The Hoover Applied History Working Group hosts The KGB and Western Plots Against the Soviet Union on Friday, May 9, 2025.
ABOUT THE TALK
The KGB was no stranger to conspiracies. Actually, it excelled in the genre. The organization was supposed to be different from its predecessors, certainly more measured, professional and rational, but the Stalinist legacy of levelling outlandish charges against groups and individuals deemed hostile to Soviet power was not easy to shake off, not to mention that the organization itself was born of conspiracy. The love affair with conspiracies endured and blossomed even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Conspiracy came naturally, easily and from every conceivable direction. But how credible were these schemes? Were the security organs immune to their own fabrications? Could KGB officers effectively detach themselves from the fake world they created for others?
This presentation is a chapter in a forthcoming book, At Home with the KGB: A New History of the Soviet Security Service, (Yale University Press, 2026).
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Amir Weiner is the Director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and a Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Making Sense of War, Landscaping the Human Garden, and numerous articles and edited volumes on the impact of World War Il on the Soviet polity, the social history of WWII and Soviet frontier politics. His forthcoming book, At Home with the KGB: A New History of the Soviet Security Service, will be published by Yale University Press in 2026.
ABOUT THE DISCUSSANT
Joseph Torigian is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution; an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC; a global fellow in the History and Public Policy Program at the Wilson Center; and a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.
Torigian was previously a visiting fellow at the Australian Center on China in the World at Australian National University; a Stanton Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; a postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program; a postdoctoral (and predoctoral) fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation; a predoctoral fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies; an IREX scholar affiliated with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow; and a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai.
His book Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao was published in 2022 by Yale University Press. His biography on Xi Jinping’s father, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, will be published in June 2025 with Stanford University Press. He studies Chinese and Russian politics and foreign policy.
