One advantage of holding kompromat in secret and acting on it under the cover of conspirativeness was to avoid challenges. If the citizens had access to the personal information held about them by the regime and the calculations made on its basis, then they might have taken steps to question the evidence or appeal the decisions. In that context, secrecy upheld the unquestionable authority of the state.
This chapter will show that kompromat was raw material for a system of statistical discrimination. The idea of statistical discrimination was developed by economists to explain why discriminatory hiring decisions persist in market economies, even among employers with a neutral disposition toward the discriminated group. Faced with a female applicant for promotion, the employer is likely unable to evaluate their individual commitment to the job in question. The employer knows, however, that women are statistically more likely than men to take leave for pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare. Comparing women to men, an employer (probably male) might conclude that on average women will make less-committed employees. Based on that calculation, the employer might go on to discriminate against female applicants generally.[240]
For the sake of its own security, the Soviet regime took the part of an employer that tries to avoid recruiting less-committed employees. Its goal was to steer disloyal citizens away from positions in the economy or public service where they could learn secrets or influence others. Any applicant could make a declaration of loyalty, but this could not be enough. A person that harbored doubts or divided allegiances would be expected to hide them and try to blend into the loyal masses. To compensate, the Soviet regime relied on a set of markers of disloyalty—confiscated family assets, a doubtful war record, a previous conviction, the suspicious conduct of family members, having relatives abroad, church attendance, loose talk in the bar or the shopping queue—that could not easily be faked or manipulated. For the individual subject, any single suspicious marker would predict disloyalty to the state and the party very imperfectly, perhaps with large errors. But taken together, the markers would approximately identify a group with lower-than-average loyalty than the rest who had clean records. This is how kompromat supported statistical discrimination.
Its poor quality made kompromat only a rough guide to the regime’s enemies. Nonetheless, it may have been the best guide available. This is suggested by a survey of Soviet war refugees in Europe and America, conducted in the 1950s by the sociologists Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer. They constructed a measure of their respondents’ underlying (as opposed to superficial) hostility to the Soviet system and looked for determinants in their life histories. Statistically, they found, the single most important factor in this hostility was “experience of arrest by the secret police of oneself or a family member.”[241] This was exactly the kind of information that the KGB looked for kompromat.
Suspicion-based discrimination among candidates for recruitment or promotion into responsible positions is the main topic of this chapter. We will see the range of suspicious markers that were included in kompromat. We will see how the KGB used them to identify potentially disloyal citizens and block their aspirations.
Discrimination is costly. In our stories, some of the costs fell straightforwardly on the “usual suspects,” who were confined to an out-group and prevented from following their ambitions. Other costs were borne by the state and the economy. As we will see, this came about because the pool from which the state drew its responsible officials was made less talented and less diverse.
The costs of suspicion contributed to the secrecy/capacity tradeoff described in Chapter 2 (Figure 2.3). Every society, including liberal democracies, must face the same dilemma. No state can prosper in the hands of bribe takers or traitors. Government officials and public servants should undergo scrutiny. Some degree of screening of those wishing to claim the rewards of state employment should surely improve the capabilities of the state, at least up to a point. Up to that point, the interests of society and the interests of its rulers are aligned. A problem arises when the incumbent rulers intensify the screening of recruits into public service to exclude every potential nonconformist, critic, freethinker, and innovator. To do so might improve the rulers’ security, but it will also progressively restrict the talent pool from which public servants are recruited, with damaging consequences for their talents and diversity. As a result, the state will become less capable, slipping down the slope of the secrecy/ capacity tradeoff.
We will find that kompromat could be used with flexibility, and a flexible approach could mitigate some of the costs. If the need was acute, the talented or qualified person with a suspicious record could still be allowed to set foot on the first rung of the ladder of promotion, serving an indefinite term of probation while remaining under scrutiny. Meanwhile, the kompromat would be kept on file.
At this point the use of kompromat to screen people merged into another use, to bring people under control in a coercive way. As discussed in the next chapter, the use of kompromat to control people was also widespread under Soviet rule.
With a population of 73,000 residents in 1970, Panevézys was Soviet Lithuania’s fifth city in order of size. (Panevezys means “On the Nevézis,” the slow-moving river that loops around its central district.) Its residents could not escape the shadow cast by the first half of the twentieth century. Lithuania, formerly a province of the Russian Empire and an independent republic from 1918, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 under the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Panevézys was quickly occupied by the Red Army. As the Soviet state began to transform Lithuania into a Soviet republic, mass arrests and deportations took place. These removed the country’s former political and business elites, including the “kulak” families (more prosperous farmers), along with anyone who took part in resistance.[242] The process was interrupted by German invasion in 1941. With Nazi occupation came mass killings of Jews and communists. Jews were concentrated from the surrounding districts into the Panevézys ghetto, and all there were murdered.[243] During 1944 the country was reoccupied by the Red Army and reabsorbed into the Soviet Union. There were more mass arrests and deportations, this time accompanied by an armed insurgency against Soviet rule that persisted for several years after the world war came to an end.[244] These traumatic events are illustrated in the personal histories of the subjects we will study.
In December 1972, responding to a request from Moscow, the Panevézys town KGB made up four lists. Two lists were directly concerned with secret work. Six people in the town had been cleared for top secret work although their files held evidence that compromised them. Ten others had been barred because of such evidence, but for some reason they “continue to work in the positions indicated.”
The other lists were longer. One document carried the details of 79 people who were engaged in “supervisory duties” despite the kompromat available in their files. (The scope of supervisory positions appears to have included anyone responsible for others, so managers and team leaders at all levels in factories and offices, plus teachers responsible for school and college students.) Another list covered 96 people of the town who had applied to travel abroad and had been refused because of various suspicions. Allowing for a few names that were repeated in more than one list, the number of unique individuals comes down to 176.
242
Panevézys Municipality, “Historical Facts,” https://www.panevezys.lt/en/ history/historical-facts.html. The definition of “class enemy” based on mixing socioeconomic criteria (anyone who owned significant property) with political criteria (anyone who resisted Soviet policies) is a familiar story in the history of communism. In Soviet history, see Lewin, “Who Was the Soviet Kulak?” In Chinese history, see Treiman and Walder, “Impact of Glass Labels on Life Chances in China.”
243
Yad Vashem, “Panevézys, Panevézys County, Lithuania,” https://www.yad vashem.org/untoldstories/database/index.asp?cid=5O3.
244
Reklaitis, Cold War Lithuania; Statiev, Soviet Counterinsurgency; Weiner and Rahi-Tamm, “Getting to Know You.”