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 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.
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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).