I had a long conversation with a retired KGB officer in January 2011. He outlined the untold story of the Soviet Union’s collapse. KGB Lt. Col. Victor Kalashnikov was a KGB analyst who worked in Austria during the events of 1989-1991. The fall of the Soviet Union, he says, was an event that has been widely misrepresented and misunderstood. “We are going to mark the 20th anniversary of that event this year,” he noted. “I happened to be a witness, and I will comment, from memory, what I experienced; how the authorities acted, and how they reacted.”
