position in civic life.
“This is not conspiracy. It is continuity.”
Opaque business fronts appear as well. StepUp Agency, a marketing firm with a fleeting UK registration and Gaza base, exemplifies the shell structure familiar from Cold War playbooks. Its UK entity dissolved within months, while Gaza-based influencer Plestia Alaqad—listed as an HR specialist—rose to global prominence with millions of followers and a bestselling book. Her footage from Gaza was real, but its amplification often ran through the same networks aligned with Russian and Iranian narratives.
“The calls for scrutiny are bipartisan and international.”
In 2025, members of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee urged the FBI and DOJ to investigate Hinkle and others under foreign-agent laws. The Justice Department has already indicted RT employees for funneling $10 million to U.S. influencers spreading Kremlin disinformation. In Britain, MPs called on MI5 and Ofcom to investigate Ahmed. Amnesty International flagged Susli’s potential Assad-linked funding. Elon Musk’s X revoked Ahmed’s blue check amid misinformation crackdowns.
“Outrage becomes currency. Clicks become income.”
As civilians in Gaza and Israel endure bombardment and displacement, their suffering becomes the backdrop for monetized outrage. Influencers with no military or journalistic experience brand themselves as analysts. Outrage is commodified. Narratives seeded in Soviet propaganda shops now generate ad revenue on Silicon Valley platforms.
“‘No one is able to come to sensible conclusions despite abundance of information.’”
Yuri Bezmenov said the point of subversion wasn’t to win an argument — it was to drown judgment. He sketched four stages that, if they took, would make truth feel remote: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, normalization. In his 1984 lectures he put rough clocks on them — 15–20 years to rot values and memory; 2–5 years to unsettle institutions; weeks or months to seize a flashpoint; and an indefinite “new normal” once people accepted the fog as air.
“Demoralize a society by erasing its history.”
Bezmenov meant schooling, media, culture — the places where identity is formed. Our own research traced how the KGB fed this stage with simple, repeatable frames: Zionism = racism; Jews as controllers of media and finance; Israel as a colonial outpost. Those lines weren’t invented on campus; they were planted globally, then laundered back through Western discourse. The UN’s 1975 Resolution 3379, branding Zionism “a form of racism,” is the canonical example — passed with Soviet/Arab bloc muscle, repealed in 1991, but rhetorically evergreen.
“Destabilize its institutions until no one knows who to trust.”
Here the playbook targets policy, law, security, economics — the working gears. Soviet active measures pushed PLO outreach to Western radicals; distributed pamphlets from Prague and Moscow; yoked Israel to South Africa and Rhodesia in a readymade anti‑colonial crate; and coached European militants who folded anti‑Israel slogans into their canon. Our notes map this to Bezmenov’s second stage: agitation that fractures bipartisan consensus and bleeds into NGOs and faculty lounges through the 1980s–2000s. Contemporary scholars and government archives describe the same toolkit: the U.S. Active Measures Working Group chronicled forgeries and front media in its 1988 report, and Thomas Rid’s history of disinformation situates those operations as standard Soviet statecraft, not conspiracy.
“The playbook doesn’t need the truth to win — only the first 24 hours.”
Crisis, for Bezmenov, is a window: grab a shocking event, flood the narrative, and let the correction die in the undertow. The Al‑Ahli hospital blast on October 17, 2023, is the classroom example. Within hours, platforms framed Israel as a child‑killer; protests followed. Subsequent forensic work — including Human Rights Watch — concluded the likely cause was a misfired Palestinian rocket, but by then the meme had set. Our files flagged this as a “classic example of how misinformation becomes entrenched.”
“Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda.”
Bezmenov’s own warning was that, after crisis, a new status quo can congeal — not necessarily a junta, but a mental climate in which the frames you’ve seeded become default. “It may last indefinitely,” he said. In 2024, the ADL recorded record U.S. antisemitic incidents (9,354), with a majority explicitly linked to Israel/Zionism; that’s not proof of a singular puppet‑master, but it is evidence of narrative capture spilling offline. (For a concrete slice, ADL’s New York audit shows ~58% of incidents tied to Israel/Zionism in 2024.)
“Academics will argue the details — the pattern is the point.”
Serious scholars caution against overhyping any one defector’s taxonomy. Rid, for example, urges sobriety: disinformation is chronic, often clumsy, and its effects are easiest to see when we measure long arcs rather than single stunts. But those same scholars also show continuity: the Soviet doctrine of active measures migrated into the present via Russian and Iranian information ops, now scaled by platforms and AI. RAND’s “firehose of falsehood” captures the physics: volume and velocity beat veracity, and refutations arrive too late to matter.
“This is not conspiracy. It is continuity.”
Our primary materials lay the Cold War trail — UN 3379 and its repeal; Mitrokhin‑era accounts of forgeries, fronts, and militant coaching; the Working Group’s catalog of Soviet ops — and then pick up the modern thread: Microsoft’s MTAC documents Iranian and Russian influence operations exploiting the Israel‑Hamas war; AI‑generated imagery like “All Eyes on Rafah” goes hyper‑viral precisely because it compresses pain into shareable certainty. That is demoralization by design — a saturation that makes nuance feel like betrayal.
“Who carries the water? Influencers, photojournalists, online personalities.”
We’ve already detailed the principal amplifiers: Hinkle (destabilization — importing Kremlin and Tehran frames, monetizing outrage), Khan (demoralization — scorning nonviolence, laundering RT‑era narratives), Susli (normalization — Assadist and anti‑Israel lines till they feel ambient), Ahmed (crisis — first‑strike claims in breaking news that harden before facts), and Alaqad (demoralization — emotive imagery that primes audiences for all of the above). The method maps cleanly to the pillars; the ecosystem does the rest.
That is the hinge of the close: Bezmenov’s stages were a theory of change for hostile states with patience. The KGB’s operational vocabulary — fronts, forgeries, agents of influence — is now native to platforms that reward outrage. RAND explains why the corrections fail; Microsoft shows who’s exploiting the gap; our own record shows how the gap fills with antisemitism and delegitimization in the real world.
Bezmenov’s pillars are not relics. They are visible in record antisemitism, in viral misinformation, in the normalization of slogans older than the activists chanting them. They are visible in unqualified influencers elevated as experts, in NGOs that launder narratives, and in shell companies that mirror Cold War fronts.
Demoralization. Destabilization. Crisis. Normalization. Four stages written in Moscow decades ago, now running on U.S. servers. They do not need to be flawless to succeed. They only need to erode trust, destabilize consensus, weaponize crises, and normalize a new reality. By every measurable outcome — from the streets to the campuses to the feeds — they already have.
I had this concept while researching these accounts in 2023. As time went on theory became a question I was consumed with. Even if Yuri couldn't predict the future, like so many before him. What if this theory was being used across the west to destabilize and distract?
You be the judge.
