First Chief Directorate - Active Measures and Assassinations

Active Measures and Assassinations

"Active measures" (Russian: Активные мероприятия) were a form of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services to influence the course of world events, "in addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessment of it". Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degree of violence". They were used both abroad and domestically. They included disinformation, propaganda, forgery of official documents.

Active measures included the establishment and support of international front organizations (e.g., the World Peace Council); foreign communist, socialist and opposition parties; wars of national liberation in the Third World; and underground, revolutionary, insurgency, criminal, and terrorist groups. The intelligence agencies of Eastern Bloc and other communist states also contributed in the past to the program, providing operatives and intelligence for assassinations and other types of covert operations.

Occasionally, KGB assassinated the enemies of the USSR abroad—principally Soviet Bloc defectors, either directly or by aiding Communist country secret services— The killings of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists members Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera by Bohdan Stashynsky in Munich in 1957 and 1959, as well as the unrelated slayings of emigre dissidents like Abdurahman Fatalibeyli; the surreptitious ricin poisoning of the Bulgarian émigré Georgi Markov, shot with an umbrella-gun of KGB design, in 1978; The defection of assassins like Nikolai Khokhlov and Bohdan Stashynsky severely curtailed such activities however, and the KGB largely gave up assassinations abroad after Stashynsky's defection, although they continued assisting the Eastern European sister services in doing so.