The original operation TRUST was a massive success for early Soviet intelligence: Faking a vast network of anticommunist circles to entrap the real domestic opposition and to deceive foreign intelligence services and the emigrés.

Over time, TRUST petered out because the major objectives had been achieved and the willingness of the world outside the USSR to believe the fantasy ran out. The Russian emigré circles failed with everything they tried.

Moscow needed to appear monolithic from then on, conducting purge after purge and committing millions to the Gulag system which made it virtually impossible to form any sort of conservative group and have meaningful activities. Anybody could spy on you, anbody could betray you. The last nail in the coffin was when Stalin started to adopt a more nationalist blood-and-soil direction because he needed that for WWII.

We have limited data from the Cold War about little pockets of conservative resistance within Soviet Russia. Internationally the KGB was further infiltrating rightwing circles but those never believed for a second that some powerful organized underground existed in Russia. The American CIA and the British MI6 managed to recruit a few high-placed Soviet sources which were usually betrayed by moles in the Western sphere and almost all of them were killed. The Anglo spy services surmised that it was easier to find collaborators in places like Soviet Ukraine, so various programs were launched to train people in good old SOE fashion in Western Europe in insurgency techniques and then smuggle them into Ukraine to find resistance groups and build them up. All of these programs were betrayed by moles. Once these commandos reached their destination they were promptly arrested and had to radio to their far-away contacts to claim successes and ask for more money.

Early soviet projections envisioned great opportunities by the year 1980. Hundreds of thousands of troops would march through Hungary and right through Austria to Western Germany’s doorsteps. In Eastern Germany an invasion army was on standby. A social democrat government in West Germany would have capitulated.

However, the Anglo services were stronger than predicted and communism was pushed back in places like Vietnam, Korea and Latin America. The USSR was facing bankruptcy by the year 1980 and the only way forward was staging the fall of communism and building a government that looked different and seemed more compatible with the West. It is likely that about a decade of intense preparation work was deemed necessary.

To fool Western intelligence services you needed a lot more than just Glasnost and Perestroika; people demonstrating in the streets, disregarding the will of the government and starting to hold elections. After generations of communism the average Russian was incapable of changing a state, let alone a superpower. If officials from the old system became leaders of the new system, no Western professionals would believe any real change was happening.

The most promising strategy for the communist elite would have been a new operation in the spirit of TRUST: Recruit carefully selected people to form a fake conservative underground and spend about 10 years to sell this fantasy to Western services. Just like in the 1920s this new TRUST would have to appear moderate: No crazy talk of a new civil war, no professed intention to conspire with unhinged dictatorships internationally. Make it seem normal, christian, conservative, business-focused. As if this group could repeat the different stages of Western development, from kingdoms to semi-kingdoms to republics, from uncontrolled robber barons to a streamlined capitalism.

The new TRUST would have to deliver wins to Western services and ultimately sell the big fake win: The fall of the USSR.

What would count as a “new TRUST”?

A true “TRUST-2” in the 1980s would have to replicate the core ingredients of the old program:

• A compelling legend that matched Western preferences (e.g., “serious Christian conservatives” quietly organizing inside the USSR).
• Backstopped channels—people, places, documents—that foreign interlocutors could touch.
• Operational payoffs (mapping, manipulation, misallocation), not just atmospherics.
• Longevity: long enough to normalize the fiction.

The 1980s context: why a trust-like play was thinkable

• Institutional continuity. The KGB never stopped running “operational games” (оперативные игры): controlled fronts, provocations, and legends. The 5th Chief Directorate managed religious/dissident milieus at home; the 1st Chief Directorate ran influence/active-measures abroad. The skillset for TRUST never disappeared; it matured.
• Religious diplomacy as a platform. The Soviet state used the Russian Orthodox Church’s external arm and other “peace committees” as interfaces to Western religious conservatives. (Even critics who disagree on particulars generally accept that Church-state coordination was tight.) That channel could carry exactly the sort of “there are serious Christians inside the USSR” messaging Western conservatives wanted to hear.
• Perestroika’s optics problem. By the mid-1980s Moscow needed the West to believe that change was real yet orderly. A narrative of respectable insiders—Christian, conservative, pro-stability—was tailor-made to reassure skeptical bankers, politicians, and cultural gatekeepers on the right.
• The confirmation-bias rhyme with the 1920s. In the 1920s, foreign services wanted “moderate monarchists.” In the 1980s, a chunk of Western elites wanted moderate, Christian patriots to be the antidote to Marxism. If you were designing a legend, you’d speak that language.

A small leak with gargantuan implications

The author Catherine Belton, in her book ‘Putin’s People’ relays the account of a young Putin—already a KGB officer—presenting himself as Christian to Tatiana von Metternich-Winneburg in Hesse, and Tatiana’s own writing strongly hinting at a conservative-Christian underground in the USSR and praising Putin and Sobchak. Belton had a source from Tatiana’s close circles but never followed up on this. Putin had been stationed with the KGB in the Eastern German city of Dresden and through the Stasi he could secretly cross the German-German border into Hessen with a false identity. In case a Western police officer conducted a traffic stop, Putin could produce papers and speak fluent German.

Why Tatiana? She had the best contacts to powerful and wealthy rightwingers like the Oetker family, making her an ideal conduit for a TRUST-2. It is exactly the kind of curated contact a rezidentura would value.

The family of the Russian princess Tatiana had fled on British ships during the communist revolution. She and her Metternich husband moved into castle Johannisberg in Geisenheim in Hessen. The very heart of the Hessen Dynasty to which the Romanovs belonged. 

Fritz Geller-Grimm – CC BY-SA 2.5

In 1815 castle Johannisberg became the property of the Austrians. Many influential people wanted it and eventually it was given to the famous Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich.

Klemens had become friends with the Prince of Wales, later King George IV, among others.

The book “Putin’s people” by Catherine Belton dos not tell us the year Putin visited Tatiana. But he was already with the KGB which helps us to narrow down the time window. She was born in 1914. Putin was born in 1952 and started his foreign posting as a KGB agent at the residentura in Dresden in 1985 at 33 years of age.

Image by WikiNight2, GFDL

Tatiana clearly states inher books that she hated the Nazi leadership, but not the German conservatives as a whole. She married a German aristocrat after all. She also says she hated Stalin and the Communists, but not the Russian conservatives that according to her still existed: Despite the Soviet purges and the fanatical ideology, many Russians allegedly never truly ceased to be nationalist conservatives. Communism couldn’t destroy the Russian soul or Christianity.

She clearly differentiates between the ugly and crazy Nazi leadership and the majority of German conservatives. If only, her readers were meant to think, there was a way to get the Russian conservative underground to damage the Communist rule in Russia and link up with the conservatives in Germany and elsewhere…

When the USSR was over in 1991 and Putin became head of state in 1999, the international conservatives who theoretically believed in this Russian underground fairy tale must have been ecstatic.

Tatiana’s anti-Nazi stance didn’t stop her from serious business dealings with former high-powered Nazis. In collaboration with a winery from the Oetker Group, she created the popular sparkling wine, “Fürst von Metternich”. In 1974, she shared ownership of the castle and the winery with the Oetker Group. After her husband’s death in 1992, she sold the property completely to Oetker, but retained the right to live on the premises. The Oetker Family is among those German families who have profited most from their close relations to the Nazi-Regime, making pudding mixes and munitions for German troops. The Oetker family’s private bank also employed as a director Rudolf von Ribbentrop (1921–2019), the son of Joachim von Ribbentrop. Rudolf August Oetker was also member of the Waffen-SS and in the Staumühle internment camp he was beaten so badly by the guards because of his SS tattoo, that he needed a cane to walk for years. His clan became billionaires. In 1960s, Oetker funded “Stille Hilfe”, a covert relief organization for the SS veterans, fugitives, and convicted war criminals. His partner in that group was Helene Princess von Isenburg (1900–1974) from Sothern Hessen. Her family is over a 1000 years old and connected to the Houses of Hannover, Schleswig-Holstein and Lippe.

In a 1992 book “Was wird aus Russland? (What will become of Russia?”) Tatiana speaks about an invitation to come to St. Petersburg and meet with major Sobtchak who was close to Putin. She claims that 12.000 churches had been reopened in the country. Other signs of a “rebirth” everywhere. People rejecting the previous decades of soviet rule completely. She complains that German money was flowing to Gorbatchev, whom she considers an old communist. She draws the comparison with German money that had once supported the Bosheviks and granting Lenin passage. She quotes a minister’s warning that the Russian people will not forgive another German financing of Bolshevism.

This is an important and overt point, repeated by many other Russian and international supporters of the later Putin regime: Communism had been imported into Russia by foreign powers. It was finally destroyed for good.

She glorifies the “brave” and “most active” of the “reformers”: Jelzin and Sobtchak. The latter was close to Putin and the former later handed the power to Putin. Next comes a dramatic description of the (weak and most likely staged) coup attempt by the communists to reclaim control.

On page 105 we find another important reference to the supposed Christian-conservative White underground during the USSR: The later generations of Soviets had already turned against communism, she asserts, while the upper nomenklatura had not realized this. Again, Tatiana does not claim explicitly that this underground was highly organized, and she certainly does not explicitly credit this underground for the downfall of the Soviet system. She is just planting the seeds in the minds of her readers, hoping they will come to this conclusion. 

On page 112 she complains about the Western intellectuals for the naïve support for communism during the USSR. She calls Ukraine a “fictitious state”, artificially created by Stalin to get more votes at the United Nations.  A drunk Chrushtchev had added Crimea and Donbas to Ukraine. Even the name Ukraine simply means border-area, she says. Kiev to her is the mother of all Russian cities. These are the words of Oleg the Prophet about Kiev: ”Let it be the mother of all Russian cities.“

Tatiana continues:

“Today an autonomy of the region justified, as long as no power hostile to Russia is being created artificially there.”

These are the same talking points we heard from Putin before and after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. There is far more common ground between these two people.

Why a “TRUST-2” would have differed from TRUST-1

• The information environment was harsher. By the 1980s there were samizdat networks, foreign broadcasters, foreign correspondents, and a large émigré ecosystem comparing notes. Running a monolithic fake movement without defections or exposures for years would have been much harder than in the 1920s.
• There were plenty of real actors. From the Baltic fronts to Sakharov’s circle to national-popular movements, the late-Soviet opposition space was messy and genuine. You can infiltrate and steer; it’s far harder to wholesale invent.
• No smoking-gun archive. With TRUST we eventually got enough detail (through memoirs, captures, and later scholarship) to see the scaffolding.

Heuristics to judge the hypothesis

If you want to pressure-test the “TRUST-2” idea, look for these indicators (the same ones the 1920s operation lit up):

• Plausibility on tap. Did the “underground” always tell Western partners exactly what they wanted to hear—Christian, moderate, order-first—while asking for time and support rather than falsifiable deliverables?
• Curated proof points. Were meetings, letters, and introductions always host-arranged on the Soviet side (consulates, church delegations, “safe” apartments), with repetition that normalized the legend?
• Calibrated peril. Were there occasional near-misses or “crackdowns” that dramatized the underground without actually dismantling it?
• Career capture. Did foreign patrons build reputations and social capital around these contacts (and thus accumulate sunk costs) the way SIS/Poles did around the 1920s Trust?
• Post-1991 payoff. Did the networks that most loudly vouched for “good insiders” in the late 1980s later translate that trust into contracts, investments, or political cover for the same clans that rose under Putin? If yes, you’re looking at a strategic return consistent with a long game.