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.
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.
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.”