While the KGB could be put off, there is no evidence that it could be bought. There are no cases on file of corrupt side-payments or other means by which managers could have bought the guardian angels’ favor.
The endemic shortage of cleared personnel may have been greater in the Western borderlands than elsewhere. In the Russian Republic the problem was reportedly less acute. Irina Dunskaya, who left the Soviet Union in 1983, specified the grounds for refusal of employment in the special design bureau (SKB) of the Moscow Radio Plant:
If one was ever in a German prison or came to the attention of German occupation authorities; one has taken part in a dissident movement; one has applied for emigration from the U.S.S.R.; often, Point-4 [a person’s ethnic label] was used to summarily exclude Jews from the Radio Plant.
At the time of writing (in 1980), she concluded:
Almost anyone in the Soviet Union can be cleared for classified work, since the children of opponents of the 1917 revolution (tsarist officers, big landowners, industrialists, the nobility) has passed away or grown old, as have those who came under the German occupation during the Second World War.[272]
That may have been the case in Russia.[273] The Western borderlands were relatively rich in kompromat. For residents of the Baltic region in the 1960s and 1970s, the taints of parentage and of resistance to Soviet rule were still comparatively fresh.
The price paid by the targets of suspicion varied from one period to another. From its first years the Soviet regime began to collect and use historical records, surveys, census data, and police registrations to catalog the population by markers of political and social unreliability.[274] During the Civil War, the principles of class justice allowed revolutionary tribunals to decide who was guilty of a crime against the Revolution based on their social background rather than on evidence of complicity.[275] By the 1930s the NKVD had card indexes listing 10 to 15 percent of the population (probably 15 to 30 percent of working adults), classified by the degree of social danger that each person represented.[276] In the “mass operations” and “national operations” of 1937 and 1938, the personal records of millions of “former people” became the basis on which they were selected for detention or execution on suspicion of being enemies. This included former landowners, “kulaks,” traders, priests, and ethnic minorities thought to harbor loyalties to bordering states.[277]
A problem of statistical discrimination is that for every correct prediction there are false positives and false negatives. When communist regimes tried to predict who would turn out to be their enemies, false negatives were those who, lacking grounds for suspicion, passed the test, were classified loyal, and then rose to positions from which they could exploit their in-group privilege for some selfish or antisocial purpose. The false positives were the innocent victims: loyal citizens who aspired to education, promotion, and rewards such as foreign travel but were held back by some suspicious marker from the past that assigned them to the out-group.
Stalin understood that false positives (or innocent victims) were inevitable. “Because it is not easy to recognize the enemy,” he declared, “the goal is achieved if only 5 percent of those killed are truly enemies.”[278] Nikolai Yezhov, who implemented this approach in the Great Terror, echoed him: “Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.”[279] As it turned out, however, false positives were not the only problem. After war broke out in 1941, many false negatives appeared. These were the millions of Soviet citizens who ended up on the side of the enemy, although there had been no reason to suspect them of disloyalty beforehand.[280]
If Stalin never had misgivings, his successors understood that mass killing based on suspicion was far too costly, given the unreliable benefits. Twenty years after Stalin’s death, in the period from which we take our data, those who turned out to have a suspicious background or associations were more likely to be watched and barred from college education, promotion, and foreign travel than detained or killed. Thus, the price of suspicion was dramatically lower in the 1960s and 1970s than in the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless, suspicion remained the basis of exclusion from responsible work.
How did this affect the evolution of the Soviet system? The idea that the Soviet state persistently excluded the most competent or talented people is of long standing. Describing Stalin’s creation of the nomenklatura system of personnel selection, his biographer Stephen Kotkin noted: “Stalin put a premium on competence, which he interpreted in terms of loyalty”—that is, party members were classed as competent if and only if they would unswervingly follow the party line and loyally implement party directives.[281]
Economists Egorov, Sonin, and Zakharov take this line of reasoning further. Egorov and Sonin argue that the people in the dictator’s circle that he should fear most are the most competent ones, because they could replace him. On that basis, they predict, when considering whom to promote, a dictator will impose a more demanding loyalty test on people of greater competence than on others of lower capability, who pose less of a threat.[282] In other words, the security-minded dictator should trade competence for loyalty. On similar lines, Aleksei Zakharov argues that dictators who value competence and promote more capable subordinates will have shorter tenures. The more far-sighted the dictator, the greater the premium he should place on loyalty over competence (not the other way around, as is sometimes suggested).[283]
Adverse selection is the predicted outcome. Adverse selection is also what contemporary observers thought they saw. “Negative selection” for “servility, brutality, and coarseness of mind” are the words used by Robert Conquest, the historian of Stalin’s terror, to describe the formation of the Soviet state’s executive class.[284] Nearly the same words were used by the Polish economist Wlodzimierz Brus when he remarked that communism tended to “negative selection” for “servility and conformity.”[285]
In fact, as we have seen, the Soviet state chose its personnel from a pool out of which the KGB had filtered anyone that might reasonably be suspected of being a freethinker or nonconformist, anyone with a cosmopolitan outlook or with close links to the wider world, anyone whose life experience or contact with other cultures and ways of life might lead them to resist the Soviet way of doing things or introduce a discordant perspective. This looks like a mechanism for the adverse selection that contemporaries described.
Stepping back from the study of communism, the wider social-science literature suggests that the social costs of discrimination arise through two channels. One channel is the quality of competition; the other is the quality of collaboration.
272
Dunskaya, Security Practices of Soviet Scientific Research Facilities, 128-29, also 20-22. The author began work in the 1950s as a specialist on guidance and control systems in the special design bureau (SKB) of the Moscow Radio Plant. In the 1970s she moved to the Academy of Sciences Institute of the History of Science and Technology as a specialist in quantum electronics and laser technology.
273
The testimony of Zhores Medvedev, cited above (footnote 34), suggests otherwise, however.
278
Quoted by Gregory, Terror by Quota, 196. See also Gregory, Schroder, and Sonin, “Rational Dictators and the Killing of Innocents.”
280
Wartime disloyalty took many forms, few of which are easily measured. Here is a measure from the state’s own statistics: from 1941 to 1945 the secret police and military tribunals sentenced almost half a million Soviet citizens for counterrevolutionary crimes, one-third of whom were executed. Werth and Mironenko, eds., MUSSOT'J'C repressii v SSSR, 608.
282
Egorov and Sonin, “Dictators and Their Viziers.” Consistently with this idea, people with truly indispensable talents were placed in institutional settings where they could be watched more closely, usually research institutes, occasionally in prison laboratories. There was no other place in the system for the independent agency of visionary entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. On the atomic physicists, see Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; on the missile designers, Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare; on the relative concentration of informers in colleges and institutes, Harrison and Zaksauskiené, “Counter-intelligence in a Command Economy,”143.
285
Brus, Socialist Ownership and Political Systems, 200. In a similar spirit Scharpf and Glâfiel, “Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organizations,” show, in the case of Argentina under military dictatorship, that career concerns drove otherwise mediocre public servants into the secret police, where hard work and a willingness to perform unpleasant tasks could compensate for lack of talent or other distinction.