ABSTRACT
In February 1989, Valentin Falin, then head of the Soviet Central Committee's international department, was reported on Moscow Radio's World Service as making this comment on the lessons to be learned from the decision to enter Afghanistan: "Our tragedy in the past" he said, was that many decisions were taken either by individuals or by groups of people behind closed doors. On August 19, 1968, a group of Moscow intellectuals gathered at the flat of one of the dissidents to compile and sign a letter supporting the reforms in Czechoslovakia. The KGB got wind of the gathering and decided to prevent this act of "ideological diversion". Well before the end of communism, the shortcomings of the Soviet Union's own information media were no longer a matter of dispute between East and West, they had become an in-joke between those in the know.
