Secret Leviathan

Preface

As a student and young scholar in the 1960s and 1970s, I grew up with the idea that the Soviet Union was secretive. I was interested in communism, and I wanted to learn more about it, but I found that many lines of enquiry were closed off by secrecy. Visiting Moscow, I also learned that curiosity was dangerous, especially to those that lived there. As an outsider, I could hope to study the Soviet economy and its history only through the smoke and mirrors of censored documents and statistics.

In 1986, a new leader of the Soviet Union announced a new policy: “openness.” A trickle of historical revelations began. At the end of 1991, to the surprise of many, the Soviet Union collapsed. For the first time, independent scholars were allowed into many of the formerly secret archives of the Soviet state.

On a dull day in the mid-1990s, I sat at a desk in the Russian State Military Archive. After tea and cakes with Vera and Nonna, I went back to the documents. They told me how the Red Army went about buying new weapons from state industry in the 1930s. Industry was supposed to be planned, but the rapid changes of military technology were a factor that no plan could anticipate. The result was a relatively decentralized process. Every year, high-ranking military engineers toured the defense factories, looking for plant directors that would take on contracts to supply new tanks and planes. While the public could see nothing of this, the Defense Ministry was supposed to have full access to the factories’ capabilities and costs. But many reports told the same story: the biggest problem facing the Army’s buyers was the walls of secrecy that the factory directors and middle managers threw up around their offices to keep the soldiers out.

Eventually there would be a bargain: the factories would contract with the Red Army to supply so many weapons for so many rubles. The number of rubles was already fixed, because the Army’s procurement budget was set by the Politburo. What was at issue was the number of weapons. More weapons meant a better deal for the military, but the factories would have to work harder to make them. The more the Army could be kept in the dark about the factories’ costs, the weaker would be its bargaining power, and the fewer units the factories could be compelled to supply. So, when a uniformed officer asked the factory manager how much it would cost to make the weapon the Army wanted, the manager’s best negotiating position was to delay the information or refuse it outright. When challenged, all too often the justification was “This information cannot be disclosed to you because it’s a military secret.” Thus, secrecy turned out to be the factories’ weapon of choice in their struggle for better terms from the military.[1]

Reading such stories in the archive that day, I thought: Secrecy is interesting! I should look into it more closely.

My enthusiasm to work on secrecy hardened into resolve after I returned home. I told my stories of the 1930s to my friend and fellow scholar Julian Cooper, a specialist on the Soviet defense industries. Of course, he replied, my story was quite familiar. Similar things were still going on in the Soviet Union half a century later.

As I continued to work in various archives of the former Soviet state, I began to collect whatever details I happened to find that related to secrecy. I came across many more stories in the records of the Soviet ministries of the defense industries and of the Gulag (the system of forced labor). Leonid Borodkin, James Heinzen, Oleg Khlevniuk, and Andrei Sokolov heard about my interest, and they generously supplied me with anecdotes from their own research.

Still, I felt, I was missing something. The former Soviet archives were crammed full of secret documentation. It seemed to me that everything in the archives was secret, and secrecy was everywhere. But where was the system? How was it designed, and what were the consequences, intended and unintended? How did one study the system of secrecy?

At the invitation of Timothy Guinnane, I gave a talk on Soviet secrecy at Yale University. During the discussion Steven Nafziger asked me: Why did the Soviet state work so hard to suppress so many facts? Wouldn’t it have been easier to camouflage them under a thousand lies? Stuck in my Soviet-era mindset, I thought this was an odd way to think about things, and I tried to dismiss it, but the idea bothered me and would not go away. Time passed. I kept busy with other things. Steve’s insight would come back to me a decade later, in the new era of “fake news,” as discussed in the final chapter of this book.

In the spring of 2009,1 sat in another archive. Outside sunshine was everywhere, for this was California and I was in the reading room of the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford University. “You should look at this,” Lora Soroka said to me. “We’ve just had the first microfilms from Vilnius, from the archive of the KGB of Soviet Lithuania.” I was curious. I began to read. Weeks later, I looked up. I had found the system I was looking for. They called it the “regime of secrecy.” The system was in the safe hands of the KGB. I set to work.

For a scholar, secrecy can be an absorbing object of study. But it is not only for scholars. Others should also take an interest. Concerned citizens, in particular, should be aware of secrecy. This is because one of the effects of secrecy is to build the mystique of authoritarian rule.

Today, the relatively transparent institutions of Western liberal democracy are in visibly poor shape. Our leaders juggle the pressures arising from public opinion and private lobbies. Their confidential business is hacked and leaked. Expert advice struggles to be heard against the clamor of “alternative facts.” Political decisions are gridlocked while economic, social, and environmental imbalances accumulate. The greater the issue, the more it is contested. The costs of decision making increase and become prohibitive, leading democracy into a “do-nothing zone” where bargaining fails and the outcome is procrastination.^[2] The authoritarian rulers of Russia and China watch us with pity and contempt, seeing our weaknesses as their opportunities. Meanwhile, among our own fellow citizens, disillusionment with free speech and the rule of law grows within and between successive age cohorts.^[3] Evidence across twenty-five high- and middleincome countries links lack of progress on various measures of health, welfare, equality, sustainability, and personal freedom and security to support for a strong leader with extraordinary power to confront wealthy elites and fix a “rigged” or “broken” system.^[4]

Secrecy endows autocrats with a powerful mystique. They rule behind closed doors, free from pressure and process. Special pleading cannot divert them, and voters, journalists, and judges cannot delay them. Human rights, expert evidence, and due process are easily set aside. When something should be done, the dictator orders it and it is done. Or so it appears: that appearance is the mystique of authoritarian rule.

The symptom of those who fall under the spell of the authoritarian mystique is “dictator envy.”^[5] They covet the dictator’s capacity to get things done. They are attracted by the appearance of swift maneuver and decisive action. The reality of authoritarian rule is hidden by a wall of secrecy. And that’s how things tend to stay—until one day for some reason the dictator falls, and there is a change of regime, and suddenly the backstage record is opened up to the light of day.

Once that happens, the historian can get to work. It then transpires that doing secret business was not so simple after all. In various ways, conspiratorial government is surprisingly costly. When the iron curtain is at last lifted, we find that secrecy made authoritarian rule cumbersome and indecisive. Secretive government denied a place in society to faces that didn’t fit. Secrecy provided a cover for widespread abuses and frauds, and these were often tolerated precisely because they took place behind the scenes, so the public could never know. Secretive government denied critical knowledge even to its own leaders.

In the first weeks of 2022, while I wrote and rewrote my typescript, Russia’s Kremlin leaders secretly planned and prepared to launch a war of aggression against Ukraine. At first sight, secrecy was on Russia’s side: neither Ukrainian nor Western leaders could fully anticipate whether or where the blow would fall.

Yet, as Chapter 8 will discuss, Russia also paid a heavy price for the secretiveness of its war plans and preparations. Deprived of information, most Russians, including many ordinary Russian soldiers, were psychologically unprepared for the war. Going into battle on foreign territory, the troops also had to contend with unreliable equipment, supply shortfalls, and failing logistics. Over twenty years the Russian government had paid generously for military modernization. But, covered by secrecy, trillions of rubles had been siphoned off into waste and corruption. Kremlin leaders were blindsided. They found that Russia’s military capacity was much less than they thought. The quick victory they expected did not materialize.

In short, the mystique of authoritarian rule is undeserved. Of course, democracies also suffer from operating frictions. For citizens weary of divisive campaigns and indecisive outcomes, the defects of democracy may be all too obvious: they can be exemplified from any newspaper op-ed or TV documentary. The devil the voters know may come to seem worse than the devil they don’t. It’s not hard to understand. After all, the failings of autocracy are hidden by design. The very secretiveness of authoritarian rule makes it the devil we don’t know. A duty of scholarship is to overcome that asymmetry.

NOTE ON AUTHORITARIANISM

In this book I discuss the Soviet system of authoritarian rule. I refer to it also as an autocracy, or as an authoritarian or autocratic regime, or as a dictatorship. (The word regime can have the neutral meaning of a set of rules, or an ordered way of doing things, but it is often applied to authoritarian governments, perhaps because authoritarian leaders tend to make lots of rules for others to abide by.) In this book I use dictatorship, autocracy, and authoritarian rule or regime more or less interchangeably.

In discussing the Soviet Union’s authoritarian regime, my purpose is often to contrast its operation with that of government under liberal or representative democracy. By democracy I mean a system that allows electoral competition and majority voting based on universal franchise, with regular opportunities for the voters to replace one ruling party by another, and the right of the losers in one election to contest the next, all predicated on the rule of law. In the most general sense, authoritarian regimes can be identified by the lack of one or more of these attributes. It might be thought a weakness to define authoritarianism by its absences, but in fact this is an inevitable outcome of the fact that until the advent of democracy, all governments were authoritarian, although of varying complexions.

Of the many varieties of authoritarian government, only a few are relevant to this book, which is focused on the Soviet Union under communist rule. The Soviet Union was a single-party dictatorship: that is, the government was formed by the ruling Communist Party, which monopolized political power to the exclusion of others, and authority within the party was concentrated in the hands of a dominant party leader.^[6]

The Soviet Union’s dominant party leaders were Vladimir Lenin (1917-1922), Joseph Stalin (1927-1953), Nikita Khrushchev (1955-1964), Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982), Yurii Andropov (1982-1984), Konstantin Chernenko (1984-1985), and Mikhail Gorbachev (1985-1991). The political scientist Milan Svolik distinguishes between the “contested” autocrat, answerable to a small circle of rivals, and the “established” autocrat, who obtains operational support from those in his circle but does not rely on them politically.^[7] In those terms, all the Soviet leaders were contested autocrats, except for Stalin, whose position was contested initially, but became established from around 1932.^[8]

As Svolik suggests, there was a general tendency for the Soviet Union’s contested autocrats to seek to become established, but that path took time and was not inevitable. The changes in Soviet life associated with the transition from Stalin’s established autocracy to the contested autocracy of Khrushchev, often called “the Thaw,” are described in more detail in Chapter 1.

My first thanks go to the colleagues who watched over my early interest in secrecy and guided my steps: Leonid Borodkin, Julian Cooper, Timothy Guinnane, Saulius Grybkauskas, James Heinzen, Oleg Khlevniuk, Vera Mikhaleva, Stephen Nafziger, the late Andrei Sokolov, Leonora Soroka, Nonna Tarkhova, Amir Weiner, and Vasilii Zatsepin. Inga Zaksauskiené, my adviser and interpreter on Lithuanian history, helped me to see the Soviet borderlands in a new light. The University of Warwick’s Department of Economics and Centre on Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy supported my research with time and funding. At Stanford University, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace welcomed me as a visitor and research fellow. In the Hoover Library & Archives I found undreamed-of resources. For more than a decade, thanks to Paul Gregory, I was part of Hoover’s annual summer Workshop on Authoritarian Regimes. There, I gained new insights as well as new friends.

Many colleagues gave me indispensable assistance in preparing this book. Paul Gregory and Norman Naimark encouraged my proposal. At that stage I benefited from comments by James Fenske and two unnamed referees. While writing, I received advice on various aspects from Steven Aftergood, Roberto Stefan Foa, Vincent Geloso, Yoram Gorlizki, Pauline Grosjean, James Harrison, Oleg Khlevniuk, Branko Milanovic, Andrew Oswald, Jeffrey Round, Claire Shaw, Peter Whitewood, Inga Zaksauskiené, and Vasilii Zatsepin. At the final stage I enlisted a team of chapter readers: Ran Abramitzky, Julian Cooper, Michael Ellman, Sharun Mukand, Robert Service, Sebastian Siegloch, and Vasilii Zatsepin. At Stanford University Press, Margo Irvin found more readers to provide further comments and invaluable advice. Julie Fedor also read and commented on the entire text. All those mentioned here gave their time willingly and generously. Finally, Margo steered my typescript through to publication. I appreciate everyone’s efforts to get me to do the right thing. If I failed, I am to blame.

Much of the writing of this book was done while a pandemic kept many of us locked down at home. This was a happy accident for me, if not for those whose home became my workspace. I thank Anne Harrison for her love and patience and for reminding me of the funny side of things.

Some of the material in this book has been published before, although all of it has been revised and rewritten. I first outlined the subject of Chapter 2, the secrecy/capacity tradeoff, alongside the main story of Chapter 4, in “Secrecy, Fear, and Transaction Costs: The Business of Soviet Forced Labour in the Early Cold War,” Europe-Asia Studies 65, no. 6 (2013). The findings of Chapter 3 were published in “Accounting for Secrets,” Journal of Economic History 73, no. 4 (2013). Inga Zaksauskiené and I first described the data for Chapter 5 in “Counter-intelligence in a Command Economy,” Economic History Review 69, no. 1 (2016). Chapter 7 reuses documentation from “A No-Longer Useful Lie,” The Hoover Digest (2009), no. 1. I thank all my publishers and Inga Zaksauskiené for permission to reuse my work.