The historical process that brought this about is suggested very approximately by Table l.i. This table reports the share of the state-owned sector in the economy in benchmark years from 1914 through 1937. The first figure shown, 8.3 percent, gives the share of the “state-capitalist” sector in the reproducible assets of the Russian Empire. Before the Revolution, therefore, private capital was heavily predominant. Later figures are shares of the “socialist” (i.e., state and cooperative) sector in the Soviet Union’s net material product. Shares of output are not exactly comparable with shares of capital, but they are sufficiently so for a broad-brush comparison.
If the state’s share of Russian economic activity was small in 1914, the 1920s are often counted as a period of a “mixed” economy. In 1924 the socialist share in the Soviet economy is reported as one-third, and nearly one-half in 1928. The increase in state ownership in 1928 over 1914 is accounted for by the nationalization of land, large-scale industry, and finance. After that, the share of the socialist sector jumped again and became almost complete. The state-owned sector received nearly all new investment funds and grew rapidly. Private industry, trade, and services were starved and repressed. Most agriculture was nationalized or “collectivized,” and collective farms fell largely under state control, although their assets other than land were nominally the joint property of the farmers. The size of the socialist sector in 1937, reported as 99 percent, is somewhat exaggerated by including as “socialist” the peasants’ private sideline farming of public land allotted to them by the collective farms from 1932 onward. Still, despite the scope for mismeasurement and overstatement, the trend is unmistakable. By the 1920s, state ownership was already much more prevalent than before the Revolution, and it became almost universal in the 1930s.
As the Soviet economic system emerged, the Soviet state acquired a near monopoly of productive capital. Along with this came the potential to monopolize the supply of an unusually wide array of information. Information is the result of activity. If the state controlled most activities, it could also control the information that they produced. In particular, state ownership was extended to publishing and the media. In short, the state monopolized the economy, which gave it control over information across an abnormally wide range, and over the channels by which information could be disseminated to the public—or blocked.
The Soviet state used its monopoly of nearly everything not only to control public information but also to suppress private information sharing. One technology that was deliberately restricted was the photocopier. A Soviet photocopier was designed in the early 1950s by the electrical engineer Vladimir Fridkin. But it posed a threat to the Soviet state’s monopoly of printed matter. In the Institute of Crystallography, where Fridkin worked, colleagues often asked him to copy articles from foreign journals, bypassing the official channels. Once this came to their notice, the KGB ordered the machine to be dismantled and its development was halted.[20] Denied access to photocopying, dissidents who wanted to self-publish manuscripts (so-called samizdat) had to rely on carbon copies laboriously typed or retyped at home; carbon paper could not make more than three or four legible copies at a time.
Another restricted information technology was dial-up telephony. The convenience of local dial-up phone networks was too great to be dispensed with (although consumer access was impeded by stopping publication of household telephone directories after the 1920s). But the Soviet authorities delayed public access to long-distance dialing by many decades. To phone a friend in most other towns required the help of a switchboard operator at the local exchange. International calls had to be booked hours or days ahead. During the 1960s, a few larger cities were connected to Moscow by intercity dialing. By 1971, when the coverage of long-distance dialing in the United States was almost complete, nearly two-thirds of Soviet long-distance calls were still connected by a human operator. One result was to restrict the private channels through which information could flow over any distance: the average Soviet person made fewer than 2 long-distance calls in 1970 compared with 35 calls in the United States and as many as 99 in Sweden, a much smaller country.[21] The effect was to limit long-distance and international calls to the eavesdropping capacity of the KGB.[22]
The Soviet government escaped the main burden of the restrictions that fell on private households and the civilian population. Imported photocopying machines could be licensed to government offices, subject to the availability of scarce foreign currency (another state monopoly).[23] As for automated dialing, as early as 1922 Lenin’s government bought and installed the so-called vertushka, a dial-up phone network that linked the top Kremlin leaders, bypassing the ears of the switchboard operator. Within a few years, high-frequency automated phone systems connected ministries and regional party offices to the center over long distances.[24]
The state monopoly of nearly everything was the first pillar that held up the regime of secrecy. While holding a monopoly inevitably creates temptations, however, it does not predetermine exactly how the monopoly will be exercised. In the Soviet Union, that depended on the other pillars that were put up at the same time.
Comprehensive censorship of the media and publishing was the second pillar of the regime of secrecy. The Bolsheviks took their first step to new rules for publishing and the media as early as 9 November 1917, two days after their coup d’état. The Decree on the Press was a preventive measure, intended to smother the newspapers opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution. The new Council of People’s Commissars gave itself powers to close publications that advocated its overthrow, or disseminated fake news, or incited criminal acts. The rationale given was that freedom of the press was merely freedom for the propertied class that owned the presses. The powers taken were temporary—to be rescinded upon the return of “normal” conditions.[25]
At this time the new measure was not particularly effective: while the state did not own all printing presses, it was a simple matter for a newspaper banned under one title to reappear under another. But, whether effective or not, the restrictions were never repealed. In the late summer of 1921, the political emergency eased. The Civil War was over, and the harvest had not yet failed. There were calls to restore press freedom. Instead, Lenin dug in his heels; he denounced the idea of media liberalization as “suicidal,” giving the same reasons as in 1917 despite the better situation.[26]
In 1918, the restriction of the opposition press was followed by measures to limit the scope of information that it was permissible to publish. No one authority was put in charge, so a division of responsibility emerged: the Cheka (as the Soviet secret police was first called) looked after political secrets while the Revolutionary Military Council did the same for military secrets. Cable traffic from abroad was monitored by the Foreign Ministry. The Ministry of Enlightenment took care of the state publishing house (schools and literature).[27]
23
At times the Kremlin’s foreign exchange was so short that even a Republican KGB could be refused. On 18 March 1974, the chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB wrote to Moscow on behalf of its information and analysis division requesting provision of a Xerox 720 photocopier. The refusal, dated 28 March, was based on “the extremely limited allocation of foreign currency.” Hoover/LYA, K-1/3/798, 26-27
24
Zakharova, “Trust in Bureaucracy and Technology,” 566-69. More generally, see Solnick, “Revolution, Reform and the Soviet Telephone System,” and Campbell, Soviet Telecommunications System
25
For the English translation see under “Seventeen Moments of Soviet History,” http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/organs-of-the-press/organs-of-the-press -texts/decree-on-the-press/. Egorov and Sonin, “Political Economics of Nondemocracy,” maintain that propaganda and censorship are conceptually the same, in the sense that they both amount to the manipulation of information by truncating some true signal. Organizationally, however, propaganda and censorship place very different demands on state capacity, and this difference explains the emphasis of the present chapter.