At the same time secret work was not confined to the parts of the economy subject to direct KGB supervision. Managers across the entire economy also required access to secret government correspondence, not just those in key plants or offices. It is more difficult to identify the limits of the secret sphere in that wider sense. The overall number of security clearances in Soviet Lithuania is known only for particular years and sectors. In 1979, for example, a total of 14,000 personnel held clearance for working at the highest grade of classification—“of special importance.”[259] This was around 1 percent of the public-sector workforce.[260] It seems certain that much larger numbers were cleared for lower grades of secrecy. In 1973, for example, the KGB issued more than ten times as many clearances for “top secret” and “secret” work as for work “of special importance.”[261] While an estimate based on a single year should have large error margins around it, it is reasonable to infer that work classified at any level could have embraced one-tenth or more of public employees.
The size and growth of the secret sphere were driven partly from above, by government policies, partly from below as managers responded to incentives created by the economic system. Government policies and priorities were of first importance: they allowed the armed forces and the defense industry to command a growing share of national resources (as discussed in Chapter 7). In Lithuania, they caused industrial development to concentrate on radio electronics, the fastest growing branch of the Soviet defense industry.[262]
The economic system itself shaped incentives in the market for loyal and responsible employees in two ways. First, the permanent labor shortage enabled employees of all kinds to move easily from job to job at the first occasion for dissatisfaction. High turnover among cleared employees necessitated a continuous flow of new clearance applications. Cleared workers, experienced in handling secret communications, sometimes left the secret sphere. Their replacements were hard to find, and everyone suffered from the newcomers’ inexperience.
Second, there was a tendency for managers just at the edge of the secrecy blanket, but not quite under it, to try to tug it over themselves for warmth. The comfort that they sought came from the privileges of secret work—the ready access to supplies, perhaps also the social aura associated with things that one can’t talk about. Managers knew, for example, that classifying a particular line of work as secret would improve supplies and other conditions of work. As a result, new lines of work could be classified or overclassified while old lines were not declassified. Another example: the KGB met with growing numbers of requests for clearance of staff from facilities that were not secure themselves but sought links with secure facilities that they could not develop without personal access.[263]
Viewed in this light, the disproportionate growth of the Soviet secret sphere can be thought of as a mix of real growth and inflation. The real growth was fueled by Soviet defense priorities and industrial plans, which steered resources into the Soviet armed forces and supporting industries. The inflation arose from the efforts of managers on the edges of the secret sphere to classify and overclassify their own activities to improve bargaining power relative to others. As one would expect in a command system driven by preparations for “future war,” there were no attempts to cut back on the secret sphere’s real growth, but there were periodic efforts to stamp down on secrecy inflation by reducing the number of posts requiring clearance. In 1963, for example, the industrial and science positions counted as secret work were abruptly cut back by 30 percent across the Lithuanian public sector.[264]
Living with Shortage
In the market for loyal and responsible employees, therefore, demand was persistently buoyant and expanding. As for supply, the KGB vetting process limited the number of candidates that could be considered over a given period. It appears that the supply always fell short of demand. The evidence of shortage is that, when the KGB came visiting, its inspectors kept on discovering persons in positions involving secret work who had not been cleared or who had been refused clearance. When these people were identified, managers used delay and negotiation to avoid having to replace them.
For managers, full compliance with the clearance system was an impossible goal. Managers regularly nominated obviously unsuitable people for clearance: an alcoholic who repeatedly lost secret documents in his charge, a former Christian Democrat who had served a term in prison for anti-Soviet resistance, and close relatives of emigrants and resisters.[265] The clearance process took too long—so long that managers lost patience and allowed the candidate to start work anyway. When the rejection came through, the manager’s headache was then to explain the situation to the newly recruited subordinate without mentioning the KGB.[266] Some other pretext had to found to justify dismissal—bad behavior or poor performance.[267]
(The same secrecy applied to decisions to refuse foreign travel.[268])
Sometimes, managers just ignored the decision. In Kaunas three such cases were reported in the autumn of 1967. The emergence of “serious” kompromat in the case of a senior engineer led the KGB to cancel—for a second time!—his clearance, but the transport ministry then failed to transfer him to other duties. Also seriously compromised were the planning and dispatch department chief of a marine engineering works “and his close relatives.” By its nature, the department chief’s work involved secret matters, but neither the factory director nor the party committee had taken steps to move him on. At a power equipment repair factory, the equipment department chief was barred from secret work on grounds of serious kompromat. After this, the director appointed him deputy chief engineer, making him no. 3 in the factory hierarchy. Frequent absences of the director (no. 1) and chief engineer (no. 2) at the same time now gave the deputy unhindered access to all the secret correspondence reaching the factory.[269]
The historian Saulius Grybkauskas suggests that the KGB had limited capacity to manage the managers that worked around the system “for the good of the cause.” It was hard to discipline passive resistance. Directors appeared to survive conflicts with KGB officers without suffering lasting career damage. The director of the Elfa electrical engineering factory explained how he worked around the KGB. The visiting KGB officer was known as the “guardian angel.” On several occasions the guardian angel ordered the director to remove politically unreliable employees from their duties. The director did not want to comply, given the difficulty of replacing them. The trick was to delay action long enough to take advantage of the turnover of the guardians. When the old one moved on, the incoming officer took time to catch up with the status of the tasks that the old one left unfinished. The director successfully exploited the guardian angels’ circulation to delay action continuously, in the case of one employee, for almost twenty years.[270]
To summarize, you could work around the KGB. More than anything else, this marks a change in the political atmosphere since the 1930s, when to ignore the secret police was to write one’s own suicide note.[271] At the same time, playing poker with state security still took nerve and effort. In other words, you could work around the KGB, but the workarounds were not costless. A manager would play the KGB only for valuable stakes, such as the capacity of the enterprise to fulfil the state plan.
260
In 1979 the Lithuanian public sector employed 1.4 million blue- and white-collar workers of all kinds (TsSU, Narodnoe khoziaistvo v 1979 godu, 390).
262
Radio electronics was the fastest growing branch as shown by the chart “The number of Soviet defence plants by industry,” Keith Dexter and Ivan Rodionov, displayed on the website of The Factories, Research and Design Establishments of the Soviet Defence Industry: A Guide, https://warwick.ac.uk/vpk.
263
Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/654, 112-13 (“Report on measures to reinforce the regime of secrecy in enterprises and institutions of the city of Kaunas,” from chief of Soviet Lithuania KGB Kaunas city department third division Maj. Trukhachev, 12 October 1967). See also Grybkauskas “Nomenklatürinis sovietinés Lietuvos pramonés valdymas,” 36.
264
Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/654, 122 (From Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman Col. Petkevicius to chief of Soviet Lithuania KGB second chief administration Col. A. M. Gorbatenko, October 1967).
265
Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/654, 105-20 (“Report on measures to reinforce the regime of secrecy in enterprises and institutions of the city of Kaunas,” from chief of Soviet Lithuania KGB Kaunas city department third division Maj. Trukhachev, 12 October 1967).
266
This was the written rule from 1959, according to Lezina, “Soviet State Security and the Regime of Secrecy,” 58 (and, one supposes, the unwritten rule long before that).
267
Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/654,101-4 (From chief of Soviet Lithuania KGB Siauliai city department Lt. Col. Zilinskas to deputy chief of Soviet Lithuania second administration third department Lt. Morkunas, 16 September 1967).
268
Denial of travel visas: “There is no information why, and no one even asks. Those who have been stopped guess at it. One of them, in his childhood, lived in temporarily occupied territory, the other has been corresponding too freely with foreigners. No one knew about this in the institute, but the ‘files’ reflected it all.” Zhores Medvedev, Medvedev Papers, vol. 1, 201,
269
Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/664,24 (Report on the high-frequency line from Kaunas by deputy chief of the Kaunas city KGB Lt. Col. Snakin to chief of second administration Col. A. I. Naras, received 11 April 1968). See also K-1/3/664,29-36 (Report from Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman J. Petkevicius to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Lithuania, 7 May 1968); Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/670, 4549 (Report from chief of the Siauliai city KGB Col. Zilinskas to Soviet Lithuania KGB deputy chairman comrade M. N. Aleksandrov, 30 January 1969).
271
When the change took place is an interesting question. Enterprise directors were always key figures in local party organizations, and Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Substate Dictatorship, 73-77, show that the secret police had lost much of its arbitrary authority over local party officials by the late 1940s. At this time Stalin was still alive, and the Thaw was several years in the future.