Active measures () is political warfare conducted by the Soviet or Russian government since the 1920s. It includes offensive programs such as espionage, propaganda, sabotage, and assassination. The programs were based on foreign policy priorities of the Soviet Union. Active measures have continued in the post-Soviet era in Russia. Description Active measures were conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, and FSB) to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing revised assessments of it. Active measures range "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". Beginning in the 1920s, they were used both abroad and domestically. Active measures includes the establishment and support of international front organizations (e.g., the World Peace Council); foreign communist, socialist and opposition parties; wars of national liberation in the Third World. It also included supporting underground, revolutionary, insurgency, criminal, and terrorist groups. Further the programs counterfeited official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration into churches, and persecution of political dissidents. The intelligence agencies of Eastern Bloc states also contributed to the program, providing operatives and intelligence for assassinations and other types of covert operations. Retired KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin, former head of Foreign Counter Intelligence for the KGB (1973–1979), described active measures as "the heart and soul of the Soviet intelligence": Not intelligence collection, but subversion: active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs. According to the Mitrokhin Archives, active measures was taught in the Andropov Institute of the KGB situated at Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) headquarters in Yasenevo District of Moscow. The head of the "active measures department" was Yuri Modin, former controller of the Cambridge Five spy ring. History As early as 1923, Joseph Stalin ordered the creation of a Special Disinformation Office. Defector Ion Mihai Pacepa claimed that Stalin himself coined the term disinformation in 1923 by giving it a French sounding name in order to deceive other nations into believing it was a practice invented in France. The noun disinformation does not originate from Russia, it is a translation of the French word . Implementation Guerrillas Promotion of guerrilla organizations