In the spring of 1947, the Soviet state was already far to the right-hand side of Figure 4.2—at a point such as Z, say, where leakages were small and fear costs were relatively large. In response to the KR affair, Stalin pushed the Soviet state still further to the right. As the story of this chapter shows, with the increase in secrecy the previous level of state capacity could not be maintained. Fear drove it down to Z'.
Writing about Stalin’s last years, a historian describes “mindless, excessive secrecy.”[227] Had Stalin’s rage caused him to lose his mind? Historians and biographers have often questioned Stalin’s sanity. He is not infrequently described as a victim of “paranoia.”[228] Scholars often seem more comfortable with the idea that Stalin blundered uncontrollably than that he calculated his moves. But this conclusion is mistaken.
There is plentiful evidence of Stalin’s psychopathology.[229] Damaged by childhood abuse, Stalin had few scruples, few friends, and a limited capacity for empathy. At the same time, he had superior talents for organizing information and for logical reasoning: in other words, he could rationalize. He excelled at the patient, step-by-step argumentation of syllogisms. In speeches and letters, he advanced complex, consistent models of cause and effect in the world. He showed patience and persistence in the pursuit of long-term objectives, whether we construe these as personal or political. With this went a high degree of self-control, including the ability to wait. He controlled his feelings, rarely allowing himself to express self-doubt, depression, or despair. Even if he lacked empathy, he had insight and was able to dominate and manipulate others.
Stalin could rationalize; could he also optimize? Some of Stalin’s policy choices have been thought to imply unstable or inconsistent preferences, which would rule out a capacity to optimize. For example, Stalin often seemed to promote investment at all costs, but then he would abruptly switch course, ordering the distribution of consumer goods. Or he would target his enemies with precision and calculation, and then abruptly lash out at the guilty and the innocent alike in very large numbers. It is hard to see the consistency.
In these cases, economically minded historians have argued that Stalin’s behavior was consistent with optimization subject to constraints: at any moment, his decisions depended on which constraints were binding. For example, Stalin favored investment over consumption when possible, but he shifted the priority to consumption when intelligence reports warned him that the limited supplies of consumer goods risked damaging the workers’ willingness to work.[230] He preferred selective repression when possible, switching to mass killing when internal threats became less well defined (making selection more difficult) and when external threats increased (making the neutralization of internal threats more urgent).[231]
A study of Soviet monitoring and audit agencies points in the same direction: Stalin did not trust his subordinates and wanted to control their actions, but not at all costs: he was willing to balance the costs against the benefits of control at the margin.[232] The balancing of benefits against costs at the margin, and readiness to adjust to changing constraints, are both signs of a capacity to optimize.
Why did Stalin not aim to maximize Soviet state capacity? Stalin had a strong interest in building the Soviet state. As previous chapters have shown, he invested great efforts in the staffing of effective state agencies, and a powerful state of multiple capabilities was one of the most important outcomes of his rule. Nonetheless, Stalin also had other concerns. Most importantly, he had no interest in building the capacity of a state over which he did not rule, a state that did not follow the directives of the party that he led. In fact, regime security was Stalin’s first and foremost concern, and state capacity was of value to him only if it was under his control. Consistently, when state capacity was at a maximum, he would have been willing to give some of it away in return for more of the secrecy that kept his regime safe. Although increased secrecy gave his officials a harder time, it also added to the security of the regime, which was also his personal security. So, a point somewhere to the right of the maximum in Figure 4.2 was the logical place for him to position the Soviet state.
But where, exactly, was the optimum? And did Stalin try to find it? The KR affair shows that in June 1949 he decided secrecy was too lax and needed to be tightened. The record does not show his understanding of the tradeoff he was making. If he understood it, he did not have the means to optimize with precision or without errors. Even if he would have preferred to balance his objectives efficiently, the command system did not exist to be efficient, and it could not calibrate or compute many of the values that would have been required for perfect optimization. If Stalin aimed to optimize, he did so intuitively, by trial and error. After 1945, moreover, he may have become more prone to errors. With age he gained knowledge and experience, but increasing age also began to erode his mental capacity and physical stamina, so that he left more and more important decisions to subordinates.[233]
Thus, the secrecy law of 1947 did have some perverse effects, and it might have been a mistake. But it was not the act of either a fool or a madman.
Despotic Leviathan should be capable of decisive measures. Dictators do not have to account for their actions before the courts or before public opinion. Soviet officials answered only to superiors for their decisions, and Stalin did not have to account to anyone for his.
The story of this chapter shows how secrecy undermined the making and implementing of decisions. When Stalin suddenly tightened secrecy in 1947, his aim was to deter officials from engaging in the unauthorized exchange of information with outsiders. But the climate of fear engendered by the new rules hindered all business—not just the unofficial business that Stalin aimed to stamp out, but also the official business of the state.
Secret Leviathan became sluggish and irresolute. The state’s business continued, only to the extent that the parties were willing to work around or ignore the new rules. In that context, however, neglect of the rules was now more dangerous than before, because the law of 1947 was explicitly aimed at secrecy violations committed without a guilty intention to harm the state. Managers tried to protect themselves by lobbying superiors for action to remove these difficulties and by seeking to implicate the superiors in the expedients that would allow them to work around the rules. Higher officials responded with indecision and delay. Everyone looked as if they were doing something, but what they were engaged in was self-protection at the expense of their core duties.
In an open society, indecision is visible. Private corporations in a competitive market economy answer for delay to the buyer, who can switch business to a more agile competitor; they must develop mechanisms to limit indecision and other business costs or leave the market. Democratic leaders must answer for indecisive government to voters, including taxpayers, who can switch their votes to political rivals. Media competition creates a market for compromising information about politicians’ performance and a race to disclose it. Political competition means that information prejudicial to one party will eventually to be exposed by others in what a well-known study calls a “fixed pattern”:
228
E.g., SebagMontefiore, Stalin, 48-49. A short guide to the scholarly literature pointing to mental illness in Stalin’s psychopathology is provided by Rachael Allen, “Stalin and the Great Terror: Can Mental Illness Explain His Violent Behavior?” Guided History (blog), http://blogs.bu.edu/guidedhistory/russia-and-its-empires/ rachael-allen/.
229
Conquest, Great Terror, 114; Medvedev, Let History Judge, 306; Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, 494; Tucker, “Dictator and Totalitarianism”; Service, Stalin, 343- 344; Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 2,492; Harris, Great Fear, 188.
231
Harrison, “Dictator and Defense” and “Soviet Union after 1945”; Gregory, Schroder, and Sonin, “Rational Dictators and the Killing of Innocents.”