Image 1: Gorbachev and his two famous, yet fatal initiatives The influx of skilled personnel in the military-industrial complex , as described in blog post 4, was viable until the 1960s, but after these years it was difficult to keep up the growth model. The rural workforce was no longer underemployed and also because women made up a large part of the Soviet workforce, there was no 'reservoir' of labor anymore. Women felt the burden of working full time and having to take car

Image 1: Soviet propaganda poster. The above line says: "Victory of the revolution is in the collaboration of workers and farmers" In the previous blog posts, we saw that Russia's history is shaped by a deep-rooted belief that the enemy is actively attacking the Russian nation. We discussed how active measures were both aimed at the external enemy (the West/NATO) and Soviet citizens who defied ideological standards. For the KGB, these were two sides of the same coin. In this

The 1990s signified a period of widespread social instability for many former Soviet citizens due to the transition to both a new political and economic system. It is referred to as the "wild nineties" (лихие девяностые), a term which has a negative [1]connotation. After the 1991 coup another violent political event took place as a constitutional crisis in 1993 which ended violently with an attack on Moscow's house of Soviets and led to a presidential rule by decree system.

Image 1: How we like to perceive Russia, and Russia likes to be perceived. Although the Cold War ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it seems that today the fear of mutual destruction is still present in the cyber realm. The reasons are manifold; apart from military aggression in Ukraine, both Russian hacktivists and state sponsored APTs are frequent suppliers of cybernews headlines. Sometimes it seems like there are endless groups of Russian-linked hackers out th

"The history of espionage didn't end with the Cold War. Russia has a foreign intelligence service, whose job it is to obtain information. It's no secret that the most effective way to do this is through technology." [1] Ilya Sackhov, cybersecurity expert at Group-IB Imagine you are living as a citizen of the Soviet Union in the 1960s in one of the bigger Russian cities. You start your day listening to the national news, broadcast by a loudspeaker on the street, ending with t