For those of us who worked in the old Soviet Union as reporters or diplomats, all the talk of “kompromat” and “dezinformatsiya” that has emerged with the Trump dossier — unverified — has been a blast from what we thought was a distant past.

In the Soviet mind-set, foreigners were a permanent but inescapable danger to be isolated in guarded compounds, monitored with ubiquitous bugs, followed in the streets, restricted in their travels and manipulated through propaganda. To be on the safe side, the K.G.B. presumably compiled compromising materials (kompro-mat) on foreigners so they could be blackmailed or thrown out if necessary.

Like many another foreign correspondent, I was the target of a few such attempts — or at least there were a few I became aware of. One time at the bar of the hotel in Odessa run by Intourist, the agency that handled foreigners’ travels, a young woman jumped suddenly on my neck as flashbulbs went off. In Samarkand a colleague and I were surreptitiously given vodka at an outdoor teahouse and then arrested for drinking it. Another colleague, a strict teetotaler, was slipped a Mickey Finn meant to make him look totally drunk. In each such case, we promptly filed a formal protest and thought little more of it, accepting it as the price of being Western reporters in a paranoid police state.

These tactics at times bore fruit. Diplomats, spies and reporters were occasionally compelled to leave over some sordid revelations. But as in the current case, these were usually unverified — kompromat, after all, ceases being useful once it is made public.