When I went to Moscow during in the Soviet era as the ABC News correspondent, communism had long since waned as a rallying ideology for the people. The regime enforced its rule with all-pervasive KGB (Committee for State Security) surveillance plus control of sources of information, from children's books to state radio and television to newspapers and literature. The major national newspapers were "Pravda," which means "truth," and "Izvestia," which translates as "news." So Russians joked that you could find no news in Pravda and no truth in Izvestia. In fact, both specialized in what is now called "fake news," boasting of Soviet economic achievements while the population coped with shortages of common consumer goods, and depicting the United States and European democracies as failing societies.
The control of information was not quite total. Short wave news broadcasts from London and Washington penetrated the static of powerful jamming. Courageous dissidents pounded out commentaries and literary fiction on typewriters stuffed with carbon paper, copies passed from hand to hand so that more "samizdat" self-published copies could be made. So the government's attitude had become: "We lie to you. We know that you know we lie to you. But every government on earth lies to its people, even those who call themselves democracies. And if you have an accident in the street, we send an ambulance. In capitalist countries, they look in your wallet to see if you can pay before they take you to a hospital."
The Soviets exported their propaganda to the outside world, creating and subsidizing communist and other front organizations in every country that allowed freedom of association, beaming Radio Moscow in multiple languages, planting fake news where possible, romancing those they called "useful idiots" who advocated accommodation to Soviet policies. Their folks in New York took American editors to lunch and complained sarcastically about the Moscow correspondents who were unsympathetic to Russia because they couldn't get soft toilet paper, among other creature comforts.
Among the Soviet policies that brought the world's opprobrium was the suppression the year before I arrived of what had become known as the "Prague Spring," an effort by the communist leadership of Czechoslovakia to mitigate the dissatisfaction of their citizens by liberalizing the country's politics, allowing an opposition press and policy debates within the ruling party. The conventional wisdom was that the Soviet regime would not act to crush their Czech brethren in defiance of world opinion. But Soviet tanks did indeed roll in and put the Czechs in their place back behind the Iron Curtain. Ironically, from today's perspective, the invasion took place as the Democratic Party in the United States was holding its 1968 presidential nominating convention.
Now, a half-century later, a KGB officer is running the show in the Kremlin and bringing the Soviet era back to the future. His military has peeled off a chunk of neighboring Ukraine, inviting the opprobrium of the allied democracies in the form of economic sanctions. Putin has been able to offer his people better consumer goods, thanks to the export of high-priced oil; they can buy pineapples and bananas, BMWs and Rolexes. And they have been free to travel wherever they can afford to go. Unlike in Soviet times, Putin's attitude toward young people who dislike his regime is that they're welcome to move to whatever country will take them.
And he has put the effort to destabilize Western democracies on vengeful steroids by using American-invented new media to replant the idea that whatever lies he tells, their governments are equally untrustworthy, their freedom a sham. He subsidizes fringe political parties that promote isolationism in their countries. He keeps the Baltic nations on edge with troop movements and overflights and naval maneuvers. And there are the new tools of cyber warfare, from shutting down government computer systems to hacking political communications to spreading fake news. The economic depredations of the financial crisis made the ground for disaffection more fertile, not to mention the Syrian refugee crisis exacerbated by the Russian air force.
Germany, heading for crucial elections next year, is openly fearful of Russian moves to influence the result. Chancellor Angela Merkel has become a world advocate for democracy as well as for maintaining the sanctions on Russia until promises to evacuate Eastern Ukraine are kept. But there's no shortage of advocates around the world for accommodation to Kremlin policies.