How messed up are Trump Supporters?

[Anomalocaris]

The USSR did not change overnight and young Master Putin, KGB spy, was probably aghast at what Gorbachev did.

Putin was not a master spy when Gorbachev was in power.  He was still a lowly Lieutenant colonel, more of an agent than a spy master.   He never really rose to become a spy master.  He dropped out of KGB and became a politician during the 1990s.  It was from a political position Boris Yelsin plucked him and put him on the path to succeed Yelsin.

The isssue of KGB’s attitude towards gorbachev's program glasnost and perestroika is a lot more complicated and nuanced.   It is absolutely not true that KGB would have been completely opposed to liberalization under Gorbachev.   In fact the KGB was the hidden driving force behind it.  

The western caricature of the Soviet KGB being merely a monolithic apparatus of state repression is not at all complete.   KGB has its own research institutes and its own think tanks and was a state within a state.  What is more it was much better informed than the Soviet state outside itself, not just about what dissidents and American military, or perspective presidential candidates were doing, but also about how economic and political system really works in practice as oppose to in theory. KGB was the only organization in the USSR that was truly aware of the state of the Soviet economy and the fundamental social and economic malaise it has suffered from since 1965, and the only organization in the USSR that truly studied and knew how western political and economic systems worked.  So KGV was in a good position to assess what reforms the USSR needed.  

Andropov was the head of KGB from 1967 to 1982.   He was also the Soviet embassedor to Hungary in 1956.   In the West Andropov has a evil reputation because of his role in the brutal crushing of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and because as head of KGB he created the network of psychiatric hospitals used to imprison dissidents without trial.

Although outwardly Andropov was the very image of the black coated KGB murderer, his actual views were much more nuanced.  He deemed repression necessary in the short run but considered these to be bandaids and didn’t address fundamental problems facing the Soviet Union.  It was he who laid out the program of reforms which he believed necessary to ensure long term survivial of the USSR.  This was basically the same program Gorbachev tried to implement.   Mikhail Gorbachev was the protege of Yuri Andropov.

When Brezhnev died in 1982 Andropov succeeded to the top post.  But Andropov had severe diabetes, needed dialysis and he knew his days were numbered. He promoted Gorbachev, whom he had mentored and cultivated as the liberal but not too rash reformer, over the heads of numerous more seasoned old guard communists, and positioned Gorbachev to be the 2nd in line to succeed himself.   Gorbachev was extraordinarily young for a senior soviet official, too young to be accepted for the top post by the Soviet power structure if he simply came out of nowhere to succeed Andropov.  So Andropov then made sure the position of number 1 in line to succeed himself went to the infirm septuagenerian old guard Konstantin Chenenko so that Gorbachev can first have time become a familiar face in the top corridors of power,  but would not have long to wait to succeed to the top post.

When Andropov died less 1 year later in 1984.  Konstantin Chenenko succeeded him but also died in 1 year, and then Gorbachev succeeded Chenenko.  The rest is the reform that brought down the USSR.

So Far from being aghast at what Gorbachev was doing, the KGB actually was the power behind the scene that engineered the Gorbachev era.