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.
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Rubanov, “Poteri ot zasekrechivaniia informatsii.” Rubanov attributed the estimate to Boris Raizberg, a missile engineer who became an economist.