SECRET LEVIATHAN
Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism
MARK HARRISON
Preface
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.
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.
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