Source: Antiwar.com
by Joseph D Terwilliger
“In 1958, Soviet intellectuals Alexander Yakovlev and Oleg Kalugin arrived at Columbia University as Fulbright scholars for a year of graduate studies. They weren’t defectors. They were loyal Party apparatchiks, sent to study how America’s ‘propaganda machine’ worked so they could better defend socialism back home. Instead, they encountered something far more dangerous to totalitarianism than propaganda: freedom. They saw professors challenging their government without fear. They saw students protesting wars and presidents without vanishing into gulags. They saw newspapers printing every side of every debate, and a system that wore criticism like a badge of honor. They didn’t defect. They went home quietly, outwardly loyal, and climbed the ranks of the Soviet system. … Years later, when Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power, Yakovlev became the architect of glasnost and perestroika, reforms that opened cracks in the Soviet system until the whole structure collapsed. Kalugin, too, was changed by his time in America.” (05/01/25)