In the 1960s, by contrast, the staff of Glavlit numbered not 46, nor even twenty or thirty times 46, but at least 70,000 according to a contemporary estimate.[33] A preliminary conclusion is therefore that the imperial censorship was far from comprehensive: it was a pale shadow of its successor, and no more.
The conspirative norms of the ruling party were the third pillar of the regime of secrecy. The Soviet state was brought into existence by a conspiracy, and it continued to be organized as a conspiracy until it passed from the scene. The third pillar of the regime of secrecy was the code of conspiratorial practices that each Bolshevik generation learned from those that came before and passed on to those that followed. These norms freed members of the party in power from any sense of obligation to account in public for the decisions they made or for their outcomes. On the contrary, the greatest obligation that they felt was to each other. This was expressed in the code of silence that they called konspiratsiia: “conspirativeness.”[34]
What were “conspirative norms,” exactly? When Soviet leaders and officials talked about them, they seem to have meant three things. First was the principle of need-to-know. In the words of a Politburo resolution “On the Utilization of Secret Documents” (dated 5 May 1927), “secret matters should be disclosed only to those for whom it is absolutely necessary to be informed.” The extreme compartmentalization of information was a direct result.
The second norm was personal accountability. The security of every chain of secret correspondence would eventually be assured by recording every document and registering it to an individual sender, courier, receiver, or keeper at every stage from creation to destruction or to the archive. The regulations that set out personal accountability and the records that assured it would also be secret and subject to the same rules.
The third conspirative norm was exclusiveness. No one should be admitted to secret correspondence whose reliability was not assured by prior vetting and approval. The channels of secret correspondence should themselves be secret and kept strictly separate from open channels such as the public postal and telephone services.
The code was there from the start but, just as with other aspects of the regime of secrecy, its formalization took time. The historian of party secrecy Gennadii Kurenkov notes the lack of a paper trail leading back to the original source of the secretive practices of the party in power. What is visible is that a “special” department of the party secretariat had been established within eighteen months of the Bolshevik Revolution (by March 1919), and a “conspirative” department existed already in 1920.[35]
At first, while the Bolshevik leaders could talk about conspirativeness all they wanted, paper records were not secure and presented great risks. For this reason, Lenin’s private messages of the period were peppered with demands for the recipient to take extreme precautions—to treat the contents “arch-conspiratively” or “arch-secretly.”[36] For the same reason, some early decisions of the party in power were not committed to paper, or the records were destroyed. An example is the lack of a paper trail accounting for the decision to execute Tsar Nicholas II with his family and retainers in Ekaterinburg on the night of 16 July 1918.[37] As record keeping became more secure, however, the need for informality diminished. Twenty years later, much greater crimes were committed to paper in excruciating detail.
While the Civil War continued, few discernible efforts were made to codify and elaborate the rules of secrecy. During 1918-1920, leading party committees discussed such matters no more than a handful of times. The situation changed from 1921, when the party secretariat (and, from 1922, Stalin’s Orgburo) began to consider communication security on average around twice a month.[38]
The rules of secret correspondence were formalized in a series of Politburo decisions, the first being a resolution of 13 August 1922, “On the procedure for storage and transmission of secret documents.”[39] After that, nearly every year brought new or updated regulations such as the “Rules on handling the conspirative documents of the Central Committee” (19 August 1924) or “On conspirativeness” (16 May 1929). On each occasion the rules became more specific and binding, often in response to violations or the discovery of grey areas.[40] This process would continue for decades, but the principles remained unchanged and were evident from the outset.
The historian Larissa Zakharova has described the parallel emergence of the conspirative phone call.[41] Written communication among the top leaders over any distance, whether of one kilometer or thousands, risked loss or interception. At first the telegraph and dial-up telephone seemed to offer a way to reduce or even eliminate the risks. The parallel rise of signals intelligence frustrated these hopes. Secure telecommunications required protection by coding or scrambling. In turn, this brought in third-party experts, who had to be vetted for loyalty and monitored. In the process, the Soviet secret police developed a substantial capacity for eavesdropping and phone tapping.
In short, conspirative norms were the special contribution of the Bolshevik party to Soviet secrecy. It is important to bear in mind, however, that conspirative norms could not have had their influence without Bolshevik control of the state, or without state control of the means of production, information, and publication.
The secret police and the secret departments were the fourth pillar of the regime of secrecy. Because government secrecy was identified with the security of the state, the procedures of secrecy were overseen by the same secret police that defended the ruling party by suppressing criticism and opposition. This was the Cheka (the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), renamed the GPU (Chief Political Administration) and OGPU (Unified Chief Political Administration), the functions of which were eventually absorbed by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), then devolved upon the NKGB (People’s Commissariat of State Security), renamed MGB (Ministry of State Security) after World War II, and reformed after Stalin’s death as the KGB (Committee of State Security).[42]
The secret police exercised its oversight of all other branches of the state by a distinctive innovation. This was the institution of the “secret department” (renamed the “first department” in 1965). From 1922, every state enterprise, office, institute, and facility of any kind and size across the Soviet Union maintained a secret department responsible for government communications and documentation, staffed by party members and regulated by the secret police.[43] In this way the entire state was brought into alignment with the party in its conspirative channeling and secure storage of information.
As supervisor of the secret departments throughout the government apparatus, the KGB was charged with ensuring that secret papers were safely stored and transmitted, vetting the employees whose jobs required access to secret communications, scanning the workforce for security risks, and investigating violations.
33
Vladimirov, “Glavlit,” 41. The author, a Soviet science journalist, defected to the United Kingdom in 1966.
34
Various translations of konspiratsiia are possible. Rosenfeldt, “Special” World, 66, prefers the literal equivalent: conspiracy. This does not seem right: while the two words look the same, the Russian konspiratsiia suggests the essence of conspiracy rather than a particular plot, for which the Russian word would be zag- ovor. Katherine Verdery, Secrets and Truths, location 560, translates the Romanian conspirativitate as “conspirativity”; she identifies it with the compartmentalization of intelligence work. It is amusing to add that a book on KGB espionage in the United States (Haynes et al., Spies, chapter 4, under “Harold Glasser”) translates konspiratsiia as “tradecraft.” In its context, this makes perfect sense: conspirativeness was the tradecraft of spies. The distinctive feature of the Soviet Union is that conspirativeness was the tradecraft of every branch of government, including those concerned with, say, licensing motor vehicles, or fixing the price of admission to movie theaters. Finally, while Lih, “Lenin and Bolshevism,” 58, does not offer a translation, he emphasizes the original meaning of konspiratsiia, that of secure communication between the underground party and its agents in the mass movement
37
Service, Last of the Tsars, 252-53. On Lenin’s efforts to avoid leaving written evidence of his involvement in various matters, see also 245-46.
40
Istochnik, “Praviashchaia partiia”; Khlevniuk et al., eds, Stalinskoe Politbi- uro v 30-e gody, 74-77; Kurenkov, Ot konspiratsiia к sekretnosti, 224-45.
42
Fainsod, How Russia Is Ruled, 425-27, recounts the establishment of the Cheka. Werth, “Soviet Union,” tells the history of the Soviet secret police up to the end of World War II.
43
Lezina, “Soviet State Security and the Regime of Secrecy,” 41; see also Rosenfeldt, “Special” World, 98-99.