The disintegration of the Soviet Union was a similar event with enormous consequences. How could it possibly be explained that a great power which had been established forever — naveki, as the then Russian anthem said — and which seemed invincible, had suddenly collapsed? The obvious approach for investigating this issue would have been to look for internal, domestic reasons — obviously something must have been wrong with the very foundations of the system. But this would have been too easy — and also too painful, because many had believed in the system and had been convinced that its foundations were solid. Hence, the overwhelming temptation to look behind the obvious, to look for hidden forces, the secret machinations by occult, outside forces intending to destroy the Soviet system.

This search for the real culprits took various forms. One was the search for a masterplan, the so-called Dulles doctrine. This was the  CIA strategy allegedly devised by Allen Dulles in 1945 which  aimed at destroying the Soviet Union. The strategy was simple but ingenious. It did not envisage a war or warlike action, but the destruction of the country, the state, and the nation from within by undermining and corrupting the cultural heritage of the Soviet Union and the moral values of the Soviet nation. Soviet writers, actors and film-makers were to be influenced to spread violence, depravity, alcoholism, drug addiction, shamelessness, cosmopolitan views, corruption, hatred between nationalities and general distrust, to mention but a few factors.

It should have been clear from the beginning that there was something suspect about the "Dulles masterplan". In 1945, there was no CIA and no Cold War. Dulles was located in Switzerland, directing American espionage against Nazi Germany. He was not in a leading position and, as he was not a Russian expert, no one would have expected from him a grand strategy paper on what to do about the Soviet Union. Soviet cultural life was not his field of specialisation. Furthermore, Soviet cultural life was strictly regimented by Stalin and Zhdanov and under various forms of strict censorship. They would not have permitted Boris Pasternak to peddle drugs and Anna Akhmatova to advocate pornography and alcoholism and preach violence. To anyone even vaguely familiar with Soviet cultural life, the whole scheme must have appeared preposterous.

Some students of the Soviet scene have tried to trace the origins of this document. Certain phrases seem to have been taken from Dostoevsky (The Possessed): "We shall make use of slander, drunkenness, we shall corrupt the young, etc." The alleged masterplan appeared in the 1960s and '70s in political novels by some minor Soviet writers — Nikolai Yakovlev, Dold Mikhailik and Anatoli Ivanov. But in its present form it got its start only in 1993 when the Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Ioan of  St Petersburg and Ladoga in a message entitled Bitva za Rossii ("The Battle for Russia") gave it his blessing (perhaps even helped to author it). This Metropolitan was also a sponsor of a reprint of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He quoted Dulles (and even promoted him to the rank of General):

By sowing chaos in Russia we imperceptibly replace their values with false ones, which will force them to believe. How? We'll find our accomplices, helpers and allies in Russia herself. In a series of episodes, a tragedy, grandiose in scale, will be played out: the demise of the last unbroken nation on earth, the final irrevocable extinguishment of their national self-consciousness. From art and literature, for example, we'll gradually exterminate the social element. We'll retrain artists, discourage in them the desire to depict the world and examine those processes taking place in the masses of the people. Literature, the theatre and the cinema will all proclaim the basest of human feelings. We shall use all our means to support and promote those so-called creators who will hammer into the people's consciousness the cult of sex, violence, sadism, and betrayal, in a word — immorality.