Dulles' Plan — CIA Plot to Destroy Russia from Within

Overview

In Russia, virtually everyone has heard of the “Dulles Plan” (Plan Dallesa). It is one of the foundational texts of Russian anti-Western sentiment — a purported speech or memorandum by Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence, supposedly delivered in 1945, in which he lays out a chilling strategy: forget military confrontation. To destroy Russia, America need only corrupt its culture from within. Promote vulgarity. Undermine family values. Turn the youth cynical. Replace patriotism with consumerism. Wait for the rot to consume the nation from inside.

The text is vivid, menacing, and deeply compelling. It reads like a villain’s monologue in a spy thriller. Which, as it turns out, is exactly what it is.

Scholars have traced the “Dulles Plan” to a 1981 Soviet novel called Eternal Call (Вечный зов) by Anatoly Ivanov, in which a fictional Nazi collaborator outlines a nearly identical strategy for cultural subversion. Somewhere between the novel’s publication and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fictional passage was extracted, attributed to Dulles, and repackaged as a genuine intelligence document. No corresponding text exists in any declassified CIA archive. No American or European historian has ever verified it. The document is a fabrication.

And yet it matters enormously. The “Dulles Plan” has been cited in Russian military academy textbooks, broadcast on state television, referenced by Duma members, and invoked to justify everything from internet censorship to the criminalization of “foreign agent” NGOs. A fiction has become a load-bearing pillar of Russian political ideology.

Origins & History

The Real Allen Dulles

Allen Welsh Dulles (1893-1969) was one of the most consequential intelligence figures of the twentieth century. He served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961, overseeing CIA operations during some of the most aggressive years of the Cold War. Under his leadership, the CIA engineered coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), attempted to destabilize left-leaning governments across the developing world, and launched programs including MKUltra and various psychological warfare initiatives.

Dulles was, without question, an aggressive and sometimes reckless Cold Warrior. He was also a prolific writer and speaker whose views on Soviet containment are well documented in his published works, including The Craft of Intelligence (1963). But his actual writings and speeches about the Soviet Union focused on intelligence gathering, covert operations, and geopolitical strategy — not on corrupting Russian morals or promoting cultural degeneracy.

The “Dulles Plan” text attributes to him a worldview he never expressed — and a literary style more consistent with Soviet melodrama than with American intelligence memoranda.

The Ivanov Connection

The critical discovery came from Russian literary scholars and historians who noticed the striking similarity between the “Dulles Plan” and passages from Anatoly Ivanov’s novel Eternal Call, first published in 1970-1976 and revised in 1981. In the novel, a character named Lakhnovskiy — a Russian collaborator with the Nazis — delivers a monologue about how to destroy Russia from within:

“We will imperceptibly replace their values with false ones and make them believe in these false values… We will find our allies in Russia itself… We will take on people, recruit them, and make them serve our purposes… We will plant the seeds of chaos in Russia…”

The parallels between Lakhnovskiy’s fictional speech and the “Dulles Plan” are extensive and, in places, verbatim. The overwhelming scholarly consensus is that the “Dulles Plan” was extracted from the novel and attributed to Dulles, either deliberately as disinformation or through a process of gradual misattribution.

Some Russian researchers have pointed to an alternative or additional source: Nikolai Yakovlev’s 1985 non-fiction book CIA Against the USSR, which contains similar anti-American language and may have served as an intermediary between the novel and the purported “document.”

How It Spread

The “Dulles Plan” appears to have entered mass circulation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the period of glasnost and the Soviet collapse. The timing is significant: as the Soviet Union was visibly disintegrating, a text that “explained” the collapse as the result of a deliberate Western conspiracy provided a powerful psychological salve. Russia was not failing because of systemic problems with communism. It was failing because America had executed a plan to destroy it from within.

The text circulated in samizdat form before the internet era, then exploded across Russian-language internet forums in the early 2000s. By the mid-2000s, it had achieved the status of received truth in much of Russian public discourse.

Institutionalization

What distinguishes the “Dulles Plan” from ordinary conspiracy theories is the degree to which it has been institutionalized:

• Military education: The text has been included in curricula at Russian military academies, presented as a genuine strategic document illustrating American intentions
• State media: Russian state television channels have broadcast programs treating the “Dulles Plan” as authentic, with commentators citing it to explain Western cultural influence
• Political rhetoric: Duma members and political figures have referenced the “Dulles Plan” in speeches and legislative debates
• Legal justification: The document’s framing has been invoked — sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly — in support of “foreign agent” laws, NGO restrictions, anti-LGBTQ legislation, and internet censorship

In effect, a passage from a 1981 novel has become a foundational document of Russian state ideology.

Key Claims

The “Dulles Plan” text, as commonly circulated, makes the following claims (attributed to Dulles):

• Cultural corruption strategy: The United States’ primary weapon against Russia is not military force but cultural subversion — promoting vulgarity, moral degradation, and cynicism to weaken the nation from within
• Youth targeting: The plan specifically targets Russian youth, aiming to turn them against their own culture, history, and national identity
• Value replacement: American agents will systematically replace authentic Russian values with false, Western, consumerist values
• Agent recruitment: The CIA will recruit Russians themselves to carry out the plan, creating a network of internal saboteurs
• Institutional destruction: The plan aims to undermine trust in Russian institutions — government, military, church, family — by promoting corruption and incompetence
• Long-term patience: The strategy requires decades, possibly generations, to complete — but its success is inevitable if pursued consistently
• Media weaponization: Art, literature, film, and media will be used as instruments of cultural destruction

Evidence

Evidence the Plan Is Fabricated

The case against authenticity is overwhelming:

• No archival source exists: Despite the declassification of millions of CIA documents, no text resembling the “Dulles Plan” has ever been found in American archives. The CIA’s declassified files, available through the FOIA Reading Room and the National Archives, contain no speech, memorandum, or strategic document matching the text
• Literary source identified: The text closely parallels passages from Ivanov’s Eternal Call, a fictional novel published decades after the supposed date of the “Dulles Plan” speech
• Anachronistic language: The text contains concepts and phrasings more consistent with late-Soviet cultural anxieties than with 1945-era American strategic thinking
• No corroborating witnesses: No American, British, or other Western intelligence figure has ever confirmed the existence of such a plan or strategy. Former CIA officers have explicitly denied it
• Dulles’s actual writings differ dramatically: Dulles’s published works and declassified correspondence focus on intelligence tradecraft and geopolitical strategy, not cultural subversion of the type described

Why It Persists

Despite its fabricated origin, the “Dulles Plan” endures because it provides a coherent narrative for genuinely disorienting events. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the chaos of the 1990s, the influx of Western consumer culture, the rise of oligarchs — these were real experiences that traumatized Russian society. The “Dulles Plan” offered a causal story: these were not accidents or systemic failures. They were the result of a deliberate enemy strategy.

This is a common pattern in conspiracy thinking: the attribution of complex, multi-causal social change to the intentional actions of a specific enemy. The “Dulles Plan” turns historical complexity into a thriller plot, and thriller plots are easier to process than structural analysis.

Debunking / Verification

The “Dulles Plan” is classified as debunked because:

1. No primary source document exists in any archive anywhere in the world
2. The text’s literary origin has been identified in a 1981 Soviet novel
3. Every professional historian who has examined the claim — Russian, American, and European — has concluded the document is fabricated
4. Allen Dulles’s actual documented views bear no resemblance to the text attributed to him
5. The CIA’s actual Cold War strategies, while aggressive and sometimes illegal, operated in a completely different register from the “Dulles Plan” text

Even some Russian scholars who acknowledge the fabrication have argued that the text “accurately reflects the spirit” of American intentions — a position that concedes the factual point while attempting to preserve the narrative utility of the myth.

Cultural Impact

The “Dulles Plan” is arguably the single most influential conspiracy theory in contemporary Russian political culture. Its impact extends well beyond the fringe:

Domestic policy: The text’s framing — Western cultural influence as deliberate subversion — has been used to justify restrictions on foreign NGOs (“foreign agent” laws), LGBTQ rights, Western media access, and academic freedom. The logic is straightforward: if the West is executing a plan to destroy Russia through cultural corruption, then resisting Western cultural influence is national defense.

Information warfare doctrine: Russian military and intelligence thinkers have incorporated the “Dulles Plan” framework into their understanding of “information warfare” — the idea that cultural, informational, and psychological operations are as important as kinetic military action. This is not to say Russian information warfare doctrine is based on a fabrication; it has its own sophisticated intellectual tradition. But the “Dulles Plan” has been used to illustrate and popularize concepts within that tradition.

Public opinion: Polls consistently show that large portions of the Russian public believe the West is engaged in a deliberate campaign to weaken Russia through cultural means. The “Dulles Plan” provides the origin story for this belief.

Export: The “Dulles Plan” has spread beyond Russia to other post-Soviet states and to anti-Western movements globally, appearing in Chinese, Arabic, and other language contexts as evidence of American cultural imperialism.

In Popular Culture

• Russian state television — Programs on Channel One, Rossiya-1, and NTV have presented the “Dulles Plan” as authentic, with panel discussions treating it as a genuine strategic document
• Russian internet memes — The “Dulles Plan” is one of the most frequently shared texts on Russian social media, often accompanied by images of moral decay attributed to Western influence
• Ivanov’s Eternal Call — The source novel was itself adapted into a popular Soviet television miniseries, making its themes familiar to multiple generations of Russian viewers
• Academic controversies — The debate over the plan’s authenticity has generated scholarly exchanges in Russian historical journals, with some academics defending its “essential truth” despite acknowledging its fabricated origin

Key Figures

• Allen Dulles (1893-1969) — CIA Director whose name was attached to the fabricated document, despite having no connection to the text. His actual career was consequential enough without invented additions
• Anatoly Ivanov (1928-1999) — Soviet novelist whose 1981 work Eternal Call contains the passages that were later extracted and attributed to Dulles
• Nikolai Yakovlev (1927-1996) — Soviet historian and author of CIA Against the USSR (1985), which may have served as a bridge between the fictional text and its presentation as a genuine document
• Metropolitan Ioann of St. Petersburg — Russian Orthodox Church leader who promoted the “Dulles Plan” as authentic in the early 1990s, lending it religious authority

Timeline

Sources & Further Reading

• Ivanov, Anatoly. Вечный зов (Eternal Call). 1981 revised edition.
• Yakovlev, Nikolai. ЦРУ против СССР (CIA Against the USSR). Moscow, 1985.
• Dulles, Allen. The Craft of Intelligence. Harper & Row, 1963.
• Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Doubleday, 2007.
• Yablokov, Ilya. Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World. Polity Press, 2018.
• Borogan, Irina, and Andrei Soldatov. The Red Web: The Kremlin’s Wars on the Internet. PublicAffairs, 2015.
• Gessen, Masha. The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Riverhead Books, 2017.

Related Theories

• New World Order — The broader framework of alleged Western elite conspiracies for global domination
• Deep State — The concept of hidden power structures within intelligence agencies
• Cultural Marxism / Western Civilization Erasure — The Western mirror-image theory alleging leftist cultural subversion