I've tried to make a book that's accessible to the ordinary intelligent reader. Very often books that cover this kind of subject are written by academics for academics. But I am not an academic.
I've never been to the Soviet Union and the main reason for that is I was warned several times by people from the KGB who had defected to the West that it would be very unsafe for me to go there
The ultimate sophistication of subversion is to take over the government not by unlawful but by lawful means.