What happened to all the sleeper agents posted in countries around the world when the USSR collapsed?

by NO_USERNAME_PROVIDED

A commenter in /r/askreddit asked this question and I am just posting because I was curious.

Here is /u/skelpie's question.

ImOP_need_nerf

This seems like a very hard question to answer given that the agents were secret. Ones that were not caught wouldn't exactly publish their life story. You can expect that some continued to live the "normal" life that they lived, some continued to work for the new government, and perhaps some returned. I can't see anything other than speculation or some specific known cases being given here, which wouldn't represent all cases.

Searocksandtrees

hi OP.. just a note that this sub has a "20-year rule" prohibiting discussion of recent events. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was only a few years before that, so there's only a very narrow window of time that permissible to discuss here, plus it's unlikely to have been studied/documented formally (pretty much everything being posting here is from sources that don't meet sub standards)

While you might get some information here, recommend you x-post this one to a less restrictive sub, e.g. /r/History, /r/AskHistory, /r/Politics(?), regional subs

Artyomic

I can't answer this, but I can tell you is that nobody really can. It's entirely possible and even likely that those operations and operatives are still relevant today, and thus still secret.

chicagofirefifa3

People who are saying we can't say anything are a bit wrong. I don't claim to be an expert but i remember this coming up on Backstory (which highlights there is knowledge out there). I'll provide a few semi quotes.

we're uncovering cases where people were in place [in US]...and continued to be illegals [think the show The Americans]

"the security services didn't dissolve they just changed their names."

"They continued to operate and continue to operate until the present day" -David Major. He runs some think tank today and was Reagan's counterintel advisor.

http://backstoryradio.org/shows/awards-2015/

7 minutes in for "spies like us" segment

So there was no great exodus of sleepers in 1989 and there has been a constant drip of deportations since them as we identify old sleepers (but from backstory it's a bit unclear about how many continued to spy versus just continued to live in the US). Now the more interesting questions about why post soviet sleepers did what they did or more detailed questions seem currently unanswerable for the reasons u/uImOP_need_nerf mentions.