News Analysis
The Word That Changed Everything
In 1996, on my first day working at the Georgian Ministry of State Security, a single term stopped me cold: subversion. It appeared in almost every document, every operational analysis, every directive left behind from the Soviet era. Georgia had only gained independence five years earlier, and the archives we inherited—partially burned, partially seized by Russian operatives before we could stop them—still carried the fingerprints of the KGB’s most ambitious project. Not espionage. Not sabotage. Something far more dangerous: the systematic destruction of a society from within.The story of those archives is itself revealing. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian Federation operatives moved quickly to retrieve KGB documents stored on Georgian soil. They succeeded—partially. Georgian resistance prevented a complete seizure. What they could not take, they burned: a deliberate fire set inside the central archive of the Georgian Ministry of State Security, destroying decades of records. But not all of them. Enough survived.
