Active Measures
The Soviet, and now Russian, craft of political warfare below the threshold of war: disinformation, forgeries, and front groups meant to deceive and divide.
Propaganda hands you a slanted version of the truth. Active measures invent the truth outright. The Russian phrase is aktivnyye meropriyatiya, and it named a whole Soviet craft of political warfare waged short of open conflict: forging documents, planting fake stories, funding foreign movements, and building front organizations, all to bend an adversary's perception of reality and turn its people against one another. The KGB ran it as a formal discipline, with its own directorate and budget.
Not just lies
The distinction from ordinary propaganda mattered to its practitioners. A propagandist spins events that happened; an active-measures officer manufactures the event itself, then lets the target's own newspapers do the spreading. The toolkit included forged letters typed on stolen letterheads, agents of influence who nudged foreign opinion without admitting who paid them, and front groups, peace councils and friendship societies, that carried Moscow's line under respectable local names. The aim, in a phrase associated with the trade, was to pollute the well: not to win any single argument but to leave a society unsure what was true at all. The Soviets had practiced the art since the 1920s, when the secret police lured emigre plotters into a fake anti-Bolshevik underground called the Trust. By the 1980s the KGB was reported to run thousands of such operations a year; in 1984 it flooded mailboxes with racist leaflets forged in the name of the Ku Klux Klan, timed to frighten African and Asian athletes away from the Los Angeles Olympics.
Operation INFEKTION
The classic case is Operation INFEKTION, also called Operation Denver. In 1983 a small English-language paper in India, itself established years earlier with KGB help, ran a story claiming the AIDS virus had been engineered at Fort Detrick, a US Army biological research base in Maryland. The Soviets let it sit, then amplified it in 1985 through the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, a wall of TASS dispatches, and forged 'scientific' evidence from a sympathetic East German biologist. Within a few years the lie had surfaced in dozens of countries and scores of languages. In 1992 the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service admitted the KGB had invented the whole thing, yet the story never fully died.
The through-line
The Soviet Union collapsed; the craft did not. Modern Russian information operations, the St. Petersburg troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency and the hack-and-leak campaign around the 2016 US election, are active measures with new tools. Social media did to disinformation what the printing press did to pamphlets: it made distribution nearly free and the original source nearly invisible. A Cold War term long buried in intelligence archives became, thirty years later, one of the most quoted phrases in Western politics, for a simple reason. The technique it describes had never stopped working.