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.
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.
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.
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,