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The Golitsyn Predictions

Mark Riebling ^ | 08-17-06 | Mark Riebling

Posted on 18.8.2006 03:07:20 by brain bleeds red

Even if one rejects Golitsyn's overall thesis -- viz., that Gorbachev's changes comprised a long-term
strategic deception -- one must still acknowledge that Golitsyn was the only analyst whose crystal
ball was functioning during the key period of the late 20th century.

When the Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989, the CIA was chastised for failing to foresee the change.
"For a generation, the Central Intelligence Agency told successive presidents everything they needed
to know about the Soviet Union," said Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "except that it was about to
fall apart."

Sovietologists both inside and outside CIA were indeed baffled, for their traditional method of
analysis had yielded virtually no clues as to what Gorbachev would do. When Mikhail Gorbachev
took power in February 1985, after the death of Konstantin Chernenko, analysts like Roy Medvedev
preoccupied themselves with trivial details in the Soviet press, and gained no larger view. "The black
mourning frame printed around the second page where the deceased leader's picture was run] looked
rather narrow," Medvedev observed. "It was still, however, a millimeter broader than the frames used
for the second-page announcements of the death of senior Politburo members like Marshal Ustinov,
who had died a few months previously." There was nothing in the measurement of picture frames to
suggest liberalization in the USSR; therefore, no one suggested it.

CIA's leadership acknowledged that fell short in predicting Gorbachev's reforms, but could provide
no real excuse. "Who would have thought that just five years ago we would stand where we are
today?" Acting Director Robert Gates told Congress in late 1991. "Talk about humbling
experiences." Gates could have said: Our reporting was poor because our Moscow network was
rolled up, coincidentally or not, precisely as Gorbachev was coming into power. Gates did not say
this, however. Instead, he suggested that "We're here to help you think through the problem rather
than give you some kind of crystal ball prediction." This anti-prediction line was echoed by the
Agency's deputy director, Robert Kerr, who told Congress: "Our business is to provide enough
understanding of the issue ... to say here are some possible outcomes.... And I think that's the role of
intelligence, not to predict outcomes in clear, neat ways. Because that's not doable."

Yet someone had predicted glasnost and perestroika, in detail, even before Gorbachev came to
power. This person's analysis of events in the communist world had even been provided to the
Agency on a regular basis.

In 1982, KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had submitted a top-secret manuscript to CIA. In it, he
foresaw that leadership of the USSR would by 1986 "or earlier" fall to "a younger man with a more
liberal image," who would initiate "changes that would have been beyond the imagination of Marx or
the practical reach of Lenin and unthinkable to Stalin."

The coming liberalization, Golitsyn said, "would be spectacular and impressive. Formal
pronouncements might be made about a reduction in the Communist Party's role; its monopoly
would be apparently curtailed.... The KGB would be reformed. Dissidents at home would be
amnestied; those in exile abroad would be allowed to take up positions in the government; Sakharov
might be included in some capacity in the government. Political dubs would be opened to
nonmembers of the Communist Party. Leading dissidents might form one or more alternative
political Censorship would be relaxed; controversial plays, films, and art would be published,
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The Golitsyn Predictions http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1685620/posts

nonmembers of the Communist Party. Leading dissidents might form one or more alternative
political Censorship would be relaxed; controversial plays, films, and art would be published,
performed, and exhibited."

Golitsyn provided an entire chapter of such predictions, containing 194 distinct auguries. Of these,
46 were not soon falsifiable (it was too early to tell, e.g., whether Russian economic ministries would
be dissolved); another 9 predictions (e.g., of a prominent Yugoslavian role in East-Bloc
liberalization) seemed clearly wrong. Yet of Golitsyn's falsifiable predictions, 139 out of 148 were
fulfilled by the end of 1993 -- an accuracy rate of nearly 94 percent. Among events correctly
foreseen: "the return to power of Dubcek and his associates" in Czechoslovakia; the reemergence of
Solidarity" and the formation of a "coalition government" in Poland; a newly "independent" regime
in Romania; "economic reforms" in the USSR; and a Soviet repudiation of the Afghanistan invasion.
-Golitsyn even envisioned that, with the "easing of immigration controls" by East Germany,
"pressure could well grow for the solution of the German problem [by] some form of confederation
between East and West," with the result that "demolition of the Berlin Wall might even be
contemplated."

Golitsyn received CIA's permission to publish his manuscript in book form, and did so in 1984. But
at time his predictions were made, Sovietologists had little use for Golitsyn or his "new methodology
for the study of the communist world." John C. Campbell, reviewing Golitsyn's book in Foreign
Affairs, politely recommended that it "be taken with several grains of salt." Other critics complained
that Golitsyn's analysis "strained credulity" and was "totally inaccurate," or became so exercised as
to accuse him of being the "demented" proponent of "cosmic theories." The University of North
Carolina's James R. Kuhlman declared that Golitsyn's new methodology would "not withstand
rigorous examination. Oxford historian R.W. Johnson dismissed Golitsyn's views as "nonsense."
British journalist Tom Mangold even went so far as to say, in 1990 -- well after Golitsyn's prescience
had become clear -- that "As a crystal-ball gazer, Golitsyn has been unimpressive." Mangold reached
this conclusion by listing six of Golitsyn's apparently incorrect predictions and ignoring the 139
correct ones.

Golitsyn's analysis was as little appreciated within CIA as it was in the outside world. "Unfortunate
is the only term for this book," an Agency reader noted in an official 1985 review. A CIA analyst
took Golitsyn to task for making "unsupported allegations without sufficient (or sometimes any)
evidence," and for this reason would be "embarrassed to recommend the whole." Golitsyn's case,
other words, was deductive: He had no "hard evidence," no transcript of a secret meeting in which
Gorbachev said the would do all these things. Perhaps most fundamentally, as the philosopher
William James once noted, "we tend to disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use."
Who had any use, in the end, for Golitsyn's belief that the coming glasnost and perestroika would
merely constitute the "final phase" of a long-term KGB strategy to "dominate the world"?

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