Second, what about other Soviet organizations—central and local government departments, enterprises, offices, research labs, and so forth. Did they too pay the secrecy tax at the KGB rate? It would be natural to suppose that Soviet secrecy was more relaxed in branches dealing with consumer goods or entertainment, for example, so that these departments might have paid the secrecy tax at a reduced or concessionary rate. Yet every office of Soviet government had its own secret department to look after its secret government instructions and its secret war mobilization plan, whether it was the KGB or the office in charge of the supply of undergarments. In short, the KGB set standards across the entire Soviet state bureaucracy, and every secret department operated on parallel lines under direct KGB supervision.
Undercutting the case for generalization, the proportions of secret to nonsecret activity were surely not uniform across all parts of the system. Even core agencies had some unclassified correspondence. Agencies outside the core probably held more unclassified documentation in relative terms. For this reason alone, the secrecy tax must have varied somewhat across the different branches of the state and bore less heavily on civilian agencies.
To summarize, we have tried to measure the secrecy tax rate on Soviet government administration. The only evidence to hand comes from the archive of the Soviet Lithuania KGB. It suggests a rate of at least one-third. But there is an error margin on each side. The fact that we rely on documentation selected for the archive suggests that one-third might not be enough. The fact that the figure is based on the KGB suggests that one-third might be too much, because for other Soviet government departments, the burden might have been less. Either way, the tax rate was high enough that even substantial corrections would struggle to make it insignificant.
When the government allocates human resources to the security of its own paperwork, is one-third a lot? To benchmark this figure, consider what would seem like a lot in other contexts. In an open society, how much does it take to excite the public? At the end of 2006 it was revealed that over the previous year London’s Metropolitan Police had spent around 5 percent of its £3.2 billion budget on “non-incident linked paperwork” (£122.2 million) and “checking paperwork” (£26.5 million). These figures were enough to create newspaper headlines in the UK.[164] The Lithuania KGB figure of one-third is larger than the Met’s 5 percent by an order of magnitude. This suggests that the British public would see the secrecy tax paid by the KGB as very large.
The principal metric employed in annual reports of the US Information Security Oversight Office is the number of instances of “original” and “derivative” classification and declassification.[165] Although informative in general terms, this does not lead to any statistic against which Soviet practices can be benchmarked. Since 2003, however, the ISOO has published an annual supplementary estimate of the dollar costs of classification and declassification. The costs of information security and classification management to American government, suitably normalized, could provide a benchmark.
In 2010, $5.7 billion (or 95 percent) of the US federal government’s total outlays on the protection of classified information were attributed to three departments: Defense, State, and Justice.[166] What is the right denominator for this sum? In the case of the Lithuania KGB, we compared the quantity of paperwork devoted to secret file management with all other paperwork not in individual case files. What is the US government activity that corresponds with the latter? Since paperwork is labor intensive, we use labor costs of the three departments largely responsible for original classification (in other words, we exclude outlays on operation and maintenance, procurement, research and development, construction, and housing). In 2010 US federal outlays on national defense personnel, “conduct of foreign affairs,” and “litigative and judicial activities” came to $184.6 billion.[167] With that on the bottom line and $5.7 billion on top, outlays on the protection of American secrets in 2010 ran at 3.1 percent of the direct costs of the general activities concerned. Again, we arrive at a fraction that falls below the Lithuania KGB’s secrecy burden by an order of magnitude.
The Soviet system of accounting for secrets throws a clear light on the procedural costs of doing business under a secretive dictatorship. Conspirative rule imposed something like a secrecy tax on the turnover of government business. Just like a real tax, secrecy threw sand in the machinery of state, making it harder for the right people to obtain information and disseminate decisions. The burden was magnified by Soviet secrecy’s reflexive quality, which turned the system of accounting for secrets into a secret on its own account, one that had to be accounted for within the system.
The human response to a tax can be compliance, avoidance, or evasion. On the evidence, it seems that most Soviet officials complied most of the time. There is little sign of avoidance. As for evasion, taking the form of careless document handling, reports are plentiful. The evidence is that bad examples, if unchecked, could take hold and spread through an office until they were uncovered and suppressed. Only continual enforcement secured general compliance.
The records of a small regional bureaucracy, the Lithuania KGB, let us measure the burden of secret paperwork. In the “normal” postwar years of 1954 to 1982, the secrecy tax was levied at an average rate of at least one-third of overall KGB management costs. There is reason to think that we could generalize this figure across all of Soviet government, although with room for error on either side.
The secrecy tax shows clearly the position of the Soviet state in the secrecy/capacity tradeoff (previously depicted in Figure 2.3). The Soviet state operated with a level of secrecy beyond that which would have maximized state capacity. The secrecy tax was heavy enough to consume a substantial proportion of the Soviet state’s human capacity. The state was rendered less capable, while the regime of the ruling party was made more secure.
By April 2011, the Hoover Archive had acquired 5,312 files from the Lithuanian Special Archive (the archive of the Soviet Lithuania KGB) containing just over one million microfilmed pages. These files, listed in Table 3.2, all from fond K-i, were catalogued in five collections (opisi) numbered 2 (counterintelligence departments of the NKVD-NKGB-MVD-KGB up to 1954), 3 (counterintelligence departments from 1945), 10 (the KGB secretariat), 14 (the KGB city administrations), and 45 (operational case files).
As can be seen, these files are not all of one type. The typical file in opisi 2, 3, 10, and 14 contained management information (instructions, plans,
| table 3A.1. The Lithuania KGB collection at Hoover, April 2011: Files, pages, and years opened and closed | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collection number | 2 | 3 | 10 | 14 | Subtotal | 45 | |||||||
| Year opened | 1941 | 1945 | 1940 | 1944 | 1926 | ||||||||
| Year closed | 1954 | 1996 | 1991 | 1986 | 1991 | ||||||||
| Files total | 39 | 1,982 | 750 | 663 | 3,434 | 1,880 | |||||||
| Pages, total | 8,959 | 415,985 | 166,888 | 76,066 | 667,898 | 370,267 | |||||||
| Pages per file: | |||||||||||||
| Average | 229.7 | 209.9 | 222.5 | 114.9 | 194.6 | 197.2 | |||||||
| Standard | |||||||||||||
| deviation | 119.4 | 117.7 | 103.1 | 84.0 | 115.7 | 168.9 | |||||||
| Years file was open: | |||||||||||||
| Average | 1.64 | 1.03 | 0.85 | 1.07 | 1.01 | 29.0 | |||||||
| Standard | |||||||||||||
| deviation | 1.33 | 0.98 | 1.43 | 1.61 | 1.24 | 14.0 | |||||||
| Note: The subtotals (of opisi 2, 3, 10, and 14) shown in bold indicate the quantitative attributes of what the text calls the “management files.” Counted among the management files in this table is one 270-page file (Hoover/LYA, K-l/3/1979) containing a file catalogue created in 1996 by the new Lithuania Special Archive. This file is excluded from further analysis. | Source: Lietuvos SSR Valstybés Saugumo Komitetas selected records, 1940-91, fond K-l, held at the Hoover Archive and described at http://www.hoover.org/library-and-archives/ collections/east-europe/featured-collections/lietuvos-ssr. | ||||||||||||
164
These figures emerged from the Home Office’s annual “activity-based costing” review of police budgets: Ben Leapman, “Police Paperwork Costs Hit 1625m,” The Telegraph (London), 3 December 2006. The figure of £625 million extrapolated the Met’s figures across the country. In 2009 a Home Office report (Normington, Reducing the Data Burden on Police Forces) made recommendations to reduce paperwork burdens on the police—including to abolish activity-based costing. For this reason, there are no more recent figures.
166
US Information Security Oversight Office, 2011 Report to the President: Cost Estimates, 3. In 2010 total US federal government costs of “information security” were ¢5.65 billion. This figure covers “information systems security” (the largest component) together with costs of classification management, declassification, operations security, and technical surveillance countermeasures. To this could be added $352.5 million laid out on “classification management,” making $6.0 billion in total. This figure excludes outlays on the physical security of persons and installations, declassification, education and training, operations security, technical surveillance countermeasures, and “security oversight, management, and planning.” In the same year, 95 percent of original classification activity was undertaken in the Departments of Defense, State, and Justice (US Information Security Oversight Office, 2011 Report to the President, 6), and 95 percent of ¢6.0 billion makes $5.7 billion.
167
US Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the U.S. Government. Fiscal Year 2013,74 and 76 (Table 3.2—Outlays by Function and Subfunction: 1962-2017, line items 051 “military personnel”), 153, and 752