Secret Leviathan

8. SECRECY AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AUTHORITARIANISM

This concluding chapter tells two stories. One is the story of secrecy in Russia, where the Soviet state collapsed in 1991. What took its place in Russia was a state of fewer capabilities and diminished pretensions, initially open to both economic and political competition. As the story will show, the regime of secrecy was shaken to its foundations and its sphere contracted sharply. A period of stabilization was followed by partial restoration. Thirty years on, the old secrecy regime had been rebuilt to a point somewhere between the suffocating completeness of the Soviet era and the chaotic freedom of the 1990s. The question then is where modern Russia has positioned itself on the secrecy/capacity tradeoff, and what that tells us about its political regime.

The other story of this chapter is one of information technology and information possibilities. The first decades of the twenty-first century have differed from most of the twentieth by the decentralization of information sharing. Peer-to-peer communication technologies and social media have transformed access to the public sphere. When most citizens carry a pocket computer that connects them directly to global networks, a state that controls only the printing presses and the broadcast studios can no longer monopolize public discourse. But modern networking technologies also provide authoritarian leaders with other means than secrecy and censorship to disinform the public.

Information has value, according to the economist Kenneth Arrow, because it reduces uncertainty.^[443] Uncertainty is a factor in the balance of power in society, because a person who is uncertain is less able to choose their best course of action, and so has less agency. In other words, uncertainty is disempowering. From this, the value of information is that it dispels the powerlessness associated with uncertainty.

For the powerful, secrecy is one way to induce powerlessness in others. Secrecy has this effect because it leaves ordinary people uncertain of what decisions have been made, who made them, and on what grounds, to what purpose, and with what expected effect. But secrecy is not the only way to induce powerlessness. The same uncertainty can be brought about by other means, such as confusion. The subject of this chapter is Russia’s transition from one form of authoritarian rule to another: how Secret Leviathan took on a new guise, Leviathan of a Thousand Lies. What does it matter if the truth leaks out, when the state can drown it out in the confusion of a thousand lies?

Leviathan of a Thousand Lies does not manage without secrecy altogether. It continues to monopolize and withhold some kinds of information, especially concerning the people and processes at the core of government. But it does not try to censor everything. On all other matters it publishes widely and communicates permissively, screening the facts behind “availability cascades” of conflicting stories, false rumors, and plausible myths.^[444]

Leviathan of a Thousand Lies is not new. In fact, it was the form in which Secret Leviathan operated abroad during the Cold War, in societies that practiced free speech. Unable to shut down Western media sources beyond the frontiers, the Soviet state competed with them by a strategy of disinformation. False news stories such as that HIV/AIDS was a US experiment gone wrong, or that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered by the FBI, were calculated to spread distrust of the West and support for anti-Western ideas.^[445]

As the capacity of the authoritarian state to practice comprehensive censorship at home was undermined by new technologies that could not be suppressed forever, the techniques of disinformation were brought home to be employed against the domestic population. How that came about in Russia is the subject of this chapter.

By disinformation I mean the government promotion of myths and false rumors. In the Cold War, disinformation was practiced by both sides. The political scientist Thomas Rid has identified the 1950s as a time of American leadership in what was then called “political warfare”; after that, the Soviet Union moved forward and took the lead. Rid argues, however, that there is a long-run affinity between dictatorship and disinformation: states that practice disinformation systematically must either be or become authoritarian. This is because disinformation undermines essential aspects of the rule of law including respect for facts and trust in the probity of elections. “Disinformation operations,” he writes, “erode the very foundation of open societies—not only for the victim but also for the perpetrator.”^[446] A government that consistently disinforms its own citizens is travelling toward authoritarian rule. Thus, dictators and would-be dictators have been disinformation’s most assiduous practitioners.

On 5 March 1991, Pavel Laptev and Yurii Ryzhov, officers of the Communist Party Central Committee, wrote a severe warning. They complained that party records were under threat of seizure by hostile groups and that party correspondence was being systematically leaked to the outside.^[447] “From now until the situation is stabilized,” they announced, members of the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the “leading organs” of the party would need to come personally to the Central Committee building in Moscow if they wished to be familiarized with “documents of a secret character.” Only in “extreme necessity” would secret documents be sent out of the building by courier, marked “Deliver person-to-person only,” and subject to immediate return.

A few months passed. Stability did not return. The summer saw a state coup and a countercoup. The Communist Party was expelled from power. At the end of the year, the Soviet Union disintegrated. The regime of secrecy collapsed.

What remained of the Soviet state after the collapse? The most obvious change was the shrunken domain of its successor, the Russian Federation. Russia lost half the Soviet Union’s population and two-fifths of its economy. Although the losses were substantial, and proved to be a source of lasting grievance, Russia kept Moscow, the former Union’s capital city; most of the former Soviet territorial expanse, including many non-Russian ethnicities and territories; most major defense industries and strategic installations; and (after some negotiation) all the nuclear weapons. Thus, post-Soviet Russia did not lose the pretension to be a global power.

While Russia retained the symbols of statehood, its state capacity was shaken to the foundations. Some of Leviathan’s key attributes, such as fiscal and legal capacity, fell to low levels. Violent crimes and property crimes rose sharply. Even before large-scale privatization, state assets were hollowed out by insiders.^[448] Budget deficits ballooned as revenues from the state sector collapsed, while the old producer lobbies and new electoral coalitions competed for fiscal handouts. Capital resources fled abroad. It is sometimes maintained that Russia’s reformers of the first Yeltsin administration made bad choices: they should have followed some other template or listened other voices. The fact is that at that time they had few levers at their disposal and few choices to make. In most matters, their hand was forced by lack of means to do anything else.^[449]

The disorderly 1990s were not all bad for Russians, giving millions new freedoms to travel, to learn, and to start a business. At the same time, the collapse of Russia’s state capacity in the early years undermined the prosperity and personal security of all citizens. Rebuilding the state was a necessary project. That it went ahead on authoritarian lines was not inevitable, but it was made highly likely by three main factors. These were the depleted state of civil society, the survival of the communist nomenklatura, and the growing weight of the siloviki.

The first factor is most general. As discussed in Chapter 2, sustainable democracy requires an inclusive state to evolve in continuous competition with civil-society activism so that the rule of law is maintained.^[450] This did not happen in Russia: civil society was enfeebled after seventy years of surveillance and repression, and its activization in the last years of Soviet rule remained superficial. Russians faced the future without long-standing, deeply rooted political parties, trade unions, charities, volunteer groups, and neighborhood associations.

Second, although the post-Soviet state was reorganized, it was never purged of officials with Communist Party or KGB backgrounds. The Russian state was overwhelmingly staffed by former Soviet officials who had entered government service through party membership and selection for secret work by the KGB.^[451] Natural processes thinned them out over the next decades. But, as recently as 2010, most holders of senior positions in Russian government posts had either entered government service in Soviet times as junior members of the party nomenklatura, or they were children of the nomenklatura.^[452] Their common attribute was to have been reared in the old ways of ruling, including the ways of conspirativeness.

Third, the army, the security services, and the police remained intact as organizations. Their departments became known as the “power ministries” with their leaders called the siloviki (strongmen). While they never worked out a common political program, they shared clear preferences for a strong state with a powerful leader ruling over a submissive society.^[453] As for the power ministries’ rank and file, their numbers were depleted, but in a way that helped the leaders. Their networks of influence widened as former comrades who had lost their positions went into business and politics, from where they could continue to trade favors.^[454] By 2010 the siloviki accounted for around one-third of the senior figures of the Russian state.^[455]

Periodic outbreaks of “people power” were not enough to prevent the state being reordered from the top down. The rise of Vladimir Putin to head of the FSB (1998), prime minister (1999), acting president (on 31 December 1999, with the resignation of President Yeltsin), and elected president (2000) was decisive. Putin, a former KGB officer, shared the values of the siloviki. Famously, he called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century.^[456] It was not so much the passing of communism that he regretted, but Russia’s loss of empire and world influence. Abroad, he reasserted Russia’s position as a rival of the West. At home he demanded a return to domestic order, rejecting the turmoil (or freedoms) of the 1990s. He set in motion the taking of power back from the regions, from the new wealthy class, and from the electorate. Russia would remain a market economy with a newly wealthy business class, but on Leviathan’s terms and under its authoritarian tutelage.^[457]

When thinking about how much modern Russia inherited from the Soviet Union, a sense of proportion is useful. The differences remain immense. The end of communism changed Russians’ everyday lives to an extraordinary extent—far more than they were changed, for example, by the Thaw after Stalin’s death. Most Russians became healthier, wealthier, freer to visit, study, and holiday abroad, and longer-lived than at any time in the past. By global standards they were neither to be pitied nor envied. In the 2000s, Russians’ average incomes remained close to the world average (as they had been more than a century before).^[458] If widespread poverty persisted alongside the superrich, that was not unusual for a large middleincome country with an entrenched elite. Perhaps Russian politics did not score well on international measures of democracy and the rule of law, but many other countries in the same income bracket were doing no better. As Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman suggested, Russia was becoming a “normal” country.^[459] Unfortunately this does not mean that Russia ceased to be a menace to the international order. What remained abnormal was Russia’s dangerous behavior on the world stage, enabled by the country’s large size and nuclear weapons.

In terms of state capacity, Russia’s basic indicators returned strongly to normal. In 1980 the “socialist sector” contributed close to 100 percent of the Soviet Union’s material production, while tax revenues absorbed almost half of Soviet GDP. In 2016, in the breathing space between the global financial crisis of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, state-owned enterprises and other government equity contributed around one-third of Russia’s GDP, while tax revenues took back barely 9 percent.^[460] In other words, Russia now had the state capacity of a typical middle-income country with a market economy.

For the citizens, a striking aspect of Russia’s normalization was their catch-up in access to information and communication technologies. As discussed in Chapter 1, Soviet times saw the deliberate suppression of advances in information sharing from automated dial-up telephony to photocopying. This was because they threatened the state’s comprehensive controls on the spread of information. When free to do so, Russians adopted these technologies with enthusiasm. By the 2010s there were more cell phone registrations in Russia than there were Russians.^[461] And by 2016 sales of household printers and scanners were running at almost half a billion US dollars per year.^[462] Thus, Russian citizens showed an entirely normal interest in sharing information.

Did Russia’s transition spell normalization for the regime of secrecy? In fact, the ending of Soviet rule left Secret Leviathan near to death. How near, exactly? Chapter 1 listed four pillars of the Soviet regime of secrecy: (1) the state monopoly of nearly everything, (2) comprehensive censorship based on the state monopoly of the press and broadcast media, (3) the conspirative norms of the ruling party, and (4) the regulation of secrecy by the KGB through the secret departments established in every state-owned enterprise and government agency. With the end of Soviet rule, the first two pillars fell. The third and fourth were weakened—but not fatally.

Almost overnight, the state lost its monopoly of production. That was the fall of the first pillar. Legalizing private enterprise had immediate consequences. Real earnings in private business shot up, while government salaries collapsed. Along with higher salaries in the private sphere came new opportunities for foreign travel and education. There was no longer any privilege in working for the state, even on secret business. At the same time the rise of private enterprise brought independent media companies, which swept away the second pillar—the capacity for comprehensive censorship.

As for the third and fourth pillars, the Communist Party was toppled from power, while a crowd toppled the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, founder of the Soviet secret police, from its plinth before the KGB headquarters in Lubianka Square. But, as the following section will show, the third and fourth pillars did not fall. The culture of conspirative norms subsisted for a while before reemerging. The KGB was reorganized and divided between intelligence and counterintelligence, the latter becoming today’s FSB. The secret departments lost their legal status, but the loss was temporary. The status and rewards for secret work were also eventually restored.

The Chernobyl disaster of April 1986 forced open many locked rooms that had previously been sealed from public view. It is true that Gorbachev’s newfound commitment to openness quickly encountered limits. In May, while Gorbachev revealed to the world the scale of the disaster, the KGB brought many aspects of its causes and impacts back under the stamp of secrecy. In June, the Soviet Ministry of Health classified secret all information relating to the health and treatment of those in the contaminated zones and the workers directly involved in managing the damaged plant. In July, the Defense Ministry ordered the records of troops’ service in the Chernobyl zone to be deleted from their personnel files. Any further revelations were forced rather than voluntary. They were driven from below, by the fury of Ukrainian and Belarusian activists and their supporters in the republican party and state hierarchies.^[463] Thus, the net effect of Chernobyl was to expose the regime of secrecy and energize its critics. Their new momentum fed into the wider process that eventually pulled apart the entire Soviet Union.

As for secrecy in the new Russia, its full history has not yet been written. An obvious reason is that the calculations and decisions behind its evolution were made in secret and will remain so for the foreseeable future. While the course of Russian secrecy can be surmised from various signals and events, some uncertainty remains intrinsic to the subject.

In 1991, as Laptev and Ryzhov feared, there were moments when it seemed as if the Soviet state and party offices, whether in Moscow or in the provinces, were about to be stormed by the mob and their papers thrown to the winds or sold off to the highest bidder. On the whole this did not happen. The state and party archives remained largely intact. For a time, the collapse of Soviet rule left access to them without a legislative framework. The gap was filled, initially, by presidential decrees of the Yeltsin administration, then by new laws on the federal archives and on state secrets enacted in the summer of 1993.^[464]

The law on state secrets of 1993 represented a considerable break with the principles of Soviet secrecy outlined in Chapter 1. In the new Russia, the old classifications (“of special importance,” top secret, and secret) were maintained, but secrecy was no longer for perpetuity. The term was limited to thirty years, although it could be extended at need. The law renewed a government list of matters governed by secrecy, but the list was more modest that in Soviet times. For the first time the law designated matters that could not be made state secrets. Exclusions included negative social or environmental trends and natural and technological disasters (such as Chernobyl). The law made explicit that secrecy could not be invoked to hide the compensation, criminality, or corruption of government officials. For the first time, access to employment involving secret matters, including the withdrawal of access previously granted, would be governed by formal rules and procedures. For the first time the law provided that the official list of secret matters should be reviewed at five-year intervals. For the first time the law guaranteed citizens’ right to appeal decisions to classify secret matters or to refuse clearance for access to secret work.

For the historian wishing to work in the formerly secret archives of the Soviet party and state, the legal framework of 1993 left many problems unresolved. Not all archives were opened. The Presidential Archive, the KGB archive (holding papers from the time of its reformed establishment in 1954), and the current archive of the Ministry of Defense (holding papers from the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in 1941) remained closed other than to privileged researchers. Disturbingly, as time passed, many archival records that had initially been declassified were reclassified secret.^[465]

Secret Leviathan, although traumatized, still had life in it. For one thing, even if the Russian state had broken formally with its communist past, Russia was still governed largely by ex-communists, brought up to honor the shared norms of conspirativeness. For another, the military, police, and security agencies signaled publicly that their bloodlines to the Red Army and Cheka of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War remained unbroken. If the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii was toppled in Moscow in 1991, his cult lived on in the ethos of the FSB.^[466] In cities and towns throughout the Russian Federation, Dzerzhinskii’s memory was honored by statues left untoppled and streets and squares left unrenamed.^[467] For Russia’s armed forces, nothing symbolized their continuity with the Soviet Union’s Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army more than the increasingly mystical me-morialization of the Soviet-German war dead.^[468]

Measures to restore the status and rewards for secret employment provided a more businesslike signal of government intentions to revive Secret Leviathan. As already mentioned, in Russia’s transition to a market economy, secret government work lost all its former privileges. This problem was addressed in October 1994 by the introduction of special salary supplements for government employees, graded by the level of classification of their work. The supplements were modest at first, being set at 25, 20, and 10 percent for work involving documentation “of special importance,” “top secret,” and “secret” respectively. Further increases in 2006 and 2007 raised the supplements to more generous levels: 50 to 75, 30 to 50, and 10 to 15 percent, respectively. Reporting these measures, the economist Julian Cooper suggests that they created (or perhaps reestablished) incentives to expand the secret sphere, and this was reflected in growing budget secrecy at the time.^[469]

For researchers on current affairs, especially those with a security aspect, an ominous trend was the growing number of defendants brought to court by the FSB, charged with collecting open-source data to pass to foreigners. Best known at the time was Igor Sutiagin, a civilian researcher on nuclear weapons. On 7 April 2004, Sutiagin was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for passing information to the US Defense Intelligence Agency. His legal defense was that all the information he had collected was in the public domain and could be known by anyone. As a civilian, he had no access to military secrets. The defense failed. Sutiagin was not the only to fall foul of the authorities in this way. Over ten years from 1996 to 2007, at least seven others were found guilty of espionage based on collecting data from unclassified or open sources.^[470]

More positive signals were given out during the presidency of Dmitrii Medvedev (2008 to 2012). The Medvedev administration took several steps toward more accountable government: there was an anticorruption drive, more transparency for the intelligence agencies, commitments for Russia to join the Open Government Partnership (an international coalition of governments and nongovernmental organizations) and the International Monetary Fund’s Fiscal Transparency Evaluation, and eventually a minister for open government, the reformist politician Mikhail Abyzov.^[471] But the Medvedev administration also restored the legal status of the “secret departments” in all agencies and enterprises connected to secret government business, and subject to supervision by the FSB.^[472]

While some of these signals supported a positive interpretation, subsequent events showed the optimism to be unfounded. With Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Russia withdrew from the Open Government Partnership.^[473] As for fiscal transparency, an IMF update in 2019 noted progress since 2014 in some areas but backsliding in others. Notably, secret outlays had increased to 17 percent of the federal budget in 2018 (compared with 10 percent in 2009) and one-third of public procurement contracts were classified as secret and not open to competitive tendering.^[474] Increased concealment of the defense budget under secret items was another negative aspect of the time.^[475] This trend is not easily explained by the secrecy laws and regulations of the time, which did not allow for classification of the ruble aggregates reported in the budget.^[476] Also in 2019, Mikhail Abyzov was arrested and charged with corruption.^[477]

Other signals of the convalescence of Secret Leviathan were a series of poorly explained events and the suppression of independent investigation into them. Among these were murders of independent journalists (such as Anna Politkovskaia, an investigator of human rights abuses), of opposition politicians (such as Boris Nemtsov), and of critics who had fled abroad (such as Aleksandr Litvinenko). State news media were brought under government editorial control. Independent media suffered harassment or were bought up by government supporters. Scholars whose investigations contradicted the government’s narrative of Russia in the twentieth century were increasingly criminalized.^[478] Important nongovernment sources of independent information, such as the Levada Center, a polling organization, and Memorial, a human rights group, were stigmatized as “foreign agents.”^[479] The same fate befell the anticorruption FBK foundation set up by the opposition activist Alexei Navalny.^[480] In other words, the government reserved to itself the right to decide who should be targeted for corruption.

Some explanations of the return to secretive government in Russia focus on particular triggers. One candidate is the global price of oil: with oil prices rising steeply in the first decade of the new century, the Russian state became more reliant on oil revenues. Perhaps it lost interest in other sources of improvement, such as competitive markets and media freedom.^[481] Consistently with this, the rise in oil prices was followed (with a few years’ lag) by the rise of anticorruption campaigners such as Alexei Navalny. Perhaps government officials and the privately wealthy people with whom they were connected found an increasing need for secrecy to hide their assets and transactions.^[482] Another possible trigger is the Western sanctions imposed on Russia after its occupation of Eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014: because of these measures, the Russian government became more interested in hiding legal and illegal transactions from international monitors.^[483]

While not discounting the role of such events, it seems beyond doubt that Russia was already returning to secretive government long before the annexation of Crimea and before anticorruption campaigning took off, and the most important underlying factor was Russia’s return to authoritarian rule under Vladimir Putin.

The restoration of Russian autocracy was deeply rooted in the way communism ended. One feature of the transition was elite continuity. As discussed earlier, the New Russian elite was largely composed of former Soviet party and state executives trained to do business in secret. Putin himself was a former KGB officer, a professional enforcer of the Soviet regime of secrecy. The first Putin administration marked an important turning point. In the Yeltsin years, when Putin was a minor figure, Kremlin politics were discussed and debated, not only in the news, but also as a matter of historical record in the memoirs of multiple participants including Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and their associates. While this shows that a return to greater secrecy was not inevitable, it is nonetheless the case that all such flows of information dried up from the time of Putin’s accession to power.^[484]

A feature of the transition that might have predisposed Russian society to accept a return to a highly managed information environment was disillusionment. The opening of Russian society was enabling for many, but not for all. For many Russians, the transition from communist rule was disappointing; for some it was tragic. Many concluded that authoritarian order was preferable to transparent disorder.^[485]

Finally, disorder was plentiful in the transition, and it had important consequences. It is sometimes said that Russia’s transition was peaceful, and this was true in the sense—important but limited—that Russia did not go to war with its neighbors, as happened in Yugoslavia. But there was plenty of violence, and not only on the periphery of the former empire. In Russia itself, private violence surged: homicide rates doubled over the benchmark of the last years of Soviet rule. State violence was refocused from a foreign war (in Afghanistan) to a civil war (in Chechnia). Two wars were fought against Chechen separatists, the first from 1994 to 1996 and the second from 1999. The trigger for the second war was a shadowy conspiracy to bomb apartment buildings in Moscow and two provincial cities, in which the FSB played a role that remains without convincing explanation.^[486] A surprising outcome was to propel the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin to presidential power: Yeltsin resigned, appointing Putin in his place, and Putin went on to be elected in 2000 by a large majority.

The breakdown of the Soviet regime of secrecy was not predetermined. The example of North Korea shows that Secret Leviathan can live on. North Korea is as closed and secretive today as the Soviet Union was in 1949. But the rulers of North Korea have paid an exceptional price: to maintain their secretive rule, they have had to keep their society in great poverty, and the result is that they themselves have few good choices.

The examples of China, Vietnam, and Cuba have shown that Secret Leviathan can also adapt. In different ways, these three countries have become more open, but each has contrived to keep the secrets and mysteries surrounding the core of power. The economic consequences have varied: China and Vietnam have prospered, but Cuba’s economy has stagnated. Even so, most Cubans today live far above the level of most North Koreans.^[487]

Why did Secret Leviathan need to adapt? To understand the evolutionary pathways of Secret Leviathan in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to grasp the fundamental conditions that made it possible in the twentieth. One condition was mass production.^[488] From the 1870s to the 1970s, in every major economy the mass production of things was coordinated by great corporations. The coordination of mass production relied on flows of information upward and inward from the periphery to the apex of power, while orders flowed downward and outward. When Lenin and Stalin envisaged the society of the future, they imagined American mass production building national power according to a centralized Bolshevik plan.^[489]

The same technologies that fostered mass production lent themselves to comprehensive censorship. Censorship relied on centralized control of information flows, and the high fixed costs of predigital technologies made centralization easy. If the state could own the means, it could control access and restrict their uses. Information sharing was centralized in a few great printing presses, a national postal service, a network of telegraph and telephone exchanges centered on great cities, and broadcasts radiating from a few radio and television studios and transmitters. Monopolization by the state made possible the comprehensive censorship of information deemed generally unsuitable to the public, and the systematic denial of access to anyone unable to demonstrate authorized need to know.

Later in the twentieth century, this model was subverted. The services revolution led the way. In today’s wealthy economies, most wealth is generated in the production of services, and services are made valuable by shared information about risks and opportunities, reflected in prices, costs, news, and personal data. Meanwhile, the fixed costs of information sharing fell with astonishing rapidity. Technologically the process was dominated by Moore’s Law, by which the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. The first integrated circuit is thought to have been created in 1959. The number of transistors per circuit reached the thousands in the 1970s, the millions in the 1990s, and the billions in the early 2000s. One outcome was to flood the globe with personal information-sharing devices: by 2016 there were more cell phone subscriptions in the world than there were people. Another was the internet: in 2016, half the world had used it by one means or another (including cell phones) in the previous three months. Four social networks—Facebook, YouTube, WeChat, and Instagram—had more than 6 billion users between them at that time.^[490]

The centralized model of information dissemination that characterized much of the twentieth century has largely given way to person-to-person information sharing. Great publishers and news corporations have not disappeared. But their influence has been greatly diluted by the rise of information sharing and social media, to which they too have had to adapt.^[491]

If knowledge is empowering, how does authoritarian rule persist in a world where most citizens carry a device in their pocket or purse with access to the world’s information? How could Secret Leviathan survive in this new world without paying the price of North Korea? It might be thought that the collapse of European communism marked a new era of more fragile dictatorships. In fact, the reverse seems to be the case: dictatorships are thought to have become more durable, not less, since the end of the Cold War.^[492]

Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, an economist and a political scientist, describe a new model of authoritarian rule. The old model relied on censorship and fear; the new model exploits the manipulation or “spinning” of information and disinformation.^[493] Examples of “spin dictators” that they give include Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.

The spin dictator’s first priority is the same as for other autocrats: to take and hold state power. Guriev and Treisman envisage a society divided into an informed elite and a relatively uninformed mass. The ruler spins the news to convince the uninformed mass that the regime is effective and competent. The new autocrat appears to promote national prosperity at home and to protect the nation’s interests in the world, especially along the nation’s borders. Mass opinion supports the autocrat—as long as the picture of the effective, competent ruler is not disrupted by elite dissidents.

Members of the informed elite might have a different view of the ruler. They have full access to the world’s information, and they can form a true picture of the ruler’s performance. Some are sincere regime supporters. Others might dislike the ruler, question the ruler’s competence, or see the ruler’s policies as counterproductive. But most elite dissidents are silent. Some are corrupted by power or money. Others are silenced by fear. Rather than mass arrests or deportations, they worry about targeted legal harassment by a tax or corruption investigation or a charge of immorality. A seemingly random beating or a fatal accident are not ruled out, but they remain less likely. Some choose to leave the country, which benefits the ruler by thinning the ranks of the openly discontented elite. A foreign refuge appears to offer safety, but an exile who makes too much noise can be vulnerable to diplomatic pressure or illegal force. The outcome is that nearly all elite members fall into line.

Guriev and Treisman call those who rule in this way “spin dictators.” The new-style autocrat regularly wins popularity polls and elections based on the unfeigned support of the uninformed majority. Discontent is limited to a few elite members who refuse to be bought or intimidated.

Under new-model autocracy there are still secrecy and censorship. Secrecy is not comprehensive; it covers only the lives and decisions of the autocrat and his circle. As for censorship, Glavlit is long gone and cannot be brought back. But censorship is practiced, nonetheless. Most mass media are owned by the state or by the state’s private stakeholders, who spread regime propaganda. Censorship is also practiced in another form, in the effects of legal harassment or imprisonment of independent researchers and of the assassination of investigative journalists. So, censorship still exists—but the model has changed.

But much information that the authorities would like to suppress cannot be kept out from the public sphere. So, curious citizens who search for it are shielded from it in two ways. First, internet searches are systematically pointed toward the state’s mouthpieces, which provide disinformation.^[494] If the citizens look elsewhere, the inconvenient truths may be available, but they are fogged by a much greater mass of lies, myths, and rumors that are fed into public discourse through social media.

Consider the shootdown of the Malaysian MH17 airliner over eastern Ukraine in 2014. If the truth is that agents of the Russian state were responsible, Russia’s rulers must deny it because it calls into question their benevolence and competence. In Soviet times, the official media controlled what facts were released, if at all, and provided only official explanations (as with the Soviet-era case of the Korean KAL007 airliner shot down over the Far East in 1983). This cannot be done today. Instead, both true and false facts are all over the Russian state media, accompanied by a bewildering variety of alternative theories: the Ukrainians did it, the Americans did it, the British did it, using various means and based on various motivations. As a result, Russians feel no obligation to accept that their own country was responsible.

What cannot be concealed can be spun. By filling the public space with lies, the rulers hope to persuade the uninformed mass that the truth is unknowable, hidden behind a smokescreen of hostile deceptions. The government version can also gain support from many members of the informed elite, because no one can be equally informed about everything.^[495]

To support their ideas, Guriev and Treisman bring evidence. The facts show that the more successful spin dictators are less violent than the old ones: they kill and imprison in dozens or hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. Where possible they subcontract the limited repression that they find necessary.^[496] They no longer try to enforce every clause and subclause of an official ideology such as Marxism-Leninism, although they do assiduously promote nationalism, illiberal social values, and antiWesternism. In the name of protecting the public sphere against disruption by foreign values, they limit access to the global internet.^[497] They praise themselves for promoting prosperity at home and protecting the nation abroad. And, as opinion polls tend to show, the strategy works: they persuade the poorer, less educated, less travelled members of society much more effectively than the informed elite that actually helps them run the country.

Guriev and Treisman call them “spin dictators,” but there is a sense in which the more violent dictators of the previous generation knew all about spin. Disinformation was disempowering then, as it is now. What is different about the new autocrats is that, as the centralized restriction of knowledge has become less practicable, disinformation has become more valuable to them and more practicable at the same time.

Are the new autocrats as bad as the old ones? Perhaps there is progress: a society where political killings are limited to tens or hundreds is better than one where they are numbered in hundreds of thousands or millions. A society where anyone can search out the truth, even if the search takes some effort, is better than one where every vestige of the truth has been rigidly suppressed. This is the progress that has been marked in the world of authoritarian rule.

But the full cost of spin dictatorship may become clear only in the long run. At the end of 2019, Sergei Guriev was optimistic that Putin’s magic spell over the loyalty of the Russian masses was wearing off, increasing the chance that his regime would crumble.^[498] In 2021, he revised his view: Putin’s regime had taken a violent turn back to the mid-twentieth-century model of the fear dictator.^[499] In 2022, Putin led Russia into violent aggression against Ukraine. With the war on Ukraine, Russia faced outright censorship of war news and severe penalties for truth tellers.

This raises the question whether the model of the spin dictator described by Guriev and Treisman can ever be stable. Sooner or later, perhaps, it must evolve into something either better or worse.

Previous chapters of this book showed that Secret Leviathan faced a secrecy/capacity tradeoff. The ruling party had two aims: to retain state power and to build the capacities of the state. More secrecy protected the regime. Beyond a point, more secrecy also eroded state capacity. Communist rulers gave the impression that they prized state capacity above everything. But the intense secrecy that they chose indicates that they actually prioritized self-protection, while the state they built was substantially less capable than it seemed from the outside.

The information-sharing revolution of the past twenty years has major implications for both state capacity and regime security. It is too early to provide a full account of these implications. For present purposes, two are especially salient. First, an implication for state capacity: new informationsharing technologies are expanding society’s production possibilities, especially in services of all kinds, including public services. Public health provides an example. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, before mass testing facilities were available, citizens of Britain and the United States could self-report sickness on a smartphone app. This enabled real-time monitoring of the likely spread of a novel disease.^[500] Notably, it relied on the participants trusting the motivations of the project with regard to the uses of their personal data and the security with which their data would be handled. More generally, public health agencies could seek to manage the pandemic with unprecedented information capacity, but information sharing rested on a relationship of mutual openness and trust between agency staff and the citizens.

A second implication of falling costs of information sharing is the growing capacity of incumbent regimes to protect themselves by spreading disinformation through social networks. It has become easier for spin dictators to protect their hold on the state despite limited secrecy and partial censorship. They have learned to manage the information available to the mass of people by dominating the public sphere behind the scenes. They crowd out the facts by spreading a thousand rumors and fabrications. They crowd out independent sources of information by legal and extralegal harassment. In this way they maintain popular uncertainty about the true character of the regime, the true state of informed opinion, and the true opportunities and benefits of political action. The outcome is that civil society is disempowered.

Where do these changes leave the secrecy/capacity tradeoff? For democracies there is good news: the returns to open government should be increasing. As a result, elected governments should be able to achieve more (because information sharing increases state capacity) with less secrecy (because secrecy is a necessary evil, and because greater transparency also supports the citizens’ willingness to share information). This is illustrated in Figure 8.1. In the figure, the information revolution has pushed the secrecy/capacity frontier outward, not everywhere to the same degree, but more so where secrecy is less intense.

The good news comes with a warning, however. If trust in government is eroded or disrupted, a democratic society may not be able to reach the frontier. There is an interior trap, where low trust and polarized ideologies handicap state capacity and push the democratic state toward greater concealment.

For autocrats, the news is also mixed. They too can exploit gains from information sharing to the benefit of state capacity. But, as Figure 8.1 suggests, with the higher degrees of secrecy required to protect the dictator, the trust required for citizens to share their data freely with the state will be harder to achieve and the gains will be more limited.

At the same time, there are costs. The dictator no longer tries to find the resources for comprehensive censorship but instead must design and build a national firewall, employ internet monitors, and maintain troll farms. In the case of China, with approximately one billion internet users, figure 8.1. The secrecy/capacity tradeoff: Information sharing makes open government relatively more capable

Note: The solid curve shows the initial secrecy/capacity frontier. As previously described in Figure 2.3, S* is the degree of secrecy that delivers the maximum of state capacity at point X. Y is a point in the equilibrium zone for democracies and Z is the same for dictators.

In the next period, a new information-sharing technology raises the returns to open government. The dotted line shows the new frontier, which is raised by more, the less is secrecy (because the amount of increase depends on the transparency of government motivations and uses of personal data). The new maximum of state capacity, at X', is reached with more state capacity and less secrecy than at A. At all points the marginal gain from secrecy (to the left of X) is reduced or the marginal cost (to the right of X) is increased.

For democracies, state capacity is a good and secrecy is a necessary evil, so an upward shift of the frontier allows more state capacity to be combined with less secrecy (comparing Y' to Y). Given the same upward shift of the frontier, the autocrat, who values both state capacity and secrecy, might choose more state capacity and more secrecy (compared to Z). However, the price of secrecy to the autocrat has increased (the frontier declines more steeply to the right of X') so the autocrat’s best response is indeterminate; it might also be to allow secrecy to remain the same or decline, as shown in the figure at Z'.

state media reported in 2013 that more than two million citizens were employed to monitor social media.^[501] This was around half of 1 percent of China’s urban working population at the time.^[502] In addition, society must be maintained in a condition where most citizens are misinformed about how the world works, and the informed minority is expected to promote misinformation, even those that know better.

As in the past, Russians today are expected to attribute most historic evils to victimization by ill-intentioned outsiders, to trust in the present-day leaders as protectors of the nation, and to stigmatize all criticism as the work of foreign enemies and domestic traitors. Such stories help the leaders to hold on to state power, but they also make state power less usable. Xenophobia and a fear of diversity keep freethinkers and innovators out of public service. A career in government must be unattractive to those members of the informed elite who are morally averse to groupthink and disinformation. Talent is drained abroad, or it prefers obscurity to promotion. Thus, the state’s human capacity is likely to suffer. Moreover, even if informed leaders see reasons to engage constructively with the rest of the world where possible, it is hard to do so when public opinion is continually mobilized by fear and ultranationalism, roiled by myths and rumors that hinder sensible debate about the country’s long-run interest in the international arena.^[503] As for learning capacity, such a state may have little capacity to recognize errors, let alone to correct them.

In short, modern dictators must continue to pay for their security by giving up a part of the effectiveness and capacities of the states that they build and over which they preside.

Turning to the secrecy/capacity tradeoff, the evidence is that it persists. One case in point is the poor quality of decisions made by the Putin administration as it approached the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Why did the Russian Army lose the early battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv? According to former soldier and Russia expert Jeffrey Edmonds, the answer is secrecy.^[504] Secrecy over Russian intentions “denied the Russian military the ability to prepare for war in the way that it had trained for countless times before,” Edmonds explains.

Interviews with captured Russian officers and enlisted personnel suggest that the operation and its scope were likely not shared at the tactical level. For those of us who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, every soldier, staffer, and commander understood where they were going, the danger they might face, and at least the rough outlines of the types of missions they were going to undertake. While there are an infinite number of surprises in war, we all knew we were going to combat. Turning to the Russian military’s experience thus far in Ukraine, it is apparent that this process of emotional and mental preparation for war was missing.

President Putin kept his invasion plans under the tightest secrecy, consulting with no more than a handful of others. According to one report, even Kremlin staff were shocked by Putin’s announcement of the “special military operation.”^[505] As a result, secrecy impeded military preparations and their implementation, and also short-circuited consideration of the likely resistance to be expected on the part of Ukraine and its supporting coalition.

The poor performance of the Russian army in the war of attrition that followed suggests another price of secrecy. Evidently, trillions of rubles supposedly invested in military modernization before the war had been diverted or lost, with poor logistics, badly designed weapons, and defective or missing equipment parts as outcomes.^[506] The growing secrecy surrounding prewar defense outlays and military procurements appeared designed to conceal Russia’s military modernization from foreign observers—but its more important effect may have been to hide the hollowing out of Russia’s military capacity by corruption and waste from the Kremlin leaders.

Thirty years after the fall of communism in Russia, the secrecy/capacity tradeoff was still at work. Moreover, the fact that the Putin administration erred on the side of too much secrecy, rather than too little, provided a clear signal of its authoritarian character.

Given that historians now have access to what happened behind the scenes of communist rule in the Soviet empire, it is tempting to think of the secret record as what “really” happened, and the rest as mere appearance. But this sets too low a value on appearances. Secrecy is also the control of appearance, and authoritarian rulers care greatly about the look of things. Secrecy can have a theatrical aspect, the “spectacle of secrecy” described by the literary scholar Cristina Vatulescu and expressed in the image of the “Iron Curtain.”^[507] In other words, the formidable appearance of authority is also part of its essence, and the history of appearances is an essential aspect of what really happened in history.

Theatre rests on illusion, and the maintenance of illusions in the Soviet theatre relied on keeping the spectators away from the back of the stage. A question that follows is to what extent the backstage capabilities of the Soviet state lived up to what the spectators imagined. Here the study of secrecy itself is helpful because it can shed a clear light on the gap between the public spectacle and what went on behind the scenes.

Extreme secrecy gave the Soviet state the appearance of decisiveness, national purpose, a monolithic will, and an unrivalled ability to command the unanimous consent of the people. But the appearance was a façade, designed to deceive. This book has shown that behind the façade lay wall-to-wall bureaucracy, high decision costs (and sometimes gridlock), abuse of power for private purposes, the misallocation of talent, contagious mistrust, and a misinformed leadership. The outcome was a state that was less capable and more fragile than anyone, insider or outsider, could imagine at the time.

The ability of a government to make decisions and direct others to carry them out without undue procrastination or diversion of effort to other purposes is one aspect of state capacity. At first sight, secrecy seems like a powerful tool for augmenting the decisiveness of the state and containing its running costs. Indeed, authoritarian regimes often display impressive decisiveness and fearsome powers of enforcement; that’s one way we know that they can be called “authoritarian.”

The mystique of authoritarian regimes arises from concealment of their inner workings. Like the proverbial sausage, they “cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”^[508] The historical research covered in this book suggests that the stratagem of concealment is deliberate. The records of the twentieth century’s most long-lived authoritarian regime show that its iron curtain of secrecy concealed colossal waste of opportunities and human resources, and diversion of time and effort to private goals.

Secrecy conceals weaknesses as well as strengths. It seems designed to hide clues, but it may also hide cluelessness. When we strip the secrecy away, we find that the true capacity of Secret Leviathan was much less than appeared on the surface. Soviet secrecy made authoritarian rule cumbersome and indecisive. Bureaucrats used nearly as much paper secretly registering and inventorizing secret correspondence as writing down the original secrets. Secretive government permitted everyday abuses, while denying a place in government business (that is, in nearly all the business there was) to faces that didn’t fit. Secretive government could withhold valuable information even from its own leaders.

I do not conclude that Soviet secrecy was irrational or mistakenly excessive from the standpoint of its rulers. The same security/usability tradeoff applied to Soviet government as to all business systems. With good reason, Soviet rulers preferred a regime that was more secretive, even if less—much less—user friendly. The force of reason behind this choice is suggested by the fact that, when the veil of secrecy was torn down, the system came down with it.

As described in this book, Secret Leviathan lives on only in a few corners of today’s world. Elsewhere it has adapted to the new era of general access to social media and information sharing. The modern exterior of the authoritarian state is Leviathan of a Thousand Lies. The beating heart of Leviathan of a Thousand Lies is still surrounded by secrecy, an impenetrable veil that prevents the investigation and accountability of power itself. But while secrecy remains at the inner core, modern dictators no longer practice comprehensive censorship of the public sphere. Instead, they propagate uncertainty by a smokescreen of myths and rumors. In this way, they aim to paralyze those inclined to collective opposition or resistance and neutralize threats to regime security.

Leviathan of a Thousand Lies continues to face the security/usability tradeoff discussed in Chapter 2. One reason is that the capacity of the state in Russia, China, and elsewhere relies on a population continually stirred up by disinformation. Leviathan of a Thousand Lies propagates many false models of how the modern world has come into being and how it works. These models rely heavily on stories of the past victimization and humiliation of the nation by foreign states and their citizens. Such stories stoke xenophobia and fear of diversity. They leave Russia a country with few friends in the world. Russia’s closest allies are China and India, two countries that hate each other. More generally, a society in which most people have been sold nonsensical beliefs or feel compelled to profess them would seem hard to govern sensibly. This is the subject for another book that someone else must write, if they have not done so already, so it is also my place to stop.