Active Measures
Active measures was the Soviet system of political warfare below open conflict, using forgeries, planted stories, and front groups to deceive and divide.
Active measures (aktivnyye meropriyatiya in Russian) was the Soviet Union's term for political warfare that stayed below the level of open conflict. The KGB treated it as a professional specialty, housed in a dedicated unit called Service A inside its foreign intelligence arm, the First Chief Directorate. The methods included forging government documents, planting fake stories in foreign newspapers, funding sympathetic movements, and building front organizations that carried Moscow's line under local names. The goal was not to win a single argument but to leave entire societies unsure what was true. The Soviet Union practiced the craft from the 1920s until its collapse in 1991, and Russia has continued it since.
How the KGB built active measures
The craft began before the KGB existed. In 1921, the Soviet secret police created a fictitious anti-Bolshevik organization called the Monarchist Union of Central Russia, known as the Trust. It presented itself as a patient, well-organized resistance movement ready to overthrow the Bolsheviks. In reality, every senior member worked for Soviet intelligence. The Trust lured real opponents into the Soviet Union, including the British agent Sidney Reilly, who was arrested and executed. The operation ran for six years before Western intelligence agencies realized it was a fabrication.
By the Cold War, the KGB had turned active measures into a routine part of its work. Service A planned the operations, and KGB stations around the world carried them out. Officers forged letters on stolen government stationery, cultivated "agents of influence" who shaped foreign opinion without disclosing their backers, and set up front organizations, including peace committees and cultural friendship societies, that passed as independent local groups. In 1984, the KGB produced threatening letters purporting to come from the Ku Klux Klan and mailed them to the Olympic committees of about twenty African and Asian countries. The goal was to dissuade their athletes from competing at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The FBI traced the letters back to the KGB after noticing that the grammatical errors were those of a Russian speaker, not an English one.
Operation INFEKTION: the lie that AIDS was an American weapon
The most well-known active-measures campaign began with a single planted story. In July 1983, a small English-language newspaper in New Delhi called the Patriot published a letter claiming that the virus causing AIDS had been created in a laboratory at Fort Detrick, a U.S. Army research facility in Maryland. The letter was attributed to a "well-known American scientist." No such scientist existed. The Patriot itself had been established with KGB support, and the letter was a fabrication.
The KGB let the story sit for two years. In October 1985, the Soviet literary weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta ran an article titled "Panic in the West" that repeated the Fort Detrick claim and cited the Patriot as an independent source. TASS, the Soviet news agency, pushed the story further. In 1986, a retired East German biophysicist named Jakob Segal published a pamphlet claiming to prove that HIV had been created by combining two existing viruses. The Stasi, East Germany's intelligence service, reportedly helped distribute copies at a conference in Zimbabwe. Within a few years the story had appeared in newspapers across more than eighty countries.
Under pressure from the United States, Mikhail Gorbachev's government disowned the story in 1987. In 1992, Yevgeny Primakov, the director of Russia's foreign intelligence service, publicly acknowledged that the KGB had fabricated the entire story. But the story never fully died. Surveys taken years later still found significant numbers of people in the United States who believed the U.S. government had created AIDS.
How active measures differ from propaganda
A propagandist spins something that actually happened. An active-measures operation creates a fake event and arranges for the target country's own journalists to report it as news. The forged KKK letters were not commentary on American racism. They were a fabricated act of racism, designed so that real journalists would report on them. The AIDS story did not argue that American biological research was dangerous. It planted a fake scientific claim and arranged for real newspapers to publish it as fact.
The distinction matters because the audience never knows it is being manipulated. The newspaper that printed the AIDS letter looked like an independent publication. The peace councils that echoed Soviet positions looked like local civic groups. The technique works by hiding where the message started.
Active measures after the Cold War
The Soviet Union collapsed, but the craft survived. Russia's intelligence services kept running influence operations, and social media gave them tools the KGB never had. Planting a story in a foreign newspaper once required a paid agent or a front organization. On social media, a single operator with a fake account can reach millions of people, and tracing the message back to its source is far harder than tracing a forged letter.
The most prominent recent example was the Internet Research Agency, a troll farm in St. Petersburg founded in 2013 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman with ties to the Kremlin. Its employees created fake American social media accounts, posed as activists on both sides of divisive issues, and organized real protests that real Americans attended without knowing who was behind them. In 2016, Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, hacked the Democratic National Committee's email servers and leaked the contents through intermediary websites. The U.S. Justice Department later indicted twelve GRU officers and the Internet Research Agency for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
The term "active measures" had been buried in intelligence archives for decades. After 2016, it became one of the most widely cited phrases in Western discussions of Russian interference, because the methods it described had never stopped being used.