Who was Yuri Bezmenov?

Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov, was a Soviet journalist for RIA Novosti (a Soviet KGB propaganda tool) and a former PGU KGB informant who eventually defected to Canada.

After being assigned to a station in India early on in his career as a KGB agent, Bezmenov eventually grew to love the people and the culture of India, and at some point he began to take issue with the less than moral practices of the government of the Soviet Union. He recognized the evils he could see in the U.S.S.R. for what they were, evil, and he wanted to escape from being enslaved to that life. He saw Communism and the Marxist-Leninist ideology for what it was, oppressive and intolerant, and violent. It simply wasn’t who he was, and he knew he had to somehow escape from it, and eventually he figured out a successful way to do that.

Yuri was born in 1939, in Mytishchi, Russia which is near Moscow. His father was a high ranking and prominent member of the Soviet Union military and according to Yuri, was one of the more level-headed and rationally thinking of the Soviet elites. Yuri referred to his father in one interview as being very conservative.

Yuri defected to Canada in the 1970s and with the help of the United States, after having slipped out of India undetected by disguising himself as an American hippie and blending into a large group of them. He made his way from India to Greece where he was debriefed for approximately six months by the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), an American intelligence gathering agency which operates globally in an effort to provide key intelligence to the United States with the main goal of protecting the American people from global threats.

After he defected to Canada, he took on a different name and went by the alias, “Tomas Schuman”, which was more of a necessity than a choice. From the point when he chose to defect from the U.S.S.R. until his death, Yuri knew his life was always in danger to some extent from the Soviet Union and its agents abroad. For a great length of time he was able to go undetected in Canada, his disappearance from India most likely written off by the Soviets as KIA or something of that nature, or possibly having died from some kind of accident or in some natural way. This type of thing wasn’t unheard of, and often KGB agents were killed by the people they were working with. Yuri said in one interview that, “sometimes they are trigger happy and unruly, if you give them machine guns, they will shoot!” That was referring to some of the people the KGB were involved with at times, and operating on the same side or for the same goals.

Yuri eventually began working at a Canadian news outlet however, and his voice landed him back on the radar of the U.S.S.R., and eventually they identified him and his true identity and they discovered that he had defected to Canada.

After discovering Yuri’s true identity, the Soviets attempted to use psychological tactics against him in order to cause him to get nervous and make critical mistakes, but those attempts were unsuccessful as his training and experience in the KGB had produced too capable an agent for these types of tactics to prove effective against. Yuri knew exactly what they were going to try to do, they did that, and he knew exactly what he should do in response, and he very effectively countered their attempts. After those attempts failed, they eventually used political tactics and the Canadians caved to various pressures the Soviets had exerted on them, and Yuri’s employment with the Canadian news outlet was terminated by his employer.

Yuri sat down for on camera interviews and sometimes taught and gave lectures at American colleges which were also recorded on video. One of his most famous interviews was in 1985 where he discussed “Ideological Subversion” or “Active Measures”, which is a KGB psychological warfare tactic that the Soviet Union developed and deployed against the United States of America.

Here is a link to the video of just that portion of the 1985 interview regarding Ideological Subversion:

https://rumble.com/embed/vgte83/?pub=6rc5p

Here is a link to the full 1985 interview:

https://rumble.com/embed/vgul3x/?pub=6rc5p

Mr. Bezmenov passed away in Windsor, Canada in 1993, and his death was attributed to having developed the affliction of alcoholism, and complications resulting from that disease. He passed away shortly after having made a trip to visit his ex-wife and his children for the holidays in a different area of Canada from where he lived. Yuri was 54 years old when he passed away.