A related innovation enabled many government facilities to disappear from the public view: the numbering of key installations. On its nationalization in 1918, the former Duks aircraft works was renamed State Aviation Factory no. 1. Some motor factories were also renamed and numbered at around the same time. At the time this was primarily symbolic. In practice, the factories were often still referred to under their former names. In 1927 the defense sector of the economy began to be withdrawn into the secret sphere, and numbering proved to be a useful way to anonymize them. The first centralized list of fifty-six defense plants was drawn up and some of them were renumbered. At the same time, war-mobilization departments were set up in every supply ministry and every province.[44] Eventually labor camps were also brought under the same level of security as defense installations (as discussed in Chapter 4).
For a while there were many inconsistencies and overlaps, and new and old factory numbers were used interchangeably. These were an impediment to concealment because some facilities then required additional identifiers to avoid confusion. While some anomalies were never ironed out, the lists of numbered factories became more and more extensive and all details of their former names, locations, and production profiles disappeared from the media, only the numbers themselves being mentioned on rare occasions. Over many years the British defense economist Julian Cooper based his personal register of numbered factories on Soviet press reports of the award of honors and decorations, for example, that the director of factory no. such-and-such had been named a Hero of Socialist Labor.
Stalin died on 5 March 1953. His death triggered an upheaval. A Kremlin power struggle led to the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev as Stalin’s successor. Within three years, Khrushchev denounced Stalin for his personal dominance and brutal methods, although not for his policies. Associated with this turn was a new period in Soviet life sometimes called the Thaw (after a controversial novel published in 1954, one that would not have passed the censorship while Stalin lived).
It seems that the regime of secrecy, including censorship, owed nearly everything to Stalin. As soon as he became the party’s general secretary in 1922, Stalin began work to reinforce and institutionalize its conspirative norms. While emerging as the supreme party leader, Stalin guided the erection of the other three pillars that upheld the secrecy regime—the state monopoly of nearly everything, comprehensive censorship, and the first departments that safeguarded government communications under the tutelage of the secret police. In his last years as the Soviet dictator, as Chapter 4 will show, Stalin was personally responsible for unprecedented extension of the scope of secrecy.
How did the design of Soviet secrecy change with the death of the chief designer? Among the more consequential reforms of the Thaw that followed Stalin’s death was a relaxation of limits on the Soviet public sphere, giving ordinary people access to a wider range of cultural influences and to more realistic representations of Soviet economic and social problems. This aspect of the Thaw was highly visible at the time and remains salient today in historical description of the period. The question is whether this signaled any fundamental change in the underlying secrecy regime.
It is useful to place this question in the context of the wider changes in Soviet life that accompanied the Thaw. To list a few: Stalin’s image disappeared from most public places and his words ceased to be quoted as the final authority on most matters of public policy. After stagnating for decades, the living standards of Soviet citizens began a sustained improvement. Ordinary Soviet citizens began to buy Soviet-made consumer durables. The conditions of civilian employment, which had been kept on a war footing long after the end of World War II, were largely demilitarized. New policies promoted housing and food production and improved the conditions of farm workers.[45] The forced labor camps of the Gulag were transferred to the Justice Ministry, and millions of detainees were released.[46] Arbitrary police powers were curtailed, especially in relation to party members.[47] There were no more mass arrests and deportations; repression became selective and targeted. Norms and rules (sometimes called “legality”) began to play a larger part in the processes of government administration.[48] The courts no longer condemned those accused of anti-Soviet crimes based on circumstances alone and began to require evidence of guilty intentions.[49] Death sentences were no longer applied without due process or the possibility of appeal.[50] The Soviet Union’s international borders were opened to small numbers of tourists, students, and artists. The censors began to allow the publication of films and books that lacked patriotic themes and happy endings. The government resumed regular publication of official statistics for the first time since before the war.[51] Notably, Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the twentieth party congress of February 1956, in which he turned his back on Stalin, rapidly became public knowledge.[52]
The overall sequence of reforms did not follow a clear plan. It is straightforward to link them to Khrushchev’s rise to power and to 1956, the year of the “secret speech.” But this would be too simple. Some changes can be traced back to Stalin’s lifetime. By the late 1940s, Stalin had already delegated some of his former powers to subordinates in the All-Union government (the Council of Ministers) and in the provincial party organizations. As described by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, a political scientist and a historian, this delegation was provisional in the sense that Stalin could revoke it at any time, but it was also substantial and had many consequences.[53] While Stalin still lived, the frequency of repression of national and regional party leaders declined sharply. The secret police lost much of its control over local party officials.[54] Ordinary Russians no longer suffered mass arrests and deportations, which were mostly confined to the western borderlands annexed in the opening stage of World War II.[55] Citizens who broke political norms without the intention to betray the motherland could be subjected to milder social sanctions that fell short of arrest and imprisonment or execution.[56] But this was not a uniform process. At the same time, for example, as already mentioned, Soviet secrecy became even more intense.
Other changes are more clearly associated with the turnover of Soviet leaders after Stalin’s death. The new leaders immediately put a stop to several purges and moved to seek a ceasefire in Korea.[57] They quickly began to scale down the millions held in the forced labor system. This was possible because a plan to so already existed: it was prepared while Stalin was alive, but he did not agree to it and had blocked its implementation.[58]
The same was largely true of new measures to relieve the dire condition of farmworkers and the countryside.[59] The partial relaxation of Soviet censorship also belongs with the measures that had to wait for Stalin to die.
44
Simonov, “‘Strengthen the Defence of the Land of the Soviets’,” 1360. Also, Cooper, introduction to Cooper, Dexter, and Harrison, “The Numbered Factories and Other Establishments.”
45
Nove, Economic History of the USSR, 331-77; Hanson, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, 48-97.
47
A decree issued in December 1938, in the wake of the Great Terror, required prosecutors seeking the arrest of party members to obtain the prior approval of the provincial party committee. At the time it was assumed that prior approval would not be unreasonably withheld. By the post-Stalin period, depending on both circumstances and personalities, the effect could be to extend a degree of protection to the party member accused of an offence by giving priority to party investigation over the decision to prosecute. Cohn, High Title of a Communist, 51-53.
51
For the change in public discussion of economic matters, see Hanson, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, 67-69
55
“The overwhelming majority of the 680,000 people deported to special settlements from 1946 to 1952 were from the newly occupied or reoccupied western regions.... To the extent that there were expulsions of‘internal’ groups ..., these were relatively limited and targeted in nature.” Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 173П. See further Chapter 5.