Much remained unknown, however. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the archives were opened, aspects of Soviet secrecy emerged that were completely unexpected, even for the veteran scholars that found them. One surprising discovery was the sheer size of the Soviet Union’s secret sphere in comparison to the size of the public sphere. If what was published was the tip of an iceberg, how much lay beneath? Here, the economic historian R. W. Davies comments on the discovery that the volume of secret Soviet government business in the 1930s exceeded the business disclosed to the public by a whole order of magnitude:
Between 1930 and 1941, as many as 3,990 decrees of [the Soviet central government] and its main economic committee were published. We naively thought that this included a high proportion of the total. We now know that the total number of decrees issued in these years was 32,415. Most of these were “for official use only,” and over 5,000 were “top secret” ... and were available only to a handful of top officials.[14]
Another surprise was the discovery of a formal code of secretive behavior to which all party members and state officials were bound to conform: “conspirativeness” (konspiratsiia). Here the social historian Sheila Fitzpatrick describes her first encounter. In September 1990 she visited the archive of Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), a previously “closed” provincial capital. There she came across an instruction of the early 1930s on the classification and handling of paperwork:
A sentence jumps out about rules for handling “correspondence of Party organs and other conspiratorial documents.” Conspiratorial documents? When this is a ruling party, in power already for fifteen years?
... [The archive director] comes in; I ask what he makes of “conspiratorial documents” phrase about party correspondence. New to him.[15]
A third surprise was the extreme compartmentalization of Soviet secrecy. All bureaucracies are divided into compartments, and it is of the nature of these divisions that they impede cooperation and communication. But in the Soviet bureaucracies the walls between government departments were as high and as impenetrable as those that shielded the state from the public. I recall my wonder at the documentation of a dispute between the Soviet Interior Ministry (MVD) and the Finance Ministry in August 1948. The Finance Ministry was preparing the national budget, which included payments toward the upkeep of the millions of detainees and guards in the labor camps of the MVD. The budget officials asked the MVD officials to confirm the numbers. The MVD refused: “Provision of these figures will lead to familiarization with especially important information on the part of a wide circle of staff of the USSR Ministry of Finance, the State Bank, and the Industrial Bank.” (“Especially important” was the highest secrecy classification.) The MVD advised Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s deputy, that in past years such figures had been loaned temporarily to the Finance Ministry to be processed by no more than two or three highly trusted workers, then returned. It noted that the ministries of the armed forces and state security provided the Finance Ministry only with financial summaries, not head counts; and it proposed that from now on the MVD should do the same.[16]
Since those early finds, there have been two kinds of further revelations. On one side, the Soviet archives have yielded many specific secrets. Studies and documentary collections have been published that show the secret working arrangements of the top party leaders and of secret branches of activity such as the secret police, the armed forces, the defense industry, the closed cities of the military-industrial complex, and the Gulag system of forced labor camps.[17]
On the other side were revelations that laid bare particular aspects of the organization of secrecy. These included accounts of the secret archives themselves; the rules pertaining to what was secret and what was not; the development of the censorship; the concealment of people, objects, organizations, and entire cities; the formalization of “conspirative” decision making; the parallel evolution of government communications on paper and by telephone; and the operation of secret processes such as the vetting of personnel for access to secret information.[18]
After all this, there remains the task of understanding the system as a whole: how the parts fitted together to constitute a system and what were its consequences. The system had a name, but even the name was secret, being unknown to the public until Soviet secrecy collapsed. The “regime of secrecy,” as insiders named it, is defined here for KGB officer trainees of the 1970s in a secret handbook copied and made available for scholars during the 1990s:
REGIME OF SECRECY: the totality of rules determined by the organs of power and administration that limit the access of persons to secret documents and activities, codify the procedure for use of secret documents, correspondingly regulate the conduct of people involved with secrets, and provide for other measures.[19]
The Soviet regime of secrecy was not unchanging. As described in this book, it was formed by beliefs and interests in an atmosphere of conflict and mobilization. It evolved by trial and error over many years. Throughout the process, a few fundamentals can be observed. Not all were there at the beginning but, once in place, they persisted to the end.
The Soviet regime of secrecy was built on four pillars that gave it exceptional coverage and iron grip. These pillars were the state monopoly of nearly everything, the censorship of the press and media, the conspirative norms of the ruling party, and the secret police and secret departments. I will briefly describe each in turn.
The state monopoly of nearly everything was the first pillar of the regime of secrecy. Under the Soviet command system, production, distribution, trade, transport, and construction were carried out almost entirely under state ownership and control. The private sector was relegated to the margins of agriculture, handicrafts, trade, and personal services. As a result, most matters that would have been private business in other countries became the business of the government. At the same time, all government business was politicized, in the sense that the ruling Communist Party based its decisions on political criteria that could override any economic, cultural, and technical considerations. In the outcome, the political business of the Soviet state was far more completely encompassing than the business of other states, including the Russian Empire that came before it.
| table 1.1. The growing importance of the state: The state-owned share in the economy of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, 1914 to 1937 (selected years and percent of total) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1914 | 1924 | 1928 | 1937 | |
| National wealth, share of “statecapitalist” sectorNational income, share of “socialist” sector | 8.3 | 35.0 | 44.0 | 99.1 |
| Sources: National wealth (reproducible assets) on the territory of the Russian Empire (excluding Finland), share of the “state-capitalist” (state-owned) sector on 1 January from Vainshtein, Narodnoe bogatstvo i narodnokhoziaistvennoe nakoplenie, 403. National income on the interwar territory of the Soviet Union, share of the “socialist” sector, from TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo SSSR. Statisticheskii sbornik, 31. The socialist sector, not defined in the source, evidently extended beyond state ownership to cooperative enterprises (including collective farms) and private sideline farming by collective farmworkers. | ||||
16
Harrison, “Economic Information,” 99. A handwritten note on the MVD proposal reads: “Comrades Popov and Serov: consider and resolve. L. Beria.”
17
Among the first collections of this nature were Gregory (ed), Behind the Façade of Stalin’s Command Economy, and Gregory and Lazarev (eds), Economics of Forced Labor. The literature concerned, too voluminous to itemize here, has been surveyed by Gregory and Harrison, “Allocation under Dictatorship”; Kuromiya, “Stalin and His Era”; Ellman, “Political Economy of Stalinism”; Kragh, “The Soviet Enterprise”; and Markevich, “Economics and the Establishment of Stalinism.”
18
Secret archives: Khorkhordina, “Khraniteli sekretnykh dokumentov.” What was secret and what was not: Bone, “Soviet Controls on the Circulation of Information.” The censorship: Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura; Kurenkov, Zashchita voennoi i gosudarstvennoi tainy. Concealment: Siddiqi, “Soviet Secrecy” and “Atomized Urbanism”; Jenks, “Securitization and Secrecy.” Conspirativeness: Khlevniuk et al., eds, Stalinskoe Politbiuro; Kurenkov, Ot konspiratsiia к sekretnosti; Rosenfeldt, “Special” World. Government mail and telephone communications: Zakharova, “Trust in Bureaucracy and Technology.” Vetting personneclass="underline" Grybkaus kas, “The Soviet Dopusk System.”
19
Nikitchenko et al., Kontrrazvedyvatel’nyi slovar’ (classified “top secret”), 279. The Google Ngram Viewer at https://books.google.com/ngrams (accessed December 8, 2020), described by Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture,” shows that “rezhim sekretnosti” (the regime of secrecy) was effectively unknown in the Russian-language Google Books corpus of 2019 until 1987. The only exception is a tiny, near-imperceptible spike in 1956