The mechanism already described was as follows. The KGB was the gatekeeper to the world of secret work, and secret kompromat provided the KGB with its instrument of control. This use of secrecy promoted the security of the ruling party leaders, but it also damaged the state through its human capacity. On average, personnel were selected, based on their compliance with an approved template of family history and lifestyle choices. The diagnosis of negative selection, as Conquest and Brus suggested, fits the story. Selected for “servility?” Perhaps in many cases, if not necessarily in all. For “conformity?” Yes; in fact, that was the point.
The Soviet state was organized on a set of core principles. Knowledge was power. Monopoly of power required a monopoly of information, from which enemies were to be excluded. Enemies were hard to single out from the mass, so potential enemies were identified on suspicion.
Suspicion was based on evidence of behaviors, associations, and family backgrounds that failed to conform to the Soviet template of the good citizen. This “compromising evidence” or kompromat was used to grade people politically and socially and to promote them or hold them back.
In Stalin’s time suspicion alone could send someone to the execution cellar. After the Thaw, the mark of suspicion was reduced to a brake or a barrier to advancement. But kompromat continued to play an important role in administering secrecy. The uses of kompromat that we have looked at in this chapter were to decide who should be allowed to make foreign visits and who should be allowed to work with government secrets.
In addition, kompromat was itself secret. Because it was secret, it was beyond verification, and decisions made on its basis were beyond challenge.
The cases we have examined are drawn from postwar Soviet Lithuania. The substance of kompromat was mostly historical and often circumstantial. In the years of world war and postwar insurgency, many Lithuanians struggled to choose among competing evils. The personal records of this traumatic period provided many grounds for KGB suspicion. Less often, it was more recent circumstances and indiscretions that provided the basis to sideline or exclude them.
The personal consequences of KGB discrimination were milder than in the past, but still left their mark on the subjects’ lives. For one person, a dream of family reunion was shattered; for another, their career slowed or came to a sudden, unexplained stop.
The consequences for the state and society can be inferred. When kompromat was used to screen candidates for employment in secret government, it acted as a filter for nonconformity. The Soviet template of the respectable citizen prescribed a set of conventional family backgrounds and associations, life experiences, attitudes, and behaviors. Those who deviated from the template invited suspicion and discrimination, leading to exclusion from many avenues for personal advancement.
A large social science literature suggests that the homogenization of society on these lines will have two effects. One is that there will be less conflict or disruption—and suppressing disruption was a key KGB priority. The other is that there will be less innovation. Perhaps the nonconformists might be better, or more talented, or smarter than others. Or, perhaps not; it might be just that the nonconformists are different, and cooperation among people who are different from each other is more valuable than cooperation among people who are all the same.
This suggests another aspect of the trade-off between secrecy and state capacity. The Soviet leaders’ quest for security drove them to restrict recruitment into the business of the Soviet state to those graded above suspicion. The outcome was to reduce the human capacities of the state.
6. SECRET POLICING AND MISTRUST
Human relations are a deadly serious business here,” a Soviet scientist told the American journalist Hedrick Smith. “We resent it if a foreigner comes to a party and brings Russian friends. It ruins the evening for us because it takes a long time to know someone and come to trust them.”[298]
This chapter is about trust and the breaking of trust. It describes a low-trust society. The party leaders drove their enemies underground. Having lost direct sight of their enemies, so to speak, they ruled on the basis that their enemies must be hiding in plain view, posing as false friends under the cover of professed loyalty. Such false friends, if not identified, would conspire with each other and with the foreign enemy to disrupt society and weaken the state. The only defense against the hidden enemy was an army of hidden watchers, able to pass among the citizens, win their confidence, learn their secrets, and gauge their true loyalties.
The central figure of this system was the secret police informer. The effectiveness of informers relied on a double relationship of trust. The pattern of the double relationship was:
Target —(1)-> Informer —(2)—» Case officer
In the first part of the relationship, the informer had to secure the trust of the person or group targeted for surveillance. Informers could not force anyone to share their secrets. They had to win trust before they could break it. In the second part, the case officer had to be sure of the informer’s trust: an informer who disclosed an operation to the adversary or withheld the information gained was worse than useless. Understanding this double relationship of trust and its corrosive effect both on trust in society and on Soviet state capacity is the focus of this chapter.
The word trust must detain us briefly. A large social-science literature embraces many meanings of the term. A common starting point is two people (A and B) and an action (X), so “A trusts В to do X.” Usually X is some part of a sequential exchange or a cooperative venture that gives rise to a lasting relationship, one that can be expected to benefit both parties but also exposes A to the risk that В can steal a one-sided gain. Then, A trusts В in the belief that В shares A’s interest in X for the sake of maintaining their relationship.[299]
For the informer’s double relationship to be productive, the target must trust the informer to keep the target’s secret for the sake of a friendship expected to yield a flow of long-term mutual benefits, and not to disclose it to others for a one-sided gain. And the informer must trust the case officer with the target’s secret in the expectation of the long-term benefits the case officer has promised in return (which could vary from money or affirmation of status to protection from arrest, as we will see), and not to expose the informer to their social circle nor to the courts.
Some questions follow. First, what is trust based on? The sociologist Barbara Misztal divides the answers into two broad streams of sociological thought. In one stream, A is a social being who gives trust under the influence of social norms and obligations. In another stream, the same A is purposeful and self-interested, giving trust according to the expected net benefit.[300]
Another divisive question is whether В must always be a person, one that is familiar to A. If В is a stranger, can we say that A trusts B? If В is an institution (such as the courts) or a social or professional group (such as lawyers generally), can we say that A trusts B? Some authorities insist that trust can only be interpersonal and based on personal familiarity: if В is “most people” or some impersonal organization or group, some other term should be used, for example “confidence.”[301]
299
This is the “encapsulated interest” model of trust, proposed by Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 7-9.
300
Misztal, “Trust and the Variety of Its Bases,” 335. An example of the first stream is Luhmann, Trust and Power. Examples of the second stream are Gambetta, “Can We Trust?” and Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness. To the rational and normative foundations of trust, Misztal adds emotional commitment.
301
Among those who reject the ideas of generalized and institutional trust are representatives of both the streams identified by Misztal. See Hardin (a rational- choice theorist), Trust and Trustworthiness, 60-62, and Luhmann (a normative thinker), “Familiarity, Confidence, Trust,” 97-99.