For years, internet users have claimed the KGB — the security and intelligence agency of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — conducted psychological experiments in the 1960s and found that two months or less of "nonstop" fear messages resulted in subjects being "brainwashed" to accept false information.
The claim appeared to have first circulated online in September 2020, when it appeared in multiple posts (archived) on Facebook (archived) and on X (archived).
(Facebook page Green Smoothie Girl)
The claim has since popped up in numerous (archived) additional posts (archived) on various social media platforms (archived). Many of the posts used exact or near-exact versions of the following phrasing:
In the 60s, the KGB did some fascinating psychological experiments.
They learned that if you bombard human subjects with fear messages nonstop, in two months or less most of the subjects are completely brainwashed to believe the false message.
To the point that no amount of clear information they are shown, to the contrary, can change their mind.
In some cases, the posts (archived) consisted of screenshots (archived) of earlier posts with parts of the text underlined (archived).
(X user @GingerJim5)
In comments (archived) on some of the posts (archived), some internet users said (archived) they were unable (archived) to find any credible sources for the claim, pointing out that searches for the details of the alleged experiments returned only further examples of the same quote — a hallmark of the type of internet content known as copypasta, a term referring to copy-and-pasted text that is often not grounded in reality.
Do you have a source? I Googled and only found this quote, but no attribution for the info. It's not that I don't find it credible, but I prefer to quote source material.
— Miriam—What Didn't Kill Me Made Me Stranger—Solon (@zombiehotflash) April 4, 2024
Like these readers, we found no descriptions of specific experiments matching the posts' claims in any of the books and articles we consulted about the history of brainwashing and the history of the KGB. We likewise found no evidence connecting the claim to Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet defector some internet users have suggested was its source.
For that reason, we have rated the claim as unproven, meaning we have investigated the claim and found no demonstrable evidence to either support or disprove it.
Claim Not Attributable to Bezmenov
In response (archived) to comments requesting a source for the claim, some internet users pointed (archived) toward statements the Soviet defector Bezmenov made in the 1980s. Bezmenov, a journalist who left Russia in 1970 and sought asylum in Canada and the United States, had a checkered history of reliability in his cooperation with Western intelligence agencies, as CBC News reported in 2022.
Bezmenov's specific claims about an alleged KGB attempt to use psychological warfare to destabilize the West resurfaced in 2020 when clips of a 1984 interview between Bezmenov and the conspiracy theorist G. Edward Griffin appeared in advertisements for the video game "Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War."
However, the details of Bezmenov's claims did not match those of the claim about KGB experiments that appeared in social media posts.
In the 1984 interview, Bezmenov summarized what he claimed was a four-step KGB campaign to weaken the U.S. that began with brainwashing American students. The relevant section begins around the 01:08:19 time-stamp in the video embedded below.
In that section, Bezmenov stated:
In reality, the main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all. According to my opinion and the opinion of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ideological subversion or active measures — aktivnye meropriyatiya, in the language of the KGB — or psychological warfare. What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country.
It's a great brainwashing process, which goes very slow, and it's divided in four basic stages, the first one being demoralization. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to [sic] educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy.
Later in the interview, around the recording's 01:12:48 time-stamp, Bezmenov described the alleged result of this demoralization on an individual:
Exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with the authentic proof, with documents, the pictures, even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him a concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom.
Despite some superficial similarities to the claim investigated here, Bezmenov's assertions were not an exact match. First, Bezmenov's timeline of 15 to 20 years to brainwash one generation of students was significantly longer than the social media posts' timeline of two months or less.
Second, Bezmenov did not use "fear messages" or any similar term to describe the content he claimed the KGB was pushing on students. Instead, he identified the material as "Marxism-Leninism," the political ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Finally, Bezmenov made no mention of any specific psychological studies related to his claims, whether in the 1960s — as the social media posts claimed — or at another time.
In fact, around the 01:12:25 time-stamp in the recording Bezmenov claimed that the KGB's demoralization campaign in the U.S. had been ongoing for 25 years. Because the interview took place in 1984, the program would have begun in 1959, according to Bezmenov's timeline.
Bezmenov's claims, therefore, did not fit the details of the claim that circulated on social media about KGB psychological experiments.
Cold War Brainwashing Research
Attempts to use psychological research to manipulate people's minds for political purposes predated the claims of both Bezmenov and the social media posts investigated here by decades.
In his book "Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media," the psychiatrist Joel Dimsdale explained how the scientific study of persuasive techniques including brainwashing began in earnest with Ivan Pavlov, the Russian physiologist whose experiments on dogs resulted in the discovery of conditioned reflexes at the beginning of the 20th century.
After the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union's leaders took great interest in possible human applications of Pavlov's research and provided him with generous research support until he died in 1936. According to Dimsdale, some historians believe Soviet state agents used Pavlov's experimental techniques to force confessions during Stalin's show trials in the late 1930s.
According to the accounts of survivors of the show trials, Dimsdale wrote:
Confessions were readily obtained after bombarding prisoners with contradictory information and eliciting feelings of guilt and anxiety. The prisoners' cognitive functioning was so disturbed by malnutrition, sleep deprivation, and massive anxiety that they readily confessed. By that time, they longed to be punished as a way to obtain salvation.
However, neither Pavlov nor the interrogators involved with Stalin's show trials were affiliated with the KGB, which was not founded until 1954.
In the 1940s and 1950s, government-funded research into the psychology of persuasion continued in the Soviet Union as well as in the U.S. The term "brainwashing" emerged in the 1950s, and specifically within the context of the Korean War, in a series of articles and books by Edward Hunter, an American journalist and propaganda specialist.
In an email to Snopes, Dimsdale said he was not aware of any published sources detailing 1960s experiments in which the KGB found that two months or less of bombarding subjects with "nonstop" fear messages resulted in subjects being "brainwashed" to accept false information, although he acknowledged that it was possible that the KGB could have run such experiments.
Ultimately, Snopes found no credible sources describing experiments matching the details given in the social media posts investigated here, and the prevalence of identical or near-identical phrasing in such posts suggests the claim is best classified as copypasta, a groundless rumor spread by internet users copying and pasting text from other social media posts.
However, we also found no evidence specifically disproving the claim. For this reason, we have rated the claim unproven.