Harrison Mark

Secret Leviathan

SECRET LEVIATHAN

Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism

MARK HARRISON

Preface

THE BIRTH OF AN IDEA

As a student and young scholar in the 1960s and 1970s, I grew up with the idea that the Soviet Union was secretive. I was interested in communism, and I wanted to learn more about it, but I found that many lines of enquiry were closed off by secrecy. Visiting Moscow, I also learned that curiosity was dangerous, especially to those that lived there. As an outsider, I could hope to study the Soviet economy and its history only through the smoke and mirrors of censored documents and statistics.

In 1986, a new leader of the Soviet Union announced a new policy: “openness.” A trickle of historical revelations began. At the end of 1991, to the surprise of many, the Soviet Union collapsed. For the first time, independent scholars were allowed into many of the formerly secret archives of the Soviet state.

On a dull day in the mid-1990s, I sat at a desk in the Russian State Military Archive. After tea and cakes with Vera and Nonna, I went back to the documents. They told me how the Red Army went about buying new weapons from state industry in the 1930s. Industry was supposed to be planned, but the rapid changes of military technology were a factor that no plan could anticipate. The result was a relatively decentralized process. Every year, high-ranking military engineers toured the defense factories, looking for plant directors that would take on contracts to supply new tanks and planes. While the public could see nothing of this, the Defense Ministry was supposed to have full access to the factories’ capabilities and costs. But many reports told the same story: the biggest problem facing the Army’s buyers was the walls of secrecy that the factory directors and middle managers threw up around their offices to keep the soldiers out.

Eventually there would be a bargain: the factories would contract with the Red Army to supply so many weapons for so many rubles. The number of rubles was already fixed, because the Army’s procurement budget was set by the Politburo. What was at issue was the number of weapons. More weapons meant a better deal for the military, but the factories would have to work harder to make them. The more the Army could be kept in the dark about the factories’ costs, the weaker would be its bargaining power, and the fewer units the factories could be compelled to supply. So, when a uniformed officer asked the factory manager how much it would cost to make the weapon the Army wanted, the manager’s best negotiating position was to delay the information or refuse it outright. When challenged, all too often the justification was “This information cannot be disclosed to you because it’s a military secret.” Thus, secrecy turned out to be the factories’ weapon of choice in their struggle for better terms from the military.[1]

Reading such stories in the archive that day, I thought: Secrecy is interesting! I should look into it more closely.

My enthusiasm to work on secrecy hardened into resolve after I returned home. I told my stories of the 1930s to my friend and fellow scholar Julian Cooper, a specialist on the Soviet defense industries. Of course, he replied, my story was quite familiar. Similar things were still going on in the Soviet Union half a century later.

As I continued to work in various archives of the former Soviet state, I began to collect whatever details I happened to find that related to secrecy. I came across many more stories in the records of the Soviet ministries of the defense industries and of the Gulag (the system of forced labor). Leonid Borodkin, James Heinzen, Oleg Khlevniuk, and Andrei Sokolov heard about my interest, and they generously supplied me with anecdotes from their own research.

Still, I felt, I was missing something. The former Soviet archives were crammed full of secret documentation. It seemed to me that everything in the archives was secret, and secrecy was everywhere. But where was the system? How was it designed, and what were the consequences, intended and unintended? How did one study the system of secrecy?

At the invitation of Timothy Guinnane, I gave a talk on Soviet secrecy at Yale University. During the discussion Steven Nafziger asked me: Why did the Soviet state work so hard to suppress so many facts? Wouldn’t it have been easier to camouflage them under a thousand lies? Stuck in my Soviet-era mindset, I thought this was an odd way to think about things, and I tried to dismiss it, but the idea bothered me and would not go away. Time passed. I kept busy with other things. Steve’s insight would come back to me a decade later, in the new era of “fake news,” as discussed in the final chapter of this book.

In the spring of 2009,1 sat in another archive. Outside sunshine was everywhere, for this was California and I was in the reading room of the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford University. “You should look at this,” Lora Soroka said to me. “We’ve just had the first microfilms from Vilnius, from the archive of the KGB of Soviet Lithuania.” I was curious. I began to read. Weeks later, I looked up. I had found the system I was looking for. They called it the “regime of secrecy.” The system was in the safe hands of the KGB. I set to work.

THE AUTHORITARIAN MYSTIQUE

For a scholar, secrecy can be an absorbing object of study. But it is not only for scholars. Others should also take an interest. Concerned citizens, in particular, should be aware of secrecy. This is because one of the effects of secrecy is to build the mystique of authoritarian rule.

Today, the relatively transparent institutions of Western liberal democracy are in visibly poor shape. Our leaders juggle the pressures arising from public opinion and private lobbies. Their confidential business is hacked and leaked. Expert advice struggles to be heard against the clamor of “alternative facts.” Political decisions are gridlocked while economic, social, and environmental imbalances accumulate. The greater the issue, the more it is contested. The costs of decision making increase and become prohibitive, leading democracy into a “do-nothing zone” where bargaining fails and the outcome is procrastination.[2] The authoritarian rulers of Russia and China watch us with pity and contempt, seeing our weaknesses as their opportunities. Meanwhile, among our own fellow citizens, disillusionment with free speech and the rule of law grows within and between successive age cohorts.[3] Evidence across twenty-five high- and middleincome countries links lack of progress on various measures of health, welfare, equality, sustainability, and personal freedom and security to support for a strong leader with extraordinary power to confront wealthy elites and fix a “rigged” or “broken” system.[4]

Secrecy endows autocrats with a powerful mystique. They rule behind closed doors, free from pressure and process. Special pleading cannot divert them, and voters, journalists, and judges cannot delay them. Human rights, expert evidence, and due process are easily set aside. When something should be done, the dictator orders it and it is done. Or so it appears: that appearance is the mystique of authoritarian rule.

The symptom of those who fall under the spell of the authoritarian mystique is “dictator envy.”[5] They covet the dictator’s capacity to get things done. They are attracted by the appearance of swift maneuver and decisive action. The reality of authoritarian rule is hidden by a wall of secrecy. And that’s how things tend to stay—until one day for some reason the dictator falls, and there is a change of regime, and suddenly the backstage record is opened up to the light of day.

Once that happens, the historian can get to work. It then transpires that doing secret business was not so simple after all. In various ways, conspiratorial government is surprisingly costly. When the iron curtain is at last lifted, we find that secrecy made authoritarian rule cumbersome and indecisive. Secretive government denied a place in society to faces that didn’t fit. Secrecy provided a cover for widespread abuses and frauds, and these were often tolerated precisely because they took place behind the scenes, so the public could never know. Secretive government denied critical knowledge even to its own leaders.

In the first weeks of 2022, while I wrote and rewrote my typescript, Russia’s Kremlin leaders secretly planned and prepared to launch a war of aggression against Ukraine. At first sight, secrecy was on Russia’s side: neither Ukrainian nor Western leaders could fully anticipate whether or where the blow would fall.

Yet, as Chapter 8 will discuss, Russia also paid a heavy price for the secretiveness of its war plans and preparations. Deprived of information, most Russians, including many ordinary Russian soldiers, were psychologically unprepared for the war. Going into battle on foreign territory, the troops also had to contend with unreliable equipment, supply shortfalls, and failing logistics. Over twenty years the Russian government had paid generously for military modernization. But, covered by secrecy, trillions of rubles had been siphoned off into waste and corruption. Kremlin leaders were blindsided. They found that Russia’s military capacity was much less than they thought. The quick victory they expected did not materialize.

In short, the mystique of authoritarian rule is undeserved. Of course, democracies also suffer from operating frictions. For citizens weary of divisive campaigns and indecisive outcomes, the defects of democracy may be all too obvious: they can be exemplified from any newspaper op-ed or TV documentary. The devil the voters know may come to seem worse than the devil they don’t. It’s not hard to understand. After all, the failings of autocracy are hidden by design. The very secretiveness of authoritarian rule makes it the devil we don’t know. A duty of scholarship is to overcome that asymmetry.

NOTE ON AUTHORITARIANISM

In this book I discuss the Soviet system of authoritarian rule. I refer to it also as an autocracy, or as an authoritarian or autocratic regime, or as a dictatorship. (The word regime can have the neutral meaning of a set of rules, or an ordered way of doing things, but it is often applied to authoritarian governments, perhaps because authoritarian leaders tend to make lots of rules for others to abide by.) In this book I use dictatorship, autocracy, and authoritarian rule or regime more or less interchangeably.

In discussing the Soviet Union’s authoritarian regime, my purpose is often to contrast its operation with that of government under liberal or representative democracy. By democracy I mean a system that allows electoral competition and majority voting based on universal franchise, with regular opportunities for the voters to replace one ruling party by another, and the right of the losers in one election to contest the next, all predicated on the rule of law. In the most general sense, authoritarian regimes can be identified by the lack of one or more of these attributes. It might be thought a weakness to define authoritarianism by its absences, but in fact this is an inevitable outcome of the fact that until the advent of democracy, all governments were authoritarian, although of varying complexions.

Of the many varieties of authoritarian government, only a few are relevant to this book, which is focused on the Soviet Union under communist rule. The Soviet Union was a single-party dictatorship: that is, the government was formed by the ruling Communist Party, which monopolized political power to the exclusion of others, and authority within the party was concentrated in the hands of a dominant party leader.[6]

The Soviet Union’s dominant party leaders were Vladimir Lenin (1917-1922), Joseph Stalin (1927-1953), Nikita Khrushchev (1955-1964), Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982), Yurii Andropov (1982-1984), Konstantin Chernenko (1984-1985), and Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1991). The political scientist Milan Svolik distinguishes between the “contested” autocrat, answerable to a small circle of rivals, and the “established” autocrat, who obtains operational support from those in his circle but does not rely on them politically.[7] In those terms, all the Soviet leaders were contested autocrats, except for Stalin, whose position was contested initially, but became established from around 1932.[8]

As Svolik suggests, there was a general tendency for the Soviet Union’s contested autocrats to seek to become established, but that path took time and was not inevitable. The changes in Soviet life associated with the transition from Stalin’s established autocracy to the contested autocracy of Khrushchev, often called “the Thaw,” are described in more detail in Chapter 1.

Acknowledgments

My first thanks go to the colleagues who watched over my early interest in secrecy and guided my steps: Leonid Borodkin, Julian Cooper, Timothy Guinnane, Saulius Grybkauskas, James Heinzen, Oleg Khlevniuk, Vera Mikhaleva, Stephen Nafziger, the late Andrei Sokolov, Leonora Soroka, Nonna Tarkhova, Amir Weiner, and Vasilii Zatsepin. Inga Zaksauskiené, my adviser and interpreter on Lithuanian history, helped me to see the Soviet borderlands in a new light. The University of Warwick’s Department of Economics and Centre on Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy supported my research with time and funding. At Stanford University, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace welcomed me as a visitor and research fellow. In the Hoover Library & Archives I found undreamed-of resources. For more than a decade, thanks to Paul Gregory, I was part of Hoover’s annual summer Workshop on Authoritarian Regimes. There, I gained new insights as well as new friends.

Many colleagues gave me indispensable assistance in preparing this book. Paul Gregory and Norman Naimark encouraged my proposal. At that stage I benefited from comments by James Fenske and two unnamed referees. While writing, I received advice on various aspects from Steven Aftergood, Roberto Stefan Foa, Vincent Geloso, Yoram Gorlizki, Pauline Grosjean, James Harrison, Oleg Khlevniuk, Branko Milanovic, Andrew Oswald, Jeffrey Round, Claire Shaw, Peter Whitewood, Inga Zaksauskiené, and Vasilii Zatsepin. At the final stage I enlisted a team of chapter readers: Ran Abramitzky, Julian Cooper, Michael Ellman, Sharun Mukand, Robert Service, Sebastian Siegloch, and Vasilii Zatsepin. At Stanford University Press, Margo Irvin found more readers to provide further comments and invaluable advice. Julie Fedor also read and commented on the entire text. All those mentioned here gave their time willingly and generously. Finally, Margo steered my typescript through to publication. I appreciate everyone’s efforts to get me to do the right thing. If I failed, I am to blame.

Much of the writing of this book was done while a pandemic kept many of us locked down at home. This was a happy accident for me, if not for those whose home became my workspace. I thank Anne Harrison for her love and patience and for reminding me of the funny side of things.

Some of the material in this book has been published before, although all of it has been revised and rewritten. I first outlined the subject of Chapter 2, the secrecy/capacity tradeoff, alongside the main story of Chapter 4, in “Secrecy, Fear, and Transaction Costs: The Business of Soviet Forced Labour in the Early Cold War,” Europe-Asia Studies 65, no. 6 (2013). The findings of Chapter 3 were published in “Accounting for Secrets,” Journal of Economic History 73, no. 4 (2013). Inga Zaksauskiené and I first described the data for Chapter 5 in “Counter-intelligence in a Command Economy,” Economic History Review 69, no. 1 (2016). Chapter 7 reuses documentation from “A No-Longer Useful Lie,” The Hoover Digest (2009), no. 1. I thank all my publishers and Inga Zaksauskiené for permission to reuse my work.

Abbreviations and Russian Terms

Cyrillic characters are romanized using the Library of Congress table at https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/russian.pdf, except that accents and diacritical marks are omitted; proper names beginning with the letters “ie” and “iu” are rendered as in Yegor and Yurii; and everyday usage takes priority where it differs, as in Ekaterinburg.

agentura—the KGB informer network Bolshevik—relating to the majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which became the ruling party of Soviet Russia in 1917

Cheka—the allRussian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage, the Soviet secret police from 1917 to 1922

Chekist—an officer of the Cheka; a generic Russian term for a secret police officer up to the present day

CIA—the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, responsible for foreign intelligence

Comecon—the Council for Mutual Economic Cooperation, the Soviet led equivalent of the OECD

CPSU—Communist Party of the Soviet Union

dopusk—security clearance

FBI—the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States, responsible for domestic counterintelligence

FSB—the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, responsible for domestic counterintelligence

GDP—gross domestic product, the value of final outlays on goods and services. “Gross” signifies the inclusion of replacement investment, and “domestic” signifies activity on a given territory.

Glavlit—Chief Administration for Literature and the Press, the office of the Soviet censorship

GNP—gross national product, equal to GDP plus the net inflow of profits and wages remitted from abroad (normally zero for the Soviet economy, making Soviet GNP interchangeable with GDP)

Gosbank—the USSR State Bank

Gosplan—the USSR State Planning Commission

Gulag—Chief Administration of CorrectiveLabor Camps of the NKVD (later, the MVD)

KGB—Committee of State Security, the Soviet secret police from 1954 to 1991, responsible for both foreign intelligence and domestic counterintelligence.

kompromat—“compromising evidence” providing a basis to suspect a person of disloyal behavior, attitudes, or intentions

konspiratsiia—“conspirativeness,” a code of secretive behavior adopted by the leadership of the Bolshevik Party (and later the CPSU)

kulak—a member of the wealthiest stratum of peasant family farmers, employing hired labor

MVD—Ministry of Internal Affairs

NATO—North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Americanled Western military alliance

NKVD—People’s Commissariat (i.e., ministry) of Internal Affairs

NMP—net material product, the value of outlays on goods utilized for consumption and accumulation, including intermediate but not final services

nomenklatura—the list of government posts reserved for members of the Bolshevik Party (later the CPSU)

OECD—Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an association of the wealthiest market economies

Orgburo—the Organization Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, responsible for membership records and the nomenklatura

osoboi vazhnosti—“of special importance,” the highest grade of Soviet secrecy, a subcategory of “top secret”

Politburo—the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the caucus of top party leaders

RDTE—research, development, testing, and experimentation (usually military)

silovik—“strongman,” a leader of the “power ministries” of postSoviet Russia, responsible for the armed forces, secret police, and civilian police

USSR—Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union

VPK—the State Military Industrial Commission of the USSR Council of Ministers

1. SECRET LEVIATHAN

Leviathan, the all-powerful sea monster of the Old Testament, was Thomas Hobbes’s metaphor for the state: “that Mortall God to which wee owe ... our peace and defence.”[9] Without Leviathan’s laws and coercive powers, Hobbes maintained, our lives would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” By submitting to Leviathan, he argued, we make our lives free and open to the development of civilization.

Since Hobbes we have learned that there are many Leviathans, not all of them benign. A recent authoritative study of state building classifies them: Despotic Leviathan (the oppressive state), Absent Leviathan (the failed state), and Shackled Leviathan (a state restrained by its own laws and by an active civil society). There is also Paper Leviathan (despotic by intention, but mostly ineffective or absent).[10]

In this book I write about the state of the Soviet Union—a regime that was clearly despotic, with a remarkable coercive capacity. Unlike those forms of despotism that rely on informality, every action of the Soviet state left a winding paper trail of decrees, orders, correspondence, forms, reports, inquiries, investigations, and audits. But this was no ineffective Paper Leviathan, for the paperwork covered every aspect of Soviet life and the decrees and directives had profound impacts on the lives of every citizen.

The Soviet state existed for seventy-four years from the Bolshevik coup d’état of October 1917 to its collapse in December 1991. Those seven and a half decades place the Soviet Union among the most long-lived of modern dictatorships. While it existed, it was also among the most secretive of modern states. The disproportion between what went on behind the scenes and what was disclosed to the public was immense. When the state collapsed, its wealth of secret records was abruptly exposed to scholarly investigation. The records show in detail the deliberate building of a powerful authoritarian state and of its industrial and military power.

I call this state Secret Leviathan. Secrecy was in the genes of the Soviet state from the first days of its creation. The Soviet state took secrecy to an extreme. When secrecy failed, the state collapsed. This book is about Soviet secrecy and its consequences.

All governments of the early twentieth century kept secrets, from military and diplomatic secrets to the confidences that arose in the ordinary business of politics. The government of the Russian Empire before the Bolsheviks was no exception. It is what came next that was exceptional.

In its first days, the new regime did not hesitate to expose the secrets of the old regime such as the record of confidential inter-Ally negotiations on a postwar settlement.[11] Regarding their own secrets, the Bolsheviks’ attitude was entirely different. They set about cloaking their activities and suppressing critical voices far more energetically than before. Their ability to do this was limited at first. It took time for the systems to be built that would enable to them to achieve their goals.

SOVIET SECRECY

Soviet government was known for its unusual secretiveness during the Cold War. “The main characteristic of the Soviet government,” wrote the American journalist John Gunther, “distinguishing it from all other governments in the world, even other dictatorships, is the extreme emphasis on secrecy.”[12] Western observers were aware that the Soviet state concealed many secrets, that there was comprehensive censorship of the press and media, and that most Soviet people were kept in the dark about nearly everything that went on outside their own narrow circles of acquaintance.[13]

Much remained unknown, however. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the archives were opened, aspects of Soviet secrecy emerged that were completely unexpected, even for the veteran scholars that found them. One surprising discovery was the sheer size of the Soviet Union’s secret sphere in comparison to the size of the public sphere. If what was published was the tip of an iceberg, how much lay beneath? Here, the economic historian R. W. Davies comments on the discovery that the volume of secret Soviet government business in the 1930s exceeded the business disclosed to the public by a whole order of magnitude:

Between 1930 and 1941, as many as 3,990 decrees of [the Soviet central government] and its main economic committee were published. We naively thought that this included a high proportion of the total. We now know that the total number of decrees issued in these years was 32,415. Most of these were “for official use only,” and over 5,000 were “top secret” ... and were available only to a handful of top officials.[14]

Another surprise was the discovery of a formal code of secretive behavior to which all party members and state officials were bound to conform: “conspirativeness” (konspiratsiia). Here the social historian Sheila Fitzpatrick describes her first encounter. In September 1990 she visited the archive of Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), a previously “closed” provincial capital. There she came across an instruction of the early 1930s on the classification and handling of paperwork:

A sentence jumps out about rules for handling “correspondence of Party organs and other conspiratorial documents.” Conspiratorial documents? When this is a ruling party, in power already for fifteen years?

... [The archive director] comes in; I ask what he makes of “conspiratorial documents” phrase about party correspondence. New to him.[15]

A third surprise was the extreme compartmentalization of Soviet secrecy. All bureaucracies are divided into compartments, and it is of the nature of these divisions that they impede cooperation and communication. But in the Soviet bureaucracies the walls between government departments were as high and as impenetrable as those that shielded the state from the public. I recall my wonder at the documentation of a dispute between the Soviet Interior Ministry (MVD) and the Finance Ministry in August 1948. The Finance Ministry was preparing the national budget, which included payments toward the upkeep of the millions of detainees and guards in the labor camps of the MVD. The budget officials asked the MVD officials to confirm the numbers. The MVD refused: “Provision of these figures will lead to familiarization with especially important information on the part of a wide circle of staff of the USSR Ministry of Finance, the State Bank, and the Industrial Bank.” (“Especially important” was the highest secrecy classification.) The MVD advised Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s deputy, that in past years such figures had been loaned temporarily to the Finance Ministry to be processed by no more than two or three highly trusted workers, then returned. It noted that the ministries of the armed forces and state security provided the Finance Ministry only with financial summaries, not head counts; and it proposed that from now on the MVD should do the same.[16]

Since those early finds, there have been two kinds of further revelations. On one side, the Soviet archives have yielded many specific secrets. Studies and documentary collections have been published that show the secret working arrangements of the top party leaders and of secret branches of activity such as the secret police, the armed forces, the defense industry, the closed cities of the military-industrial complex, and the Gulag system of forced labor camps.[17]

On the other side were revelations that laid bare particular aspects of the organization of secrecy. These included accounts of the secret archives themselves; the rules pertaining to what was secret and what was not; the development of the censorship; the concealment of people, objects, organizations, and entire cities; the formalization of “conspirative” decision making; the parallel evolution of government communications on paper and by telephone; and the operation of secret processes such as the vetting of personnel for access to secret information.[18]

After all this, there remains the task of understanding the system as a whole: how the parts fitted together to constitute a system and what were its consequences. The system had a name, but even the name was secret, being unknown to the public until Soviet secrecy collapsed. The “regime of secrecy,” as insiders named it, is defined here for KGB officer trainees of the 1970s in a secret handbook copied and made available for scholars during the 1990s:

REGIME OF SECRECY: the totality of rules determined by the organs of power and administration that limit the access of persons to secret documents and activities, codify the procedure for use of secret documents, correspondingly regulate the conduct of people involved with secrets, and provide for other measures.[19]

The Soviet regime of secrecy was not unchanging. As described in this book, it was formed by beliefs and interests in an atmosphere of conflict and mobilization. It evolved by trial and error over many years. Throughout the process, a few fundamentals can be observed. Not all were there at the beginning but, once in place, they persisted to the end.

THE FOUR PILLARS OF SECRECY

The Soviet regime of secrecy was built on four pillars that gave it exceptional coverage and iron grip. These pillars were the state monopoly of nearly everything, the censorship of the press and media, the conspirative norms of the ruling party, and the secret police and secret departments. I will briefly describe each in turn.

The state monopoly of nearly everything was the first pillar of the regime of secrecy. Under the Soviet command system, production, distribution, trade, transport, and construction were carried out almost entirely under state ownership and control. The private sector was relegated to the margins of agriculture, handicrafts, trade, and personal services. As a result, most matters that would have been private business in other countries became the business of the government. At the same time, all government business was politicized, in the sense that the ruling Communist Party based its decisions on political criteria that could override any economic, cultural, and technical considerations. In the outcome, the political business of the Soviet state was far more completely encompassing than the business of other states, including the Russian Empire that came before it.

table 1.1. The growing importance of the state: The state-owned share in the economy of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, 1914 to 1937 (selected years and percent of total)

1914

1924

1928

1937

National wealth, share of “statecapitalist” sectorNational income, share of “socialist” sector

8.3

35.0

44.0

99.1

Sources: National wealth (reproducible assets) on the territory of the Russian Empire (excluding Finland), share of the “state-capitalist” (state-owned) sector on 1 January from Vainshtein, Narodnoe bogatstvo i narodnokhoziaistvennoe nakoplenie, 403. National income on the interwar territory of the Soviet Union, share of the “socialist” sector, from TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR. Statisticheskii sbornik, 31. The socialist sector, not defined in the source, evidently extended beyond state ownership to cooperative enterprises (including collective farms) and private sideline farming by collective farmworkers.

The historical process that brought this about is suggested very approximately by Table l.i. This table reports the share of the state-owned sector in the economy in benchmark years from 1914 through 1937. The first figure shown, 8.3 percent, gives the share of the “state-capitalist” sector in the reproducible assets of the Russian Empire. Before the Revolution, therefore, private capital was heavily predominant. Later figures are shares of the “socialist” (i.e., state and cooperative) sector in the Soviet Union’s net material product. Shares of output are not exactly comparable with shares of capital, but they are sufficiently so for a broad-brush comparison.

If the state’s share of Russian economic activity was small in 1914, the 1920s are often counted as a period of a “mixed” economy. In 1924 the socialist share in the Soviet economy is reported as one-third, and nearly one-half in 1928. The increase in state ownership in 1928 over 1914 is accounted for by the nationalization of land, large-scale industry, and finance. After that, the share of the socialist sector jumped again and became almost complete. The state-owned sector received nearly all new investment funds and grew rapidly. Private industry, trade, and services were starved and repressed. Most agriculture was nationalized or “collectivized,” and collective farms fell largely under state control, although their assets other than land were nominally the joint property of the farmers. The size of the socialist sector in 1937, reported as 99 percent, is somewhat exaggerated by including as “socialist” the peasants’ private sideline farming of public land allotted to them by the collective farms from 1932 onward. Still, despite the scope for mismeasurement and overstatement, the trend is unmistakable. By the 1920s, state ownership was already much more prevalent than before the Revolution, and it became almost universal in the 1930s.

As the Soviet economic system emerged, the Soviet state acquired a near monopoly of productive capital. Along with this came the potential to monopolize the supply of an unusually wide array of information. Information is the result of activity. If the state controlled most activities, it could also control the information that they produced. In particular, state ownership was extended to publishing and the media. In short, the state monopolized the economy, which gave it control over information across an abnormally wide range, and over the channels by which information could be disseminated to the public—or blocked.

The Soviet state used its monopoly of nearly everything not only to control public information but also to suppress private information sharing. One technology that was deliberately restricted was the photocopier. A Soviet photocopier was designed in the early 1950s by the electrical engineer Vladimir Fridkin. But it posed a threat to the Soviet state’s monopoly of printed matter. In the Institute of Crystallography, where Fridkin worked, colleagues often asked him to copy articles from foreign journals, bypassing the official channels. Once this came to their notice, the KGB ordered the machine to be dismantled and its development was halted.[20] Denied access to photocopying, dissidents who wanted to self-publish manuscripts (so-called samizdat) had to rely on carbon copies laboriously typed or retyped at home; carbon paper could not make more than three or four legible copies at a time.

Another restricted information technology was dial-up telephony. The convenience of local dial-up phone networks was too great to be dispensed with (although consumer access was impeded by stopping publication of household telephone directories after the 1920s). But the Soviet authorities delayed public access to long-distance dialing by many decades. To phone a friend in most other towns required the help of a switchboard operator at the local exchange. International calls had to be booked hours or days ahead. During the 1960s, a few larger cities were connected to Moscow by intercity dialing. By 1971, when the coverage of long-distance dialing in the United States was almost complete, nearly two-thirds of Soviet long-distance calls were still connected by a human operator. One result was to restrict the private channels through which information could flow over any distance: the average Soviet person made fewer than 2 long-distance calls in 1970 compared with 35 calls in the United States and as many as 99 in Sweden, a much smaller country.[21] The effect was to limit long-distance and international calls to the eavesdropping capacity of the KGB.[22]

The Soviet government escaped the main burden of the restrictions that fell on private households and the civilian population. Imported photocopying machines could be licensed to government offices, subject to the availability of scarce foreign currency (another state monopoly).[23] As for automated dialing, as early as 1922 Lenin’s government bought and installed the so-called vertushka, a dial-up phone network that linked the top Kremlin leaders, bypassing the ears of the switchboard operator. Within a few years, high-frequency automated phone systems connected ministries and regional party offices to the center over long distances.[24]

The state monopoly of nearly everything was the first pillar that held up the regime of secrecy. While holding a monopoly inevitably creates temptations, however, it does not predetermine exactly how the monopoly will be exercised. In the Soviet Union, that depended on the other pillars that were put up at the same time.

Comprehensive censorship of the media and publishing was the second pillar of the regime of secrecy. The Bolsheviks took their first step to new rules for publishing and the media as early as 9 November 1917, two days after their coup d’état. The Decree on the Press was a preventive measure, intended to smother the newspapers opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution. The new Council of People’s Commissars gave itself powers to close publications that advocated its overthrow, or disseminated fake news, or incited criminal acts. The rationale given was that freedom of the press was merely freedom for the propertied class that owned the presses. The powers taken were temporary—to be rescinded upon the return of “normal” conditions.[25]

At this time the new measure was not particularly effective: while the state did not own all printing presses, it was a simple matter for a newspaper banned under one title to reappear under another. But, whether effective or not, the restrictions were never repealed. In the late summer of 1921, the political emergency eased. The Civil War was over, and the harvest had not yet failed. There were calls to restore press freedom. Instead, Lenin dug in his heels; he denounced the idea of media liberalization as “suicidal,” giving the same reasons as in 1917 despite the better situation.[26]

In 1918, the restriction of the opposition press was followed by measures to limit the scope of information that it was permissible to publish. No one authority was put in charge, so a division of responsibility emerged: the Cheka (as the Soviet secret police was first called) looked after political secrets while the Revolutionary Military Council did the same for military secrets. Cable traffic from abroad was monitored by the Foreign Ministry. The Ministry of Enlightenment took care of the state publishing house (schools and literature).[27]

While these measures certainly had a restrictive effect, they were only first steps on a long path to the comprehensive, centralized censorship of later years. The next important measure was the establishment of an office of the censor, known as Glavlit, on 6 June 1922. (Its full name, the Chief Administration for Literature and the Press, went through many variations, but the short form was retained to the end.) The first list of prohibited topics was promulgated: anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, military secrets, false information causing alarm, information inciting ethnic and religious hatred, and pornography.[28] But the system was not watertight because censorship remained decentralized and was implemented with many inconsistencies and loopholes.

By 1930 or so, the wrinkles were ironed out and the leaks were stopped.[29] From that time, the censors ensured that scarcely a word was printed or broadcast from one end of the Soviet Union to the other without prior scrutiny. They kept from circulation the least hint that could reflect badly on the ruling party or its leaders.

Comprehensive censorship, the second pillar of the Soviet regime of secrecy, was exceptionally effective. Throughout the history of the Soviet state there were few leaks. Great facts that were effectively concealed figure 1.1. Censorship worked: The frequency of the term “Glavlit” in 600,000 Russian books over the twentieth century (cases per 100,000 words per year)

Notes: Glavlit was the shortened name of the office of the Soviet censorship, founded in 1922. The table shows the frequency of cases of “Glavlit” per 100,000 words per year. This unit is chosen, based on the average length of a book in the Google Books Russian-language corpus of 2019 (described by Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture”) over the period shown, which was 97,777 words. The search parameters were “Glavlit” in Cyrillic characters, switching off case-sensitivity and year-to-year smoothing, A figure of 0.1 on the vertical axis would mean that, if mentions of Glavlit were randomly distributed, the probability of finding a single mention of Glavlit in a randomly chosen book in a given year and of average size over the sample was one in ten. If mentions were clustered (for example, by passages of text in which Glavlit was mentioned repeatedly), the true probability would be much lower.

include the famines of 1933 and 1947, the mass killings of 1937 and 1938, Soviet responsibility for the Katyn forest massacre of 1940 (the event itself was uncovered only by the accident of Germany’s wartime occupation of the territory on which it took place), the scale of forced labor, the military and population losses of World War II, the burden of Cold War military outlays, and the exact geolocation of almost everything, including the existence of some cities.

A simple yet unambiguous measure of the effectiveness of the censorship is shown in Figure 1.1. How well did Glavlit suppress discussion of its own existence? The Google Books Russian-language corpus of 2019 gives access to the digitized texts of 600,000 books published in the twentieth century. The vertical axis shows the frequency of mentions of “Glavlit” per 100,000 words per year; this was close to the average length of a book in the corpus. The data start in 1901, when Glavlit did not exist. In each year before 1922, when Glavlit was established, the probability of finding a single mention of Glavlit in a published book was zero or, if not zero, so close to zero as to be explained, most likely, by a typographical error or an error of digitization. In the years from 1922 to 1930, the censorship was being built, and Glavlit was mentioned and discussed in public, so the probability of finding a mention of “Glavlit” in a book of average size soared, peaking at around one-quarter. Of course, a single mention is not a discussion, so the probability of finding a discussion of Glavlit might be one or two orders of magnitude less. But in 1931 the frequency fell back to zero, or close to zero. The hush that followed was disturbed only by an occasional murmur (in 1936, for example, the frequency briefly returned to one-tenth before falling back). After that, from the late 1930s to the late 1980s, that is, for a full half century, silence reigned.

Only after Gorbachev initiated the policy of “openness” (glasnost’) in 1987 did uncensored discussion of Glavlit resume. It never returned to the level of the 1920s, for public interest was now limited to the narrow circle of historical scholars. Anyway, the lesson is that Soviet censorship worked.

What was permitted by the Soviet censors varied over time, although generally within strict limits. Writing in the first half of 1953, the economist Abram Bergson offered a simple gauge of the tendency of the secret sphere to encroach on what was previously disclosed. He used the quantity of published documentation of successive Soviet five-year plans for the national economy.[30] The first five-year plan (1929) amounted to four published volumes, full of detailed economic and social statistics (although already with notable gaps and half truths). That quantity was halved for the second plan (two volumes in 1933) and halved again for the third (one volume in 1938). The third was the last plan to be published before war broke out. The postwar period saw further restriction. The fourth plan (1946) was published in six newsprint pages in Pravda, with the fifth plan (1950) covered in just three pages.

After Stalin’s death, the policy of increasing restriction was reversed. During the post-Stalin “Thaw” (discussed below) the censors allowed a return to regular publication of economic and social statistics. Although the data published were heavily selected and the gaps remained notable, the change in policy was large enough to have important effects on the atmosphere and substance of the Soviet Union’s public discourse. Thus, a policy was changed, while the system remained the same. The strongest evidence of continuity is that, as shown in Table 1.2, the existence of the office of censorship was strictly shielded from public exposure.

The Bolsheviks did not invent censorship, which was practiced in Imperial Russia before the Soviet period. If there was continuity within the Soviet period, was there continuity from pre-Soviet times? The two systems cannot be evaluated in exactly comparable terms. The work of the historian Benjamin Rigberg makes possible only a rough comparison. He finds that the prerevolutionary statute on censorship seemed to give the imperial government sweeping powers to control the press and prevent publications that might disseminate critical views or subvert public order. But these powers remained largely unused for lack of resources. In 1882, forty-four censors were employed across the Russian Empire. By 1917, after thirty-five years of growth of the print media and in the middle of a world war, the number had risen to just forty-six. While the censors’ efforts were not completely ineffective, they did little to intimidate a lively public sphere where great issues were debated in a spirit that was often hostile to authority.[31] Rigberg concludes:

It is now clear that the tsarist regime made improper provision for the attainment of its aims. Even a staff twenty or thirty times larger than that actually functioning could scarcely have supervised effectively the vast printing operations of tsarist times. It thus seems obvious that the government cannot itself have attached overriding importance to censorship operations; else why so paltry a budget for the Chief Administration? However one speculates the conclusion seems inescapable: Censorship was not a major arm of repression which the Old Regime relied upon.[32]

In the 1960s, by contrast, the staff of Glavlit numbered not 46, nor even twenty or thirty times 46, but at least 70,000 according to a contemporary estimate.[33] A preliminary conclusion is therefore that the imperial censorship was far from comprehensive: it was a pale shadow of its successor, and no more.

The conspirative norms of the ruling party were the third pillar of the regime of secrecy. The Soviet state was brought into existence by a conspiracy, and it continued to be organized as a conspiracy until it passed from the scene. The third pillar of the regime of secrecy was the code of conspiratorial practices that each Bolshevik generation learned from those that came before and passed on to those that followed. These norms freed members of the party in power from any sense of obligation to account in public for the decisions they made or for their outcomes. On the contrary, the greatest obligation that they felt was to each other. This was expressed in the code of silence that they called konspiratsiia: “conspirativeness.”[34]

What were “conspirative norms,” exactly? When Soviet leaders and officials talked about them, they seem to have meant three things. First was the principle of need-to-know. In the words of a Politburo resolution “On the Utilization of Secret Documents” (dated 5 May 1927), “secret matters should be disclosed only to those for whom it is absolutely necessary to be informed.” The extreme compartmentalization of information was a direct result.

The second norm was personal accountability. The security of every chain of secret correspondence would eventually be assured by recording every document and registering it to an individual sender, courier, receiver, or keeper at every stage from creation to destruction or to the archive. The regulations that set out personal accountability and the records that assured it would also be secret and subject to the same rules.

The third conspirative norm was exclusiveness. No one should be admitted to secret correspondence whose reliability was not assured by prior vetting and approval. The channels of secret correspondence should themselves be secret and kept strictly separate from open channels such as the public postal and telephone services.

The code was there from the start but, just as with other aspects of the regime of secrecy, its formalization took time. The historian of party secrecy Gennadii Kurenkov notes the lack of a paper trail leading back to the original source of the secretive practices of the party in power. What is visible is that a “special” department of the party secretariat had been established within eighteen months of the Bolshevik Revolution (by March 1919), and a “conspirative” department existed already in 1920.[35]

At first, while the Bolshevik leaders could talk about conspirativeness all they wanted, paper records were not secure and presented great risks. For this reason, Lenin’s private messages of the period were peppered with demands for the recipient to take extreme precautions—to treat the contents “arch-conspiratively” or “arch-secretly.”[36] For the same reason, some early decisions of the party in power were not committed to paper, or the records were destroyed. An example is the lack of a paper trail accounting for the decision to execute Tsar Nicholas II with his family and retainers in Ekaterinburg on the night of 16 July 1918.[37] As record keeping became more secure, however, the need for informality diminished. Twenty years later, much greater crimes were committed to paper in excruciating detail.

While the Civil War continued, few discernible efforts were made to codify and elaborate the rules of secrecy. During 1918-1920, leading party committees discussed such matters no more than a handful of times. The situation changed from 1921, when the party secretariat (and, from 1922, Stalin’s Orgburo) began to consider communication security on average around twice a month.[38]

The rules of secret correspondence were formalized in a series of Politburo decisions, the first being a resolution of 13 August 1922, “On the procedure for storage and transmission of secret documents.”[39] After that, nearly every year brought new or updated regulations such as the “Rules on handling the conspirative documents of the Central Committee” (19 August 1924) or “On conspirativeness” (16 May 1929). On each occasion the rules became more specific and binding, often in response to violations or the discovery of grey areas.[40] This process would continue for decades, but the principles remained unchanged and were evident from the outset.

The historian Larissa Zakharova has described the parallel emergence of the conspirative phone call.[41] Written communication among the top leaders over any distance, whether of one kilometer or thousands, risked loss or interception. At first the telegraph and dial-up telephone seemed to offer a way to reduce or even eliminate the risks. The parallel rise of signals intelligence frustrated these hopes. Secure telecommunications required protection by coding or scrambling. In turn, this brought in third-party experts, who had to be vetted for loyalty and monitored. In the process, the Soviet secret police developed a substantial capacity for eavesdropping and phone tapping.

In short, conspirative norms were the special contribution of the Bolshevik party to Soviet secrecy. It is important to bear in mind, however, that conspirative norms could not have had their influence without Bolshevik control of the state, or without state control of the means of production, information, and publication.

The secret police and the secret departments were the fourth pillar of the regime of secrecy. Because government secrecy was identified with the security of the state, the procedures of secrecy were overseen by the same secret police that defended the ruling party by suppressing criticism and opposition. This was the Cheka (the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), renamed the GPU (Chief Political Administration) and OGPU (Unified Chief Political Administration), the functions of which were eventually absorbed by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), then devolved upon the NKGB (People’s Commissariat of State Security), renamed MGB (Ministry of State Security) after World War II, and reformed after Stalin’s death as the KGB (Committee of State Security).[42]

The secret police exercised its oversight of all other branches of the state by a distinctive innovation. This was the institution of the “secret department” (renamed the “first department” in 1965). From 1922, every state enterprise, office, institute, and facility of any kind and size across the Soviet Union maintained a secret department responsible for government communications and documentation, staffed by party members and regulated by the secret police.[43] In this way the entire state was brought into alignment with the party in its conspirative channeling and secure storage of information.

As supervisor of the secret departments throughout the government apparatus, the KGB was charged with ensuring that secret papers were safely stored and transmitted, vetting the employees whose jobs required access to secret communications, scanning the workforce for security risks, and investigating violations.

A related innovation enabled many government facilities to disappear from the public view: the numbering of key installations. On its nationalization in 1918, the former Duks aircraft works was renamed State Aviation Factory no. 1. Some motor factories were also renamed and numbered at around the same time. At the time this was primarily symbolic. In practice, the factories were often still referred to under their former names. In 1927 the defense sector of the economy began to be withdrawn into the secret sphere, and numbering proved to be a useful way to anonymize them. The first centralized list of fifty-six defense plants was drawn up and some of them were renumbered. At the same time, war-mobilization departments were set up in every supply ministry and every province.[44] Eventually labor camps were also brought under the same level of security as defense installations (as discussed in Chapter 4).

For a while there were many inconsistencies and overlaps, and new and old factory numbers were used interchangeably. These were an impediment to concealment because some facilities then required additional identifiers to avoid confusion. While some anomalies were never ironed out, the lists of numbered factories became more and more extensive and all details of their former names, locations, and production profiles disappeared from the media, only the numbers themselves being mentioned on rare occasions. Over many years the British defense economist Julian Cooper based his personal register of numbered factories on Soviet press reports of the award of honors and decorations, for example, that the director of factory no. such-and-such had been named a Hero of Socialist Labor.

REGIMES OF SECRECY: THE THAW

Stalin died on 5 March 1953. His death triggered an upheaval. A Kremlin power struggle led to the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev as Stalin’s successor. Within three years, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his personal dominance and brutal methods, although not for his policies. Associated with this turn was a new period in Soviet life sometimes called the Thaw (after a controversial novel published in 1954, one that would not have passed the censorship while Stalin lived).

It seems that the regime of secrecy, including censorship, owed nearly everything to Stalin. As soon as he became the party’s general secretary in 1922, Stalin began work to reinforce and institutionalize its conspirative norms. While emerging as the supreme party leader, Stalin guided the erection of the other three pillars that upheld the secrecy regime—the state monopoly of nearly everything, comprehensive censorship, and the first departments that safeguarded government communications under the tutelage of the secret police. In his last years as the Soviet dictator, as Chapter 4 will show, Stalin was personally responsible for unprecedented extension of the scope of secrecy.

How did the design of Soviet secrecy change with the death of the chief designer? Among the more consequential reforms of the Thaw that followed Stalin’s death was a relaxation of limits on the Soviet public sphere, giving ordinary people access to a wider range of cultural influences and to more realistic representations of Soviet economic and social problems. This aspect of the Thaw was highly visible at the time and remains salient today in historical description of the period. The question is whether this signaled any fundamental change in the underlying secrecy regime.

It is useful to place this question in the context of the wider changes in Soviet life that accompanied the Thaw. To list a few: Stalin’s image disappeared from most public places and his words ceased to be quoted as the final authority on most matters of public policy. After stagnating for decades, the living standards of Soviet citizens began a sustained improvement. Ordinary Soviet citizens began to buy Soviet-made consumer durables. The conditions of civilian employment, which had been kept on a war footing long after the end of World War II, were largely demilitarized. New policies promoted housing and food production and improved the conditions of farm workers.[45] The forced labor camps of the Gulag were transferred to the Justice Ministry, and millions of detainees were released.[46] Arbitrary police powers were curtailed, especially in relation to party members.[47] There were no more mass arrests and deportations; repression became selective and targeted. Norms and rules (sometimes called “legality”) began to play a larger part in the processes of government administration.[48] The courts no longer condemned those accused of anti-Soviet crimes based on circumstances alone and began to require evidence of guilty intentions.[49] Death sentences were no longer applied without due process or the possibility of appeal.[50] The Soviet Union’s international borders were opened to small numbers of tourists, students, and artists. The censors began to allow the publication of films and books that lacked patriotic themes and happy endings. The government resumed regular publication of official statistics for the first time since before the war.[51] Notably, Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the twentieth party congress of February 1956, in which he turned his back on Stalin, rapidly became public knowledge.[52]

The overall sequence of reforms did not follow a clear plan. It is straightforward to link them to Khrushchev’s rise to power and to 1956, the year of the “secret speech.” But this would be too simple. Some changes can be traced back to Stalin’s lifetime. By the late 1940s, Stalin had already delegated some of his former powers to subordinates in the All-Union government (the Council of Ministers) and in the provincial party organizations. As described by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, a political scientist and a historian, this delegation was provisional in the sense that Stalin could revoke it at any time, but it was also substantial and had many consequences.[53] While Stalin still lived, the frequency of repression of national and regional party leaders declined sharply. The secret police lost much of its control over local party officials.[54] Ordinary Russians no longer suffered mass arrests and deportations, which were mostly confined to the western borderlands annexed in the opening stage of World War II.[55] Citizens who broke political norms without the intention to betray the motherland could be subjected to milder social sanctions that fell short of arrest and imprisonment or execution.[56] But this was not a uniform process. At the same time, for example, as already mentioned, Soviet secrecy became even more intense.

Other changes are more clearly associated with the turnover of Soviet leaders after Stalin’s death. The new leaders immediately put a stop to several purges and moved to seek a ceasefire in Korea.[57] They quickly began to scale down the millions held in the forced labor system. This was possible because a plan to so already existed: it was prepared while Stalin was alive, but he did not agree to it and had blocked its implementation.[58]

The same was largely true of new measures to relieve the dire condition of farmworkers and the countryside.[59] The partial relaxation of Soviet censorship also belongs with the measures that had to wait for Stalin to die.

To summarize, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s the Soviet Union went through many changes. The changes were to a large extent unplanned and experimental. Although written from varied perspectives, recent historical studies of the Soviet Union in the Thaw period share a common theme of the unintended consequences of haphazard reforms, including confusion, division, excesses of political dissent, outbreaks of ordinary criminality, and conservative backlashes. Fearing to lose control, the party leaders were forced to give increasing attention to the restoration of order, which took several years to achieve to their satisfaction.[60]

Comparing before and after the Thaw, the Soviet system of authoritarian changed gears, moving from high- to low-intensity repression.[61] High-intensity repression compels by violent actions such as detention, killing, imprisonment, and forced resettlement. High-intensity repression can be targeted but is often indiscriminate. Where high-intensity repression compels by violence, low-intensity repression controls and prevents. It uses harassment and threats, which are targeted selectively on particular persons rather than entire groups.

How did the Thaw affect the Soviet regime of secrecy? Did the original regime persist with minor adjustment, or did it undergo fundamental change? This question can be answered by thinking about the four pillars of Soviet secrecy. The state monopoly of nearly everything was entirely unaffected by the Thaw. Comprehensive censorship remained in place without substantial reorganization. The scope of permitted material was somewhat widened, so now the censors had more work to process than before, and they had to make many difficult decisions as they tried to fix new limits on the public sphere. Within a few years the new limits were clearly established. The party’s conspirative norms were disturbed by a major violation, the leaking of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the outside world, but the violation was not repeated, and the code of silence was restored. And behind the scenes, the secret police and the secrete departments continued to safeguard government communications as before.

Once the Thaw had run its course, two things became clear. First, de-Stalinization would not be reversed, but it was to be kept within strict limits, and attempts to push beyond the limits would be punished. Above all, de-Stalinization would not be allowed to put at risk the state’s monopolization of the economy and the party’s monopolization of state power. Soviet repression shifted from high to low intensity, but low-intensity repression was still repression, and the political regime continued to rely on it. Indeed, after the Thaw, the balance of repression continued to evolve so that, under Brezhnev, Soviet rule became steadily less violent but also more intrusive through mass surveillance and individually targeted “preventive” measures.

A second clear outcome of the Thaw was that the Soviet public sphere was permanently widened, and the detailed operations of censorship were reprogrammed to allow more information and a somewhat wider variety of influences to enter public discourse. Important though it was, that was all. Even if a few individuals pushed at the limits, there was no public debate of the need for censorship, which continued as before so that, once the new limits on the public sphere were established, they were strictly enforced. As for the other pillars of secrecy, they stood unaltered. Thus, while the atmosphere of Soviet politics and culture changed markedly, the regime of secrecy continued from Stalin to Khrushchev and Brezhnev with only minor alterations.

NORMS OF SECRECY: USSR VERSUS USA

For much of its existence the Soviet Union saw the United States as its chief adversary—and conversely. It would be of interest, therefore, to compare the rules and practices of secrecy in the two countries during the Cold War in such a way that we could trace their interaction and coevolution— the consequences of each on the other.[62] While that is beyond the scope of the present work, a first step is to describe the norms of secrecy on each side in comparable terms. Norms do not explain practical working arrangements. No doubt poor practices and violations (some described later in this book) were frequent on both sides. Despite this, a comparison of norms does at least tell us about the expectations that leaders placed on their subordinates on either side of the Cold War.

At first sight, most secrecy systems look the same. The start is a classification hierarchy in which “top secret” matters are distinguished from matters that are merely “secret,” while secret matters are separated from those that are confidential in the ordinary way of doing business. To break a confidence leads to a warning or dismissal. To disclose a secret leads to prison or worse. Both sides used terminologies of this nature.

Beneath the surface, significant differences lay buried. One difference is that the Soviet system was older than the American system. In the United States, spying for a foreign power was made illegal by the Espionage Act of 1917, but the scope of secrecy was not legally defined, so that the act had little force. In two world wars, American press censorship was largely voluntary.[63]

An American system of secrecy was established only after World War II, by President Truman’s Executive Order (EO) no. 10290 (1951), which set out four levels of classification:[64]

“Top Secret,” “Secret,” “Confidential,” and “Restricted” . .. shall be used only for the purpose of identifying information which must be safeguarded to protect the national security....

The major criterion for the assignment of [“Top Secret”] shall be recognition of the fact that unauthorized disclosure of information so classified would or could cause exceptionally grave danger to the national security. The classification “Secret” . . . shall be given only to information which requires extraordinary protection in the interest of national security. The classification “Confidential” . .. shall be given to such information as requires careful protection in order to prevent disclosures which might harm national security. The classification “Restricted” . . . shall be applied to information having such bearing upon national security as to require protection against unauthorized use or disclosure, particularly information which should be limited to official use.

For comparison, a KGB training handbook of the 1970s sets out the rules of Soviet classification.[65]

There were four classes of secrecy, beginning with a supersecret category called “Top secret (of special importance)” (sovershenno sekretno [osoboi vazhnosti]).[66] This was followed by “top secret” (without any qualifiers), “secret,” and finally “restricted” (dlia sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniia, literally “for staff use”).

In Soviet parlance, matters are classified “top secret” (whether of special importance or not) if their disclosure can “cause harm to the interests of the Soviet state”; the degree of harm is not considered. This is enough to make them state secrets. Matters that are state secrets are listed in periodic decrees of the USSR Council of Ministers (dated 9 June 1947,28 April 1956, and 15 September 1966, for example); these lists were themselves state secrets. In consultation with the KGB, particular ministries can also declare aspects of their activity to be state secrets. Unauthorized disclosure of top secrets is a “state crime” (treason, in other words).

“Secret” matters are administrative secrets, not state secrets; their disclosure can harm a government agency or facility, rather than the state as a whole. Unauthorized disclosure may be a crime or an administrative violation, depending on circumstances, but it is not a “state crime.” The importance of the distinction is illustrated by a story from Vilnius in 1973. While drinking in a bar, a police lieutenant lost an informer’s paperwork documenting their code name, real name, address, life story, associates, criminal activities, and police contacts. Taken together, were these a state secret, leading to prosecution, or just an administrative secret? Local officials wanted the more serious charge, but Moscow overruled them. The officer lost his job, but criminal charges were dropped for lack of a crime.[67]

Finally, matters that are “restricted” are not secret but they are subject to state censorship on the basis that disclosure “can cause harm to the Soviet state.”

A side-by-side comparison (Table 1.2) highlights these and other differences. First, what was secrecy for? For Americans, the sole legitimate purpose was to protect national security (row 1 of the table). From Truman onward, it was explicit:

Information ... shall not be classified under these regulations unless it requires protective safeguarding in the interest of the security of the United States.

These words were clearly intended to stop the use of secrecy to protect bureaucratic or other interests unrelated to national security.

table 1.2. Abnormal norms? Soviet versus American norms of secrecy in the Cold War

USA

USSR

1. National security the sole criterion

Yes

No

2. Value placed on “informed citizenry”

Yes

No

3. Norms of secrecy made public

Yes

No

4. Contestable in public forums

Yes

No

5. Existence of a secret cannot be secret

Yes (1953 to 1978)

No

6. Strictures against overclassification

Yes

Yes

7. Presumption of ultimate disclosure

Yes

No

8. Citizen may request declassification

Yes (from 1966)

No

9. Scale of classification activity disclosed

Yes (from 1979)

No

10. Vetting before clearance for secret work

Yes

Yes

11. Clearance authority is civilian employer

Yes

No

12. Subject denied clearance may appeal

Yes

No

Sources: See the text.

On this issue Soviet rules diverged. Only the “top secret” classification covered disclosures threatening the interests of the state (with “state security” taking the place of “national security” in the American lexicon). In the Soviet context, matters that put the interests of a particular agency or facility at risk could then be classified “secret” despite the absence of a threat to the state as a whole. Thus, Soviet secrecy was not limited to protecting national security (or state security in the broadest sense); it could also be invoked to protect the interests of any government organization and its assets.

The scope to misuse American secrecy for private or strictly bureaucratic purposes was further restricted by an order of the Carter administration (EO no. 12065, 1978), which made it illegal to classify information with the intention “to conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error, to prevent embarrassment to a person, organization or agency, or to restrain competition.” The practical force of this provision was (and remains) limited, however, in so far as evidence of crimes or abuses may still be concealed under US secrecy as long as covering up the crime was not the motive behind the original classification.[68] By contrast, Soviet secrecy was deliberately exploited to cover up the party leaders’ complicity in great crimes, such as mass killings, carried out with no higher purpose in mind.

If a degree of secrecy was necessary, was it a necessary evil, limited by the citizens’ interest in open government? American norms (Table 1.2, row 2) acknowledged the value of an “informed citizenry” for democracy and accountability. Eisenhower’s EO no. 10501 (1953) opened with the words: “Whereas it is essential that the citizens of the United States be informed concerning the activities of their government.” With minor variation, similar words have appeared in every version since. But the idea that government information has civic value did not exist for Soviet citizens.

While the American public was expected to put up with a certain amount of secrecy, it was kept fully informed of the rules by which secrecy worked (Table 1.2, row 3). These were set out and revised in executive orders published by each incoming presidential administration starting from Franklin D. Roosevelt (EO no. 8381, 1940). Because they were published, the principles could be debated in the US media and Congress, and their application challenged (not always with success) in the courts (Table 1.2, row 4).

By contrast the Soviet regime of secrecy was itself a secret, and the rules of classification and document handling were strictly censored, so that they remained entirely outside of public discussion and were never debated or challenged in public.

To what extent was secrecy on either side reflexive, in the sense of covering itself (Table 1.2, row 5)? This question can be asked at two levels, the level of the system (or regime) and the level of particular secrets. At the system level, the contrast is clear: Soviet secrecy was reflexive while American secrecy was not. At the level of detail, Soviet secrecy was reflexive again: any reference to the existence of classified information, even if it did not disclose any of that information, was just as secret as the information that was classified. This had important practical implications (detailed in Chapter 3).

It is an open question whether US secrecy norms were reflexive at the level of detail. From Eisenhower (EO no. 10501,1953) through Nixon (EO no. 11652, 1972), the American rules contained the instruction: “Material containing references to classified materials, which references do not reveal classified information, shall not be classified.” From Carter (EO no. 12065 !978) onward, the limitation was removed. Whether that made any practical difference is unclear. But on the Soviet side, we will see, it was not even a question: the existence of a secret was always secret.

A risk on both sides was overclassification, that is, turning restricted or confidential items into secrets or secrets into top secrets, whether motivated by excessive caution or private concealment. What kind of limits were placed on overclassification (Table 1.2, row 6)? On the American side, strictures were issued against overclassification from Truman onward (EO no. 10290,1951). Despite these, effective limits proved elusive. On the Soviet side (Chapter 3 will show), KGB officials did occasionally complain about the burdens of undue secrecy. There is no sign of support for such complaints from higher levels.

Was secrecy intended to be forever (Table 1.2, row 7)? Truman (EO no. 10290, 1951) allowed the option of classifying a document for a set time, after which declassification would be automatic. His successors varied the idea in small ways. The general rule of the Cold War era became that American secrecy should generally be time limited, but the limit could be extended for as long as necessary.[69]

Other measures forced American officials to give practical attention to declassification. The Freedom of Information Act (1966) entitled private citizens to seek disclosure of government information (although the government could still refuse it) (Table 1.2, row 8). The annual reports of the Information Security Oversight Office (established in 1979) disclosed the scale of aggregate classification and declassification activity across US government departments (Table 1.2, row 9).

Such concerns were foreign to the work of Soviet officials. Soviet secrecy was forever, with exceptions made when it served official purposes to release information that was formerly secret. The years after Stalin’s death saw a wave of such revelations. But any visitor to the Soviet-era buildings that still house most Russian archives today can tell that their designers never anticipated the need to provide members of the public with a comfortable reading room or other facilities.

The American and Soviet states both encountered the need to vet the government employees who would work with secret information for their trustworthiness (Table 1.2, row 10). For Americans this was an afterthought. Not until the Hatch Act (1939) was the federal government prohibited from hiring members of organizations promoting its overthrow. EO 8781 (1941) introduced criminal record checks for federal employees, and the War Service Regulations (1942) barred federal employment of anyone whose loyalty was in reasonable doubt. Concerns were heightened after World War II, when the FBI became aware of the systematic infiltration of Soviet agents into US government service.[70] Truman’s EO no. 9835 (1948) established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which provided for background investigation of loyalty and character.[71]

In the present context, two features of the US vetting system that emerged are notable. First, while investigation of loyalty was typically subcontracted to the FBI, responsibility for granting or denying clearance remained with the head of the employee’s department (Table 1.2, row 11). Second, from the last year of the Eisenhower administration (EO no. 10865, i960), a subject whose security clearance was denied or revoked could appeal the ruling (Table 1.2, row 12), based on rights to know the grounds of refusal, to reply, to call witnesses, and to be represented—all conditional on the requirements of national security, however.

The loyalty of party and government workers was a concern for the Soviet state from its foundation. Two institutions were created to filter them for loyalty, the nomenklatura and the dopusk. The nomenklatura emerged in the early 1920s and the dopusk at some point thereafter. The nomenklatura provided a first filter: it listed thousands of leading government positions to be filled by party members approved by the Central Committee secretariat (eventually there were separate nomenklaturas for the republican and provincial levels of government administration).[72] The second filter was established by the dopusk, the Soviet equivalent to the US security clearance, issued only after a background check on the subject. The dopusk was issued at three levels, third (for “secret” matters), second (for “top secret” matters), and first (for matters “of special importance”).[73]

Soviet security clearance in the Cold War differed from the American vetting process in two features (discussed further in Chapter 5). One, the final decision lay with the secret police, which clashed regularly with managers. Two, the process was entirely secret, with the subject kept in ignorance of any investigation. If the outcome was negative, the subject’s employment was then terminated on other grounds. There was no question of appeal, therefore.

The grading of access to secrets, like the grading of the secrets themselves, indicates that secrecy was not an absolute, even in the Soviet Union. This is suggested even more strongly by another classification that existed everywhere, although rarely acknowledged: the category of “open secrets.” In the Soviet Union an example of an open secret was the widespread use of undercover informers by the secret police (discussed in Chapter 6). The hierarchical nature of secrets and the scope for leakage across the boundaries between the various grades has led the historian Asif Siddiqi to propose the idea of a map of Soviet society contoured by access to knowledge classified at different levels.[74]

WHAT THIS BOOK WILL SHOW

What was the value of secrecy? Government secrecy is employed to the extent that it helps governments and parties in power to achieve their goals. Chapter 2, “The Secrecy/Capacity Tradeoff,” argues that, where communists took control of the state, their goals were to retain state power and to expand it in unprecedented ways. Up to a point, secrecy contributed to both these goals.

Secrecy was also costly. Direct costs were the efforts of government personnel diverted from other priorities to preserve the secrecy of their business. Indirect costs were the harms done by secrecy to the wider effectiveness of the state. These included the spread of suspicion and mistrust through the state and society, and the inability to correct policy mistakes because of the suppression of knowledge about them. The result was a tradeoff: for the sake of its own security, the Soviet regime pursued secrecy far beyond the point where state capacity began to decline. This implies that, although the communists aimed to expand state power, it was not their most important goal. Their most important goal was to hold on to power at all costs.

The following five chapters illustrate this theme, providing evidence of a range of damages to Soviet state capacity arising from the excess of secrecy. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the practical impact of conspirative norms on government business and the working lives and practices of the officials responsible for it. These were direct costs of secrecy. Compliance costs arose because secrecy created burdensome additional rules and procedures with which business partners had to comply in order to do business. There were also behavioral costs: an environment of secrecy reduced cooperation among higher authorities and lower officials, whose efforts were redirected away from government goals. Chapter 3, “The Secrecy Tax,” considers compliance costs. It takes a deep dive into the procedures that assured secrecy. It describes these procedures, and it shows that compliance with them placed a burden on government business similar to a cascading transaction tax. When measured, the secrecy tax was surprisingly heavy. The costs could be mitigated by ignoring them or working around them, but systematic violations were not the norm. To the limited extent that we can measure across countries, the Soviet costs of secrecy were heavier than in modern liberal-democratic states by an order of magnitude. The readiness of the Soviet authorities to pay a heavy secrecy tax shows the importance of secrecy to their system of rule.

Chapter 4, “Secrecy and Fear,” considers the behavioral cost of secrecy. Soviet secrecy affected government business not only procedurally, but also by changing the behavior of government personnel. An event study from the late 1940s is based on a natural experiment in history. Unexpectedly, Stalin ordered a sharp intensification of the regime of secrecy. This created new penalties for government officials who shared secret government information with each other, even though sharing the information was necessary to carry out their normal business. The shock sent a ripple of fear through the Soviet bureaucracy. As the wave reached them, we see how officials stopped doing their regular jobs and turned their efforts instead to self-protection and mutual insurance against heightened risks. Normal business did not stop, but it slowed down before recovering.

Two more chapters are about indirect costs of the regime of secrecy. Nearly all Soviet business was government or party business, and nearly all government and party business was secret. No one could be selected for a white-collar or management role unless the KGB cleared them for access to government secrets at the level corresponding to the role. This gave the KGB oversight of the selection and promotion of the Soviet state’s responsible personnel. How this worked is addressed in Chapter 5, “Secret Policing and Discrimination.” The KGB used evidence held in its secret files to discriminate against candidates whose life experience and personal attributes gave grounds for suspicion. The evidence was called kompromat (“compromising evidence”). Vetting based on kompromat valued loyalty over competence and conformity over diversity and originality. Discrimination on such lines harmed the quality of the state’s human capacities.

The party aimed to win the people’s trust, but its methods of rule created a low-trust society. By its nature, the Soviet police state drove its enemies underground. To pursue them and neutralize their influence, the state used the secret police and undercover informers. This is the subject of Chapter 6, “Secret Policing and Mistrust.” The informer network provided the state with important information that could not be obtained in any other way. A few documents from the archives of the Soviet security police allow us to see in detail how the KGB developed productive informers: how they came to the KGB’s attention, were recruited, and were trained and reeducated. A common factor among potential recruits was a tainted past, documented by kompromat. In principle this allowed for recruitment under pressure, but pure coercion was an inadequate foundation for productive, long-term collaboration. In fact, the KGB often caught such people at a moment when they were having second thoughts about their underground activities or feelings of regret for past transgressions. People in this situation might be superficially willing to accept recruitment, but their commitment was often skin deep, so that they might then go on to waver or become passive, and this had to be managed. It was essential for the agent to trust the case officer, and for the agent to win the trust of the subjects being secretly investigated. The purpose of winning trust was to carry out deception. In turn, the penetration of society by informers was an open secret. Private citizens learned to distrust strangers, especially those that sought familiarity. In the short term, lack of trust in society raised the costs of government surveillance. In the long term it harmed society and the economy.

Chapter 7, “Secrecy and the Uninformed Elite,” investigates the effects of secrecy on the capacity of the state to know itself and correct its policies. In most modern societies, even if public opinion is underinformed about some issue of state, there is usually an informed elite. In the Soviet state, no one was entitled to know anything beyond their immediate sphere of responsibility. Thus, secrets were withheld not only from the Soviet public but even from party leaders who lacked a direct need to know. The outcome was a chronically underinformed leadership. The chapter describes the case of Soviet defense outlays. In the sunset years of Soviet rule, Mikhail Gorbachev ordered disclosure of the Soviet Union’s true military spending. In the arena of international diplomacy, he concluded, secrecy had cost the Soviet Union its credibility. No one would negotiate arms control with a state that could be expected to lie about the size of its armed forces or military budget. Only openness, Gorbachev believed, could regain external trust. From this point the friends and enemies of greater openness in military affairs fought a protracted struggle. Possibly, however, the struggle was pointless: the true burden of Soviet military spending had been so well hidden for many years that it had been changed from a secret, known if only to a few, into a mystery that no one could fathom. It follows that for many years no one had been controlling the Soviet budgetary allocation to defense, something that ought to be one of the most important strategic decisions of any state.

Communist rule in Russia ended with the collapse of secrecy. The transition from communist rule and the state-owned command economy took place amid a new crisis of state capacity, which turned out to be much more decisive for how things worked out than the plans and policies espoused by reformers or the advice they received from outsiders. The crisis of state capacity was resolved, once again, in an authoritarian way. The book is concluded by Chapter 8, “Secrecy and Twenty-First-Century Authoritarianism.” Its subject is the forms of government that have emerged in Russia (and some other countries, most importantly China) since the Cold War came to an end. Previous chapters described the nexus between secrecy and an authoritarian system in the era of the typewriter, the filing cabinet, and the briefcase. Digital information technologies and peer-to-peer information sharing have revolutionized the context of authoritarian rule, forcing a redefinition of the spheres and rules of secrecy. I describe this process as the morphing of Secret Leviathan into Leviathan of a Thousand Lies. What remains the same is that the core of power in Russia (as in other authoritarian states) is once again veiled by secrecy. Moreover, the secrecy/ capacity trade-off is still at work.

My book seeks to contribute to history and social science. Its contribution to history lies in the thick description of Soviet secrecy, a subject little studied before now because it was deliberately concealed. My book discusses the historical evolution of the Soviet regime of secrecy and its uses and costs, with a focus on those aspects that appear to have been more specific to communist rule. As for what is left out, Soviet secrecy also provided a cover for corruption and cheating the state.[75] But corruption and cheating take place under all systems of rule, so these are omitted.

To social science my book contributes a simple idea, the secrecy/capacity trade-off. In turn, this is based on a way of understanding the gains and losses from secrecy and their distribution. As explained in Chapter 2, the innovations involved are modest steps, not great leaps. Other scholars have linked authoritarian rule to the control of information. However, it is often assumed that the control of information is sufficiently understood as propaganda plus censorship (including the punishment of violators such as harassing or killing disobedient journalists).[76] As this chapter has already shown, comprehensive censorship was only one of the four pillars of the Soviet regime of secrecy. Again, the idea that authoritarian rulers must incur costs in order to protect their ruling position is not new to social and political science. The contribution of this book is to locate the costs of the Soviet regime of secrecy in damaged state capacity, and to explain why the Soviet rulers ignored the damage or found it acceptable.

For both history and social science, my book tries to inject some precision into the idea of the costs of secrecy. In the last months of Soviet rule, a senior KGB officer floated the figure of 30 to 40 billion rubles (equal to 3 to 4 percent of Soviet GDP in 1990) in the Russian press as the social cost of “unjustified secrecy.”[77] Unfortunately the meaning of this estimate remains unclear. An obvious issue is that “unjustified” secrecy begs the question of how much is justified. Less obviously, as this book will show, the cost of secrecy comes in many forms, including the resources consumed by enforcing and assuring it, the resources wasted because of the adverse behaviors it induces, and the opportunities for economic and social development foregone because of the restrictions that secrecy places upon individual and social choices.

The focus of this book is on how secrecy affects state capacity. It combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to conclude that Soviet secrecy helped to keep the Communist Party in power, while doing material damage to the capacities of the state the communists built. If it has a shortcoming of which I am aware, it is that my book is not always able to determine the size of these effects. Where my skills fall short, I have every confidence that others will be able to improve on my efforts.

2. THE SECRECY/CAPACITY TRADEOFF

The Bolsheviks began to build their state from near zero. World War I had weakened Russia’s old monarchical regime and its governing institutions, and the Bolshevik insurrection completed their collapse. Now the Bolsheviks had to reestablish the minimum duties of any state—external defense, internal security, the promulgation of laws, and the policing of crime. Restoring these minimum functions received the Bolsheviks’ first attention. As the historian Lars Lih noted, the communist experiment had “many long-term destructive consequences,” but history should recognize the communists’ achievement of building a “serviceable state apparatus out of nothing” despite their inexperience.[78]

But the Bolsheviks’ goal was not to restore the state as it had been. They aimed to build a new state that was far more powerful than Russia had ever seen, with broader scope and more sweeping authority than other states of the time.

It took the Bolsheviks no more than twenty years to achieve this goal. Within that time the Soviet state became virtually the sole legal owner of land, industrial capital, and transport infrastructure, public utilities and services, urban housing, educational and health facilities, public media, news and entertainment, and virtually the sole employer of nonagricultural labor. It became the monopoly buyer of farmers’ surpluses of major foodstuffs and of nearly all nonagricultural goods and services, which it resold to the population at controlled prices. It censored the press and communications. It kept the public and private lives of the citizens under continuous surveillance. As well as strictly policing the external borders, it also controlled where broad categories of people could live and move within their own country.[79]

As the powers of the Soviet state expanded, the rights of citizens were restricted by laws that created many novel offences. These laws extended the powers of the agencies of Soviet internal security and law enforcement. As a result, while policing is among the functions of any state, the police functions of the Soviet state became much more sweeping and intrusive than was normal elsewhere. That kind of society is sometimes called a “police state.”[80]

The growing operational demands that the party leaders placed on the Soviet state continually challenged its capabilities. One result was continuous policy cycles in all aspects of Soviet life, from the economy to criminal justice to culture. These cycles began with aggressive plans and campaigns that designated new priorities and imposed new controls. The cycle ran from initial successes and touted achievements to overreach, disorder, and retrenchment, followed eventually by normalization. Whether the new normal involved more or less centralized regulation than the old one depended on the historical phase of the Soviet system.

The functions and powers of the Soviet police state were more comprehensive than in other countries, but this was not all. They were also more secret. The enforcement of secrecy was another challenge to the capabilities of the Soviet state. This chapter considers how secrecy could add to these capabilities, how it could also detract from them, and what was the net effect.

THE TWIN GOALS OF COMMUNIST RULE

Wherever they took power, communist rulers pursued two objectives: to monopolize state power and to expand it. To monopolize power, they repressed opposition and silenced unauthorized criticism. To expand power in all its “hard” and “soft” dimensions, they invested in the military, economic, and cultural capabilities of the state.

This is a simplified interpretation of the goals of communist rule. Like all simplifications, it might not be useful for all purposes.[81] At first sight it seems to exclude the influence of communist ideas (officially defined by “Marxism-Leninism”) about raising the condition of the workers and modernizing society. In fact, both Marx and Lenin are represented by the goals of monopolizing and expanding state power, although in somewhat reduced form. From Marx, the communists inherited an antipathy to private property in general and specifically to private property rights as the legitimate basis of decentralized social action. As Marx told the story of “primitive” accumulation, the capitalist class had exploited state power to help them seize the means of production from the producers. In the workers’ hands, as the Bolsheviks saw it, state power became the agent that would now expropriate the expropriators (or “loot the looters” in Lenin’s more colorful phrase).[82] For this reason, the Bolsheviks laid tremendous weight upon seizing state power, on excluding all other influences and interests from its direction, and on developing it to the utmost.

From Lenin came the Bolsheviks’ view of global society as an arena of conflict between capitalism and socialism, where hostile classes and social systems contended for the prize of domination. Without an exclusive hold on state power, the Bolsheviks would be quickly dislodged by the internal class enemy. But to hold power within Russia was not enough. In Lenin’s words of 1917, Russia must “either perish or overtake and outstrip the advanced countries.”[83] The workers’ state must be powerful enough to dominate its neighbors, or the Bolsheviks would be crushed by the external enemy.

The communists found secrecy useful in working toward both their twin goals. And secrecy did contribute to both the monopolization and expansion of state power—but not at the same rate, and only up to a point.

The contribution of secrecy to the ruling party’s monopoly of power does not require detailed explanation. Secrecy and censorship allowed the communist leaders to frame public discourse as they wished by excluding competing voices, values, visions, and the knowledge that might have lent credibility to the alternatives. The same secrecy and censorship also kept those with private access to alternative ideas and facts isolated from each other. Those who felt they had an alternative for Russia were prevented from finding each other and from building networks, developing strategies, and summoning others to collective action to challenge the regime. These considerations made secrecy the key to the security of the ruling party’s hold on power.

How might secrecy promote the expansion of the state’s powers—as distinct from state security? The distinction may seem like a thin one at first sight. But the experience of liberal democracies shows the difference: they have found uses for secrecy that protect the state, but without shielding the ruling party from public criticism, political competition, and frequent elections with unpredictable outcomes. Secrecy that is limited in this sense is widely regarded as legitimate in that the limits are regulated by law and can be appealed in the courts. Limited secrecy can then be thought of as something like a government prerogative: just as law-abiding citizens may close their curtains against nosy neighbors, rulers that govern by consent are entitled to conceal information that private or foreign interests might exploit to the detriment of the community.[84]

Military secrecy and budget secrecy are examples. If the outsider is a foreign power, the government holds its war plans in secret. The gain to the community is to make the foreign adversary uncertain of its best move. Alternatively, if the outsider is a special-interest group that seeks preferential treatment, the government shields its budgetary processes by secrecy. The gain to the community comes from closing off the lobbyists’ inside track. In both cases, secrecy gives the state greater autonomy, making it more capable of choosing its own path. In both cases, it is true, secrecy also somewhat limits the rights of citizens to take part in formulating policies or to know what state officials are up to when they are being paid by the public. When there is secrecy, the voters must trust the government to do the right thing. Only afterward can they hold it accountable. For liberal democracies, therefore, some secrecy may be necessary, but it is still a necessary evil.

To summarize, secrecy has distinct uses. It can be used to enhance the capabilities of the state. It can also be used to protect the incumbent ruler. It is not hard to see why a party bent on holding and expanding state power would exploit secrecy for both reasons. Hence—Secret Leviathan.

How far can secrecy be taken? For the sake of regime security, the Bolsheviks took secrecy far beyond the limits encountered in liberal democracies. They extended secrecy to all decision making, to all information that might make them accountable, or that risked enabling or empowering civic activism independent of the Communist Party.

Why did they do this? The extension of secrecy was never an explicit goal of communist rule, nor did it have any foundation in the ideals of socialism that they inherited. Rather, they did it because they could. More precisely, the underground conspirators who seized state power in 1917 were already habituated to secret ways of working and coordinating their work. Then, their monopolization of state power and the ensuing centralization of economic, social, and cultural life under state management gave them unexpected opportunities to extend conspirative practices throughout the spheres that they controlled. By trial and error, they learned to use these opportunities to the fullest extent.

This book will show that, in doing so, the Soviet rulers encountered the increasing costs of secrecy. Ratcheting up the degree of secrecy and restricting the availability of information gave rise to both benefits and costs. The benefits were increased security of the regime and increased autonomy of the state. But the costs were manifold and were also increasing. Moreover, the costs fell exclusively on the state’s capabilities. The party’s hold on the state became ever tighter, while the state’s capabilities declined.

The rising costs were both direct and indirect. Directly, secrecy diverted the state’s resources and efforts away from other priorities to the handling and storing of secrets and the control of public discourse. Indirectly, secrecy spread fear and suspicion in the state and mistrust in society, lowered the quality of government information, and made some contribution to the eventual collapse of Soviet rule.

In short, secrecy made the ruling party more secure by helping to scatter and silence its opponents. It also added to the capacity of the Soviet state—up to a point. Beyond that point, what additional secrecy gave to the rulers with one hand it took away from the state with the other. As a result, the capacity of the state was increasingly compromised.

WHAT IS STATE CAPACITY?

The concept of “state capacity” has given rise to an extensive literature at the interface of political science, economics, and history. This literature is of great interest, but a particular problem is that it has not paid close attention to the experience of twentieth-century communism. In the next two sections I will discuss what is known about state capacity. After that, I will illustrate how twentieth-century communists were exceptional state builders.

There is no single definition of state capacity. Some definitions are descriptive, while others are normative. Descriptive definitions list various attributes of the state that can help it to get things done. If the state is able to get more of a thing done, or get more things done, then it has greater capacity. For example, political scientists Hanson and Sigman define state capacity as the ability of the state to “coerce, tax, and administer.”[85] Economic historians Johnson and Koyama propose the ability to “collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide public goods.”[86] As short lists these are descriptively useful, although (we will see) limited in what they cover.

Normative definitions focus on the capacity of the state to maximize an assumed objective function. Economists Besley and Persson, for example, define state capacity as “the institutional capability of the state to carry out various policies that deliver benefits and services to households and firms.”[87] This presumes that the government’s intention is to serve society in a benign or inclusive way, which might not be the case. More neutrally the economic historian Mark Dincecco defines state capacity as “the state’s ability to accomplish its intended policy actions—economic, fiscal, and otherwise.”[88] But this still measures capacity relative to intentions. On that basis a highly interventionist state would have no more capacity than a state that leaves nearly everything to private initiative, provided only that both succeed in the tasks they set themselves. In this book I have in mind the capacity of the state to get things done, measured on a scale that does not depend on government intentions, benevolent or otherwise. Therefore, I will focus on state capacity in its descriptive sense.

In that spirit, what is the scope of things a state can do that require capacity? The short lists provided by the literature such as “coerce, tax, and administer,” or “collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide public goods,” are a good start. Probably what is included here does not require too much explanation. National defense and the enforcement of public laws and private contracts are textbook cases of the public goods that can be efficiently supplied by government. No government can be effective without administrative capacity, a requirement of multiple objectives that can be achieved only by subdividing tasks across a multifunctional bureaucracy and delegating them from higher to lower levels. As for fiscal capacity, it supplies the funding necessary for the other aspects of state capacity.[89]

Is more detail necessary? In the interest of parsimony, the literature often singles out fiscal capacity not just for itself but as an indicator that can stand for state capacity generally. Fiscal capacity has the advantage of being measurable in government accounts over long periods of time and across many countries. Relying on fiscal capacity to proxy for state capacity generally is not unreasonable, given that fiscal capacity is generally complementary to some other aspects of state capacity, which, therefore, should all tend to be correlated with each other.[90] The larger the number of diverse aspects of state capacity we need to consider, however, the less we should rely on fiscal capacity to represent them all, since the chance that at least one other significant aspect is a substitute rather than a complement is likely to increase as the scope of state capacity widens.

The scope of demands that communist rulers placed on state capacity was unusually wide, and any description of state capacity under communism demands attention to aspects that fail to make the conventional shortlists or, even if shortlisted, are rarely treated in detail. Think for example of human capacity in the sense of competent, multiskilled, knowledgeable, noncorrupt personnel, selected and motivated to pursue the state’s objectives.[91] This might be a factor in the capacity of any state, but it was particularly important for communist states, simply because their leaders expected the state to do so much more than in other societies.

Something that communist leaders particularly demanded of state personnel was to exercise ownership and control rights over most productive capacity. Productive capacity under state ownership is completely overlooked in the state capacity literature. Indeed, it is not currently measured in any major cross-country historical dataset (as discussed in the appendix to this chapter).

A related aspect, administrative capacity, although found in the Hanson-Sigman short list, is seldom defined or investigated.[92] Building administrative capacity was a core project of communist state builders. None of their goals could be achieved without the subdivision and delegation of tasks. In turn, to build administrative capacity posed difficult tradeoffs between the scope and specialization of executive agencies.[93]

A feature of administration to which communist leaders gave especially close attention was the control function, as in the military sense of “command and control.” When commands were issued to officials at lower levels, how would higher officials know whether the commands were successfully executed?[94] In economically decentralized societies, much of the economic control function is given over to markets, prices, and profits. In command economies, the control function of prices was absent or weakened, so administrative control took its place and made very significant demands on state capacity.

Arising from this, but separate from it, was the capacity of the state to diagnose the level responsible for policy failures as they occurred: a policy might fail because of lack of effort or competence at lower levels, or because the policy itself was mistaken, in which case the fault lay above. In turn, this suggests the need for capacity to learn and correct errors. In an uncertain and fast-changing world, policy makers make mistakes. Decisions have unintended consequences. The multiplying losses associated with uncorrected errors may eventually grow to represent existential risks. To avoid these, the state needs an open channel for those willing to speak truth to power. When the message gets through, the state ought to be capable of responding by adjusting its policy settings, adapting its instruments, and reordering priorities.[95] This cannot be taken for granted, because those who seek power rarely wish to be corrected. Open political competition provides a mechanism for learning: the voters can decide whether a policy has failed and eject the authors from office. When political competition is suppressed, error correction must take place through an administrative process—if it is provided for.

A final dimension of state capacity is time. State capacity needs to be durable, because state breakdown invites civil violence and foreign intervention and is associated with persistent development setbacks.[96] What is known about the design of durable states? One form of constitution that is relatively sustainable is a state that coevolves with civil-society activism, allowing the citizens to participate in government and restrain government by laws.[97] Conversely, authoritarian directives that superimpose top-heavy controls on an unresponsive society have been shown to be ineffective or self-limiting.[98] But the evidence of communist states, which have shown surprising resilience (and sometimes fragility) in peace and war, is typically ignored or mentioned only in passing in the studies that are cited here.[99]

To summarize, state capacity can have many dimensions. Coercive, legal, fiscal, human, productive, administrative, control, and learning capacities all look as if they might have separate implications for the conduct of the state’s business—the more so, the more encompassing is the business of the state. Time is also a dimension of state capacity because an effective state must be durable.

This book investigates the relationship between secrecy and state capacity. When we look over the activities that make up state capacity, where does secrecy belong? On the face of it, secrecy belongs, first of all, to legal capacity. Legal capacity is the ability to create formal rules that allow people to resolve disputes without violence. Secrecy is the set of formal rules that restrict what people are allowed to learn, which limits the scope for people to engage in disputes in the first place. Then again, secrecy is closely related to coercive capacity: coercion restricts people’s choices by threatening them with violence, whereas secrecy restricts their choices by preventing them from learning about other possibilities. Based on examples we have already mentioned, secrecy keeps the adversary guessing. It is easier to coerce an adversary who has no idea when or where the next blow might fall, whether the adversary is a foreign enemy or a domestic opponent. In this sense, secrecy economizes on coercion.

Secrecy also turns out to affect all the other capacities. Think of administrative capacity, which is the ability to subdivide and delegate tasks in an organization. The secrecy involved in compartmentalizing information has the potential to make subordinates more compliant, because it deprives them of the information that could allow them to challenge orders or work around them, or to combine with other subordinates to resist the principal.

In the examples given so far, secrecy appears to augment state capacity. But in some other respects, state capacity might be impeded by secrecy. Think of human capacity, which is made up by the number and quality of public servants. Human capacity is influenced by secrecy because subordinates must be chosen who, in carrying out their tasks, can be trusted to keep the secrets they know and lack interest in the secrets that they do not need to know. It is a good question whether a state will be served best when officials are selected for pliability and lack of curiosity.

And it is straightforward to see how secrecy might impede the state’s capacity for error correction. Learning from mistakes and unintended consequences depends on two things—the free circulation of information and the sense that people are free to draw attention to policy failures—both inhibited by secrecy. A state that repeats mistakes because it cannot learn from them might eventually lose durability too.

To summarize, it seems that secrecy can augment several aspects of state capacity, at least up to a point. But questions arise along the way that suggest limits on the relationship. For example, lack of information that would allow officials or citizens to challenge policies and their implementation will eventually be damaging if it prevents errors from being corrected.

In this chapter I will suggest that the net effects of secrecy on state capacity are nonlinear: a certain amount of secrecy is likely to be capacity enhancing, but as secrecy becomes more intense, the net benefit to state capacities of various kinds begins to wear off and turns into a loss. The subject of this book is then how the Soviet rulers added to the state’s capabilities, what those capabilities amounted to—and how secrecy first added to them and then eroded them.

STATE CAPACITY: PRODUCTIVE, EXTRACTIVE, OR PROTECTIVE?

Does high state capacity promote economic development? To begin with, it can be seen that the wealthy market economies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) all have high state capacity and that many middle-income and nearly all poor countries such as in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa do not.[100] This suggests that a capable state might be productive for economic development.

Also consistent with the evidence is an alternative view, that the state is primarily extractive. Based on the possibility of reverse causation, the economist Bryan Caplan has argued that state capacity building is mostly wasteful, and richer countries acquire higher-capacity states only because they can afford the luxury of waste.[101] On this view the state is primarily extractive, and greater wealth permits bureaucrats and politicians to extract more rents from society.

Historical data, which make it possible to compare the dynamics of economic development and state building in different countries, generally support a more nuanced conclusion. States that were capable but avoided the excesses of despotism and corruption appear to have fostered early economic development: they complemented the market-economy by suppressing internal and external predators, guaranteeing property rights, and providing public goods.[102] Providing public goods could be called productive, whereas suppressing rent seeking and defending against external predators are protective functions. In research on these lines, however, it is often difficult to separate the productive contributions from the protective ones. The most convincing evidence relates to the protective functions of the state. Various studies have been able to link both state building and economic development to historical experiences of warfare. This suggests that the stimulus to state building was to seek protection from warfare. Notably, the evidence has been drawn from almost every region and period of history—except that of twentieth-century communism.[103]

Geloso and Salter, economic historians, argue that protection is the other side of extraction. Richer countries might invest more in state capacity, not because state capacity is productive, but because it is extractive. In global society, countries with weak states can expect to be plundered by predators, and wealthier countries will provide higher value as targets for plunder. Therefore, wealthier countries must have invested more in state capacity, not because it brought prosperity but because it protected prosperity once achieved.[104]

This view of state capacity would not have surprised the historian Richard Tilly, who famously wrote: “War made the state and states made war.”[105] It would have been endorsed enthusiastically by the nineteenth-century German economist and advocate of German unification, Friedrich List, who responded to the “English” idea that a wealthy economy is more important than a powerful state as follows:

Power is of more importance than wealth because a nation, by means of power, is enabled not only to open up new productive sources, but to maintain itself in possession of former and of recently acquired wealth, and because the reverse of power—namely, feebleness—leads to the relinquishment of all that we possess, not of acquired wealth alone, but of our powers of production, of our civilisation, of our freedom, nay, even of our national independence, into the hands of those who surpass us in might.[106]

COMMUNISM AND STATE CAPACITY

I have argued that the experience of communist state building has been neglected by social scientists writing about state capacity. How was communist state building different? The evidence shows two things. First, on basic measures, communist states showed extraordinary capacity.[107] And second, time mattered: communist state capacity was relatively durable.

Figures 2.1 and 2.2 compare the state capacities of the relatively wealthy market economies belonging to the OECD and the somewhat less wealthy economies under communist rule and belonging to Comecon, the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Cooperation. The year is 1980, toward the end of the Cold War, at a time when communist rule was everywhere intact. The figures illustrate two measures of state capacity, the tax share and the state ownership share in the economy. These aspects of state capacity are important in their own right. In addition, at high levels they also imply something about coercive capacity. High tax rates encourage evasion, which must be policed and repressed. High levels of state ownership are likely to have required the forced seizure of private assets in the past and continued repression of private ventures that might weaken public monopolies in the present.

The figures plot these measures against the average real GDP per head of each country. As discussed earlier in this chapter, a country’s state capacity is likely to be increasing in its level of economic development (as noted, the direction of causation remains a matter of debate). Before attributing a country’s higher levels of state capacity to communist rule, therefore, we should check whether greater wealth could be the underlying correlate.

The charts answer this question clearly: communist rule was decisive. On fiscal capacity (Figure 2.1), we see that the Comecon economies had figure 2.1. Communist economies had higher tax shares in 1980, given their level of economic development

Sources and notes: See the Appendix to this chapter and Table 2A.1

generally high tax ratios (the group average is 49 percent of GDP). At first sight this does not look exceptional because a subgroup of market economies in northwestern Europe shows similar tax shares (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—although many other OECD countries come in below). What the figure demonstrates, however, is that the high tax shares of the Comecon group were exceptional, given their income levels. The Comecon countries were relatively poor in real GDP (6,000 to 8,000 international dollars per head). The subgroup of market economies with similar fiscal capacity were much richer (12,000 to 16,000 international dollars per head). In other words, countries under communist rule had fiscal capacity similar to market economies that were roughly twice as wealthy.

Alternatively, the same chart lets us compare fiscal capacities of the Comecon group with the OECD countries at similar levels of income at the time—Spain and Portugal. By contrast to those countries, the Comecon group show tax shares that were higher by around 20 percentage points of GDP—a very large advantage.

The contrast of the Comecon countries to the OECD countries is even more clear cut in Figure 2.2 (China, not a Comecon member state, is added figure 2.2. Communist economies had higher state ownership around 1980, regardless of their level of economic development

Sources and notes: See the Appendix to this chapter and Table 2A.2. I thank Branko Milanovic for advice on sources and discussion of comparability across countries and systems of national accounts.

to the data). Here the measure is the share of state-owned or public corporations in economic activity in or around 1980. This measure indicates the scope and variety of government activities, over and above the functions of government administration that nearly all states engage in, such as defense, policing, education, and so forth. The differences are stark, and there is no overlap. The Comecon group average for state-owned activities is 92 percent of national income, and for China nearly 80 percent. The OECD group average stands at around 9 percent. The difference cannot be explained away by relative income levels for, if high development were the statistical correlate of high state capacity, it would go the opposite way.

The evidence so far relates to communist state capacity in snapshots, taken at a single moment in time. But time itself is a dimension of state capacity. In addition to showing unusual capabilities, communist states have been capable for longer, both by comparison with other types of authoritarian regime, and also by comparison with some democracies.

When measured against the longstanding liberal democracies of northwestern Europe or North America, communist states might appear fragile or short lived. But this might be the wrong yardstick. Twenty years ago, the political scientist Barbara Geddes wrote:

Since at least the 1950s, many analyses of communist regimes have stressed their inherent dysfunctions and contradictions. When the regimes finally broke down, these dysfunctions were invoked as causes. Yet these political systems had lasted forty years in Eastern Europe and seventy in the Soviet Union.[108]

None of the communist states that remained has broken down since then. Today they include North Korea (founded in 1948), China (1949), Vietnam (1955), Cuba (1959), and Laos (1975). North Korea matched the seventy-four years of Soviet rule in 2022, and China should do so in 2023.

Multiple datasets show that single-party dictatorships are especially long-lived forms of authoritarian rule—among them, most prominently, communist states.[109] Single-party regimes are thought to be more durable than others (such as military and personal dictatorships) because they offer ways to institutionalize rent sharing, career advancement, and orderly succession, preventing intra-elite disputes from breaking out into violence.[110] At the same time not all single-party regimes are the same. Particularly long lived are “revolutionary autocracies” that have their origins in civil and foreign wars. As political scientist Jean Lachapelle and coauthors write:

Revolutionary elites’ efforts to radically transform the existing social and geopolitical order trigger intense domestic and international resistance, often resulting in civil or external war. These military conflicts pose an existential threat to new revolutionary regimes and in some cases, such as Afghanistan and Cambodia, they destroy them. But where regimes survive, violent conflict produces four important legacies: (1) a cohesive ruling elite, (2) a loyal military, (3) a powerful coercive apparatus, and (4) the destruction of rival organizations and alternative centers of power in society. These legacies help to inoculate revolutionary regimes against elite defection, military coups, and mass protest—three principal sources of authoritarian breakdown.[111]Regime longevity matters. It is not just a signal of political vitality. It is also a precondition of economic modernization. The longer a regime can persist without breaking down amid violence, the longer is the period in which the economy can grow without a setback. Communist countries were able to industrialize their economies and modernize their armies, not only because these were priorities, but because they were able to suppress political conflict for decades, giving their policies time to work.

The shared outlook of these countries’ rulers was a determination to rule indefinitely and to build economic and military power while doing so. Perhaps it can all end tomorrow. The title of Alexei Yurchak’s book about “the last Soviet generation” is a warning to communist rulers from history: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.[112] But so far, and for some of them, tomorrow has been put off.

To summarize: communist states under stable authoritarian rule have been the most formidable Leviathans of the last hundred years, perhaps of all time. They arose from top-down state building, carried out amid the ruin of interstate and civil wars. They mobilized economies against all the maxims of mainstream economics—lacking the rule of law, the protection of private property and contracts, or the enforcement of market competition. The durability and continuity of the surviving communist regimes assure the world that their plans for economic and military modernization remain deeply serious. If the economic outcomes have been dismal in some places and times, they have been striking in others. The global impact of China’s industries, exports, and military power is just the latest illustration.

Despite the capabilities and sustainability demonstrated by communist states, scholarly writing since the end of the Cold War has tended to downplay the communist experience of state building. The neglect is visible in the selection of regions and periods from which many studies of state capacity have drawn their data. Yet the communist experience shows a record of top-down state building far more capable and sustained than the consensus would allow.

Moreover, whether or not communism will be over one day, it is not over yet. Will China have time to become the first communist country to join the rich nations’ club? You, the reader, might be optimistic or skeptical.

As of now, we can’t be sure of the answer; only time will tell. Meanwhile, a better grasp of the strengths and weaknesses of communist state capacity does at least give us a chance at the question.

THE SECRECY/CAPACITY TRADEOFF

Communist states developed exceptional state capabilities. But how usable were the capabilities that they intended to deploy? To understand why this question comes next, think of the internet. The internet endows us with capabilities, such as instant access to global information and commerce, that would astonish a visitor from 1970. But every internet user has had the annoyance of being locked out of an account by a forgotten or misremembered password. Sometime the internet is just not very usable.

A feature of internet commerce is the “security/usability” tradeoff. An expert writes:

A colleague of mine used to quip “Got an access denied? Good, the security is working.” That means that security administration is fundamentally opposed to network administration—they are, in fact, conflicting goals. .. . Essentially, the tradeoff is between security and usability. The most secure system is one that is disconnected and locked into a safe.[113]

How does the security/usability tradeoff work? When internet security is light and the bar is low, predators crowd in and begin to feed on the unwary. User confidence collapses. The first password is an obvious advance. It boosts my confidence in the internet and increases my willingness to use it. Soon, all the legitimate account holders have a password. An arms race develops. Thieves become proficient at hacking passwords and stealing identities. More complex passwords, memorable information, and multifactor authentication make it more difficult for criminals to break through the security surrounding my account details by stealing my identity. But these precautions don’t just make it more difficult for criminals. They also make it more difficult for me to assert my identity in my own legitimate business. The price of making my assets more secure is that they are also made less usable.

This is the security/usability tradeoff. Too little security, and the system is laid waste by thieves. More security seems like a good idea, but it also makes the system harder to use. Too much security and the thieves are locked out, but so is legitimate business. Somewhere, there is the right amount of security—but where is it?

State secrecy appears to have a similar effect on state capacity. At very low levels, secrecy is productive: it keeps out opportunists and troublemakers. And this enhances capacity. Beyond a point, however, the costs of secrecy increase so much that they begin to detract from state capacity. When the price of more secrecy is that capacity declines, there is a secrecy/ capacity tradeoff.

What, exactly, causes the tradeoff to bind? There are three factors. First, as secrecy becomes more and more intense, the government must commit increasing resources to managing the “regime of secrecy” and maintaining its integrity. These resources must be taken from elsewhere, and the diversion places an increasing burden on state capacity.

A second factor that comes into play as secrecy grows is not less important, but it is more complicated: the bundling of functions. Secrecy enables some functions and disables others in bundles that cannot be disentangled. An example is the bundling of error correction with the management of authority (or reputation). Suppose a policy has a bad outcome: the excessive rapidity of Soviet industrialization in the late 1920s and early 1930s led directly to a famine in which millions of people starved to death. To maintain the authority of the party and its leaders, this bad outcome was strictly censored. Because of this, private citizens and most public officials were deprived of information that could have been useful in preventing a repetition. Thus, in enabling the management of authority, secrecy also disabled error correction.

Evidence in support of this bundling is provided by economists Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin: using data from the period 1995-2007 and controlling for income levels, democracy scores, and natural resources, they show that bureaucratic quality across more than 130 countries was positively and significantly increased by the degree of media freedom.[114] The authoritarian ruler’s problem is that media freedom opens a channel to the improvement of policies and their delivery, but the same channel can allow criticism to spread and opponents to coordinate action.

Another example is the bundling of concealment (from an external adversary) with cooperation (internally among managers responsible for the business of the state). Suppose the location of a sensitive facility is encrypted, with the key kept under secrecy. Outsiders who do not have the key can no longer find the facility on the map. But insiders—say, managers with legitimate business at the secret facility—who lack the key, cannot find it either. In this real-life example (from evidence to be provided in Chapter 4), secrecy switched concealment on and cooperation off at the same time.

And a third factor in the secrecy/capacity tradeoff: As secrecy becomes more intense, it provides a cover for those who choose to exploit it, not in the interests of the state, but because they are greedy or lazy. You want to inspect my work? No, it’s secret. You want to know how much I’m entitled to charge you? No, that’s secret too.

The sense of this discussion is captured in Figure 2.3. This figure shows state capacity (increasing vertically) as a function of the intensity of figure 2.3. The secrecy/capacity tradeoff: State capacity rises, peaks, and then falls away as the degree of secrecy increases

Note: In this figure the degree of secrecy (defined as increasing regulation of information and penalization of violations) is measured on the horizontal scale. State capacity is measured on the vertical scale. Cmax marks the maximum attainable level of state capacity, and S* is the degree of secrecy that delivers the maximum at point X. This chapter argues that citizens of a democracy are likely to prefer combinations to the left of the maximum, such as Y, whereas an authoritarian ruler is likely to prefer a combination to the right, such as Z.

secrecy (increasing horizontally from left to right). Secrecy is made more intense by increased regulation and increased penalization of noncompliance. By assumption, secrecy has diminishing returns and increasing costs. At low intensities, the costs of secrecy are low and the benefits are high. The rising part of the curve reflects those aspects of secrecy that promote state capacity by providing minimal assurance of the power to take decisions without being manipulated by foreign and domestic adversaries. While marginal costs are low and benefits are high, state capacity rises. As costs increase and benefits diminish, a peak is reached at X, after which a decline sets in. As secrecy becomes even more intense, state capacity is driven down by the costs of assuring the growing volume and detail of secrets, the difficulty of protecting the business of the state from the growing complications of secrecy, and the growing scope for insiders to exploit secrecy for personal gain.[115]

As this approach hints, somewhere in the figure there should be a “right” level of secrecy—but where? That very question was assigned to the journalist and former spy Mark Frankland during his training for the British Secret Intelligence Service in 1958:

We had to write an essay on “the economic level of security.” Total security led to paralysis, for only if no one said or did anything could nothing be given away. Too little security led to disaster. Where was the golden mean? It was as good, or as pointless, a subject for debate as the medieval argument about how many angels could sit on the head of a pin.[116]

Although seemingly scholastic, the location of the golden mean, the “right” level of secrecy, is a practical issue for all states, one that is vital to get at least approximately right. But where is it to be found? It would be easy, but wrong, to identify the golden mean with the point at X, where state capacity finds its peak.

A moment’s reflection suggests the mistake. The answer depends on the constitution of the state. In a liberal democracy, where an “informed citizenry” is valued, the voters might tend to see secrecy as a necessary evil. If so, they should be willing to give away some state capacity so as to have less secrecy, preferring Y to X, for example. A degree of openness to foreign influences, whether welcome or unwelcome, or an element of domestic gridlock resulting from political competition, might be a price worth paying for the right of citizens to be fully involved in the making of decisions or to challenge the authority of the decision makers.

For the dictator, by contrast, secrecy is not a necessary evil but a good. Such a ruler should be willing to give away some state capacity so as to have more secrecy. Beyond X, where secrecy is beginning to erode state capacity, lies a point such as Z. Here the ruler willingly sacrifices some capabilities in order to conceal mistakes and wrongdoing, maintain a façade of competence, and suppress criticism and opposition.

In the case of communist parties in power, it appears that they wanted two things: to secure their own regime, and to build a powerful state. At first sight, these two objectives looked fully compatible. Looking more closely, the notion of the secrecy/capacity tradeoff drives a wedge between them. It suggests that secrecy promoted both regime security and state building up to a point. Beyond that point, increasing secrecy continued to fortify the defenses of the ruling party, but it began to work against the goals of state building. This was because the costs of secrecy began to eat away the capacity of the state to do anything more than keep its own secrets and keep the ruling party in power.

The idea that a dictator faces tradeoffs is not new. Any authoritarian ruler must spend resources on repressing opponents or on buying them off. These resources must be diverted from other uses, which must be traded off.[117] Again, the more fearsome the dictator, the less he can trust the sycophants that surround him to share unwelcome facts: this suggests he must trade truth for compliance.[118] Another recognized tradeoff is competence of government personnel for loyalty: autocratic regimes are likely to promote their officials based on unthinking loyalty and adherence to the leader, to the detriment of their general level of competence.[119] The contribution of this chapter is to identify secrecy as one of the margins at which the dictator must optimize.

In claiming that communist rulers wanted to hold state power and build the state, I do not exclude that their program extended to other things as well—to build a modern, technologically progressive, well-defended society, for example. But for all the things the rulers wanted, they saw one instrument—a strong, capable, multifunctional state. Power was what made the state their instrument, and, for that and for their own survival, they wanted to hold onto power at any price. Secrecy helped to keep the rulers in power, but the same secrecy also ate into the capacity of their instrument to deliver their program. This was part of the price they were willing to pay to retain power.

WAS SOVIET SECRECY IRRATIONAL?

The idea of the secrecy/capacity tradeoff suggests rational choice. A public-choice perspective would imply that the government can calculate and freely choose the degree of secrecy most consonant with its preferences.[120] From this perspective, secrecy looks like a policy, similar to a tax rate or a speed limit, that can be varied in line with changing circumstances and needs.

To what extent did communist regimes consciously choose the degree of secrecy, knowing the consequences of doing so? Does the government of any country actually choose the amount of secrecy in this deliberative, calculating way? Doesn’t the amount of secrecy that the government inherited, to which everyone has become habituated, weigh more heavily than any calculation? Was the level of Soviet secrecy really a calculated choice?

There are several approaches to this issue, and public choice is not the only angle. To understand the responsiveness of the degree of secrecy to a changing world, we could range the alternative models on a spectrum, with secrecy more easily recalculated and fine tuned at one end, and more inherited from the past and inflexible at the other. To simplify, secrecy might be a policy (flexible and freely chosen), a culture (inherited and predetermined), or an institution (with elements of both).

Secrecy os a Policy

As discussed above, the idea of a secrecy/capability tradeoff suggests that the government should freely decide the combination that is best suited to its idea of the national interest. If circumstances or needs change, the degree of secrecy should change. In this view, secrecy is just a policy that can be recalibrated and varied as flexibly as a tax rate. This idea has at least some merit, for Soviet secretiveness was not a constant. As discussed in Chapter 1 (and further illustrated in Chapter 4), Soviet secrecy was more intense than secrecy in prerevolutionary Russia, while the late 1920s, late 1930s, and late 1940s saw consecutive increases in the degree of secrecy, before a rebound in the 1950s.

Empirical support for the idea that secrecy can be varied in response to changes in the context is found in the work (already mentioned) of Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin.[121] They note that, to retain power, authoritarian rulers need to control both society and their own bureaucracy Control of the media helps them control society, but it also impedes control of the bureaucracy because bureaucrats become the main source of information about their own performance. Media freedom gives the ruler better information about bureaucratic performance, but also empowers the opposition. But this problem is more acute for some rulers than for others. An oil-rich regime can maintain itself by spending or sharing oil rents; it need have less concern for bureaucratic performance. Egorov and coauthors show that media freedom is inversely related to the size of a country’s oil reserves: the more an incumbent ruler can expect to rely on oil rents, the less is media freedom in the country. The direction of the effect is unambiguous, and its timescale is within a few years. This provides support for the idea that the degree of censorship, at least, can be varied in response to changes in the regime’s environment.

While Soviet secretiveness was not a constant, it was clearly less flexible than, say, a tax rate. Major alterations transpired no more frequently than once a decade, and there seems to have been little fine-tuning in between. This suggests that secrecy was not so much continuously variable as a regime (the word they used themselves) with considerable persistence, adjusted rather occasionally and then quite sharply.

The idea of secrecy as a flexible policy instrument suffers from another notable weakness. It rests on the idea that costs and benefits are well defined and measurable, so that the government can balance them and find the right degree of secrecy by watching the balance change as secrecy is adjusted in real time—an implausible scenario. If optimization did take place, and if reoptimization happened when circumstances changed, it must have taken the form of time-consuming trial, error, and correction.

The idea of trial and error does not contradict optimization in general; on the contrary, much real-world optimization takes that form. But it certainly implies that finding the optimum might be much more difficult than Figure 2.1 would suggest.

A Culture of Secrecy

An opposite approach to secrecy can be found in the idea of culture— that is, the degree of Soviet secrecy might have been the outcome of a secretive culture. The word culture is often a way of capturing the sense of shared norms and practices that persist unchanged among a population or a subgroup over long periods of time. Often it is associated with the transmission of identity: look, we do things this way, not because it happens to be efficient, but because we are who we are. Cultures change, and a culture of secrecy might be made to change by external pressure, such as a competing culture or counterculture of openness, but cultures do not change of their own accord.[122] A characteristic weakness of the “culture of secrecy” approach might be the lack of a clear sense of who are the agents of cultural persistence and what motivates them. But perhaps this is not required, because if one culture is equipped to suppress another, it is surely a culture of secrecy.

The idea of a communist culture of secrecy is clearly exemplified by the idea of “conspirative norms”: the Bolsheviks explicitly patterned their governmental practices on the habits they developed for survival in the revolutionary underground.[123] Once the party came out into the open and seized power, it did not change its habits but rather formalized them in a written code, so that conspirativeness became a way of ruling. On this interpretation, extreme secrecy was not so much a choice as an inheritance that no one could avoid—not only a way of ruling but a way of being that was handed down from one Bolshevik generation to the next.

On this reading, Soviet leaders of the following generations had no alternative but to continue the culture of secrecy. They did not calculate how they did things; they would have been able to fine-tune it only with great difficulty, and they could not abandon it. Even Mikhail Gorbachev departed from it only under the pressure of extreme events that could not be denied, such as the Chernobyl catastrophe.[124]

There is clearly something to the idea of a secretive culture, not only communist but also Russian. For hundreds of years, Russia has been ruled by secretive councils organized around the figure of a tsar, then a general secretary, and now a president.[125] From time to time, Russia has become more open, but such periods have been brief, followed quickly by a return to “normal” secrecy.

At the same time, the idea of a fixed Russian culture does not explain how Soviet secretiveness went so far beyond prerevolutionary practices. The idea of a fixed communist culture does not explain the variation of secrecy over time under communist rule. It might be useful to turn to a third way of understanding secrecy, one that is neither policy nor culture.

Secrecy as an Institution

An intermediate position is available: secrecy might be an institution in Douglass North’s sense of “rules of the game.”[126] In this view institutions are rules of interaction, which were adopted in the past and persist today, and while they persist, people make choices within them. The rules persist, not forever, but for as long as they have the support of a governing coalition. They change when the individual choices made within them give rise to new coalitions of people that have the power and will to change them.

A significant feature of Soviet history is that the “governing coalition” was often extremely narrow and, on occasion, depended entirely on the changeable will of a single person—the party leader. Thus, it is consistent with the idea of secrecy as an institution that the rules of Soviet secrecy could persist for quite long periods, and then be altered abruptly. Factors in the sudden shifts of Soviet secrecy included the break with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Lenin’s turn to a one-party state (in 1918); Stalin’s victories over the Left Opposition and the “Right deviation” (in 1927 and 1929); his anger at the unauthorized sharing of biomedical research (in 1947); Khrushchev’s unexpected denunciation of Stalin (in 1956), which disrupted the coalition of Stalin’s successors; and the prevailing winds that, by blowing radioactive debris from Chernobyl across half of Europe, forced Gorbachev into unprecedented disclosure (in 1986) of a domestic catastrophe.

To conclude, if we wish to understand why the Soviet Union’s leaders gave up substantial state capacity for the sake of secrecy, there are three approaches. Each of them is a simplified concept that has something to offer. I am not inclined to nominate one of them as the only correct approach to secrecy. In this book, we will see secrecy operating sometimes as a culture, sometimes as a policy, and sometimes as an institution.

At the same time, I should disclose my professional bias. As an economist, I was trained to look for costly behavior. Where a cost is incurred but could be avoided by choice, there should also be a benefit. This approach presumes rational choice, not as a matter of faith, but as a driver of investigation: if costly behavior is not explained by an apparent net benefit, then there must be some factor at work that we have not yet understood. Perhaps we should dig deeper. At all times, therefore, I will resist the temptation to describe Soviet secretiveness as “irrational.”

In the present case, if Soviet secrecy was costly, and if more transparent forms of government that avoided the costs were clearly available, then why did the Soviet rulers choose to accept these costs? The answer to which I will return again and again is that the expected benefit of secrecy to the rulers must have been commensurately large. It was not by chance that the Soviet system tended to merge security and secrecy into one. When decisions were pondered in secret, the ruler was secured against pressure from civil society. When the decisions themselves were censored, the ruler was secured against challenge. When the outcomes of bad decisions were concealed, the ruler was secured against accountability and criticism. For these reasons it was worth the rulers’ while to uphold the culture, to enforce the institution, to provide the career incentives for millions of administrators and managers to conform to the pattern, and to tolerate the very high costs to their effectiveness in other dimensions.

Finally, the idea of a secrecy/capacity tradeoff does not preclude mistakes. In the Soviet state it was possible to increase security to a point where usability became so difficult that people felt compelled to behave in “insecure” ways. I do not describe this as irrational, but it had unanticipated consequences and could reasonably be called a mistake.

The ultimate purpose of Soviet secrecy was to sustain a durable dictatorship. It does not matter much whether you ascribe the origins of Soviet secrecy to the inner drive of totalitarian single-party rule or to the external pressures of foreign encirclement.[127] The Soviet Union’s communist rulers made no distinction between the survival of the country and the security of the regime. Whichever way you looked at it, the need for secrecy was existential. If you wanted to run a durable dictatorship, and not be overthrown by the foreign enemy or the domestic enemy, you had to pay the costs, no matter how heavy.

Moreover, secrecy worked. It did sustain a dictatorship for seven long decades—more than the lifespan of the average twentieth-century Russian male. From that perspective, Soviet secrecy was generally extreme, sometimes weird, occasionally amusing—but irrational? Over a long period of reflection, I have come to think not.

APPENDIX. MEASURING STATE CAPACITY ACROSS ECONOMIC SYSTEMS

The purpose of this appendix is to set out and explain the data underlying Figures 2.1 (tax shares) and 2.2 (ownership shares). It involves discussion of the comparability of statistics across both countries and accounting systems. Comparing tax shares in national income is primarily a problem of the accounting system for national income. Comparing ownership shares presents multiple issues.

For tax shares the problem is to estimate the country share of current government revenues (the numerator) in national income (the denominator) when the denominator is measured inconsistently. The countries of the OECD shared the System of National Accounts, in which national income is measured by the gross domestic product or GDP, the aggregate value of final goods and services at market prices. The Comecon countries and China used the material product system, in which national income is measured by the net material product or NMP, the aggregate value of final goods utilized for consumption and accumulation at prevailing prices. The main difference between the two lies in the treatment of final services. Contrary to what is often asserted, the NMP does include some services— the intermediate services that enter into the production of goods. It excludes only those services that enter directly into the final consumption and accumulation decisions of households, firms, and government. Thus, education and health expenditures are not counted in material production, and retail banking and passenger transportation are also left out. But freight transportation and distribution are included.[128]

The importance of final services in the global economy has tended to grow over time, and by 1980, the year of interest for our measures of state capacity, the difference between GDP and NMP measures was quantitatively large. In the final years of the Soviet system, official statisticians began to calculate the Soviet national income retrospectively using both measures. For 1980, they estimated the Soviet net material product utilized as 454.1 billion rubles, while GDP was 619 billion rubles, more than one-third larger.[129]

For tax shares, what counts on the side of the numerator is approximately equivalent between the two systems, both of which acknowledge the major categories of retail sales taxes and personal income and profit taxes. The denominator is the big difference. As Table 2A.1 shows, Com-econ country tax shares in the net material product in 1980 look much larger than OECD country tax shares in GDP, and there is no overlap at the near edge of the two distributions. But NMP is much less than GDP. When we adjust, we find that Comecon tax shares are still very much on the high side, but (as noted in the chapter text) they now overlap the high-tax market economies of northwestern Europe.

Turning to ownership shares, the comparability of country statistics is compromised in several ways. First, OECD countries did not routinely report data on the value of output or assets or the size of employment by public enterprises.[130] For the OECD countries shown in Table 2A.2,1 rely on the data for many OECD countries in the 1970s and 1980s, assembled by the economist Branko Milanovic, for output and employment shares of “state-owned enterprises in commercial activities.” In Milanovic’s data, “government services proper” are excluded; this refers to government services supplied free of charge, from defense and policing to health and education.

Second, for Comecon countries we have two sources on ownership shares. One is, again, Milanovic, as shown in the table. Alternatively, there is an official source, because such figures were also compiled and reported by Comecon statisticians, and they too are shown in the table. Their coverage table 2A.1. Measures of state capacity across countries: Fiscal ratios in 1980

(A) OECD countries, general government current receipts, percent of:

GDP

(B) Comecon countries, current government revenues, percent of:

NMP

GDP

United States

31.0

Czechoslovakia

63.5

46.6

Canada

36.7

East Germany

70.0

51.4

Iceland

37.2

Soviet Union

66.0

48.4

Denmark

48.0

Hungary

72.1

52.9

Norway

51.2

Bulgaria

64.9

47.6

Sweden

51.7

Poland

62.8

46.0

France

46.0

Netherlands

49.0

Belgium

46.1

Austria

47.1

Japan

27.7

Italy

33.0

Finland

43.6

United Kingdom

37.0

Spain

28.5

Portugal

26.8

Unweighted mean

40.6

Unweighted mean

66.6

48.8

Note. The countries shown in the table are ranked in declining order of their real GDP per head (in dollars and international prices of 1990) according to the Total Economy Database (January 2014) of the Conference Board at http://www.con ference-board.org/data/economydatabase/. For 1980, the unweighted mean for the OECD countries shown was $13,929, and for Comecon countries it was $6,603. The real GDP per head of the poorest OECD country, Portugal, was $8,044; that of the richest Comecon country, Czechoslovakia, was $7,982. Thus, the two groups of countries do not overlap.

Sources: (A) OECD countries: Economic Outlook, no. 108 (December 2020), https:// www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/data/oecd-economic-outlook-statistics-and-pro-jections_eo-data-en, gives general government current receipts as a percentage of GDP (the sum of final goods and services at market prices) (series YRGQ). (B) Comecon countries: current government revenues (taxes, levies, fees, fines, and enterprise incomes) are calculated in percent of NMP (net material product, the sum of final goods and intermediate services at prevailing prices) from United Nations, Statistical Yearbook 1981, Tables 26 and 46. Shares of net material product are then recalculated as shares of GDP, based on the observation that the Soviet GDP for 1980 reported by the government statistical agency was 36 percent greater than NMP utilized (Goskomstat, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1990g., 5). The same conversion factor is applied to all the Comecon countries. Unweighted averages are then calculated for this table from the figures shown.

TABLE 2A.2. Measures of state capacity across countries^ Productive or com^ mercial activity under state ownership around ^^^^

^A^ OECD countries

Output of public corporations^ percent of GDP

Year

United States

1.3

(1983)

West Germany

10.7

(1982)

Denmark

6.3

(1974)

France

16.5

(1982)

Netherlands

3.6

(1971-1973)

Australia

9.4

(1978/79)

Austria

14.5

(1978/79)

Italy

14.0

(1982)

United Kingdom

10.7

(1983)

New Zealand

12.0

(1987)

Spain

4.1

(1979)

Greece

6.1

(1979)

Portugal

9.7

(1976)

Unweighted mean

9.1

. . .

(B) Comecon countries and China

Socialist sector, percent of net material product

State-owned enterprises, percent of net material product (various yearsЪ

(1980) (col. 1)

(col. 2)

Year (col.3)

Czechoslovakia

99.4

99.7

(1986)

East Germany

99.5

96.5

(1982)

Soviet Union

100

96.0

(1985)

Hungary

96.5

69.8

(1980)

Bulgaria

99.96

. . .

. . .

Poland

84.3

83.4

(1980)

(В) Comecon countries and China

State-owned enterprises,

Socialist sector, percent of net material product (1980) (col. 1)

percent of net material product (various years) (col. 2)

Year (col. 3)

Cuba

96.9

Romania

95.5

Mongolia

100

Vietnam

52.7

Unweighted

average

92.2

88.5

China

78.7

(1980)

Notes. The countries shown in both parts of the table are ranked in declining order of their real GDP per head in 1980, as explained under Table 2A.1, except that Cuba and Mongolia, not given in the TED dataset, are inserted on the basis of comparable estimates in the Maddison historical dataset (2009 edition), http://www.ggdc.net/ maddison/oriindex.htm.

Sources: (A) OECD countries, from Milanovic, Liberalization and Entrepreneurship, 24. Figures cover “state-owned enterprises in commercial activities,” excluding “government services proper.” Where Milanovic gives country figures for more than one year, I take the nearest to 1980. (B) Comecon countries and China, socialist sector in 1980 (col. 1), from SEV, Statisticheskii ezhegodnik, 37. Figures are for the shares of “state enterprises and institutions, social organizations, cooperatives of all kinds and types, personal sideline farms of members of cooperatives and personal sideline farms of manual and white-collar employees of state, social, and cooperative enterprises and institutions” (SEV, Statisticheskii ezhegodnik, 417-18) in the net material product in 1980, except Bulgaria where the figure for 1980 is missing, and the share of the socialist sector in productive fixed capital is used in its place. For Poland the source gives two figures. The lower figure, shown here, is at current prices, with a slightly higher figure at “comparable” prices. Shares of state-owned enterprises in the net material product in various years (cols 2 and 3) are those reported by Milanovic, Liberalization and Entrepreneurship, 21.

is subtly different from the OECD data: the “socialist sector” comprised “state enterprises and institutions, social organizations, cooperatives of all kinds and types, personal sideline farms of members of cooperatives and personal sideline farms of manual and white-collar employees of state, social, and cooperative enterprises and institutions.”

The inclusion of cooperatives and of households’ sideline farming (on state-owned land but not themselves state owned) within the “socialist sector” of Comecon countries is the major difference from the concept of the OECD figures. This is not so troubling for agricultural cooperatives (“collective farms”) which, although not legally owned by the state, were heavily regulated and monitored. The inclusion of nonagricultural cooperatives and of sideline farming is potentially misleading, however, because these were more often forms of private enterprise, either taxed and regulated or operating below the state’s radar. Still, the overstatement of state ownership in Comecon countries is far smaller than the Comecon/OECD gap.

Another source of discrepancy might be the treatment of “government services proper.” These are excluded from the OECD data, whereas the Comecon concept includes the output of “state . .. institutions.” The important thing is that whatever output is included in the Comecon data cannot refer to “government services proper” because the material product system counted these as final services, which were excluded from the value of output.

In short, the OECD data refer to the “commercial activity” of public corporations whereas the Comecon data refer to the “productive” activity of state-owned and cooperative enterprises, and this is the nearest we can get to comparable numerators.

Third, we turn to the denominator, the national income measure. Do the ownership shares of Comecon countries in national income need the same correction as the tax shares? It is a matter of judgement, but my judgement is no. For both groups of countries, we have an internally consistent measure. For OECD countries, final services are included in both numerator and denominator. For Comecon countries they are excluded. If they are to be added back to the bottom of the fraction, they must also be added back to the top. It is hard to imagine that substantial change would be the result.

3. THE SECRECY TAX

All states keep accounts. These accounts are of various kinds. Of necessity, they include records of the state’s money and the state’s employees. From more modern times they have also accounted for the nation’s money and the nation’s people. It goes without saying that the Soviet state accounted for money and for people.[131]

The Soviet state also kept accounts of secret paperwork. As part of their normal duties, Soviet officials regularly counted and listed all classified documents that passed through their hands, and all that were held in their files. Each classified document had its own life course, every moment of which was recorded from its creation through distribution and storage to destruction or assignment to the archive. The purpose of the accounting system was to provide assurance of the integrity of the regime of secrecy. As I will show, the accounting system was surprisingly costly. It was costly because secrets were numerous and keeping track of them was a complex task that consumed the efforts of government officials.

The costs of accounting for secrets deserve investigation because a willingness to incur costs can be evidence of motivation. The costs of Soviet secrecy suggest a lower bound on the value of secrecy to the Soviet rulers. The rulers valued secrecy because it helped to prevent change in the political order and so preserved the flow of benefits to the regime.

The existence of the Soviet system of accounting for secrets can be documented directly. It is also evident from many small failures. From creation to destruction, a named person was responsible for every classified document at every moment. Being human, these people lost or mislaid secret paperwork in a variety of circumstances, or they failed to record their disposal as required. These failures were also documented. They too reveal the system. In addition, they provide evidence of misaligned incentives and of the many attempts to bring them back into alignment.

The first part of this chapter describes the life course of the secret document and the data that it generated at each stage. The costs of complying with secrecy procedures can be likened to a cascading secrecy tax, paid on every transaction of government business. Using a unique data source, I go on to measure the burden of the Soviet secrecy tax on the management of a small regional bureaucracy—a republican KGB. A comparative perspective suggests that the burden was heavy. Finally, I consider the scope for generalizing this finding.

The secrecy tax was a procedural cost of Soviet secrecy. If we wish to account for the overall costs of Soviet secrecy, the procedural cost was a first instalment. Secrecy also incurred further costs directly through the effects of fear on the productiveness of officials and managers (Chapter 4), and indirectly through the adverse selection of the officials and managers themselves (Chapter 5), the spread of mistrust through society (Chapter 6), and the misinformation of the leaders (Chapter 7). While it is only the start, however, the secrecy tax is of particular interest because the evidence will suggest that the secrecy tax alone was very large.

THE SECRET DOCUMENT'S LIFE COURSE

To understand how the burdens of Soviet secrecy arose, we will follow the life course of the secret or top-secret document. Although “top secret” differed from “secret” in other ways, the system’s auditors and stocktakers would often refer to “secret and top-secret” documents in the same breath, treated them similarly, and counted them with the same obsessive attention.

The evidence is taken from three microfilm collections in the archive of the Hoover Institution. Those used here are from a party agency, the KPK (Commission of Party Control, responsible for looking into wrongdoing

table 3.1. The secret document’s life course: Documentation created at each stage

Stage

Documentation

Production;Distribution;Filing and storageTransfer of ownershipIInspection and audit;Incineration or transfer to archive

Logged within the document

Correspondence ledgers

Deeds of inventorization

Deeds of transfer

Inspection and audit reports

Deeds of destruction or records of entry in archive catalogue

Source: See the text.

by party members), and two government agencies, the Gulag (chief administration of labor camps of the Soviet Interior Ministry) and the KGB (Committee of State Security, or secret police) of Lithuania, at the time a province of the Soviet Union.

The life course of the secret document was marked by rites of passage, enacted at certain fixed staging points: production, distribution, filing and storage, transfers of ownership, inspections, and destruction or archiving. Each stage generated its own documentary evidence, as shown in Table 3.1.

Production

The original secret document was usually typewritten with a fixed number of carbon copies. On 7 February 1965, deputy chief Juozas Petkevicius of the Lithuania KGB signed a six-page report to Moscow on popular responses to Khrushchev’s dismissal in 1964.[132] As illustrated in Figure 3.1 (panel A), the front page shows that the archive holds copy no. 2 of a document classified “top secret.” A standard block of information on the back of the last page states that two copies were made. Copy 1 went to Moscow and

figure 3.1. Birthmarks of the secret document

In Russian

In English

(A)

ОТП. 2 ЭКЗ

typed 2 copies

I - в адрес

I - to address

2 - дело № 236

2 - file no. 236

исп. Балтинас

executor Baltinas

печ. Кузина

typist Kuzina

б.П.ббг.

6.II.65

(B)

ОТП. 2 ЭКЗ

typed 2 copies

I - в адрес

I - to address

2 - дело №

2 - file no.

исп. Пыльников

executor Pyl’nikov

печ. Тимонова

typist Timonova

3.1У.65Г.

3.IV.65

Черновик уничтожен:

Original destroyed:

Sources: (A) Hoover/LYA, K-l/3/639,6. (B) Hoover/LYA, K-l/3/639,15ob.

copy 2 to “file no. 236.” The person responsible for the document is identified as Baltinas and the typist as Kuzina. The date of typing is 6 February, one day before the signature. This information was standard although not completely uniform. The next document in the file (panel B) shows small variations. Copy 1 went to Moscow, but the file number for the second copy is not entered; we see this quite often. The last line adds that the original draft was destroyed, but the space for confirmation is left blank.

Distribution

Every office was required to maintain daybooks or ledgers that recorded, line by line, every item of outgoing and incoming secret and nonsecret documentation, including letters, instructions, and telegrams. Some ledgers listed correspondence such as reports and memoranda; others itemized the instructions that cascaded down from above. Every item was logged as outgoing by the sender and as incoming by the receiver. Thus, any and every item could be tracked and its whereabouts established, whether it was at rest or in transit. In principle, this assured secure distribution.

The ledgers, which were inevitably also classified secret, amounted to substantial documentation. Ledgers were typically bound volumes of one hundred double-sided sheets (two hundred pages) with handwritten entries that recorded in rows and columns every item sent or received, any copies made, to whom they were distributed, by whom acknowledged, when returned, and whether destroyed, with dates of each event.[133]Over time, every office quickly accumulated many ledgers. When the officer responsible for the MVD Gulag secretariat was changed on 7 January 1953, the outgoing and incoming officers cosigned an inventory of its paperwork. It was recorded that, in the two years from 1951, the office had acquired 343 ledgers (nearly 70,000 pages) listing incoming correspondence, more than half of them secret items. Another 15 ledgers itemized more than 11,000 incoming coded telegrams and more than 2,000 outgoing in 1952 alone.[134]

With such a system, what could go wrong? Either sender or recipient could be guilty of a lack of care. When that happened, the minutes that were normally needed to enter an item in the correspondence ledger turned into hours of painful investigation. To illustrate: a secret packet arrives. You sign for it, so now you are responsible. When you open it, you find a missing page, or perhaps an incorrect serial number. Who can say it’s not your fault? You convene your colleagues. Together you write and swear a witness statement (necessarily classified secret) to confirm the discrepancy.[135]

In that example the fault belonged to the senders. Alternatively, the sender could be a victim of the recipient’s lack of care. Here is a tale with which any student can empathize. Having borrowed a secret handbook from the KGB training library, you handed it back to the librarian. But the librarian failed to record that you did so. Now it seems you must have mislaid it, so you will be charged with a violation: the loss of a secret document. You’re saved only when the book turns up—back on the library shelf.[136]

Intermediaries could blur responsibility. In 1944, Stalin’s war cabinet telegraphed a secret instruction to a factory manager in Gor’kii (Nizhnii Novgorod) province. In his absence, the local party secretary held it for safe keeping. Five years later, someone asked: Who now held the telegram? The party secretary said he handed the telegram to the manager, but without obtaining a receipt. The manager, now a junior minister, swore he had never received it. This story has several notable features. It took five years to follow up the missing telegram, plus two more years to investigate it. The case was considered important enough to be reported to Stalin’s chief of staff. And the outcome? After investigation, no guilt could be assigned.[137]

Secret documents were supposed to be distributed through one of two channels, the agency’s own courier service (if it had one) or the “special service” of the ministry of communications. Open channels such as the regular mail or civilian couriers were not to be used under any circumstances. But the secret channels were cumbersome. Mishaps arose when officials resorted to workarounds: they carried secret documents themselves or sent them by a personal courier. Lapses of attention on the part of the bearer led to many cases of paperwork being lost or stolen in transit. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, briefcases were sometimes stolen in bars or mislaid as a result of excessive drinking.[138] (Men often used briefcases to carry shopping, so the casual thief was likely looking for alcohol or personal valuables more than government papers.)

The sheer volume of secret correspondence was sometimes of concern. Throughout the Soviet system there was a perennial cascade of instructions, many of them secret, and many of them implementing, modifying, or canceling previous instructions. If the original instruction was classified, care had to be taken to ensure that subsequent correspondence referring to that instruction was classified to the same level. So many decrees heightened the risk that a nonsecret decree could disclose the content of secret ones, or even just their existence, by referring to them.[139] This illustrates the issues that could arise when secrecy was reflexive at the level of detail.

Filing and Storage

In important offices such as those of the Gulag, an inventory of secret paperwork was carried out on the first of each month. This was one of a series of measures that together assured secure storage. Many archived files contain lengthy sequences of affidavits enumerating hundreds of secret and top-secret items incoming and outgoing from various offices.[140] Despite the scope for deficient storage and mistakes in handling, nearly all such accounts certified everything as all present and correct.

Should we believe them? The system was designed for a low-trust environment. In all cases, the inventories had to be certified by at least two officials of varying status, who had to agree on a cover-up if the records were not in order and shared the risks of being caught out later in a he. It was not possible for one person to cover personal deficiencies without securing the collusion of others. Collusion to cover up missing items was not impossible, but the conditions for achieving it were demanding.

Transfers of Ownership

Comprehensive inventories were also required when one official was appointed to replace another in charge of an office. A joint affidavit acknowledged the transfer of responsibility for classified papers. The length of such a document could range from one page to many dozens. The following case is not untypical. In June 1965, the first (secret) department of the Lithuania KGB second administration changed hands. Two senior lieutenants signed a deed of transfer (typed the same day in one copy).[141] Over six pages the document enumerated files, ordinary, letter-coded, and special; decrees and instructions; personal files and personnel records; “most wanted” and “no longer wanted” notices and lists; information about German intelligence; lists of traitors, foreign agents, participants in anti-Soviet organizations, war criminals, and state criminals; forms to request undercover documentation and wire taps; records of undercover documentation issued to officers; card indexes of agents, “safe house” keepers, and active cases; and ledgers for registration of incoming and outgoing correspondence.

In this list the largest single item was the correspondence ledgers, amounting to 13 volumes and so 2,600 pages altogether, compared with a mere 1,400 pages of documents in files. This illustrates the reflexive quality of Soviet secrecy: the deed itemized not only original documents but also the ledgers that itemized them as they came in and went out. Classified “secret,” the deed of transfer would be entered into the next inventory in its own right.

Changeovers occasionally exposed the loss of documents. When an office changed hands, the new boss had a strong incentive not to cover for items that had gone missing under the preceding regime. Here is an example from February 1948. At that time (as discussed in Chapter 4) the entire Soviet bureaucracy was in a state of high anxiety over a recent law that criminalized the accidental or negligent disclosure of state secrets. The incoming chief of the Gulag secretariat reported that a classified document was missing. The last person to hold it, a former chief of Gulag, could no longer trace it. The loss was reported to the interior minister, who personally demanded another search.[142]

However strong the precautionary motivation for the newcomer to check the integrity of the secret files left by his predecessor, it could be overridden by other factors. Corners were sometimes cut in the Gulag in wartime when newly appointed camp bosses took over “on the go,” dispensing with the formalities of inventories and deeds of transfer in the rush. Later, they ran into trouble because they had accepted responsibility for documents that turned out to be missing.[143]

Further measures ensured secure storage facilities and day-to-day handling. In every establishment, classified documents were the property of the secret department. The documents’ file headings were periodically reviewed and approved. Each file was listed as either secret or top secret, with its term of conservation (three years, for example) and the name of the responsible official.[144] The secret department required secure rooms where staff could work unobserved, and where safes could be locked away. Outside working hours, all documents had to be returned to the safes and the doors and safes of the secret department were supposed to be locked and sealed.

Office by office, the security of file storage and compliance and the procedures for handling secret documentation were audited periodically by inspectors of the MVD or KGB. Their reports show how inadequate facilities and under staffing could interact.[145] The existence of files did not ensure that documents were placed in them in a timely way; backlogs of documents might accumulate in trays, waiting to be filed.[146] Safes might be left unsealed overnight. Lacking secure accommodation, classified work might be done and documents left lying around in areas accessible to civilians or, in the Gulag, even to prisoners.[147]

Inspection

From time to time, external audits gave rise to scandals. Best known is the Gosplan affair of 1949. Nikolai Voznesenskii, the chief of planning, was a younger favorite of Stalin, but in the spring of that year he lost the dictator’s confidence. An investigation revealed that many secret and top-secret papers were missing from Gosplan. The report noted, sinisterly, that no one had yet been prosecuted “as the law demands.”[148]

Other audits that can be found in the archives cover a range of years and types of organization.[149] They typically exposed violations similar to those found in Gosplan, including failures to use and store classified paperwork securely, and a steady trickle of lost instructions, reports, internal publications, photographs, maps, and security passes. These could give rise to sharp criticism, but the lethal consequences of the Gosplan affair were exceptional.

Destruction or Transfer to the Archive

The secret document’s life course ended with selection for destruction or the archive. Numerous records of this stage populate the archives. They take the by-now-familiar form of an affidavit signed by two or more officers, listing files selected for incineration because they had “lost practical importance” or “had no value.” Some are brief (e.g., “today we destroyed so many files”) while others itemize every record destroyed over many pages.[150]

Given the quantities of paperwork destroyed each year, it is not surprising that mistakes were made. Deviations from the record were a nightmare for honest officials and an opportunity for dishonest ones. It was difficult to tell the difference after the fact. When documents went missing, everyone would blame each other, while those closest to the event would maintain that the missing documents had been destroyed without a record being kept. Thus, they were willing to admit to procedural violations, which was not as bad as losing state secrets. Conversely, one might ask whether the process of destruction gave scope to cover up the loss or misappropriation of documents by recording them as incinerated. This could be detected only if a document listed as destroyed, but in reality missing, subsequently turned up intact. Exactly this happened in the Gosplan affair, when thirty-three documents listed as destroyed turned up in the home of an official of Gosplan’s secret department.[151]

The choice between destruction and transfer to the archive also selected the documentation that is available today for historical research. In general terms, we are told, documents were destroyed when they were judged to have neither operational nor historical value. In fact, the former Soviet archives that have been opened are full of records of historical value, including “secret plans, reports, minutes, decisions, appeals, and the official and private correspondence of citizens from the highest authorities in the Kremlin to the humblest provincial petitioner.”[152] In contrast, we have no idea of the historical value of what was incinerated.

As for volume, how much paperwork might the archived records represent, compared to what was discarded? Estimates of the proportions of documentation of federal agencies destined for the US National Archives range from “1-3%” (an overall average) to 20 percent in the case of the FBI, the internal security functions of which would appear to match most closely those of the KGB.[153] In the Soviet case we have not the faintest idea of the proportion destroyed. Quite possibly, the tens of millions of formerly secret historical documents that have kept both Russian and Western scholars so busy over the last thirty years are only a small fraction of the cumulative total of Soviet party and state paperwork that circulated through the history of the Soviet Union. We will return to this problem below.

SECRECY AS A TRANSACTION TAX

Soviet procedures for handling classified paperwork were evidently costly. Just as a business must set part of its revenue aside to meet taxes paid in money, Soviet organizations had to set aside resources to meet the requirements of secrecy regulation. These regulations acted on the turnover of Soviet political and economic business like a tax on every transaction made. The tax was levied on the paperwork through which the Soviet system did its business. The tax was paid by every facility and office in the work done by its managers, supported by the white-collar staff of the secret departments, to register and trace every classified document through its life course. The consideration and determination of every significant issue required the exchange of secret paperwork, and this paperwork incurred the secrecy tax every time it changed hands. A personal instruction might change hands only once or twice, but a single decree that was distributed from Moscow to every establishment of a ministry or every province or district could change hands hundreds or thousands of times, with the tax being paid each time.

Considered as a tax on Soviet political and economic transactions, Soviet secrecy had two special properties. First, it was a “cascading” tax in the sense that it was levied on every stage of the original document’s lifecourse and on every stage in the life of the derivative paperwork produced to assure the government that the tax had been paid. Second, the secrecy tax did not yield a revenue to anyone: it was entirely consumed in the act of collecting it, resulting in a deadweight loss.

The cascading property of the secrecy tax was a result of the reflexive quality of Soviet secretiveness. Secrecy covered not only all the original tangible or intangible objects that were secret, but also the existence of secrets, including the regulations that protected them. When classified information was distributed, not only its content but also the facts that it existed and was distributed were classified. This affected the system of accounting for secrets because the derivative paperwork created by logging and auditing original secret documents was also classified secret, and so had to be accounted for in subsequent inventories and inspections, the documentation of which had to be kept secret and accounted for in turn and so on ad infinitum. As a result, the secrecy tax had an internal multiplier: each new original secret increased the total cost of secrecy by more than its own cost. Much of what we find in the former Soviet archives, such as inventories of documents including page after page that lists ledgers, inventories, and certificates of transfer and destruction of documents, is explained by this multiplier.

The secrecy tax provides a simple example of how secrecy made the Soviet political and economic system more secure, while at the same time reducing its capacity. Secrecy threw sand into the Soviet machine in the same way that transaction taxes and trade costs throw sand into the machine of any economy based on exchange.

Secrecy procedures worked in the same way as an oppressive and distorting tax, only to the extent that officials complied with it. Alternatives to tax compliance are tax avoidance and tax evasion. As in the world of real taxes, avoiding the secrecy tax required officials to find adaptations that would satisfy the demands of the secrecy regime more efficiently, while staying within the rules. By contrast, secrecy tax evasion involved rule breaking. How much was there of each?

Compliance

On the side of compliance, the mass of internal inventories suggests near universal alignment with secrecy regulations. In many offices, it seems, years went by without a single sheet going missing. It was worthy of note when someone was willing to admit that one document in a thousand or ten thousand had gone astray. Apparently isolated violations were reported to Moscow and pursued vigorously. As previously discussed, when a police officer lost an informer’s files and failed to report it, the loss was uncovered in less than a month. When a manager was implicated in the loss of a classified item, he was pursued for it for years. These documents give the strong impression of an orderly system of record keeping and tracking where mistakes and deviations were rare.

Where did compliance come from? For loyal public servants there was the internal psychological reward of adherence to a shared code, the code of conspirativeness. No doubt this was reinforced by the expectation that loyal compliance would be rewarded eventually by career advancement. It is evident that compliance could not be taken for granted. For those more focused on the job at hand than on abstract political values, such as research workers, secrecy regulations could be a source of frustration: they interfered with workflow and the sharing of information.[154] Other frustrations of secret work were the greater difficulty of getting permission to travel abroad or public acknowledgment of achievements. Despite this, secret work also brought personal rewards. Secret work was of higher priority, so employees could expect higher salaries and larger bonuses, better conditions of work and housing, and better supplies of both working materials and consumer goods and services.[155] Finally, the “cult of secrecy” bound all the participants together like a church congregation. Whether they came to communion because they were true believers or because they hoped for material benefits or just for the sake of giving and receiving solidarity, they all observed the same rituals.[156]

Avoidance

The most obvious adaptation to the secrecy tax was to avoid creating a paper trail by doing business face to face or on the phone. This adaptation was certainly effective, but within narrow limits.[157] A two-way conversation could pass on simple instructions or provide a channel for a yes/no decision. Much government business was too complex or involved too many participants to be handled in this way. Outcomes based on conversation weakened accountability, unless immediate records were made on both sides, which defeated the object of reducing paperwork. Finally, the interception of telecommunications became the object of a Cold War arms race, and protecting signals also became increasingly costly over time.

Staying with paper-based technologies, avoidance could have taken the form of reorganization to limit the flows of secret correspondence. If secret correspondence arose with highest frequency in the vertical transmission of instructions, then the secrecy tax gave officials an incentive to shorten chains of command, even at the cost of some loss of scope. If the more frequent occasion for secret correspondence was horizontal coordination, then officials should have encouraged horizontal integration, even if vertical chains of command were lengthened. As discussed earlier (in Chapter 2), the Soviet ministerial system was subject to continual reorganization in both dimensions, but there is no evidence that secrecy costs were a salient consideration.

Finally, officials responsible for managing secret work might have undertaken direct measures to limit secret correspondence. A rare example of open concern is found in documents dated April 1974. Officials of the Soviet Lithuania KGB warned that secret paperwork was a growing burden: Excluding the secret department itself, 1.3 million secret and top-secret items had gone in and out of KGB offices during 1973. This was an increase over 1972 of more than 4 percent.[158] The figures implied that each KGB employee handled about 1,000 classified items per year.[159] The authors called on “unit leaders to take forceful measures to restrict administrative correspondence and get rid of instances of the creation and duplication of documents not required by urgent administrative necessity.” But there is no sign that this or any other concerns ever prompted specific measures to stem the flood of classified paperwork.

Evasion

Evidence of evasion of the secrecy tax is plentiful. The records of audit and inspection, already discussed, often pointed to an office culture of carelessness and negligence that spread behind the closed doors of a particular ministerial department or local party organization. As a rule, perhaps, loyalty and career concerns were enough to ensure that most government officials stuck to the rule book most of the time. But, at any moment, standards could slip. Caught between an exacting rule book and the need to get things done, one person took a shortcut. The next person ignored it to maintain goodwill, and a third copied it to save effort. In this way, rule breaking could spread within an office from desk to desk.[160] In some cases, entire organizations degenerated into slipshod practices. Multiple violations would persist until somebody broke ranks and there was a scandal, followed by decisive action and a return to compliance.

MEASURING THE SECRECY TAX

Because the secrecy tax was not paid in money, the former Soviet archives have no record of its ruble cost. The secrecy tax was paid in effort. Ideally, we would somehow aim to capture in a single measure the scale of efforts that went into the original and derivative classification of Soviet secrets and all the measures that traced and protected them. We cannot do that, but we can see the results of those efforts in archived paperwork. Paperwork can be measured, although imperfectly, in numbers of pages, documents, or files, and the overall purposes of paperwork can also be analyzed, again with some imprecision.

In this section I use part of the archive of a small regional Soviet bureaucracy, the KGB of Soviet Lithuania, held on microfilm at the Hoover Institution as of 2011. Taken as a whole, the archive comprised two kinds of records: management information (instructions, plans, reports, and so forth), and operational case files (including many private or personal records not of KGB origin). The records containing management information are taken to represent KGB management activity, so we use those, setting the case files aside. Then, we estimate the proportion of the management files that was dedicated to maintaining secrecy.

The comparison cannot be done directly, because the Soviet Lithuania KGB archive, which contains millions of pages of documents, has not been digitized. Instead, I sample it based on a unique source, the catalogue of the Lithuania KGB collection at the Hoover Institution. The source combines two features: it is digitized, and the description goes down to the level of the individual file.[161] These features are unique in so far as the catalogues of other former Soviet archives are typically unpublished paper records that cannot be reproduced or processed digitally, or they do not provide file-level description.

The unique features of the Hoover catalogue can be used to distinguish the records of the secrecy accounting system from other management records. As described in more detail in the Appendix to this chapter, the analysis involves using stemmed keywords and their combinations to assign files to topics of KGB activity. In the process most management files are assigned to one or more topics of KGB activity.

The data run continuously from 1940 to 1991. For present purposes I will focus on the period from 1954 to 1982, which I will call “Soviet postwar normality.” The beginning of normal times was marked by the restoration of civil peace in Lithuania after years of armed rebellion, and the end was marked by the death of Leonid Brezhnev. Under Soviet postwar normality, the KGB was outwardly preoccupied by the activities we might expect—investigating suspicious people and hunting fugitives, forestalling demonstrations, investigating plots, eavesdropping on suspects, following foreigners, and harassing nonconformists or excluding them from work involving government secrets. Yet the documents left behind from those years indicate that behind the façade, the work of the KGB was overshadowed by a larger preoccupation: assuring the safety of its own secrets.

In Table 3.2, normal times are represented by the second column. The column shows that, over thirty years of Soviet postwar normality, accounting for secrets alone accounted for 34 percent of the paperwork left in the KGB archive. On that basis, the average secrecy tax rate paid by the KGB was one-third. This is the single most important fact that emerges from the documents.

The rest of the table provides context. Before 1954, archived KGB paperwork is dominated by the records of its existential struggle with an

table 3.2. In normal times, one-third of KGB paperwork was documentation of secret file management: The number of Lithuania KGB management files and their composition by topic and year opened, 1940-1991

1940-1953

1954-1982

1983-1991

1940-1991

All files

1,992

1,003

438

3,433

Per year

142.3

34.6

48.7

66.0

By topic, percent:

Counterinsurgency

76.0

7.6

0.6

46.5

Secret file

management

7.8

33-7

71.2

23.4

Other matters

16.2

58.7

27.2

30.0

Total

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

Note: The bold figure in the table is the one highlighted in the text as the most important outcome of the exercise.

Source: Statistical appendix to Harrison, “Accounting for Secrets,” https://warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/data/secrets/jeh2013appendix.pdf.

armed nationalist insurgency. While the armed struggle took priority, accounting for secret paperwork took a back seat, and the secrecy tax made up less than 8 percent of KGB records. After 1982, the secrecy tax wedge was apparently twice its size in normal times—more than 70 percent of KGB records. But this should not be taken as meaningful. As discussed below, that figure is almost certainly skewed by the collapse of regular archiving practices in the last years of Soviet rule.

When secret file management is compared with other KGB activities, it becomes apparent that, in normal times, the secrecy tax consumed more paperwork than any single operational focus of the KGB that is identified here. This is shown in Table 3.3. Examples of other activities were the investigation of crimes and hunting suspects, looking into citizen complaints and petitions (often denunciations), keeping surveillance on foreigners, looking into economic disruptions, and warning rule breakers to behave. None of these other activities comes close to accounting for secrets in the proportion of KGB attention it could expect to receive.

How reliable and how representative is this exercise? First, reliability. A problem is that we have access not to all KGB paperwork, but only

table 3.3. Under Soviet postwar normality, accounting for secrets was the first operational priority of the Lithuania KGB: A topical analysis of 1,003 archived management files opened between 1954 and 1982

Percent of files

Accounting for secrets

33.7

Police investigation and search

13.5

Complaints and petitions

8.3

Counterinsurgency

7.6

Matters relating to foreigners

6.2

Economic matters

5.6

Preventive work

2.4

Matters relating to young people

1.8

Anonymous circulars

1.6

Matters relating to Jews

0.6

Not classified

18.7

Total

100.0

Source: The method is described in the statistical appendix to Harrison, “Accounting for secrets,” available on the author’s webpage at https://warwick.ac.uk/markharri son/data/secrets/jeh2013appendix.pdf, except that for this table double counting of some categories has been eliminated by proportional distribution of files allocated to more than one category.

to the KGB paperwork that was archived. The fact is that we lack useful knowledge about the policies that selected paperwork for conservation, as opposed to destruction. But any error that has resulted is likely to be on the side of understating the burden of secrecy. As noted earlier, “practical importance” was the only criterion ever mentioned for keeping a document for the archive. Intuitively, it seems unlikely that the documentation of secret file management was seen as of more practical importance, and therefore more worthy of archiving, than the documentation of an anti-Soviet plot and its suppression. If the records of file management were disproportionately targeted for incineration, then our estimate of the burden of the secrecy tax could be biased downward.

The idea of a downward bias is reinforced by the composition of documentation archived from of the last years of Soviet rule in Lithuania. In that period, KGB priorities for the retention of documents were reversed. The documents of greatest practical importance were selected for removal or destruction in order to prevent their ultimate disclosure. Less important documents were retained because it was not a priority to destroy them. The result appears in the third column of Table 3.2: for the years 1983 to 1991, three-quarters of the KGB archive consists of records of secret file management. In fact, there is little else. On that basis the secrecy tax rate paid by the KGB was at least one-third.

Then, representativeness. If that was the rate paid by the Soviet Lithuania KGB, what does it mean for the Soviet state more generally? Lithuania’s KGB was, after all, a relatively small agency, with fewer than 1,200 regular employees in 1971 from a country of 3 million.[162] No matter how large as a proportion of its own costs, the aggregate burden of KGB secrecy in Lithuania on the Soviet state was trivial. The one-third secrecy tax rate takes on real significance only if it gives some idea of the rate at which the tax was levied across the Soviet state as a whole.

The case for generalization is substantial, but some uncertainties cannot be eliminated and should be acknowledged. First, what about the KGB elsewhere? The KGB of Soviet Lithuania clearly worked to the same procedural standards as the much larger KGB of the Union. KGB structures were everywhere similar, if not identical. All republican KGBs followed the norms set by Moscow. If security threats were always local and specific, the systems used to manage them were general. The relationship between center and periphery was not one way, it is true. Moscow and the republican KGBs continually exchanged best practices and aimed for mutual improvement. When things went wrong, however, Moscow called the tune. This was the message of Vitalii Fedorchuk, sent to Kyiv in 1970 to take over the Ukrainian KGB. Faced with the suggestion of doing things the local way, he dismissed it contemptuously: “We work for the entire Union. There is no such thing as Ukraine in our work.”[163] In short, the KGB everywhere did what the KGB was doing in Lithuania.

Second, what about other Soviet organizations—central and local government departments, enterprises, offices, research labs, and so forth. Did they too pay the secrecy tax at the KGB rate? It would be natural to suppose that Soviet secrecy was more relaxed in branches dealing with consumer goods or entertainment, for example, so that these departments might have paid the secrecy tax at a reduced or concessionary rate. Yet every office of Soviet government had its own secret department to look after its secret government instructions and its secret war mobilization plan, whether it was the KGB or the office in charge of the supply of undergarments. In short, the KGB set standards across the entire Soviet state bureaucracy, and every secret department operated on parallel lines under direct KGB supervision.

Undercutting the case for generalization, the proportions of secret to nonsecret activity were surely not uniform across all parts of the system. Even core agencies had some unclassified correspondence. Agencies outside the core probably held more unclassified documentation in relative terms. For this reason alone, the secrecy tax must have varied somewhat across the different branches of the state and bore less heavily on civilian agencies.

To summarize, we have tried to measure the secrecy tax rate on Soviet government administration. The only evidence to hand comes from the archive of the Soviet Lithuania KGB. It suggests a rate of at least one-third. But there is an error margin on each side. The fact that we rely on documentation selected for the archive suggests that one-third might not be enough. The fact that the figure is based on the KGB suggests that one-third might be too much, because for other Soviet government departments, the burden might have been less. Either way, the tax rate was high enough that even substantial corrections would struggle to make it insignificant.

BENCHMARKING THE SECRECY TAX

When the government allocates human resources to the security of its own paperwork, is one-third a lot? To benchmark this figure, consider what would seem like a lot in other contexts. In an open society, how much does it take to excite the public? At the end of 2006 it was revealed that over the previous year London’s Metropolitan Police had spent around 5 percent of its £3.2 billion budget on “non-incident linked paperwork” (£122.2 million) and “checking paperwork” (£26.5 million). These figures were enough to create newspaper headlines in the UK.[164] The Lithuania KGB figure of one-third is larger than the Met’s 5 percent by an order of magnitude. This suggests that the British public would see the secrecy tax paid by the KGB as very large.

The principal metric employed in annual reports of the US Information Security Oversight Office is the number of instances of “original” and “derivative” classification and declassification.[165] Although informative in general terms, this does not lead to any statistic against which Soviet practices can be benchmarked. Since 2003, however, the ISOO has published an annual supplementary estimate of the dollar costs of classification and declassification. The costs of information security and classification management to American government, suitably normalized, could provide a benchmark.

In 2010, $5.7 billion (or 95 percent) of the US federal government’s total outlays on the protection of classified information were attributed to three departments: Defense, State, and Justice.[166] What is the right denominator for this sum? In the case of the Lithuania KGB, we compared the quantity of paperwork devoted to secret file management with all other paperwork not in individual case files. What is the US government activity that corresponds with the latter? Since paperwork is labor intensive, we use labor costs of the three departments largely responsible for original classification (in other words, we exclude outlays on operation and maintenance, procurement, research and development, construction, and housing). In 2010 US federal outlays on national defense personnel, “conduct of foreign affairs,” and “litigative and judicial activities” came to $184.6 billion.[167] With that on the bottom line and $5.7 billion on top, outlays on the protection of American secrets in 2010 ran at 3.1 percent of the direct costs of the general activities concerned. Again, we arrive at a fraction that falls below the Lithuania KGB’s secrecy burden by an order of magnitude.

CONCLUSIONS

The Soviet system of accounting for secrets throws a clear light on the procedural costs of doing business under a secretive dictatorship. Conspirative rule imposed something like a secrecy tax on the turnover of government business. Just like a real tax, secrecy threw sand in the machinery of state, making it harder for the right people to obtain information and disseminate decisions. The burden was magnified by Soviet secrecy’s reflexive quality, which turned the system of accounting for secrets into a secret on its own account, one that had to be accounted for within the system.

The human response to a tax can be compliance, avoidance, or evasion. On the evidence, it seems that most Soviet officials complied most of the time. There is little sign of avoidance. As for evasion, taking the form of careless document handling, reports are plentiful. The evidence is that bad examples, if unchecked, could take hold and spread through an office until they were uncovered and suppressed. Only continual enforcement secured general compliance.

The records of a small regional bureaucracy, the Lithuania KGB, let us measure the burden of secret paperwork. In the “normal” postwar years of 1954 to 1982, the secrecy tax was levied at an average rate of at least one-third of overall KGB management costs. There is reason to think that we could generalize this figure across all of Soviet government, although with room for error on either side.

The secrecy tax shows clearly the position of the Soviet state in the secrecy/capacity tradeoff (previously depicted in Figure 2.3). The Soviet state operated with a level of secrecy beyond that which would have maximized state capacity. The secrecy tax was heavy enough to consume a substantial proportion of the Soviet state’s human capacity. The state was rendered less capable, while the regime of the ruling party was made more secure.

APPENDIX. MEASUREMENT, STEP BY STEP

By April 2011, the Hoover Archive had acquired 5,312 files from the Lithuanian Special Archive (the archive of the Soviet Lithuania KGB) containing just over one million microfilmed pages. These files, listed in Table 3.2, all from fond K-i, were catalogued in five collections (opisi) numbered 2 (counterintelligence departments of the NKVD-NKGB-MVD-KGB up to 1954), 3 (counterintelligence departments from 1945), 10 (the KGB secretariat), 14 (the KGB city administrations), and 45 (operational case files).

As can be seen, these files are not all of one type. The typical file in opisi 2, 3, 10, and 14 contained management information (instructions, plans,

table 3A.1. The Lithuania KGB collection at Hoover, April 2011: Files, pages, and years opened and closed

Collection number

2

3

10

14

Subtotal

45

Year opened

1941

1945

1940

1944

1926

Year closed

1954

1996

1991

1986

1991

Files total

39

1,982

750

663

3,434

1,880

Pages, total

8,959

415,985

166,888

76,066

667,898

370,267

Pages per file:

Average

229.7

209.9

222.5

114.9

194.6

197.2

Standard

deviation

119.4

117.7

103.1

84.0

115.7

168.9

Years file was open:

Average

1.64

1.03

0.85

1.07

1.01

29.0

Standard

deviation

1.33

0.98

1.43

1.61

1.24

14.0

Note: The subtotals (of opisi 2, 3, 10, and 14) shown in bold indicate the quantitative attributes of what the text calls the “management files.” Counted among the management files in this table is one 270-page file (Hoover/LYA, K-l/3/1979) containing a file catalogue created in 1996 by the new Lithuania Special Archive. This file is excluded from further analysis.

Source: Lietuvos SSR Valstybés Saugumo Komitetas selected records, 1940-91, fond K-l, held at the Hoover Archive and described at http://www.hoover.org/library-and-archives/ collections/east-europe/featured-collections/lietuvos-ssr.

reports, and so forth). It was open for around a year and was closed at around 2oo pages. The typical operational case file in opis 45 was of similar length (but length was much more variable). It contained many personal records not of KGB origin. A few were opened long before Soviet rule reached Lithuania, and many remained open for decades (at the extreme, one file ran from 1926 to 1985). To focus on the routine management of the Lithuania KGB and place some limits on heterogeneity in the data, we leave opis 45 out of the analysis, keeping opisi 2,3,10, and 14 in. In the text, I call these the “management files.”

It would be hard to make sense of this material without paying close attention to time variation. More files were opened in just one decade, from 1944 to 1953, than in all other years taken together. There were sharp increases in the rate of file creation in 1943 and 1983, and sharp declines in 1953 and 1985.

Specifically, from 1940 to 1953 Lithuania was a theater of conflict, including armed resistance to Soviet rule in 1940/41 and from 1944 to 1953. KGB activity was dominated by the need to suppress the armed resistance. In the KGB archive this is reflected by a torrent of paperwork devoted to counterinsurgency operations. From 1954 the flood subsided to a trickle that was limited to concerns over historic offences and offenders.

From 1983, the quantity and balance of KGB records present in the archive were increasingly affected by the disorderly end of the KGB’s presence in Lithuania in 1991. It became the KGB’s priority to remove to Moscow or destroy many records of current operations that would normally have been archived, to prevent their ultimate disclosure. At the same time, many records deemed to be neither current nor important were retained, because it was not a priority to destroy them.

For the purposes of this chapter, therefore, I discount the data provided by the early and late years of KGB activity in Lithuania. That leaves the 29 years in between, from 1954 to 1982, which (for ease of reference) I call the period of “Soviet postwar normality.” These “normal” years yield 1,003 management files containing more than 160,000 pages of reports, minutes, letters, speeches, and similar material.

The spirit of the exercise is to assign files to topics, based on analyzing the terms used to describe them. The topics are found from keywords and keyword clusters in the file descriptions reported by the Hoover Archive’s electronic catalogue. The first step reduces the catalogue to words and numerals. When numerals are dropped, just over 86,000 words are left. At the second step, “stop” words are eliminated—all words of one or two letters, and conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, and numbers—leaving words that may be considered substantive. The language of the documentation is Russian, and in Russian nouns decline and verbs conjugate, so substantive words must be reduced to their invariant word stems by deleting the variable word endings, while managing the risk of ambiguity arising from word stems with multiple meanings. This is done by hand. The final list comprises 1,400 unique keywords.

TABLE 3A.2. Lithuania KGB management files, 1940-1991: Top ten operational, organizational, and procedural terms by frequency

Rank

Frequency

Operational terms

1 partizan- (partisan)

2373

2 bor'b- (struggle)

1404

3 antisov- (anti-Soviet)

955

4 podpol- (underground)

616

5 natsionalist- (nationalist)

567

6 nastroen- (mood)

460

7 prover- (verification)

421

8 LNDR- (Lithuanian Popular Movement)

308

9 inostran- (foreign)

228

10 avtor- (author)

204

Organizational terms

1 NKGB, MGB, KGB- (People's Commissariat,

Ministry, Committee of State Security)

4398

2 LSSR- (Soviet Lithuania)

3094

3 otdel- (department)

1909

4 MVD- (Ministry of Internal Affairs)

1774

5 rabo- (worker, employee)

1430

6 upravlen- (administration)

1353

7 uezd- (rural district)

1205

8 lits- (person)

1059

9 agentur- (agent network)

813

10 proiavl- (manifestation)

794

Procedural terms

1 dokument- (document)

1667

2 otchet- (report)

1154

3 sprav- (reference report)

1116

4 soobshch- (communication)

991

5 del- (file)

868

6 spis- (list)

523

7 akt- (deed)

521

8 perepis- (correspondence)

465

9 svod- (briefing)

424

10 danny- (data)

414

Source: Statistical appendix to Harrison, “Accounting for Secrets,” https://warwick. ac.uk/markharrison/data/secrets/jeh2013appendix.pdf.

The third step assigns each keyword to one of three broad headings, “operational” (oriented toward external goals, such as the suppression of hostile activity), “organizational” (oriented toward internal goals, such as integration with other party and state institutions), and “procedural” (oriented toward compliance with internal norms of bureaucratic behavior). For general interest, Table 3A.2 lists the top ten keywords under each heading with their frequencies.

The fourth and last step involves determining the frequency of particular topics, based on the clustering of predetermined keywords in the file descriptions. In the spirit of quantitative text analysis, this amounts to supervised topic identification. Topics are identified by a stepwise procedure: first, files are identified by association with counterinsurgency and with secret file management (the category of interest for this chapter). This step generates the data for Table 3.2. Remaining files are assigned to police work (the identification and pursuit of state criminals), matters relating to foreigners, the study of complaints (including denunciations) and petitions, economic matters (surveillance of the economy and investigation of the causes of economic disruption), the suppression of anonymous circulars, matters relating to young people, preventive work (called profilaktika), and matters relating to Jewish people. In the outcome (shown in Table 3.3), more than 80 percent of management files are successfully assigned to one or more topics of KGB activity.

4. SECRECY AND FEAR

In March 1948, a new set of “Instructions to ensure the conservation of state secrets in institutions and enterprises of the USSR” appeared on the desks of government officials in Moscow and other cities.[168] The purpose of the new instructions was to provide for detailed implementation of the law “On responsibility for the disclosure of state secrets and for the loss of documents containing state secrets” enacted nine months previously.

Dissemination of the new instructions sent a wave of anxiety through the offices of the Soviet state. The most immediate cause was not so much the detailed provisions inside as the words on the outside: the top righthand corner of the cover page was marked “Top secret.” The provisions inside the document regulated the handling of all secrets, those classified “secret” as well as “top secret.” Clause no. 108 of the instructions obliged the secret department of every organization to issue the relevant extract of the rules to personnel responsible for handling correspondence classified at the level of merely “secret.” But a preceding clause, no. 87, “categorically” prohibited taking copies from secret government “decrees, decisions, and dispositions.” Thus, the top-secret classification on the outside of the instructions indicated that those qualified to work with documentation classified secret, but not more secret than that, should not be allowed to read the provisions that they were now obliged to follow. The fear was intensified because the law itself, now brought to life by the instructions, established heavy criminal penalties for negligent or thoughtless violations: to fall foul of the law, it was not necessary to be suspected of acting on behalf of a foreign power.

To work for Secret Leviathan in those years was frightening. At work you were bombarded with plans and priorities that were continually revised. You were supposed to achieve them while also showing compliance with a bewildering variety of political norms and administrative rules. You slipped up, and after that your fate was a matter of chance. Maybe no one would notice; or they might notice and do nothing now, but they might recall it months or years later. Once the matter was reported, you could suddenly find yourself under arrest, holding up your trousers because your belt had been removed, under interrogation, then under sentence, then in a cattle truck bound for the Far North or East.

The new law and the instructions that brought it into operation laid out a minefield of entrapments from which anyone would be lucky to escape unscathed. The instructions ran to 47 printed pages and 168 clauses. Anyone who has seen an organization develop knows how it works. You start out with a few simple rules, and you trust everyone to work to their spirit, not their letter. Inevitably, a few people set out to test the limits and cut corners. On each occasion, you respond by adding a new prohibition. Over time, the rules multiply.[169] Here are just two of the rules for typists:

§112. It is prohibited for typists to keep any kind of documents on their desks in nonworking time. All spoiled documents and sheets of paper interleaved to protect the typewriter roller should be handed at the end of work to the senior typist or to the chief of the secret department (secret unit) for storage or destruction.

§113. It is prohibited for typists to carry on conversation with any other person about their work. To clarify unclear wording in original documents, typists should turn to the senior typist or to the executive who submitted the secret document for typing.

Each new rule added to the number of things to be remembered and observed. It also increased complexity, heightening the risk that new rules would contradict old ones or that combinations of rules would have consequences that were unwanted and unexpected.

Among government officials it was a particular fear that matters such as plan figures, released a few months previously and already in the public domain, might now be considered secret, making it an offence under the law to repeat them in public.[170]

Heightened fear had economic consequences. Afraid of the law and the instructions, officials sought insurance against the new risks they faced. They looked for protection by various means. One way was to do as little work as possible, because if nothing was done no rules would be broken. But inaction was dangerous, too, because no one was paid to do nothing. If inaction carried risks, one compromise was to slow business down through postponement. Another was for middle managers to seek out the support of colleagues. Here the problem was to take advice from peers without creating the appearance of an organized conspiracy against the party. A more attractive workaround was to petition the superiors who depended on the middle managers to fulfil the party’s plans. Such appeals ensured that the superiors were fully informed of the issues and made the higher-ups coresponsible for the steps that the middle managers now had to take. In turn, the higher-ups were made to switch attention from their own core tasks to the reform of procedures that stood in the way of getting results.

At every level, normal business slowed down. To outsiders, the Soviet Leviathan retained its usual appearance: all-knowing, authoritative, under the command of a single will. On the inside, Leviathan dithered, its limbs paralyzed by indecision.

The next sections of this chapter discuss the origins of the intensified secrecy regime, and then its implications for one particular—and most important—secret: the identification and location of the labor camps of the Gulag. Thereafter I tell the story that is central to this chapter as it transpired in 1949. The concluding sections discuss how fear worked in the Soviet economy and whether the effects of fear show that Stalin went too far.

THE "KR" AFFAIR

The seeds of the chaos that spread through the Soviet bureaucracy during 1948 are to be found in the global search for a cure for cancer. At the end of the 1920s a Soviet scientist, Grigorii Roskin, embarked on a long-term project of research on biological cancer therapies. Reasoning that cancer growth involved a failure of the immune system, Roskin’s idea was to find a naturally occurring agent that would boost the capacity of the immune system to combat tumors. He chose the tropical parasite that causes Chagas disease, an inflammatory syndrome. After a few years his wife Nina Kliueva joined the project. Their research was not classified, and the work in progress gave rise to several open publications. Despite wartime disruption, by 1946 Kliueva and Roskin had developed what they believed to be a promising if still experimental anticancer drug, which they called “KR.”[171]

In the prewar years, Stalin’s terror had broken Soviet scientific contacts and exchanges with Western Europe and the United States. During the war these contacts were resumed with official support on both sides. There were limits, however: the Soviet Union was excluded from Anglo-American atomic research, for example, and gained access to its results only by espionage.[172]

At the war’s end, there were widespread hopes among Soviet people that they would be rewarded for the Soviet victory by relaxation, allowing a more open or even “normal” political and cultural atmosphere.[173] KR became a vehicle of these hopes. In July 1946, an article by Roskin describing his research appeared in the American journal Cancer Research; the paper had been solicited, approved, and submitted through official channels in the autumn of 1945.[174] This and other scientific contacts fed public interest in the United States. In Moscow, the US ambassador was able to meet Kliueva and Roskin. Subsequently, he put forward an American-funded program of joint research to Georgii Miterev, the Soviet health minister. Visiting the United States in October, Vasilii Parin, secretary of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, carried samples of KR and a book, newly published in the Soviet Union by Kliueva and Roskin, that described their work. After some hesitation, he shared the book and the samples with interested American researchers.

Disaster followed. The scientists had misread the direction from which the wind was blowing. High officials of the USSR Health Ministry and Politburo members such as Andrei Zhdanov and Viacheslav Molotov were aware of what was going on and even encouraged it, but they failed to secure the approval of the Politburo itself—in other words, of Stalin. Instead, there were delays and miscommunications while the visits and exchanges went ahead. In January 1947, when the matter came to Stalin’s attention, Zhdanov turned abruptly from the promotion of Soviet science in the West to a new posture: the need to protect valuable Soviet secrets. Angered, Stalin sacked Miterev and had Parin arrested. Over a few weeks, however, his crosshairs shifted away from the officials to the scientists. Stalin feared that, by sharing their work in progress on KR, Kliueva and Roskin had put at risk Soviet claims to priority in an important field of health science and to the potential revenues from its commercial exploitation. The scientists were now accused of violating secrecy and of betraying the interests of the Soviet state to American intelligence for the sake of “personal fame.”

All that the outside world knew was that the exchanges and visits came to a sudden stop, while Kliueva and Roskin disappeared along with their work. In fact, they remained at liberty and their research continued, although in secret. They were not charged with spying or arrested, a sign of how times had changed since the Great Terror. Behind closed doors, however, they were subjected to severe condemnation. Zhdanov had them brought before an “honor court” held on 5-7 June 1947, where they were denounced and censured before hundreds of spectators. In the second half of 1947, party organizations and government ministries held hundreds of closed meetings across the country to condemn them.[175]

The KR affair had lasting consequences. One was the secrecy law of 9 June 1947.[176] The new law took the regime of secrecy to a new degree of intensity. The law was not aimed at espionage or treason, for which the most severe penalties were already available under the infamous Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. Rather, it set out severe penalties for the lesser offenses of unintentional or negligent disclosure of state secrets, which were potentially far more numerous and everyday than cases of deliberate spying.[177]

In Soviet history, new laws were often accompanied by stringent enforcement campaigns based on exemplary punishment of offenders.[178] Discussing the new law in a draft for Pravda (subsequently published on 27 September 1947), the USSR state prosecutor Konstantin Gorshenin outlined recent cases in which the defendants were sentenced to four or more years of forced labor, not because they were traitors, but because they lost secret documents through negligence. There were spies in Gorshenin’s narrative, but the spies were foreign rather than home grown. Foreign intelligence agencies, Gorshenin suggested, were predators in search of a “habitat” that could supply “willing or unwilling prey.” He claimed that they found their victims especially among those citizens “in whose consciousness such relics of the past as a self-centered attitude to social causes, nonideological, narrow-minded interests, an egotistical drive toward cheap personal fame, adulatory self-abasement before bourgeois culture, and so forth, are still strong.” Also open to foreign manipulation were “those who, out of their own generosity, trust everyone and anyone, and fail to reckon the cost of their generosity to the interests of the state.” Only increased vigilance could frustrate the imperialists’ designs.[179]

If the KR affair triggered the sudden clampdown, it is natural ask what wider considerations were also at work. The historian Nikolai Krementsov places weight on the international context of the late 1940s. He suggests that Stalin, having observed how the United States had exploited secrecy to gain a monopoly on the new technology of atomic weapons, may have concluded that the Soviet Union should seek a parallel monopoly in the new medical technology of cancer treatment. He quotes a telling phrase found in a secret report of the time, where the author, a Soviet journalist, described the KR treatment as “a kind of biological ‘atomic bomb.’”[180] The analogy might be weakened by the fact that the Americans had made public the most important ideas behind the atomic bomb and its manufacturing technology in August 1945, within days of the first use of atomic weapons against Japan. The Smyth Report withheld some details, but still it gave away enough for the Soviet atomic engineer Nikolai Sinev to call it “an original compass, making it possible to orient oneself in the taiga [i.e., wilderness], so as not to get lost and to have confidence in success.” Although it was public information in the rest of the world, the Soviet authorities did not allow the Smyth Report to circulate freely and provided it only to specialists based on need to know.[181] These reasons make it hard to see the Soviet secrecy law of June 1947 as a symmetrical or proportional response to American measures. But there is no doubt that Stalin saw American interest in Soviet-American scientific exchanges as predatory.

The previous chapter described how secrecy threw sand into the machine of the Soviet state by burdening the officials’ working lives with complex procedures. The story of this chapter is a case study in how a sudden intensification of the regime of secrecy had a similar effect by making the officials severely afraid of new penalties. The new secrecy law of 1947 applied everywhere across the Soviet state, not just to the administration of health science, where the shock originated, and it reduced state capacity everywhere, including in completely unrelated branches of the state. We will show this by looking at what happened in the Gulag system of labor camps.[182]

In 1947 the Gulag was already completely secret, and the new law made no difference to that. What the law did in the Gulag, as elsewhere, was make everybody much more frightened of accidentally letting slip details about their work, even when the people they were dealing with were other state officials, and even when their mutual business was carrying out plans that were previously authorized and made compulsory by government legislation.

FORCED LABOR AND SECRECY

A few days after the new secrecy law of 1947 was enacted, the leaders of the Gulag issued a new list itemizing the Gulag’s secrets. First on the list was: “The location of corrective-labor and verification-filtration camps, colonies, deportation prisons, and other Gulag subsections.”[183]

This was not new; the location and identification of labor camps were secret long before 1947. They had become secret in stages, rather than all at once. In 1922, Moscow’s three labor camps belonging to the Chief Administration for Compulsory Projects were no secret: their phone numbers were published in the telephone directory.[184] As of 1927, a comprehensive list of Soviet state secrets did not mention labor camps. It did classify as “secret,” under “matters of a military nature,” “The dislocation in toto of every category of institution and establishment (for example,... all institutions of higher learning..., all warehouses, etc.).”[185] So, under these rules, a comprehensive list of labor camps would have been classified, but labor camps were not singled out as a special case, and it was not forbidden to reveal the location of any particular forced labor facility. In the early 1930s the Soviet media published various accounts of life behind the wire. The writer Maksim Gor’kii contributed idealized stories about life in the labor camps of the Solovetskii islands, the Moscow suburb of Liubertsy, and the White Sea canal project.[186] At this time, therefore, although the censorship was now fully operational, the existence of particular labor camps was still not secret, although reports of conditions were heavily sanitized.

By the 1930s, however, the fact that something was not listed as secret did not mean that anyone could freely know it or repeat it. The statistics of forced labor were secret de facto at this time, as well as the laws governing the use of the laborers.[187] A particular factor is that the early 1930s were the time of the Great Depression in the world economy. An international outcry developed against the Soviet export of commodities produced by forced labor such as timber and gold.[188] This set off a self-reinforcing cycle: foreign opinion became more suspicious of the Soviet uses of forced labor, so the Soviet state (which did have something to hide) became more secretive, and this strengthened foreign suspicions.

After the Depression the campaign against Soviet exports died away, but there was no return to openness. Official propaganda of the benefits of “corrective labor” ceased. The works on the subject that were previously published were banned, and some authors were arrested. By 1937, concealment was total.[189] There were no more stories of conditions in the Gulag until 1962, when a window was opened briefly for Alexander Solzhenitsyn to publish his fictional account of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, set in an unnamed Siberian labor camp. Then the window closed again, and the full facts were suppressed for another quarter century.[190]

An illustration of the utter secrecy under which the labor camps had fallen can be found in the beginning of the end of the Gulag. Stalin died on 5 March 1953. On 28 March, on the initiative of its first deputy chairman and interior minister Lavrentii Beria, the USSR Council of Ministers ordered the Ministry of the Interior to transfer most forced labor camps and colonies to the Ministry of Justice.[191] Within a few weeks, hundreds of establishments and millions of lives had changed hands.

For the handover to take place, Justice Ministry officials had to receive some sort of account of the camps and colonies for which they were suddenly responsible. Of many questions they might have had, the first was surely: Where are they? What are they called?

In fact, camps were everywhere—not just in the Arctic and in Siberia, as many once supposed. In Moscow the secretariat of Gulag (the interior ministry chief administration of labor camps) compiled lists and maps. There appears to have been one list and one map for each of the 150 or so provinces and republics of the Soviet Union at the time. Every map was drawn in pen and pencil by an anonymous hand. Roads, railways, rivers, and coasts were traced. Installations were symbolized and place names were artfully lettered.[192]

For the historian, the inference is unmistakable: the Gulag had no printed maps. Why not? It is true that the Soviet Union was not a rich country, and maps that were accurate enough to be useful were not cheap to produce and reproduce. But were they so costly as to be beyond the country’s means? Absolutely not.

In fact, Russia had a long tradition of print cartography. According to the website of the Russian National Library, map printing “began and came of age” in Russia already in the eighteenth century.[193] In Russian history, when maps were needed, they were produced. Alexander I created the Imperial Army corps of topographers in 1812. In 1914 the Russian Army entered World War I with a stock of 30 million printed maps of the border districts of the empire and its neighbors. In 1941 the Red Army’s early retreats cost it a stockpile of too million maps.[194] By this time, topographical units fully equipped with map stores and printing facilities were embedded in the Red Army’s mobile formations. After the chaos of 1941, much of the war was fought over vast interior spaces of the country that prewar thinking had considered invulnerable. Despite this, each major operation saw the printing of many millions of maps of various scales and their distribution to the troops, including specialized maps for different branches of the armed forces.[195]

In short, Stalin’s bureaucracy was certainly capable of supplying printed maps when required. It was demand, not supply, that prevented their production. If the Gulag had no printed maps, it is because they were not wanted. The production and distribution of printed maps of the Gulag could only have widened the circle of people with access to the identity and location of labor camps, which were among the top state secrets of the time.

FEAR SPREADS THROUGH THE GULAG

The labor camps of the Gulag were not self-sufficient. They received deliveries of food, fuel, and equipment from outside suppliers. They provided civilian facilities with products such as timber, ores and minerals, and other materials and foodstuffs. This required them to undertake everyday transactions with a wide range of civilian counterparties: suppliers and purchasers, the railways that delivered supplies and took them away, and the state banking system that held an account for each camp and recorded debits and credits for camp purchases and receipts.

In 1949, bilateral transactions between the Gulag and its civilian environment began to break down. Reading between the lines, one gathers that the breakdown remained partial; it would have become complete only if all those involved from top to bottom had stuck rigidly to formal rules. Instead, a complete breakdown was avoided to the extent that officials resorted to working around the rules or ignoring them to some degree.

A gap between rules and realities was not unique to this moment or this context. Generally, rigid adherence to rules might have made the entire Soviet system unworkable. All Soviet managers were compelled to break rules for the sake of their job, even those who aimed to do only just enough to be left alone to “sleep peacefully.”[196] They were used to an environment in which rules came into conflict with realities. Their skill lay in knowing which rules they could break and how much they could get away with.

The evidence of our story is that Soviet managers saw the gap between secrecy rules and realities as particularly dangerous. It produced more than the usual amount of fear. For this reason, while they were willing to work around the rules to some extent, they also took steps to insure themselves against the potentially severe legal consequences of doing so. Insurance involved two things, both directed at their superiors. One was prompt disclosure of the illegal actions they were being forced to undertake; this implicated their superiors in joint responsibility either for rule breaking or for the plan breakdown that would follow from working to rule. The other was to invest significant time and effort in lobbying superiors for the rules to be adapted to reality.

The practical issue started from the designation of labor camps’ names and addresses. Labor camps were given different designations for different purposes. Specifically, every camp had a “full” or “effective designation” (polnoe or deistvitel’noe naimenovanié) and one or more “conventional designations” or code names (uslovnoe naimenovanié).

The camp’s code name was for nonsecret use, most commonly in providing release certificates to prisoners at the end of their terms, in enabling personal correspondence between prisoners and their relatives, and in the personal correspondence of camp officers and hired employees. The sole purpose of the code name was to avoid disclosing the full name and address. For that reason, it was also essential to avoid disclosing the concordance between code names and full designations.

An example is Volzhlag, also known as Volgolag (and before that Vol-gostroi). Volzhlag was opened in 1946 and transferred in April 1953 to the Yaroslavl’ provincial Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) administration.[197] Its full name was Volzhskii ITL MVD (the Volga Corrective Labor Camp of the Ministry of Internal Affairs). Its full address was “Perebory village, Rybinsk ward [raiori], Yaroslavl’ province [oblast’].” Volzhlag also had a unique telegraphic address, “Volga.”

Unique letter codes were issued to every camp under MVD decree 001542 of 25 December 1945. For Volzhlag, high in the Russian alphabet, the letter code was “E”. Camps lower down the list had codes with two or three letters. Camps were issued with letter-coded stamps (shtampy) and seals (pechati) to certify releases and correspond with persons such as prisoners’ relatives, Gulag officers, and hired employees. Stamps were articles of convenience that substituted for typed or printed letterheads. Circular seals were more important: they gave legal force to signed original documents. At this time, meanwhile, camps continued to use their full designations in correspondence with state organizations and state counterparties. They were also issued with stamps and seals giving full designations to authorize and notarize such correspondence and financial documentation under MVD decree no. 00249 of 29 April 1949.

Finally, mailbox numbers were issued under MVD decree 0035 of 15 January 1949; these were for use in all nonsecret correspondence to avoid fuller identification.[198] For Volzhlag, the mailbox address was “Shcherbakov town, mailbox no. 229.”

Things Fall Apart

Our story begins on 15 February 1949, when Gulag third administration chief Volkovyskii forwarded a letter to second administration legal department chief Liamin. The letter was from Moldavian deputy interior minister Babushkin to Gulag chief Dobrynin in Moscow.[199] It reported that the local oil industry distributor was refusing orders for fuel from the local Gulag administration. The reason: these orders were classified secret, as they had to be, given that the delivery address was a state secret. But under the Soviet Union’s new secrecy regime, the fuel supplier was entitled to accept secret orders only from military units. The camps of the Moldavian Gulag were not military units, so their orders were returned without being met. The same difficulty was affecting supplies of meat, grain, and other food products to the camps, and so was “demoralizing the work of supply.”

A related issue emerged with a letter of 7 April from MVD war supplies administration chief Gornostaev to deputy interior minister Obruchnikov.[200] MVD decree no. 0035-1949 (already mentioned above) ordered that labor camps’ nonsecret correspondence should use mailbox numbers as the only form of designation. This created the following problem. Gos-bank, the state bank, held its depositors’ full names and addresses, not their mailbox numbers. Gosbank was now refusing transfers to or from the settlement accounts of labor camps based on identification by mailbox number, because this did not match the account details that it held. But full designations were now a state secret that could not be disclosed to Gosbank—although Gosbank already held this information in the account details. Payments were being held up, and there was a risk of penalty charges for setting up transfers incorrectly.

A note of 6 August from Moscow office chief Slobodkin of the MVD supply administration to Gulag chief Dobrynin widens the frame.[201] Slobodkin reported a general breakdown in the settlement of invoices to labor camps for equipment and medical supplies. Bank officers were rejecting payments across the board on the grounds that the payer was insufficiently identified. Bank records had not been updated to correspond with depositors’ mailbox numbers.

Slobodkin warned Dobrynin to anticipate a problem when considering how to update the bank records. Under MVD regulations, it was prohibited to extract and copy information from secret documents. If the document that Gulag now provided to Gosbank was a list of camps by mailbox number, it would be labeled “top secret” or “secret,” making it illegal for the bank to extract and copy the necessary information. Slobodkin asked Dobrynin “not to delay a solution.”

Time passed, but the mismatch between rules and realities persisted. On 9 March 1950, a year after the problem first arose, Volzhlag chief Kopaev reported his anxieties to Gulag secretariat chief Chirkov.[202] The root of the problem, he suggested, was a clash between two MVD decrees. Decree no. 001542-1945 gave every camp a letter-coded designation and letter-coded stamps and seals to authorize releases and correspond with private persons. Decree no. 00249-1949 issued stamps and seals giving camps’ full designations, for correspondence with state organizations and state counterparties, and to authorize and notarize financial documentation. One problem arose in mailing nonsecret correspondence to other government agencies. The letter inside was written on paper headed by the full name of the camp. The envelope, which could be seen by anyone, carried the sender’s mailbox number and town. Put the two together and you had access to a state secret—the concordance between the camp’s full and conventional designations. Similarly, an order issued to an external supplier bore the camp’s mailbox number, while the authorizing seal gave its full name. Similar issues arose in dispatching products and making payments. Someone in the secretariat wrote in the margin: “Comrade Rozenberg. We need to speed up agreement on the draft decree. 17 March 1950.”

Recall MVD war supplies administration chief Gornostaev, who wrote first to deputy interior minister Obruchnikov in April 1949. He appears in the file twice more, the second time more than a year later, on 24 July 1950, writing to new deputy interior minister Serov.[203] He began by reminding Serov that the matter was not new. MVD decree no. 0035-1949, he continued, did not cover the addressing of rail and river shipments and bank transfers. At present this could be done only by revealing the full names of camps. The MVD war supplies administration had made proposals, Gornostaev complained, but the matter remained unresolved. “Given that the disclosure of the full designation of MVD camps, building sites, and colonies, and their location is impermissible,” he concluded, “I ask for your instructions to accelerate the resolution of this question.”

Who t Is to Be Done?

Overlapping with the sequence of complaints were the first moves toward a possible resolution. In May 1949, Gulag second administration deputy chief Nikulochkin reported to Gulag chief Dobrynin that the allocation of mailbox numbers to camps had given rise to unanticipated difficulties with suppliers and bank officers.[204] He proposed a round of consultations with counterparties to identify solutions. But consultations would involve the exchange of information, which required high-level authorization. Nikulochkin asked Dobrynin to authorize the Gulag’s financial section chief to visit Gosbank, its transport section chief to visit the transport ministry, and its quartermaster general to visit the ministry of communications.

These visits evidently took place. On 1 July 1949, MVD transport section chief Zikeev reported back that the transport ministry did not need to know details of senders other than mailbox numbers (the report does not discuss the problem of recipients).[205] The MVD transport section could provide the transport ministry with a daily matrix of shipments by line of origin and destination. The mailbox numbers of camps had to be known to the MVD transport section in Moscow, its local suboffices along the railway lines, and the station masters. This system already applied to shipments from special-purpose construction projects, i.e., the secret labor camps of the interior ministry’s administration for industrial construction, Glavpromstroi.

Six weeks later, on 21 September, Gulag acting chief Bulanov proposed two options to deputy interior minister Chernyshov.[206] He began by reviewing the current situation: orders for food, clothing, building materials, equipment and machinery, pharmaceuticals, and published materials were breaking down. The orders went to suppliers as top secret, and so were being rejected and returned unfilled. Suppliers required full addresses to fill orders. But to provide these addresses openly would disclose state secrets. The first option that Bulanov proposed to Chernyshov was to assimilate relations between Gulag establishments and civilian counterparties to the rules that the interior ministry had recently (6 August 1949) applied to the military formations of its internal security troops. In effect, every camp would be reclassified as a troop unit (voiskovaia chast’) of the MVD. A second option was to reregister every camp with suppliers and banks as an “MVD facility” (ob'ekt MVD) with a mailbox number. Either way, private correspondence would continue to go via existing mailbox numbers.

Bulanov’s memo is followed in the file by two options for interior minister Kruglov to consider. The first option took the form of a draft decree “On the introduction of new designations of corrective labor camps.” The draft approved the nomenclature “MVD facility, mailbox number XXXX.”[207] It authorized camp chiefs to communicate in top secret their true addresses to deposit holders and railheads, and it required them to prepare new stamps and seals incorporating the new nomenclature.

The second option, a draft decree “On the procedure for maintaining correspondence of corrective labor camps and formalization of their documentation on business and financial operations,” was provisionally dated November 1949 and so was most likely prepared separately. It approved another nomenclature, “troop unit no. XXXX,” for all camps except those of Glavpromstroi.[208] According to this draft decree, Gosbank account holders would register only the troop unit number; orders for goods would specify the unit number and railway line and station. This draft decree gave authorizations and requirements to camp chiefs that were similar to the one before, and it covered the complexities of secret and private correspondence in more detail.

At this point the MVD second special section stepped in and became responsible for carrying the matter forward. On 26 November, second special section chief Filatkin wrote to Gulag chief Dobrynin asking for comments on a revised draft decree “On the procedure for maintaining correspondence,” etc. This document is not in the file, but it was evidently a revision of the option that sanctioned the renaming of camps as “troop units” (the title given is the same but with a few extra words).[209] Dobrynin wrote back to Filatkin on 7 December with minor amendments and corrections to the list of camps. Dobrynin and Filatkin jointly sent the agreed composite to Kruglov for signature on 30 December.

One Step Forward, One Step Back

Kruglov did not sign. On 20 January, MVD financial department chief Karmanov and chief accountant Zaitsev raised objections to the Dobrynin-Filatkin solution.[210] They pointed out that, under a Gosbank instruction of 2 April 1945, troop units could hold only deposit accounts, not settlement accounts with overdraft facilities. The camps currently held 10.6 billion rubles of Gosbank credits that they would have to give up. Replacing this sum would be beyond the budget of the MVD (more evidence, if more is required, that access to money did matter in the Soviet economy). For the proposal to work, Gosbank and Prombank, the state industrial investment bank, would have to agree to alter the instructions so that the “troop units” of the Gulag could raise overdrafts.

Almost immediately, this interpretation was confirmed by Gosbank. On 4 February 1950, financial service state counsellor Borychev wrote to deputy interior minister Mamulov to make a simple point: Renaming labor camps as troop units would not preserve secrecy.[211] “Everyone knows,” he explained patiently (or was that sarcasm?) that military troop units were not funded by Gosbank. The labor camps had large funding needs. The discrepancy, he pointed out, would attract attention and this would lead directly to what was to have been avoided: disclosure of the location of camps. It would be better, Borychev argued, to stick to mailbox numbers on a system like that used by the defense industry.

These arguments appear powerful and are not contested in the documentation. Instead, they were ignored. A short background paper from Gulag second administration chief Matevosov, dated May 1950, for example, noted that the “troop unit” proposal had been current since September the previous year when Gulag first proposed it to deputy interior minister Chernyshov.[212] FIG u re 4.1. Should we give labor camps the cover of “troop unit”? Mock letterhead for a troop unit of the MVD

In Russian:

In English:

МВД СССР

MVD of the USSR

ВОЙСКОВАЯ ЧАСТЬ

TROOP UNIT

№

No.

19 Г.

19 (year).

№

No.

гор.

town

Source: Hoover/GARF, R-9414/ldop/145, 41 (“Appendix no. 2 to USSR MVD Decree No.___of____December 1949”). This document was (naturally) classified “Top secret.”

It envisaged that, while camps would be renumbered as troop units for business purposes, the system of identifying camps by a letter designation, which originated with NKVD decree no. 001542-1945 (see above), would be maintained for nonsecret correspondence such as release certificates and correspondence with private persons.

The MVD leadership met on 9 May 1950. The minutes recorded approval “in principle” of Filatkin’s draft decree, but also asked the MVD secretariat, second special department, and legal unit “attentively to review” the issue together one more time.[213] There is no draft decree, but ninety-five Gulag establishments were listed by name from “A” to “Ya,” each labeled “Troop unit no. [space].”[214] The list is dated December 1949, so it is most likely part of the package originally sent to Kruglov at the end of that month (see above). A sheet attached with a mock letterhead and three seals for correspondence, financial authorizations, and packages respectively, looks as if it has the same origin. The letterhead followed the template shown in Figure 4.1.

The proposal to reclassify labor camps as “troop units” was still current in June 1950, when a draft letter from interior minister Kruglov to war minister Vasilevskii enquired whether the Soviet Army would object to the renaming of camps as troop units.[215] It is not clear whether the letter was ever sent: no reply is filed. Handwritten across the copy on file are the words: “Comrades Yatsenko and Filatkin. Examine the draft decree one more time for report to the minister for signature. 8 June (signature illegible).”

Indecision

At the back of the file are further draft decrees of the interior minister, one dated “1950” and the other “August 1950.” The idea of renaming camps as “troop units” had gone. Instead, both decrees were based on Bulanov’s other option of September 1949: camps were to be renamed “MVD facility” (ob”ekt MVD) with a four-digit number. The first draft decree is a single page followed by lengthy “Instructions” and a model letter for each camp to send to its local Gosbank branch office.[216]

The instructions are more detailed than in previous draft decrees. A key clause affirms: “The location (of camps) is a document of special importance” (in Russian, osoboi vazhnosti, the highest level of Soviet secrecy); “Reproduction and duplication are prohibited.” Previous conventional designations, including letter codes and telegraphic addresses, were to be abolished, but mailbox numbers would be retained. Secret correspondence within the MVD would use full designations; secret correspondence with other ministries (including MGB, the security ministry) and nonsecret correspondence would use only facility numbers. The instructions cover many other contingencies, including how to deal with camps that are dissolved, newly established, relocated, and so on.

The last draft decree in the file, dated August 1950, again enacts the “MVD facility” solution. Model letters to local railway stationmasters and bank officials are included.[217] The tone is more practical and bureaucratic than the preceding draft. Much of the content is similar; two additions stand out. Paragraph 6(e) deals with prisoners and their relatives:

Mailboxes of MVD corrective labor and special camps are used only for letters, transfers, and packages addressed to prisoners. Answers to relatives of convicts requesting the location of prisoners... are to be given out only verbally through the information bureau of the first special department ... indicating the mail address of the prisoner’s place of confinement (e.g., Skvortsov Ivan Petrovich, year of birth 1903, serving punishment—town of Kotlas, mailbox no. 420).

And paragraph 3(c) directly addresses the anxieties of Volzhlag chief Kopaev (voiced in March 1950 and mentioned above):

To prohibit the simultaneous use in a single administrative correspondence of differently named forms, stamps, and seals of the camp (e.g., application of a seal with the camp’s conventional name and use of its actual name on signature, etc.).

Neither the “troop unit” nor the “facility” solution was enacted. On July 29, 1950, MVD war supplies administration chief Gornostaev complained—again—to deputy interior Serov.[218] The interior minister, he said, had issued more decrees: in addition to no. 0035-1949, there was now decree no. 00108-1950. These decrees (not in the file, unfortunately) gave every camp a mailbox number. The problem, Gornostaev continued, was that nothing had been implemented. MVD camps and building sites had not revised their bank account details, so that the MVD war supplies administration remained unable to debit camps for shipments because the debits were not accepted by Gosbank. In fact, Gosbank was imposing a 100-ruble penalty for each incorrect debit. Meanwhile, the war supplies administration had to continue to use full details of camp names and addresses, since these were what Gosbank required. Until the matter was resolved, Gornostaev asked permission to maintain this practice, using the MVD secret courier service.

Decree no. 00108-1950 was not the final word. Gulag second administration chief Matevosov wrote to MVD legal section acting chief Kurbatov on 23 September 1950, asking him for comments on the draft decree “On the procedure for maintaining correspondence,” mentioned above, revised after the MVD leadership meeting on 9 May 1950, and still, apparently, pending.[219]

The Outcome?

Nearly one year after Volzhlag chief Kopaev first reported it, the problem of mixing secret and nonsecret identities in nonsecret correspondence continued to trouble camp officials. On 9 February 1951, Bazhenovlag acting chief of administration Golubev asked MVD secretariat deputy chief Diukanov for urgent clarification of MVD decree no. 0035-1949. Two months passed before Gulag organization department chief Liamin replied, on 4 April:

A draft decree has been presented to the USSR MVD leadership on the procedure for correspondence about questions of the production and business activities of camps. Given a positive decision on this question, the questions raised by comrade GOLUBEV will find their solution.[220]

On 27 February 1953, the MVD finally issued decree no. 0033-1953 (again, missing from the files), with new rules to resolve the problem of unintentional disclosure of state secrets in nonsecret correspondence. Provincial MVD administrations reported new mailbox numbers to their superiors and to bank officials and other counterparties. There was no mention of “troop units” or “facilities.”[221]

By this time, it would appear, the fear had subsided. In the spring of 1953, nearly four years had passed since the Gosplan affair of 1949 (discussed in Chapter 3), which began with the loss or misplacement of secret documents. The files of the party control commission from this period show only two other cases involving carelessness with secrets. In 1944 (another incident from Chapter 3), a coded telegram from Stalin’s war cabinet got lost in Gor’kii (Nizhnii Novgorod) province between a factory director and the local party secretary. Although five years had passed, in the fevered atmosphere of 1949, an inquiry was launched. The matter was taken seriously enough for a two-year investigation, but the principals blamed each other, and evidence was lacking to determine fault, so no action was taken. And in June 1953 a case was filed against half a dozen officials of the USSR state committee for supply of food and consumer goods for the loss of secret documents.[222] Each blamed the others, and the matter was resolved by party warnings and reprimands. These were light penalties, normal in the bureaucratic career of any moderate risk taker. There was no hint of criminal charges.

Six years after the secrecy law of 9 June 1947, the number of complaints about its impact had fallen away. The officials of the Gulag had evidently learned to do business in spite of the new regime. Perhaps, through habituation, they no longer feared it. Stalin was on his way to see Marx. The Gulag would fade to a shadow before disappearing forever in 1960. But its secrets would be kept for another generation.

HOW FEAR WORKED

The impact of the June 1947 secrecy law worked its way through the Soviet system. The effects were not instantaneous, because the law took many months to implement fully. Rather, the shock rippled through the system at all its levels. At lower levels the evidence is of a sharp increase in trade costs—the costs of transacting official business among the various specialized agencies of the state.

Official business depended on the willingness of parties and counterparties to share information. For example, buyer and seller had to identify themselves to each other before setting out prices and quantities in contracts that would implement the plans already decided at higher levels. As the regulatory framework evolved, managers recalculated the risks of identifying themselves to each other as before. They found that the risks of penalization for innocent disclosures had risen. As a result, they changed their behavior. They redirected their efforts away from managing the economy toward self-protection.

In the first wave, managers tried to avoid giving away dangerous secrets or receiving them. With that aim, managers declined orders, and bank officials declined payments. By these actions, officials replaced one risk by another. While mitigating the risk that they would be charged with unintentional secrecy violations, they heightened the risk that they would fail to fulfill the state plans by which all would be judged. The state’s business still had to be done.

In the second wave, the managers embarked on a spontaneous campaign of writing letters. They appealed to their superiors for help. The object of these appeals was twofold. On the surface, they demanded solutions that would allow them to do business safely. There was also a subtext, to implicate the superiors in responsibility for the rule breaking and workarounds that might now be forced on them if they were to continue to do the state’s business. These were the efforts by which the managers sought to protect themselves.

At higher levels, officials were made forcefully aware of the spreading disorder below, the risks of paralysis, and their responsibility for finding a solution. But any solution would have unintended consequences and could even be interpreted as an attempt to work around the law. Workarounds based on joint action could quickly acquire the smell of conspiracy. When decisive action was risky, with few certain benefits, it was generally better to keep options open.

In the short term, the outcome that was safest for the higher officials might well be to procrastinate and put the decision off until tomorrow. When tomorrow came and the advantages of the various options had to be recalculated, continued delay would probably come out on top again. Thus, the short term could drift into the long term.

Economists have given considerable attention to the human tendency to procrastinate. George Akerlof attributes it to undue salience of the costs of present versus future action.[223] For Susan Rose-Ackerman, complex organizations can give rise to rational procrastination. Suppose responsibilities overlap, so that more than one official is available to solve a particular problem. In that case, a reputation for prompt decision making becomes a liability: the official that is known for timely decisions will be overwhelmed by petitioners. Delay is better because it shifts work pressure onto others.[224]

In the present context, a more plausible candidate is the explanation offered by Gomes, Kotlikoff, and Viceira. They describe a competitive democracy in which tenure is limited by the frequency of elections. Short tenures encourage short-term optimization: if the decision that would most benefit the community in the long term looks personally risky, leave it to your successor.[225] The Soviet Union of the 1940s was not a democracy, but bureaucratic circulation was still competitive. As long as the normal period of tenure was shorter than the period of payoff from tough decisions, procrastination could be the outcome in an authoritarian system, just as in democracies.

In this story, the Gulag officials did not want to risk being held accountable for wrong decisions, and the safest course was to make no decisions and hope to be promoted or transferred before the issue became a crisis. How did their indecision affect the state? There was a pure time cost: a decision that would optimally be taken now was taken later. But this was not all. While the decision was delayed, additional costs were incurred: The state’s resources were used up in the time that officials spent in committees and working parties, on fact-finding missions, and on the writing and reading of correspondence. This is because the decision was not just delayed: for the sake of delay, it had to be considered and reconsidered repeatedly. Higher officials used their time to prolong investigations and draft and redraft complicated decrees and instructions in alternative variants that were never approved. Lower officials used their time to press for information about the progress of a decision that was never made. In our story, the decision they needed had absolutely no political significance: it was of a technical nature that might be thought well suited to a committee of experts. The problem was simply that the committee did not decide.

The costs of managers’ self-protection and high-level indecision interacted and fed off each other. At lower levels, the Soviet officials that left these issues hanging in the air were demonstrating indifference to heightened transaction costs. While they left matters unresolved, officials and managers below them continued to avoid responsibility where necessary, to work around the rules where possible, and to take out the insurance that seemed to be recommended—to give time and effort to lobbying Moscow for change. So, decision costs and trade costs compounded each other. The officials that repeatedly delayed effective resolutions tolerated this negative spiral.

As the short term drifted into the long term, a mitigating factor was the human capacity to normalize changes in the environment. At first, the new secrecy law was frightening. Officials did not know how it would work and how it might affect them. It took several years to learn how to work around it and insure against it. Eventually, however, it became the new “normal.”

From this point of view, procrastination had its merit. In postponing resolution, senior officials simply waited for managers to find a workable accommodation to the new regime. Eventually, they legislated in such a way as to formalize this accommodation. There is no evidence that this happened by design, but it suggests that wait-and-see was a sensible strategy from the private perspective of those involved.

SECRECY, FEAR, AND THE SECRECY/CAPACITY TRADEOFF

The effects of the secrecy law of June 1947 offer a natural fit to the concept of the secrecy/capacity tradeoff. Figure 4.2 extends the diagram introduced in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.2). As before, the vertical axis measures state capacity, and the horizontal axis measures the degree of secrecy (which in turn depends on the mix of regulation and penalization).

The outcome of this figure will be, as before, to show state capacity with an effective maximum at the degree of secrecy S*. But the figure’s starting point is the notional maximum of state capacity, shown as the level of the horizontal dotted line level marked C. Think of notional state capacity as what might be achieved by selfless, fearless officials, true “servants of the people” who seek neither personal advantage nor self-protection. The ideal limit is not achievable, because real servants of the people are human and therefore to some degree self-interested. I don’t mean that all public figure 4.2. The secrecy/capacity tradeoff: Secrecy adds to state capacity by cutting leakages, but subtracts from it by augmenting fear

Note: On the horizontal scale, higher degrees of secrecy (marked by increasing regulation and penalization) lie to the right. On the vertical scale, C marks the level of notional state capacity, as defined in the text. At each degree of secrecy, effective state capacity is notional capacity, less leakage costs, less fear costs. S* marks the degree of secrecy that delivers the maximum of effective state capacity. From Z, a point initially preferred by the dictator, an increase in secrecy moves the state to Z': leakage costs are further reduced, but fear costs increase by much more, so effective state capacity declines

servants are venal; clearly, in fact, some societies have been much better than others at approaching the upper limit, because of their social norms and their methods of selecting and training noncorrupt public servants. Nonetheless, the supply of saints is limited everywhere, and everyone has private needs and desires, so public administration is never perfect. Because of those private motivations, effective state capacity will always fall below notional capacity.

The figure simplifies the private motives of government personnel into two deductions from notional state capacity, arising from leakages and from fear respectively. Effective state capacity is what is left after accounting for the combined costs of leakages and fear.

Leakage costs are what is lost from state capacity when officials leak government information in order to share a benefit with private or foreign interests. This is the violation of which Kliueva and Roskin were accused. The reasoning behind the idea that state capacity is reduced by leakage of government information might be that the information leaked is intrinsically valuable, or that leakages deprive the government of its first-mover advantage in games of strategic rivalry. In the KR affair, as Stalin and Zhdanov saw it, Kliueva and Roskin sold information that belonged to the state and might have been of both commercial value and of value to national prestige, in exchange for personal fame and favors in the West.

The Politburo response was to intensify information regulation and to create new offences subject to criminal penalties, in the expectation that these would deter further leakages. In other words, the Stalin-Zhdanov model of regulation and penalization predicted that more secrecy would reduce leakages. Large at first, then diminishing as the degree of secrecy is increased, leakage costs are shown in Figure 4.2 by the vertical distance between notional state capacity (the horizontal dotted line) and the dashed curve. As the curve suggests, it might not be possible to eliminate all leakages and, in that case, each further increase in the intensity of secrecy would have a diminishing marginal effect. Still, we already know that the results were effective to some degree.

Fear costs are the other deduction from notional state capacity. These are shown in Figure 4.2 by the vertical distance between the dashed curve and the solid curve. When the state is transparent, there is no fear.

Suppose the regulation of official life becomes more complex and demanding, and penalties for violation become both more severe and also, because of growing complexity, less predictable. Then, fear will spread through officialdom. The human response to fear is to seek insurance, individually and in groups. But the process of building insurance consumes time and effort, which are diverted from the resources assigned to the officials’ state business. As secrecy becomes more intense, fears multiply. As fear grows, the costs of fear increase at an increasing rate, shrinking state capacity.

Effective state capacity is always less than notional capacity because of the deduction of leakage costs and fear costs. More secrecy narrows the gap at first, because large leakage costs can be easily suppressed while fear costs remain low. At first, effective state capacity is increased. It rises to a maximum where secrecy is set at S*. Beyond that point, fear costs take over because, while officials are already too frightened to leak much information, increasingly they are also too frightened to do their jobs. As the fear effect sets in and increasingly dominates their working lives, so effective state capacity declines slowly at first, then rapidly.[226]

In the spring of 1947, the Soviet state was already far to the right-hand side of Figure 4.2—at a point such as Z, say, where leakages were small and fear costs were relatively large. In response to the KR affair, Stalin pushed the Soviet state still further to the right. As the story of this chapter shows, with the increase in secrecy the previous level of state capacity could not be maintained. Fear drove it down to Z'.

Writing about Stalin’s last years, a historian describes “mindless, excessive secrecy.”[227] Had Stalin’s rage caused him to lose his mind? Historians and biographers have often questioned Stalin’s sanity. He is not infrequently described as a victim of “paranoia.”[228] Scholars often seem more comfortable with the idea that Stalin blundered uncontrollably than that he calculated his moves. But this conclusion is mistaken.

There is plentiful evidence of Stalin’s psychopathology.[229] Damaged by childhood abuse, Stalin had few scruples, few friends, and a limited capacity for empathy. At the same time, he had superior talents for organizing information and for logical reasoning: in other words, he could rationalize. He excelled at the patient, step-by-step argumentation of syllogisms. In speeches and letters, he advanced complex, consistent models of cause and effect in the world. He showed patience and persistence in the pursuit of long-term objectives, whether we construe these as personal or political. With this went a high degree of self-control, including the ability to wait. He controlled his feelings, rarely allowing himself to express self-doubt, depression, or despair. Even if he lacked empathy, he had insight and was able to dominate and manipulate others.

Stalin could rationalize; could he also optimize? Some of Stalin’s policy choices have been thought to imply unstable or inconsistent preferences, which would rule out a capacity to optimize. For example, Stalin often seemed to promote investment at all costs, but then he would abruptly switch course, ordering the distribution of consumer goods. Or he would target his enemies with precision and calculation, and then abruptly lash out at the guilty and the innocent alike in very large numbers. It is hard to see the consistency.

In these cases, economically minded historians have argued that Stalin’s behavior was consistent with optimization subject to constraints: at any moment, his decisions depended on which constraints were binding. For example, Stalin favored investment over consumption when possible, but he shifted the priority to consumption when intelligence reports warned him that the limited supplies of consumer goods risked damaging the workers’ willingness to work.[230] He preferred selective repression when possible, switching to mass killing when internal threats became less well defined (making selection more difficult) and when external threats increased (making the neutralization of internal threats more urgent).[231]

A study of Soviet monitoring and audit agencies points in the same direction: Stalin did not trust his subordinates and wanted to control their actions, but not at all costs: he was willing to balance the costs against the benefits of control at the margin.[232] The balancing of benefits against costs at the margin, and readiness to adjust to changing constraints, are both signs of a capacity to optimize.

Why did Stalin not aim to maximize Soviet state capacity? Stalin had a strong interest in building the Soviet state. As previous chapters have shown, he invested great efforts in the staffing of effective state agencies, and a powerful state of multiple capabilities was one of the most important outcomes of his rule. Nonetheless, Stalin also had other concerns. Most importantly, he had no interest in building the capacity of a state over which he did not rule, a state that did not follow the directives of the party that he led. In fact, regime security was Stalin’s first and foremost concern, and state capacity was of value to him only if it was under his control. Consistently, when state capacity was at a maximum, he would have been willing to give some of it away in return for more of the secrecy that kept his regime safe. Although increased secrecy gave his officials a harder time, it also added to the security of the regime, which was also his personal security. So, a point somewhere to the right of the maximum in Figure 4.2 was the logical place for him to position the Soviet state.

But where, exactly, was the optimum? And did Stalin try to find it? The KR affair shows that in June 1949 he decided secrecy was too lax and needed to be tightened. The record does not show his understanding of the tradeoff he was making. If he understood it, he did not have the means to optimize with precision or without errors. Even if he would have preferred to balance his objectives efficiently, the command system did not exist to be efficient, and it could not calibrate or compute many of the values that would have been required for perfect optimization. If Stalin aimed to optimize, he did so intuitively, by trial and error. After 1945, moreover, he may have become more prone to errors. With age he gained knowledge and experience, but increasing age also began to erode his mental capacity and physical stamina, so that he left more and more important decisions to subordinates.[233]

Thus, the secrecy law of 1947 did have some perverse effects, and it might have been a mistake. But it was not the act of either a fool or a madman.

CONCLUSION

Despotic Leviathan should be capable of decisive measures. Dictators do not have to account for their actions before the courts or before public opinion. Soviet officials answered only to superiors for their decisions, and Stalin did not have to account to anyone for his.

The story of this chapter shows how secrecy undermined the making and implementing of decisions. When Stalin suddenly tightened secrecy in 1947, his aim was to deter officials from engaging in the unauthorized exchange of information with outsiders. But the climate of fear engendered by the new rules hindered all business—not just the unofficial business that Stalin aimed to stamp out, but also the official business of the state.

Secret Leviathan became sluggish and irresolute. The state’s business continued, only to the extent that the parties were willing to work around or ignore the new rules. In that context, however, neglect of the rules was now more dangerous than before, because the law of 1947 was explicitly aimed at secrecy violations committed without a guilty intention to harm the state. Managers tried to protect themselves by lobbying superiors for action to remove these difficulties and by seeking to implicate the superiors in the expedients that would allow them to work around the rules. Higher officials responded with indecision and delay. Everyone looked as if they were doing something, but what they were engaged in was self-protection at the expense of their core duties.

In an open society, indecision is visible. Private corporations in a competitive market economy answer for delay to the buyer, who can switch business to a more agile competitor; they must develop mechanisms to limit indecision and other business costs or leave the market. Democratic leaders must answer for indecisive government to voters, including taxpayers, who can switch their votes to political rivals. Media competition creates a market for compromising information about politicians’ performance and a race to disclose it. Political competition means that information prejudicial to one party will eventually to be exposed by others in what a well-known study calls a “fixed pattern”:

Classified documents are routinely passed out to support an administration; weaken an administration; advance a policy; undermine a policy. A newspaper account would be incomplete without some such reference?[234]

Thus, liberal democracies have been poor keepers of government secrets. While this does not rule out indecision, it does at least ensure that the citizens hear about it at some point.

It is something of a surprise, therefore, to find that indecision and gridlock could also be features of authoritarian rule. Fear can be electrifying, and Stalin often counted on that aspect of fear to galvanize those around him into action. In our story, however, the effect of fear on government business was the opposite: the shock was paralyzing. The decision to intensify secrecy was the cause of the paralysis, and secrecy also served to conceal it until many decades had passed.

5. SECRET POLICING AND DISCRIMINATION

When some ordinary person popped up on the KGB radar, the first step of the officer on duty was to write a note to the KGB archive. The note asked the archivist: Is there “compromising evidence” on this person?

The term “compromising evidence” (komprometiruiushchie materialy) was unknown before the Soviet era. In the early years of Bolshevik rule, the secret police began to build its records of the political and social attitudes of the individual citizens who came under surveillance. Whenever suspicion arose over a person’s loyalties or practical inclinations, the records were scoured for “compromising evidence” that might shed new light on the case.[235] Official use of the phrase became so frequent that it was shortened in writing to “k/m” or (in conversation) “kompromat.” More recently, the word kompromat even entered the English language.[236]

A search for kompromat could be prompted by many things. Sometimes it was a person’s suspicious behavior that drew attention: for example, they might express anticommunist views to a neighbor, or tell subversive jokes at work, or show interest in political or military secrets over a drink in a bar. Someone might meet up with a foreigner, seemingly by accident, or by an arrangement that fell outside the foreigner’s authorized schedule of official meetings. A person could attract attention just by being in the neighborhood of a suspicious incident, such as a fire or an industrial accident. Any of these things could trigger KGB enquiries into the subject’s record to establish whether there was some preexisting pattern of behavior or association.

Citizens could attract the interest of the secret police even while they behaved entirely correctly. One way was to apply for promotion to a position of leadership or responsibility at work. Another was to seek permission to travel abroad—a privilege reserved for those with loyal attitudes and responsibilities. Or, to put it differently, while it was obvious that you could invite an enquiry into your background by doing things that invited suspicion, you could achieve the same less obviously by seeking an advancement that required you to be above suspicion.

In terms of its bearing on the subject’s loyalty, the quality of kompromat was extremely variable. The clearest indication was provided by evidence directly implicating the subject in a crime. By contrast, a good deal of information counted as kompromat was made up of facts or hearsay of a purely circumstantial nature: for example, living on one’s own, or living in the neighborhood of a secret installation. Other kinds of information were historical, being based on incidents or associations from a person’s distant past. We will see that most items of kompromat were circumstantial or historical. To that extent, it is reasonable to say that its evidential quality was typically poor. This was a defining feature, not a defect. For most purposes it was enough for kompromat to provide a basis for suspicion. It did not need to prove guilt.

Despite its typically poor quality, kompromat was valuable. The value of kompromat arose in two contexts. The context of this chapter was created by what the economist Ronald Wintrobe has called the “dictator’s dilemma.” Secret Leviathan was perennially suspicious. The security of the Soviet rulers rested on their capacity to sniff out enemies to be isolated or neutralized or punished before they could pose a serious threat. But who were the enemies? The party leaders could not judge people by appearances. Fearing repression, those who were disaffected or alienated from the existing order spent much of their time simulating loyalty, at least in public. Even an all-powerful dictator with powers of life and death could not make those around him freely confess the inner feelings that might lead them to hostile thought and action if the opportunity were ever to arise.[237]

In the context of the dictator’s dilemma, the secret police had no better choice than to turn to kompromat, to the tenuous evidence of past associations and patterns of behavior and to hearsay, with the hope of achieving a rough separation of those who could safely be advanced or promoted from the others—the “usual suspects”—who were marked out to be isolated and marginalized. Here, therefore, the value of kompromat was its use for discrimination.

This chapter is based on evidence of the uses of kompromat in Soviet Lithuania, a Western borderland province of the Soviet Union, in the 1970s. This was well after the Thaw, when the consequences of being identified as a “usual suspect” became much less severe. In the 1930s and 1940s, people were identified as suspect based on class background, ethnic affiliation (especially when linked to the people of a neighboring state), past political activity, and compromising family ties. Hundreds of thousands at a time went on to suffer forced resettlement, imprisonment, or execution.[238] The Thaw put an end to these worst outcomes. Discrimination against people with suspicious markers became more selective and took the milder form of restricting individual access to education, employment, and foreign travel. At the same time, the principle of using markers of suspicion to judge a person and secretly channel them from one life course to another did not change.

Discrimination was not the only use of kompromat. A second use arose in a different context. A party or public official might ask for the cooperation of a subordinate or private citizen in a task, based on their civic duty. Faced with refusal, they could use kompromat to persuade by other means—by threatening disclosure of evidence that could lead to loss of employment or loss of liberty. A particular case, the use of kompromat to blackmail persons of interest into becoming KGB informers, is discussed in the next chapter. Although the power of kompromat to coerce was no doubt weaker in the 1970s than in the 1930s, the principle again did not change.[239]

When used for its present purpose, that is, for discrimination, kompromat was bound up with secrecy in two ways. First, kompromat served the regime of secrecy. Because the Soviet system of government was more secretive and more encompassing than other systems, the performance of most if not all responsible work required access to secret government communications. The KGB used the kompromat in its files to decide who would be allowed to work with secrets and who would be barred.

Second, the substance of kompromat and all its uses were secrets in themselves. Decisions based on kompromat were covered by conspirative norms. When the KGB found reason to bar a subject from secret work or from foreign travel, we will see, no explanation was given, or some excuse was found. The subject was never notified that it was the KGB’s decision to bar them, or the grounds on which it did so. The victims might guess but could never be sure.

One advantage of holding kompromat in secret and acting on it under the cover of conspirativeness was to avoid challenges. If the citizens had access to the personal information held about them by the regime and the calculations made on its basis, then they might have taken steps to question the evidence or appeal the decisions. In that context, secrecy upheld the unquestionable authority of the state.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

This chapter will show that kompromat was raw material for a system of statistical discrimination. The idea of statistical discrimination was developed by economists to explain why discriminatory hiring decisions persist in market economies, even among employers with a neutral disposition toward the discriminated group. Faced with a female applicant for promotion, the employer is likely unable to evaluate their individual commitment to the job in question. The employer knows, however, that women are statistically more likely than men to take leave for pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare. Comparing women to men, an employer (probably male) might conclude that on average women will make less-committed employees. Based on that calculation, the employer might go on to discriminate against female applicants generally.[240]

For the sake of its own security, the Soviet regime took the part of an employer that tries to avoid recruiting less-committed employees. Its goal was to steer disloyal citizens away from positions in the economy or public service where they could learn secrets or influence others. Any applicant could make a declaration of loyalty, but this could not be enough. A person that harbored doubts or divided allegiances would be expected to hide them and try to blend into the loyal masses. To compensate, the Soviet regime relied on a set of markers of disloyalty—confiscated family assets, a doubtful war record, a previous conviction, the suspicious conduct of family members, having relatives abroad, church attendance, loose talk in the bar or the shopping queue—that could not easily be faked or manipulated. For the individual subject, any single suspicious marker would predict disloyalty to the state and the party very imperfectly, perhaps with large errors. But taken together, the markers would approximately identify a group with lower-than-average loyalty than the rest who had clean records. This is how kompromat supported statistical discrimination.

Its poor quality made kompromat only a rough guide to the regime’s enemies. Nonetheless, it may have been the best guide available. This is suggested by a survey of Soviet war refugees in Europe and America, conducted in the 1950s by the sociologists Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer. They constructed a measure of their respondents’ underlying (as opposed to superficial) hostility to the Soviet system and looked for determinants in their life histories. Statistically, they found, the single most important factor in this hostility was “experience of arrest by the secret police of oneself or a family member.”[241] This was exactly the kind of information that the KGB looked for kompromat.

Suspicion-based discrimination among candidates for recruitment or promotion into responsible positions is the main topic of this chapter. We will see the range of suspicious markers that were included in kompromat. We will see how the KGB used them to identify potentially disloyal citizens and block their aspirations.

Discrimination is costly. In our stories, some of the costs fell straightforwardly on the “usual suspects,” who were confined to an out-group and prevented from following their ambitions. Other costs were borne by the state and the economy. As we will see, this came about because the pool from which the state drew its responsible officials was made less talented and less diverse.

The costs of suspicion contributed to the secrecy/capacity tradeoff described in Chapter 2 (Figure 2.3). Every society, including liberal democracies, must face the same dilemma. No state can prosper in the hands of bribe takers or traitors. Government officials and public servants should undergo scrutiny. Some degree of screening of those wishing to claim the rewards of state employment should surely improve the capabilities of the state, at least up to a point. Up to that point, the interests of society and the interests of its rulers are aligned. A problem arises when the incumbent rulers intensify the screening of recruits into public service to exclude every potential nonconformist, critic, freethinker, and innovator. To do so might improve the rulers’ security, but it will also progressively restrict the talent pool from which public servants are recruited, with damaging consequences for their talents and diversity. As a result, the state will become less capable, slipping down the slope of the secrecy/ capacity tradeoff.

We will find that kompromat could be used with flexibility, and a flexible approach could mitigate some of the costs. If the need was acute, the talented or qualified person with a suspicious record could still be allowed to set foot on the first rung of the ladder of promotion, serving an indefinite term of probation while remaining under scrutiny. Meanwhile, the kompromat would be kept on file.

At this point the use of kompromat to screen people merged into another use, to bring people under control in a coercive way. As discussed in the next chapter, the use of kompromat to control people was also widespread under Soviet rule.

KOMPROMAT IN ACTION

With a population of 73,000 residents in 1970, Panevézys was Soviet Lithuania’s fifth city in order of size. (Panevezys means “On the Nevézis,” the slow-moving river that loops around its central district.) Its residents could not escape the shadow cast by the first half of the twentieth century. Lithuania, formerly a province of the Russian Empire and an independent republic from 1918, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 under the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Panevézys was quickly occupied by the Red Army. As the Soviet state began to transform Lithuania into a Soviet republic, mass arrests and deportations took place. These removed the country’s former political and business elites, including the “kulak” families (more prosperous farmers), along with anyone who took part in resistance.[242] The process was interrupted by German invasion in 1941. With Nazi occupation came mass killings of Jews and communists. Jews were concentrated from the surrounding districts into the Panevézys ghetto, and all there were murdered.[243] During 1944 the country was reoccupied by the Red Army and reabsorbed into the Soviet Union. There were more mass arrests and deportations, this time accompanied by an armed insurgency against Soviet rule that persisted for several years after the world war came to an end.[244] These traumatic events are illustrated in the personal histories of the subjects we will study.

In December 1972, responding to a request from Moscow, the Panevézys town KGB made up four lists. Two lists were directly concerned with secret work. Six people in the town had been cleared for top secret work although their files held evidence that compromised them. Ten others had been barred because of such evidence, but for some reason they “continue to work in the positions indicated.”

The other lists were longer. One document carried the details of 79 people who were engaged in “supervisory duties” despite the kompromat available in their files. (The scope of supervisory positions appears to have included anyone responsible for others, so managers and team leaders at all levels in factories and offices, plus teachers responsible for school and college students.) Another list covered 96 people of the town who had applied to travel abroad and had been refused because of various suspicions. Allowing for a few names that were repeated in more than one list, the number of unique individuals comes down to 176.

Taken together, these lists provide unique information on the “usual suspects” in a Soviet market town of the 1970s. They include men and women, aged from their twenties to nearly ninety. The subjects were drawn from every major social group including farmworkers, factory workers, managers, government officials, and pensioners. One of the few restrictions is that, judged by family names, nearly all were ethnic Lithuanians.

Beyond that, the subjects of kompromat fell into two roughly distinct groups. These make the two columns of Table 5.1. A first group enters the record because they wished to travel abroad and were refused. They tended

Table 5.1. Who were the “usual suspects”? Two types, Panevézys, 1972

Denied foreign travel

In or seeking responsible work

Total number

96

86

Personal data:

Age in 1972, years

52.2

43.5

Education, years

7.5

12.5

Non-Lithuanian ethnicity, percent

2.1

0.0

Female, percent

65.6

15.1

Party or Komsomol member, percent

4.2

14.0

Employment status:

Employed, percent

66.7

*98.8

Supervisor or teacher, percent

30.2

**977

Retired, percent

19.8

0.0

“Housewife,” percent

7.3

0.0

Key: * One subject’s employed status is missing. ** Two subjects’ employment type is missing.

Source: The information in Tables 5.1 to 5.3 is abstracted from four documents in a file at Hoover/LYA, K-l/3/703. For ease of reference, I label them A, В, C, and D as below. In this table, the first column (“Denied foreign travel”) is based on the subjects named in List C; the second column (“In or seeking responsible work”) combines Lists A, B, and D. Six subjects are named in both columns. The lists are as follows: (A) Folios 90-91 (“List of persons cleared for top secret work and documents with compromising evidence,” 6 names, from chief of Panevézys KGB Lt.-Col. S. J. Kisonas, 3 December 1972). (B) Folios 92-93 (“List with compromising evidence [on persons] denied access, but they continue to work in the positions indicated,” 10 names, 2 December 1972). (C) Folios 94-109 (“List of persons withdrawn from journeys abroad for 1970 to 1972,” 100 names found in 99 entries, one of which concerns a married couple, from chief of Panevézys KGB Lt.-Col. S. J. Kisonas, 2 December 1972). (D) Folios 110-122 (“List with compromising evidence on persons with supervisory duties” (zanimaiushchikh rukovodiashchie dolzhnosti), 80 names, of which four also appear in List A above, five in List B, and six in List C, from chief of Panevézys KGB Lt.-Col. S. J. Kisonas, 3 December 1972).

to be older citizens, in their early fifties on average. Most were still in work, but one in five were pensioners. They were typically less educated and less skilled. The proportion of party members in the group (4 percent) was close to that in the adult population of Lithuania at the time.[245]

The second group comprised all those listed because of their employment status or ambitions. They were younger, with average age in the mid-forties. They were more heavily male, more highly educated, and they had already reached higher-status positions. The proportion of party members (14 percent) was several times higher than in the adult population.

What was it, exactly, that made these people “usual suspects”? The purpose of KGB counterintelligence was forward looking, in the sense of aiming to forestall security threats before they materialized. Given that, one might think that the most useful compromising information would consist of suspicious things that people were reported as saying or doing in the present or quite recently. This was generally not the case. All the subjects were well used to living under authoritarian rule. They all aspired to responsible employment, or to foreign travel, or to both. Regardless of their inner thoughts, they understood the importance of living in outward conformity to the norms of Soviet life. The kompromat listed against their names shows few recent behavioral clues or signals.

To make sense of the mass of personal detail, we break it down into specifics. It turns out that the 176 personal files included 320 separate items of information. Then, each item can be classified in two dimensions. Was it recent, or was it “historical” in the sense of originating in Lithuania’s time of troubles now twenty years or more in the past, that is, up to 1953? And did it stem from some action or confession that the subject undertook by choice, or from circumstances or associations beyond their control?

Table 5.2 distributes the 320 items of kompromat over those two dimensions. In the time dimension, more than two-thirds (227 items) echoed the relatively distant past. In the voluntary/involuntary dimension, two-thirds (218 items) reflected circumstances and associations. In the aggregate, only one item in eight (39 items) reported something the subject chose to do or say in the recent past. This illustrates the low quality of kompromat generally.

table 5.2. The quality of kompromat, Panevézys, 1972: How much was recent? How much was based on voluntary actions?

Historic items

Recent items

All items

Involuntary circumstances

and associations

164

54

218

Voluntary choices and

confessions

63

39

102

All items

227

93

320

Notes: Historic items date from the Stalin era (1953 or before); they include evidence from Lithuania as an independent state before World War II, under one German and two Soviet occupations, and up to the end of the postwar insurgency that coincided roughly with the death of Stalin. Recent items date from subsequent years. While the timing is not completely clear cut, no serious issues arise. Involuntary circumstances include suspicious family background; victimization by forced resettlement during Sovietization, whether as an adult or as a child; and having a family member known to be living abroad. Involuntary associations include all those cases where a close relative fell under suspicion for any reason listed above or below. Voluntary choices include decisions to resist Soviet rule in any way or at any stage, or to commit any other offence against Soviet law, including subsequent criminal penalization where it was applied. Included under voluntary choices are leaving the country under any circumstance, the evasion of resettlement, unauthorized meetings with foreigners, and any attempt to conceal the facts of involuntary circumstances or associations. Voluntary confessions can be religious or personal in nature; personal confessions are suspicious if they imply any kind of estrangement from society or desire to live differently, including marital discord, loneliness, and (in one case) a simple intention to emigrate. Source: See Table 5.1. The figures shown in this table combine the data of all 176 subjects named in the four lists.

Some examples bring us closer to reality. A straightforward case of kompromat that was both historical and circumstantial is provided by a male deputy chief technician, age twenty-four, with higher education, not a party member. He is listed as one who held a supervisory responsibility despite being compromised. During the postwar reoccupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, this person’s family was designated a “kulak” household; their land was seized, and they were forcibly deported and resettled in a remote region of Siberia. So, the substance of the kompromat was that the subject, a baby at the time, was resettled with his parents as “son of a kulak.” While this is not said, his family history and personal experience as a child might lead him to hold a grudge against the Soviet regime.

Other aspects of family history that evoked suspicion were parents, siblings, or other close relatives who had held positions of prominence in Lithuanian life before the Soviet annexation of 1940, or who had collaborated with the wartime German occupation of 1941 to 1944, or who had avoided the Soviet reconquest of Lithuania in 1944 by fleeing westward, or who had stayed to resist Soviet rule during the armed insurgency of 1944 to 1953.

For example, a female secondary schoolteacher (age fifty-nine, with secondary education, not a party member) was listed as holding a supervisory position despite kompromat. The substance was that in independent Lithuania before the war, her husband had been a police chief (the Russian word used is derived from the German polizei). At the end of the war, the husband fled with the retreating Germans and now lived abroad. It seems the couple were no longer in contact (if they had been, it would likely have been mentioned). Among other examples, a female typist in the Panevézys town hall (age thirty-nine, with secondary education, not a party member), had been granted access to “top-secret” work despite the following circumstances: in 1948, one brother received a five-year term of forced labor as a supporter of armed nationalist groups; and in 1949, another brother was sentenced under the law of 4 June 1947 (against theft of state and public property).[246] A young woman who managed a travel agency (age thirty-five, higher education, nonparty) was barred from foreign travel, because her father had served in the police under German occupation. All these people might be expected to have bitter feelings about what they had lost because of the Soviet occupation or the punishments their families had suffered for resistance.

Not all the circumstantial evidence was historical. Present-day circumstances and associations could also arouse suspicion. For example, a female secondary school teacher (age thirty-six, higher education, non-party), was reported to be living not far from “mailbox R-6478,” in other words, a strategic facility of some kind. There was more: the teacher had a close relative, an aunt, living in the United States. Finally, as a child, she had experienced forced resettlement. The outcome: the teacher’s request to travel to America to visit the aunt was denied. Living near a “mailbox” or a military establishment or having professional familiarity with a secret facility was also cited as kompromat in other cases where a foreign travel visa was refused. Even if nothing bad was known about their motivation, such a person had a capacity to do harm, and this raised a red flag for the authorities.

The involuntary circumstances that bred suspicion could amount to a cruel Catch-22. A male pensioner (age seventy-three, with secondary specialist education, nonparty) was refused a trip to Canada to visit his son. The kompromat that served as the basis for the refusal was that the pensioner lived alone and the son, who lived abroad, was wealthy. Nothing else was reported against either father or son. However, the circumstances implied that the son could easily support the father in Canada. If allowed to leave, the father had no strong reason to return home. The father’s loneliness, his separation from a son with the means to support him abroad, and lack of other family ties were the very reasons why he could not be allowed to make the visit. “Lives alone” or “Lacking family ties” was listed as kompromat in several other cases where permission to travel was denied.

All the forms of kompromat described so far were circumstances that the subject could not have changed. Other items indicate how the subject’s own choices could further shape the regime’s view of them. These choices could be far enough in the past to be considered historical, but they still carried weight. In 1948 a young woman had been given a ten-year sentence for supporting a nationalist group. Now a seamstress, in middle age, she was refused permission to travel abroad.

Of those listed as combining supervisory positions in the town with suspicious markers on their records, nearly one-third had spent time in a Soviet labor camp. Usually they had been convicted under the notorious Article 58, which was applied to counterrevolutionary crimes committed in the 1940s and early 1950s. The crimes in question stemmed typically from resistance to Soviet rule or collaboration with German occupation. They were punished by lengthy sentences, usually of ten years but sometimes of twenty-five (a term that replaced the death penalty between 1947 and 1950). What did such a sentence mean? It is a fact that, until the mid-1950s, those charged with such crimes could be convicted without evidence of guilty intention.[247] Some acted as they did under a degree of coercion; others may have faced a choice between competing evils with no obvious “right” answer at the time. Still, many Lithuanians did choose to resist Soviet rule or support the German occupation, and to classify such actions as chosen seems more reasonable than the alternative.

Some cases look historical at first sight, but then they turn out to have involved more recent factors. As a child, the male deputy chief of a factory workshop (age thirty-seven, with higher education, a party member) had been resettled because he was born into a “kulak” family—something he did not choose. Later, as an adult, he chose to make things worse for himself. At some point, most likely when joining the party, he was required to write down a short summary of his life. In doing so, he omitted the compromising aspect—his “kulak” family origin, for which he had been resettled. This raised suspicion: a truly loyal applicant ought to have entrusted the party with the truth. It was coupled with another suspicious factor: his uncle had fled to the West in 1944 and now lived in the United States. The outcome was that the workshop chief was denied access to secret work, although he continued to be employed in the same position as before. A negative outcome also awaited a female schoolteacher who supplied contradictory information (perhaps in successive versions of her formal autobiography) about the fates of various relatives who were now missing and perhaps abroad. That they might be abroad was already compromising, but she compromised herself again by her efforts at concealment.

Amid the base materials, finally, there was gold—the kompromat provided by evidence of recent or current misbehavior. A deputy chief engineer (male, age thirty, with higher education, nonparty) was reported to be hostile to Soviet rule and dissatisfied with the existing order. Previously chief engineer, he had been refused clearance for top-secret work and demoted. But deputy chief engineer was still a position of trust, which he continued to hold despite the kompromat. Another engineer (male, age forty-three, with incomplete higher education, a party member) had also been denied access to secret work, but he was not dismissed. He had been disciplined once by the party for theft of public property (in other words, he had been the subject of a party investigation, but his party membership had saved him from prosecution). On top of this, his wife’s family was in contact with relatives in the United States. In i960 he had met up with American tourists in Vilnius—implicitly, without authority.) Such indiscretions were unusual—at least among those counted as holding down responsible jobs.

For those hoping to travel abroad, misconduct involving foreign tourists was fatal. Just a few months previously, without permission, a deputy head teacher (male, age thirty-six, a party member) had used his own private car to drive American tourists from Vilnius to Panevézys. Other kinds of unwise behavior involved rash confessions. A pensioner (female, age fifty-nine, non-party), whose husband was known to be living in the United States, was described as “indiscreet”: she was overheard saying things classed as disloyal. It was imprudent to praise the American way of life. It was especially careless to confide in a friend that, if allowed abroad, one might not come back. In fact, it was compromising even to admit to marital discord, because this suggested a weakening of the family ties that ought to ensure the responsible citizen’s return to the motherland. All such cases were refused a travel visa.

The data from Panevézys show that many people with kompromat were nonetheless allowed to hold jobs with some element of influence over others. Table 5.3 gives a few clues to what the KGB would overlook and what remained unacceptable. The table compares two groups, those cleared for top-secret work despite kompromat and those barred because of it. In Panevézys the top-secret sphere was very small, so we have only a few subjects—six in the cleared group and ten that were barred. Small numbers undermine the significance of the differences we see. That said, the demographics of the two groups (age, gender, education, and so forth) were very similar. But two differences are evident. First, those cleared were more likely to be party members. Perhaps the KGB saw this as providing some additional assurance of loyalty. Second, no one was cleared for top-secret work if the evidence on their files, of whatever kind, related to them personally (not to a family member) as an adult (not as a child).

A puzzle follows: Why were so many people with kompromat allowed to hold supervisory positions in the town, when so many more ordinary citizens were barred from foreign travel? On the face of it, secret work might seem more important to the state than foreign tourism. Why did the KGB screen the would-be tourists more rigorously than the managers?

A few factors suggest themselves. From the perspective of the KGB officer, the stakes involved in letting the “wrong” person travel abroad were very high. The outcome could be irreversible. On reaching a foreign country, where KGB surveillance was impeded, a tourist could defect. Permission to

TABLE 5.3. To clear or not to clear: How did candidates cleared for top-secret work in spite of kompromat differ from those barred because of it?

Cleared

Barred but still in employment

Total

6

10

Personal data:

Age in 1972, years

38.8

38.6

Education, years

13.3

14.2

Non-Lithuanian, percent

0

0

Female, percent

17

0

Party or Komsomol member, percent

67

30

Employment status, percent:

Employed

100

100

Supervisor or teacher

100

100

Kompromat of historic originCircumstances and associations, percent:

Of subject

17

40

Of family member

0

10

Resettlement in remote regions, percent:

As adult

0

0

As child of family

17

20

Current family member was resettled

17

20

Profession, confession, or action (whether legal at the time or not), percent:

Of subject

0

0

Of family member

50

50

Imprisonment, percent:

Of subject

0

0

Of family member

17

30

Kompromat of recent originCircumstances and associations, percent:

Of subject

0

0

Family member living abroad

17

20

Profession, confession, or action, percent:

Of subject

0

50

Of family member

17

10

Source and notes: See Tables 5.1.and 5.2 The figures shown in this table show the data of the subjects named in Lists A and B^ The two lists are exclusive.

travel might be and occasionally was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to abandon the Soviet motherland forever. As a defector in a foreign capital, a pensioner or a seamstress could do far more visible damage than a teacher or an engineer in their everyday duties in a small town in a Soviet province. Ordinary caution provides a plausible explanation for high rates of refusal.

By contrast, the risks of allowing the “wrong” person to start a career as a teacher or a deputy chief engineer could be managed. A new appointee, about whom suspicions lingered, could be watched. The damage they could do was real but limited. Mistakes could be reversed later by transferring the subject away from secret work or halting further promotion.

The greater lenience shown in employment decisions may also reflect another factor, one with wider significance. While the Soviet government was content to be represented abroad by citizen tourists of proven loyalty, it rarely had the need for any particular person to go. In contrast the state needed teachers and engineers everywhere, including in Lithuania. The state preferred its teachers and engineers to be above suspicion, but perhaps Lithuania had too few people like that. Its traumatic history loomed over so many who had been forced to make impossible choices in the past, and who now had to live under its shadow.

Perhaps there was an absolute shortage of guaranteed loyalty. Particularly in the early years of Soviet rule, native Lithuanians who combined the education needed for responsible work with a clean record may have been hard to find. Once the “usual suspects” were discounted, there might not have been enough people left to provide all the loyal teachers and managers that were needed. The data suggest that, in the face of a shortage, the Lithuania KGB learned to be flexible. Notably, if the only evidence against a person was historical or circumstantial, they could be allowed to rise, at least to the first rungs on the promotion ladder. But they could not be let out of the country. This was how Soviet Lithuania made its compromise with the tainted human resources available.

LOYAL MANAGERS: A DEFICIT COMMODITY

Every Soviet organization of significance received secret plans and other instructions from higher authority through a secure channel, maintained by its secret department. In turn, the secret department was staffed by party members and supervised directly by the KGB. Under these arrangements, the KGB was responsible not just for secret communications but also for selecting the people to fill the positions requiring access to the secret communications. In effect, there was a partition of the Soviet labor market between secret and nonsecret work that no one could cross without KGB clearance.

The Soviet economy was plagued by permanent shortages. The shortages, a result of the mobilization style of administrative allocation, extended to nearly all products from toothpaste and toilet paper to gasoline. Because there was a deficit of supply compared to demand, these were commonly known as “deficit commodities.” Because goods were in short supply, so were the workers needed to produce them. Perhaps not surprisingly, in Soviet Lithuania at least, it turns out that workers of certifiable loyalty were another deficit commodity.

The shortage of loyal managers in Lithuania had two proximate causes. On the supply side, the investigative capacity of the local KGB to investigate and resolve the large number of doubtful cases for clearance was limited. On the demand side, the sphere of secret work tended to expand faster than nonsecret employment. This left the KGB always struggling to catch up with the growing demand for cleared employees.

The Supply of Clearances

For a country of three million people, the Soviet Lithuania KGB was not a large organization. In the 1960s and early 1970s it employed around 1,200 officers and other salaried staff, two-thirds of them in Vilnius with the rest scattered around Lithuania’s other towns and villages. In Vilnius the counterintelligence administration had 140 career officers, of whom 26 belonged to its economic department.[248]

The officers of the KGB economic department were probably a cut above the average. In 1977 three-quarters of economic department officers had college degrees.[249] This compares very favorably with the wider Lithuanian workforce, less than half of whom had college experience (including incomplete) according to the 1970 census a few years earlier.[250] To supplement their resources, they ran their own network of civilian informers in important factories and offices. The informers were also relatively well educated and motivated. As of 1968, there were 239 informers reporting to the economic department (a small fraction of the roughly 9,000 KGB informers of various categories in Lithuania at the time). The typical informer was an engineer, with higher education, aged 25 to 50 years and with 5 to 15 years’ experience of collaboration with the KGB. Of particular interest is that only 13 of the 239 informers had kompromat in their files. Of the 13, moreover, only five were recorded as having been blackmailed into cooperation; the others, although vulnerable to pressure, had agreed to work for the KGB without the pressure being exerted.[251]The officers of the economic department had many duties. They were responsible for work on the railways and air transport, and in important industrial facilities, research institutes, and civil-defense organizations. In the facilities for which they were responsible, they were expected to organize surveillance, with particular scrutiny of the employees cleared for access to government secrets; to recruit additional informers; and to make security plans for events such as visits and exhibitions.[252] Their duties included the raising of vigilance among the workers with regard to security lapses and suspicious behavior by means such as delivering interminable lectures in the workplace on “the struggle with the adversary’s ideological diversions.”[253]

What was it like to work at a secure facility under KGB surveillance? As described by the historian Kristina Burinskaité, the territory of a closed facility was screened from regular passers-by and secured by controlled access. Employees’ workplace conversations were monitored and their contacts with visitors were restricted. Foreign visitors were excluded altogether or, if admitted, were shown equipment and products designed to mislead, while secret activities were suspended.[254]

In short, the officers whose duty it was to investigate and certify the loyalty of those admitted to secret work were high in quality but few in number. They also had a vast range of competing responsibilities and priorities. Thus, the supply of clearances was limited by the resources available, which were scarce.

The Demand for Clearances

In just one year, 1973, the rather small KGB economic department issued 4,584 clearances in total—nearly 90 per week—but this was not enough to meet the demand. In any case, not all applications for clearance succeeded. In the same year, 321 candidates (or 7 percent of the total) were rejected.[255] When the KGB barred an employee from secret work, it generally caused difficulties for the managers responsible for their selection, who were already invested in the unsuccessful candidate, and they now became reluctant to enforce the KGB’s decision.

How large was the sphere of secret employment? In Soviet Lithuania in the 1960s, more than 100 offices and factories were secured by direct KGB supervision. Some were industrial plants, often specialized in research and defense-related production—Lithuania did not have any weapon plants, but there was considerable emphasis on defense-related lines including radar, radio electronics, and marine engineering. Other workplaces that demanded KGB regulation were focused on Lithuania’s topography (mapping and aerial photography) and external borders (border security, ports, and airports). Fisheries came under KGB supervision because trawlers could be used to spy on foreign shipping and their crews might find opportunities to defect. The network utilities supplying power, gas, and water, and railway, highway, mail, and cable and wireless services also came under surveillance, as did the Vilnius offices of the Soviet Union’s planning and statistical agencies and central bank.[256]

The number of KGB-regulated facilities increased only a little over the period of our data (1961 to 1971), but their workforce doubled, rising from 98,000 at the beginning of the 1960s to 200,000 at the beginning of the 1970s. This was substantially faster than the growth of aggregate employment in Lithuanian state-owned enterprises and offices, so the share of the secret sphere also expanded from 14 to 17 percent of public employment.[257]

Not everyone that worked in the secure facilities required access to secret communications. A handful of workplaces—six in 1961, ten by 1971— was designated “especially important” (osobo vazhnyi, the highest grade of secrecy). In these facilities around one-third of the workforce was cleared for access to paperwork classified “secret” or higher, and their number tripled over the 1960s.[258] The increase would have been even greater, but for a purge in 1963 (discussed below) which resulted in a sudden large drop in the number of cleared employees.

At the same time secret work was not confined to the parts of the economy subject to direct KGB supervision. Managers across the entire economy also required access to secret government correspondence, not just those in key plants or offices. It is more difficult to identify the limits of the secret sphere in that wider sense. The overall number of security clearances in Soviet Lithuania is known only for particular years and sectors. In 1979, for example, a total of 14,000 personnel held clearance for working at the highest grade of classification—“of special importance.”[259] This was around 1 percent of the public-sector workforce.[260] It seems certain that much larger numbers were cleared for lower grades of secrecy. In 1973, for example, the KGB issued more than ten times as many clearances for “top secret” and “secret” work as for work “of special importance.”[261] While an estimate based on a single year should have large error margins around it, it is reasonable to infer that work classified at any level could have embraced one-tenth or more of public employees.

The size and growth of the secret sphere were driven partly from above, by government policies, partly from below as managers responded to incentives created by the economic system. Government policies and priorities were of first importance: they allowed the armed forces and the defense industry to command a growing share of national resources (as discussed in Chapter 7). In Lithuania, they caused industrial development to concentrate on radio electronics, the fastest growing branch of the Soviet defense industry.[262]

The economic system itself shaped incentives in the market for loyal and responsible employees in two ways. First, the permanent labor shortage enabled employees of all kinds to move easily from job to job at the first occasion for dissatisfaction. High turnover among cleared employees necessitated a continuous flow of new clearance applications. Cleared workers, experienced in handling secret communications, sometimes left the secret sphere. Their replacements were hard to find, and everyone suffered from the newcomers’ inexperience.

Second, there was a tendency for managers just at the edge of the secrecy blanket, but not quite under it, to try to tug it over themselves for warmth. The comfort that they sought came from the privileges of secret work—the ready access to supplies, perhaps also the social aura associated with things that one can’t talk about. Managers knew, for example, that classifying a particular line of work as secret would improve supplies and other conditions of work. As a result, new lines of work could be classified or overclassified while old lines were not declassified. Another example: the KGB met with growing numbers of requests for clearance of staff from facilities that were not secure themselves but sought links with secure facilities that they could not develop without personal access.[263]

Viewed in this light, the disproportionate growth of the Soviet secret sphere can be thought of as a mix of real growth and inflation. The real growth was fueled by Soviet defense priorities and industrial plans, which steered resources into the Soviet armed forces and supporting industries. The inflation arose from the efforts of managers on the edges of the secret sphere to classify and overclassify their own activities to improve bargaining power relative to others. As one would expect in a command system driven by preparations for “future war,” there were no attempts to cut back on the secret sphere’s real growth, but there were periodic efforts to stamp down on secrecy inflation by reducing the number of posts requiring clearance. In 1963, for example, the industrial and science positions counted as secret work were abruptly cut back by 30 percent across the Lithuanian public sector.[264]

Living with Shortage

In the market for loyal and responsible employees, therefore, demand was persistently buoyant and expanding. As for supply, the KGB vetting process limited the number of candidates that could be considered over a given period. It appears that the supply always fell short of demand. The evidence of shortage is that, when the KGB came visiting, its inspectors kept on discovering persons in positions involving secret work who had not been cleared or who had been refused clearance. When these people were identified, managers used delay and negotiation to avoid having to replace them.

For managers, full compliance with the clearance system was an impossible goal. Managers regularly nominated obviously unsuitable people for clearance: an alcoholic who repeatedly lost secret documents in his charge, a former Christian Democrat who had served a term in prison for anti-Soviet resistance, and close relatives of emigrants and resisters.[265] The clearance process took too long—so long that managers lost patience and allowed the candidate to start work anyway. When the rejection came through, the manager’s headache was then to explain the situation to the newly recruited subordinate without mentioning the KGB.[266] Some other pretext had to found to justify dismissal—bad behavior or poor performance.[267]

(The same secrecy applied to decisions to refuse foreign travel.[268])

Sometimes, managers just ignored the decision. In Kaunas three such cases were reported in the autumn of 1967. The emergence of “serious” kompromat in the case of a senior engineer led the KGB to cancel—for a second time!—his clearance, but the transport ministry then failed to transfer him to other duties. Also seriously compromised were the planning and dispatch department chief of a marine engineering works “and his close relatives.” By its nature, the department chief’s work involved secret matters, but neither the factory director nor the party committee had taken steps to move him on. At a power equipment repair factory, the equipment department chief was barred from secret work on grounds of serious kompromat. After this, the director appointed him deputy chief engineer, making him no. 3 in the factory hierarchy. Frequent absences of the director (no. 1) and chief engineer (no. 2) at the same time now gave the deputy unhindered access to all the secret correspondence reaching the factory.[269]

The historian Saulius Grybkauskas suggests that the KGB had limited capacity to manage the managers that worked around the system “for the good of the cause.” It was hard to discipline passive resistance. Directors appeared to survive conflicts with KGB officers without suffering lasting career damage. The director of the Elfa electrical engineering factory explained how he worked around the KGB. The visiting KGB officer was known as the “guardian angel.” On several occasions the guardian angel ordered the director to remove politically unreliable employees from their duties. The director did not want to comply, given the difficulty of replacing them. The trick was to delay action long enough to take advantage of the turnover of the guardians. When the old one moved on, the incoming officer took time to catch up with the status of the tasks that the old one left unfinished. The director successfully exploited the guardian angels’ circulation to delay action continuously, in the case of one employee, for almost twenty years.[270]

To summarize, you could work around the KGB. More than anything else, this marks a change in the political atmosphere since the 1930s, when to ignore the secret police was to write one’s own suicide note.[271] At the same time, playing poker with state security still took nerve and effort. In other words, you could work around the KGB, but the workarounds were not costless. A manager would play the KGB only for valuable stakes, such as the capacity of the enterprise to fulfil the state plan.

While the KGB could be put off, there is no evidence that it could be bought. There are no cases on file of corrupt side-payments or other means by which managers could have bought the guardian angels’ favor.

The endemic shortage of cleared personnel may have been greater in the Western borderlands than elsewhere. In the Russian Republic the problem was reportedly less acute. Irina Dunskaya, who left the Soviet Union in 1983, specified the grounds for refusal of employment in the special design bureau (SKB) of the Moscow Radio Plant:

If one was ever in a German prison or came to the attention of German occupation authorities; one has taken part in a dissident movement; one has applied for emigration from the U.S.S.R.; often, Point-4 [a person’s ethnic label] was used to summarily exclude Jews from the Radio Plant.

At the time of writing (in 1980), she concluded:

Almost anyone in the Soviet Union can be cleared for classified work, since the children of opponents of the 1917 revolution (tsarist officers, big landowners, industrialists, the nobility) has passed away or grown old, as have those who came under the German occupation during the Second World War.[272]

That may have been the case in Russia.[273] The Western borderlands were relatively rich in kompromat. For residents of the Baltic region in the 1960s and 1970s, the taints of parentage and of resistance to Soviet rule were still comparatively fresh.

DISCRIMINATION AND THE SECURITY/CAPACITY TRADEOFF

The price paid by the targets of suspicion varied from one period to another. From its first years the Soviet regime began to collect and use historical records, surveys, census data, and police registrations to catalog the population by markers of political and social unreliability.[274] During the Civil War, the principles of class justice allowed revolutionary tribunals to decide who was guilty of a crime against the Revolution based on their social background rather than on evidence of complicity.[275] By the 1930s the NKVD had card indexes listing 10 to 15 percent of the population (probably 15 to 30 percent of working adults), classified by the degree of social danger that each person represented.[276] In the “mass operations” and “national operations” of 1937 and 1938, the personal records of millions of “former people” became the basis on which they were selected for detention or execution on suspicion of being enemies. This included former landowners, “kulaks,” traders, priests, and ethnic minorities thought to harbor loyalties to bordering states.[277]

A problem of statistical discrimination is that for every correct prediction there are false positives and false negatives. When communist regimes tried to predict who would turn out to be their enemies, false negatives were those who, lacking grounds for suspicion, passed the test, were classified loyal, and then rose to positions from which they could exploit their in-group privilege for some selfish or antisocial purpose. The false positives were the innocent victims: loyal citizens who aspired to education, promotion, and rewards such as foreign travel but were held back by some suspicious marker from the past that assigned them to the out-group.

Stalin understood that false positives (or innocent victims) were inevitable. “Because it is not easy to recognize the enemy,” he declared, “the goal is achieved if only 5 percent of those killed are truly enemies.”[278] Nikolai Yezhov, who implemented this approach in the Great Terror, echoed him: “Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.”[279] As it turned out, however, false positives were not the only problem. After war broke out in 1941, many false negatives appeared. These were the millions of Soviet citizens who ended up on the side of the enemy, although there had been no reason to suspect them of disloyalty beforehand.[280]

If Stalin never had misgivings, his successors understood that mass killing based on suspicion was far too costly, given the unreliable benefits. Twenty years after Stalin’s death, in the period from which we take our data, those who turned out to have a suspicious background or associations were more likely to be watched and barred from college education, promotion, and foreign travel than detained or killed. Thus, the price of suspicion was dramatically lower in the 1960s and 1970s than in the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless, suspicion remained the basis of exclusion from responsible work.

How did this affect the evolution of the Soviet system? The idea that the Soviet state persistently excluded the most competent or talented people is of long standing. Describing Stalin’s creation of the nomenklatura system of personnel selection, his biographer Stephen Kotkin noted: “Stalin put a premium on competence, which he interpreted in terms of loyalty”—that is, party members were classed as competent if and only if they would unswervingly follow the party line and loyally implement party directives.[281]

Economists Egorov, Sonin, and Zakharov take this line of reasoning further. Egorov and Sonin argue that the people in the dictator’s circle that he should fear most are the most competent ones, because they could replace him. On that basis, they predict, when considering whom to promote, a dictator will impose a more demanding loyalty test on people of greater competence than on others of lower capability, who pose less of a threat.[282] In other words, the security-minded dictator should trade competence for loyalty. On similar lines, Aleksei Zakharov argues that dictators who value competence and promote more capable subordinates will have shorter tenures. The more far-sighted the dictator, the greater the premium he should place on loyalty over competence (not the other way around, as is sometimes suggested).[283]

Adverse selection is the predicted outcome. Adverse selection is also what contemporary observers thought they saw. “Negative selection” for “servility, brutality, and coarseness of mind” are the words used by Robert Conquest, the historian of Stalin’s terror, to describe the formation of the Soviet state’s executive class.[284] Nearly the same words were used by the Polish economist Wlodzimierz Brus when he remarked that communism tended to “negative selection” for “servility and conformity.”[285]

In fact, as we have seen, the Soviet state chose its personnel from a pool out of which the KGB had filtered anyone that might reasonably be suspected of being a freethinker or nonconformist, anyone with a cosmopolitan outlook or with close links to the wider world, anyone whose life experience or contact with other cultures and ways of life might lead them to resist the Soviet way of doing things or introduce a discordant perspective. This looks like a mechanism for the adverse selection that contemporaries described.

Stepping back from the study of communism, the wider social-science literature suggests that the social costs of discrimination arise through two channels. One channel is the quality of competition; the other is the quality of collaboration.

The Quality of Competition

Dividing people into an in-group and a discriminated out-group impairs the competition that allows individual talents to find their best use. Negative selection results in the short run, because more talented out-group members are kept out of the promotion pool, and their place is taken by less talented in-group members. Discrimination in education will multiply those losses in the long run, because educational capital will be misallocated in favor of the less-talented in-group members.

While the discriminatory barriers facing women and ethnic minorities in Western market economies are lower than they used to be, the costs of the barriers that remain are thought to remain large. A complete elimination of racial barriers to labor market competition from the French economy could raise its GDP by 16 percent.[286] A study of the US economy finds that declining barriers to the employment of women and Black people explain two-fifths of real income growth over the half century from i960 to 2010; reduced educational disadvantages produced greater gains than reduced discrimination in labor hiring. Complete elimination of remaining barriers would raise US GDP by a further 10 percent.[287]

On the side of employees, KGB discrimination also created disincentives. It raised the personal risk associated with investment in skills and qualifications. A person could spend years studying and training, and then KGB kompromat could stop their career in its tracks. For some employees—in Lithuania, a significant number—the risk of exposure of a dubious record could become a reason to avoid gaining the competences that would put them in line for promotion. For them, KGB regulation may have made a quiet life in a low-skill, low-wage environment preferable to seeking distinction and risking the scrutiny that would follow. Their talents would remain unused or undeveloped.

It remains the case that every society places some barriers in the way of talented people from less-privileged backgrounds. Before communism, interwar Lithuania placed many restrictions on the opportunities available to women and to ethnic minorities—Jews, in particular.[288] Rather than focus on the negative (discrimination against those who became outcasts under communist rule), should we celebrate the positive (discrimination in favor of formerly marginalized groups)?[289] Or did communist rule just replace one caste by another?

There is no doubt that the coming of Soviet rule to Lithuania widened opportunities for many women and for many Jews.[290] What Soviet rule did not do is create a competitive labor market. Rather, it attached labels to the population, allowing authority and privilege to be redistributed in favor of those classed as loyal. This favored Jews who were willing to commit to the establishment of Soviet rule. Later, it worked against them when they were reclassified as potential agents of the new state of Israel. Rather than levelling the playing field, Soviet class labels replaced old forms of discrimination with new ones, fixing in place a new stratification of society.[291]

The Quality of Cooperation

Another channel for the effects of discrimination is the quality of cooperation. The idea is that a group of people with different but complementary capabilities, experiences, and insights will collaborate and innovate more productively than a group of people who are all the same.[292] By implication, excluding out-group members can only reduce the diversity of the talent pool, with groupthink and stagnation as outcomes.

Diversity might not be an unmixed blessing. It is thought that an increase in the genetic diversity or ethnolinguistic diversity of a population might also disrupt society by weakening solidarity and promoting conflicts, at least beyond a point.[293] The key here is that to realize the gains from diversity requires diversity to be expressed. There can be no gain from diversity if people cannot voice their differences of experience and insight, and if those differences are not allowed to bring change to established ways of thinking and doing. The challenge, therefore, is to manage change without slipping into violence—a continuous balancing act of moderated disruption.

Soviet institutions ruled out this balancing act. Suppressing disruption was literally the first priority of KGB counterintelligence.[294] The Soviet leaders feared that open disputes over Soviet goals and values could only weaken the authority of the ruling party and lead to civil conflict. In their eyes, the diversity arising from “alien” social origins and nonconformist outlooks was always a threat to be suppressed. An example is provided by the considerable ethnolinguistic variation across the length and breadth of the Soviet landmass. This diversity was an unavoidable fact, but Soviet leaders from Stalin onward were determined to minimize its political significance. In 1930 Stalin declared that, until they inevitably disappeared, ethnic cultural differences should be confined to matters of “form” (such as dress and language), while all Soviet cultures would share the same socialist “content.”[295]

This formula continued to rule Soviet “nationalities” policy long after its author was no longer mentioned. It was not contradicted, at least in the eyes of the authorities, by universal compulsory ethnic self-labelling, or by official support for non-Russian languages and non-Russian elites, because the distinctions of ethnicity and language were supposed to be merely formal, while meanings and practices were expected to conform precisely with the substance of official norms and central directives.[296]

The KGB system for protecting government secrecy and security was designed to keep people with discordant values and life experiences out of positions of responsibility. These people, the excluded minority, may not have been any smarter, or more knowledgeable, or more talented than others. What they had to offer was simply different. The risk that the ingredient of nonconformity might lead to change in the design or working arrangements of the state and planned economy was exactly the reason they had to be excluded.

To conclude, the secret uses of KGB kompromat capture another aspect of the Soviet secrecy/capacity tradeoff. The more the Soviet regime tried to improve its security by excluding suspicious people from secret work, the more it harmed the human capacities of the state. In the late 1930s, Stalin’s preference for loyalty over competence became so extreme that the millions of people being killed or imprisoned included even world-class scientists and engineers; at the same time, important branches of science and technology were handed over to out-and-out frauds such as Trofim Lysenko, whose mistaken pseudo-Marxist claims about plant selection and adaptation were forced on agricultural specialists and farmers.[297]

By the 1970s, Stalin’s successors had had time to revise his legacy. The Soviet state no longer tried to kill out-group members or physically exclude them by imprisonment or resettlement in the remote interior. For the most part, it tried to keep them within the community while discriminating against them in a calibrated way, aiming to exclude them from managerial responsibility and influence over others. They aimed to recover some state capacity while sufficiently protecting their secret channels of communication. At the point where we observe it in this chapter, the Soviet state was more open to competing and diverse talents than in Stalin’s day. Still, it remained highly secretive and suspicious of those who had the ambition to serve it, and there was still a price to be paid. Thus, the Soviet state remained on the downward slope of the secrecy/capacity frontier.

The mechanism already described was as follows. The KGB was the gatekeeper to the world of secret work, and secret kompromat provided the KGB with its instrument of control. This use of secrecy promoted the security of the ruling party leaders, but it also damaged the state through its human capacity. On average, personnel were selected, based on their compliance with an approved template of family history and lifestyle choices. The diagnosis of negative selection, as Conquest and Brus suggested, fits the story. Selected for “servility?” Perhaps in many cases, if not necessarily in all. For “conformity?” Yes; in fact, that was the point.

CONCLUSIONS

The Soviet state was organized on a set of core principles. Knowledge was power. Monopoly of power required a monopoly of information, from which enemies were to be excluded. Enemies were hard to single out from the mass, so potential enemies were identified on suspicion.

Suspicion was based on evidence of behaviors, associations, and family backgrounds that failed to conform to the Soviet template of the good citizen. This “compromising evidence” or kompromat was used to grade people politically and socially and to promote them or hold them back.

In Stalin’s time suspicion alone could send someone to the execution cellar. After the Thaw, the mark of suspicion was reduced to a brake or a barrier to advancement. But kompromat continued to play an important role in administering secrecy. The uses of kompromat that we have looked at in this chapter were to decide who should be allowed to make foreign visits and who should be allowed to work with government secrets.

In addition, kompromat was itself secret. Because it was secret, it was beyond verification, and decisions made on its basis were beyond challenge.

The cases we have examined are drawn from postwar Soviet Lithuania. The substance of kompromat was mostly historical and often circumstantial. In the years of world war and postwar insurgency, many Lithuanians struggled to choose among competing evils. The personal records of this traumatic period provided many grounds for KGB suspicion. Less often, it was more recent circumstances and indiscretions that provided the basis to sideline or exclude them.

The personal consequences of KGB discrimination were milder than in the past, but still left their mark on the subjects’ lives. For one person, a dream of family reunion was shattered; for another, their career slowed or came to a sudden, unexplained stop.

The consequences for the state and society can be inferred. When kompromat was used to screen candidates for employment in secret government, it acted as a filter for nonconformity. The Soviet template of the respectable citizen prescribed a set of conventional family backgrounds and associations, life experiences, attitudes, and behaviors. Those who deviated from the template invited suspicion and discrimination, leading to exclusion from many avenues for personal advancement.

A large social science literature suggests that the homogenization of society on these lines will have two effects. One is that there will be less conflict or disruption—and suppressing disruption was a key KGB priority. The other is that there will be less innovation. Perhaps the nonconformists might be better, or more talented, or smarter than others. Or, perhaps not; it might be just that the nonconformists are different, and cooperation among people who are different from each other is more valuable than cooperation among people who are all the same.

This suggests another aspect of the trade-off between secrecy and state capacity. The Soviet leaders’ quest for security drove them to restrict recruitment into the business of the Soviet state to those graded above suspicion. The outcome was to reduce the human capacities of the state.

6. SECRET POLICING AND MISTRUST

Human relations are a deadly serious business here,” a Soviet scientist told the American journalist Hedrick Smith. “We resent it if a foreigner comes to a party and brings Russian friends. It ruins the evening for us because it takes a long time to know someone and come to trust them.”[298]

This chapter is about trust and the breaking of trust. It describes a low-trust society. The party leaders drove their enemies underground. Having lost direct sight of their enemies, so to speak, they ruled on the basis that their enemies must be hiding in plain view, posing as false friends under the cover of professed loyalty. Such false friends, if not identified, would conspire with each other and with the foreign enemy to disrupt society and weaken the state. The only defense against the hidden enemy was an army of hidden watchers, able to pass among the citizens, win their confidence, learn their secrets, and gauge their true loyalties.

The central figure of this system was the secret police informer. The effectiveness of informers relied on a double relationship of trust. The pattern of the double relationship was:

Target —(1)-> Informer —(2)—» Case officer

In the first part of the relationship, the informer had to secure the trust of the person or group targeted for surveillance. Informers could not force anyone to share their secrets. They had to win trust before they could break it. In the second part, the case officer had to be sure of the informer’s trust: an informer who disclosed an operation to the adversary or withheld the information gained was worse than useless. Understanding this double relationship of trust and its corrosive effect both on trust in society and on Soviet state capacity is the focus of this chapter.

The word trust must detain us briefly. A large social-science literature embraces many meanings of the term. A common starting point is two people (A and B) and an action (X), so “A trusts В to do X.” Usually X is some part of a sequential exchange or a cooperative venture that gives rise to a lasting relationship, one that can be expected to benefit both parties but also exposes A to the risk that В can steal a one-sided gain. Then, A trusts В in the belief that В shares A’s interest in X for the sake of maintaining their relationship.[299]

For the informer’s double relationship to be productive, the target must trust the informer to keep the target’s secret for the sake of a friendship expected to yield a flow of long-term mutual benefits, and not to disclose it to others for a one-sided gain. And the informer must trust the case officer with the target’s secret in the expectation of the long-term benefits the case officer has promised in return (which could vary from money or affirmation of status to protection from arrest, as we will see), and not to expose the informer to their social circle nor to the courts.

Some questions follow. First, what is trust based on? The sociologist Barbara Misztal divides the answers into two broad streams of sociological thought. In one stream, A is a social being who gives trust under the influence of social norms and obligations. In another stream, the same A is purposeful and self-interested, giving trust according to the expected net benefit.[300]

Another divisive question is whether В must always be a person, one that is familiar to A. If В is a stranger, can we say that A trusts B? If В is an institution (such as the courts) or a social or professional group (such as lawyers generally), can we say that A trusts B? Some authorities insist that trust can only be interpersonal and based on personal familiarity: if В is “most people” or some impersonal organization or group, some other term should be used, for example “confidence.”[301]

The usages of the word trust in this chapter are intentionally eclectic and inclusive. My argument does not require the reader to commit to a single meaning or school of thought. It allows that the meanings of trust and the motivations behind it are many and can vary across people and settings. It is inclusive, in the sense that the chapter discusses not only interpersonal trust but also generalized trust (in strangers) and institutional trust (in politics and government). For that purpose, it draws on a third stream of thought, one in which trust is allowed to mean whatever people have in mind when they give scaled answers to social survey questions about trust, even though such questions may leave unstated the precise individual who is trusted or the precise gain that is expected from trust.[302] The most common form of such questions is “In general how much do you trust most people?”; or “In general how much do you trust most people you know personally?”; or “Even if you have had very little or no contact with these institutions ... how much [do] you personally trust [your country’s] Parliament? The police? The civil service?”[303]

In relying on survey respondents to work out for themselves what these questions mean, we make a methodological leap like that made by economists and psychologists who study subjective well-being by asking people how they feel as opposed to specifying the elements of a good life in advance.[304]

What is the value of trust? Trust is one of the mechanisms that can promote mutually beneficial cooperation in society. Trust frees the partners in an enterprise from fear of exploitation and betrayal, whether the enterprise is familial, economic, or political. Trust is important to the quality of cooperation.[305] If a task is unskilled, and effort is easily observed, it may be enough to secure cooperation by coercion or threats, but if quality and diligence matter to performance (as in the accurate passing of complex information), and cannot be easily monitored, brute force may not be productive. There must be more than force and fear.[306] From that perspective, trust is more valuable when the quality of performance is at stake.

When trust is defined by social survey respondents, its outcome validity is found when the resulting measures of trust can be causally associated with evidence on outcomes of cooperation that would be impeded by lack of trust. This is not easy, partly because of the scope for reverse causation (just as trust can enable cooperation, the experience of cooperation can build trust), and partly because both cooperation and trust can be influenced by other factors that vary across social settings. When these factors are disentangled, it turns out that higher levels of generalized trust in society, as measured by social surveys, are associated with higher levels of investment and economic development around the world, and some part of the association is probably causal: reduced trust causes investment and development to decline.[307]

What was the state of trust in Soviet society? The evidence is both qualitative and quantitative; both kinds of evidence require careful interpretation.

The qualitative testimonies recorded by those with first-hand experience of living in Soviet society have been marshalled by historians. Surveying the field, Geoffrey Hosking explains the destructiveness of Stalin’s purges by “the wildfire spread of generalized social distrust.” After Stalin, he writes, relationships of trust were to some extent restored within families and work collectives, but “The paroxysms of distrust manifested in Stalin’s Terror... left permanent outlines in the Soviet landscape.”[308] These judgements are consistent with other kinds of qualitative evidence to be reviewed later in this chapter. They do not prove that the Soviet Union was a low-trust society compared to others, but they do suggest plausible ways in which aspects of communist rule might have reduced generalized trust.

Quantitative survey evidence has been used to suggest that low trust is a feature of modern Russia.[309] Can that judgement be extended backward to Soviet times? The measurement of trust in society was still in its infancy at the point when European communism collapsed. The Soviet Union lasted just long enough for the Soviet Russian republic to be included in the second (1990) wave of the World Values Survey. Asked how much they could trust people of their own nationality in general, 38 percent of Russian respondents answered either “a lot” or “somewhat.” This placed Russia last but one out of seventeen countries, far behind the leader (India, with 90 percent) and not much above South Africa (35 percent).[310]

Russia may have been a low-trust society as communist rule collapsed. Is this evidence that low trust was a direct legacy of communist rule? In favor of that interpretation, trust in society changes slowly, and seems to have considerable persistence across generations. If low trust was a feature of Russia in 1990, then it was probably also the case in 1980 or 1970.

But then a more difficult question arises: was low trust under late communism a result of the experience of communism, or was trust in Russia always low? A sceptic could point to China, another country with traumatic experiences of communist repression. China often does comparatively well on trust measures and was the middle country by rank in the 1990 World Values Survey on the question reported above. This does not mean communism had no effect. Perhaps the levels of trust found in China might always have been higher than in other countries because of factors peculiar to Chinese culture or history. But, if so, the converse might be true of Russia. Trust might be low in Russian history, just because of Russia.

More fine-grained evidence of the effects of communist policies is again suggestive, although not conclusive. A well-known study of levels of trust in Africa finds that it was severely damaged by the incidence of the slave trade. This is untangled by identifying how trust measured today across ethnic groups is systematically related to the varying historical exposure of each ethnic group to enslavement.[311] Turning to Soviet history, a study of exposure to forced labor under Stalin finds a similar result: the descendants of those citizens more exposed report lower trust in others today.[312] This result can be compared with another study that starts from Russians’ historical exposure to the prerevolutionary institution of serfdom. That study finds present-day trust unaffected.[313] Putting these together, it has proved easier to identify a persistent detrimental effect on trust arising from communist policies than from coercive institutions in Russia before communism.

When the Soviet leaders resorted to methods of rule that plausibly lowered trust in society, was this a bug or a feature? Did the Soviet leaders bring about a low-trust society by design? For the autocratic ruler, a society with low trust among citizens should have the great advantage that those who might otherwise join with each other to engage in collective opposition are less likely to find each other in the first place or, if they do, more likely to avoid the other as a likely agent provocateur of the regime. The Soviet authorities were always ready to create and spread mistrust, using unfounded rumors, forgeries, and disinformation as a weapon to divide hostile movements and states (as discussed in Chapter 8). It is tempting to conclude that a low-trust society was the intended outcome of Soviet policies and institutions.

This might be too simple, for the Soviet rulers could achieve nothing without the cooperation of millions of state officials and party members. As the political scientist Yoram Gorlizki has argued, “Whatever its flaws, the Soviet state exhibited levels of cooperation that were simply too high for it to be merely written off as a case-study in pervasive or all-encompassing distrust.”[314] While the Soviet state may have achieved high levels of cooperation by using coercion and surveillance to compensate for low trust, the party leaders were also aware of trust as a factor in the success of their project and in their own survival. Gorlizki shows that in private they talked obsessively about trust and how to sustain it. In public, they boosted the importance of the trust relationship between the party and the people. This relationship was famously satirized by the playwright Bertolt Brecht after the Berlin workers’ uprising of 1953: the people had forfeited the party’s trust, he said, so the party should now “dissolve the people and elect another.”[315]

To better understand the basis of cooperation within the Soviet system, some scholars have developed the concept of “forced trust,” applying it to relationships based on deprivation of independence (trust me because what other choice do you have?) or coercive control (trust me because I know your guilty secrets).[316] This terminology takes the idea of trust too far from the scholarly and everyday meanings discussed so far. The feature distinguishing “forced trust” is force, not trust.[317] What it points to, however, is the need to fill a gap: how trust works among people of unequal status.

The status that matters here is rank within hierarchies, which were characteristic of Soviet society’s formal organizations. Economists Albert Breton and Ronald Wintrobe define hierarchies as combining vertical relationships (between a principal and an agent of lower rank) with horizontal relationships (between agents of the same rank). Organizational performance is improved, they argue, when principals and agents build mutual trust on vertical lines: the worker who trusts the manager to deliver rewards and protection is more likely to work to the manager’s goals and to tell the manager the truth if those goals are compromised. Horizontal trust, on the other hand, is bad for an organization’s productivity, because workers that trust each other are more likely to protect each against the manager than to cooperate to deliver the manager’s goals.[318] An implication is that vertical and horizontal trust are likely to be substitutes, not complements.[319]

The practical focus of this chapter is on the mass surveillance of society. Mass surveillance was the work of a particular hierarchical organization, the Soviet secret police and its agentura (“agent network”). We will see that vertical trust was the key to productive collaboration between the KGB and its informers. In turn, KGB surveillance was nested in the mutually distrustful relationship between the party and the people under communist rule. On one side, the ruling party kept the people uninformed and under secret surveillance. On the other side, those people who had misgivings about the party and its rule, being conscious of surveillance and wary of coming under suspicion, kept their doubts to themselves. If the party lived by conspirative norms, so did the people. In turn, however, widespread reticence and suspicion of others complicated the task of surveillance.

The reader might wonder whether there is anything special in this topic. After all, every state has its enemies, including liberal democracies, and all states engage in counterintelligence. Every country has security services that practice surveillance and recruit informers.[320] What was different about communist states was the use of undercover informers to watch not just the small numbers suspected of active hostility to communist rule but also much larger numbers of “potential” and even “unconscious” enemies. Those to be watched included all that showed any sign of unauthorized deviation from political and social norms or that voiced any unauthorized criticisms of the Soviet political or social order, even if such behavior was hardly ever on the direct orders of the foreign adversary and was far more likely to indicate the general influence of ideas and values designated as foreign.

Associated with this was an extraordinarily sweeping definition of hostile intelligence activity, which was not limited to the purloining of secrets by professional spies but was extended to the unauthorized spreading of any attitudes or behaviors that might disrupt the social and political order. Under this exceptionally inclusive designation, almost anyone could turn out to be doing the work of a spy. If spies could be anywhere, then it was natural for spy catching to take the form of mass surveillance.[321]

Related to the exceptionally wide scope of Soviet counterintelligence was the unusually large number of Soviet counterspies. We will see that the number of undercover informers engaged by the Soviet KGB exceeded the number of FBI informers in the United States at the same stage of the Cold War by two orders of magnitude.

Undercover informers acted on the relationship between the Soviet state and society in two ways. One was to tip the balance of information in favor of the state, by giving early warning of the small-scale expressions and actions that might be precursors to more significant disruption of the political order. As a result, the state could usually be one step ahead of the citizen in preempting or promptly suppressing such tendencies. Notably, the informers could achieve this precisely because, working under cover, they did not present themselves as agents of the state. Rather, they were familiar figures—your classmate or colleague, your neighbor, or your drinking companion.

Because of this, the informers also acted on the relationship between state and society in another way. Although the facts of surveillance were strictly censored, it seems to have been widely understood in Soviet society that the KGB used undercover informers in significant numbers, that these would seek to exploit friendship or make friends in order to betray others to the state, and that no one could be sure who the informers were. The effect was to spread fear of informers and to corrode interpersonal (or horizontal) trust.

Secret surveillance was one factor leading to a low-trust society. For the authorities, low levels of trust in society presented pluses and minuses. On the plus side, low trust limited the scope of horizontal social networks and made ordinary people much less likely to join organized criticism of the regime or resistance to it. This enhanced the party leaders’ hold on power. But low trust also limited what they could achieve with the power that they held. Low trust reduced the effectiveness of state-sponsored or pro-regime initiatives because mistrust limited popular support and citizen cooperation. Thus, while secret surveillance added to regime security, security came at the expense of state capacity. From this perspective, the effects can be readily understood in terms of the secrecy/capacity tradeoff.

The first part of this chapter describes the KGB agent network in Soviet Lithuania: how many people, of what types, and where they operated. It introduces various kinds of documentary evidence that shed light on the attributes that made the effective informer, the “contract” with the KGB that formalized their recruitment, and various aspects of their training and motivation. A unique collection of records from the early 1960s shows us a range of stories of the recruitment and training of informers. We will find that the building of vertical trust was a key to the informer/case officer relationship.

In turn, the operations of the KGB agent network were nested within the larger relationship of society to the state. A seeming paradox is that the effectiveness of informers in information gathering relied on operational secrecy, but the existence of the agentlira was an open secret. The fear of informers that disrupted horizontal trust in society arose directly from this open secret. Fear of informers raised the costs of the mass surveillance on which regime survival relied. The result was long-term damage to society and the economy.

WHO WAS THE KGB INFORMER?

Because their existence was an open secret, informers were talked about in Russian society under a variety of names. The literal Russian equivalent to “informer” was osvedomitel. Slang terms showed unofficial society’s distaste for those who side with authority: donoschik (tell-tale or grass) or stukach (stool pigeon, literally a cellmate who relays information by knocking on the pipes). More ironic was seksot (an abbreviation of sekretnyi sotrudnik, or secret collaborator).

Formal responsibility for the KGB’s domestic informers belonged to the officers of its counterintelligence (second) administration. In internal KGB documentation, the term used for informers generally was “undercover helper” (neglasnyi pomoshchnik). Within that class were two main subcategories, the “agent” (agent) and the “trusted person” (doverennoe litso). The term agent was also the basis of the KGB’s collective term for its surveillance apparatus, the agentura (translated here as “agent network”). As well as agents, the agentura also comprised smaller numbers of “residents” (rezidenty, who provided safe houses) and “supernumeraries” (vneshtatnye operativniki, reserve officers that the KGB placed undercover in facilities that it supervised directly).

The common feature of agents and trusted persons was that they were all civilian helpers of the KGB under secret cover. In other respects, they differed. An agent’s recruitment was formalized by a signed agreement and the selection of a code name. A trusted person had not signed anything and would be identified in KGB paperwork by their initials.[322] At a deeper level, they were separated by political reliability: someone who was politically unreliable or compromised could not be a trusted person. An agent, by contrast, might or might not be politically reliable: there was no presumption either way. Because of this, the motivations of agents could be expected to show greater variety than those of trusted persons. For example, an agent might be recruited by consent or under duress, whereas a trusted person was always a willing recruit.

How many informers were there in the 1960s? In Soviet Lithuania in 1961, the republican KGB of 1,181 officers and staff deployed 2,904 agents and 2,531 trusted persons. This was around 1.9 per thousand of the local population.[323] The share of informers in Lithuania was substantially larger than across the whole country. In 1962 the KGB agent network in the entire Soviet Union was almost 165,000, a little less than one per thousand of the population, so half the density in Lithuania at the time.[324]

Such figures imply two things. First, whether one or two per thousand of the population, the prevalence of informers was low enough that many citizens could pass their lives having little or no contact with a KGB informer. Second, therefore, informers were a scarce resource, not to be distributed evenly, but to be focused where they would be of greatest value. The borderlands represented more immediate security risks than the vast Soviet interior. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Baltic region saw more intensive cultivation of informers than other regions.

The same principle of distributing the informers in proportion to perceived risks also operated within Lithuania. The informers reporting to the Soviet Lithuania KGB were heavily focused on the groups regarded as most susceptible to the adversary’s disruptive influences: young people in schools and colleges and adults employed in education, culture, science, and science-based industry, especially those responsible for teaching or managing others. They included people in towns that might see foreign tourists and in enterprises that might be visited by foreign specialists. Looking at fractions of informers among employees in Lithuania in 1963 and keeping 2 to 4 per thousand in mind as the average across the population, we find 14 KGB informers per thousand among schoolteachers, 19 at the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, 58 at the Technical College, 70 at the State Conservatory, 85 at Vilnius State University, 112 at Vilnius Teacher Training College, and 214 (more than one in five) at the Art College. The share of informers was 17 per thousand at Klaipéda’s large Baltija shipyard in 1970, and 27 per thousand at KNIIRIT (a radar research facility in Kaunas) in 1968.[325]

Because most KGB informers were found in such settings, it follows that there were far fewer elsewhere. Those with the best chance of avoiding contact with an undercover informer lived away from the borders, in the countryside, or in communities without external diasporas and unlikely to receive foreign visitors. They worked in farming or small enterprises. They did not go to college, gain higher qualifications, or aspire to highly skilled or responsible work. These were also the people with least opportunity to threaten regime security.

While the Soviet informer network was thinly spread in view of its tasks, it was abundant in international comparison. The American equivalent was the FBI informer. For comparability consider 1971, when the number of KGB informers in Soviet Lithuania had risen to 11,675.[326] As of 1975, the nearest comparable year, the FBI was running 1,500 informers.[327] Thus, little Lithuania had several times more KGB informers than there were FBI informers in the entire United States. Across the Soviet Union, and in proportion to its population, the KGB had one hundred times as many.[328]

What sort of person did the secret police hope to recruit? Some desirable features are obvious. The Romanian Securitate looked for “sociability and social connections.”[329] An informer that lacked these would have nothing to report. Security officials of China’s Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s looked for “discretion, nerve, and self-motivation.”[330] An informer that lacked discretion and nerve would not be able to maintain a cover, and one that lacked self-motivation would not want to.

For the Soviet secret police, we have more precise indications. They arise from an exercise that the KGB undertook in the 1970s to upgrade its data handling capacities, which included designing and circulating a lot of forms for officers to fill in with entries that could become fields in databases of one kind of another.[331] There was a form to register informers who were Soviet citizens, another for foreign informers, and a third for registering changes of status during each calendar year.[332] The greater part of these forms was devoted to recording the kind of factual detail that you would expect to find in anyone’s work record. Worth noting here are the questions that tried to capture the informer’s capacity for social relationships with others, the presence of other propensities that the KGB defined as “negative,” and the quality of the informer’s cooperation with the KGB.

The KGB form confirms that sociability was highly valued, along with capacities for observation and recall. A section headed “characterization” asks a series of yes/no questions: “has exceptional memory”; “has exceptional observation”; “has the capacity to influence others”; “has exceptional capacity to make and develop acquaintance”; “has personal charm”; “has success with women”; “has success with men”; and, inevitably, “other distinctive qualities”. Later in the form, much attention is paid to categorizing the people in the informer’s social circle, and especially any foreigners.

Possible “negative propensities” are given detailed attention. Bad attributes and habits start from drug addiction, homosexuality, and lesbianism, continue via gambling and illicit trading, take in the status of “reemigrant,” “repatriate,” and “immigrant,” and move on to connections to foreign spy agencies and nationalist, religious, and other anti-Soviet groups, before turning to any criminal record, especially crimes against the state. Still under the heading of “negative propensities,” the form inquires about the informer’s experience of foreign travel and asks for more particular information based on a detailed breakdown of the possible indiscretions a Soviet citizen might have committed while travelling, such as private conversations and commercial and sexual transactions with foreign citizens, losing documents and papers, disclosing secrets, excessive drinking, and voicing comparisons unfavorable to the Soviet Union.

While all these things were classed as negatives, there is no suggestion that any of them would make the subject less desirable as an undercover collaborator of the security police. To the contrary, connections to the political underworld could be an advantage.

Of particular interest is the close attention that the KGB registration form pays to the informer’s cooperation. The readiness with which the informer accepts recruitment is distinguished from the quality of subsequent performance. At the recruitment stage, did the subject accept cooperation based on “patriotic” motives (by implication, shared values or common preferences), or based on “compromising evidence” (blackmail or threats such as prosecution)? Subsequently, did the subject carry out assignments in a wholehearted or enthusiastic way (in Russian, okhotno), or was cooperation limited by second thoughts or latent reservations?

As we will see, all combinations were possible. The reluctant recruit could go on to work productively, while the apparently eager volunteer could hesitate and fall at the first fence.

THE CASE OFFICER'S PROBLEM: ASSURING COMMITMENT

Managing every informer was a KGB case officer. The relationship between case officer and informer relied ultimately on vertical trust—not trust alone, and not too much, but a degree of trust was understood to be essential.

The need for vertical trust was implicit in the case officer’s goal. The goal was to learn more about the potential adversary. The means was deception: the informer had to win the target’s trust in order to betray it. There was nothing routine about the task. An informer was not an assembly-line worker performing a mechanical task that could be prescribed and monitored to the millimeter. For the informer, the quality of performance was everything—with “performance” meaning both to act out a role and to fulfil the task.

In fact, to be an effective informer required a high degree of personal commitment. The reluctant or ambivalent informer would surely either fail to elicit the necessary information or give themselves away. In the worst case, they would go on to hide the failure from the case officer, leaving the KGB in ignorance of the true picture.

The KGB had limited ways of controlling the risks. The case officer could (and did) try out new informers on assignments where the outcomes were already known or where the task could be observed or recorded. The officer could (and did) set well-tried informers to watch the informers that were new and untried. But the goal remained to gain entry to settings that the KGB could not penetrate without help. Only the informer could find out what the officer needed to know. The point would inevitably be reached where the KGB had to decide whether to trust the informer or not. If the agent’s information could not be believed at that point, there was no point to the collaboration.

To assure the agent’s commitment became the case officer’s fundamental problem. This formulation of the case officer’s problem also makes clear the relationship between commitment and trust: one party trusts the other by accepting some assurance of the other’s commitment.

Commitment was an issue for everyone, even the most apparently loyal people. To become an effective informer took time; it was not decided in a moment. The decision was not just political; it was also social and moral. The informer might be asked to put the interests of the Soviet state not only before the interests of other states, but also before those of colleagues, neighbors, intimate friends, and family members. Even the most loyal citizen might feel torn. For those recruited because their close relatives or they themselves were involved in anti-Soviet activities, the tug of loyalties could be acute.

Every agent was different, and the KGB needed more than one way to manage them. The one common element was a rite of passage: in the decisive moment, the subject chose a code name and signed an agreement with the security police. The code name was incorporated in the wording or was used to sign it. The wording typically obligated the agent to cooperate with the KGB; often, it bound the agent to maintain conspirativeness about their collaboration. Symbolizing the personal nature of the commitment, the agreement did not follow a standardized template and was usually handwritten by the new agent in Russian or Lithuanian, depending on those involved.[333]

The written terms of the agreement were silent on many matters. The obligations placed on the agent were completely general, and there was no terminal date, so there was never a point at which the agent could say: “I have fulfilled my part of the bargain.” The case officer made no written promise and offered no consideration in exchange. The informer’s expectation of acknowledgment, or reward, or protection, rested entirely on trust—that is, on assurance of the case officer’s unwritten promise.

Considered as a contract, the terms of the informer’s agreement were highly incomplete. In economics a contract is called incomplete when a party agrees to fulfil an assignment in return for a consideration, and qualities such as care and diligence are crucial to the task, and they cannot be fully specified in writing.[334] Everyday examples that readers maybe familiar with include contracts for employment, for teaching and learning, for publishing, and for marriage.

When a contract is incomplete, certain things follow. The contract itself turns out to be one moment in a process that necessarily begins long before and continues long after. Before the contract, there is a search for the best partner and there is due diligence. There are also implications for after the contract. Despite all the efforts made before the contract, only after it is signed does each side discover the true extent of the other’s commitment and come to understand the further investments that might be required to uphold the spirit in which the contract was signed.

The spirit in which the contract was signed could vary. When the subject’s own motivation was enough, recruitment was recorded as based on “patriotic” or “ideological” considerations. In other cases, coercion (or blackmail) could be applied. Given Lithuania’s troubled history, many citizens had something in their past that might provide leverage if the recruit was reluctant. When coercion was explicit, the agent’s recruitment was recorded as based on kompromat.

There was also a middle ground, which provides scope for misclassification. Sometimes, we will see, coercion was implicit in the candidate’s predicament but not voiced. The subject with a compromised record might logically anticipate that to refuse recruitment would invite the KGB to open the Pandora’s box of the past. In such a case, pressure could be a motivating factor without ever being mentioned.[335] Then, recruitment would be recorded as voluntary, although the agent’s agreement was motivated by an implicit threat.

Possibly, therefore, the KGB underrecorded the frequency with which coercion was a factor in recruitment. At the same time, even if coercion was more prevalent than the records suggest, it would be surprising if coercion was ever the sole factor in an effective recruitment. As already discussed, when care and diligence matter to a task, they cannot be assured by coercion. There must be more than force and fear.

In KGB practices we will see the varied strategies that the case officer could choose from to maintain the informer’s commitment. Guilt and ambition were powerful drivers for those who wished to atone for a rebellious youth or to wipe the slate clean of past misdeeds. Training, or becoming proficient in tradecraft, allowed the agent to find professional interest and pleasure in a job done well. Lengthy reeducation could put a stop to backsliding. Positive affirmation of status gave the informer who had broken faith with one underground community the chance to find solidarity and recognition in another: the secret community of the state’s undercover operatives. In that context, occasional gifts and privileges could provide a material signal of the state’s respect and gratitude. To the informer with a troubled conscience, they were also the thirty pieces of silver that marked a point of no return.

PATHS TO UNDERCOVER COLLABORATION

The influences that brought the citizen into undercover collaboration with the KGB are not easy to lay bare. Accounts of everyday dealing between informer and case officer are rare, for several reasons. Under communism, the informer’s lips were sealed by conspirativeness. After communism, they remained closed by social discrimination or the fear of it.[336] The historian of the Baltic region might hope to find more detail in the archived personal files of the informers, but most relevant documents that could be used to construct their stories were destroyed or taken to Moscow when the KGB left the region, including many tens of thousands of files from Lithuania alone.[337]

A few stories can introduce the wide variety of paths to collaboration with the KGB. The cases are selected from a unique, small-scale dataset that will be described and summarized in the following section. They are presented here, not as typical, but to illustrate some of the varied roles of trust in the formation of the effective informer. The agents are identified by code names.

The Desire to Atone: Agent Neman

Recruited in December 1959, Agent Neman worked for the KGB in order to find a path back to respectability and a career. Born in 1925, he was just a teenager when war broke out. Lithuania fell under German occupation, and the young man was deported to Germany as a forced laborer. There, the German authorities recruited him to make anti-Soviet propaganda. Returning to Soviet Lithuania, he entered university, graduating in 1951. He joined the state radio. But his prospects were clouded by his record of wartime collaboration with the enemy. At some point he was dismissed for “political reasons,” and he was reduced for a while to working as a secondary school teacher. Eventually he was reinstated, but he felt that he remained under suspicion. The cloud of mistrust did not lift.

In 1957 the World Festival of Youth and Students (28 July to 11 August) brought an unaccustomed flood of foreign tourists to Moscow and created many opportunities for KGB surveillance. As a journalist, Neman was able to attend, and this put him touch with many foreigners, including Western journalists. The KGB now identified him as a likely prospect and looked at him closely. On a business trip he found himself sharing a room with a “party worker,” in reality an undercover KGB officer, who struck up a friendship with him.

Neman was thought to have many talents: he was able to work on his own, without external supervision, was good with languages, and could win the confidence of strangers. He was just the sort of person whom the KGB could use with tourists at home and abroad. But why would he? For Neman the key to recruitment was that he felt his career was blocked by his war record, about which he was quite open. In December 1959, when the KGB offered him the opportunity to collaborate, he saw the offer as a means of redemption, which he now grasped with both hands.

Thereafter Neman became a prolific informer. In Vilnius he was brought into contact with two Western Europeans—a male diplomat and a female society journalist (or a “spy”?) with connections to Eastern Europe, Lithuanian emigrants, and the Vatican hierarchy. She invited him to visit Warsaw and Rome and supplied him with forbidden books—Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, Milovan Djilas’s The New Class, and Lithuanian nationalist literature. This was surely how the KGB expected foreign spies to cultivate a Soviet citizen. His relationship with the journalist became warm and confidential.

At this point the KGB tried Neman out on a foreign trip: he travelled with a tourist group to China. This was before the Soviet-Chinese split, although relations were already deteriorating. No doubt he had to report on the conduct of his fellow tourists, and more than likely he was himself under surveillance, but the report does not comment on this. Meanwhile, the journalist invited Neman to visit her in Rome or in Warsaw. At the next stage, the KGB planned that Neman would visit Warsaw.

His personal qualities made Neman an ideal recruit. He entered adult society, vulnerable to discrimination because of his bad war record. In another person, that bad war record could have been the lever to force him into the service of the KGB. Neman did not need to be threatened. He wanted to cancel out the past, saw collaboration with the KGB as means to that end, and freely committed himself to it. His case officer returned his commitment with trust.

Can You Protect Me? Agent Rimkus

A male Lithuanian born in 1908, Rimkus was a seminary student in prewar Lithuania, then a Christian Democratic journalist and nationalist. Continuing to work in Lithuania under enemy occupation was enough to have him arrested in 1945 and sentenced to five years of forced labor. On release, he found work as a farm technician (“agronomist”) in the Klaipéda rural district. Based on surveillance reports, the technician attracted KGB attention for two reasons. One, he had information about the misappropriation of collective farm property, was angry about this, and talked about taking the information to the KGB. (The misappropriation was surely a police matter. It seems doubtful that the KGB would have been interested if it did not involve foreigners or anti-Soviet activity.) Two, he appeared to be disillusioned with the nationalist cause and his former nationalist comrades—two of whom he knew to be living locally on forged identification papers.

The KGB made its first approach to the technician under cover. When questioned, he readily shared his information about the property crimes. At first, he was silent about the former nationalists, but eventually he shared this information too. So, he passed a test. The next step was to approach him openly with an offer of recruitment.

In this moment, the candidate panicked. On further questioning, the way he put it was that he feared one day, “in the event of a complication of the international situation,” his former associates would uncover his role.[338] The KGB promised him that no one would ever know. On that basis Rimkus consented to recruitment. He became an effective informer, helping the KGB to keep tabs on nationalists and their activities both at home and abroad.

Agent Rimkus was not the first person to worry about the stability of Soviet rule in the event of an international conflict. This was a central concern of secret police reports to the Soviet leaders through all the decades of Soviet rule.[339] Nonetheless, the KGB kept its promise to Rimkus. His personal file was either destroyed or removed to Moscow in 1991. Today the world can read about Rimkus in the files that were left, but there is no record of his real name.

Agent Rimkus had once sided with the Soviet Union’s enemies. The KGB found him just as he began to reconsider his past loyalties. The obstacle that remained was that Rimkus feared exposure. His recruitment was unblocked by the KGB’s commitment never to allow his identity to be revealed. Rimkus might have accepted it at face value, or he might have concluded he had no choice but to accept it—a fine distinction, but a necessary one. Either way, the vertical trade of trust for commitment opened the way for him to become an effective informer.

Trust os Motivation: Agent Gobis

This person lived in Siauliai, a provincial town that gained significance in the Cold War as a staging post for Soviet missile troops. A Jewish male born in 1916, college-educated, fluent in several languages, he is described as a rounded person, calm, responsive, sociable, and businesslike. During the Soviet-German war he served in the Red Army; at some point he joined the party. The war ended, however, with several of his family members living abroad. The report does not say directly where they went, but Israel was evidently the destination. Because he persisted in corresponding with them, he was expelled from the party in 1950—in other words, during the late-Stalinist campaign against Jewish “rootless cosmopolitans.”

The MGB, forerunner of the KGB, recruited Agent Gobis in July 1951. The circumstances are not reported. It would be reasonable to see him as compromised by the links that he maintained with Jewish emigrants, one of them active in Israeli politics. We are not told whether he was recruited under pressure. We are told that he twice asked to be released, and was refused, which does suggest absence of consent.

Serving as an agent, Gobis remained under surveillance and investigation until 1957. What did the KGB learn from its surveillance? Gobis was not disloyal. He did complain to others, but only about everyday problems (po bytovym voprosam, a phrase often used as KGB code for consumer shortages). The KGB concluded that Agent Gobis was falling short of his potential, not from disloyalty, but because he was distrusted and mismanaged.

The World Festival of Youth and Students of 1957, held in Moscow from 28 July to 11 August, created an opportunity for the KGB to reset its relationship with Agent Gobis. Beforehand, he had been contacted by an Israeli visitor, who asked to meet him at the festival—which the KGB now encouraged and enabled. From there, Gobis entered a web of dealings with Israeli diplomats, and with a Jewish aviation engineer in Chisinau who apparently looked for a way to pass state secrets to the Israeli embassy. There were telephone procedures and code words. The KGB facilitated the travel of Gobis between Vilnius, Moscow, and Chisinau. At the time of the report, nothing had come of the aviation secrets, but a good deal had become known to the KGB about other citizens who maintained unauthorized contact with Israeli embassy staff.

The sensitivity of the mission is marked by a note that “For operational reasons the agent’s code name and the names of his contacts, passwords, and meeting places have been changed.”

During his meetings with the various people involved, Gobis was himself kept under covert observation by street watchers and eavesdroppers. The KGB learned that he was generally truthful when reporting on operational matters. But he did hold something back, in a pattern consistent with his past conduct. In the company of his foreign contacts, he complained continually about his poor standard of living, and he went so far as to ask for favors. Could they help him obtain a passenger car? Would they bring him imported goods? The agent risked compromising himself in this way although, in the KGB’s judgement, he “lived well materially.” Worse still, Gobis covered up this aspect of his conduct when reporting to his case officer, who found out only because the additional layer of surveillance.

In due course the case officer challenged Gobis about his selective reporting of his own behavior, and the lack of basis for his complaints against Soviet life. This was done “carefully and tactfully,” with the aim of avoiding a confrontation.

In this post-Stalin era, the KGB learned to value Gobis as a senior agent with a complex personality. They treated him sensitively. They acknowledged his service by sending him to be pampered in water spas. At every meeting, his case officer took time to chat to him about the state of the world and of Soviet society; listen to him holding forth on highbrow literature and spy novels, which the case officer used to improve his tradecraft; and, not least, remind him of his duty of gratitude for the advance of Soviet living standards.

On the surface, this was a story of early mistakes eventually corrected. Until the Moscow festival of 1957, Gobis underperformed for lack of trust. When entrusted with an important mission, he rose to the level that the mission demanded. The reporting officer pontificated:

Correctly arranged mutual relations with the agent are of no little significance. Mutual relations and work should be organized so that the agent continually feels interest in the work and our trust, care, and attentiveness toward him.

Too Much Trust: Agent Stanislav

A male railway employee, Agent Stanislav worked the main line connecting Vilnius to Kuznica in Poland. His work gave him access to foreigners and to international shipments of goods and letters. He was recruited by consent (“on an ideological basis”) in 1958. His case officer saw him as capable, educated, well motivated, and fully cooperative. So far, so good.

Another railway worker was found to be smuggling goods across the border. Because he worked closely with Stanislav, who should have known, questions were raised about the agent’s conduct: he had withheld information about his colleague’s criminal activities from the KGB. In turn this led to questions about the quality of his supervision: his case officer had trusted him too much.

The KGB brought Agent Stanislav under tighter discipline. The case officer reeducated him in the importance of truth telling and the legal consequences of failing to report offences, particularly when they involved foreigners and foreign goods. From now on, he was kept on a shorter leash. Less trust and closer supervision made Agent Stanislav a more effective informer. (From another perspective, the KGB now held kompromat against him—evidence that he had concealed a crime.) He went on to uncover various other cross-border crimes, some of them organized, and he was able to win the confidence of people engaged in more significant crimes against the state and secure evidence of their activities.

Yearning to Belong: Agent Ruta

In 1957 a twenty-year-old male was sentenced to five years of forced labor for his part in organized resistance to Soviet rule in Lithuania. He served his time thoughtfully, seeking the company of like-minded prisoners, but also trying to understand more about politics. His “long and complicated path to collaboration” with the KGB began when he realized that organized resistance to Soviet rule had become futile. Thinking it through, the young man concluded that he had picked the wrong side. He had been fighting for a society that no longer existed and that few really wanted to restore. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was building the future. For the time being, he kept his conversion to himself.

By the time he left the labor camp, the young man was ready to come out as a reformed character. At first, he thought of making a grand public gesture, renouncing his former comrades and their goals, and committing himself to communism. On reflection, he concluded, this would change few minds. Instead, he turned to the KGB to offer his services in the undercover struggle against the Lithuanian nationalist resistance.

Agent Ruta was that rare creature, a walk-in (volunteer). He expected the KGB to greet him with suspicion. Instead, they welcomed him with open arms. From the KGB standpoint the young man was an ideal recruit, being deeply embedded in the “hostile environment” of anti-Soviet nationalism from before and during his time in the labor camp.

Agent Ruta writes of his case officers in glowing terms. The first, named Vitas Domo, showed him only goodwill and sincerity. He describes the second, Julius Antano, as “calm, unhurried, an intelligent person, an experienced Chekist [secret policeman].” In their hands, Ruta experienced a rare moment of optimism and peace of mind.

The honeymoon did not last. Soon, Agent Ruta began to let Julius Antano down, missing meetings and failing assignments. This marked the onset of a personal crisis, the reasons for which Ruta kept to himself. The trigger for this crisis (he explains, looking back) was that in society he now found himself completely isolated. In his own mind, he had become proud of the Soviet Union’s achievements, and he wanted to work with others to help overcome its residual defects—which were exactly the issues that nationalists exploited to promote discontent. As a loyal citizen he hungered for the respect and trust of others who felt like him. But those other loyal citizens continued to avoid and despise him as the unreformed nationalist that he still appeared to be. His only friends were the old comrades of the resistance whom he had come to inwardly reject.[340]

The people Ruta hated most were the former resisters who had avoided prison and were now making their careers and had even joined the Communist Party, to which they professed loyalty out of self-interest rather than inner belief. As a former state criminal, by contrast, Ruta could not make a career; he could get only low-status work at a “miserly” wage. He turned in on himself and fell into a depression. He began to drink. Eventually he was hospitalized with pulmonary tuberculosis.

A visitor brought Ruta to a turning point. “When Julius Antano visited me in the clinic,” Ruta writes,

he showed himself to be so close to me, just like a father. I began more and more to feel a kind of inner love for the Chekists, and I began to follow them and imitate them. More and more often I repeated to myself the words of F. E. Dzerzhinskii [founder of the Soviet secret police]: “A Chek-ist can only be a person with a cool head, a warm heart, and clean hands.” It was more or less an exercise in self-hypnosis. Today I think that the key to prevailing over that old pessimism, that morbid nightmare, was my old acquaintance with Julius Antano. I am grateful to him for my whole life.

Over several years Ruta emerged from his depression. Helped by his KGB connections, he changed his residence, finished college, and gained employment in accordance with his profession (not specified, but involving conferences, lectures, and some branch of scholarship).

How else did the KGB help him, specifically? This was “hard to say. Maybe it was that I always felt goodwill and sincerity from their side, and trust in me, or maybe it was that I trusted them. Most likely, both at once.” Most important, Ruta was no longer lonely: “There are many good people around me. They trust me—which is most important.”

In the last pages of his memoir, Ruta recounts that he has successfully completed many important assignments to report on former nationalist resisters now released back into society. Sometimes he is invited to write about the evolving “forms, methods, and tactics” of nationalist groups. He concludes with advice for case officers on how to assign surveillance tasks without arousing suspicion and the importance of allowing agents to exercise a degree of initiative. Ruta, it seems, has become an elite collaborator, entrusted not only with low-level tasks but also with advice and analysis.

To summarize, the story of Ruta reveals the psychological stress of the undercover helper whose inner thoughts are known only to the KGB. Trust was the key that unlocked the informer’s ability to perform his role. At first the door was locked on both sides. The KGB turned the key from one side by showing trust in Ruta. But this was not enough: it did not save Ruta from despair. For that, Ruta had to turn the key from the other side by learning to trust the KGB with his darkest inner thoughts.

Trust—but Verify

For the KGB, things worked out best when the agent sought the case officer’s trust and offered trust in exchange. Agent Ruta longed to belong and be trusted, but he had to learn to trust his case officer with his deepest fear, which was of social isolation. Agent Rimkus accepted recruitment without much prompting, but he had to trust the KGB with his new identity. Agent Gobis had to trust the KGB with knowledge of his selfish urges. Agent Stanislav had to learn to trust the KGB more than he trusted his criminal colleagues.

One can doubt that our stories tell the whole truth. Walking into the KGB to offer his services after years in the nationalist underground, Agent Ruta felt trusted from the start. But for the KGB to have accepted such an offer at face value would have gone against all caution.[341] It seems certain that, while the officers handling Agent Ruta did not show him their doubts, their colleagues behind the scenes would have verified him in minute detail. Agent Rimkus appeared willing to serve, and explained his hesitation over recruitment by fear of exposure, as if it were a merely practical concern, but did he agree to serve only for fear that his bad record would be used against him, while retaining unspoken loyalties to his former comrades after? Agent Gobis felt entrusted with an important mission, but the reality is that the KGB kept him under remote surveillance: the trust they showed him was simulated. Agent Stanislav became more effective when kept on a shorter leash, but the KGB now had evidence that he had helped to conceal a crime, bringing him under a clear threat.

In the informer’s commitment to collaboration, the desire to win trust may have been a strong motivation, strongest among those with a compromised past, such as Agent Ruta. KGB case officers recognized this motivation, but they did not return it in full. While the KGB had to rely on its agents to some degree, good practice demanded that their work should be checked at every opportunity. To allow mistrust to dominate the relationship could spoil an agent, as in the case of Agent Gobis. But unconditional trust was not recommended: it was too much trust that put agent Stanislav at risk. Good practice demanded that every agent’s work should be checked, in the spirit of the Russian proverb: “Trust—but verify.”[342]

The principal’s problem is presented here as one of verifying an agent’s commitment to a vertical relationship based on trust. This problem is common to all large organizations where quality of performance matters, regardless of ownership or socioeconomic context. What made the case of

KGB officers and agents worthy of special attention? There are two distinctive features. One was the scope for coercion of the agent, made possible by KGB access to kompromat. The other was the ultimate purpose—to enable the KGB to penetrate private households, church congregations, and informal affinity networks in order to learn their secrets and, if necessary, frustrate their projects.

WHO MADE AN EFFECTIVE INFORMER?

The stories related in the previous section are selected from a unique collection of twenty-one personal narratives assembled from the archive of the KGB of Soviet Lithuania, as described below. The narratives are abstracted in Table 6.1.

The documentary collection arises as follows. The condition of the agentura was a continual preoccupation of the KGB leaders. A related issue was the need to improve the training of agents’ handlers. In the early 1960s a specialist group was formed under Soviet KGB chairman Vladimir Semichastnyi for “study and dissemination of the experience of operative workers and of information about the adversary.” Similar groups were also set up in the Republican KGBs, including that of Soviet Lithuania. Like any large organization, in other words, the KGB was keen to identify and document improved practices and to disseminate them through in-house newsletters and training opportunities like conferences and away-days. The earliest batch of reports in our sample is accompanied by a memo signed by the head of the Soviet Lithuania KGB, responding to a request for information from the Moscow group.[343] More reports of a similar nature appear elsewhere in the archive, although without accompanying correspondence. All our stories were reported with the aim of uncovering and exemplifying good practices.

The sample is not only small but highly selected. It includes only successes. We know that KGB informer relationships often ended in failure. Elsewhere in the files, anecdotal evidence of unproductive agents and incompetent case officers abounds. When Moscow demanded that the agent network should be “small in numbers and high in quality,” the KGB’s own surveys show, it was easy to let unproductive agents go, but more difficult

table 6.1. Twenty-one effective KGB informers: Their personal data, abstracted from KGB records

Code name

Personal data

Algis

Lithuanian male factory employee in Kaunas. Compromised by war service for Germany (sentenced to 10 years). Thought to have abandoned former beliefs. Recruited by consent, July 1963, to report on former nationalist prisoners. Complied fully with assignments. Rewarded by suitable employment for wife. Served 1 year 1 month to date of report, May 1964.

Berzas-1*

Lithuanian male rector of Catholic church.Compromised by evidence of minor theft of kolkhoz property. Recruited under pressure, July 1957, to report on other priests. Initial compliance with assignments was limited, resolved by lengthy discussions and a valuable gift. Served 3 years 8 months to date of report, March 1961.

Berzas-2*

Lithuanian male employed and studying part-time in Kaunas. Compromised (no detail given), now abandoned former beliefs. Recruited by consent, August 1962, to report on nationalists. Initial compliance with assignments was limited, resolved by lengthy discussions. Served 2 years to date of report, August 1964.

Genys

Lithuanian male, born 1933, incomplete high school. Compromised by nationalist activity before and after sentence (1951). Thought to have moderated former beliefs. Recruited under pressure, late 1950s, to report on nationalists. Complied fully with assignments. Served several years to date of report, January 1962.

Gobis

Lithuanian Jewish male born 1916, higher education, multilingual, resident of Siauliai. War service in Red Army, party member. Compromised by emigration of family members to Israel, with whom he maintained contact. Expelled from party, 1950. Recruited 1951(continued)

table 6.1. (continued)

Code name

Personal data

(unstated whether willing or not), to report on the Jewish diaspora. Complied fully with assignments, except complaints made undercover to targets about living standard. Performance was monitored excessively. Resolved by giving more responsibility in connection with the World Festival of Youth and Students (1957) and thereafter. Monitoring was continued; undercover complaints about living standards also persisted. Resolved by political reeducation plus privileges. Served 9 years to date of report, September 1960.

Karklas

Lithuanian male, born 1905, higher education, schoolteacher in Siauliai. Multilingual. Compromised by remaining in Lithuania under German occupation and by brother (active nationalist, resettled). Recruited by consent, April 1961, to report on nationalists and emigrants. Compliance appeared full but still being evaluated. Served 5 months to date of report, June 1961.

Komandulis

Recent immigrant of Lithuanian Jewish origin, born 1937. Compromised by joint actions with other young people seeking reemigration. Friend of Agent Korabel’nik. Recruited by consent, 1961, through agency of father to report on associates. Complied fully with assignments. Served some months to date of report, January 1962.

Korabel’nik

Recent immigrant of Lithuanian Jewish origin, born 1938. Multilingual. Compromised by joint actions with other young people seeking reemigration. Friend of Agent Komandulis. Recruited by consent, 1960, through agency of father and work colleagues to report on associates. Complied fully with assignments. Served some months to date of report, March 1961.

Maksim

Lithuanian male, born 1911, higher education, journalist. Compromised by family (“kulak”) origin and by working in occupied Lithuania. Sentenced, recently released,

Code name

Personal data

seeking return to Vilnius. Recruited by consent, 1961, to report on nationalists. Complied fully with assignments. Served some months to date of report, January 1962.

Mindaugas

Lithuanian male, higher education, actor. Recruited by consent, 1956, to report on others in the arts world suspected of nationalism. Initial compliance with assignments was limited. Personal issues: inner reservations, low salary, death of mother. Resolved by political reeducation, sympathy, and financial assistance. Served 5 years to date of report, January 1962.

Mir

Lithuanian male, higher education, choral singer. Multilingual. Compromised by family origin (former urban middle class) and links to emigrants. Recruited by consent 1956 to report on nationalist diaspora. Complied reluctantly with assignments. Personal issues: anti-Soviet views, low salary. Resolved by political reeducation and a higher-paid position in Vilnius TV. Served 5 years to date of report, March 1961.

Neman

Lithuanian male, born 1925, higher education, radio journalist. Compromised by war record (remained on occupied territory, deported to Germany, collaborated in making anti-Soviet propaganda). For this reason, dismissed from state radio in 1952/53, then reinstated. Attended the World Festival of Youth and Students (Moscow, 1957) as a journalist, where he attracted KGB interest. Recruited by consent December 1959 to report on foreign diplomats and journalists. Personal issue: desire to wipe clean his bad war record. Complied enthusiastically with assignments; sent abroad on mission to China, being considered for another to Poland. Served 1 year 3 months to date of report, March 1961.

Neris

Lithuanian female, higher education, fluent German, port authority worker in Klaipéda. Recruited by consent, April 1958, to report on foreign shipping. Complied fully

table 6.1. (continued)

Code name

Personal data

with assignments, but first results were disappointing. Personal issue: too easy-going with the ships’ crews, unable to elicit useful information. Resolved by political and moral reeducation, helping her to gain confidence of ships’ officers. Served 3 years 9 months to date of report, January 1962.

Nevskii

Russian male, born 1931, higher education, multilingual, port dispatcher in Klaipéda. Komsomol member. Recruited by consent, April September 1957, to report on foreign shipping. Complied fully with assignments, but first results were disappointing. Personal issue: off-putting manner (brash, talkative). Resolved by personal reeducation. Served 4 years 4 months to date of report, January 1962.

Petrauskas

Lithuanian male. Compromised by past nationalism and violent record (sentenced 1948 to 25 years, released after 15). Thought to regret his past. Personal issue: was his conversion genuine? Resolved by prolonged discussion. Recruited by consent, September 1963, to report on nationalists. Complied fully with assignments. Served 10 months to date of report, August 1964.

Rimkus

Lithuanian male, born 1908, secondary education, formerly a journalist, now farm technician (“agronomist”) in Klaipéda rural district. Compromised by record under enemy occupation; sentenced 1945 (5 years). Attracted KGB interest by complaints about misappropriation of farm property. Thought to have knowledge of nationalists living locally under cover, possibly regretful of past association with nationalists. Recruited by consent September 1961, to report on nationalists locally and in the diaspora. Followed by regret. Personal issue: fear of exposure. Resolved by discussion and assurances. After this, complied fully with assignments. Served 4 months to date of report, January 1962.

Code name

Personal data

Ruta

Lithuanian male, born 1937. Compromised by engagement in nationalist resistance; sentenced and released. Regretting past, hoped to wipe the slate clean. Recruited by consent (volunteer) during 1960s to report on nationalists. Complied fully with assignments at first, then dropped out. Personal issues: psychological isolation, low-wage employment, lack of status. Resolved by befriending, life coaching, help with new residence and employment. Served around ten years to date of report, September 1975.

Sadovskii

Lithuanian male resident of Kaunas. Recruited by consent in 1964 to report on nationalists. Compliance with assignments being verified. Served a few months to date of report, August 1964.

Stanislav

Male railway employee on the Vilnius-Kuznica (Poland) main line. Recruited by consent (“on ideological basis”), December 1958, to report on foreign contacts. Thought to be fully compliant with assignments, but he failed to report a smuggling racket. Resolved by moral and political reeducation. Now complying fully. Served 2 years 4 months by date of report.

Surikov

Lithuanian male factory worker. Compromised by record of nationalist activity, sentenced in 1951. Thought to have changed views. Recruited by consent in 1961 to report on nationalists. Served a few months to date of report, January 1962.

Valdas

Lithuanian male born 1939, student of Vilnius State University. Recruited by consent November 1961 to report on nationalist students. Complied enthusiastically with assignments. Self-described fan of KGB. Served 2 months to date of report, January 1962.

* Agents chose their own code names, and could by accident prefer the same one, in this case “Berzas.”

(continued')

TABLE 6.1. (continued)

Sources: Agent Algis: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/323, 24-27 (Report by operative commissioner of the Kaunas city KGB second department Capt. Sidorov, 27 August 1964). Agent Berzas-1: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300, 34-35 (Report by consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Maj. Gomyranov, March 1961). Agent Berzas-2: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/323, 34-36 (Report by operative commissioner of the Kaunas city KGB second department Capt. Balkus, August 1964). Agent Genys: Hoover/ LYA, K-l/10/311, 22-24 (Report by senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, 26 January 1962). Agent Gobis: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300, 213-18 (Report by senior operative commissioner of the Siauliai city KGB, Maj. Ostapenko, 26 September 1960). Agent Karklas: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300, 302-4 (Report by senior operative commissioner of the Siauliai city KGB Capt. Sar-palius, no date but 1961). Agent Komandulis: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311,28-29 (Report by senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, 22 January 1962). Agent Korabel’nik: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300,30-33 (Report by senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, 11 March 1961. Agent Maksim: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311, 19-21 (Report by chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB group for study and dissemination of the experience of operative workers Lt. Col. Babintsev, no date but 1962). Agent Mindaugas: Hoover/ LYA, K-l/10/311, 42-43 (Report by senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, 23 January 1962). Agent Mir: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300, 38-40 (Report by consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Maj. Gomyranov, 10 March 1961). Agent Neman: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300, 26-29 (Report by senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, March 1961). Agent Neris: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311, 17-18ob (Report by chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB group for study and dissemination of the experience of operative workers Lt. Col. Babintsev, 22 January 1962). Agent Nevskii: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311, 34-35 (Report by chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB group for study and dissemination of the experience of operative workers Lt. Col. Babintsev, no date but 1962). Agent Petrauskas: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/323, 28-30 (Report by senior operative commissioner of the Kaunas city KGB second department Capt. Raudis, August 1964). Agent Rimkus: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311, 39-41 (senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, 23 January 1962). Agent Ruta: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/440, 15-32 (Remarks of agent Ruta, recruited from a hostile environment, 30 September 1975). Agent Sa-dovskii: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/323,31-33 (Report by senior operative commissioner of the Kaunas city KGB second department Maj. Troinin, 26 August 1964). Agent Stanislav: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/300,36-37 (consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Maj. Gomyranov (no date but March 1961). Agent Surikov: Hoover/ LYA, K-l/10/311,25-27 (Report by chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB group for study and dissemination of the experience of operative workers Lt. Col. Babintsev, January 1962). Agent Valdas: Hoover/LYA, K-l/10/311,36-38 (senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group Lt. Col. Tumantsev, no date but 1962).

to raise the performance of the rest.[344] From that perspective, the agent stories we have do not help us much to understand the general quality of informer management or performance. What they show us is good practice as the KGB saw it at the time. Being rich in detail and widely varied, they allow important common features to emerge that can guide further investigation.

Given that the documentation purports to represent good practices, the reader might worry that our agent stories were varnished or fictionalized for the sake of officers’ personal reputation or to cover up their defective work. This is unlikely. Those with most at stake were the case officers with personal responsibility for individual agents. By contrast, all the agent stories in our sample were composed and signed off by KGB officers of higher rank. The authors were of similar seniority to the officers who compiled the critical surveys, already mentioned, that exposed the poor general state of the agent network in various localities in the same period. In fact, two senior officers (Gomyranov and Tumantsev) did both: they wrote half of our stories at the same time as they contributed critical surveys. If they did not cover up poor work in one context, it is not obvious why they should have invented good work in another.

What is described in our twenty-one reports? Twenty, written in the third person and signed off by a senior officer, are from the years 1961 to 1964. The subjects are agents (agenty). While the detail varies, they typically described the person’s background and the circumstances in which the person came to the attention of the KGB. (There are some gaps: four reports, all from the Kaunas KGB office, have a missing first page that probably listed significant personal data.) Each report went on to explain the manner of recruitment and, in most cases, what happened next: how the new informer adapted to the task, what problems arose, and by what means the issues were overcome. Thus, while the informer’s voice is not heard directly, each document attempts to represent the informer’s perspective.

The twenty-first story, that of Agent Ruta, has a different format. Dated 1975, a decade after the others, it was written for an internal limited circulation KGB magazine, the Sbornik.[345] A ghost writer has surely been at work, so we do not hear the subject’s uncensored voice. Two-thirds of the eighteen-page typescript are devoted to the informer’s inner path from

table 6.2. Twenty-one effective KGB informers: Demographic statistics

Percent

N

Male

95

21

Urban residence (if known)

93

14

Higher education (if known)

82

11

White-collar (if known)4'

85

13

Ethnic Lithuanian**

76

21

Compromised by past action or association

67

21

Party or Komsomol member at any time***

9

21

* Includes one college student. ** Others were Russians, a Jew, and a likely Pole. One, a former party member, had been expelled; another was a Komsomol member in good standing.Notes: Because reports did not follow a common format, not all reports included the same information for each subject. Thus, the sample size varies across indicators. I give the sample size as 21 when every report gave this information or allowed it to be inferred (gender and ethnicity), or when the information would have been regarded as so significant that absence of evidence could be construed as evidence of absence (party status; compromised by past action or association). Dates given in the documentation are sometimes approximate or inferred from internal evidence. For birth date, only the year is given. For recruitment, the year, month, or exact date may be given. Where necessary, I fill in missing values by assuming midmonth or midyear. Source: As Table 6.1.

active resistance to collaboration with Soviet rule. Hard biographical data are missing; circumstantial detail is limited. But the purpose is evidently the same: the KGB wanted to explain to itself how the opportunity arose to recruit an agent “from a hostile environment” and how the opportunity was exploited. That is why it is included here.

What kinds of people are found in our reports? Table 6.2 reports basic demographics. There are few surprises. Most agents were male, urbanized, college educated, and in white-collar employment (including one college student). Three-quarters were ethnic Lithuanians, a share close to that in the general population of the republic.

As the table shows, two-thirds of our sample lived under some shadow arising from their past conduct or associations. As discussed in Chapter 5, at best this meant family connections with Lithuania’s prewar elite or a record of noncommunist political activity before the war; at worst it meant wartime collaboration with the German occupation or

table 6.3. Twenty-one effective KGB informers: Age and service

Median

Mean

N

Birth year (if known)

1931

1925

11

Age at recruitment (if known), years

28.0

34.2

11

Year recruited

1961

1960

21

Years served

1.2

2.7

21

Source and notes: As Tables 6.1 and 6.2.

armed rebellion against Soviet rule. It was such records that made these subjects useful as informers. Correspondingly, only two of the set had any record of Communist Party affiliation (one a former member, the other a Komsomol member). No doubt party members were more likely to be recruited as trusted persons than agents, as was the case in East Germany.[346]

Table 6-3 shows age and length of service. The median birth year of our informers, if known, was 1931, and their median age at recruitment was twenty-eight. Based on the dates of their reports, nine had been in service for less than one year. This cannot be typical of all agents: rather, the documents’ emphasis on the manner of recruitment has biased the sample to recent recruits. But, as the averages suggest, there was a tail of older, more experienced agents. Seven had served for more than two years, including two who had served up to a decade.

RECRUITMENT, REEDUCATION, REWARDS

The reports in our sample show wide variation in how the recruitment process worked out. Table 6.4 reports a few measurable aspects. Taking the reports at face value, most of the effective agents joined by consent. Only two were recruited under an explicit threat (agents Berzas-i and Genys).

This contrasts to the data in Table 6.2. Two-thirds of informers were recruited with compromising evidence held against them, but in most cases the evidence was not used.

Was recruitment an offer that could not be refused? None of the informers in our sample said no, but some needed persuasion. In other settings, we know, candidates for recruitment did sometimes refuse.[347]

table 6.4. Twenty-one effective KGB informers: Recruitment and performance

Percent

N

Recruited by consent (if known), percent

90

20

Initial compliance was full (if known), percent

61

18

Initial compliance was monitored, percent

38

21

Service was rewarded, percent

29

21

Source and notes: As Tables 6.1 and 6.2.

A question that follows is whether those who accepted freely did so because they expected a refusal to be punished.

The individual stories can help us understand the data, but they do not resolve the issue in all cases. A first point is that for some candidates, the offer of recruitment signaled an unspoken menace: the KGB was aware of the subject’s history. The candidate with a compromised record might anticipate that to hesitate would invite the KGB to open the Pandora’s box of the past. Better to accept recruitment immediately than allow the box to be opened.

This does not cover all cases, however. A genuine desire to make up for past misdeeds was possible (agents Neman and Ruta). For those who now felt trapped by youthful misdeeds and wondered how to resume a respectable way of life and a career, the offer of collaboration with the KGB could be welcome: it offered a way to achieve their personal goals. There were also intermediate cases (agents Algis and Genys, for example). KGB officers evidently watched the members of suspicious groups for the weaker links who might be showing mixed feelings about former activities and associates. For these people, KGB intervention could tip the balance from resistance to collaboration without any further pressure.[348]

Related to this, the KGB subjected all our candidates to scrutiny before selecting them for recruitment. There was a covert stage of preliminary investigation, often followed by prolonged discussion with the candidate: the report on Agent Petrauskas notes, for example, that it took as many as twelve separate conversations with an officer before the KGB was convinced of the sincerity of his conversion. By implication, those who would not have been recruited without heavy coercion, and who could hardly have been trusted with sensitive assignments, were not (or should not have been) selected.

Selection is the simplest explanation of the low incidence of coercive recruitment: the KGB preferred recruits whose incentives to cooperate were already aligned or could be aligned with little pressure.[349] This was most likely to be the case for those who had resisted Soviet rule in the past and had now lost the courage of their former convictions. People in this situation might quickly be persuaded that resistance was pointless and that to make a show of resistance could leave them worse off.

Further illustration is provided by two informers that, although mentioned in the reports, are not in the data. These are the fathers of Korabel’nik and Komandulis, who were recruited to inform on their sons and their sons’ friends. Evidence from East Germany suggests that informing on the family circle was sometimes a stumbling block for the most willing recruits.[350] Our documentation makes it appear that the fathers were good citizens who willingly accepted the assignment to spy on their sons (who were eventually recruited as informers themselves). But, setting their political loyalties to one side, considering them only as parents, what choice did the fathers have when the KGB asked them to cooperate? Without some kind of intervention, their children were already on a course leading straight to the labor camp. The KGB was the only outside agency that offered to help. Under those circumstances, what parent would say no?

Any of these people could go on to suffer from further regrets, however. No matter how readily they agreed to cooperate, and whatever their motives, they were often unprepared for the psychological burden of reporting on close friends or family members.

Table 6.4 shows that KGB case officers did not take the quality of compliance for granted. The monitoring of new informers’ performance by an undercover officer or another informer, or by some form of eavesdropping, is mentioned in two-fifths of reports. This might be the extent of it, or the practice of third-party verification might have been considered so normal that it was not mentioned every time.[351]

Some kinds of underperformance did not require verification because they were obvious to the handler. As Table 6.4 shows, two-fifths of the effective informers showed signs of slacking after recruitment, and this included outwardly willing recruits. Slacking took forms that are instantly recognizable to readers from a college setting, where every student has chosen freely to join the course, yet many still contrive to cut classes, fail to respond to the instructor’s messages, and submit assigned work late or not at all. In a similar spirit, the reluctant informer missed appointments and reporting deadlines and, when cornered, reported verbally while declining to record observations in writing.[352]

To fix problematic performance often required case officers to make further investments in their agents’ understanding and capabilities. Two words arise frequently in this context: privitie and vospitanie. Privitie (training) addressed deficiencies in the informer’s tradecraft. Vospitanie (education, or even reeducation) addressed deficiencies in the informer’s understanding of the patriotic duty they owed to the Soviet state and the KGB.

All recruits required training in the tradecraft of undercover work: how to approach a person of interest without arousing suspicion, what information to report, and how to report it without risking exposure. The training did not have to be arduous: for example, agents Genys and Gobis were encouraged to read spy fiction and discuss it with their case officers.[353]

Lack of tradecraft was rarely a significant obstacle, and slacking was often voluntary. Slacking was first and foremost a breach of the trust relationship between agent and case officer. The remedy was to rebuild trust. The first step was to establish on which side the deficiency lay. Sometimes the fault was on the side of the KGB. According to the reports, one officer demotivated Stanislav by trusting him too much. Another did the same to Gobis by distrusting him without sufficient cause. More often, however, the barrier lay on the side of the agent, who withheld full commitment because of some hidden moral or political reservation.

In such cases, the case officer had to undertake the agent’s reeducation, which aimed to restore commitment and trust by reforming the agent’s moral and ideological attitudes. If the agent’s performance improved, the breakthrough could be usefully consolidated by tangible rewards that signaled gratitude and acknowledgment. Thus, reeducation and rewards were used as complements.

The process of thought reform often involved the case officer in many hours of detailed and no doubt repetitive discussion with the agent about the role of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in history and world affairs, the achievements and advantages of the Soviet system, and the rights and obligations of the citizen. Reading such words does little to convey the atmosphere of such discussions. It is an open question whether the balance lay on the side of persuasion or intimidation. Agent Mir may have chosen the path of wholehearted collaboration based on new-found convictions inspired by his mentors. Alternatively, he may have decided that ideological submission followed by loyal cooperation was the only way to bring the bullying lectures to a conclusion. Perhaps persuasion and intimidation were also complements: an important aspect of the process was surely to convince the agent that keeping up the defense of religious or nationalist values would lead inevitably to loss of status and isolation from society.

Successful reeducation could be reinforced by material rewards. These were cash payments or gifts of goods or services (in one case, spa holidays) in short supply. The context is that in principle the services of the informer were unpaid. Rewards were supposed to be small and to reflect exceptional service. These principles were not always observed: just as the KGB was aware that some agents were unsuited to their duties or shirked them, it was reported from time to time that some case officers misused bonus payments to reward routine performance or even nonperformance.[354] In the records at hand, in contrast, we see that payments and privileges could be productive. Rewards were distributed in a calculated way, not in the petty spirit of incentive payments for results, but to affirm the agent’s status and service and to strengthen the affective tie between agent and case officer. In turn, this improved the agent’s morale and increased motivation and effort.

FEAR AND MISTRUST

Fear of informers spread mistrust of strangers through Soviet society. How do we know this? Not directly, but by a series of deductions. First, the existence of informers was widely known, although not necessarily uniformly so. Second, this knowledge induced fear of all but the most intimate relationships, which can be construed as mistrust of strangers. Third, the long-term consequences of mistrust of strangers were greater where informers were most likely to be present.

To begin, the existence of the agentura, although strictly censored, was an open secret to many. Widespread awareness of informers is suggested by memoirs and personal accounts drawn from most if not all periods of Soviet history.[355] Another kind of evidence is literally anecdotal: informers were the subject of many jokes that circulated and have been recorded. An encyclopedia of nearly six thousand Soviet political anecdotes lists thirty-nine items—in other words, not many, but also not zero—under the index heading “seksot i donoschik” (secret collaborator and informer).[356] Here’s no. 1,636, which captures the sense of the incalculable risk presented by a stranger:

Parked at the embassy is an American automobile of an expensive make and the latest model. Two pedestrians walk up from opposite directions and stop involuntarily. One of them exclaims: “An amazing foreign car!” Then he panics and tries to correct his gaffe: “An amazing Soviet car. I think it’s Soviet. Yes, yes, it must be. Of course!” “What, can’t you tell an American automobile from a Soviet one at first glance?” “At first glance I can’t even tell an informer from a regular person.”

Given that undercover surveillance was strictly secret, how did awareness of informers enter society? Even gossip and rumor must start from somewhere. Several channels are plausible. One channel was a constant factor: the official ideology. Through the period of Soviet rule, the ruling party leaders presented the people with the image of a society encircled and penetrated by enemies. When anybody could be a spy, it may have become obvious that anyone could also be a counterspy.

Another channel that may have fed the public awareness of the presence of informers in society was the high-water marks left by the periodic waves of radical mobilization and terror. At such times the hunger of the secret police for private information was advertised by campaigns that encouraged all citizens to volunteer denunciations.[357] The cult of Pavlik Morozov, the son who supposedly denounced his father to the state for resisting the collectivization of local farms, taught this duty to generations of schoolchildren.[358] Then there was correction: the Great Terror was followed by a campaign against “slanderers,” those who had falsely denounced their colleagues and neighbors to the secret police and were now made scapegoats for some of the more obvious injustices. The campaign against slander was publicized and extensively reported in the press.[359]

Finally, the carelessness and indiscretion of officials may have helped to stimulate informal understanding of the role of informers in society. Officers could gossip in bars or among neighbors.[360] The negligent disclosure of informers’ evidence might have enabled some targets of surveillance to identify them.[361] Some recruits to the agentura gave themselves away, driven by conscience or by carelessness.[362]

A related question is how far this awareness extended, and where were its limits. The evidence available includes the testimony of relatively urbanized, educated people that left diaries or memoirs or met and confided in Western visitors, who were often journalists or scholars. Perhaps personal awareness of the KGB agentura was higher in towns or among educated or responsible people. If so, it would support the idea that the awareness of informers somehow followed their actual presence in society. But the silence of the less educated and more dispersed sections of society leaves the conjecture untested.

Where the awareness of informers was felt, the effect was a fear of strangers. “You can’t trust anyone but your pillow,” said a young man to the American journalist Hedrick Smith, after learning that one of his friends had reported on him to the KGB.[363] Without knowing, perhaps, he echoed a remark attributed to Isaak Babel, a writer of the previous generation: “Today a man talks freely only with his wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”[364]

A consequence of the fear of strangers was self-censorship. A woman whose father was arrested in 1936 recalls, “We were brought up to keep our mouths shut.”[365] In postwar Odesa, Jewish parents taught their child that what was said within the home could not be shared at school or outside their intimate circle: “You are not to repeat.... Only to your family members and your friends.”[366] Instinctively, ordinary people developed their own “conspirative” norms for everyday survival. On meeting strangers or distant acquaintances, it was a mark of good faith not to discuss politics, not to complain about shortages, and not to enquire after missing people. The fear of strangers made such confidences impossible without long and intimate association.

The same fear also limited the scope of horizontal social networks. In any circle, the new arrival was an unknown risk. “We don’t want personal relations with that many other people,” the journalist Hedrick Smith was told.[367]

New perspectives on the long-term consequences of undercover surveillance are provided by two recent projects on East Germany before and after unification. The anthropologist Ulrike Neuendorf, herself East German by origin, took the life histories of ten former citizens of East Berlin and Brandenburg (supplemented by other shorter interviews), with the aim of working out the effects of secret police surveillance on society. She sought to establish how her subjects remembered feeling at the time, first, living in East Germany under Stasi surveillance, and then, in the aftermath of German unification. She offers a qualitative summary:

During GDR-times: Paralysis—Guarded towards others—Security— Order—Reliance on the system to work/comfort—Shame—Distrust / Trust was even more meaningful, as more was at stake—Anger— Disappointment—Betrayal—Fear—Uncertainty—Dissociative behaviour / escape through alcohol abuse.

Contemporary Germany: Scepticism—Paranoia—Cynicism—Nostalgia (related to order and security)—Events of the past overshadowing present life—Shame—Distrust / Trust—Anger—Disappointment— Disillusionment—Betrayal—Fear—Uncertainty—Dissociative behaviour / escape through alcohol or drug abuse.[368]

In a quantitative study, economists Lichter, Lôffler, and Siegloch take as their starting point a range of qualitative descriptions of East German society that strongly resemble those found by Neuendorf: a widespread consciousness of informer surveillance, leading to a fear of strangers and the breakdown of bonds of trust among colleagues, neighbors, friends, and family members. They then look for validation of these patterns and their present-day correlates, mapping modern large-scale survey evidence onto historical variation in the density of Stasi informer networks across more than two hundred East German counties in the 1980s.[369] The variation was substantial, with as few as one informer per thousand in some counties and up to ten per thousand in others.[370]

This project finds a statistical link from more intensive informer surveillance in the 1980s to lower levels of trust in strangers and civic engagement thirty years later. The authors interpret the correlation as causal, not only because of the passage of time, but also by ruling out other historical factors that might also have been responsible for systematically higher levels of surveillance in particular counties.[371]

As the wider literature on economic development would predict, it turns out that higher levels of informer surveillance under East German communism are also linked to reduced education, employment, selfemployment, and incomes after communism. The authors estimate that these effects could account for half of the East-West gap in productivity and incomes across unified Germany.

These findings are of interest at more than one level. First, it is remarkable that the outcomes of informer surveillance are found in the variance of fear or mistrust across society. Thirty years later, mistrust is greater where informer surveillance was previously more intense. In other words, the people of an East German county not only registered the experience of being more (or less) under watch in some way but also altered their social norms and preferences to match that experience, and these alterations persisted across a generation.

Second, it appears that the capacities for grassroots political and economic cooperation in civil society are bundled together and cannot be separately treated. When informer surveillance suppressed political cooperation against the regime, it also did long-term damage to the citizens’ ability to join with each other in productive cooperation.

Finally, if a low-trust society was the product of secret police surveillance, it is of interest to return to the question of whether the product was intended. This seems unlikely, for two reasons. One, the party leaders sought and demanded the trust of the people. And two, while distrust of strangers impeded antiregime activities, it also impeded KGB information gathering. The effectiveness of KGB operations relied on the capacity of the agents to win and retain trust in others while persuading them that they were not in fact under surveillance. The targets of surveillance sometimes rejected approaches from informers, based on no more than suspicion. In anticipation of scrutiny, every informer had to be trained to overcome suspicion and win trust. Fear of inadvertent exposure could also hinder the recruitment of potentially useful informers, as in the case of Agent Rimkus.

In all these ways the fear of informers, and the mistrust of strangers associated with it, raised the operating costs of the authoritarian state and consumed resources that would otherwise have been available for other purposes. The secrecy/capacity tradeoff was at work once more.

CONCLUSIONS

Stalin’s first requirement of his subordinates was that they should be open with him. The party expected its members to trust it with their personal failings and weaknesses. The KGB expected to be informed of the facts of everything, no matter how intimate.

The glass through which the regime watched society was a one-way mirror. The regime itself was opaque. Its conspirative norms were designed to prevent outsiders from seeing in. Those kept out were not only the nonparty masses but also many ordinary party members, who were not trusted with the inner secrets of the system of power.

Those who were excluded from the system of power had considerable understanding of the spirit in which they were governed. They responded by developing their own informal rules of conspirative behavior. To defend their privacy, they put up barriers against strangers, especially those that seemed unreasonably curious. Conversation in queues or on the telephone became guarded. Children were taught that what is said in the family cannot be repeated in the classroom or even in the playground. In fact, while the Soviet system of power deliberately held back the development of civil society, this unofficial tradecraft provides confirmation that civil society did exist under Soviet rule. The shared conspirative norms of personal interaction were a practical achievement of Soviet civil society, one that helped its self-defense against a suspicious and intrusive state.

The widespread fear of informers raised barriers against the operation of counterintelligence. Every informer had to be trained to overcome the mistrustful instincts of the target, win the target’s confidence, uncover their secrets, and betray them to the state. The same secrecy that enhanced the security of the regime undermined the effectiveness of the state over which the regime presided.

As a result, the Soviet leaders’ efforts to secure themselves against the disruptive influences of ethnic nationalism, cultural rebellion, and hostile religious and ethical values required large investments and incurred increasing costs. Relative to respective populations, the KGB maintained an agentlira of around one hundred times the size of the FBI informer network on the American side at a similar stage of the Cold War. The damage done by informer surveillance to the capacity of citizens to work together in both politics and economics persisted long after the communist state came to an end.

7. SECRECY AND THE UNINFORMED ELITE

In 1989 the Soviet Union’s leaders finally let go one of their most valued secrets, one that Western agencies had devoted tremendous efforts to guessing or uncovering over a quarter of a century. This was the true size of the USSR’s military budget. The Soviet leaders agonized over this decision: what might they gain and lose by disclosing the truth? Was continued secrecy helping them achieve their goals—or had it become a hindrance to safeguarding the Soviet Union’s vital interests? Would the disclosure be enough to satisfy Western curiosity—or would it open the Soviet government to demands for more revelations?

Underlying these dilemmas was a still more agonizing question: Could the leaders themselves lay hands on the information some of them now wanted to disclose? Did anyone know the truth? If not, how could they disclose to the West something that none of them knew, even if there existed a compelling national interest in doing so?

From the point of view of secrecy, the subject of this chapter is the effects of compartmentalizing secret government information. The scale of a country’s economic commitment to military power is valuable information. The economy’s overall supplies must be divided between military uses on one hand, and civilian uses on the other—primarily, consumption and investment. The more is committed to defense uses, the less is available to others. The division can be an index of national priorities. The government of a country may have an idea of the influence it seeks in the world

and the role of military power in supporting its ambitions. But it also needs to know the economic costs and whether they can be sustained. Domestic opponents and foreign rivals can exploit the same information. If they know the costs and sustainability of a country’s military power, they can second-guess the government’s true intentions and criticize them at home or work to frustrate them abroad. In turn, that becomes the ruler’s reason to lock the information in a secret compartment reserved for a few trusted subordinates.

At this point, the ruler’s problem becomes: whom and how many can I trust? On the most charitable reading of the evidence, for much of the duration of Soviet rule, the size of the military budget was regarded as so sensitive that barely a handful of people could be trusted with it. In Stalin’s time, the fixing of the defense budget in the Politburo was a key moment in the annual cycle of economic policy. By Brezhnev’s time the defense budget was so secret that most Politburo members were excluded. The decision (if it was made at all, an issue raised below) could not be debated anywhere, not even in the hypersecret council of the Politburo.

From the point of view of state capacity, therefore, the subject of this chapter is the damage done by such secrecy. For the sake of keeping a few figures away from domestic critics and foreign adversaries, the Soviet rulers lost their own capacity to decide the balance of resources between military and civilian uses. Whether this had anything to do with the collapse of the Soviet system is debatable, but it is certainly an indicator of the system’s decline.

In this chapter we will see measures of Soviet and US military spending compared. The comparisons were controversial almost entirely because of doubts over whether defense activities were properly costed and whether the costs were properly attributed to defense. Mercifully for the reader, there was hardly any disagreement about how to define “defense activities.” Both sides of the Cold War shared a broadly common conception of what items ought to appear in the military budget. This was the government money allocated to each country’s ministry of the armed forces (the Soviet Ministry of Defense or, in the United States, the Department of Defense). On both sides the ministry was expected to pay for the military means of the country’s external security. So, the main line items of the military budget on both sides should have been the outlays of the armed forces on the pay and maintenance of servicemen and women; the procurement of weapons and other equipment; the construction of military bases and fortifications; the costs of military transportation and operations; and outlays on military research, development, testing, and experimentation (RDTE).

Both sides accepted that there was a grey zone. In the grey zone were military pensions—a legacy cost of military activity in the past rather than in the present.[372] Also in the grey zone were the costs of building or maintaining various capacities that could be switched between civilian and military uses.[373] For one example, the Soviet Union maintained “internal” troops that were charged to the Ministry of the Interior, not the Ministry of Defense, because their primary use was in domestic security operations. But they were fully capable of military action, and in the Soviet-German war, they took part in battles. Another example is the costs of building defense factories: in both countries these were not charged to defense on the grounds that building a new plant adds generally to a country’s productive capacity, not just to its defense capacity. The same applied to industrial mobilization capacities, such as war factories built in excess of the country’s immediate needs for defense goods, which were used in peacetime to produce civilian goods while being kept in readiness for a rapid switchover to munitions when conflict threatened. The costs of keeping them ready for war were paid out of civilian, not military funds. Likewise, both sides excluded outlays on civil defense from the defense budget because equipping and training civilians to deal with emergencies could be just as useful in the case of natural disasters and pandemics as for war contingencies. It is plausible that communist regimes sank more resources into dual purpose capacities than Western governments in the Cold War, relative to the size of their economies. But the grey zones on either side played little part in the issues discussed below.

On that basis, defining and measuring the costs of Soviet defense activities in a way that was roughly comparable to the United States should have been a simple matter. Instead, it became a mare’s nest of equivocation and disinformation.

A DELIBERATE LIE

As a point of departure, Soviet leaders seldom published exact figures that they knew to be false. The Russian archives have confirmed that most economic statistics that were published were the same as those available to government and party officials in secret. While the figures might have been biased by the underlying methods, or distorted by the incentives of those who reported them, the biases and distortions were similar for everyone.[374] In other words, the system did not generally provide for two different sets of accounts: a false set for public consumption, and a true set for the informed elite.[375] For most purposes, the limited information that the public saw was just a highly restricted sample of the mass of data on which the government relied for its secret business.

As the economist Peter Wiles described it, the Soviet authorities followed a rule of “minimal untruthfulness.”[376] When the leaders wanted to conceal the truth of some quantity, they did not usually invent an outright lie. Rather, they preferred to mislead by giving out a half or a quarter of the truth, or else to say nothing at all.

There were exceptions, and the exceptions could concern matters of historic importance. On a few occasions, the Soviet government published figures that amounted to deliberate fabrications. The lies included the size of the Soviet harvest in 1932 (disastrous), the size of the Soviet population in 1939 (decimated by famine and terror), human losses in the Soviet-German war (catastrophic), and property losses in the same war (overstated). In all these cases, the false figure was adopted everywhere, in secret councils as in the public sphere. No secret compartment was set aside where the truth was retained.[377]

Then, there was military spending. In the 1920s the Soviet government’s official figures for its annual outlays on defense were truthful, at least in the sense of a lack of intention to deceive. In 1930, however, the League of Nations opened disarmament negotiations in Geneva among the great powers. The Soviet government decided to take part. At home, rearmament had begun, and the Soviet military budget was growing rapidly. With the aim of supporting their negotiating position in Geneva, Stalin’s Politburo decided to conceal the increase in defense outlays by publishing false figures. The actual and false figures are shown in Table 7.1.

table 7.1. A deliberate lie: Soviet defense outlays (million rubles), 1928/29 to 1936, as published at the time and found in the archives

Published at the time

Found in the archives

1928/29

880

850

1929/30

1,046

1,046

1930, Q4

434

1931

1,288

1,790

1932

1,296

4,308

1933

1,421

4,739

1934 (plan)

1,665

5,800

1935

5,019

5,355

1936

14,800

14,800

Note: The planning year 1928/29 ran from October 1928 to September 1929. In 1930 a “special quarter” from October to December was added to 1929/30 to bring the fiscal and planning year into conformity with the calendar year. The figures shown in bold are those that were deliberately understated.

Sources. Davies, “Soviet Military Expenditure,” 580; Davies and Harrison, “The Soviet Military-Economic Effort,” 370.

For a few years, the published figure fell below the actual one by a wide margin. By 1932, when the USSR published a defense spending figure of 1.3 billion rubles (less than 4 percent of total government outlays) to the League of Nations, the actual figure was 4.3 billion (nearly 11 percent of government outlays).

In defense accounting, therefore, for several years there were two sets of books, one for consumption by the public along with the broad mass of less-privileged party members and government officials, and another for the Politburo alone that showed the true situation. This position changed in 1935. The ruling circles in Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo were now openly expansionist. Disarmament hopes had collapsed. Stalin decided there was nothing to lose from resuming truthful publication. The following year, as shown in the table, the Soviet government published a figure for defense outlays of 14.8 billion rubles (now 16 percent of the state budget and rising).

Having returned to the path of relative truthfulness on this matter, the government remained on it until the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in 1941. While the war continued, Soviet defense outlays were kept secret, but the wartime budgets were disclosed soon after the war ended.[378] With the return to peace, the published Soviet budget once more gave the actual picture, and this went on for a few years, at least—probably into the 1950s.

By the 1960s, however, the defense outlays disclosed to the public had departed once more from any sensible idea of the actual total. This time there was no early reconciliation, but a lasting separation.

As Table 7.2 shows, in 1950, the reported defense outlays of 8.3 billion rubles accounted for 20 percent of total Soviet government outlays. Over the following years, the ruble figures increased absolutely, standing at 17.1 billion rubles in 1980. But the size of the economy in rubles was now so much larger that the defense share of government outlays had fallen to less than 6 percent. That share continued to drift downward through the 1980s.

These figures made a puzzle. In 1980 the Soviet national income on the official basis (the net material product, which excluded outlays on final services) was 454 billion rubles—probably, more than 600 billion if adjusted to GDP.[379]

table 7.2. Growing understatement: Soviet defense outlays, 1950-1989 (selected years), as published at the time

Billion rubles

Percent of state budget outlays

1950

8.3

20.0

1960

9.3

12.7

1970

17.9

11.5

1980

17.1

5.8

1985

19.1

4.9

1986

19.1

4.6

1987

20.2

4.7

1988

20.2

4.4

1989

20.2

4.2

Notes: For comparison with the sums shown in Table 7.1, in 1961 the Soviet government took a zero off the currency so that one new ruble was worth ten old ones. All the figures in this table are given in new rubles. The figures in bold are those that are now acknowledged to have been understated.Sources: Figures published at the time are from TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR. 1922-1972 gg., 481-82; Goskomstat, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR za 70 let, 629, 631; Goskomstat, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1989 godu, 612.

table 7.3. Soviet numerical superiority: The military balance, 1980, according to the International Institute of Strategic Studies

USSR

USA

USA/USSR, ratio

Armed forces, personnel (thousand)

3,658

2,050

0.6

Submarine-launched ballistic missiles

1,003

656

0.7

Intercontinental ballistic missiles

1,398

1,054

0.8

Intermediate and medium-range ballistic

missiles

600

0

0.0

Long and medium-range bombers

850

430

0.5

Tactical and air defense combat aircraft

2,600

3,700

1.4

Major combat surface ships

289

173

0.6

Ballistic missile submarines

87

41

0.5

Attack submarines

257

81

0.3

Naval combat aircraft

775

1,200

1.5

Medium tanks

50,000

10,900

0.2

Armored and infantry fighting vehicles

62,000

22,000

0.4

Notes: The ratios in the right-hand column are calculated from the figures shown. The figures do not show alliance strengths and are relevant only to a direct comparison of the two powers. Figures in bold are those that indicate American superiority. Source: IISS, Military Balance 1980, 5-13.

Soviet defense spending as published, therefore, would come in at less than 3 percent of Soviet GDP. In the same year, the United States spent $134 billion on national defense, around 4.8 percent of its much larger GDP. Taken together, the figures suggested that the Soviet economy ought to be able to support a military establishment around one-quarter the size of America’s.[380]

Western observers also approached the problem from the other end: what was the actual size of the Soviet military establishment? This was a state secret, but it could be gauged from intelligence sources. As Table 7.3 shows, Western estimates around 1980 indicated that the Soviet military establishment of the time was numerically larger than that of the United States in most respects.

Was Soviet military power at least equal to that of the United States, as the numbers of personnel and hardware suggested, or was it one-quarter the size, as the budget figures implied? There was a fourfold discrepancy.

The Soviet media argued that the Western estimates of their military power were overstated. On one argument, they maintained, an impartial observer would discount the numbers. The Soviet Union, unlike the United States, had to defend long continental borders. In many aspects of military technology, moreover, the Soviet Union was at a qualitative disadvantage that mere numbers could not capture. On another argument, the Western estimates of Soviet military power were lies intended to stoke fear. All such arguments were weakened, however, by the fact that the Soviet government presented no credible alternative figures.

SOVIET DEFENSE OUTLAYS: WHO CARED?

It might be asked why the Soviet military budget mattered to anyone. After all, Soviet defense rubles were just a means to an end, an intermediate step to a greater goal, which was the production of Soviet military capabilities. Evidently it was possible to build capabilities without a transparent budget. Regardless of how the rubles were found to pay for them, Soviet missiles armed with atomic warheads could be deployed in silos and submarines. The Soviet Army could wargame battles with NATO forces on the Central European plain; it could invade Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Afghanistan. All these capabilities could be evaluated independently of the budgetary channels that paid for them. Why then did Soviet defense costs matter?

The importance of the question can be seen from both sides of the Iron Curtain. While they largely understood Soviet military capabilities, Western leaders also wanted to understand Soviet intentions. Soviet military power rested on an economic foundation. The demands it placed on the economy could be used to measure the willingness of Soviet leaders to sacrifice other goals—for example, the modernization of the civilian economy and the living standards of the people—for the sake of military power. Thus, the size and rate of change of the military budget would have provided the Western powers with information about Soviet goals and intentions that could not be obtained just by counting troops and missiles. For Western leaders, these concerns became especially salient in the 1960s, as American defense accountants came to rely increasingly on measures of cost-effectiveness in deciding how to allocate defense dollars.[381]

Western leaders also wanted to understand whether the Soviet defense burden was sustainable. Consider two ratios. Apparently, the size of the Soviet military establishment relative to that of the United States was roughly 1 to 1. But the size of the Soviet economy relative to that of the United States was perhaps 0.4 to 1. Per unit of military capability, the relative sacrifice of Soviet civilian needs, the loss of provision for present and future living standards, must have been several times greater. Could such a situation continue indefinitely? This depended on the trend of the share of overall production taken up by military demands. If the Soviet defense share was stable, it was sustainable. If the defense share was rising, it could not rise indefinitely.[382] Stability was easier to maintain if the Soviet economy kept pace with American growth. If it was falling behind, a point might come when Soviet civilians would resist continually increasing hardships.

If the military burden on the Soviet economy grew indefinitely, something must give—but what? Conceivably, the Soviet system itself might give way. Writing about the rise and fall of great powers, the historian Paul Kennedy concluded that overambitious military commitments and the associated burdens are precursors of economic decline.[383] That was one possibility—from the Western perspective, a hopeful one. A greater worry was that a rising defense burden on the Soviet economy, being unsustainable in the long run, could imply preparation for imminent war.

If Western leaders asked themselves these questions, they were also excellent questions for the Soviet leaders, who should have been capable of providing clear answers, at least to each other in private, if not to the public. But they could not do this without a reliable measure of the defense burden on the economy.

Soviet leaders had further reasons to need to know the size of their own defense budget. Defense outlays should have been an important control variable for economic management. This might not be obvious in the context of a textbook stereotype of the Soviet planned economy. According to the stereotype, it was the Soviet planning system that allocated supplies of materials such as steel, fuel, and machinery to their final uses through the planning. Money was supposed to follow the plan. It was not clear what role was left for demand factors such as budgetary assignments in rubles. But the stereotype is misleading: the real working of the Soviet economy was different.[384]

Most importantly, the Soviet planners were much less all-powerful than the stereotype supposed. Centralized plans were not detailed enough to link particular products to particular users, and many products did not have a deterministic use. In practice, the final allocation of commodities was closed on the demand side. Aggregate demand was dominated by three monetary aggregates, all of them supposedly controlled by the government: the defense budget, the investment budget, and the annual bill for wages, pensions, and other benefits, from which households made their consumption decisions.

The decisive importance of aggregate demand is supported by the observation that Stalin and his immediate associates gave much more time and thought to fixing the amount of money for the annual budgets for civilian construction and military procurements than to cursory scrutiny and approval of the annual “control figures” for material supply plans. Seen in this light, Soviet money was not just a token; it was valued for its purchasing power. While the ruble’s purchasing power was much less flexible than money in a market economy, it was still decisive.

A related mistake of the textbook stereotype of the Soviet economy is to suppose that prices were fixed, and all decisions were made in quantities of output. In reality, most Soviet supply plans were denominated not in tons or physical units (as the stereotype claimed) but in rubles. To translate plan rubles into quantities required prices. The prices were supposedly fixed from above, but in practice they could be pushed up by suppliers. The result was a tendency to inflation, sometimes hidden, sometimes open. Prices could be pushed up more easily in some sectors than others; complex products like machinery and construction were particularly vulnerable. As a result, an increased budget for capital construction or defense might not result in more real investment or more real military activity. It might just lead to more inflation. In the case of defense, enlarged budgets were not always spent, perhaps partly because of this. Here was another reason for the Soviet government to keep a watchful eye on the aggregate of defense outlays.

To summarize, everyone had powerful reasons to want to know the Soviet government’s military budget. How important was Soviet military power, and what were the Soviet rulers willing to sacrifice to get it? What did the costs of military power imply for the present and future of the Soviet economy? Could the economy sustain Soviet defense costs, not just today, but tomorrow?

Western observers found themselves starved of the clear, credible official information that might have supported the answers they sought. In that situation, they turned to alternative sources.

THE SOVIET MILITARY BUDGET: WESTERN ESTIMATES

Over several decades, Western governments and scholars puzzled over the Soviet defense budget. The puzzle was a rather obvious one. The official figures were impossibly small, and they failed to increase in step with the visible expansion of Soviet military capabilities.

The baseline for the alternative Western estimates was set by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA maintained an Office of Soviet Analysis charged with evaluating the military activities and overall economic potential of the Soviet Union. Working out the likely Soviet military budget in both rubles and dollars was an essential part of this work.

In addition to the deceptive Soviet published statistics, the CIA had access to its own intelligence data. At infrequent intervals, its few human sources provided what purported to be inside information about the Soviet Union’s factual defense costs. The “benchmark data,” as William T. Lee, a former CIA analyst, called them, are listed in Table 7.4. They painted a picture of Soviet defense outlays rising rapidly from 50 billion rubles in 1970 (12.5 percent of GNP) to 100 billion in 1980 (16 percent) and to 150 billion in 1982.[385]

To provide cross-validation without undue reliance on Soviet official statistics, the CIA developed a direct costing approach or “building block” methodology. The building blocks were estimates of quantities of Soviet defense resources used or stockpiled in each year. These were based

table 7.4. The CIA’s “benchmark data” for Soviet defense outlays, 1970-1982, selected years

Billion rubles

1970

50

1972

approx. 58

1980

approx. 100

1982

more than 150

Note: The “benchmark data” were those supplied to the CIA by intelligence sources and defectors.

Source: Lee, CIA Estimates, 145. To these figures might be added a figure for 1990 of “more than 200 billion rubles” provided by Soviet economic journalists Gams and Makarenko, “Razmyshleniia о rak-hodakh obshchestva na oboronu.”

on another kind of intelligence data: estimates of the scale of the Soviet armed forces’ acquisitions, deployments, and operations. The building blocks were valued by working out how much it would have cost to provide them in the United States in some base year, such as 1960. For each block of a given resource, the quantity multiplied by the base-year cost gave its dollar value, and the sum of values of the blocks gave the CIA an estimate of overall Soviet defense outlays in constant dollars.[386] Dollars were converted to rubles by applying either ruble prices of the base year (where known) directly to the same blocks of quantities, or by converting dollar values based on estimated purchasing-power parities. Finally, the current ruble value of Soviet defense activity for a given year could be derived by applying estimates of ruble price changes since the base year.

On that basis, the CIA estimated that the Soviet defense outlays at around 47 billion rubles in 1970, and 94 billion in 1980. These figures, included in Table 7.5, were close to the “benchmark data” if slightly below them, and they showed a similar trend over time.

At first the CIA had a monopoly in the field. Before long, outsiders’ doubts about CIA analysis developed into keen rivalry. Other players included the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (the DIA, established in 1961) and the Stockholm Independent Peace Research Institute (SIPRI, established in 1966). Outside the institutions worked a handful

table 7.5. A bewildering range: Competing estimates of Soviet defense outlays, 1980 (billion rubles and current prices)

1970

1980

DIA (high)

107

Lee (high)

49

106

DIA (low)

96

CIA

46.9

94

Lee (low)

44

93

Steinberg

48.2

81.2

Rosefielde

49

SIPRI

42

48.7

Soviet official

17.9

17.1

Wiles

16.5

Note: GIA figures (in bold) are used as a baseline estimate in the text.

Sources: DIA from Michaud, “Paradox of Current Soviet Military Spending,” 120. Rosefielde, False Science (second edition), 186. Wiles from Rosefielde, “Soviet Defence Spending,” 70 (interpolated by Rosefielde on his own estimate for 1970). Other figures from Noren, “Controversy over Western Measures,” 269.

of independent scholars and other mavericks. Among them were Lee (a former CIA analyst who was hired by the DIA), Steven Rosefielde and Peter Wiles (university-based economists), and Dmitri Steinberg (an independent economist). A bewildering range of competing estimates emerged, as shown in Table 7.5.

While admitting that its own figures were of uneven reliability, the CIA maintained that they were corroborated by other sources and accepted by other intelligence services.[387] But this self-defense was challenged, most fiercely by Lee and Rosefielde. They charged that the CIA’s direct costing procedures were incomplete and insufficiently transparent; they were insufficiently robust to the incorporation of new information and understated the growing quality and cost of Soviet weapons.[388]

In the CIA’s exchanges with Lee and Rosefielde, there was bad feeling on each side. Lee and Rosefielde both charged that the CIA had colluded in a Soviet strategy of disinformation, resulting in understatement

of the Soviet military-economic effort. The implications that they drew diverged, however. According to Rosefielde, the outcome was insufficient United States preparedness for war.[389] According to Lee, the outcome was excessive United States engagement in arms control. If (as he assumed) the Soviet economy was already at the limits of its military-industrial potential, restraining the arms race would one-sidedly advantage the Soviet Union since only the United States was capable of further economic mobilization.[390]

In his own working, Rosefielde hewed closest to the lines of the CIA’s direct costing methodology. He started from the same quantity building blocks as the CIA, supplemented or corrected by those of the CIA, and from base-year prices or costs of i960 that the CIA first adopted, then later abandoned. In addition, Rosefielde claimed a superior methodology of price adjustment for quality change in later years. The result was a measure of defense spending in rubles that approximately matched that of the CIA, but Rosefielde claimed the match was no accident: the CIA estimates were being forced to adapt to realities, but the adjustment was being done dishonestly under a pretense of scholarship. Moreover, the implications of the CIA’s and Rosefielde’s estimates for military stock building in real terms were quite different: in Rosefielde’s view the Soviet Union had substantially overtaken the United States in its military capabilities by the 1980s.

The rest, including Lee, worked directly with Soviet data and did not attempt to build from blocks in physical units. If they estimated defense activity in real terms, it was usually at the final stage of deflating nominal values. Lee, for example, began from the residual of the nominal gross output of the machine-building industry in each year after subtracting reported or estimated net intermediate and final deliveries to other sectors and inventories. He attributed what was left over to military procurement, and this became the keystone of a calculation of the wider military budget. As Table 7.5 indicates, Lee’s result was a range of figures that approximately straddled the central estimates published by the CIA.

Rosefielde also worked with the machine building residual and approved of this method. Against it may be made a general point: working with small residuals left after subtracting one large number from another is always hazardous because small errors in large numbers lead to large errors in small ones. But there was also an important point in favor of it, one that could not have been made at the time. A document in the Soviet archives for 1937 shows that officials understood exactly the danger of publishing information that might permit computation of a heavy-industry residual: it could reveal the value of secret military procurement.[391]

Beyond Lee and Rosefielde, several others attempted to estimate Soviet defense spending by decoding Soviet official data in different ways. Among these were both academic scholars and staff researchers at the DIA. They generally began from the official military budget figures, which they understood as most likely representing a subtotal of outlays on the pay and subsistence of troops. To cover other military items such as procurement, operations, construction, and RDTE, they then added varying shares of other items taken from published information concerning purportedly civilian outlays on the national economy or the accumulation fund or additions to state reserves. (We will see that this line of enquiry more or less predicted the efforts of Russian insiders in post-Soviet times to reconstruct the Soviet defense budget.) Working on these lines, DIA estimates generally turned out larger than those made by the GIA, but estimates made on similar lines by other Western scholars were sometimes smaller and occasionally much smaller.[392]

Some estimates of this general type were very elaborate. Most complex was the apparatus developed by Steinberg, who began from the hunch that most Soviet defense production and activity was excluded from the official national accounts.[393] Steinberg’s framework aimed to account for hidden flows, both real and financial, and to distribute them among producers and users in such a way as to consistently reveal the true scale of Soviet defense.[394] But the hunch itself remained untested and has not been confirmed since. Unlike those of others in this group, as Table 7.5 shows, Steinberg’s estimates were relatively large and close to those of the CIA.

Cleverest was the method of Peter Wiles, who began from the idea that weapons are a form of capital asset that depreciates rapidly because of technical obsolescence. He called this depreciation the “weapons writeoff.” He argued that the Soviet defense accountants had hidden most of military procurement by reporting it only in net terms, after subtracting the weapons write-off.[395]

There was a promise in the methods of Wiles and Steinberg that Rose-fielde for one acknowledged at the time.[396] But the promise remained unfulfilled, and the underlying intuitions have not been substantiated.

While the rivalry was often heated and the range of estimates showed little sign of converging, it is important to note that there was more agreement among the rivals than might have appeared at the time. There was universal acceptance that Soviet official budget figures were deceptive. Alternative estimates in rubles—the currency that is of interest for this chapter—were mostly clustered in a fairly narrow range that was clearly separated from the Soviet official figures of the time. Thus, the acrimony arose more from the mutual questioning of motives than from radically different outcomes.

The range of alternative estimates for 1970 and 1980 can be judged from Table 7.5. For 1970 the mainstream lay somewhere between 42 and 49 billion rubles (10-13 percent of Soviet GNP); only Wiles stood outside (and far below) that range. By 1980 SIPRI had left the mainstream with a greatly reduced estimate, and Lee had gone to work for the DIA, which now set the upper limit. As a result, the mainstream had lifted and widened to between 81 and 107 billion rubles (13-17 percent). An error margin of several percentage points of GNP could not be grounds for complacency. But the problem was of enormous scope, and the uncertainties were intrinsic. For these reasons, demands for greater precision might well have been unreasonable.

FOR DISCLOSURE-AND AGAINST

Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Communist Party on 11 March 1985. At that time, the Soviet Union was already in a “precrisis” situation. That is, the country was visibly beset by problems, none of which was critical in that moment; but all of them were growing.[397] Gorbachev was determined to break out of the “era of stagnation”—a term that he coined to describe the outcome of his predecessors’ attitude of persisting with past policies while waiting for the country’s luck to change.[398]

Among Gorbachev’s priorities was a comprehensive arms control agreement with the United States. The United States was engaged in a decade-long rearmament and modernization of atomic weapons. Rearmament began during the administration of President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) and was pressed forward by President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989). Between 1979 and 1986, the GNP share of US defense outlays grew from 4.5 to 6 percent—the biggest slice since the end of the Vietnam War.[399]

Meanwhile, thinking about arms control on both sides was being complicated by the widening range of new weapons that were entering the balance. In addition to nuclear missiles to be launched against the adversary’s cities from underground silos and underwater submarines, there were now mobile land-based missiles armed with miniaturized nuclear warheads for use against ground forces in Europe, and a US project for space-based antimissile defense. Both sides felt a growing threat.

Gorbachev wanted to persuade the West that the Soviet Union was neither a strategic threat nor a growing one. In public, he announced a unilateral nuclear test moratorium and renewed proposals to limit the deployment of theatre-based mobile nuclear weapons. In private, he had become convinced that the Soviet Union’s longstanding secrecy over the size of its armed forces, and the deception over its military spending, were now damaging its external security.

Meeting with Reagan at Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, Gorbachev felt he had come close to agreement, and the failure made him all the more aware of the longstanding mistrust of Soviet official claims and assurances.[400] The Soviet government’s initial silence concerning the Chernobyl nuclear disaster a few months before the Reykjavik meeting had done fresh damage to confidence in the Soviet willingness to negotiate frankly over military affairs and to confidence in Gorbachev personally.[401]

What happened next is told here from the personal papers of Vitalii Kataev, a senior Soviet defense industry manager and arms control specialist. On 21 November 1986, the party Central Committee approved a resolution “On increasing the openness of the military activity of the USSR.” Formally, the initiative came from Vladimir Petrovskii, deputy foreign minister for disarmament (the foreign ministry was led at the time by Eduard Shevardnadze, later president of Georgia). We don’t have the exact words of the decree, but the Kataev papers include a commentary by Oleg Beliakov, Central Committee secretary for the defense industry.[402] “In the opinion of the USSR Foreign Ministry,” Beliakov wrote, increased openness “would allow the Soviet side to take up an offensive position in questions of military activity in international forums, and not allow speculation that is inimical to us about the lack of sufficient information on these questions.” A handwritten addition, part of it torn away, goes on to describe the then current figure of 19 billion rubles as “unconvincing” from the standpoint of Soviet claims to strategic parity with the United States.

The Politburo commissioned a group of four to report back on ways and means of implementing greater openness. The four were Yurii Mashukov and Valentin Smyslov (deputy heads of Gosplan), Nikolai Yemokhonov (deputy head of the KGB), and Marshal Sergei Akhromeev (chief of the armed forces general staff).[403] We’ll come across Akhromeev and Mashukov several times more.

Six months passed without progress. In April 1987, Central Committee secretary for the defense industry Beliakov reported the reason for the hold-up: “Gosplan considers it impermissible to publish the factual size of outlays on the defense activity of the USSR, but it does not propose any way out of the situation created as a result.”[404]

There must be some uncertainty as to the original source of the resistance to disclosure. While Beliakov blamed Gosplan, a note by Kataev blamed the military on the grounds that “traditionally the military determined the level of secrecy in the country.”[405] Whether or not this was generally true, Kataev’s recollections make clear that on this issue, a chief opponent of disclosure was Marshal Akhromeev, the country’s senior serving military officer.

According to Kataev, Akhromeev based his resistance on several arguments. His starting point was that, if the published figure for Soviet defense outlays was not credible, the available secret figures were little better. Because of omissions, they too understated the real cost of Soviet military activities by a large margin. To publish them would not help; they would raise many more questions than they would answer. Akhromeev feared the public reaction within the Soviet Union:

Who would believe that the USSR had such a small military budget? Among ordinary people, among the Supreme Soviet deputies, questions would immediately arise for the country’s leaders and for the military: how, on such a small budget, was it possible to secure parity with the Americans, whose budget was many times larger? It must follow that the leaders are deceiving the people under the cover of secrecy.[406]

Akhromeev also feared international repercussions:

A comparison of the budgets of the USSR and USA would prompt the thought that the claims of the USSR’s leadership to stand up to the USA “on equal terms” was a bluff, since the USSR budget was several times smaller than the budget of the USA. At the same time, the USSR’s leadership would be accused of deception.[407]

To respond to such concerns, the Soviet government would be forced to go into the secret figures in detail and explain exactly why they too fell short:

It would be complicated to answer such questions; one would have to go into the differences in labor and material costs in the USSR compared with abroad, the social channels of redistribution of part of the income in the USSR, and to compare the purchasing power of the ruble and dollar.[408]

Here, when Akhromeev mentioned “the social channels of redistribution of part of the income in the USSR,” he evidently had the following idea in mind. Traditionally, the Soviet government raised substantial tax revenues from the production and sale of consumer goods to households, while subsidizing production and investment in the heavy and defense industries. To the extent that taxes on consumer goods were used to subsidize other sectors of the economy, relative prices faced by buyers were distorted: civilian consumer goods were priced above their production costs while machinery and weapons were priced below costs. Thus, large parts of the country’s military activities were actually paid out of sums earmarked for government support of the economy, not of the military. This seems to be what Akhromeev had in mind.

The result was that one ruble in the hands of Soviet military agencies had greater purchasing power over state products than a civilian ruble. But there was no comparable distortion of relative prices in the US economy. Using the prices prevailing in each country, therefore, the Soviet economy would appear to support a given level of military activity from a smaller consumer sacrifice than the US economy. To correct the appearance would require detailed comparison of the purchasing power of the two currencies, as Akhromeev remarked.

An aspect of the problem that Akhromeev did not consider is that the understatement of Soviet defense costs could not be corrected just by adding in the cost of direct subsidies to the Soviet defense industries. Accounting for direct subsidies was only the start of the problem. There were also indirect subsidies that lowered the prices paid for military activities. At first sight, for example, bread and meat subsidies did not look as if they had anything to do with defense. But they reduced wage costs for all lines of production, civilian as well as military. Possibly workers in the defense industries had privileged access to subsidized bread and meat, which others would have to buy at much higher prices in the urban markets. Privileged access to food subsidies would then disproportionately lower the cost of weapons. This too would have to be taken into the account. Most likely, the final effect of all the direct-plus-indirect subsidies on the relative costs of military and civilian lines of production could only be ascertained by actually removing them all and observing the results that would ripple through the economy.

Could this be done at all? Periodically, it is true, the Soviet authorities attempted to reset industrial prices in line with costs (this was called “price reform”), with the aim of restoring the loss makers to profitability and eliminating cross-subsidies. Price reforms were costly and arduous to implement, and the cross-subsidies always soon returned.[409] As of 1987, it was expected that the Soviet economic reforms being promoted by Gorbachev would include a comprehensive reform of state prices, but no reform had yet been undertaken.

Related to the price of Soviet weapons in the internal defense market was the question of its export price. The Soviet Union priced its exports based not on production costs but on what the foreign market would bear. For that reason alone, production costs were a carefully guarded commercial secret. Akhromeev worried that having to publicize the subsidized ruble prices of Soviet weapons in the domestic market would undercut the prices and profits of the Soviet arms trade:

By publishing information about the low production cost of military equipment in the USSR, we will spoil our [international] military-technical cooperation, [where currently] we work at world prices and get a good profit.[410]

Finally, Akhromeev speculated that the lack of credibility of the ridiculously small figures for defense outlays published at the time gave the Soviet Union a hidden propaganda advantage:

The propagation of myths about large outlays of the USSR’s budget on military purposes and the “Cold War” was advantageous to the USSR’s leaders since it provided a justification (based on “huge” military outlays) of the low standard of living of people in the USSR.[411]

Despite his long list of concerns arising from the prospect of disclosure, Akhromeev did not insist on secrecy forever. Whether as a tactical retreat or as a strategic repositioning, he pleaded for time:

We are not ready to enter such discussions. Let us come out onto the world level in our [international] economic relations in the 1990s, and then we will publish our military budget and have no more secrets.[412]

As of April 1987, the situation was one of deadlock. The reformers wanted “no more secrets” now, not in several years’ time. But there was no consensus on what should take the place of secrecy. At this point, Beliakov made a remarkable suggestion:

It appears expedient not to publish the actual sum of outlays and in preparation of the documentation to proceed by way of artificial formulation of a figure for our “outlays on defense activities” that is acceptable for publication.

Given this, [we ought] to examine the actual outlays of the advanced capitalist countries on these uses and compare their outlays per head of population and in terms of percent of gross national product. The figure of our outlays on defense activities (which should include the known outlays on defense—20 billion rubles) in percentage terms should be not worse than the developed capitalist countries.[413]

The spirit of the proposal was clear enough. Beliakov was playing the joke of the business consultant who, on being asked to solve two plus two, lowers his voice to ask: “How much do you want it to be?” It is ambiguous what Beliakov meant by “not worse.” Most likely, he meant “not less”: everyone understood that the published figure was too small, and a more expedient figure would be larger than before, one that showed the Soviet Union neither underplaying nor overplaying its hand as an equal partner of the United States.

A COMPROMISE

Akhromeev was not alone in his anxieties. In the early summer of 1987, the resistance crystallized. The Kataev papers include a memorandum from July of that year, prepared for signature by seven senior figures: Prime Minister Ryzhkov, Defense Minister Yazov, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, former ambassador to Washington Dobrynin, Central Committee secretaries Zaikov and Yakovlev, and first deputy KGB chief Bobkov.[414] All but Bobkov and Dobrynin were Politburo members. This was a heavyweight alliance.

The Seven acknowledged that the published 20-billion-ruble figure lacked credibility. For context, they cited the CIA’s much higher estimates of the Soviet military burden at the time—15 to 17 percent of Soviet GNP.[415] They warned, however, “Disclosure of the actual scale of overall allocations to the needs of defense of the USSR at prevailing prices will not yield a positive political outcome and can even lead to adverse consequences for the USSR.” Their supporting arguments echoed Akhromeev’s:

If we set out along the road of detailed justification of our defense outlays at current prices, then we will have to enter fruitless discussions about the comparative costs of the basic types of weapons and military equipment, design work, and other items at home and in the West. At the same time, to announce the true prices of domestic military products would create particular difficulties in the sale of our weapons to foreign countries.

For the first time, they set out a concrete plan of action:

In the situation before us, it appears possible ... to start from the proposition that the published defense budget of the USSR expresses [only] the outlays of the USSR ministry of defense on personal maintenance of the Armed Forces, their material-technical provision, military construction, the provision of pensions, and a number of other outlays.

In this secret document, the Seven chose their words with notable caution. “That the published defense budget of the USSR expresses the outlays of the USSR ministry of defense on personal maintenance of the Armed Forces,” et cetera, was termed a “proposition” from which it was “possible to start.” They did not affirm it as a fact. They went on:

Concerning the financing of scientific research and experimentation, and also the procurement of munitions and military equipment, it can be announced that we make the necessary allocations under other headings of the USSR state budget; comparison of this part of the outlays of the USSR with the outlays of other countries on analogous uses has no sense because of fundamental differences in the structure of the armed forces, prices of weaponry, and the mechanism of price formation.

Public comparison of the Soviet and American military budgets, they concluded, “will be possible in 1989 to 1990 after the Soviet Union has implemented the proposed radical reform of price formation in the course of restructuring the administration of the economy,” that is, in the next “two to three years.” To announce this position would “allow us in some degree to lift the pressure which has existed for a long time on the question of the size of the USSR military budget.”

In the short term, therefore, Akhromeev got his way. On 6 August 1987, the Central Committee adopted the position that the defense budget would be declassified, not immediately, but within the next two to three years.[416] This would buy time for the experts to come up with a number that would be both credible and meet the foreign objectives of Soviet diplomacy.

The outcome was revealed to the world in several stages. Speaking at the Geneva disarmament conference on 15 August 1987, Gorbachev affirmed that the Soviet Union was committed to greater military openness—in principle. The following day, Deputy Foreign Minister Petrovskii told the conference that the published Soviet military budget, now 20.2 billion rubles, was accounted for largely by the maintenance of the troops and so forth, and so was only a fractional component of the true total. (This appeared to vindicate the working assumptions underlying a substantial subset of the Western estimates of the Cold War era, discussed above.)

Finally, after three more weeks, Gorbachev announced that transparent and comparable figures for the Soviet defense budget would be made available within “two to three years.” This completed the implementation of the Central Committee decision of 6 August.

If the decision is taken at face value, then the following months should have been full of activity. To expose the thousand hidden cross-subsidies that supported military production and procurement to a first or second approximation would have required a major accounting exercise, but there is no evidence that such an effort was commissioned or undertaken. Alternatively, as the Seven envisaged, it required the “radical reform of price formation” that was expected to accompany the transition to a market economy, so that the results could be observed. There is no sign of this either. On the contrary, it is a fact that no price reform took place, the reason being that all serious economic reform measures were blocked by resistance and indecision.[417]

While nothing was being done, the balance of elite opinion was shifting. In the autumn of 1988, a party journal published a long article entitled “From the cult of secrecy to an information culture.”[418] The author, Vladimir Rubanov, was a senior KGB officer serving as head of a research unit for “questions of the defense of state secrets and of legal regimes of assurance of state security.”[419] Although much of it was couched in rather general and abstract terms, the article amounted to a wholesale rejection of the existing regime of secrecy. It called for public discussion of the proper limits to be placed on government information and for legal regulation of security classification based on a “presumption of nonsecrecy.”[420] It introduced the Soviet reader to the US system of information security oversight, including its acknowledged defects. It highlighted both the economic costs of excessive secrecy and the losses to Soviet diplomacy of the inability to respond with facts to Western discussion of Soviet ends and means.

That was in theory. In practice the clock was ticking. There was an external deadline: Gorbachev expected to visit London in April 1989 and wanted to know what to tell Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about Soviet military spending and force levels in Europe.[421] In the event, the foreign deadline did not bind. Gorbachev spoke in London about Soviet force levels but made no announcement about military spending. There was also an internal deadline. Under new constitutional arrangements, oversight of the military budget was to be delegated to a parliamentary committee of the USSR Supreme Soviet. For review of the 1990 budget, details would have to be laid before the committee in the autumn of 1989.[422]

FULL DISCLOSURE?

A new figure began to appear in the documents, although not yet in public: 77.3 billion rubles for defense in 1989, falling to 71 billion rubles in the budget for the following year.[423] The preliminary budget account for 1989 included a figure of 20.2 billion, but this was now listed against military maintenance, construction, and pensions only. Munitions and equipment, RDTE, and “other” items accounted for the other 50 billion.

The Kataev papers place the new figures for 1989 in the context of US outlays on national defense in the same year, as shown in Table 7.6. On the new basis, Soviet defense outlays took up 8.4 percent of Soviet GDP, while the equivalent American burden was only 5.9 percent. As can be seen, the new numbers met Beliakov’s “expediency” criterion for disclosure: they suggested that the Soviet Union, with a military establishment roughly equal to that of the United States, but with fewer national resources to support them, bore a heavier military burden relative to its GDP.

To judge from the papers, there was still a residue of private defensiveness about going public. The points were made that the forecast figures

table 7.6. Matching burdens: Defense outlays (in national currencies and percent) of the Soviet Union and the United States, 1989

USSR

USA

Defense outlays, billion rubles or dollars

77.3

308.9

Percent of state or federal budget outlays

15.7

27.2

Percent of gross domestic product

8.4

5.9

Source: Hoover/Kataev, 11/31 (“O raskhodakh na oboronu,” accompanying a memo dated 22 March 1989). The US figure for outlays on national defense reported retrospectively was 303,555 million dollars, making 26.5 percent of federal outlays and 5.5 percent of GDP. The White House, Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, Table 3.1 (Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940-2025), https:// www.whitehouse.gov/omb/historical-tables/.

would show defense outlays falling through 1990 and 1991, and that this would underline the Soviet commitment to peace. In case anyone in the Politburo was inclined to backslide, it was emphasized that not to disclose the figures would mean reneging on the public promises made in 1987.[424]

At all events, there was no going back. In a speech to the USSR Supreme Soviet on 30 May 1989, Gorbachev finally released new figures to the public: in 1989, Soviet defense outlays would be not 20.2 billion rubles but 77.3 billion.[425] The long wait was over.

Or was it? As soon as they were released, the new figures evoked intense curiosity. Although many times the sums previously acknowledged, 77.3 billion rubles was still far short of most Western estimates. CIA analysts concluded privately that the true figure for 1989 remained in the range 130 to 160 billion rubles.[426] Describing the 77.3-billion-ruble figure as “a best effort for the present,” they recorded the suspicion that the Soviet administration itself still did not know the full extent of continuing defense subsidies and was aware of its own ignorance.

Controversy was fueled by subsequent statements made by top Soviet leaders that put the Soviet military burden at 16,18, or even 20 percent of national income.[427] These statements were typically vague about whether GNP or the net material product (at least one-third smaller) was the intended denominator. But their claims were so far above the 8 to 9 percent of GNP implied by the ruble figures announced in 1989 that imprecise definitions did not much matter.

Hidden Soviet defense industry costs were the focus of a new investigation led by Dmitri Steinberg. In Moscow in the winter of 1990/91, he consulted with statistical officials and former defense industry managers with the aim of identifying budgetary items not counted under the Ministry of Defense allocation and other costs imposed on the civilian economy by military activities and military procurement. He concluded that an upper limit on Soviet defense outlays in 1989 was 133 billion rubles.[428] This figure was within the range of the CIA estimate for the same year, although at the lower end.

To summarize, Akhromeev correctly predicted what could go wrong. Gorbachev’s disclosure of Soviet defense costs in 1999 was an important step. But it did not build trust or allay suspicions that the Soviet leadership was still not being entirely frank. It created new puzzles and invited further enquiries. From our perspective, most important was the growing sense that what was being concealed by the Soviet leaders was not a truth that only they knew, but that no one knew the truth.

At the time this was admitted, more or less plainly, by Akhromeev. Speaking on Russian television in October 1989, he responded to an interviewer:

You are young and you want it all at once on a plate. Just think how we established this budget of 77.3 billion rubles. After all, we did not have it as such. Previously the armed forces were only interested in what they were given for upkeep, in accordance with a government decision. As far as research and development was concerned, this came under the ministries of defense industry sectors. Nor did we pay for series production deliveries. First, we had to bring this together.[429]

Here was an important difference from the situation in the early 1930s. Then, although the public was deceived about the factual total of defense outlays, a handful of people always knew the truth. How many people knew the truth in Brezhnev’s time? According to Yurii Mashukov, the answer was “a limited circle of persons (the leadership of USSR Gosplan and not even all Politburo members).”[430] According to a Russian military source the answer was four (the party general secretary, the prime minister, the defense minister, and the chief of the general staff).[431] According to Gorbachev, the answer was “two or three.”[432] But Akhromeev implied that the real answer was none. As some Western observers now concluded, maybe the decades of deception had caused even the Kremlin to lose sight of the true figure.[433]

It is a fact that, in 1987, when Gorbachev finally admitted that the old figure was deceptive, he could not immediately find a new one to replace it. He promised that the new figure would be available in “two to three years.” That alone suggests that a substantial research project was anticipated. It does not follow that the necessary work was actually undertaken, however.

BACKCASTING TO 1960

The process of disclosure awaited one more step: to trace the deception back to its origin. In 1999, a new historical series for Soviet defense outlays was published, adjusted retrospectively to the 1989 basis. This provided an opportunity to learn more about hidden Soviet defense spending and the reliability of the new figures.

The authors of the new historical series were former Soviet defense insiders Yurii Mashukov and Yevgenii Glubokov. In Soviet times, Mashukov had been head of two key bodies, the state military-industrial commission (VPK, for a few months in 1991) and the national planning board (Gosplan, from 1988 to 1991). Glubokov had been a specialist member of the VPK. Mashukov, moreover, was one of the Seven who had put together the compromise on disclosure in 1987. They wrote with authority, therefore.

The Masliukov-Glubokov findings are shown in Table 7.7. The earliest year reported was i960. In that year, as Table 7.2 showed previously, the deceptive official budget claimed 9.3 billion rubles of defense outlays. Corrected to the 1989 basis, this should have been 15.3 billion rubles. If so, hidden defense spending already stood at 6 billion rubles in 1960. After that, the table suggests, hidden spending grew rapidly—11 billion by 1970, 30 billion by 1980, and 57 billion by 1989.

But was correction to the 1989 basis sufficient? In percent of Soviet GNP, Figure 7.1 shows the tremendous gap between the deliberately deceptive figures for Soviet defense outlays before 1989 and most Western table 7.7. The new “official” history of Soviet defense outlays, 1960 to 1990 (selected years), as published by Mashukov and Glubokov on 1989 basis

Billion rubles

Per cent of GNP

1960

15.3

7.5

1970

29.2

7.3

1980

48.9

7.4

(7.9)

1985

63.4

8.3

1986

67.7

8.4

1987

72.7

8.8

1988

76.9

8.9

(8.8)

1989

77.3

8.4

(8.2)

1990

71.0

7.5

(7.1)

Source: Masliukov and Glubokov, “Planirovanie i finansirovanie voennoi promyshlennosti,” 105. Percentages of GNP are as published in the source, except for figures in brackets, which are corrected by the author. The basis for correction is the GNP series shown below (in billion rubles):

1960

203.1

1970

397.6

1980

661.9

(619)

1985

777.0

1986

798.6

1987

825.0

1988

863.0

(875)

1989

924.1

(943)

1990

963.0

(1,000)

Again, GNP figures are as published in the source, except for figures in brackets, which are corrected by the author as follows. For 1980, the figure of 661.9 billion rubles reported by Masliukov and Glubokov and used in their calculation of the defense burden in that year is most likely a typographic error; the figure of 619 billion is a better fit in the series and was published twice without revision in Goskomstat, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1989 g., 6, and Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1990 g., 5. For 1988 and 1989, the figures reported by Masliukov and Glubokov appeared in Goskomstat, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1989 g., 6, but were revised the following year in Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1990 g., 5. As for 1990,1 prefer the figure from Goskomstat, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1990 g.,5, for consistency. figure 7.1. The Soviet military burden, 1960-1990: Alternative views of defense spending in rubles, percent of GNP

Sources: CIA estimates in rubles, percent of GNP, are reported by Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending, 129-30. M&G (Masliukov and Glubokov) corrected as Table 7.7. Budget pre-1989 figures are as Table 7.2, divided by GNP corrected as in the note to Table 7.7.

estimates, represented here by the CIA. Into this gap now stepped the new historical series provided by Mashukov and Glubokov. The new series tracked the CIA estimates to some extent. For example, both series now showed the Soviet military burden peaked before declining at the end of the 1980s. But still, if (and, of course, only if) the CIA set the standard of credibility, then Masliukov and Glubokov had closed less the half the gap.

In presenting these figures, Mashukov and Glubokov discussed when and why the deception began, the methodology they used to reconstruct the 1989-basis figures, and why their new series should be preferred to others. First, when and why did the deception begin? The authors wrote:

In the postwar period the USSR continually posed the issue of cutting the defense budgets of all countries so as to facilitate substantial disarmament or a lower level of confrontation. This idea was already expressed at the first session of the United Nations General Assembly and further specific proposals were put forward.

In 1963 the USSR unilaterally cut [its] allocations to the armed forces to show goodwill and the USA also made some cuts, but the West did not support the 1964 proposal to cut military budgets by 10 to 15 percent. The USSR made proposals to cut military allocations successively in 1973,1976, 1978,1980, 1982, 1983, 1984, and 1987. At the same time, the necessity of providing for strategic parity in the arms race that was imposed on us, and of improvement of the technical level of armament and military equipment, demanded further development of the defense complex and growth of the volume of finance. Therefore, defense spending in real terms rose and peaked in 1988-89. In 1989 it amounted to 77,294.2 million rubles (16.1 percent of the overall budget of the country).[434]

On this reading, the motivation for concealment in the 1960s was the same as in the 1930s. At a time when the Soviet Union was determined to rearm, it wanted to encourage others to show restraint and, if possible, bind them into mutually agreed limitations on weaponry. To do both openly would appear inconsistent. Disclosure of the real dimensions of Soviet defense outlays would undercut the Soviet foreign-policy position on arms reductions. The only way to square these objectives was to pursue rearmament in secret, and this required deceptive budget figures.

Although they did not say it explicitly, Mashukov and Glubokov left the reader to suppose that an important moment in the emergence of the budgetary deception was 1963, the year in which the Soviet Union (with the United States and the United Kingdom) signed a treaty banning atmospheric and underwater nuclear weapon tests. Closer inspection suggests that this could not have been the start. Table 7.7 shows that that large-scale deception was already taking place in i960: it did not begin in 1963. So, it began earlier, but we still do not know exactly when.

Second, the methodology of reconstruction. Mashukov and Glubokov indicated that deception took the form of reporting one element of defense costs, the outlays on the maintenance of the troops, military construction, and pensions, as if it were the whole. To reconstruct the whole, it was necessary to look for the missing outlays. Their location in the budget accounts is described as follows:

The finance of [military] RDTE and provision for procurement of armament and military equipment was conducted, until 1989, under the national economic plans confirmed annually by decrees of the party Central Committee and Soviet government and budgetary allocations assigned to the defense ministries for RDTE, and [the finance] was entered under the item of outlays on the national economy of the country.[435]

Taking these words at face value, Mashukov and Glubokov started from the published defense outlays and then added direct budgetary support of military research and equipment (“the finance of RDTE and provision for procurement”). As discussed above, this cannot fully account for all forms of support of the defense sector, which benefited not only from direct subsidies but also from indirect subsidies at earlier stages of the supply chain. Of course, it is possible that Masliukov and Glubokov simplified the explanation of their work for the general reader, but the lack of mention of indirect subsidies is likely to mean that this part of the work was not done or even considered.

A related problem is to understand how the government was able to phase in the start of the deception. Mashukov and Glubokov maintained that the deception mainly took the form of reassigning defense outlays on procurement and RDTE from the reported defense total to other budget headings, and that this began in the early 1960s. But these missing items were already large relative to military maintenance in the 1930s, let alone the 1950s. If there existed some end point of budgetary truthfulness in the late fifties, it is not easy to understand how the items to be concealed could have been subtracted from the published series without causing a noticeable break.

Finally, which series should be preferred? Masliukov and Glubokov noted that their historical series on the 1989 basis, like the 1989 defense budget itself, fell consistently below those of the CIA (among others), but they maintained that this was entirely defensible: the CIA was wrong.

To support their case, they offered two arguments. First, the only way to find a higher GNP share of Soviet defense was to include items from the grey zone adjacent to defense activity. For 1989 this could add another 1.4 percent of GNP to the 8.6 percent already found, making 10 percent in total.[436] This was still far short of the CIA estimate for the same year. In any case, they pointed out, grey outlays would not be counted in the defense budget proper “in the USSR, as in other countries.” In other words, these items were not in dispute in the first place, so they could not contribute to a reconciliation.

What else could account for the gap? Masliukov and Glubokov then accused the CIA of adopting a methodology that unreasonably inflated its estimate of the Soviet military burden. This (they claimed) was the use of American salaries to value the services of Soviet military personnel and of American prices to value Soviet weapons, hugely overstating their costs in rubles.[437] As already mentioned, dollar valuation was one stage of the CIA’s “building block” methodology. The aim of that stage was to compare Soviet and American military spending at comparable prices. But when the aim was to value the Soviet defense burden in terms of Soviet GNP, the next stage of the CIA methodology converted dollars to rubles at purchasing power parity. If done properly, the conversion eliminated the bias of which Masliukov and Glubokov complained. In short, Masliukov and Glubokov misrepresented the CIA methodology and were not able to account for the gap otherwise.

Summing up, the credibility of the historical series introduced by Masliukov and Glubokov pivots on two things: the revised defense budget total announced by Gorbachev in 1989 and the methodology that worked the defense budget totals backward from 1989 to i960. The documentary evidence suggests strongly that Gorbachev’s 1989 figure was crafted for political expediency, not accounting veracity. It did not fully close the statistical gap or the credibility gap. Working backward from 1989, Glubokov and Masliukov improved on the deceptive figures of the past, but that was a low bar. At best, they made a first approximation to a more convincing series. As for what remains to be done, most obvious is a correction for the indirect subsidies of the defense sector arising from systematically distorted Soviet prices. Is that omission large enough to explain the remaining gap? We still do not know.

Finally, through the decades of deception of the public, did the top Soviet leaders (if not the full Politburo) retain private access to a secret figure that gave them meaningful or substantial control over defense outlays? The evidence-based answer must be no. For, if such a figure existed anywhere, it is hard or impossible to explain why months and years of specialist research were required to reconstruct it, not in the disorderly 1990s that followed the Soviet collapse, but before then, in 1988 and 1989, when the Soviet regime was still in place and exactly that figure was urgently required.

CONCLUSION: FROM A SECRET TO A MYSTERY

A British government report (concerning intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in the Iraq war) offers a conventional distinction between intelligence secrets and intelligence mysteries:

In principle, intelligence can be expected to uncover secrets. The enemy’s order of battle may not be known, but it is knowable. The enemy’s intentions may not be known, but they too are knowable. But mysteries are essentially unknowable: what a leader truly believes, or what his reaction would be in certain circumstances, cannot be known, but can only be judged.[438]

For much of the Cold War, Western intelligence worked on the assumption that Soviet defense costs were a secret. With hindsight, they look more like a mystery. When the time came to disclose them, no one could lay their hands on a figure. Three years went by before a figure could be identified for disclosure. At best, one may believe what was said or implied by Akhromeev and Mashukov. On that basis, the figure that was disclosed in 1989 was an incomplete approximation to the reality. At worst, placing more weight on Beliakov’s call for an “artificial formulation,” one might conclude that the 1989 figure was concocted out of thin air. Either way, even if Soviet defense costs were intrinsically knowable, for much of the Cold War they were practically unknowable, which must come close.

Introducing the words quoted above, the Butler report noted: “A hidden limitation of intelligence is its inability to transform a mystery into a secret.” Conversely, our story suggests how to turn a secret into a mystery. In the first years after World War II, Soviet defense outlays were not secret, and the published figure was not deceptive. At some point a decision was made to allow the published figure to diverge from the factual total, and the factual total became a secret. To maintain the secret, the flows of funds into the defense sector were covered by mistitled budget items and redirected by hidden subsidies. Over time, the underground river widened, and its secret tributaries multiplied. The cover was originally designed to hide the true scale of the defense sector from foreign eyes, but it worked so well that eventually the Politburo itself lost sight of it. The secret became a mystery.

Why did the Soviet leaders, who concentrated so many powers into their own hands, allow this to happen? One explanation is simple and plausible: it suited the Soviet military not to have to account for the full sum of defense costs. Akhromeev came close to admitting this in his television statement, already quoted: “Previously the armed forces were only interested in what they were given for upkeep, in accordance with a government decision. As far as research and development was concerned, this came under the ministries of defense industry sectors. Nor did we pay for series production deliveries.” In other words, in sharp contrast to the American military from the 1960s onward, the Soviet military was spared the need to count its costs, other than for the upkeep of the troops. Nor did it have to justify the costs for the simple reason that nobody knew what they were.

It is sometimes asked if the Soviet Union collapsed because of its military burden. A moment’s thought suggests that this cannot have been the single cause. The Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991. At this time, having already peaked, the military burden was declining. If a heavy military burden could bring about economic collapse without help from other factors, then the Soviet Union should have collapsed in 1942 or 1943 when the military burden was several times higher than in 1987 or 1988.[439] In fact, the Soviet collapse had many causes, including economic, social, political, and moral factors. The military burden was there in the background, but it was never decisive.

What can be affirmed is that the mystery surrounding the military burden indicates the declining effectiveness of Soviet rule. Stalin, for whom divide-and-rule was a first principle of governance, would never have tolerated a situation where the military could make common cause with the leaders of the defense industries to freely spend the government’s money.[440] During the time of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the military acquired an unprecedented capacity to exploit secrecy in their own interest. In that sense the “golden age” of the Soviet defense complex (as the historian Julian Cooper called the Brezhnev period) was the leaden age of communist rule.[441]

Eventually, secrecy over defense costs came at the expense of state capacity. As Gorbachev recognized, secrecy had deprived the Soviet state of the capacity to do business with its foreign adversaries—to commit to arms limitations. It also cost the Soviet state its capacity to manage government spending and limit its burden on the economy.

Stepping back, we can see that the secrecy over defense costs was one aspect of a more general phenomenon. Soviet secretiveness gave rise to an uninformed elite. In principle, one person had the right to know everything: the party leader. Below this level, even within the Politburo, all knowledge was compartmentalized by need-to-know. One agency, the KGB, had the responsibility to manage the compartments of secrecy. This was bad enough. The result of need-to-know was that most members of the late Soviet elite were brought up on myths about the history of their own country and of their own party, about how the world worked, and about the Soviet Union’s place in the world. The few that knew better had no right to share their knowledge more widely and risked punishment if they tried to do so without authorization. Most were never exposed to serious debate involving principles of logic and evidence. It is true that many products of Western scholarly research and debate were imported and translated into Russian, but their availability was strictly limited to readers whose loyalty was proven, so that they were already known to be willing to endorse the conclusions previously approved by the party.[442]

All knowledge is one. This is why our institutions of higher learning are called universities, not multiversities. While universities generally find it convenient to compartmentalize their teaching and research into disciplines that lend their titles to departments and faculties of economics, history, or chemistry, a good deal of what passes for the advance of understanding relies on making connections across those boundaries. When knowledge is compartmentalized by secrecy, those kinds of advance are suppressed. In the early 1980s, the future of the Soviet Union had become an inherently multidisciplinary problem, involving economics, ecology, sociology, political science, and moral philosophy (at least). Few were used to thinking in all those disciplines at once, and those that were inclined to try were forced into silence or into exile. In that context it is unsurprising that, of the many plans for institutional reform put before Soviet society over the next few years, not one was realized.

Could less secrecy have saved the Soviet Union or communist rule? That might be a counterfactual too far. Before Gorbachev, all Soviet leaders saw comprehensive secrecy as fundamental to preservation of their regime. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, seems to have shown that they were right: when he became a late convert to the idea of an open society, the Soviet regime lost its grip on society and fell apart.

8. SECRECY AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AUTHORITARIANISM

This concluding chapter tells two stories. One is the story of secrecy in Russia, where the Soviet state collapsed in 1991. What took its place in Russia was a state of fewer capabilities and diminished pretensions, initially open to both economic and political competition. As the story will show, the regime of secrecy was shaken to its foundations and its sphere contracted sharply. A period of stabilization was followed by partial restoration. Thirty years on, the old secrecy regime had been rebuilt to a point somewhere between the suffocating completeness of the Soviet era and the chaotic freedom of the 1990s. The question then is where modern Russia has positioned itself on the secrecy/capacity tradeoff, and what that tells us about its political regime.

The other story of this chapter is one of information technology and information possibilities. The first decades of the twenty-first century have differed from most of the twentieth by the decentralization of information sharing. Peer-to-peer communication technologies and social media have transformed access to the public sphere. When most citizens carry a pocket computer that connects them directly to global networks, a state that controls only the printing presses and the broadcast studios can no longer monopolize public discourse. But modern networking technologies also provide authoritarian leaders with other means than secrecy and censorship to disinform the public.

Information has value, according to the economist Kenneth Arrow, because it reduces uncertainty.[443] Uncertainty is a factor in the balance of power in society, because a person who is uncertain is less able to choose their best course of action, and so has less agency. In other words, uncertainty is disempowering. From this, the value of information is that it dispels the powerlessness associated with uncertainty.

For the powerful, secrecy is one way to induce powerlessness in others. Secrecy has this effect because it leaves ordinary people uncertain of what decisions have been made, who made them, and on what grounds, to what purpose, and with what expected effect. But secrecy is not the only way to induce powerlessness. The same uncertainty can be brought about by other means, such as confusion. The subject of this chapter is Russia’s transition from one form of authoritarian rule to another: how Secret Leviathan took on a new guise, Leviathan of a Thousand Lies. What does it matter if the truth leaks out, when the state can drown it out in the confusion of a thousand lies?

Leviathan of a Thousand Lies does not manage without secrecy altogether. It continues to monopolize and withhold some kinds of information, especially concerning the people and processes at the core of government. But it does not try to censor everything. On all other matters it publishes widely and communicates permissively, screening the facts behind “availability cascades” of conflicting stories, false rumors, and plausible myths.[444]

Leviathan of a Thousand Lies is not new. In fact, it was the form in which Secret Leviathan operated abroad during the Cold War, in societies that practiced free speech. Unable to shut down Western media sources beyond the frontiers, the Soviet state competed with them by a strategy of disinformation. False news stories such as that HIV/AIDS was a US experiment gone wrong, or that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered by the FBI, were calculated to spread distrust of the West and support for anti-Western ideas.[445]

As the capacity of the authoritarian state to practice comprehensive censorship at home was undermined by new technologies that could not be suppressed forever, the techniques of disinformation were brought home to be employed against the domestic population. How that came about in Russia is the subject of this chapter.

By disinformation I mean the government promotion of myths and false rumors. In the Cold War, disinformation was practiced by both sides. The political scientist Thomas Rid has identified the 1950s as a time of American leadership in what was then called “political warfare”; after that, the Soviet Union moved forward and took the lead. Rid argues, however, that there is a long-run affinity between dictatorship and disinformation: states that practice disinformation systematically must either be or become authoritarian. This is because disinformation undermines essential aspects of the rule of law including respect for facts and trust in the probity of elections. “Disinformation operations,” he writes, “erode the very foundation of open societies—not only for the victim but also for the perpetrator.”[446] A government that consistently disinforms its own citizens is travelling toward authoritarian rule. Thus, dictators and would-be dictators have been disinformation’s most assiduous practitioners.

THE NEAR-DEATH OF SECRET LEVIATHAN

On 5 March 1991, Pavel Laptev and Yurii Ryzhov, officers of the Communist Party Central Committee, wrote a severe warning. They complained that party records were under threat of seizure by hostile groups and that party correspondence was being systematically leaked to the outside.[447] “From now until the situation is stabilized,” they announced, members of the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the “leading organs” of the party would need to come personally to the Central Committee building in Moscow if they wished to be familiarized with “documents of a secret character.” Only in “extreme necessity” would secret documents be sent out of the building by courier, marked “Deliver person-to-person only,” and subject to immediate return.

A few months passed. Stability did not return. The summer saw a state coup and a countercoup. The Communist Party was expelled from power. At the end of the year, the Soviet Union disintegrated. The regime of secrecy collapsed.

What remained of the Soviet state after the collapse? The most obvious change was the shrunken domain of its successor, the Russian Federation. Russia lost half the Soviet Union’s population and two-fifths of its economy. Although the losses were substantial, and proved to be a source of lasting grievance, Russia kept Moscow, the former Union’s capital city; most of the former Soviet territorial expanse, including many non-Russian ethnicities and territories; most major defense industries and strategic installations; and (after some negotiation) all the nuclear weapons. Thus, post-Soviet Russia did not lose the pretension to be a global power.

While Russia retained the symbols of statehood, its state capacity was shaken to the foundations. Some of Leviathan’s key attributes, such as fiscal and legal capacity, fell to low levels. Violent crimes and property crimes rose sharply. Even before large-scale privatization, state assets were hollowed out by insiders.[448] Budget deficits ballooned as revenues from the state sector collapsed, while the old producer lobbies and new electoral coalitions competed for fiscal handouts. Capital resources fled abroad. It is sometimes maintained that Russia’s reformers of the first Yeltsin administration made bad choices: they should have followed some other template or listened other voices. The fact is that at that time they had few levers at their disposal and few choices to make. In most matters, their hand was forced by lack of means to do anything else.[449]

The disorderly 1990s were not all bad for Russians, giving millions new freedoms to travel, to learn, and to start a business. At the same time, the collapse of Russia’s state capacity in the early years undermined the prosperity and personal security of all citizens. Rebuilding the state was a necessary project. That it went ahead on authoritarian lines was not inevitable, but it was made highly likely by three main factors. These were the depleted state of civil society, the survival of the communist nomenklatura, and the growing weight of the siloviki.

The first factor is most general. As discussed in Chapter 2, sustainable democracy requires an inclusive state to evolve in continuous competition with civil-society activism so that the rule of law is maintained.[450] This did not happen in Russia: civil society was enfeebled after seventy years of surveillance and repression, and its activization in the last years of Soviet rule remained superficial. Russians faced the future without long-standing, deeply rooted political parties, trade unions, charities, volunteer groups, and neighborhood associations.

Second, although the post-Soviet state was reorganized, it was never purged of officials with Communist Party or KGB backgrounds. The Russian state was overwhelmingly staffed by former Soviet officials who had entered government service through party membership and selection for secret work by the KGB.[451] Natural processes thinned them out over the next decades. But, as recently as 2010, most holders of senior positions in Russian government posts had either entered government service in Soviet times as junior members of the party nomenklatura, or they were children of the nomenklatura.[452] Their common attribute was to have been reared in the old ways of ruling, including the ways of conspirativeness.

Third, the army, the security services, and the police remained intact as organizations. Their departments became known as the “power ministries” with their leaders called the siloviki (strongmen). While they never worked out a common political program, they shared clear preferences for a strong state with a powerful leader ruling over a submissive society.[453] As for the power ministries’ rank and file, their numbers were depleted, but in a way that helped the leaders. Their networks of influence widened as former comrades who had lost their positions went into business and politics, from where they could continue to trade favors.[454] By 2010 the siloviki accounted for around one-third of the senior figures of the Russian state.[455]

Periodic outbreaks of “people power” were not enough to prevent the state being reordered from the top down. The rise of Vladimir Putin to head of the FSB (1998), prime minister (1999), acting president (on 31 December 1999, with the resignation of President Yeltsin), and elected president (2000) was decisive. Putin, a former KGB officer, shared the values of the siloviki. Famously, he called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century.[456] It was not so much the passing of communism that he regretted, but Russia’s loss of empire and world influence. Abroad, he reasserted Russia’s position as a rival of the West. At home he demanded a return to domestic order, rejecting the turmoil (or freedoms) of the 1990s. He set in motion the taking of power back from the regions, from the new wealthy class, and from the electorate. Russia would remain a market economy with a newly wealthy business class, but on Leviathan’s terms and under its authoritarian tutelage.[457]

When thinking about how much modern Russia inherited from the Soviet Union, a sense of proportion is useful. The differences remain immense. The end of communism changed Russians’ everyday lives to an extraordinary extent—far more than they were changed, for example, by the Thaw after Stalin’s death. Most Russians became healthier, wealthier, freer to visit, study, and holiday abroad, and longer-lived than at any time in the past. By global standards they were neither to be pitied nor envied. In the 2000s, Russians’ average incomes remained close to the world average (as they had been more than a century before).[458] If widespread poverty persisted alongside the superrich, that was not unusual for a large middleincome country with an entrenched elite. Perhaps Russian politics did not score well on international measures of democracy and the rule of law, but many other countries in the same income bracket were doing no better. As Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman suggested, Russia was becoming a “normal” country.[459] Unfortunately this does not mean that Russia ceased to be a menace to the international order. What remained abnormal was Russia’s dangerous behavior on the world stage, enabled by the country’s large size and nuclear weapons.

In terms of state capacity, Russia’s basic indicators returned strongly to normal. In 1980 the “socialist sector” contributed close to 100 percent of the Soviet Union’s material production, while tax revenues absorbed almost half of Soviet GDP. In 2016, in the breathing space between the global financial crisis of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, state-owned enterprises and other government equity contributed around one-third of Russia’s GDP, while tax revenues took back barely 9 percent.[460] In other words, Russia now had the state capacity of a typical middle-income country with a market economy.

For the citizens, a striking aspect of Russia’s normalization was their catch-up in access to information and communication technologies. As discussed in Chapter 1, Soviet times saw the deliberate suppression of advances in information sharing from automated dial-up telephony to photocopying. This was because they threatened the state’s comprehensive controls on the spread of information. When free to do so, Russians adopted these technologies with enthusiasm. By the 2010s there were more cell phone registrations in Russia than there were Russians.[461] And by 2016 sales of household printers and scanners were running at almost half a billion US dollars per year.[462] Thus, Russian citizens showed an entirely normal interest in sharing information.

Did Russia’s transition spell normalization for the regime of secrecy? In fact, the ending of Soviet rule left Secret Leviathan near to death. How near, exactly? Chapter 1 listed four pillars of the Soviet regime of secrecy: (1) the state monopoly of nearly everything, (2) comprehensive censorship based on the state monopoly of the press and broadcast media, (3) the conspirative norms of the ruling party, and (4) the regulation of secrecy by the KGB through the secret departments established in every state-owned enterprise and government agency. With the end of Soviet rule, the first two pillars fell. The third and fourth were weakened—but not fatally.

Almost overnight, the state lost its monopoly of production. That was the fall of the first pillar. Legalizing private enterprise had immediate consequences. Real earnings in private business shot up, while government salaries collapsed. Along with higher salaries in the private sphere came new opportunities for foreign travel and education. There was no longer any privilege in working for the state, even on secret business. At the same time the rise of private enterprise brought independent media companies, which swept away the second pillar—the capacity for comprehensive censorship.

As for the third and fourth pillars, the Communist Party was toppled from power, while a crowd toppled the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, founder of the Soviet secret police, from its plinth before the KGB headquarters in Lubianka Square. But, as the following section will show, the third and fourth pillars did not fall. The culture of conspirative norms subsisted for a while before reemerging. The KGB was reorganized and divided between intelligence and counterintelligence, the latter becoming today’s FSB. The secret departments lost their legal status, but the loss was temporary. The status and rewards for secret work were also eventually restored.

SECRECY IN THE NEW RUSSIA

The Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 forced open many locked rooms that had previously been sealed from public view. It is true that Gorbachev’s newfound commitment to openness quickly encountered limits. In May, while Gorbachev revealed to the world the scale of the disaster, the KGB brought many aspects of its causes and impacts back under the stamp of secrecy. In June, the Soviet Ministry of Health classified secret all information relating to the health and treatment of those in the contaminated zones and the workers directly involved in managing the damaged plant. In July, the Defense Ministry ordered the records of troops’ service in the Chernobyl zone to be deleted from their personnel files. Any further revelations were forced rather than voluntary. They were driven from below, by the fury of Ukrainian and Belarusian activists and their supporters in the republican party and state hierarchies.[463] Thus, the net effect of Chernobyl was to expose the regime of secrecy and energize its critics. Their new momentum fed into the wider process that eventually pulled apart the entire Soviet Union.

As for secrecy in the new Russia, its full history has not yet been written. An obvious reason is that the calculations and decisions behind its evolution were made in secret and will remain so for the foreseeable future. While the course of Russian secrecy can be surmised from various signals and events, some uncertainty remains intrinsic to the subject.

In 1991, as Laptev and Ryzhov feared, there were moments when it seemed as if the Soviet state and party offices, whether in Moscow or in the provinces, were about to be stormed by the mob and their papers thrown to the winds or sold off to the highest bidder. On the whole this did not happen. The state and party archives remained largely intact. For a time, the collapse of Soviet rule left access to them without a legislative framework. The gap was filled, initially, by presidential decrees of the Yeltsin administration, then by new laws on the federal archives and on state secrets enacted in the summer of 1993.[464]

The law on state secrets of 1993 represented a considerable break with the principles of Soviet secrecy outlined in Chapter 1. In the new Russia, the old classifications (“of special importance,” top secret, and secret) were maintained, but secrecy was no longer for perpetuity. The term was limited to thirty years, although it could be extended at need. The law renewed a government list of matters governed by secrecy, but the list was more modest that in Soviet times. For the first time the law designated matters that could not be made state secrets. Exclusions included negative social or environmental trends and natural and technological disasters (such as Chernobyl). The law made explicit that secrecy could not be invoked to hide the compensation, criminality, or corruption of government officials. For the first time, access to employment involving secret matters, including the withdrawal of access previously granted, would be governed by formal rules and procedures. For the first time the law provided that the official list of secret matters should be reviewed at five-year intervals. For the first time the law guaranteed citizens’ right to appeal decisions to classify secret matters or to refuse clearance for access to secret work.

For the historian wishing to work in the formerly secret archives of the Soviet party and state, the legal framework of 1993 left many problems unresolved. Not all archives were opened. The Presidential Archive, the KGB archive (holding papers from the time of its reformed establishment in 1954), and the current archive of the Ministry of Defense (holding papers from the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in 1941) remained closed other than to privileged researchers. Disturbingly, as time passed, many archival records that had initially been declassified were reclassified secret.[465]

Secret Leviathan, although traumatized, still had life in it. For one thing, even if the Russian state had broken formally with its communist past, Russia was still governed largely by ex-communists, brought up to honor the shared norms of conspirativeness. For another, the military, police, and security agencies signaled publicly that their bloodlines to the Red Army and Cheka of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War remained unbroken. If the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii was toppled in Moscow in 1991, his cult lived on in the ethos of the FSB.[466] In cities and towns throughout the Russian Federation, Dzerzhinskii’s memory was honored by statues left untoppled and streets and squares left unrenamed.[467] For Russia’s armed forces, nothing symbolized their continuity with the Soviet Union’s Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army more than the increasingly mystical me-morialization of the Soviet-German war dead.[468]

Measures to restore the status and rewards for secret employment provided a more businesslike signal of government intentions to revive Secret Leviathan. As already mentioned, in Russia’s transition to a market economy, secret government work lost all its former privileges. This problem was addressed in October 1994 by the introduction of special salary supplements for government employees, graded by the level of classification of their work. The supplements were modest at first, being set at 25, 20, and 10 percent for work involving documentation “of special importance,” “top secret,” and “secret” respectively. Further increases in 2006 and 2007 raised the supplements to more generous levels: 50 to 75, 30 to 50, and 10 to 15 percent, respectively. Reporting these measures, the economist Julian Cooper suggests that they created (or perhaps reestablished) incentives to expand the secret sphere, and this was reflected in growing budget secrecy at the time.[469]

For researchers on current affairs, especially those with a security aspect, an ominous trend was the growing number of defendants brought to court by the FSB, charged with collecting open-source data to pass to foreigners. Best known at the time was Igor Sutiagin, a civilian researcher on nuclear weapons. On 7 April 2004, Sutiagin was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for passing information to the US Defense Intelligence Agency. His legal defense was that all the information he had collected was in the public domain and could be known by anyone. As a civilian, he had no access to military secrets. The defense failed. Sutiagin was not the only to fall foul of the authorities in this way. Over ten years from 1996 to 2007, at least seven others were found guilty of espionage based on collecting data from unclassified or open sources.[470]

More positive signals were given out during the presidency of Dmitrii Medvedev (2008 to 2012). The Medvedev administration took several steps toward more accountable government: there was an anticorruption drive, more transparency for the intelligence agencies, commitments for Russia to join the Open Government Partnership (an international coalition of governments and nongovernmental organizations) and the International Monetary Fund’s Fiscal Transparency Evaluation, and eventually a minister for open government, the reformist politician Mikhail Abyzov.[471] But the Medvedev administration also restored the legal status of the “secret departments” in all agencies and enterprises connected to secret government business, and subject to supervision by the FSB.[472]

While some of these signals supported a positive interpretation, subsequent events showed the optimism to be unfounded. With Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Russia withdrew from the Open Government Partnership.[473] As for fiscal transparency, an IMF update in 2019 noted progress since 2014 in some areas but backsliding in others. Notably, secret outlays had increased to 17 percent of the federal budget in 2018 (compared with 10 percent in 2009) and one-third of public procurement contracts were classified as secret and not open to competitive tendering.[474] Increased concealment of the defense budget under secret items was another negative aspect of the time.[475] This trend is not easily explained by the secrecy laws and regulations of the time, which did not allow for classification of the ruble aggregates reported in the budget.[476] Also in 2019, Mikhail Abyzov was arrested and charged with corruption.[477]

Other signals of the convalescence of Secret Leviathan were a series of poorly explained events and the suppression of independent investigation into them. Among these were murders of independent journalists (such as Anna Politkovskaia, an investigator of human rights abuses), of opposition politicians (such as Boris Nemtsov), and of critics who had fled abroad (such as Aleksandr Litvinenko). State news media were brought under government editorial control. Independent media suffered harassment or were bought up by government supporters. Scholars whose investigations contradicted the government’s narrative of Russia in the twentieth century were increasingly criminalized.[478] Important nongovernment sources of independent information, such as the Levada Center, a polling organization, and Memorial, a human rights group, were stigmatized as “foreign agents.”[479] The same fate befell the anticorruption FBK foundation set up by the opposition activist Alexei Navalny.[480] In other words, the government reserved to itself the right to decide who should be targeted for corruption.

Some explanations of the return to secretive government in Russia focus on particular triggers. One candidate is the global price of oil: with oil prices rising steeply in the first decade of the new century, the Russian state became more reliant on oil revenues. Perhaps it lost interest in other sources of improvement, such as competitive markets and media freedom.[481] Consistently with this, the rise in oil prices was followed (with a few years’ lag) by the rise of anticorruption campaigners such as Alexei Navalny. Perhaps government officials and the privately wealthy people with whom they were connected found an increasing need for secrecy to hide their assets and transactions.[482] Another possible trigger is the Western sanctions imposed on Russia after its occupation of Eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014: because of these measures, the Russian government became more interested in hiding legal and illegal transactions from international monitors.[483]

While not discounting the role of such events, it seems beyond doubt that Russia was already returning to secretive government long before the annexation of Crimea and before anticorruption campaigning took off, and the most important underlying factor was Russia’s return to authoritarian rule under Vladimir Putin.

The restoration of Russian autocracy was deeply rooted in the way communism ended. One feature of the transition was elite continuity. As discussed earlier, the New Russian elite was largely composed of former Soviet party and state executives trained to do business in secret. Putin himself was a former KGB officer, a professional enforcer of the Soviet regime of secrecy. The first Putin administration marked an important turning point. In the Yeltsin years, when Putin was a minor figure, Kremlin politics were discussed and debated, not only in the news, but also as a matter of historical record in the memoirs of multiple participants including Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and their associates. While this shows that a return to greater secrecy was not inevitable, it is nonetheless the case that all such flows of information dried up from the time of Putin’s accession to power.[484]

A feature of the transition that might have predisposed Russian society to accept a return to a highly managed information environment was disillusionment. The opening of Russian society was enabling for many, but not for all. For many Russians, the transition from communist rule was disappointing; for some it was tragic. Many concluded that authoritarian order was preferable to transparent disorder.[485]

Finally, disorder was plentiful in the transition, and it had important consequences. It is sometimes said that Russia’s transition was peaceful, and this was true in the sense—important but limited—that Russia did not go to war with its neighbors, as happened in Yugoslavia. But there was plenty of violence, and not only on the periphery of the former empire. In Russia itself, private violence surged: homicide rates doubled over the benchmark of the last years of Soviet rule. State violence was refocused from a foreign war (in Afghanistan) to a civil war (in Chechnia). Two wars were fought against Chechen separatists, the first from 1994 to 1996 and the second from 1999. The trigger for the second war was a shadowy conspiracy to bomb apartment buildings in Moscow and two provincial cities, in which the FSB played a role that remains without convincing explanation.[486] A surprising outcome was to propel the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin to presidential power: Yeltsin resigned, appointing Putin in his place, and Putin went on to be elected in 2000 by a large majority.

SECRECY AND INFORMATION-SHARING

The breakdown of the Soviet regime of secrecy was not predetermined. The example of North Korea shows that Secret Leviathan can live on. North Korea is as closed and secretive today as the Soviet Union was in 1949. But the rulers of North Korea have paid an exceptional price: to maintain their secretive rule, they have had to keep their society in great poverty, and the result is that they themselves have few good choices.

The examples of China, Vietnam, and Cuba have shown that Secret Leviathan can also adapt. In different ways, these three countries have become more open, but each has contrived to keep the secrets and mysteries surrounding the core of power. The economic consequences have varied: China and Vietnam have prospered, but Cuba’s economy has stagnated. Even so, most Cubans today live far above the level of most North Koreans.[487]

Why did Secret Leviathan need to adapt? To understand the evolutionary pathways of Secret Leviathan in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to grasp the fundamental conditions that made it possible in the twentieth. One condition was mass production.[488] From the 1870s to the 1970s, in every major economy the mass production of things was coordinated by great corporations. The coordination of mass production relied on flows of information upward and inward from the periphery to the apex of power, while orders flowed downward and outward. When Lenin and Stalin envisaged the society of the future, they imagined American mass production building national power according to a centralized Bolshevik plan.[489]

The same technologies that fostered mass production lent themselves to comprehensive censorship. Censorship relied on centralized control of information flows, and the high fixed costs of predigital technologies made centralization easy. If the state could own the means, it could control access and restrict their uses. Information sharing was centralized in a few great printing presses, a national postal service, a network of telegraph and telephone exchanges centered on great cities, and broadcasts radiating from a few radio and television studios and transmitters. Monopolization by the state made possible the comprehensive censorship of information deemed generally unsuitable to the public, and the systematic denial of access to anyone unable to demonstrate authorized need to know.

Later in the twentieth century, this model was subverted. The services revolution led the way. In today’s wealthy economies, most wealth is generated in the production of services, and services are made valuable by shared information about risks and opportunities, reflected in prices, costs, news, and personal data. Meanwhile, the fixed costs of information sharing fell with astonishing rapidity. Technologically the process was dominated by Moore’s Law, by which the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. The first integrated circuit is thought to have been created in 1959. The number of transistors per circuit reached the thousands in the 1970s, the millions in the 1990s, and the billions in the early 2000s. One outcome was to flood the globe with personal information-sharing devices: by 2016 there were more cell phone subscriptions in the world than there were people. Another was the internet: in 2016, half the world had used it by one means or another (including cell phones) in the previous three months. Four social networks—Facebook, YouTube, WeChat, and Instagram—had more than 6 billion users between them at that time.[490]

The centralized model of information dissemination that characterized much of the twentieth century has largely given way to person-to-person information sharing. Great publishers and news corporations have not disappeared. But their influence has been greatly diluted by the rise of information sharing and social media, to which they too have had to adapt.[491]

If knowledge is empowering, how does authoritarian rule persist in a world where most citizens carry a device in their pocket or purse with access to the world’s information? How could Secret Leviathan survive in this new world without paying the price of North Korea? It might be thought that the collapse of European communism marked a new era of more fragile dictatorships. In fact, the reverse seems to be the case: dictatorships are thought to have become more durable, not less, since the end of the Cold War.[492]

Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, an economist and a political scientist, describe a new model of authoritarian rule. The old model relied on censorship and fear; the new model exploits the manipulation or “spinning” of information and disinformation.[493] Examples of “spin dictators” that they give include Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.

The spin dictator’s first priority is the same as for other autocrats: to take and hold state power. Guriev and Treisman envisage a society divided into an informed elite and a relatively uninformed mass. The ruler spins the news to convince the uninformed mass that the regime is effective and competent. The new autocrat appears to promote national prosperity at home and to protect the nation’s interests in the world, especially along the nation’s borders. Mass opinion supports the autocrat—as long as the picture of the effective, competent ruler is not disrupted by elite dissidents.

Members of the informed elite might have a different view of the ruler. They have full access to the world’s information, and they can form a true picture of the ruler’s performance. Some are sincere regime supporters. Others might dislike the ruler, question the ruler’s competence, or see the ruler’s policies as counterproductive. But most elite dissidents are silent. Some are corrupted by power or money. Others are silenced by fear. Rather than mass arrests or deportations, they worry about targeted legal harassment by a tax or corruption investigation or a charge of immorality. A seemingly random beating or a fatal accident are not ruled out, but they remain less likely. Some choose to leave the country, which benefits the ruler by thinning the ranks of the openly discontented elite. A foreign refuge appears to offer safety, but an exile who makes too much noise can be vulnerable to diplomatic pressure or illegal force. The outcome is that nearly all elite members fall into line.

Guriev and Treisman call those who rule in this way “spin dictators.” The new-style autocrat regularly wins popularity polls and elections based on the unfeigned support of the uninformed majority. Discontent is limited to a few elite members who refuse to be bought or intimidated.

Under new-model autocracy there are still secrecy and censorship. Secrecy is not comprehensive; it covers only the lives and decisions of the autocrat and his circle. As for censorship, Glavlit is long gone and cannot be brought back. But censorship is practiced, nonetheless. Most mass media are owned by the state or by the state’s private stakeholders, who spread regime propaganda. Censorship is also practiced in another form, in the effects of legal harassment or imprisonment of independent researchers and of the assassination of investigative journalists. So, censorship still exists—but the model has changed.

But much information that the authorities would like to suppress cannot be kept out from the public sphere. So, curious citizens who search for it are shielded from it in two ways. First, internet searches are systematically pointed toward the state’s mouthpieces, which provide disinformation.[494] If the citizens look elsewhere, the inconvenient truths may be available, but they are fogged by a much greater mass of lies, myths, and rumors that are fed into public discourse through social media.

Consider the shootdown of the Malaysian MH17 airliner over eastern Ukraine in 2014. If the truth is that agents of the Russian state were responsible, Russia’s rulers must deny it because it calls into question their benevolence and competence. In Soviet times, the official media controlled what facts were released, if at all, and provided only official explanations (as with the Soviet-era case of the Korean KAL007 airliner shot down over the Far East in 1983). This cannot be done today. Instead, both true and false facts are all over the Russian state media, accompanied by a bewildering variety of alternative theories: the Ukrainians did it, the Americans did it, the British did it, using various means and based on various motivations. As a result, Russians feel no obligation to accept that their own country was responsible.

What cannot be concealed can be spun. By filling the public space with lies, the rulers hope to persuade the uninformed mass that the truth is unknowable, hidden behind a smokescreen of hostile deceptions. The government version can also gain support from many members of the informed elite, because no one can be equally informed about everything.[495]

To support their ideas, Guriev and Treisman bring evidence. The facts show that the more successful spin dictators are less violent than the old ones: they kill and imprison in dozens or hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. Where possible they subcontract the limited repression that they find necessary.[496] They no longer try to enforce every clause and subclause of an official ideology such as Marxism-Leninism, although they do assiduously promote nationalism, illiberal social values, and antiWesternism. In the name of protecting the public sphere against disruption by foreign values, they limit access to the global internet.[497] They praise themselves for promoting prosperity at home and protecting the nation abroad. And, as opinion polls tend to show, the strategy works: they persuade the poorer, less educated, less travelled members of society much more effectively than the informed elite that actually helps them run the country.

Guriev and Treisman call them “spin dictators,” but there is a sense in which the more violent dictators of the previous generation knew all about spin. Disinformation was disempowering then, as it is now. What is different about the new autocrats is that, as the centralized restriction of knowledge has become less practicable, disinformation has become more valuable to them and more practicable at the same time.

Are the new autocrats as bad as the old ones? Perhaps there is progress: a society where political killings are limited to tens or hundreds is better than one where they are numbered in hundreds of thousands or millions. A society where anyone can search out the truth, even if the search takes some effort, is better than one where every vestige of the truth has been rigidly suppressed. This is the progress that has been marked in the world of authoritarian rule.

But the full cost of spin dictatorship may become clear only in the long run. At the end of 2019, Sergei Guriev was optimistic that Putin’s magic spell over the loyalty of the Russian masses was wearing off, increasing the chance that his regime would crumble.[498] In 2021, he revised his view: Putin’s regime had taken a violent turn back to the mid-twentieth-century model of the fear dictator.[499] In 2022, Putin led Russia into violent aggression against Ukraine. With the war on Ukraine, Russia faced outright censorship of war news and severe penalties for truth tellers.

This raises the question whether the model of the spin dictator described by Guriev and Treisman can ever be stable. Sooner or later, perhaps, it must evolve into something either better or worse.

INFORMATION SHARING AND STATE CAPACITY

Previous chapters of this book showed that Secret Leviathan faced a secrecy/capacity tradeoff. The ruling party had two aims: to retain state power and to build the capacities of the state. More secrecy protected the regime. Beyond a point, more secrecy also eroded state capacity. Communist rulers gave the impression that they prized state capacity above everything. But the intense secrecy that they chose indicates that they actually prioritized self-protection, while the state they built was substantially less capable than it seemed from the outside.

The information-sharing revolution of the past twenty years has major implications for both state capacity and regime security. It is too early to provide a full account of these implications. For present purposes, two are especially salient. First, an implication for state capacity: new informationsharing technologies are expanding society’s production possibilities, especially in services of all kinds, including public services. Public health provides an example. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, before mass testing facilities were available, citizens of Britain and the United States could self-report sickness on a smartphone app. This enabled real-time monitoring of the likely spread of a novel disease.[500] Notably, it relied on the participants trusting the motivations of the project with regard to the uses of their personal data and the security with which their data would be handled. More generally, public health agencies could seek to manage the pandemic with unprecedented information capacity, but information sharing rested on a relationship of mutual openness and trust between agency staff and the citizens.

A second implication of falling costs of information sharing is the growing capacity of incumbent regimes to protect themselves by spreading disinformation through social networks. It has become easier for spin dictators to protect their hold on the state despite limited secrecy and partial censorship. They have learned to manage the information available to the mass of people by dominating the public sphere behind the scenes. They crowd out the facts by spreading a thousand rumors and fabrications. They crowd out independent sources of information by legal and extralegal harassment. In this way they maintain popular uncertainty about the true character of the regime, the true state of informed opinion, and the true opportunities and benefits of political action. The outcome is that civil society is disempowered.

Where do these changes leave the secrecy/capacity tradeoff? For democracies there is good news: the returns to open government should be increasing. As a result, elected governments should be able to achieve more (because information sharing increases state capacity) with less secrecy (because secrecy is a necessary evil, and because greater transparency also supports the citizens’ willingness to share information). This is illustrated in Figure 8.1. In the figure, the information revolution has pushed the secrecy/capacity frontier outward, not everywhere to the same degree, but more so where secrecy is less intense.

The good news comes with a warning, however. If trust in government is eroded or disrupted, a democratic society may not be able to reach the frontier. There is an interior trap, where low trust and polarized ideologies handicap state capacity and push the democratic state toward greater concealment.

For autocrats, the news is also mixed. They too can exploit gains from information sharing to the benefit of state capacity. But, as Figure 8.1 suggests, with the higher degrees of secrecy required to protect the dictator, the trust required for citizens to share their data freely with the state will be harder to achieve and the gains will be more limited.

At the same time, there are costs. The dictator no longer tries to find the resources for comprehensive censorship but instead must design and build a national firewall, employ internet monitors, and maintain troll farms. In the case of China, with approximately one billion internet users, figure 8.1. The secrecy/capacity tradeoff: Information sharing makes open government relatively more capable

Note: The solid curve shows the initial secrecy/capacity frontier. As previously described in Figure 2.3, S* is the degree of secrecy that delivers the maximum of state capacity at point X. Y is a point in the equilibrium zone for democracies and Z is the same for dictators.

In the next period, a new information-sharing technology raises the returns to open government. The dotted line shows the new frontier, which is raised by more, the less is secrecy (because the amount of increase depends on the transparency of government motivations and uses of personal data). The new maximum of state capacity, at X', is reached with more state capacity and less secrecy than at A. At all points the marginal gain from secrecy (to the left of X) is reduced or the marginal cost (to the right of X) is increased.

For democracies, state capacity is a good and secrecy is a necessary evil, so an upward shift of the frontier allows more state capacity to be combined with less secrecy (comparing Y' to Y). Given the same upward shift of the frontier, the autocrat, who values both state capacity and secrecy, might choose more state capacity and more secrecy (compared to Z). However, the price of secrecy to the autocrat has increased (the frontier declines more steeply to the right of X') so the autocrat’s best response is indeterminate; it might also be to allow secrecy to remain the same or decline, as shown in the figure at Z'.

state media reported in 2013 that more than two million citizens were employed to monitor social media.[501] This was around half of 1 percent of China’s urban working population at the time.[502] In addition, society must be maintained in a condition where most citizens are misinformed about how the world works, and the informed minority is expected to promote misinformation, even those that know better.

As in the past, Russians today are expected to attribute most historic evils to victimization by ill-intentioned outsiders, to trust in the present-day leaders as protectors of the nation, and to stigmatize all criticism as the work of foreign enemies and domestic traitors. Such stories help the leaders to hold on to state power, but they also make state power less usable. Xenophobia and a fear of diversity keep freethinkers and innovators out of public service. A career in government must be unattractive to those members of the informed elite who are morally averse to groupthink and disinformation. Talent is drained abroad, or it prefers obscurity to promotion. Thus, the state’s human capacity is likely to suffer. Moreover, even if informed leaders see reasons to engage constructively with the rest of the world where possible, it is hard to do so when public opinion is continually mobilized by fear and ultranationalism, roiled by myths and rumors that hinder sensible debate about the country’s long-run interest in the international arena.[503] As for learning capacity, such a state may have little capacity to recognize errors, let alone to correct them.

In short, modern dictators must continue to pay for their security by giving up a part of the effectiveness and capacities of the states that they build and over which they preside.

Turning to the secrecy/capacity tradeoff, the evidence is that it persists. One case in point is the poor quality of decisions made by the Putin administration as it approached the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Why did the Russian Army lose the early battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv? According to former soldier and Russia expert Jeffrey Edmonds, the answer is secrecy.[504] Secrecy over Russian intentions “denied the Russian military the ability to prepare for war in the way that it had trained for countless times before,” Edmonds explains.

Interviews with captured Russian officers and enlisted personnel suggest that the operation and its scope were likely not shared at the tactical level. For those of us who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, every soldier, staffer, and commander understood where they were going, the danger they might face, and at least the rough outlines of the types of missions they were going to undertake. While there are an infinite number of surprises in war, we all knew we were going to combat. Turning to the Russian military’s experience thus far in Ukraine, it is apparent that this process of emotional and mental preparation for war was missing.

President Putin kept his invasion plans under the tightest secrecy, consulting with no more than a handful of others. According to one report, even Kremlin staff were shocked by Putin’s announcement of the “special military operation.”[505] As a result, secrecy impeded military preparations and their implementation, and also short-circuited consideration of the likely resistance to be expected on the part of Ukraine and its supporting coalition.

The poor performance of the Russian army in the war of attrition that followed suggests another price of secrecy. Evidently, trillions of rubles supposedly invested in military modernization before the war had been diverted or lost, with poor logistics, badly designed weapons, and defective or missing equipment parts as outcomes.[506] The growing secrecy surrounding prewar defense outlays and military procurements appeared designed to conceal Russia’s military modernization from foreign observers—but its more important effect may have been to hide the hollowing out of Russia’s military capacity by corruption and waste from the Kremlin leaders.

Thirty years after the fall of communism in Russia, the secrecy/capacity tradeoff was still at work. Moreover, the fact that the Putin administration erred on the side of too much secrecy, rather than too little, provided a clear signal of its authoritarian character.

CONCLUSIONS

Given that historians now have access to what happened behind the scenes of communist rule in the Soviet empire, it is tempting to think of the secret record as what “really” happened, and the rest as mere appearance. But this sets too low a value on appearances. Secrecy is also the control of appearance, and authoritarian rulers care greatly about the look of things. Secrecy can have a theatrical aspect, the “spectacle of secrecy” described by the literary scholar Cristina Vatulescu and expressed in the image of the “Iron Curtain.”[507] In other words, the formidable appearance of authority is also part of its essence, and the history of appearances is an essential aspect of what really happened in history.

Theatre rests on illusion, and the maintenance of illusions in the Soviet theatre relied on keeping the spectators away from the back of the stage. A question that follows is to what extent the backstage capabilities of the Soviet state lived up to what the spectators imagined. Here the study of secrecy itself is helpful because it can shed a clear light on the gap between the public spectacle and what went on behind the scenes.

Extreme secrecy gave the Soviet state the appearance of decisiveness, national purpose, a monolithic will, and an unrivalled ability to command the unanimous consent of the people. But the appearance was a façade, designed to deceive. This book has shown that behind the façade lay wall-to-wall bureaucracy, high decision costs (and sometimes gridlock), abuse of power for private purposes, the misallocation of talent, contagious mistrust, and a misinformed leadership. The outcome was a state that was less capable and more fragile than anyone, insider or outsider, could imagine at the time.

The ability of a government to make decisions and direct others to carry them out without undue procrastination or diversion of effort to other purposes is one aspect of state capacity. At first sight, secrecy seems like a powerful tool for augmenting the decisiveness of the state and containing its running costs. Indeed, authoritarian regimes often display impressive decisiveness and fearsome powers of enforcement; that’s one way we know that they can be called “authoritarian.”

The mystique of authoritarian regimes arises from concealment of their inner workings. Like the proverbial sausage, they “cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”[508] The historical research covered in this book suggests that the stratagem of concealment is deliberate. The records of the twentieth century’s most long-lived authoritarian regime show that its iron curtain of secrecy concealed colossal waste of opportunities and human resources, and diversion of time and effort to private goals.

Secrecy conceals weaknesses as well as strengths. It seems designed to hide clues, but it may also hide cluelessness. When we strip the secrecy away, we find that the true capacity of Secret Leviathan was much less than appeared on the surface. Soviet secrecy made authoritarian rule cumbersome and indecisive. Bureaucrats used nearly as much paper secretly registering and inventorizing secret correspondence as writing down the original secrets. Secretive government permitted everyday abuses, while denying a place in government business (that is, in nearly all the business there was) to faces that didn’t fit. Secretive government could withhold valuable information even from its own leaders.

I do not conclude that Soviet secrecy was irrational or mistakenly excessive from the standpoint of its rulers. The same security/usability tradeoff applied to Soviet government as to all business systems. With good reason, Soviet rulers preferred a regime that was more secretive, even if less—much less—user friendly. The force of reason behind this choice is suggested by the fact that, when the veil of secrecy was torn down, the system came down with it.

As described in this book, Secret Leviathan lives on only in a few corners of today’s world. Elsewhere it has adapted to the new era of general access to social media and information sharing. The modern exterior of the authoritarian state is Leviathan of a Thousand Lies. The beating heart of Leviathan of a Thousand Lies is still surrounded by secrecy, an impenetrable veil that prevents the investigation and accountability of power itself. But while secrecy remains at the inner core, modern dictators no longer practice comprehensive censorship of the public sphere. Instead, they propagate uncertainty by a smokescreen of myths and rumors. In this way, they aim to paralyze those inclined to collective opposition or resistance and neutralize threats to regime security.

Leviathan of a Thousand Lies continues to face the security/usability tradeoff discussed in Chapter 2. One reason is that the capacity of the state in Russia, China, and elsewhere relies on a population continually stirred up by disinformation. Leviathan of a Thousand Lies propagates many false models of how the modern world has come into being and how it works. These models rely heavily on stories of the past victimization and humiliation of the nation by foreign states and their citizens. Such stories stoke xenophobia and fear of diversity. They leave Russia a country with few friends in the world. Russia’s closest allies are China and India, two countries that hate each other. More generally, a society in which most people have been sold nonsensical beliefs or feel compelled to profess them would seem hard to govern sensibly. This is the subject for another book that someone else must write, if they have not done so already, so it is also my place to stop.

APPENDIX. Espionage as Open-Source Data Collection

This appendix gathers cases of Russian citizens known to have been prosecuted by the FSB in the early years of post-Soviet Russia for gathering open-source data and passing it to foreigners.

Babkin, Anatolii (2003)

On 19 February 2003, Anatolii Babkin was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, suspended, for passing information on underwater rocket technology to a US naval intelligence officer, Edmund Pope. His defense was that all the information was already in the public domain.[509]

Danilov, Valentin (2004)

On 5 November 2004, Danilov was convicted by a court in Krasnoiarsk of passing satellite information to a Chinese company. His defense was that the information had been declassified for more than a decade.[510]

Nikitin, Aleksandr (1996)

In February 1996, Aleksandr Nikitin, a retired nuclear-submarine engineer, was accused of passing state secrets to a Norwegian organization regarding environmental contamination caused by nuclear submarines. His defense was that all the information supplied was already in the public domain.[511] He appealed his case to the Supreme Court, where he was acquitted. Subsequently the FSB reopened his case with fresh charges.[512]

Pasko, Grigori (1997)

In 1997 Grigorii Pasko, a naval officer and journalist with the newspaper of the Russian Pacific Fleet, was accused of releasing classified information concerning the Russian Navy’s dumping of nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan. After several trials, he was eventually convicted of espionage.[513] His appeal to the European Court of Human Rights was rejected on the grounds that the information concerned was covered by the Russian Law on State Secrecy and that he owed a duty of discretion to his employer, the Russian State.[514]

Pavlov, Ivan (2007)

In October 2007, Ivan Pavlov, director of the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information, was severely beaten and hospitalized for several days. This came shortly after he sued the government to publish a register of standards for products and services produced in Russia. This register should have been available to Russian consumers free of charge. He won his case after recovering from his injuries and returning to the court.[515] In September 2021, Pavlov fled to Georgia to escape prosecution for disclosing supposedly classified information while acting as a defense lawyer for Ivan Safronov, a former space official charged with treason.[516]

Reshetin, Igor (2007)

In October 2007, Igor Reshetin, a Russian scientist, was sentenced to eleven years and six months for supplying reports on research relating to space vehicles to China. Although these reports were certified as nonclassified or already in the public domain, he was convicted along with three business associates; a fourth died before the trial, having signed a confession.[517]

Shchurov, Vladimir (2003)

On 25 August 2003, a court in Vladivostok sentenced Vladimir Shchurov to two years in prison for preparing to export underwater listening devices to China. He was then released immediately under an amnesty.[518] His defense was that the equipment was twenty years old and had found no uses in Russia; the Russian Academy of Sciences had approved the agreement, and the FSB had raised no objections to it.

Sutiagin, Igor (2004)

Igor Sutiagin, a civilian researcher on nuclear weapons, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on 7 April 2004, for passing information to the US Defense Intelligence Agency. His defense was that all the information he had collected was in the public domain; as a civilian, he had no access to military secrets.[519] In 2010 Sutiagin was released as part of the same spy swap as Anna Chapman and Sergei Skripal and, like Skripal, he settled in the UK. Sutiagin’s inclusion in the exchange was described as anomalous at the time: he was the only one involved who had not passed classified data.[520]

Примечания

1

For detail see Harrison and Simonov, “Voenpriemka,” 233-35

2

Wintrobe, Political Economy of Dictatorship, 247-79.

3

Foa and Mounk, “Democratic Disconnect”; see also Foa et al, Global Satisfaction with Democracy; Drutman, Goldman, and Diamond, Democracy Maybe.

4

IPSOS, Broken-System Sentiment in 2021. The direction of causation is unclear. Acemoglu et al., “(Successful) Democracies Breed Their Own Support,” find that the failure to overcome economic and political crisis contributes to disillusionment with democratic institutions. Funke, Schularick, and Trebesch, “Populist Leaders and the Economy,” draw a line from disillusionment with democracy through the adoption of populist economic policies to poor economic and social outcomes. Combining these findings suggests a self-reinforcing, downward spiral.

5

The phrase coined in David Runciman, “The Trouble with Democracy,” The Guardian (London), 8 November 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/08/trouble-with-democracy-david-runciman

6

For a brief account of terms applied to authoritarian systems in the political science literature, see Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, “A Note on Dictatorship,” in Substate Dictatorship, 311-16. A longer survey and treatment is by Frantz, Authoritarianism.

7

Svolik, Politics of Authoritarian Rule, 78-81.

8

“He [Stalin] must be assessed differently according to the time, the period; there were various Stalins. The postwar Stalin was one Stalin; the prewar Stalin was another, and Stalin between 1932 and the 1940s was yet another Stalin. Before 1932 he was entirely different. He changed. I saw at least five or six different Sta¬lins,” said Lazar Kaganovich, once Stalin’s deputy, looking back after many years. Cited in the editors’ introduction to Davies, Khlevniuk, and Rees, eds., Stalin- Kaganovich Correspondence,

9

The Bible, Job 41; Hobbes, Leviathan.

10

Acemoglu and Robinson, The Narrow Corridor

11

Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, book 3, 24-25.

12

Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 537

13

Some who wrote knowledgeably during the Cold War about what they could see of Soviet secrecy from the outside were journalists (Gunther, Inside Russia Today, 74-81; Smith, The Russians, 420-57); some were specialists (Bergson, “Reliability and Usability”; Hardt, statement in US Congress Joint Economic Commit¬tee, Allocation of Resources in the Soviet Union and China- Hutchings, Soviet Secrecy, Maggs, Nonmilitary Secrecy; Rosenfeldt, Knowledge and Power and Stalin’s Special Departments'). Among the contributors were also Russian insiders who made it to the West while the Cold War was still on (Vladimirov, “Glavlit”; Zhores Medvedev, Medvedev Papers and Soviet Science; Birman, Secret Incomes; Dunskaya, Security Practices at Soviet Research Facilities; Agursky and Adomeit, “The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex”)

14

Davies, “Making Economic Policy,” 63.

15

Fitzpatrick, “Closed City and Its Secret Archives,” 780.

16

Harrison, “Economic Information,” 99. A handwritten note on the MVD proposal reads: “Comrades Popov and Serov: consider and resolve. L. Beria.”

17

Among the first collections of this nature were Gregory (ed), Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy, and Gregory and Lazarev (eds), Economics of Forced Labor. The literature concerned, too voluminous to itemize here, has been surveyed by Gregory and Harrison, “Allocation under Dictatorship”; Kuromiya, “Stalin and His Era”; Ellman, “Political Economy of Stalinism”; Kragh, “The Soviet Enterprise”; and Markevich, “Economics and the Establishment of Stalinism.”

18

Secret archives: Khorkhordina, “Khraniteli sekretnykh dokumentov.” What was secret and what was not: Bone, “Soviet Controls on the Circulation of Information.” The censorship: Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura; Kurenkov, Zashchita voennoi i gosudarstvennoi tainy. Concealment: Siddiqi, “Soviet Secrecy” and “Atomized Urbanism”; Jenks, “Securitization and Secrecy.” Conspirativeness: Khlevniuk et al., eds, Stalinskoe Politbiuro; Kurenkov, Ot konspiratsiia к sekretnosti; Rosenfeldt, “Special” World. Government mail and telephone communications: Zakharova, “Trust in Bureaucracy and Technology.” Vetting personnel: Grybkaus kas, “The Soviet Dopusk System.”

19

Nikitchenko et al., Kontrrazvedyvatel’nyi slovar’ (classified “top secret”), 279. The Google Ngram Viewer at https://books.google.com/ngrams (accessed December 8, 2020), described by Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture,” shows that “rezhim sekretnosti” (the regime of secrecy) was effectively unknown in the Russian-language Google Books corpus of 2019 until 1987. The only exception is a tiny, near-imperceptible spike in 1956

20

Churilov, “Pervyi sovetskii ‘kseroks.’”

21

Lewis, “Communications Output in the USSR,” 411-12.

22

On KGB phone tapping, see Harrison, One Day We Will Live without Fear, 195-200.

23

At times the Kremlin’s foreign exchange was so short that even a Republican KGB could be refused. On 18 March 1974, the chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB wrote to Moscow on behalf of its information and analysis division requesting provision of a Xerox 720 photocopier. The refusal, dated 28 March, was based on “the extremely limited allocation of foreign currency.” Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/798, 26-27

24

Zakharova, “Trust in Bureaucracy and Technology,” 566-69. More generally, see Solnick, “Revolution, Reform and the Soviet Telephone System,” and Campbell, Soviet Telecommunications System

25

For the English translation see under “Seventeen Moments of Soviet History,” http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/organs-of-the-press/organs-of-the-press -texts/decree-on-the-press/. Egorov and Sonin, “Political Economics of Nondemocracy,” maintain that propaganda and censorship are conceptually the same, in the sense that they both amount to the manipulation of information by truncating some true signal. Organizationally, however, propaganda and censorship place very different demands on state capacity, and this difference explains the emphasis of the present chapter.

26

Lenin, “Pis’mo G. Miasnikovu” (5 August 1921).

27

Kurenkov, Ot konspiratsii k sekretnosti, 169.

28

Kurenkov, Ot konspiratsii k sekretnosti, 170.

29

The centralization of the censorship is described by Goriaeva, Politich- eskaia tsenzura, 162-240. The relative liberalism of the 1920s allowed E. H. Carr to take the story of his multivolume History of Soviet Russia through the end of 1928. Beyond that point, Carr decided, the growing secrecy of Soviet politics and policy making became too great a barrier to the writing of history. Carr, Bolshevik Revolution, Book 1, 6, and Carr, “Russian Revolution and the West,” 27.

30

Bergson, “Reliability and Usability of Soviet Statistics,” 14.

31

Rigberg, “Tsarist Press Law”; “Efficacy of Tsarist Censorship Operations,” and “Tsarist Censorship Performance.” In 1906, for example, the scope of budgetary secrecy was debated in print as Russia moved toward constitutional rule. Avinov, “Sekretnye kredity v nashem gosudarstvennom biudzhete.” Avinov was a prominent Cadet (Constitutional Democrat). I thank Vasilii Zatsepin for this reference.

32

Rigberg, “Efficacy of Tsarist Censorship Operations,” 343.

33

Vladimirov, “Glavlit,” 41. The author, a Soviet science journalist, defected to the United Kingdom in 1966.

34

Various translations of konspiratsiia are possible. Rosenfeldt, “Special” World, 66, prefers the literal equivalent: conspiracy. This does not seem right: while the two words look the same, the Russian konspiratsiia suggests the essence of conspiracy rather than a particular plot, for which the Russian word would be zag- ovor. Katherine Verdery, Secrets and Truths, location 560, translates the Romanian conspirativitate as “conspirativity”; she identifies it with the compartmentalization of intelligence work. It is amusing to add that a book on KGB espionage in the United States (Haynes et al., Spies, chapter 4, under “Harold Glasser”) translates konspiratsiia as “tradecraft.” In its context, this makes perfect sense: conspirativeness was the tradecraft of spies. The distinctive feature of the Soviet Union is that conspirativeness was the tradecraft of every branch of government, including those concerned with, say, licensing motor vehicles, or fixing the price of admission to movie theaters. Finally, while Lih, “Lenin and Bolshevism,” 58, does not offer a translation, he emphasizes the original meaning of konspiratsiia, that of secure communication between the underground party and its agents in the mass movement

35

Kurenkov, Ot konspiratsii к sekretnosti, 24,46.

36

Voronov, “‘Arkhisekretno, shifrom!’”

37

Service, Last of the Tsars, 252-53. On Lenin’s efforts to avoid leaving written evidence of his involvement in various matters, see also 245-46.

38

Kurenkov, Ot konspiratsiia к sekretnosti, 102.

39

Kurenkov, Ot konspiratsiia к sekretnosti, 84.

40

Istochnik, “Praviashchaia partiia”; Khlevniuk et al., eds, Stalinskoe Politbi- uro v 30-e gody, 74-77; Kurenkov, Ot konspiratsiia к sekretnosti, 224-45.

41

Zakharova, “Trust in Bureaucracy and Technology.”

42

Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, 425-27, recounts the establishment of the Cheka. Werth, “Soviet Union,” tells the history of the Soviet secret police up to the end of World War II.

43

Lezina, “Soviet State Security and the Regime of Secrecy,” 41; see also Rosenfeldt, “Special” World, 98-99.

44

Simonov, “‘Strengthen the Defence of the Land of the Soviets’,” 1360. Also, Cooper, introduction to Cooper, Dexter, and Harrison, “The Numbered Factories and Other Establishments.”

45

Nove, Economic History of the USSR, 331-77; Hanson, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, 48-97.

46

Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer; Hardy, Gulag after Stalin.

47

A decree issued in December 1938, in the wake of the Great Terror, required prosecutors seeking the arrest of party members to obtain the prior approval of the provincial party committee. At the time it was assumed that prior approval would not be unreasonably withheld. By the post-Stalin period, depending on both circumstances and personalities, the effect could be to extend a degree of protection to the party member accused of an offence by giving priority to party investigation over the decision to prosecute. Cohn, High Title of a Communist, 51-53.

48

Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 81.

49

Hornsby, Protest, Reform, and Repression, 130-31.

50

Hardy and Skorobogatov, “‘We Can’t Shoot Everyone’.”

51

For the change in public discussion of economic matters, see Hanson, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, 67-69

52

Bittner, Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw, 40-74.

53

Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 165-170, and Substate Dictatorship, 5-11.

54

Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Substate Dictatorship, 47-49,73-77.

55

“The overwhelming majority of the 680,000 people deported to special settlements from 1946 to 1952 were from the newly occupied or reoccupied western regions.... To the extent that there were expulsions of‘internal’ groups ..., these were relatively limited and targeted in nature.” Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 173П. See further Chapter 5.

56

Adamec, “Courts of Honor.” A postwar court of honor is featured in Chapter 4.

57

Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 167.

58

Tikhonov, “End of the Gulag”; Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 123-331

59

Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 133-42.

60

These themes are shared by various recent histories of the Thaw: Bittner, Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw; Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer; Hardy, Gulag after Stalin; Hornsby, Protest, Reform, and Repression; Jones, ed., Dilemmas of De-Stalinization; Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma.

61

For the distinction see Frantz, Authoritarianism, 107. The title of Hardy and Skorobogatov, “‘We Can’t Shoot Everyone’,” captures the spirit of the transition: in 1962, Leonid Brezhnev wrote that “we can’t shoot everyone,” but that sense of restraint would not have occurred to anyone in 1937.

62

Starting points can be found in Krementsov, Stalinist Science, and Jenks, “Securitization and Secrecy.”

63

Sam Lebovic, “The Surprisingly Short History of American Secrecy,” July 5, 2016, American Historical Association, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/summer-2016/the-surprisingly-short-history-of-american-secrecy.

64

Executive Order no. 10290,27 September 1951, Federation of American Scientists website under “Selected Executive Orders on National Security,” https:// fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/. In this chapter, further references to executive orders are given in the text by the name of the president followed by the number of the order and the year of its publication, the text of the order being available at the same address on the Federation of American Scientists website unless otherwise mentioned. See also helpful discussion by Aftergood, “Secrecy and Accountability in U.S. Intelligence”; Elsea, “Protection of Classified Information”; Moynihan Commission, Report; Quist, Security Classification of Information, vol. 1.

65

Nikitchenko et al., eds, Kontrrazvedyvatel’nyi slovar’, 75,292,323-24.

66

Also called “top-top secret” by Agursky and Adomeit, “Soviet Military- Industrial Complex,” 28.

67

Hoover/LYA K-1/10/405, 24-26 and 27-28 (memos to USSR KGB investigation department chief Volkov A. F., both signed by Lithuania KGB investigation department chief Kismanis E., 6 November 1973 and 1 March 1974, respectively)

68

As discussed by Steven Aftergood in “Trump Jr: Declassify Everything!,” FAS Secrecy Blog, December 6, 2020, https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2020/12/declassify-everything/.

69

See also Quist, Security Classification of Information, vol. 1, 72. Once the Cold War came to an end, the Clinton rules (EO no. 12958,1995) for the first time required the opening of all classified documentation after twenty-five years unless specifically exempted, but exemptions were many and broad. The Obama rules (EO no. 13526, 2009) added: “No information may remain classified indefinitely.” Time limits on classification have had practical consequences. These rules were still in force in the winter of 2020. Personnel shortages arising from the COVID- 19 pandemic of that year left officials of many US agencies scrambling to complete their review of documents coming up for otherwise automatic declassification, as discussed by Steven Aftergood in “2020 Declassification Deadline Remains in Force,” FAS Secrecy Blog, December 6,2020, https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2o2o/12/ declass-deadline-2020/.

70

Described by Haynes and Klehr, Venona; Haynes et al., Spies.

71

Executive Order 9835 is available from the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/executive-orders/9835/executive-order-9835. See also Eisenhower’s EO no. 10450 (1953).

72

Rigby, “Staffing USSR Incorporated”; Harris, “Stalin as General Secretary.”

73

Grybkauskas, “Soviet Dopusk System.”

74

Siddiqi, “Soviet Secrecy.”

75

Corruption: Heinzen, The Art of the Bribe. Cheating: Harrison, “Forging Success.”

76

For example, Egorov and Sonin. “The Political Economics of Nondemocracy.”

77

Rubanov, “Poteri ot zasekrechivaniia informatsii.” Rubanov attributed the estimate to Boris Raizberg, a missile engineer who became an economist.

78

Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 269

79

Harrison, “Foundations of the Soviet Command Economy.”

80

The term “police state” had its origins in the mid-nineteenth-century development of Prussia’s bureaucracy, but it became widely used only in the 1950s when observers grappled with the similarities and differences of “totalitarian” rule in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. Again, see Google’s Ngram Viewer at https:// books.google.com/ngrams

81

For other purposes, the goals of communist rule might be formulated otherwise. Many economists have sought to analyze the Soviet economy on the basis that the goal of communist rule was to promote civilian development goals such as industrial modernization or productivity growth. An up-to-date example of that tradition, well received and widely cited, is Allen, Farm to Factory. By contrast Kontorovich, Reluctant Cold Warriors, argues that Soviet economic policies and institutions are better understood as promoting military power. For discussion see Harrison, “Foundations of the Soviet Command Economy,” 375-76

82

Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 713-15; Lenin, “Rech’ pered agitatorami,” 327. On 5 February 1918 Lenin spoke to party activists about to fan out to the countryside to campaign for food confiscations: “The old Bolshevik was right,” Lenin said, “when he explained Bolshevism to the Cossack. When the Cossack asked if it was true that the Bolsheviks are looters, the old man replied: Yes, we loot the looters.” “We loot the looters” is a widespread but loose translation of “My grabim nagrablen- noe,” literally, “We loot what was looted.” See also Millar, “Note on Primitive Accumulation.”

83

Lenin, “Groziashchaia katastrofa,” 198. See also Harrison, “Communism and Economic Modernization.”

84

On privacy, Posner, Economics of Justice, 271.

85

Hanson and Sigman, “Leviathan’s Latent Dimensions.”

86

Johnson and Koyama, “States and Economic Growth,” 2.

87

Besley and Persson, Pillars of Prosperity, 6.

88

Dincecco, State Capacity and Economic Development, 2.

89

Dincecco and Katz, “State Capacity and Long-Run Economic Performance”; Besley and Persson, Pillars of Prosperity, 103-68.

90

Aspects of state capacity as complements: Besley and Persson, Pillars of prosperity, 6-10.

91

Finan, Olken, and Pande, “Personnel Economics of the State”; Xu Guo, “Costs of Patronage.”

92

An exception is Skocpol and Finegold, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention.”

93

For historical discussion see Crowfoot and Harrison, “USSR Council of Ministers under Late Stalinism”; Pannell, “Growth, Stagnation, and Transition”; Gregory, Terror by Quota, 81-106; Markevich and Zhuravskaya, “M-form Hierarchy with Poorly-Diversified Divisions.”

94

Markevich, “How Much Control Is Enough?”

95

Hall, “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State,” refers to these adjustments as policy changes of first, second, and third order respectively.

96

North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders, 3-6. On the consequences of political failure, see Fouquet and Broadberry, “Seven Centuries of European Economic Growth”; Broadberry and Wallis, “Growing, Shrinking, and Long Run Economic Performance”; Broadberry and Gardner, “Economic Growth in sub-Saharan Africa.”

97

Acemoglu and Robinson call the domain of coevolution the “narrow corridor”; they call the competitive coevolution of state and society the “Red Queen” effect, and they call the result “Shackled Leviathan.” Acemoglu and Robinson, Narrow Corridor, 33-73.

98

Acemoglu et al., “Perils of High-Powered Incentives”; Acemoglu and Robinson, Narrow Corridor, 354.

99

Besley and Persson, Pillars of Prosperity; Dincecco, State Capacity and Economic Development; and Acemoglu and Robinson, Narrow Corridor. Surprising resilience and fragility in peace and war: communist rule has collapsed in Europe but persists in China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba. Communist rule collapsed in the Soviet Union in 1991, at a time of international relaxation, but not in 1941 with the Kremlin in sight of an invading army. Exceptionally, experiences under communism are discussed by the authors of State Capacity Building in Contemporary China, edited by Naito and Macikenaite.

100

Besley and Persson, Pillars of Prosperity, 2-5; Dincecco, State Capacity and Economic Development, 2-6.

101

Bryan Caplan, ‘“State Capacity’ Is Sleight of Hand,” 5 June 2018, https:// www.econlib.org/state-capacity-is-sleight-of-hand/; “The Underbelly of State Capacity,” 7 June 2018, https://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/06/some_stuff_to_k .html; and “State Priorities not State Capacity,” 29 April 2020, https://www.econlib.org/state-priorities-not-state-capacity/.

102

Dincecco, State Capacity and Economic Development, 4-45; Johnson and Koyama, “States and Economic Growth,” 15-16.

103

Europe before 1914: Dincecco and Prado, “Warfare, Fiscal Capacity, and Performance,” and Dincecco, Political Transformations and Public Finances; Europe today: Bruszt and Campos, “Economic Integration and State Capacity.” North America: Acemoglu, Moscona, and Robinson, “State Capacity and American Technology.” Latin America: Cardenas, “State Capacity in Latin America.” Africa: Dincecco, Fenske, and Onorato, “Is Africa Different?” India before Colonial Rule: Dincecco, Fenske, Menon, and Mukherjee, “Pre-colonial Warfare”; and under colonial rule: Roy, “State Capacity and Colonial India.” China before communism: Ma and Rubin, “Paradox of Power.”

104

Geloso and Salter, “State Capacity and Economic Development.” Koyama agrees (cited at length by Bryan Caplan, “Koyama Responds on State Capacity,” 11 June 2018, https://www.econlib.org/archives/2o18/o6/koyama_responds.html).

105

Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” 42.

106

List, National System of Political Economy, Chapter 4 (“The English”).

107

It is important to this conclusion that we start from description of state capacity, not from a normative concept. For example, the Worldwide Governance Indicators of the World Bank (https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/) are sometimes used as measures of state capacity (e.g., Savoia and Sen, “Measurement, Evolution, Determinants, and Consequences”). These give weight to such aspects of “good” governance as transparency, accountability, and the rule of law. On those criteria, communist states would generally fall short. The point here is that, while the capacities of communist states may not have been normatively good, they were exceptional in scale and scope.

108

Geddes, Paradigms and Sand Castles, 3.

109

Geddes, “What Do We Know about Democratization,” based on a dataset of 161 authoritarian regimes from 1946 to 1998; Frantz, Authoritarianism, 217, based on an expanded dataset of 280 authoritarian regimes from 1946 to 2010, described by Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions.” See also Dimitrov, “Understanding Communist Collapse and Resilience,” 5, based on a dataset of “39 noncommunist single-party regimes ...,20 nondemocratic monarchies, and 15 communist regimes.”

110

Levitsky and Way, “Durable Authoritarianism.”

111

Lachapelle et al., “Social Revolution and Authoritarian Durability,” 558; see also Smith, “Life of the Party”; Levitsky and Way, “Durable Authoritarianism.”

112

Yurchak, Everything Was Forever.

113

Johansson, “Security Management.”

114

Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin, “Why Resource-Poor Dictators Allow Freer Media,” 660-61. Their study used scores for media freedom from Freedom House and government effectiveness and regulatory quality scores from the World Bank; it used instrumental variables to check for reverse causation.

115

Economists will recognize this as a “toy” model in the sense of Bliss, “Application of Toy Economic Models.” It lacks generality; it is “silly, little, and useful.”

116

Frankland, Child of My Time, 83.

117

Egorov and Sonin, “Political Economics of Non-democracy,” 2.

118

Wintrobe, Political Economy of Dictatorship, 20-39; Greitens, Dictators and their Secret Police, 34.

119

Egorov and Sonin, “Dictators and Their Viziers”; Zakharov, “Loyalty- Competence Trade-Off in Dictatorships.” The prehistory of this idea is discussed in Chapter 5.

120

“Public choice” is essentially the idea that one can understand political activity in the same way as economic activity, that is, individual political actors pursue their perceived self-interest by allocating resources and cooperating or competing with others subject to material and institutional constraints. See Shughart, “Public Choice.”

121

Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin, “Why Resource-Poor Dictators Allow Freer Media.”

122

In the context of US secrecy, this language is found on almost every page of the chairman’s foreword to the Report of the Moynihan Commission, xxxi- xlv, as well as throughout the report itself. In the Soviet context see Mikoyan, “Eroding the Soviet ‘Culture of Secrecy’”; Zakharova, “Trust in Bureaucracy and Technology.”

123

Lih, “Lenin and Bolshevism,” 58, traces the Bolshevik idea of “conspirativeness” back to the revolutionary underground of 1906.

124

Plokhy, Chernobyl, 247-48.

125

On the secret councils of Imperial Russia, see Tarschys, “Secret Institutions in Russian Government.”

126

North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, 3-4.

127

Totalitarian rule: Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura v SSSR, 8. Foreign encirclement: Kurenkov, Ot konspiratsiia к sekretnosti, 219.

128

United Nations, Basic Principles of the System of Balances.

129

Goskomstat, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1990 g., 5.

130

The problem of comparing “the size of the public sector” across the OECD is further discussed by Lanfranchi and Perrin, Measuring Public Employment in OECD Countries.

131

On Soviet statistics see Treml and Hardt (eds), Soviet Economic Statistics; Wheatcroft and Davies, “Crooked Mirror of Soviet Economic Statistics.”

132

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/639, 6

133

To illustrate, ledger no. 221 of the Lithuania KGB listed decrees, directives, and instructions from the KGB headquarters in Moscow through 1972, divided into sections: top secret (pages 1 to 30), secret (31 to 90), nonsecret (121 to 180), and “for personnel” fpo lichnomu sostavu) (181 to 200). Hoover/LYA K-1/10/403, 1-110.

134

Hoover/GARF R94i4/ia/i93,4-40 (deed of transfer signed by former chief of MVD Gulag Chirkov and deputy chief Kovalev, 7 January 1953).

135

Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575,107 (deed signed by military unit 7557 chief of secret unit Kozyrevskii, manager of archival file office Yakushev, and secret unit despatcher Ludtsev, 10 November 1951)—a document with the wrong serial number. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 28 (deed signed by MVD security administration chief of secretariat Polovnev and filing officer Laskina, 13 June 1951)—a document with the wrong number of sheets appended. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 31 (deed signed by MVD Sakhalin ITL administration, chief of secret unit Sil’vanovskii, senior inspector Karpukhina, and senior inspector Kovbasa, 31 July 1951)—a document lacking “secret” classification. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 33 (deed signed by Riazan oblast UMVD, chief of secretariat Aleshin, filing officer Gracheva, and typist Kochetygova, 13 August 1951)—a document intended for another recipient. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 35 (deed signed by MVD Gulag senior operational commissioner of secretariat Shaposhnikov, assistant Petrova, and assistant inspector of secretariat Baranova, 17 August 1951)—documents wrongly numbered and wrongly addressed. From another archive, Hoover/LYA K-1/10/308, 56 (deed signed by 301 Training Parachute Regiment Capt. Sliadnev, Junior Sergeant Shlez- inger, and servicewoman Os’kina, addressed to USSR KGB special department chief, copied to Lithuania KGB second administration, 22 March 1963)—a document wrongly classified and wrongly addressed.

136

Hoover/LYA K-1/10/406, 1-2 (memo to Lithuania KGB deputy chairman Aleksandrov, signed by seventh department chief Bukauskas and seventh department second section chief Abramov, 14 March 1972). Hoover/LYA K-1/10/406, 16 (memo to Lithuania KGB acting deputy chairman for personnel Armonavicus, signed by USSR KGB training department chief Ivanov, 21 March 1972). Hoover/ LYA K-1/10/406, 17 (memo signed by Lithuania KGB chairman Petkevicius, 29 March 1972). Hoover/LYA K-1/10/406, 18-19 (finding of investigation, signed by Lithuania KGB investigation department senior investigator Urbonas and chief Kismanis, 3 March 1972; confirmed by Petkevicius, 4 April 1972). The proceedings were dropped, and the inspector was severely reprimanded.

137

Hoover/RGANI, 6/6/1575, 33-34 (report to Poskrebyshev, signed by KPK chairman Shkiriatov, 16 April 1951).

138

Hoover/GARF, R94i4/ia/i45 (Gulag chief Nasedkin to chiefs of camps of republics, regions, and provinces, 1 July 1946); Hoover/GARF, R94i4/ia/84, 6 (acting Gulag chief Dobrynin, decree no. 4,13 January 1947); Hoover/GARF, R94i4/ia/9i, 1 (Gulag chief Dolgikh to minister Kruglov, 22 May 1951).

139

Hoover/GARF, R9414/1/85, 170 (Gulag chief Dobrynin, “top-secret” decree no. 139,17 October 1947).

140

To illustrate: Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575,12 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration chief of organizational department Koriukin, senior lieutenant Grigor’ev and junior sergeant Safronova, 10 May 1951), counting secret and top-secret documents, 737 incoming and 371 outgoing. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 13 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration senior assistant to chief of quartermaster’s division Ziuzin and secretary of quartermaster’s division Ragina, 8 May 1951), counting secret and top-secret documents for April, incoming 130, outgoing 73. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575,14 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration senior instructor of political unit Bartkevich and secretary of political unit Karmanenkova, 15 May 1951) counting secret and top-secret documents for April, incoming 281, outgoing 88. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 15 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration secretary of department of combat readiness Demushkina and senior assistant of the chief of department Taran, 8 May 1951) counting secret and top-secret documents for April, incoming from no. 736 to no. 907, outgoing from no. 3/46 to no. 3/74. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 16 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration filing officer of secretariat Laskina and cryptographer of secretariat Chernenko, 10 May 1951) counting secret and top-secret documents for April, not numbered but all present and correct. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575,18 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration senior veterinary officer Kuz’kin and secretary of operations department Kalmykova, 25 May 1951), counting secret and top-secret documents for April, incoming 805, outgoing 167. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575,19 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration senior instructor of political unit Kuriachii and secretary of political unit Karmanenkova, 5 June 1951) counting secret and top-secret documents for May, incoming 185, outgoing 30. Hoover/ GARF R9414/1/2575, 20 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration filing officer of secretariat Laskina and cryptographer of secretariat Chernenko, 8 June 1951), counting secret and top-secret documents for April. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 21 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration senior instructor of political unit Bartkevich and secretary of political unit Karmanenkova, 15 May 1951), counting secret and top-secret documents for 1 to 10 June, incoming 69, outgoing 27. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 22 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration senior assistant to chief of quartermaster’s division Ziuzin and assistant to chief of quartermaster’s division Ovechkin, 12 June 1951), counting secret and top-secret documents for May, incoming 106, outgoing 89. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 23 (deed signed by MVD GULAG security administration senior assistants to chief of orgstroi department Sorokin and Kurzikova, department secretary Safronova, 16 June 1951), counting secret and top-secret documents for May, incoming 748, outgoing 311. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 24 (deed signed by MVD GULAG operations department officers Kuz’kin, Pvlov, Usatov, Rudnev, and Salo, 14 June 1951) counting secret and top-secret documents for May to 10 June, incoming 1,137, outgoing 259, and from the first of the year, incoming 4,028, outgoing 868.

141

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/636,155-61 (deed of transfer, signed by LSSR KGB second administration first department, outgoing operational commissioner Marma and incoming Kirichenko, 11 June 1965). From earlier years see also Hoover/LYA K-1/10/34,348-51 (deed of transfer of LSSR MGB decrees held by Department “B”, signed by outgoing department secretary Nesytykh and incoming Litvinova, 8 December 1947), listing 234 decrees and directives of the Lithuania MGB including 69 top secret, 47 secret, and 117 nonsecret and other, noting that two are in the possession of comrades Andreev and Obukauskas; at the level of a parish office, Hoover/LYA K-1/10/35, 192-228 (deed of transfer, signed by LSSR MGB Zarasai parish outgoing division secretary Sukhorukova and incoming Shishin, 12 July 1949), listing 1,393 decrees, instructions and circulars of USSR and Lithuania MGB issued since 1939, of which 798 were top secret or secret; from the same period, Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 1 (deed of transfer signed by MVD GULAG security administration secretary of quartermaster’s division Ragina and deputy chief of quartermaster’s division Ovechkin, 16 May 1951); Hoover/GARF R94i4/ia/i93, 4-40 (deed of transfer signed by former chief of USSR MVD GULAG Chirkov and deputy chief Kovalev, 7 July 1953). Hoover/GARF R94i4/ia/i93, 64-99 (deed of transfer signed by Gulag secretariat first division outgoing deputy chief Savina and incoming Konovalov, 7 July 1953).

142

Hoover/GARF R94i4/ia/i93, 60 (Gulag chief Dobrynin to Interior minister Kruglov, 2 February 1948). The memo bears Dobrynin’s handwritten note: “The minister has been informed. He has decreed to search again for the aforementioned decree. Dobrynin. 2.2.48.”

143

Hoover/GARF R94i4/idop/i382, 56 (memo to all chiefs of camps, signed by NKVD administration for prisoners of war and internees chief Petrov, 10 November 1943).

144

To illustrate: for 1953 the MVD GULAG security administration had a list of 492 file titles (with 8 titles in reserve, taking the total up to 500), classified “top secret,” covering 27 typewritten pages, including directives, plans, and correspondence with each of the Gulag’s units and subunits. Hoover/GARF R94i4/idop/i94, 2-28 (nomenklatura of secret files of the MVD GULAG security administration for 1953, signed by security administration chief of secretariat Teterevenkov and acting chief of security administration Egnarov, 22 December 1952). For similar documents see Hoover/GARF R94i4/idop/i94, 80-82 (nomenklatura of 32 secret flies of the MVD GULAG secretariat for 1953, signed by deputy chief of secretariat Kovalev, no date but December 1952, classified “secret”) and Hoover/GARF R94i4/idop/i94, 83-84 (excerpt from nomenklatura of 16 secret files of the MVD GULAG secretariat, cryptography division, for 1953 (second half), signed by chief of cryptography division Malakhov, 29 August 1953, classified “secret”).

145

Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575,132-4 (deed of inspection of secret file keeping and the storage of state secrets at MVD Gulag, 69th militarized security detachment, signed by Karaganda province MVD administration, operational commissioner Tret’ian, 26 November 1951).

146

An inventory of incoming and outgoing secret correspondence of the MVD security administration in November 1952 found documents not yet filed, going back to January, with delays in filing in all departments. Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2588, 90 (deed of inventorization, signed by GULAG MVD security administration senior lieutenant of the internal service Babinskii and four others, dated 6 November 1952). A Lithuania KGB report on security in ministries and state organizations in April 1969 noted that the Kédainiai district party secretary was failing to keep files in good order. Hoover/LYA K-1/3/670, 67-73 (report “On the status of provision of preservation of state secrets in ministries and institutions of the republic,” signed by LSSR Council of Ministers chief of administration Petrila, April 1969) on pages 67-68.

147

In August 1944, the chief of Gulag complained of secrecy violations in camps and colonies. He cited reports from camps in the Khabarovsk region that listed files with top-secret papers, ledgers of secret correspondence, and stamps and seals openly accessible on office desks, and top-secret papers and topographical maps in cupboards open to prisoners. Hoover/GARF, R9414/1/324, 84 (Gulag chief Nasedkin to chiefs of local camp administrations, 19 August 1944). A Lithuania KGB report of April 1969 recorded that the safe for secret documents belonging to one of the local authorities was often left unsealed. It also criticized a variety of ministries, enterprises, and institutes for lack of separately enclosed office space for those executing secret paperwork. Hoover/LYA K-1/3/670, 67-73 (report “On the status of provision of preservation of state secrets in ministries and institutions of the republic,” signed by LSSR SM chief of administration Petrila, April 1969).

148

Khlevniuk et al., eds, Politbiuro TsK VPK(b), 293-300. Voznesenskii was afterward arraigned and executed for treason and undermining the economy (Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 83-89).

149

See, in addition to those already cited, a Stalin-era MGB inspection of Gosprodsnab, the state committee for supply of consumer and industrial goods, reported at second hand in Hoover/RGANI, 6/6/1650, 21-23 (report to KPK chairman Shkiriatov, signed by responsible controller Byshov, June 1953); and on similar lines a Brezhnev-era report on local government and party organizations in Soviet Lithuania in Hoover/LYA K-1/3/670, 55-61 (report to the Lithuanian party Central Committee, signed by KGB chair Petkevicius, 31 March 1969). Hoover/ LYA K-1/3/670, 88-91 (to Lithuanian Council of Ministers chairman Manyusis I. A., signed by LSSR KGB chair Petkevicius, 1 April 1969).

150

Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 17 (deed of file destruction signed by MVD GULAG security administration cryptographer of secretariat Chernenko and filing officer of secretariat Ivanova, 17 May 1951); Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2588, 13-37 (deed of file destruction signed by MVD GULAG security administration operation department chief of third division Shipkov, senior operational commission Kharchevnikov, and secretary of operations department Kalmykova, 1 April 1952). Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2588, 63-69 (deed of destruction, signed by MVD GULAG security administration operations department, senior operational commissioner Kharchevnikov, senior veterinary officer Kuz’kin, and secretary Kalmykova, 26 July 1952). Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2588,78-79 (deed of destruction, signed by MVD GULAG security administration, operations department deputy chief Khanevskii, senior operational commissioner Dmitriev, senior veterinary officer Kuz’kin, 14 August 1952), referring to a 32-page appendix listing each document destroyed); Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2590, 29-30 (selection of documentary materials of the USSR MVD GULAG security administration subject to destruction, signed by chief of secretariat Teterevenkov and four others, 16 December 1952).

151

Khlevniuk et al., Politbiuro TsK VPK(b), 296

152

Gregory and Harrison, “Allocation under Dictatorship,” 721.

153

The website of the US National Archives and Records administration observes: “Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States federal government, only i%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever” http://www.archives .gov/about/. Haines and Langbart, Unlocking the Files of the FBI, xvi, report: “In 1984 the National Archive proposed and the FBI accepted recommendations for the FBI Records Retention Schedule, which would preserve approximately 20 percent of all Bureau records as permanently valuable and allow for the destruction of the rest.”

154

Agursky and Adomeit, “Soviet Military-Industrial Complex,” 27-36.

155

Dunskaya, Security Practices of Soviet Scientific Research Facilities, 131.

156

The phrase “cult of secrecy” was popularized by Rubanov, “Ot kul’t sekret- nosti к informatsionnoi kul’tury.” Here I extend its meaning somewhat.

157

As discussed by Zakharova, “Trust in Bureaucracy and Technology.”

158

Hoover/LYA K-1/3/786, 28-38 (report “On the condition of and measures to improve work with documents in the LSSR KGB,” signed by chief of inspection Rupsys, chief of information and analysis division Andriatis, and chief of secretariat Grakauskas, 8 April 1974) on folio 33. This report also gave figures for the Lithuania KGB second (counterintelligence) administration alone (30,965 items of secret and top-secret correspondence in 1971, 31,236 in 1972, and 33,000 in 1973) and for the Kaunas city department of the KGB (4,658 items in 1973 up to 10 April, and 5,456 in the same period of 1974, an increase of 12 percent).

159

In 1971 the Lithuania KGB employed 1,218 officers, enlisted men, and civilian employees, reflecting slow growth over preceding years. Anusauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 43.

160

This kind of copying seems to explain the local spread of most kinds of petty offending. Glaeser, Sacerdote, and Scheinkman, “Crime and Social Interactions.”

161

File catalogues in Russian archives, if they exist, are paper based. Often, basic file descriptors are lacking. Published catalogues are generally not detailed at the file level. See for illustration the 700-page catalogue of the Gulag archive Sovetskaia repressivno-karatel’naia politika i penitentsiarnaia Sistema edited by Werth and Mironenko; also the online catalogues of GARF at http://opisi.garf.su/ and of RGAE at http://opisi.rgae.ru/.

162

Anusauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 43.

163

Quoted by Weiner and Rahi-Tamm, “Getting to Know You,” 7.

164

These figures emerged from the Home Office’s annual “activity-based costing” review of police budgets: Ben Leapman, “Police Paperwork Costs Hit 1625m,” The Telegraph (London), 3 December 2006. The figure of £625 million extrapolated the Met’s figures across the country. In 2009 a Home Office report (Normington, Reducing the Data Burden on Police Forces) made recommendations to reduce paperwork burdens on the police—including to abolish activity-based costing. For this reason, there are no more recent figures.

165

E.g., US Information Security Oversight Office, 2011 Report to the President.

166

US Information Security Oversight Office, 2011 Report to the President: Cost Estimates, 3. In 2010 total US federal government costs of “information security” were ¢5.65 billion. This figure covers “information systems security” (the largest component) together with costs of classification management, declassification, operations security, and technical surveillance countermeasures. To this could be added $352.5 million laid out on “classification management,” making $6.0 billion in total. This figure excludes outlays on the physical security of persons and installations, declassification, education and training, operations security, technical surveillance countermeasures, and “security oversight, management, and planning.” In the same year, 95 percent of original classification activity was undertaken in the Departments of Defense, State, and Justice (US Information Security Oversight Office, 2011 Report to the President, 6), and 95 percent of ¢6.0 billion makes $5.7 billion.

167

US Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the U.S. Government. Fiscal Year 2013,74 and 76 (Table 3.2—Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962-2017, line items 051 “military personnel”), 153, and 752

168

Hoover/GARF, R-9492/2/79, 2-26.

169

And they did multiply. The previous edition of the instructions, dated 1929, was limited to 27 pages. The final edition, dated 1987, ran to 222 pages. Lezina, “Soviet State Security and the Regime of Secrecy,” 44.

170

Gorlizki, “Ordinary Stalinism,” 722-23

171

On the background, history, and outcomes of the KR project, see Kre- mentsov, Stalinist Science, 131-43; Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 36-38.

172

Haynes and Klehr, Venona; Haynes et al., Spies.

173

Hough, “Debates about the Postwar World”; Zubkova, Russia After the War.

174

Roskin, “Toxin Therapy of Experimental Cancer.”

175

Ironically, it was the nationwide coordination of the secret meetings that caused news of the affair to leak abroad. Correspondence about the KR affair between Komsomol officials in Moscow and Frunze, Uzbekistan, was intercepted and shared in British-American signals intelligence transcripts. TNA, UKUSA Agreement Files, S/ARU-E/T54, “Party Action on the Anti-state Activities of Two Soviet Professors” (Codeword—Glint), September 25,1947, HW 75/167, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.Uk/details/r/C11538964.

176

Gorlizki, “Ordinary Stalinism,” 721. Other consequences included complete bans on the publication of scientific reports of work in progress (Medvedev, Soviet Science, 121), and of economic statistics of any kind (Kaser, “Publication of Soviet Statistics,” 50).

177

As described in Chapter 3, the downfall of Nikolai Voznesenskii, the wartime economic chief and once Stalin’s favorite, was triggered in March 1949 by a scandal over the negligent loss of secret papers in Gosplan, but his subsequent execution in August was for treason and undermining the economy under Article 58, which dealt with counterrevolutionary crimes. Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 83-89.

178

Gorlizki, “Rules, Incentives and Soviet Campaign Justice”; Heinzen, ‘“Campaign Spasm’.”

179

Hoover/GARF, R-9492/ia/5i3, 8-18 (“Communication by the USSR Prosecutor”).

180

Krementsov, Stalinist Science, 136.

181

Lebina, “Defence-Industry Complex in Leningrad,” 187. See also Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes.

182

The scale, scope, organization, and conditions of Soviet forced labor have been an important focus of research in formerly secret Russian archives since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Significant histories and documentary collections on Soviet forced labor are now available, written in English and Russian from various disciplinary perspectives. In the English language see Alexopoulos, Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag; Applebaum, Gulag; Bacon, Gulag at War; Barnes, Death and Redemption; Bell, Stalin’s Gulag at War; Gregory and Lazarev (eds), Economics of Forced Labor; Khlevniuk, History of the Gulag. By contrast, this chapter has a narrow focus on forced labor as a business and how this business was affected by the secrecy governing the location and identification of labor camps. Closely related to that focus is research on the concealed existence and location of the Soviet “closed” cities, as discussed by Siddiqi, “Atomized Urbanism.”

183

Hoover/GARF, R-9414/1/335, 11-12 (“List of questions of the work of the GULAG of the USSR MVD and its peripheral organs that are state secrets [gosudarstvennaia taina],” signed by acting Gulag chief Dobrynin, 17 June 1947). Applebaum, Gulag, no, notes that “subsection” was an internal codeword for a labor camp. On 10 December 1951, USSR interior minister Kruglov issued a similar “List of questions of special importance [osoboi vazhnosti] about the GULAG of the USSR MVD, correspondence about which should be classified ‘top secret (special file),’” in Russian, sovershenno sekretno (osobaia papka) (Hoover/GARF, R-9414/1/335,71-72). Items 2 and 3 were “The location and information about numbers of the Gulag contingents engaged in the construction of especially important closed special construction projects of Glavpromstroi” (a reference to the newly founded Soviet atomic weapons industry) and “Summative information on the location of corrective labor camps and colonies and transit prisons of the USSR MVD.” Item no. 1 was “Summative information on the overall number of the contingent of prisoners maintained in all MVD camps (including special camps) and colonies, their physical condition and labor utilization”; this was the second item in the 1947 list.

184

“Vrozhdennyi terror: v 1922 godu v odnoi Moskve rabotali 9 kontslagerei,” 2 September 2021, https://newizv.ru/news/society/02-09-2021/vr0zhdennyy-terror-v-i922-godu-v-odnoy-moskve-rabotali-9-kontslagerey. The article reports the work of “journalist and historian” Vladimir Tikhomirov and provides scanned pages from Vsia Moskva, the city phone directory for 1922, as evidence.

185

Quoted by Bone, “Soviet Controls,” 81-83. “Dislocation” is evidently a too-literal translation of the Russian dislokatsiia, which generally means just “location.”

186

Liubertsy: Davies, Crisis and Progress in the Soviet Economy, 36. Solovetskii islands and White Sea Canal: Applebaum, Gulag, 59-62 and 80-82.

187

Davies, Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 35.

188

Davies, Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 395; Applebaum, Gulag, 74-76.

189

Applebaum, Gulag, 110.

190

Bacon, Gulag at War, surveys the pre-1991 literature. The most reliable clues to the size of the Gulag were contained in secret sections of the Soviet national economic plan for 1941, seized by German forces during World War II and later published in the United States. The 1941 plan was exploited by Jasny, “Labor and Output in Soviet Concentration Camps” (published in 1951) for an evaluation that turned out remarkably close to the figures revealed in the 1990s. Even today, aspects of Gulag life remain controversial. This is more because the archival records can be interpreted in different ways than because they are withheld. See Nakonechnyi, “Factory of Invalids.”

191

Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 132.

192

Hoover/GARF, R-9414/1/119 to 205 contain these documents (also catalogued in Kozlov and Mironenko, Istoriia, vol. 7, 94). Some are dated before 1953, evidence of the preparation prior to Stalin’s death. Beria is known to have planned the reform of the Gulag but could not go ahead while Stalin lived (Tikhonov, “End of the Gulag”).

193

See “Russian Maps and Atlases in the National Library of Russia,” http://www.nlr.ru/eng/coll/maps/rus_map.html.

194

Losev and Kazakov, “Korpus voennykh topografov.”

195

Voronkov and Zakuvaev, “Topogeodezicheskoe obsluzhivanie.”

196

The expression, a direct translation from Russian, was adopted by Berliner, Factory and Manager, 156.

197

The Memorial website entry under “Volzhskii ITL MVD” at http://www .memo.ru/history/nkvd/gulag/r3/r3-63.htm provides these and following details.

198

Mailbox numbers were first issued, apparently, in 1939, to enable camps to subscribe to periodical publications without revealing their full addresses. Hoover/ GARF, 9414/1/21,1.49 (Gulag chief Filaretov, decree dated 16 January 1939).

199

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, la, 3.

200

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45,4.

201

Hoover/GARF, R-9414/KI0P/45, 8.

202

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 26-27.

203

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45,42.

204

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 5.

205

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 6.

206

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 9-13.

207

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45,12-13.

208

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45,14-16.

209

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45,17.

210

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 31.

211

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 30.

212

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 22-23.

213

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 35.

214

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 36-40.

215

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 34.

216

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 43-50. The model letter is not without interest. It is written as if from the Mikhailovskii camp chief to the Sverdslovsk branch office of Gosbank. Headed “Top secret” and “In person only,” it reads: “I inform (you) that the Mikhailovskii corrective labor camp of MVD has been given the conventional designation ‘MVD facility no. 5401’. In connection with this I request (you), from 1 September 1950, to change the designation of settlement account no. 258 of the Mikhailovskii camp and rename it: ‘Settlement account no. 258 of MVD facility no. 5401 in the town of Sverdlovsk’.” In the top lefthand corner is a place marker for “Stamp with full designation of the camp.” The words “with the aim of preventing disclosure of the location of MVD corrective labor camps” are crossed out from the text of the letter. Too much information, perhaps.

217

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45,51-56 (the decree), 57 (model letter to railway officers), 58 (the same to bank officers).

218

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 24.

219

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i45, 66.

220

Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i57,1-2. “Bazhenovskii ITL MVD,” telegraphic address “Kombinat”; address “Sverdlovsk province (oblast’), Asbest town”; mailbox number 35 or ED-35. See the entry on the Memorial website at http://www .memo.ru/history/NKVD/GULAG/r3/r3-19.htm.

221

For example, Hoover/GARF, R-94i4/idop/i87, 32-33 (Chuvash ASSR, 17 March 1953); file 204, 24-25 (Kaliningrad province, 10 March 1953); file 212,18-19 (Crimea province, 14 March 1953).

222

Hoover/RGANI, 6/6/1650,21-23 (report to KPKchairman Shkiriatov, signed by responsible controller Byshov, June 1953). The report responded to a former employee of the state committee who had complained of mismanagement and various abuses.

223

Akerlof, “Procrastination and Obedience.”

224

Rose-Ackerman, “Reforming Public Bureaucracy through Economic Incentives?”

225

Gomes, Kotlikoff, and Viceira, “Excess Burden of Government Indecision.”

226

In this perspective the Soviet political economy is viewed from above as a hierarchical command system. The rationality of the model belongs to the ruler. In the context of the historical literature on Stalinism (surveyed by Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 1-25), its spirit is closer to a totalitarian view than one that emphasizes plural interest groups or independently operating factions, but it is not designed to lend support to that view. It captures the facts that Stalin was clearly in charge, but also had to reckon with the behavior of others for whom unhesitating obedience would be just as dangerous as overt resistance. The dictator presented them with a Catch-22, from which they had to protect themselves at the same time as they attended to his orders. Richer models are possible, but they are not required here to understand the matter at hand.

227

Filtzer, Hazards of Urban Life, 18.

228

E.g., SebagMontefiore, Stalin, 48-49. A short guide to the scholarly literature pointing to mental illness in Stalin’s psychopathology is provided by Rachael Allen, “Stalin and the Great Terror: Can Mental Illness Explain His Violent Behavior?” Guided History (blog), http://blogs.bu.edu/guidedhistory/russia-and-its-empires/ rachael-allen/.

229

Conquest, Great Terror, 114; Medvedev, Let History Judge, 306; Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, 494; Tucker, “Dictator and Totalitarianism”; Service, Stalin, 343- 344; Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 2,492; Harris, Great Fear, 188.

230

Gregory, Political Economy of Stalinism, 76-109.

231

Harrison, “Dictator and Defense” and “Soviet Union after 1945”; Gregory, Schroder, and Sonin, “Rational Dictators and the Killing of Innocents.”

232

Markevich, “How Much Control Is Enough?”

233

Gorlizki, “Ordinary Stalinism.”

234

Moynihan Commission, Report, A-3.

235

For examples of such requests, see Harrison, One Day We Will Live without Fear, 156,166,174,193.

236

The Google Ngram Viewer, described by Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis Of Culture,” shows that “komprometiruiushchie materialy” entered the Russian-language Google Books corpus (2019) in the 1920s but was not in widespread use before the 1990s. The abbreviation “kompromat” did not appear in Russian print publications until the end of the 1980s and, in English, not until the end of the century.

237

Wintrobe, Political Economy of Dictatorship, 20-39.

238

On the “mass operations” and “national operations” of the Great Terror, see Davies et al., Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 12-19. On mass deportations from 1930 to 1953, see Tsarevskaia-Diakina, ed., Spetspereselentsy v SSSR.

239

Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Substate Dictatorship, describe the uses of kompromat for coercion in the personal regime of Mir Jafar Bagirov, the party boss of Azerbaijan after the war (35-39), and in the campaign of Lavrentii Beria to succeed Stalin in the months after the latter’s death (124-26). They go on to show that, as the Thaw got under way, the nature of kompromat changed—at least for middle- and high-ranking officials and at least temporarily: “The information that had once been used for Stalin-era kompromat was ... downgraded [but this] did not mean that blackmail was no longer used.... It was now, conversely, the fact that a leader had been a perpetrator of Stalin-era repressions that became the main source of kompromat” (127). The varied uses of kompromat outlived communist rule. On kompromat in modern Russia see Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works, 59-90; Mesquita, “Kompromat (Russia).”

240

Phelps, “Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism”; Arrow, “Theory of Discrimination.”

241

Inkeles and Bauer, Soviet Citizen, 265-80.

242

Panevézys Municipality, “Historical Facts,” https://www.panevezys.lt/en/ history/historical-facts.html. The definition of “class enemy” based on mixing socioeconomic criteria (anyone who owned significant property) with political criteria (anyone who resisted Soviet policies) is a familiar story in the history of communism. In Soviet history, see Lewin, “Who Was the Soviet Kulak?” In Chinese history, see Treiman and Walder, “Impact of Glass Labels on Life Chances in China.”

243

Yad Vashem, “Panevézys, Panevézys County, Lithuania,” https://www.yad vashem.org/untoldstories/database/index.asp?cid=5O3.

244

Reklaitis, Cold War Lithuania; Statiev, Soviet Counterinsurgency; Weiner and Rahi-Tamm, “Getting to Know You.”

245

In 1970 the Communist Party of Lithuania had 116,600 members, or 3.7 percent of the 3,166,000 population. At least one-third of that population was under 18, and so ineligible for party membership. On that basis, I estimate that 5 to 6 percent of all those aged 18 and over were party members. Probably, however, that share was much lower in the older age groups that were seeking permission to travel abroad.

246

This law cracked down on the pilfering of food and industrial materials in the context of postwar food shortages and consumer price increases; while it was in operation, the average sentence exceeded that for murder. See Gorlizki, “Theft under Stalin,” 302.

247

Noting the unjust convictions handed out in the Stalin era, a party Central Committee report dated June 1955 argued that the party’s habit of requiring its members to declare the past convictions of themselves and family members risked compounding the earlier injustices. Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Substate Dictatorship, 126. There is no sign that these considerations retained any influence with the KGB of Soviet Lithuania by the 1970s.

248

The KGB bureaucracy was divided into numbered subunits. In Soviet Lithuania the second administration was responsible for counterintelligence and its third department was responsible for the economy. So, the full title of what this book calls the economic department of the KGB counterintelligence administration was “the third department of the second administration of the Soviet Lithuania KGB.” Its functions as of 1966 are described in Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/644, 39-47 (“Report on the Second Administration of the KGB of the Council of the Ministers of the Lithuanian SSR,” by chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB second administration Col. Obukauskas, 31 January 1966). The KGB economic department also supervised visits by foreigners to economic facilities.

249

Grybkauskas, “KGB veikla sovietinés Lietuvos pramonés monèse,” 100.

250

TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR. 2922-1972, 594.

251

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/670, 92-94 (1968). According to Anusauskas, KGB Lietu- voje, 88, there were just over 9,000 KGB “agents” and “trusted persons” in 1967 and 10,000 in 1969. The role of pressure in recruiting KGB informers is discussed in Chapter 6.

252

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/664,1-13 (“Plan of agent and operative work of the third department of the second administration of the Soviet Lithuania KGB for 1968,” from chief of the third department of the second administration of the Soviet Lithuania KGB Lt.-Col. Akimov, 4 March 1968).

253

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/656, 87 (Summary of speech “On the condition of agent and operative work on reinforcement of the regime of secrecy at facilities of industry, communications, and transport and provision of secrecy and security of movement of special-purpose military transports by rail,” 24 February 1966); K-1/3/668, 4-13 (“Plan of agent and operative measures at industrial facilities for the first half of 1969,” from Soviet Lithuania KGB Kaunas city department third division chief Trukhachev, 12 February 1969); K-1/3/668, 179 (“Report on results of work of the third division for 1969,” from Soviet Lithuania KGB Kaunas city department third division chief Trukhachev, 9 December 1969).

254

Burinskaité, “Lietuvos SSR KGB dezinformaciné veikla,” 101. Such visits could be made only with the approval of the USSR Council of Ministers, after consultation with the KGB and armed forces General Staff. Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/670, 29-30 (“Extract from instructions on the procedure for application of the Rules of residence for foreigners and stateless persons in the USSR,” 28 February 1969).

255

Grybkauskas, “The Soviet Dopusk System,” 84.

256

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/664, 120-132 (“List of institutions, organizations, and enterprises of the Lithuanian SSR at which the second administration of the Soviet Lithuania KGB is obliged to undertake counterintelligence work,” from Soviet Lithuania KGB second administration chief Col. Naras, 18 June 1968).

257

For KGB-regulated facilities in 1961 and 1971, employment figures are from Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/793, 60 (“Information on basic elements of the operational situation on the territory served by the KGB of the republic,” undated but evidently compiled in early 1972 in response to a request from Moscow for this information.) For public-sector employment in 1961 and 1971, figures are linear interpolations on data for i960, 1965, 1970, and 1975, found in TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v i960 g., 638, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR. 1922-1972 gg, 601, and Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR. 1922-2982, 402.

258

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/793, 60.

259

Grybkauskas, “The Soviet Dopusk System,” 80.

260

In 1979 the Lithuanian public sector employed 1.4 million blue- and white-collar workers of all kinds (TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo v 1979 godu, 390).

261

Grybkauskas, “The Soviet Dopusk System,” 84.

262

Radio electronics was the fastest growing branch as shown by the chart “The number of Soviet defence plants by industry,” Keith Dexter and Ivan Rodionov, displayed on the website of The Factories, Research and Design Establishments of the Soviet Defence Industry: A Guide, https://warwick.ac.uk/vpk.

263

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/654, 112-13 (“Report on measures to reinforce the regime of secrecy in enterprises and institutions of the city of Kaunas,” from chief of Soviet Lithuania KGB Kaunas city department third division Maj. Trukhachev, 12 October 1967). See also Grybkauskas “Nomenklatürinis sovietinés Lietuvos pramonés valdymas,” 36.

264

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/654, 122 (From Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman Col. Petkevicius to chief of Soviet Lithuania KGB second chief administration Col. A. M. Gorbatenko, October 1967).

265

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/654, 105-20 (“Report on measures to reinforce the regime of secrecy in enterprises and institutions of the city of Kaunas,” from chief of Soviet Lithuania KGB Kaunas city department third division Maj. Trukhachev, 12 October 1967).

266

This was the written rule from 1959, according to Lezina, “Soviet State Security and the Regime of Secrecy,” 58 (and, one supposes, the unwritten rule long before that).

267

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/654,101-4 (From chief of Soviet Lithuania KGB Siauliai city department Lt. Col. Zilinskas to deputy chief of Soviet Lithuania second administration third department Lt. Morkunas, 16 September 1967).

268

Denial of travel visas: “There is no information why, and no one even asks. Those who have been stopped guess at it. One of them, in his childhood, lived in temporarily occupied territory, the other has been corresponding too freely with foreigners. No one knew about this in the institute, but the ‘files’ reflected it all.” Zhores Medvedev, Medvedev Papers, vol. 1, 201,

269

Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/664,24 (Report on the high-frequency line from Kaunas by deputy chief of the Kaunas city KGB Lt. Col. Snakin to chief of second administration Col. A. I. Naras, received 11 April 1968). See also K-1/3/664,29-36 (Report from Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman J. Petkevicius to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania, 7 May 1968); Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/670, 4549 (Report from chief of the Siauliai city KGB Col. Zilinskas to Soviet Lithuania KGB deputy chairman comrade M. N. Aleksandrov, 30 January 1969).

270

Grybkauskas, “The Soviet Dopusk System,” 37-39.

271

When the change took place is an interesting question. Enterprise directors were always key figures in local party organizations, and Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Substate Dictatorship, 73-77, show that the secret police had lost much of its arbitrary authority over local party officials by the late 1940s. At this time Stalin was still alive, and the Thaw was several years in the future.

272

Dunskaya, Security Practices of Soviet Scientific Research Facilities, 128-29, also 20-22. The author began work in the 1950s as a specialist on guidance and control systems in the special design bureau (SKB) of the Moscow Radio Plant. In the 1970s she moved to the Academy of Sciences Institute of the History of Science and Technology as a specialist in quantum electronics and laser technology.

273

The testimony of Zhores Medvedev, cited above (footnote 34), suggests otherwise, however.

274

Holquist, “State Violence as Technique,” 154.

275

Figes, People’s Tragedy, 534-35.

276

Gregory, Terror by Quota, 106-31.

277

Khlevniuk, Master of the House, 166-202.

278

Quoted by Gregory, Terror by Quota, 196. See also Gregory, Schroder, and Sonin, “Rational Dictators and the Killing of Innocents.”

279

Quoted by Sebag Monteflore, Stalin, 194.

280

Wartime disloyalty took many forms, few of which are easily measured. Here is a measure from the state’s own statistics: from 1941 to 1945 the secret police and military tribunals sentenced almost half a million Soviet citizens for counterrevolutionary crimes, one-third of whom were executed. Werth and Mironenko, eds., MUSSOT'J'C repressii v SSSR, 608.

281

Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 1, chapter 10.

282

Egorov and Sonin, “Dictators and Their Viziers.” Consistently with this idea, people with truly indispensable talents were placed in institutional settings where they could be watched more closely, usually research institutes, occasionally in prison laboratories. There was no other place in the system for the independent agency of visionary entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. On the atomic physicists, see Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; on the missile designers, Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare; on the relative concentration of informers in colleges and institutes, Harrison and Zaksauskiené, “Counter-intelligence in a Command Economy,”143.

283

Zakharov, “Loyalty-Competence Trade-Off in Dictatorships.”

284

Conquest, “Academe and the Soviet Myth,” 94.

285

Brus, Socialist Ownership and Political Systems, 200. In a similar spirit Scharpf and Glâfiel, “Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations,” show, in the case of Argentina under military dictatorship, that career concerns drove otherwise mediocre public servants into the secret police, where hard work and a willingness to perform unpleasant tasks could compensate for lack of talent or other distinction.

286

Bon-Maury et al., Le coût économique des discriminations, 14.

287

Hsieh et al., “Allocation of Talent and U.S. Economie Growth,” 1460,1463.

288

Jureniene, “Women’s Position in Lithuanian Labour Market”; Pinchuk, “Sovietization of the Jewish Community.”

289

The Affirmative Action Empire is the title of Terry Martin’s study of the evolution of Soviet nationalities policy in the 1920s and 1930s.

290

Pinchuk, “Sovietization of the Jewish Community,” 391-92.

291

In a new study of communist and postcommunist Hungary, Bukowski et al., “Social Mobility and Political Regimes,” show that successive regime changes brought dramatic changes in the representation of historically low-status family names in Hungary’s political elite, but rates of social mobility into elite occupations and groups at least one remove from the central government remained low and unchanged throughout. The question of how to balance social levelling versus social stratification also arose among scholars studying communist China. See for example Whyte, “Inequality and Stratification in China” (published in 1975) and the same author’s thirty-year retrospective, “Rethinking Equality and Inequality in the PRC.”

292

Ottaviano and Peri, “Economic Value of Cultural Diversity.” To explain the benefits of diversity, the economist Ricardo Hausmann suggests the model of an alphabet. A complex idea requires many words using most letters of the alphabet. In a homogeneous society, where everyone lives in the same way and shares the same background, each person knows only the same few letters. No matter who collaborates, complex ideas can’t arise; conventional wisdom and groupthink predominate. What is needed is collaboration with people who can pool the knowledge that comes from different backgrounds and experiences. Together they can combine a wider range of letters to make more complex words, sentences, and conceptions. Thus, increased variety produces innovation. Hausmann et al., Atlas of Economic Complexity, 20.

293

Genetic diversity: Ashraf and Galor, “The 'Out of Africa’ Hypothesis,” find that the level of development around the world is “hump-shaped” in a predictor of genetic diversity: that is, genetic diversity promotes development up to a point, so you can have too little of it and also too much, but somewhere there is a right amount. Ethnolinguistic diversity: Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly, “Public Goods and Ethnic Divisions”; Alesina and La Ferrara, “Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance.”

294

The sphere of counterintelligence was defined by Nikitchenko et al., Kon- trrazvedyvatel’nyi slovar’, 142, as “struggle with the intelligence agencies of other states and the disruptive activities of the organizations and persons that they exploit” (my emphasis). Scanning society for signs of disruption and checking for evidence of foreign agents at work were then the tasks of KGB surveillance and investigation.

295

Stalin, “Politicheskii otchet tsentral’nogo komiteta XVI s”ezdu VKP(b),” 368 (27 June 1930).

296

Why was Stalin’s expectation at fault? One possibility is a mistaken assumption—that, when crossing languages and cultures, it is possible to find exactly equivalent meanings, with nothing lost or added in translation. Another possibility is proposed by Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 448-51: compulsory ethnic labelling and the promotion of non-Russian languages may have had the unintended consequence of reinforcing awareness of deep-rooted ethnic differences.

297

Davies et al., The Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 106-7, 237.

298

Smith, Russians (published in 1976), 142.

299

This is the “encapsulated interest” model of trust, proposed by Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 7-9.

300

Misztal, “Trust and the Variety of Its Bases,” 335. An example of the first stream is Luhmann, Trust and Power. Examples of the second stream are Gambetta, “Can We Trust?” and Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness. To the rational and normative foundations of trust, Misztal adds emotional commitment.

301

Among those who reject the ideas of generalized and institutional trust are representatives of both the streams identified by Misztal. See Hardin (a rational- choice theorist), Trust and Trustworthiness, 60-62, and Luhmann (a normative thinker), “Familiarity, Confidence, Trust,” 97-99.

302

But Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, condemns this approach as a “slippage” (55), and a “vernacular usage” allowing “implications that are wrong” (60); generalized trust is not trust, just “optimistic expectations about being able to build successful relationships with certain, perhaps numerous, others (although surely not with just anyone)” (62).

303

These questions take the form recommended by Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Guidelines on Measuring Trust, 197. In each case the answers should be scaled from о (“Not at all”) to 10 (“Completely”).

304

On the external validity of such measures, see Kaiser and Oswald, “Scientific Value of Numerical Measures”; Diener, Inglehart, and Tay, “Theory and Validity of Life Satisfaction Scales.”

305

Many mechanisms can bring about cooperation, and trust is only one of them. Others discussed below include coercion or threats of violence, and rewards based on monitoring. Cook, Hardin, and Levi, Cooperation without Trust.

306

Acemoglu and Wolitzky, “Economics of Labor Coercion.”

307

Alesina and Giuliano, “Culture and Institutions”; Algan and Cahuc, “Trust and Growth.”

308

Hosking, “Trust and Distrust in the USSR” (introducing a special issue of the Slavonic and East European review on the same theme), 1,25.

309

Shlapentokh, “Trust in Public Institutions in Russia”; McKee et al., “Do Citizens of the Former Soviet Union Trust State Institutions”; Kuchenkova, “Interpersonal Trust in Russian Society.”

310

Other trust categories were neither (trust nor distrust), not much, not at all, and don’t know. The number of Russian respondents was 1,961. Inglehart et al., World Values Survey: Round Two, 340.

311

Nunn and Wantchekon, “Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust.”

312

Nikolova, Popova, and Otrashchenko, “Stalin and the Origins of Mistrust.”

313

Nikolova, Popova, and Otrashchenko, “Stalin and the Origins of Mistrust.”

314

Gorlizki, “Structures of Trust,” 124.

315

Brecht, Poems, 440.

316

Gorlizki, “Structures of Trust”; Tikhomirov, “Regime of Forced Trust”; also Ledeneva, “Genealogy of Krugovaya Poruka.”

317

Compare the legal concepts of controlling and coercive behavior in personal relationships, described in Home Office, “Controlling or Coercive Behaviour,” 3-4.

318

Breton and Wintrobe. “Bureaucracy of Murder,” 910.

319

The idea that horizontal trust is a negative for corporate performance might seem old-fashioned in today’s world of team building and “distributed leadership.” Breton and Wintrobe appear to base their argument on scale. To improve productivity, horizontal cooperation needs to be coordinated across an entire organization. In an organization of any size, this is harder to achieve than the concealment of local shirking and diversion of resources. Smaller groups can more easily impede coordination than improve it. And horizontal trust is built more easily in smaller groups. Regardless of intentions, horizontal trust is more likely to worsen productivity than improve it. This plausibly suggests why a twentiethcentury command-and-control bureaucracy such as the Soviet state consistently prioritized vertical over horizontal relationships. Gregory and Harrison, “Allocation under Dictatorship,” 747-49. On vertical versus horizontal trust in the Soviet context see Belova, “Economic Crime and Punishment.”

320

But not in all times, an exception being China from 1967 to 1973, when the use of undercover informers was condemned as contradicting the mass line of the Cultural Revolution. Schoenhals, Spying for the People, 1-9.

321

Kuromiya and Peplonski, “Stalin, Espionage, and Counter-Espionage,” relate this way of thinking to the idea of “total” espionage (that is, that anyone could be a spy). They suggest that the idea spread from the security thinking of Japan in the early twentieth century to Germany in the 1920s and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. They describe Stalin’s mass killing of suspects in the 1930s as a corresponding form of total counterespionage. From that perspective, one could understand the KGB of the 1960s and 1970s as continuing to practice total counterespionage but replacing Stalin’s “kill all suspects” by “watch all suspects.”

322

Nikitchenko et al., eds, Kontrrazvedyvatel’nyi slovar’, 9-10, 55, 93-94, 279-80.

323

Anusauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 71. According to the 1959 census, Soviet Lithuania was a country of 2.7 million people, of whom four-fifths belonged to the titular ethnic group (others were mainly Russians and Poles) TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v i960 g., 18-20.

324

The number of KGB informers in 1962 was given as 164,774 by Vladimir Se- michastnyi in his report “On the results of work of the KGB of the USSR Council of Ministers and its organs in the localities for 1962” to Nikita Khrushchev, 1 February 1963 (Hoover/Volkogonov papers, container 28 [reel 18]). The number had barely increased five years later (in his annual report for 1967, dated 6 May 1968, found in the same location), Semichastnyi’s successor Andropov gave 24,952 as the number of new agents recruited in 1967, being 15 percent of the total number, which would therefore have been roughly 166,350.

325

Harrison and Zaksauskiené, “Counter-Intelligence in a Planned Economy, 142-43.

326

Anusauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 71 (the sum of agents and trusted persons in that year).

327

Church Committee, “Use of Informants in FBI Intelligence Investigations.” At that time, the main focus of FBI investigations was America’s political fringes from the Ku Klux Klan to the Black Panthers. In the following years, the FBI became more engaged with organized crime and narcotics. Informant numbers swelled, reaching 2,800 in 1980 and “well beyond 6,000” in 1986. Ronald J. Ostrow and Robert L. Jackson, “U.S. Agents Make Increasing Use Of informants: But ‘Handlers’ Face Complex Legal Hazards When Condoning Criminal Acts”, Los Angeles Times, 15 June 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-06-15- mn-11287-story.html.

328

As mentioned in the text, there were 1,500 FBI informers in 1975, or 7 per million of the US population at the time. For the Soviet Union, the nearest comparable year is 1967. In his annual report for 1967, dated 6 May 1968 (Hoover/Volkogonov papers, container 28 [reel 18]), Yurii Andropov gave 24,952 as the number of new agents recruited in 1967, being 15 percent of the total number, which would therefore have been roughly 166,350. This made 0.7 per thousand of the Soviet population at the time. Finally, 0.7 per thousand is one hundred times 7 per million. Numbers of informers were on an upward trend in both countries in this period, but a difference of two orders of magnitude could not be closed by shifting the base of one of the measures by a few years.

329

This is noted by Verdery, Secrets and Truths, chapter 3, in connection with informer recruitment by the Romanian Securitate.

330

Schoenhals, Spying for the People, 110.

331

The related KGB project for a database of informers’ reports on the behavior of Soviet citizens travelling abroad in groups is described by Harrison, One Day, 169-70.

332

Hoover/LYA, 1/3/798, 184-186 (“Explanatory report” by Col. Kurenkov, chief of analysis for the Moscow city and province KGB, 30 July 1974); the forms themselves follow at folios 187-1 to 187-боЬ.

333

From the last months of Soviet rule in Lithuania, for example, Agent Gin- taras (Amber) writes in Lithuanian: “I [name] promise to keep secret [my] cooperation with the security organs. I will sign further documents ‘Gintaras.’ 1989.03.01 [signed] Gintaras” (personal communication from Inga Zaksauskiené, 1 February 2019).

334

Hart, Firms, Contracts and Financial Structure, 73-92.

335

This is confirmed from another setting. A Stasi officer “kept several cards up his sleeve to be played depending how the meeting unfolded. Most candidates agreed to become informers on the initial request. If they wavered, however, [he] would remind them in blunt terms of some infraction, however minor, from their past. Very rarely did candidates then have the courage to refuse.” Another officer kept in reserve that the candidate’s wife had been caught with anticommunist leaflets, and she would be prosecuted if the candidate refused to cooperate. The candidate “freely agreed to work for the Stasi” so the threat was never voiced. See Bruce, The Firm, 87.

336

Verdery, Secrets and Truths, Chapter 3, writes of Romania: “What do we know about the relation of officers to their informers? Relatively little, for those two categories of people seldom write memoirs.” The personal histories of a variety of collaborators across Eastern Europe are collected in Apor, Horvath, and Mark, eds., Secret Agents and the Memory of Everyday Collaboration.

337

Skucas, “Lithuania,” 419. The Latvian KGB archive, in contrast, has recently published 4,141 personal files of KGB informers. Latvian Public Broadcasting, “First Batch of Latvia’s KGB Archives Published Online,” 20 December 2018, https://eng.lsm.lv/article/society/society/first-batch-of-latvias-kgb-archives-pub lished-online.a3O37O4/.

338

Agent Rimkus resembled the Chinese agents in Liaoning province, bordering Korea, recruited during the Korean War, as described by Schoenhals, Spying for the People, 121. One of them “insisted he be told by his handlers what they had in store for him if and when ‘the situation becomes critical’”: “Some agents could not bring themselves to believe that the [People’s Republic of China] stood any chance of emerging victorious from a military confrontation with the United States. In conversation with their handlers, they raised questions such as ‘How many aircraft do you have?’ ‘Do you have any B-29 bombers?’ ‘When the situation becomes really tense, will I be able to go with you?”’

339

For examples from the Stalin period see Harrison, “Dictator and Defense,” 5-7. From the Cold War, the reports of six urban and rural district KGB commissioners to the KGB and party leaders in Vilnius about rumors of war circulating in Soviet Lithuania in June 1956, sparked by a partial mobilization of Soviet army reserves, are preserved in Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/506,336-56.

340

Ruta’s breakdown oddly resembled the crises experienced by the idealistic young Soviet people of thirty years previously, described by Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 106-12. They dreamed of solidarity and of serving the community. Involuntarily doubting the nature of their society and the wisdom of its leaders, they found themselves isolated and their dreams poisoned, as they confided in their diaries. More than one felt the urge to confide in the authorities: “The only thing that I would like to have ... is trust of the NKVD,” wrote Julia Piatnitskaia. I thank Claire Shaw for pointing me in this direction.

341

“Like most secret services, the Stasi had a pathological fear of walk-ins.” Schmeidel, Stasi: Shield and Sword, 37.

342

Gieseke, History of the Stasi, 80, quotes from the Stasi’s Dictionary of Political-Operational Work: the “trusting relationship” between case officers and informers should involve “full trust” on the informer’s part, whereas the case officer “must always bear in mind the security and control aspect.”

343

Hoover/LYA, K-1/10/300,24-25 (letter to Col. T. N. Beskrovnyi, chief of the USSR KGB chairman’s group for study and generalization of the experience of operative work and information about the adversary, from Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman Col. A. Randakevicius, 14 March 1961).

344

Hoover/LYA, K-1/10/300, 48-65 (Report on the status of agent-operative work in the apparatus of the Soviet Lithuania KGB administration for Trakai district by Maj. Gomyranov, consultant, February 1961); the words quoted in the text are on page 50. Also K-1/10/300, 65-81 (Report on the status of agentoperative work of the Akmené KGB apparatus on 5 February 1961, by Lt. Col. Tumantsev, senior consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group for generalization and study of operative work, 21 February 1961); 82-95 (Report on the status of agent-operative work in the apparatus of the Soviet Lithuania KGB commissioner in the town of Birzai, by Maj. Gomyranov, consultant of the Soviet Lithuania KGB group for generalization and study of operative work, March 1961); 97-108 (Report on the status of agent-operative work in the Taurag district apparatus ofthe KGB on 20 March 1961, by Maj. Snakin, operative officer of the Soviet Lithuania KGB second administration, March 1961); 111-64 (Report on the status of work in the Kaunas apparatus of the Soviet Lithuania KGB, by Col. Matulaitis, chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB second administration, 25 April 1961).

345

“Published in Sbornik no. 2 for 1976” is noted by hand on the first page.

346

Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance, 22.

347

In East Germany, Schmeidel, Stasi: Shield and Sword, 36; Dennis, Stasi: Myth and Reality, 104-6; Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance, 48-49. In Romania, Verdery, Secrets and Truths, chapter 3. As for the Soviet Union, the author has received personal accounts in conversation.

348

From China Schoenhals, Spying for the People, 141-42, gives an example of seizing the right moment to recruit an agent, cited in the original source as exemplifying good practice.

349

In the 1960s, in East Germany at roughly the same time as most of our stories, Stasi researchers estimated that only 7.7 percent of “unofficial collaborators” in Karl-Marx-Stadt were recruited under duress. Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance, 41, 47. Dennis, Stasi: Myth and Reality, 98, suggests that this was policy: Stasi guidelines of a few years later recommended that recruitment should be based on “the candidates’ positive political stance, on their personal needs, and interests, on the desire to atone for misdemeanors,” or a combination. “Atonement” might be a cynical euphemism for blackmail, but the desire to atone for misdemeanors implies what we see to have been fairly frequent in our Soviet data: a compromised past, followed by regret. On similar lines, Schmeidel, Stasi: Shield and Sword, 38, attributes the low rate of recruitment by threats to career concerns: the typical Stasi officer advanced by recruiting informers and was damaged by failures, so preferred the willing to the unwilling.

350

Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance, 42.

351

That third-party verification was considered normal is implied by a report on the condition of the agent network managed by the KGB Trakai office. A stream of criticisms includes the remark: “Following recruitment of an agent, no evidence of verification is added to the personal file.” (Hoover/LYA, K-1/10/300, 48-65, Report on the status of agent-operative work in the apparatus of the Soviet Lithuania KGB administration for Trakai district by Maj. Gomyranov, consultant, February 1961). Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance, 15, suggests that the East German Stasi aimed to confirm the accuracy of all agent reports by systematic triangulation.

352

Our reports place considerable weight upon the agent’s willingness to report in writing. It was seen as an inferior outcome when the agent reported verbally to the case officer, who had to write up the report afterward. In East Germany, as argued by Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance, 15, the Stasi discouraged verbal reporting because of the discretion it gave to the case officer to filter the detail given by the informer.

353

For Chinese informers before the Cultural Revolution, the exploits of Sherlock Holmes were recommended reading. Schoenmals, Spying for the People, 179.

354

Hoover/LYA, K-1/10/311, 87-94 (Report on the expediency and appropriateness of cash outlays under Art. 9 (special outlays) in the organs of the Soviet Lithuania KGB, by Lt. Col. Babintsev, chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group, 23 June 1962).

355

From the 1930s, see Figes, Whisperers, 258-71. From the 1970s, see Smith, Russians, 141-142, and Harrison, “There Was a Front,” 45-46.

356

Mel’nichenko, Sovetskii anekdot.

357

Fitzpatrick, “Signals from Below.” See also the row heading “Complaints and Petitions” in Table 3.3.

358

The myth and reality are explored by Kelly, Comrade Pavlik.

359

Khlevniuk, Khoziain, 392-95.

360

In China in 1957, a security officer attributed widespread informal awareness of the interception of mail to indiscreet colleagues. Schoenhals, Spying for the People, 133.

361

That this was possible is indicated by occasional KGB documentation of efforts to avoid it. “With the aim of legalizing the agent evidence of X’s unhealthy utterances” (in other words, to disguise the true origin of the evidence), “her colleagues Y and Z interviewed her covertly. In their submissions they both indicated that in their presence at the end of May this year X expressed anti-Soviet nationalist judgments.” Hoover/LYA. K-1/3/697, 80-82 (Report to Maj.-Gen. Yu. Yu. Petkevicius, chairman of the Soviet Lithuania KGB, on preventive measures implemented in relation to X, no date but November 1972, names redacted by the author).

362

Carelessness: Harrison, “There Was a Front,” 46. Conscience: Figes, Whisperers, 259. A few years ago, the author heard of a young man who, on being approached by the KGB to provide information, immediately told all his friends, knowing that this would halt his recruitment. According to Gieseke, History of the Stasi, 94, in dissident and church circles this was “the most proven method” of refusing Stasi recruitment without saying no to the face of the recruiter.

363

Smith, Russians, 142.

364

Figes, Whisperers, 251.

365

For the 1930s see Figes, Whisperers, 251-58, and Hosking, “Trust and Distrust,” 14-17.

366

Oring, “Risky Business,” 212.

367

Smith, Russians, 142.

368

Neuendorf, “Surveillance and Control,” 261-62.

369

Lichter, Loftier, and Siegloch, “Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance.” The evidence of this paper is based on the third-stream definition of trust, discussed earlier in the chapter: trust is allowed to mean whatever respondents have in mind when they respond to survey questions about trust.

370

Lichter, Loftier, and Siegloch, “Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance,” 11. This study uses a subset of Stasi informers designated as “operative” informers. Pooling the data from all the East German counties at that time gives an average operative informer density of 3.8 per thousand. If all categories of Stasi informers were counted, the total in 1980 would be 170,000 (Gieseke, “German Democratic Republic,” 199), making an informer density of just over 10 per thousand in the East German resident population of the time.

371

As the authors report, informer density was determined by Stasi leaders at the level of larger districts, the borders of which were redrawn in the 1950s on the basis of economic factors that can be controlled for. To limit the scope for other confounding factors, the study exploits the variation of outcomes when counties on either side of district borders are compared with each other. Lichter, Loffler, and Siegloch, “Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance,” 7,16.

372

As noted by Bergson, “Russian Defense Expenditures,” 373.

373

For these aspects of the grey zone in Soviet history, see Cooper, “Civilian Production”; Cooper, Soviet Defence Industry; Barber et al., “Structure and Development”; Simonov, “Mobpodgotovka”; Markevich, “Planning the Supply of Weapons”; Davies, “Planning for Mobilization.”

374

Wheatcroft and Davies, “Crooked Mirror of Soviet Economic Statistics,” concisely describe the most common biases and distortions.

375

Bergson, “Reliability and Usability.”

376

Wiles, “Soviet Military Finance,” 6.

377

The harvest in 1932 (and, to a lesser extent, in following years): Davies and Wheatcroft, Years of Hunger, 444. The population in 1939: Davies et al., Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 150-51. Human losses in World War II: Harrison, “Counting the Soviet Union’s War Dead,” 1036. Property losses in the same war: Babichenko, Debit and Credit of War, 167.

378

Plotnikov, Biudzhet sovetskogo gosudarstva; Voznesenskii, Voennaia ekono- mika SSSR; Bergson, “Russian Defense Expenditures.”

379

For Soviet net material product utilized for consumption and accumulation in 1980, see TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1985 g, 411. Soviet GDP at current prices in 1980 was not known with any precision at the time, but it was retrospectively reported as 619 billion rubles: see Goskomstat, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR v 1990 g, 5-

380

The real GDP of the Soviet Union in 1980 was around 40 percent of that of the USA (see the Maddison Project Historical Statistics dataset, https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/. The real value of reported Soviet military outlays should therefore have been in the region of 3 percent (of Soviet GDP) divided by 4.8 percent (of US GDP), multiplied by 40 percent (the ratio of Soviet to US real GDP), which equals 25 percent of the United States.

381

Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending, 34-37.

382

For retrospective analysis, see Easterly and Fischer, “Soviet Economic Decline.”

383

Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

384

The following discussion is based on Gregory and Harrison, “Allocation under Dictatorship,” 744-47.

385

Here and below, defense shares of Soviet GNP are based on the retrospective estimates used in Table 7.7.

386

The CIA’s dollar estimates raised specific issues that I do not discuss here. A persistent critic of the dollar estimates was Franklyn D. Holzman, who argued that, by neglecting substitution (or index-number) biases, the CIA overestimated the real value of Soviet military outlays. Holzman, “Are the Soviets Really Out- spending the U.S.?”

387

Swain, “Soviet Military Sector,” 109

388

Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, Estimated Soviet Defense Spending; Lee, Estimation of Soviet Military Expenditures; Rosefielde, False Science (first edition). It was suggested that the building-block methodology could only give a lower bound on Soviet spending because its coverage of the building blocks was inevitably incomplete. For the categories of equipment that were covered, the CIA was alleged to understate the rates of growth of true quantities and costs. That is, it attributed too much of observed price changes to hidden inflation and so failed to capture the full improvement in the quality of Soviet weapons through time; this led to understatement of the value of Soviet military stocks relative to the United States. At the same time, it failed to observe the full extent of price inflation, and this led to understatement of the cost of Soviet defense activity to the economy supplying it. Both Lee and Rosefielde argued that the CIA methodology lacked transparency, withholding the evidence base of prices and quantities from which the building blocks were valued, and the procedure for consistent revision of serial data when new information was factored in. Finally, they diagnosed lack of robustness from the character of CIA responses to new information. In the most celebrated case, when the “benchmark” figure of 50 billion rubles in 1970 transpired, it was more than twice the previous CIA estimate. The latter was then revised upward. The CIA claimed that this revision would have happened anyway in the course of repricing and was independent of the “new information”. Burton, “Estimating Soviet Defense Spending,” replied for the CIA, but neither Rosefielde, False Science (second edition) nor Lee, CIA Estimates of Soviet Military Expenditures, was reconciled. Although the CIA’s direct costing exercise was wound up after the fall of communism, those formerly engaged in it continued to defend their position. Noren, “Controversy over Western Measures”; Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending.

389

Rosefielde, False Science (second edition).

390

Lee, CIA Estimates of Soviet Military Expenditures.

391

Barber et al., “Structure and Development of the Defence Industry Complex,” 21.

392

Higher DIA figures are presented in Michaud, “Paradox of Current Soviet Military Spending,” but the methodology was also represented by Duchêne, “How Much Do the Soviets Spend,” Duchêne and Steinberg, “Soviet National Accounts,” and Mochizuki, “Estimating Soviet Defence Expenditures,” and it had its roots in Becker, “Soviet Military Outlays. The latter scholars are among those that tended to come up with estimates lower than the CIA. A similar methodology underlay the SIPRI figures shown in Table 7.5. The reasons why shared principles could give rise to a wide range of estimates were explored by Matosich, “Estimating Soviet Military Hardware Purchases.”

393

The pioneer of this line of thinking was Birman, Secret Incomes.

394

Steinberg, “Estimating Total Soviet Military Expenditures”; “Trends in Soviet Military Expenditure”; The Soviet Economy, 1970-1990.

395

Wiles, “Soviet Military Finance”; Wiles, “How Soviet Defence Expenditure Fits.”

396

Rosefielde, “Soviet Defence Spending.”

397

Harrison, “Economic Growth and Slowdown,” 62-63.

398

Sandle, “Brezhnev and Developed Socialism,” 183-85.

399

The White House, Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, Table 3.1 (Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940-2025), https://www .whitehouse.gov/omb/historical-tables/.

400

Service, End of the Cold War, 209-18; see also Kimball, “Looking Back.”

401

The Chernobyl catastrophe began in the early hours of 26 April 1986. Two and a half days passed before the first reluctant official admission. It was addressed by US president Reagan in a radio broadcast of 4 May. Ten more days passed before Gorbachev broke his own silence. Plokhy, Chernobyl, 233-35.At the time of Reagan’s broadcast, Secretary of State George P. Shultz was quoted as saying that “while Chernobyl has no ‘one-on-one connection’ with the arms control process, ‘the problem of verification is a very important problem’ that must be addressed completely before any arms control agreement can be reached.” Jack Nelson, “Reagan Criticizes Disaster Secrecy: Soviets ‘Owe World an Explanation’ for Chernobyl Blast, President Says,” Los Angeles Times, 4 May 1986, https://www .latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-05-04-mn-3685-story.html.

402

The Hoover Archive, Vitalii Leonidovich Kataev collection, Box 12, File 13 (“TsK KPSS. О predlozheniiakh MID SSSR po povysheniiu otkrytosti voennoi deiatel’nosti SSSR,” dated November 1986). The Kataev collection is based on a private archive. It is not always clear whether documents represent final or preliminary drafts, whether memoranda were sent, or whether recommendations were adopted. Sometimes this can be inferred indirectly.

403

Hoover/Kataev, 12/13 (“TsK KPSS. K porucheniiu о povyshenii otkrytosti voennoi deiatel’nosti SSSR,” dated April 1987).

404

Hoover/Kataev, 12/13 (“TsK KPSS. К porucheniiu о povyshenii otkrytosti voennoi deiatel’nosti SSSR,” dated April 1987).

405

Hoover/Kataev, electronic files, 2002c48_disk_04_mic.pdf (“Sovetskii VPK—vzgliad izvnutri,” page 22).

406

Hoover/Kataev, electronic files, 2002c48_disk_04_mic.pdf (“Sovetskii VPK—vzgliad izvnutri”). Akhromeev was a true Soviet conservative. In the end he could not reconcile himself with

407

Hoover/Kataev, 1/1 (“V. L. Kataev. Perechen’ arkhivnykh materialov. Kom- mentarii к nekotorym iz nikh,” undated).

408

Hoover/Kataev, electronic files, 2002c48_disk_04_mic.pdf (“Sovetskii VPK—vzgliad izvnutri”).

409

Bornstein, “The Soviet 1963 Industrial Price Revision”; Schroeder, “The 1966-67 Soviet Industrial Price Reform.”

410

Hoover/Kataev, electronic files, 2002c48_disk_04_mic.pdf (“Sovetskii VPK—vzgliad izvnutri”).

411

Hoover/Kataev, 1/1 (“V. L. Kataev. Perechen’ arkhivnykh materialov. Kom- mentarii к nekotorym iz nikh,” undated).

412

Hoover/Kataev, electronic files, 2002c48_disk_04_mic.pdf (“Sovetskii VPK—vzgliad izvnutri”).

413

Hoover/Kataev, 12/13 (“TsK KPSS. К porucheniiu о povyshenii otkrytosti voennoi deiatel’nosti SSSR,” dated April 1987).

414

Hoover/Kataev, 12/13 (“TsK KPSS. V sootvetstvii s porucheniem TsK KPSS doklady vaem ...”). Bobkov’s name was added by hand after crossing out the name of KGB Chief Chebrikov. This document has other annotations including a date, 20 July 1987, and, above the heading, the reference “P78/VII.” This seems to correspond with resolution P78/VII on the future declassification of the defense budget, adopted by the Politburo on 6 August 1987, mentioned in other documents in the same file (“T.t. Masliukovu Yu. D. (sozyv) . . .”, 13 dated August 1987), and 11/31 (“Spravka. Dlia aktivizatsii nashei vneshnei politiki,” accompanied by a memo dated 22 March 1989).

415

Compare Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending, 130.

416

Hoover/Kataev, 12/13 (“T.t. Masliukovu Yu. D. (sozyv) ...”)

417

Hanson, “Soviet Economic Reform,” provides contemporary insight into the deadlock behind the failure of Soviet economic reforms under Gorbachev. For a retrospective view, see Miller, Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, 55-73.

418

Rubanov, “Ot kul’ta sekretnosti.”

419

“Rubanov Vladimir Arsent’evich,” on the website of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, a Russian NGO think-tank, http://svop.ru/ рубанов-владимир-арсентьевич/.

420

Rubanov, “Ot kul’ta sekretnosti,” 32.

421

Gorbachev’s briefing for the London visit can be found in Hoover/Kataev, 11/31 (“General’nomu sekretariu TsK KPSS” dated March 1989), and possibly also 12/13 (“K poezdke”).

422

Hoover/Kataev, 11/31 (“Spravka. Dlia aktivizatsii nashei vneshnei politiki,” no date but evidently March 1989).

423

Hoover/Kataev, 11/31 (“O raskhodakh na oboronu,” accompanied by a memo dated 22 March 1989).

424

Hoover/Kataev, 11/31 (“Spravka. Dlia aktivizatsii nashei vneshnei politiki”).

425

The defense budget was broken down into six headings: personal and operating costs (20.2 billion), procurement (32.6 billion), RDTE (15.3billion), construction (4.6 billion), other items (production and delivery of nuclear weapons, 2.3 billion), and pensions (2.3 billion). Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending, 186.

426

Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, Defense in the 1989 Soviet State Budget. Published studies are by Steinberg, “Soviet Defense Burden”; Cooper, “Military Expenditure of the USSR”; and Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending, 185-188.

427

Noren, “Controversy over Western Measures,” 262. The statements were made by Defense Minister Yazov, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, and even Gorbachev himself.

428

Steinberg, “Soviet Defense Burden,” 257.

429

Quoted by Noren, “Controversy over Western Measures,” 26on (emphasis added).

430

Masliukov and Glubokov, “Planirovanie i finansirovanie voennoi promysh- lennosti,” 105

431

Cited by Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending, 260П.

432

Gorbachev, Memoirs, 215.

433

Firth and Noren, Soviet Defense Spending, 188-91.

434

Masliukov and Glubokov, “Planirovanie i finansirovanie voennoi promyshlennosti,” 105.

435

Masliukov and Glubokov, “Planirovanie i finansirovanie voennoi promyshlennosti,” 105.

436

Masliukov and Glubokov, “Planirovanie i finansirovanie voennoi promyshlennosti,” 106. Specifically, “outlays on the organs of state administration on the organization of the defense complex .. . a number of tasks undertaken by institutes of the Academy of Sciences and the Higher School out of their own budgetary allocations and [funding of] dual-purpose projects . .. the part of capital investments directed toward the development of the defense complex, minus depreciation costs included in the prices of military products ... outlays incurred for the maintenance of necessary mobilization inventories.”

437

Mashukov and Glubokov, Planirovanie i finansirovanie voennoi promysh- lennosti,” 106-107. “In an annual report to Congress in 1989, [US Secretary of Defense] Carlucci gives the distribution of US defense outlays by items, where outlays on salaries are 44 percent of the total ($131.5 billion). Given that the structure of Soviet outlays was similar, and setting the average annual salary in the USSR (3,168 rubles in industry in 1989) equal to the average annual salary in the USA ($25,600, or 15,560 rubles at the official rate), then outlays on defense in the USSR would be 152 billion rubles (16.6 percent of GNP), which matches the estimates of American specialists on Soviet military outlays, based on the cost of production in American values.” For an earlier argument on similar lines, see Holzman, “Are the Soviets Really Outspending the U.S.?”

438

Butler Committee, Review of Intelligence, 14-15.

439

Harrison, Accounting for War, 110.

440

Harrison, “Soviet Industry and the Red Army.”

441

Cooper, “Defense Industry and Civil-Military Relations,” 170.

442

Treml, Censorship, Access, and Influence.

443

Arrow, “The Value of and Demand for Information.”

444

On availability cascades in a free society, see Kuran and Sunstein, “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation.” This prescient paper was published in 1999 when Facebook did not exist, and the number of internet users worldwide was no more than 300 million,

445

For these and other examples see Cull et al., Soviet Subversion, Disinformation and Propaganda; Rid, Active Measures.

446

Rid, Active Measures, 10-11. Similarly, Bennett and Livingston, “Brief History of the Disinformation Age,” 3, describe the goal of disinformation as the disruption of rule-based institutions. A focus of recent literature on information wars and disinformation is the potential they create for democratic breakdown, especially in the United States: see Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda; Bennett and Livingston, eds., Disinformation Age; Lindberg, ed., Automatization Turns Viral. Glaeser, “Political Economy of Hatred,” provides a canonical discussion of the use of false histories to mobilize support for authoritarian leaders by polarizing societies and focusing popular anger against outgroups.

447

Hoover/RGANI, 89/21/66, 1 (“On the question of the procedure for familiarization with CPSU Central Committee documentation and materials of Central Committee members and leaders of regional party committee in the complex sociopolitical situation,” to the CPSU Central Committee from deputy head of the Central Committee general department P. Laptev and first deputy head of the Central Committee organizational department Yu. Ryzhov, 5 March 1991).

448

Solnick, Stealing the State.

449

For a powerful memoir of the time see Gilman, No Precedent, No Plan; for a strongly argued retrospective, Mau, “Russian Economic Reforms.”

450

Acemoglu and Robinson, Narrow Corridor, 33-73.

451

Kryshtanovskaya and White, “From Soviet Nomenklatura to Russian Elite.”

452

Snegovaya and Petrov, “Long Soviet Shadows,” 9.

453

On continuity from the Soviet KGB to Russia’s FSB, see Service, Kremlin Winter, Chapter 20.

454

Kim Murphy, “Russia’s New Elite Draws from Old KGB,” Los Angeles Times, 10 November 2003, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2oo3-nov-1o-fg -spiesio-story.html.

455

Snegovaya and Petrov, “Long Soviet Shadows,” 10.

456

“Putin Deplores Collapse of the USSR,” 25 April 2005, BBC News, http:// news.bbc .co.uk/i/hi/448 0745. stm.

457

Kryshtanovskaya and White, “Sovietization of Russian Politics.”

458

Harrison, “Soviet Economy, 1917-1991,” 200.

459

Shleifer and Treisman, “A Normal Country,” and “Normal Countries.”

460

For 2016 see Di Bella, Dynnikova, and Slavov, “Russian State’s Size and Footprint,” 12, and statistics of the World Bank, https://data.worl dbank .org/indica- tor/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS?locations=RU. For the Soviet Union in 1980, see Tables 2A.1 and 2A.2. For government spending, reported as around 35 percent of GDP in 2016 by Di Bella, Dynnikova, and Slavov, “Russian State’s Size and Footprint,” 10, the contrast with the past would have been less stark.

461

By 2017 the ratio was almost 160 percent. See Our World in Data, https:// ourworldindata.org/grapher/mobile-cellular-subscriptions-per-ioo-people?tab =chart&country= RUS ~OW I D_W R L.

462

Printer, scanner, and multifunction printer market revenue in Russia from 2016 to 2021 (in US dollars), Statista, https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1o8o221/ printer-scanner-revenue-in-russia.

463

Plokhy, Chernobyl, 310.

464

Grimsted, “Archives of Russia Five Years After,” 20-21; also, Russian Federation, “Zakon о gosudarstvennoi taine. N5485-1,” Moscow, 21 June 1993, https:// fstec.ru/en/1o7-tekhnicheskaya-zashchita-informatsii/dokumenty/zakony/362 -zakon-rossijskoj-federatsii-ot-2i-iyunya-i993-g-n-5485-i.

465

Grimsted, “Archives of Russia Five Years After,” 21.

466

Fedor, Russia and the Cult of State Security; Service, Kremlin Winter, Chapter 20.

467

The physicist Lech Borkowski lists statues of Dzerzhinskii and monuments to him still standing in Saratov, Ufa, Taganrog, Novosibirsk, and Kras- noiarsk, two in Volgograd, and a Feliks shopping center in Dzerzhinskii Street, Kirov. Personal communication dated June 7, 2021, and Dr hab. Lech S. Borkowski (@LechSBorkowski), “Comment on the @MCinParis article in @TheSunday Times 13 Feb 2021 about Mayor of Bristol @MarvinJRees friendship with Navalny,” Twitter, 14 February 2021, 5:38 p.m., https://twitter.com/LechSBorkowski/ status/1361127668616429568. In September 2021, two new Dzerzhinskii memorials were unveiled, one in Krasnodar and the other in Simferopol’, a Ukrainian city in Russian-occupied Crimea. See “New Russian Monuments to Soviet Secret Police Founder Spark Controversy” Moscow News, 13 September 2021, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2o21/o9/13/new-russian-monuments-to-soviet-secret-police -founder-spark-controversy-a75032.

468

Discussed by Harrison, “Counting the Soviet Union’s War Dead.”

469

Cooper, Russian Military Expenditure, 35-36. Chapter 5 above discussed the incentives to inflate the secret sphere in Soviet times.

470

See the Appendix to this chapter, “Espionage as Open-Source Data Collection.”

471

Anticorruption: Oleg Shchedrov, “Russia’s Medvedev Sets out Anticorruption Drive,” Reuters, July 2, 2008, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rus sia-medvedev-corruption-idUSLo24266682Oo8o7O2. Transparency for intelligence agencies: Ilya Arkhipov, “Medvedev Orders Online Disclosures by Russian Secret Services,” Bloomberg, 10 August 2011, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2on-o8-io/medvedev-orders-online-disclosures-by-russian-secret-ser vices. The Open Government Partnership: “Russia to Join Open Government Partnership,” RT, December 14, 2012, https://www.rt.com/russia/medvedev-open-gov ernment-join-042/. Fiscal transparency: International Monetary Fund, Russian Federation Fiscal Transparency Evaluation.

472

Russian Federation, Postanovlenie ot 6 fevralia 2010 no. 63 “Ob utverzh- denii Instruktsii о poriadke dopuska dolzhnostnykh lits i grazhdan Rossiiskoi Federatsii к gosudarstvennoi taine,” http://pravo.gov.ru/proxy/ips/?docbody=&nd =i02i35832&rdk=.

473

Alex Howard, “Russia Withdraws from Open Government Partnership. Too Much Transparency?” Open Government Partnership, 21 May 2013, https:// www.opengovpartnership.org/stories/russia-withdraws-from-open-government -partnership-too-much-transparency/.

474

International Monetary Fund, Russian Federation Fiscal Transparency Evaluation Update, 15-16.

475

Ivan Tkachev and Anton Feinberg, “Rossiia raskryla v OON tol’ko 42% svoikh voennykh raskhodov,” RBK, August 30, 2017, https://www.rbc.ru/economic 8/30/08/2017/598588189879470192154521; Andermo and Kragh, “Secrecy and Military Expenditures.”

476

Cooper, Russian Military Expenditure, 33-34.

477

“Ex-minister Mikhail Abyzov’s Shock $6zM Fraud Detention, Explained,” Moscow Times, 27 March 2019, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/03/27/ex -minister-mikhail-abyzovs-shock-62-million-fraud-detention-explained-a64976.

478

Vaypan and Nuzov, Russia: “Crimes Against History.”

479

Memorial: “Russia Censured Memorial Rights Group as ‘Foreign Agent/” BBC News, 9 November 2015, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe -34767014; The Levada Centre: “Russia’s Levada Centre Polling Group Named Foreign Agent,” BBC News, 5 September 2016, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world -europe-37278649.

480

“Russia: Opposition Figure Navalny’s Foundation Declared‘Foreign Agent,”’ BBC News, 9 October 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49986o16.

481

This interpretation would be in line with Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin, “Why Resource-Poor Dictators Allow Freer Media.”

482

On power and money in Putin’s Russia, see Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, and Miller, Putinomics.

483

Tkachev, “Sekretnye materialy.”

484

Service, “Report for the Litvinenko Inquiry,” 4.

485

Satter, It Was a Long Time Ago.

486

Dunlop, Moscow Bombings of September 1999.

487

In 2015 North Korea’s GDP per head (at purchasing power parity) was estimated at $1,700 (compared with $42,770 for South Korea in 2019). For Vietnam, Cuba, and China in 2017 the same figures were $6,900, $12,700, and $18,200 respectively. CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/.

488

Harrison, “Soviet Economy, 1917-1991,” provides discussion and justification.

489

For the affinity of early and mid-twentieth-century mass production to both communism and national socialism, see Link, Forging Global Fordism.

490

See Our World in Data on Moore’s Law, https://ourworldindata.org/gra pher/transistors-per-microprocessor; on cellular subscriptions, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/mobile-cellular-subscriptions-per-ioo-people; on internet users https://ourworldindata.org/internet; on users of social media https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media).

491

Hong and Kim, “Will the Internet Promote Democracy?”

492

Frantz, Authoritarianism, 217, based on a dataset of 280 authoritarian regimes from 1946 to 2010, described by Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions.”

493

Guriev and Treisman, Spin Dictators.

494

Hong and Kim, “Will the Internet Promote Democracy?”

495

Frantz, Authoritarianism, 117-18; Dukalskis, Authoritarian Public Sphere.

496

Frantz, Authoritarianism, 108-10.

497

Clark et al., Shifting Landscape of Global Internet Censorship.

498

Sergei Guriev, “The Future of Putin’s Information Autocracy,” Project Syndicate, 27 December 2019, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ putin-popularity-information-autocracy-by-sergei-guriev-2019-12.

499

Sergei Guriev, “We May Already Be Seeing Russia’s Return to the Repressive Dictatorship of the 20th Century,” Institute of Modern Russia, 5 August 2021, https://imrussia.org/en/opinions/3321-sergei-guriev-%E2%80%9Cwe-may-already-be-seeing-russia%E2%8o%99s-return-to-the-repressive-dictatorship-of -the-20th-century%E2%8o%9D).

500

Menni et al. “Real-Time Tracking of Self-Reported Symptoms.”

501

“China Employs Two Million Microblog Monitors State Media Say,” BBC Chinese Service, 4 October 2013, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl-china-243969571.

502

The working population of China’s urban areas in 2013 was 382.4 million. “Statistical Communique of the People’s Republic of China on the 2013 National Economic and Social Development,” National Bureau of Statistics of China, 24 February 2014, http://www.stats.g0v.cn/english/PressRelease/201402/ t20140224_515103.html.

503

For discussion on these lines in relation to China, see Luttwak, Rise of China, 81-82,100-101.

504

Edmonds, “Start from the Political.”

505

“Istochniki: rossiiskie vlasti ne byli gotovy к vvedennym protiv strany sanktsiiam. Vozmozhno, po tomu chto Putin skryl plan vtorzheniia ot mnogikh podchinennykh,” Agenstvo, 2 March 2022, https://www.agents.media/rossijskie-vlasti-sanktsii/.

506

Polina Beliakova, “Russian Military’s Corruption Quagmire,” Politico, 8 March 2022, https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-military-corruption- quagmire/; Alex Crowther, “Russia’s Military: Failure on an Awesome Scale,” Centre for European Policy Analysis, 15 April 2022, https://cepa.org/article/ russias-military-failure-on-an-awesome-scale/.

507

Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 6. For the “Iron Curtain,” see Winston S. Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace,” speech at Westminster College, Fulton, MO, 5 March 1946, International Churchill Society, http://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/ speeches/i946-i963-elder-statesman/i2O-the-sinews-of-peace.

508

Applied to law making, this saying is traced back to the lawyer John Godfrey Saxe, writing in the Daily Cleveland Herald on 2 March 1869, by Fred Shapiro in “Our Daily Bieg: Uncovering More Quote Authors,” Freakonomics, 5 March 2009, https://freakonomics.com/2oo9/o3/o5/our-daily-bleg-uncovering-more-quote-au thors/. (A “bleg” is a blog entry that begs the reader for further information.)

509

“Russian ‘Spy’ Avoids Jail Term,” BBC News, 19 February 2003, http:// news.bbc.co.Uk/1/hi/world/europe/2779959.stm.

510

AAAS Human Rights Action Network, case no. reo2o8_dan, 12 November 2004, on the website of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, http://shr.aaas.org/aaashran/alert.php?a_id=290.

511

“Aleksandr Nikitin: Researcher Facing Imprisonment,” Amnesty International, http://web.archive.0rg/web/20031226015639/http://www.amnestyusa.org/ group/bannedbooks/1998/russia.html.

512

“Aleksandr Nikitin Faces Further Persecution,” Amnesty International, 1 August 2000, https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/aleksandr-nikitin-faces -further-persecution.

513

“Russia: Release of Imprisoned Journalist Grigory Pasko Must Be Made Unconditional,” Amnesty International, 23 January 2003, https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/russia-release-imprisoned-journalist-grigory-pasko -must-be-made-unconditional.

514

“Evrosud otkazal Grigoriiu Pas’ko,” Kommersant, 27 May 2010, https:// www.kommersant.ru/doc/1375949.

515

C. J. Chivers, “The Defender of a Lesser-Known Guarantee in Russia,” New York Times, 27 October 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2oo7/1o/27/world/ europe/27pavlov.html.

516

“‘They Followed Me All the Way to the Airstairs.’ Human Rights Lawyer Ivan Pavlov Explains Leaving Russia after the Authorities Made His Job Impossible,” Meduza, 9 September 2021, https://meduza.i0/en/feature/2021/09/09/ they-followed-me-all-the-way-to-the-airstairs).

517

Brett Stephens, “Putin’s Political Prisoners,” Wall Street Journal, 19 February 2008, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB120338385727075719.

518

Carl Levitin, “Russian Scientist ‘Tried to Smuggle Spy Device to China,”’ Nature 401, no. 200 (16 September 1999), https://www.nature.com/articles/45628.

519

“Case no. 52” (7 April 2004), http://www.case52.org; “Case Study: Igor Sutyagin,” Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/eca/ russia/4.htm.

520

Ian Black, “Igor Sutyagin Is Odd Man Out in Spy Swap Deal,” Guardian, 17 August 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2o1o/aug/17/igor-sutyagin -spy-swap.

Content

Harrison Mark Secret Leviathan

SECRET LEVIATHAN Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism MARK HARRISON

Preface

Abbreviations and Russian Terms

1. SECRET LEVIATHAN

2. THE SECRECY/CAPACITY TRADEOFF

3. THE SECRECY TAX

4. SECRECY AND FEAR

5. SECRET POLICING AND DISCRIMINATION

6. SECRET POLICING AND MISTRUST

7. SECRECY AND THE UNINFORMED ELITE

8. SECRECY AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AUTHORITARIANISM

APPENDIX. Espionage as Open-Source Data Collection

Примечания