The international media and the academic researchers are surprisingly slow and ineffective in revealing the full extent of the program of the psychological harassment and terror carried out by the communist regimes of Eastern Europe.
The failure to reveal even the most basic information about the program, its techniques and its extent is apparently not accidental.
The current version of the English wikipedia entry on Stasi, the East German secret police, contains the following description of die Zersetzung (version dated July 2012, accessed 1 October 2013):
The Stasi perfected the technique of psychological harassment of perceived enemies known as Zersetzung – a term borrowed from chemistry which literally means "decomposition".
By the 1970s, the Stasi had decided that methods of overt persecution which had been employed up to that time, such as arrest and torture, were too crude and obvious. It was realised that psychological harassment was far less likely to be recognised for what it was, so its victims, and their supporters, were less likely to be provoked into active resistance, given that they would often not be aware of the source of their problems, or even its exact nature. Zersetzung was designed to side-track and "switch off" perceived enemies so that they would lose the will to continue any "inappropriate" activities.
Tactics employed under Zersetzung generally involved the disruption of the victim’s private or family life. This often included psychological attacks such as breaking into homes and messing with the contents – moving furniture, altering the timing of an alarm, removing pictures from walls or replacing one variety of tea with another. Other practices included property damage, sabotage of cars, purposely incorrect medical treatment, smear campaigns including sending falsified compromising photos or documents to the victim's family, denunciation, provocation, psychological warfare, psychological subversion, wiretapping, bugging, mysterious phone calls or unnecessary deliveries [...]
This article about Stasi is a perfect example of disinformation. Take a look at the following sentence from the excerpt:
Tactics employed under Zersetzung generally involved the disruption of the victim’s private or family life.
This is of course not true. The target's professional life was attacked as well. This is a critical omission. Also many important references are left out. This is a disinformation. The author of the Stasi entry seems to be a Stasi sympathizer and protector.
Also the following sentence is not true:
Zersetzung techniques have since been adopted by other security agencies, particularly the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).Various forms of psychological attacks against a human being were invented by the Russian Bolsheviks themselves who transferred the method to the countries of Eastern Europe, which they occupied after WW2. The secret police of the communist regimes in those countries were subordinates of the Russian NKVD and later KGB or GRU.
