Active Measures (Russian: Активные мероприятия) were a form of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB) to influence the course of world events, "in addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessment of it". Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degrees of violence". They were used both abroad and domestically. They included disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration of churches, and persecution of political dissidents.

Active measures included 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; and underground, revolutionary, insurgency, criminal, and terrorist groups. The intelligence agencies of Eastern Bloc and other communist states also contributed in the past to the program, providing operatives and intelligence for assassinations and other types of covert operations.

Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov (Russian: Юрий Безменов, also known as Tomas David Schuman; 1939 – 1993) was a journalist for RIA Novosti and a former KGB informant from the Soviet Union who defected to Canada.

After being assigned to a station in India, Bezmenov eventually grew to love the people and culture of India, while, at the same time, he began to resent the KGB-sanctioned oppression of intellectuals who dissented from Moscow's policies. He decided to defect to the West. Bezmenov is best remembered for his pro-American, anti-communist lectures and books from the 1980s.

Bezmenov was born in 1939 in a suburb of Moscow to a high ranking Soviet Army officer. He was educated in an elite school inside the Soviet Union, and became an expert in Indian culture and Indian languages.

At the age of 17, Bezmenov entered the Institute of Oriental Languages, a part of Moscow State University—which was under the direct control of the KGB and the Communist Central Committee. In addition to languages, Bezmenov studied history, literature, and music. During his second year, Bezmenov sought to look like a person from India; his teachers encouraged this because graduates of the school were employed as diplomats, foreign journalists, or spies.