In Table 3.2, normal times are represented by the second column. The column shows that, over thirty years of Soviet postwar normality, accounting for secrets alone accounted for 34 percent of the paperwork left in the KGB archive. On that basis, the average secrecy tax rate paid by the KGB was one-third. This is the single most important fact that emerges from the documents.
The rest of the table provides context. Before 1954, archived KGB paperwork is dominated by the records of its existential struggle with an
| table 3.2. In normal times, one-third of KGB paperwork was documentation of secret file management: The number of Lithuania KGB management files and their composition by topic and year opened, 1940-1991 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1940-1953 | 1954-1982 | 1983-1991 | 1940-1991 | |
| All files | 1,992 | 1,003 | 438 | 3,433 |
| Per year | 142.3 | 34.6 | 48.7 | 66.0 |
| By topic, percent: | ||||
| Counterinsurgency | 76.0 | 7.6 | 0.6 | 46.5 |
| Secret file | ||||
| management | 7.8 | 33-7 | 71.2 | 23.4 |
| Other matters | 16.2 | 58.7 | 27.2 | 30.0 |
| Total | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
Note: The bold figure in the table is the one highlighted in the text as the most important outcome of the exercise.
Source: Statistical appendix to Harrison, “Accounting for Secrets,” https://warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/data/secrets/jeh2013appendix.pdf.
armed nationalist insurgency. While the armed struggle took priority, accounting for secret paperwork took a back seat, and the secrecy tax made up less than 8 percent of KGB records. After 1982, the secrecy tax wedge was apparently twice its size in normal times—more than 70 percent of KGB records. But this should not be taken as meaningful. As discussed below, that figure is almost certainly skewed by the collapse of regular archiving practices in the last years of Soviet rule.
When secret file management is compared with other KGB activities, it becomes apparent that, in normal times, the secrecy tax consumed more paperwork than any single operational focus of the KGB that is identified here. This is shown in Table 3.3. Examples of other activities were the investigation of crimes and hunting suspects, looking into citizen complaints and petitions (often denunciations), keeping surveillance on foreigners, looking into economic disruptions, and warning rule breakers to behave. None of these other activities comes close to accounting for secrets in the proportion of KGB attention it could expect to receive.
How reliable and how representative is this exercise? First, reliability. A problem is that we have access not to all KGB paperwork, but only
| table 3.3. Under Soviet postwar normality, accounting for secrets was the first operational priority of the Lithuania KGB: A topical analysis of 1,003 archived management files opened between 1954 and 1982 | |
|---|---|
| Percent of files | |
| Accounting for secrets | 33.7 |
| Police investigation and search | 13.5 |
| Complaints and petitions | 8.3 |
| Counterinsurgency | 7.6 |
| Matters relating to foreigners | 6.2 |
| Economic matters | 5.6 |
| Preventive work | 2.4 |
| Matters relating to young people | 1.8 |
| Anonymous circulars | 1.6 |
| Matters relating to Jews | 0.6 |
| Not classified | 18.7 |
| Total | 100.0 |
| Source: The method is described in the statistical appendix to Harrison, “Accounting for secrets,” available on the author’s webpage at https://warwick.ac.uk/markharri son/data/secrets/jeh2013appendix.pdf, except that for this table double counting of some categories has been eliminated by proportional distribution of files allocated to more than one category. | |
to the KGB paperwork that was archived. The fact is that we lack useful knowledge about the policies that selected paperwork for conservation, as opposed to destruction. But any error that has resulted is likely to be on the side of understating the burden of secrecy. As noted earlier, “practical importance” was the only criterion ever mentioned for keeping a document for the archive. Intuitively, it seems unlikely that the documentation of secret file management was seen as of more practical importance, and therefore more worthy of archiving, than the documentation of an anti-Soviet plot and its suppression. If the records of file management were disproportionately targeted for incineration, then our estimate of the burden of the secrecy tax could be biased downward.
The idea of a downward bias is reinforced by the composition of documentation archived from of the last years of Soviet rule in Lithuania. In that period, KGB priorities for the retention of documents were reversed. The documents of greatest practical importance were selected for removal or destruction in order to prevent their ultimate disclosure. Less important documents were retained because it was not a priority to destroy them. The result appears in the third column of Table 3.2: for the years 1983 to 1991, three-quarters of the KGB archive consists of records of secret file management. In fact, there is little else. On that basis the secrecy tax rate paid by the KGB was at least one-third.
Then, representativeness. If that was the rate paid by the Soviet Lithuania KGB, what does it mean for the Soviet state more generally? Lithuania’s KGB was, after all, a relatively small agency, with fewer than 1,200 regular employees in 1971 from a country of 3 million.[162] No matter how large as a proportion of its own costs, the aggregate burden of KGB secrecy in Lithuania on the Soviet state was trivial. The one-third secrecy tax rate takes on real significance only if it gives some idea of the rate at which the tax was levied across the Soviet state as a whole.
The case for generalization is substantial, but some uncertainties cannot be eliminated and should be acknowledged. First, what about the KGB elsewhere? The KGB of Soviet Lithuania clearly worked to the same procedural standards as the much larger KGB of the Union. KGB structures were everywhere similar, if not identical. All republican KGBs followed the norms set by Moscow. If security threats were always local and specific, the systems used to manage them were general. The relationship between center and periphery was not one way, it is true. Moscow and the republican KGBs continually exchanged best practices and aimed for mutual improvement. When things went wrong, however, Moscow called the tune. This was the message of Vitalii Fedorchuk, sent to Kyiv in 1970 to take over the Ukrainian KGB. Faced with the suggestion of doing things the local way, he dismissed it contemptuously: “We work for the entire Union. There is no such thing as Ukraine in our work.”[163] In short, the KGB everywhere did what the KGB was doing in Lithuania.