Classified documents are routinely passed out to support an administration; weaken an administration; advance a policy; undermine a policy. A newspaper account would be incomplete without some such reference?[234]
Thus, liberal democracies have been poor keepers of government secrets. While this does not rule out indecision, it does at least ensure that the citizens hear about it at some point.
It is something of a surprise, therefore, to find that indecision and gridlock could also be features of authoritarian rule. Fear can be electrifying, and Stalin often counted on that aspect of fear to galvanize those around him into action. In our story, however, the effect of fear on government business was the opposite: the shock was paralyzing. The decision to intensify secrecy was the cause of the paralysis, and secrecy also served to conceal it until many decades had passed.
5. SECRET POLICING AND DISCRIMINATION
When some ordinary person popped up on the KGB radar, the first step of the officer on duty was to write a note to the KGB archive. The note asked the archivist: Is there “compromising evidence” on this person?
The term “compromising evidence” (komprometiruiushchie materialy) was unknown before the Soviet era. In the early years of Bolshevik rule, the secret police began to build its records of the political and social attitudes of the individual citizens who came under surveillance. Whenever suspicion arose over a person’s loyalties or practical inclinations, the records were scoured for “compromising evidence” that might shed new light on the case.[235] Official use of the phrase became so frequent that it was shortened in writing to “k/m” or (in conversation) “kompromat.” More recently, the word kompromat even entered the English language.[236]
A search for kompromat could be prompted by many things. Sometimes it was a person’s suspicious behavior that drew attention: for example, they might express anticommunist views to a neighbor, or tell subversive jokes at work, or show interest in political or military secrets over a drink in a bar. Someone might meet up with a foreigner, seemingly by accident, or by an arrangement that fell outside the foreigner’s authorized schedule of official meetings. A person could attract attention just by being in the neighborhood of a suspicious incident, such as a fire or an industrial accident. Any of these things could trigger KGB enquiries into the subject’s record to establish whether there was some preexisting pattern of behavior or association.
Citizens could attract the interest of the secret police even while they behaved entirely correctly. One way was to apply for promotion to a position of leadership or responsibility at work. Another was to seek permission to travel abroad—a privilege reserved for those with loyal attitudes and responsibilities. Or, to put it differently, while it was obvious that you could invite an enquiry into your background by doing things that invited suspicion, you could achieve the same less obviously by seeking an advancement that required you to be above suspicion.
In terms of its bearing on the subject’s loyalty, the quality of kompromat was extremely variable. The clearest indication was provided by evidence directly implicating the subject in a crime. By contrast, a good deal of information counted as kompromat was made up of facts or hearsay of a purely circumstantial nature: for example, living on one’s own, or living in the neighborhood of a secret installation. Other kinds of information were historical, being based on incidents or associations from a person’s distant past. We will see that most items of kompromat were circumstantial or historical. To that extent, it is reasonable to say that its evidential quality was typically poor. This was a defining feature, not a defect. For most purposes it was enough for kompromat to provide a basis for suspicion. It did not need to prove guilt.
Despite its typically poor quality, kompromat was valuable. The value of kompromat arose in two contexts. The context of this chapter was created by what the economist Ronald Wintrobe has called the “dictator’s dilemma.” Secret Leviathan was perennially suspicious. The security of the Soviet rulers rested on their capacity to sniff out enemies to be isolated or neutralized or punished before they could pose a serious threat. But who were the enemies? The party leaders could not judge people by appearances. Fearing repression, those who were disaffected or alienated from the existing order spent much of their time simulating loyalty, at least in public. Even an all-powerful dictator with powers of life and death could not make those around him freely confess the inner feelings that might lead them to hostile thought and action if the opportunity were ever to arise.[237]
In the context of the dictator’s dilemma, the secret police had no better choice than to turn to kompromat, to the tenuous evidence of past associations and patterns of behavior and to hearsay, with the hope of achieving a rough separation of those who could safely be advanced or promoted from the others—the “usual suspects”—who were marked out to be isolated and marginalized. Here, therefore, the value of kompromat was its use for discrimination.
This chapter is based on evidence of the uses of kompromat in Soviet Lithuania, a Western borderland province of the Soviet Union, in the 1970s. This was well after the Thaw, when the consequences of being identified as a “usual suspect” became much less severe. In the 1930s and 1940s, people were identified as suspect based on class background, ethnic affiliation (especially when linked to the people of a neighboring state), past political activity, and compromising family ties. Hundreds of thousands at a time went on to suffer forced resettlement, imprisonment, or execution.[238] The Thaw put an end to these worst outcomes. Discrimination against people with suspicious markers became more selective and took the milder form of restricting individual access to education, employment, and foreign travel. At the same time, the principle of using markers of suspicion to judge a person and secretly channel them from one life course to another did not change.
Discrimination was not the only use of kompromat. A second use arose in a different context. A party or public official might ask for the cooperation of a subordinate or private citizen in a task, based on their civic duty. Faced with refusal, they could use kompromat to persuade by other means—by threatening disclosure of evidence that could lead to loss of employment or loss of liberty. A particular case, the use of kompromat to blackmail persons of interest into becoming KGB informers, is discussed in the next chapter. Although the power of kompromat to coerce was no doubt weaker in the 1970s than in the 1930s, the principle again did not change.[239]
When used for its present purpose, that is, for discrimination, kompromat was bound up with secrecy in two ways. First, kompromat served the regime of secrecy. Because the Soviet system of government was more secretive and more encompassing than other systems, the performance of most if not all responsible work required access to secret government communications. The KGB used the kompromat in its files to decide who would be allowed to work with secrets and who would be barred.
Second, the substance of kompromat and all its uses were secrets in themselves. Decisions based on kompromat were covered by conspirative norms. When the KGB found reason to bar a subject from secret work or from foreign travel, we will see, no explanation was given, or some excuse was found. The subject was never notified that it was the KGB’s decision to bar them, or the grounds on which it did so. The victims might guess but could never be sure.
235
For examples of such requests, see Harrison, One Day We Will Live without Fear, 156,166,174,193.
236
The Google Ngram Viewer, described by Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis Of Culture,” shows that “komprometiruiushchie materialy” entered the Russian-language Google Books corpus (2019) in the 1920s but was not in widespread use before the 1990s. The abbreviation “kompromat” did not appear in Russian print publications until the end of the 1980s and, in English, not until the end of the century.
238
On the “mass operations” and “national operations” of the Great Terror, see Davies et al., Soviet Economy and the Approach of War, 12-19. On mass deportations from 1930 to 1953, see Tsarevskaia-Diakina, ed., Spetspereselentsy v SSSR.
239
Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Substate Dictatorship, describe the uses of kompromat for coercion in the personal regime of Mir Jafar Bagirov, the party boss of Azerbaijan after the war (35-39), and in the campaign of Lavrentii Beria to succeed Stalin in the months after the latter’s death (124-26). They go on to show that, as the Thaw got under way, the nature of kompromat changed—at least for middle- and high-ranking officials and at least temporarily: “The information that had once been used for Stalin-era kompromat was ... downgraded [but this] did not mean that blackmail was no longer used.... It was now, conversely, the fact that a leader had been a perpetrator of Stalin-era repressions that became the main source of kompromat” (127). The varied uses of kompromat outlived communist rule. On kompromat in modern Russia see Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works, 59-90; Mesquita, “Kompromat (Russia).”