His role in the KGB was so inconsequential that he saw the files of journalists who were slated for executed come revolution. Got it. I'm sure everyone could freely access those.
The more serious criticism in my view is that not many of Bezmenov's specific allegations have been well-corroborated since, although a great deal of information about the KGB became available, eg the Mitrokhin archive - although parts do remain classified (by the UK).
And the interviewer is an American. They're talking about American conditions. Where he defected isn't that important within that context. Additionally, he moved to Los Angeles a couple of years before this interview was conducted. Specifically to have an easier time connecting with his audience.
> After graduating in 1963, Bezmenov spent two years in India working as a translator and public relations officer with the Soviet economic aid group Soviet Refineries Constructions, which built refinery complexes.
Soviet citizens could not freely leave the country. All travel was subject to very strict background checks several generations into your family tree to verify loyalty to the state, and travel groups had KGB informants attached to them to keep an eye out for any suspicious behaviour.
Not to mention such foreign assignments, which were under total KGB control. Either he worked directly for KGB or had a curator from KGB. Independently going abroad and working there was unthinkable.
Given that he did public relations and was probably visible more than most Soviet staff, his posting to India should be pretty easy to verify through contemporary newspapers, photos from public events and other similar sources. His major at Moscow State University is also easy to verify and it's a well-known fast-track into intelligence work.
Bezmenov isn't even alone in this. Defectors are notoriously unreliable: they tell their host country whatever they want to hear; in this case, because he correctly read the prevailing fears of the Reagan era. He is not the only Soviet defector who told inconsistent or outright false stories.
This is almost word-for-word the same rationalization employed by the people who denied the Cambodian genocide.
The Cambodian genocide happened.
Defectors are notoriously unreliable and many Soviet defectors told falsehoods their host country wanted to believe. (This doesn't mean every defector is unreliable, or even that everything an unreliable defector will say is false -- it just means what it means, that defectors are unreliable as a category.)
Both things are true.
On the contrary, quite a bit of evidence about these "active measures" campaigns was later found in the Mitrokhin Archives. Thing is, ideologies tend to take on a life of their own long after their original cause has subsided. The current "post-modern" woke discourse in the Western world can be understood as essentially a zombie variant of precisely the sort of KGB indoctrination Bezmenov talks about, cross-mutated with the highly successful memeplex of the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" from China. (For better or for worse, Mao Zedong was greatly admired by radical youths in the 1970s and 1980s; and the Cultural Revolution - doing away with everything that's too old, traditional and counter to revolutionary goals - was very much credited to him at the time. Of course, we have since learned that the story was more complicated than that.)
Bezmenov defected in 1970. After his defection would not be privy to any new information. The interview is from 1984 and not 1985 as the title purports. Ultimately, the claims in this video are categorically false. We can observe this in two ways.
First, after the collapse of the USSR no information on these efforts was revealed. Bezmenov claims 85% of the KGB's efforts are spent on this supposed program of ideological subversion of the American public. And yet, we have seen no documents. No intelligence from the US side. Nothing.
Second, he claims the subversion was put in place to change the schooling system and thus indoctrinate the next generation. Keep in mind that this program would've had to be in place by 1970. And quite a few years earlier than that too since, again, Bezmenov was not a particularly privileged member of the KGB. And if we were to assume the program is real the changes should blindingly obvious in hindsight. But in fact, there are none.
So we must look a little closer at Bezmenov - why would he claim these things, and why does the interview keep resurfacing?
At the time of the interview there was a great panic around communist influence across the country. We're in the middle of Reagan's first term as president. Reagan was hawkish on perceived communist sympathies, just like the rest of the Republicans and the mainstream American right-wing. The market for people claiming that the ideological foundations of their political rivals is grounded in communist indoctrination. They wanted to hear how homosexuality becoming more accepted, a call for racial equality, and a general anti-establishment attitude was, in fact, Soviet indoctrination of the schooling systems.
Bezmenov earned his living peddling what this large group of conservatives wanted to hear, and that is where his lectures and this interview come in.
Today we see claims of "cultural marxism" and "post-modernism" infecting universities, and thus infecting the minds of the very late cohort of millenials and the early cohort of Gen Zs. It's the same dance of comfort we saw in the 80s playing out again. The interview isn't someone predicting the future because of some special insight. It's someone playing into the 80s "culture war" and people recognizing that a similar "culture war" is happening again today. A "culture war" that will continue to happen as long as societies continue to evolve and re-evaluate their collective values.