Secret Leviathan

1. SECRET LEVIATHAN

Leviathan, the all-powerful sea monster of the Old Testament, was Thomas Hobbes’s metaphor for the state: “that Mortall God to which wee owe ... our peace and defence.”^[9] Without Leviathan’s laws and coercive powers, Hobbes maintained, our lives would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” By submitting to Leviathan, he argued, we make our lives free and open to the development of civilization.

Since Hobbes we have learned that there are many Leviathans, not all of them benign. A recent authoritative study of state building classifies them: Despotic Leviathan (the oppressive state), Absent Leviathan (the failed state), and Shackled Leviathan (a state restrained by its own laws and by an active civil society). There is also Paper Leviathan (despotic by intention, but mostly ineffective or absent).^[10]

In this book I write about the state of the Soviet Union—a regime that was clearly despotic, with a remarkable coercive capacity. Unlike those forms of despotism that rely on informality, every action of the Soviet state left a winding paper trail of decrees, orders, correspondence, forms, reports, inquiries, investigations, and audits. But this was no ineffective Paper Leviathan, for the paperwork covered every aspect of Soviet life and the decrees and directives had profound impacts on the lives of every citizen.

The Soviet state existed for seventy-four years from the Bolshevik coup d’état of October 1917 to its collapse in December 1991. Those seven and a half decades place the Soviet Union among the most long-lived of modern dictatorships. While it existed, it was also among the most secretive of modern states. The disproportion between what went on behind the scenes and what was disclosed to the public was immense. When the state collapsed, its wealth of secret records was abruptly exposed to scholarly investigation. The records show in detail the deliberate building of a powerful authoritarian state and of its industrial and military power.

I call this state Secret Leviathan. Secrecy was in the genes of the Soviet state from the first days of its creation. The Soviet state took secrecy to an extreme. When secrecy failed, the state collapsed. This book is about Soviet secrecy and its consequences.

All governments of the early twentieth century kept secrets, from military and diplomatic secrets to the confidences that arose in the ordinary business of politics. The government of the Russian Empire before the Bolsheviks was no exception. It is what came next that was exceptional.

In its first days, the new regime did not hesitate to expose the secrets of the old regime such as the record of confidential inter-Ally negotiations on a postwar settlement.^[11] Regarding their own secrets, the Bolsheviks’ attitude was entirely different. They set about cloaking their activities and suppressing critical voices far more energetically than before. Their ability to do this was limited at first. It took time for the systems to be built that would enable to them to achieve their goals.

Soviet government was known for its unusual secretiveness during the Cold War. “The main characteristic of the Soviet government,” wrote the American journalist John Gunther, “distinguishing it from all other governments in the world, even other dictatorships, is the extreme emphasis on secrecy.”^[12] Western observers were aware that the Soviet state concealed many secrets, that there was comprehensive censorship of the press and media, and that most Soviet people were kept in the dark about nearly everything that went on outside their own narrow circles of acquaintance.^[13]

Much remained unknown, however. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the archives were opened, aspects of Soviet secrecy emerged that were completely unexpected, even for the veteran scholars that found them. One surprising discovery was the sheer size of the Soviet Union’s secret sphere in comparison to the size of the public sphere. If what was published was the tip of an iceberg, how much lay beneath? Here, the economic historian R. W. Davies comments on the discovery that the volume of secret Soviet government business in the 1930s exceeded the business disclosed to the public by a whole order of magnitude:

Between 1930 and 1941, as many as 3,990 decrees of [the Soviet central government] and its main economic committee were published. We naively thought that this included a high proportion of the total. We now know that the total number of decrees issued in these years was 32,415. Most of these were “for official use only,” and over 5,000 were “top secret” ... and were available only to a handful of top officials.^[14]

Another surprise was the discovery of a formal code of secretive behavior to which all party members and state officials were bound to conform: “conspirativeness” (konspiratsiia). Here the social historian Sheila Fitzpatrick describes her first encounter. In September 1990 she visited the archive of Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg), a previously “closed” provincial capital. There she came across an instruction of the early 1930s on the classification and handling of paperwork:

A sentence jumps out about rules for handling “correspondence of Party organs and other conspiratorial documents.” Conspiratorial documents? When this is a ruling party, in power already for fifteen years?

... [The archive director] comes in; I ask what he makes of “conspiratorial documents” phrase about party correspondence. New to him.^[15]

A third surprise was the extreme compartmentalization of Soviet secrecy. All bureaucracies are divided into compartments, and it is of the nature of these divisions that they impede cooperation and communication. But in the Soviet bureaucracies the walls between government departments were as high and as impenetrable as those that shielded the state from the public. I recall my wonder at the documentation of a dispute between the Soviet Interior Ministry (MVD) and the Finance Ministry in August 1948. The Finance Ministry was preparing the national budget, which included payments toward the upkeep of the millions of detainees and guards in the labor camps of the MVD. The budget officials asked the MVD officials to confirm the numbers. The MVD refused: “Provision of these figures will lead to familiarization with especially important information on the part of a wide circle of staff of the USSR Ministry of Finance, the State Bank, and the Industrial Bank.” (“Especially important” was the highest secrecy classification.) The MVD advised Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s deputy, that in past years such figures had been loaned temporarily to the Finance Ministry to be processed by no more than two or three highly trusted workers, then returned. It noted that the ministries of the armed forces and state security provided the Finance Ministry only with financial summaries, not head counts; and it proposed that from now on the MVD should do the same.^[16]

Since those early finds, there have been two kinds of further revelations. On one side, the Soviet archives have yielded many specific secrets. Studies and documentary collections have been published that show the secret working arrangements of the top party leaders and of secret branches of activity such as the secret police, the armed forces, the defense industry, the closed cities of the military-industrial complex, and the Gulag system of forced labor camps.^[17]

On the other side were revelations that laid bare particular aspects of the organization of secrecy. These included accounts of the secret archives themselves; the rules pertaining to what was secret and what was not; the development of the censorship; the concealment of people, objects, organizations, and entire cities; the formalization of “conspirative” decision making; the parallel evolution of government communications on paper and by telephone; and the operation of secret processes such as the vetting of personnel for access to secret information.^[18]

After all this, there remains the task of understanding the system as a whole: how the parts fitted together to constitute a system and what were its consequences. The system had a name, but even the name was secret, being unknown to the public until Soviet secrecy collapsed. The “regime of secrecy,” as insiders named it, is defined here for KGB officer trainees of the 1970s in a secret handbook copied and made available for scholars during the 1990s:

REGIME OF SECRECY: the totality of rules determined by the organs of power and administration that limit the access of persons to secret documents and activities, codify the procedure for use of secret documents, correspondingly regulate the conduct of people involved with secrets, and provide for other measures.^[19]

The Soviet regime of secrecy was not unchanging. As described in this book, it was formed by beliefs and interests in an atmosphere of conflict and mobilization. It evolved by trial and error over many years. Throughout the process, a few fundamentals can be observed. Not all were there at the beginning but, once in place, they persisted to the end.

The Soviet regime of secrecy was built on four pillars that gave it exceptional coverage and iron grip. These pillars were the state monopoly of nearly everything, the censorship of the press and media, the conspirative norms of the ruling party, and the secret police and secret departments. I will briefly describe each in turn.

The state monopoly of nearly everything was the first pillar of the regime of secrecy. Under the Soviet command system, production, distribution, trade, transport, and construction were carried out almost entirely under state ownership and control. The private sector was relegated to the margins of agriculture, handicrafts, trade, and personal services. As a result, most matters that would have been private business in other countries became the business of the government. At the same time, all government business was politicized, in the sense that the ruling Communist Party based its decisions on political criteria that could override any economic, cultural, and technical considerations. In the outcome, the political business of the Soviet state was far more completely encompassing than the business of other states, including the Russian Empire that came before it.

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]

While these measures certainly had a restrictive effect, they were only first steps on a long path to the comprehensive, centralized censorship of later years. The next important measure was the establishment of an office of the censor, known as Glavlit, on 6 June 1922. (Its full name, the Chief Administration for Literature and the Press, went through many variations, but the short form was retained to the end.) The first list of prohibited topics was promulgated: anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, military secrets, false information causing alarm, information inciting ethnic and religious hatred, and pornography.^[28] But the system was not watertight because censorship remained decentralized and was implemented with many inconsistencies and loopholes.

By 1930 or so, the wrinkles were ironed out and the leaks were stopped.^[29] From that time, the censors ensured that scarcely a word was printed or broadcast from one end of the Soviet Union to the other without prior scrutiny. They kept from circulation the least hint that could reflect badly on the ruling party or its leaders.

Comprehensive censorship, the second pillar of the Soviet regime of secrecy, was exceptionally effective. Throughout the history of the Soviet state there were few leaks. Great facts that were effectively concealed figure 1.1. Censorship worked: The frequency of the term “Glavlit” in 600,000 Russian books over the twentieth century (cases per 100,000 words per year)

Notes: Glavlit was the shortened name of the office of the Soviet censorship, founded in 1922. The table shows the frequency of cases of “Glavlit” per 100,000 words per year. This unit is chosen, based on the average length of a book in the Google Books Russian-language corpus of 2019 (described by Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture”) over the period shown, which was 97,777 words. The search parameters were “Glavlit” in Cyrillic characters, switching off case-sensitivity and year-to-year smoothing, A figure of 0.1 on the vertical axis would mean that, if mentions of Glavlit were randomly distributed, the probability of finding a single mention of Glavlit in a randomly chosen book in a given year and of average size over the sample was one in ten. If mentions were clustered (for example, by passages of text in which Glavlit was mentioned repeatedly), the true probability would be much lower.

include the famines of 1933 and 1947, the mass killings of 1937 and 1938, Soviet responsibility for the Katyn forest massacre of 1940 (the event itself was uncovered only by the accident of Germany’s wartime occupation of the territory on which it took place), the scale of forced labor, the military and population losses of World War II, the burden of Cold War military outlays, and the exact geolocation of almost everything, including the existence of some cities.

A simple yet unambiguous measure of the effectiveness of the censorship is shown in Figure 1.1. How well did Glavlit suppress discussion of its own existence? The Google Books Russian-language corpus of 2019 gives access to the digitized texts of 600,000 books published in the twentieth century. The vertical axis shows the frequency of mentions of “Glavlit” per 100,000 words per year; this was close to the average length of a book in the corpus. The data start in 1901, when Glavlit did not exist. In each year before 1922, when Glavlit was established, the probability of finding a single mention of Glavlit in a published book was zero or, if not zero, so close to zero as to be explained, most likely, by a typographical error or an error of digitization. In the years from 1922 to 1930, the censorship was being built, and Glavlit was mentioned and discussed in public, so the probability of finding a mention of “Glavlit” in a book of average size soared, peaking at around one-quarter. Of course, a single mention is not a discussion, so the probability of finding a discussion of Glavlit might be one or two orders of magnitude less. But in 1931 the frequency fell back to zero, or close to zero. The hush that followed was disturbed only by an occasional murmur (in 1936, for example, the frequency briefly returned to one-tenth before falling back). After that, from the late 1930s to the late 1980s, that is, for a full half century, silence reigned.

Only after Gorbachev initiated the policy of “openness” (glasnost’) in 1987 did uncensored discussion of Glavlit resume. It never returned to the level of the 1920s, for public interest was now limited to the narrow circle of historical scholars. Anyway, the lesson is that Soviet censorship worked.

What was permitted by the Soviet censors varied over time, although generally within strict limits. Writing in the first half of 1953, the economist Abram Bergson offered a simple gauge of the tendency of the secret sphere to encroach on what was previously disclosed. He used the quantity of published documentation of successive Soviet five-year plans for the national economy.^[30] The first five-year plan (1929) amounted to four published volumes, full of detailed economic and social statistics (although already with notable gaps and half truths). That quantity was halved for the second plan (two volumes in 1933) and halved again for the third (one volume in 1938). The third was the last plan to be published before war broke out. The postwar period saw further restriction. The fourth plan (1946) was published in six newsprint pages in Pravda, with the fifth plan (1950) covered in just three pages.

After Stalin’s death, the policy of increasing restriction was reversed. During the post-Stalin “Thaw” (discussed below) the censors allowed a return to regular publication of economic and social statistics. Although the data published were heavily selected and the gaps remained notable, the change in policy was large enough to have important effects on the atmosphere and substance of the Soviet Union’s public discourse. Thus, a policy was changed, while the system remained the same. The strongest evidence of continuity is that, as shown in Table 1.2, the existence of the office of censorship was strictly shielded from public exposure.

The Bolsheviks did not invent censorship, which was practiced in Imperial Russia before the Soviet period. If there was continuity within the Soviet period, was there continuity from pre-Soviet times? The two systems cannot be evaluated in exactly comparable terms. The work of the historian Benjamin Rigberg makes possible only a rough comparison. He finds that the prerevolutionary statute on censorship seemed to give the imperial government sweeping powers to control the press and prevent publications that might disseminate critical views or subvert public order. But these powers remained largely unused for lack of resources. In 1882, forty-four censors were employed across the Russian Empire. By 1917, after thirty-five years of growth of the print media and in the middle of a world war, the number had risen to just forty-six. While the censors’ efforts were not completely ineffective, they did little to intimidate a lively public sphere where great issues were debated in a spirit that was often hostile to authority.^[31] Rigberg concludes:

It is now clear that the tsarist regime made improper provision for the attainment of its aims. Even a staff twenty or thirty times larger than that actually functioning could scarcely have supervised effectively the vast printing operations of tsarist times. It thus seems obvious that the government cannot itself have attached overriding importance to censorship operations; else why so paltry a budget for the Chief Administration? However one speculates the conclusion seems inescapable: Censorship was not a major arm of repression which the Old Regime relied upon.^[32]

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.

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.

To summarize, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s the Soviet Union went through many changes. The changes were to a large extent unplanned and experimental. Although written from varied perspectives, recent historical studies of the Soviet Union in the Thaw period share a common theme of the unintended consequences of haphazard reforms, including confusion, division, excesses of political dissent, outbreaks of ordinary criminality, and conservative backlashes. Fearing to lose control, the party leaders were forced to give increasing attention to the restoration of order, which took several years to achieve to their satisfaction.^[60]

Comparing before and after the Thaw, the Soviet system of authoritarian changed gears, moving from high- to low-intensity repression.^[61] High-intensity repression compels by violent actions such as detention, killing, imprisonment, and forced resettlement. High-intensity repression can be targeted but is often indiscriminate. Where high-intensity repression compels by violence, low-intensity repression controls and prevents. It uses harassment and threats, which are targeted selectively on particular persons rather than entire groups.

How did the Thaw affect the Soviet regime of secrecy? Did the original regime persist with minor adjustment, or did it undergo fundamental change? This question can be answered by thinking about the four pillars of Soviet secrecy. The state monopoly of nearly everything was entirely unaffected by the Thaw. Comprehensive censorship remained in place without substantial reorganization. The scope of permitted material was somewhat widened, so now the censors had more work to process than before, and they had to make many difficult decisions as they tried to fix new limits on the public sphere. Within a few years the new limits were clearly established. The party’s conspirative norms were disturbed by a major violation, the leaking of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the outside world, but the violation was not repeated, and the code of silence was restored. And behind the scenes, the secret police and the secrete departments continued to safeguard government communications as before.

Once the Thaw had run its course, two things became clear. First, de-Stalinization would not be reversed, but it was to be kept within strict limits, and attempts to push beyond the limits would be punished. Above all, de-Stalinization would not be allowed to put at risk the state’s monopolization of the economy and the party’s monopolization of state power. Soviet repression shifted from high to low intensity, but low-intensity repression was still repression, and the political regime continued to rely on it. Indeed, after the Thaw, the balance of repression continued to evolve so that, under Brezhnev, Soviet rule became steadily less violent but also more intrusive through mass surveillance and individually targeted “preventive” measures.

A second clear outcome of the Thaw was that the Soviet public sphere was permanently widened, and the detailed operations of censorship were reprogrammed to allow more information and a somewhat wider variety of influences to enter public discourse. Important though it was, that was all. Even if a few individuals pushed at the limits, there was no public debate of the need for censorship, which continued as before so that, once the new limits on the public sphere were established, they were strictly enforced. As for the other pillars of secrecy, they stood unaltered. Thus, while the atmosphere of Soviet politics and culture changed markedly, the regime of secrecy continued from Stalin to Khrushchev and Brezhnev with only minor alterations.

For much of its existence the Soviet Union saw the United States as its chief adversary—and conversely. It would be of interest, therefore, to compare the rules and practices of secrecy in the two countries during the Cold War in such a way that we could trace their interaction and coevolution— the consequences of each on the other.^[62] While that is beyond the scope of the present work, a first step is to describe the norms of secrecy on each side in comparable terms. Norms do not explain practical working arrangements. No doubt poor practices and violations (some described later in this book) were frequent on both sides. Despite this, a comparison of norms does at least tell us about the expectations that leaders placed on their subordinates on either side of the Cold War.

At first sight, most secrecy systems look the same. The start is a classification hierarchy in which “top secret” matters are distinguished from matters that are merely “secret,” while secret matters are separated from those that are confidential in the ordinary way of doing business. To break a confidence leads to a warning or dismissal. To disclose a secret leads to prison or worse. Both sides used terminologies of this nature.

Beneath the surface, significant differences lay buried. One difference is that the Soviet system was older than the American system. In the United States, spying for a foreign power was made illegal by the Espionage Act of 1917, but the scope of secrecy was not legally defined, so that the act had little force. In two world wars, American press censorship was largely voluntary.^[63]

An American system of secrecy was established only after World War II, by President Truman’s Executive Order (EO) no. 10290 (1951), which set out four levels of classification:^[64]

“Top Secret,” “Secret,” “Confidential,” and “Restricted” . .. shall be used only for the purpose of identifying information which must be safeguarded to protect the national security....

The major criterion for the assignment of [“Top Secret”] shall be recognition of the fact that unauthorized disclosure of information so classified would or could cause exceptionally grave danger to the national security. The classification “Secret” . . . shall be given only to information which requires extraordinary protection in the interest of national security. The classification “Confidential” . .. shall be given to such information as requires careful protection in order to prevent disclosures which might harm national security. The classification “Restricted” . . . shall be applied to information having such bearing upon national security as to require protection against unauthorized use or disclosure, particularly information which should be limited to official use.

For comparison, a KGB training handbook of the 1970s sets out the rules of Soviet classification.^[65]

There were four classes of secrecy, beginning with a supersecret category called “Top secret (of special importance)” (sovershenno sekretno [osoboi vazhnosti]).^[66] This was followed by “top secret” (without any qualifiers), “secret,” and finally “restricted” (dlia sluzhebnogo pol’zovaniia, literally “for staff use”).

In Soviet parlance, matters are classified “top secret” (whether of special importance or not) if their disclosure can “cause harm to the interests of the Soviet state”; the degree of harm is not considered. This is enough to make them state secrets. Matters that are state secrets are listed in periodic decrees of the USSR Council of Ministers (dated 9 June 1947,28 April 1956, and 15 September 1966, for example); these lists were themselves state secrets. In consultation with the KGB, particular ministries can also declare aspects of their activity to be state secrets. Unauthorized disclosure of top secrets is a “state crime” (treason, in other words).

“Secret” matters are administrative secrets, not state secrets; their disclosure can harm a government agency or facility, rather than the state as a whole. Unauthorized disclosure may be a crime or an administrative violation, depending on circumstances, but it is not a “state crime.” The importance of the distinction is illustrated by a story from Vilnius in 1973. While drinking in a bar, a police lieutenant lost an informer’s paperwork documenting their code name, real name, address, life story, associates, criminal activities, and police contacts. Taken together, were these a state secret, leading to prosecution, or just an administrative secret? Local officials wanted the more serious charge, but Moscow overruled them. The officer lost his job, but criminal charges were dropped for lack of a crime.^[67]

Finally, matters that are “restricted” are not secret but they are subject to state censorship on the basis that disclosure “can cause harm to the Soviet state.”

A side-by-side comparison (Table 1.2) highlights these and other differences. First, what was secrecy for? For Americans, the sole legitimate purpose was to protect national security (row 1 of the table). From Truman onward, it was explicit:

Information ... shall not be classified under these regulations unless it requires protective safeguarding in the interest of the security of the United States.

These words were clearly intended to stop the use of secrecy to protect bureaucratic or other interests unrelated to national security.

On this issue Soviet rules diverged. Only the “top secret” classification covered disclosures threatening the interests of the state (with “state security” taking the place of “national security” in the American lexicon). In the Soviet context, matters that put the interests of a particular agency or facility at risk could then be classified “secret” despite the absence of a threat to the state as a whole. Thus, Soviet secrecy was not limited to protecting national security (or state security in the broadest sense); it could also be invoked to protect the interests of any government organization and its assets.

The scope to misuse American secrecy for private or strictly bureaucratic purposes was further restricted by an order of the Carter administration (EO no. 12065, 1978), which made it illegal to classify information with the intention “to conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error, to prevent embarrassment to a person, organization or agency, or to restrain competition.” The practical force of this provision was (and remains) limited, however, in so far as evidence of crimes or abuses may still be concealed under US secrecy as long as covering up the crime was not the motive behind the original classification.^[68] By contrast, Soviet secrecy was deliberately exploited to cover up the party leaders’ complicity in great crimes, such as mass killings, carried out with no higher purpose in mind.

If a degree of secrecy was necessary, was it a necessary evil, limited by the citizens’ interest in open government? American norms (Table 1.2, row 2) acknowledged the value of an “informed citizenry” for democracy and accountability. Eisenhower’s EO no. 10501 (1953) opened with the words: “Whereas it is essential that the citizens of the United States be informed concerning the activities of their government.” With minor variation, similar words have appeared in every version since. But the idea that government information has civic value did not exist for Soviet citizens.

While the American public was expected to put up with a certain amount of secrecy, it was kept fully informed of the rules by which secrecy worked (Table 1.2, row 3). These were set out and revised in executive orders published by each incoming presidential administration starting from Franklin D. Roosevelt (EO no. 8381, 1940). Because they were published, the principles could be debated in the US media and Congress, and their application challenged (not always with success) in the courts (Table 1.2, row 4).

By contrast the Soviet regime of secrecy was itself a secret, and the rules of classification and document handling were strictly censored, so that they remained entirely outside of public discussion and were never debated or challenged in public.

To what extent was secrecy on either side reflexive, in the sense of covering itself (Table 1.2, row 5)? This question can be asked at two levels, the level of the system (or regime) and the level of particular secrets. At the system level, the contrast is clear: Soviet secrecy was reflexive while American secrecy was not. At the level of detail, Soviet secrecy was reflexive again: any reference to the existence of classified information, even if it did not disclose any of that information, was just as secret as the information that was classified. This had important practical implications (detailed in Chapter 3).

It is an open question whether US secrecy norms were reflexive at the level of detail. From Eisenhower (EO no. 10501,1953) through Nixon (EO no. 11652, 1972), the American rules contained the instruction: “Material containing references to classified materials, which references do not reveal classified information, shall not be classified.” From Carter (EO no. 12065 !978) onward, the limitation was removed. Whether that made any practical difference is unclear. But on the Soviet side, we will see, it was not even a question: the existence of a secret was always secret.

A risk on both sides was overclassification, that is, turning restricted or confidential items into secrets or secrets into top secrets, whether motivated by excessive caution or private concealment. What kind of limits were placed on overclassification (Table 1.2, row 6)? On the American side, strictures were issued against overclassification from Truman onward (EO no. 10290,1951). Despite these, effective limits proved elusive. On the Soviet side (Chapter 3 will show), KGB officials did occasionally complain about the burdens of undue secrecy. There is no sign of support for such complaints from higher levels.

Was secrecy intended to be forever (Table 1.2, row 7)? Truman (EO no. 10290, 1951) allowed the option of classifying a document for a set time, after which declassification would be automatic. His successors varied the idea in small ways. The general rule of the Cold War era became that American secrecy should generally be time limited, but the limit could be extended for as long as necessary.^[69]

Other measures forced American officials to give practical attention to declassification. The Freedom of Information Act (1966) entitled private citizens to seek disclosure of government information (although the government could still refuse it) (Table 1.2, row 8). The annual reports of the Information Security Oversight Office (established in 1979) disclosed the scale of aggregate classification and declassification activity across US government departments (Table 1.2, row 9).

Such concerns were foreign to the work of Soviet officials. Soviet secrecy was forever, with exceptions made when it served official purposes to release information that was formerly secret. The years after Stalin’s death saw a wave of such revelations. But any visitor to the Soviet-era buildings that still house most Russian archives today can tell that their designers never anticipated the need to provide members of the public with a comfortable reading room or other facilities.

The American and Soviet states both encountered the need to vet the government employees who would work with secret information for their trustworthiness (Table 1.2, row 10). For Americans this was an afterthought. Not until the Hatch Act (1939) was the federal government prohibited from hiring members of organizations promoting its overthrow. EO 8781 (1941) introduced criminal record checks for federal employees, and the War Service Regulations (1942) barred federal employment of anyone whose loyalty was in reasonable doubt. Concerns were heightened after World War II, when the FBI became aware of the systematic infiltration of Soviet agents into US government service.^[70] Truman’s EO no. 9835 (1948) established the Federal Employee Loyalty Program, which provided for background investigation of loyalty and character.^[71]

In the present context, two features of the US vetting system that emerged are notable. First, while investigation of loyalty was typically subcontracted to the FBI, responsibility for granting or denying clearance remained with the head of the employee’s department (Table 1.2, row 11). Second, from the last year of the Eisenhower administration (EO no. 10865, i960), a subject whose security clearance was denied or revoked could appeal the ruling (Table 1.2, row 12), based on rights to know the grounds of refusal, to reply, to call witnesses, and to be represented—all conditional on the requirements of national security, however.

The loyalty of party and government workers was a concern for the Soviet state from its foundation. Two institutions were created to filter them for loyalty, the nomenklatura and the dopusk. The nomenklatura emerged in the early 1920s and the dopusk at some point thereafter. The nomenklatura provided a first filter: it listed thousands of leading government positions to be filled by party members approved by the Central Committee secretariat (eventually there were separate nomenklaturas for the republican and provincial levels of government administration).^[72] The second filter was established by the dopusk, the Soviet equivalent to the US security clearance, issued only after a background check on the subject. The dopusk was issued at three levels, third (for “secret” matters), second (for “top secret” matters), and first (for matters “of special importance”).^[73]

Soviet security clearance in the Cold War differed from the American vetting process in two features (discussed further in Chapter 5). One, the final decision lay with the secret police, which clashed regularly with managers. Two, the process was entirely secret, with the subject kept in ignorance of any investigation. If the outcome was negative, the subject’s employment was then terminated on other grounds. There was no question of appeal, therefore.

The grading of access to secrets, like the grading of the secrets themselves, indicates that secrecy was not an absolute, even in the Soviet Union. This is suggested even more strongly by another classification that existed everywhere, although rarely acknowledged: the category of “open secrets.” In the Soviet Union an example of an open secret was the widespread use of undercover informers by the secret police (discussed in Chapter 6). The hierarchical nature of secrets and the scope for leakage across the boundaries between the various grades has led the historian Asif Siddiqi to propose the idea of a map of Soviet society contoured by access to knowledge classified at different levels.^[74]

What was the value of secrecy? Government secrecy is employed to the extent that it helps governments and parties in power to achieve their goals. Chapter 2, “The Secrecy/Capacity Tradeoff,” argues that, where communists took control of the state, their goals were to retain state power and to expand it in unprecedented ways. Up to a point, secrecy contributed to both these goals.

Secrecy was also costly. Direct costs were the efforts of government personnel diverted from other priorities to preserve the secrecy of their business. Indirect costs were the harms done by secrecy to the wider effectiveness of the state. These included the spread of suspicion and mistrust through the state and society, and the inability to correct policy mistakes because of the suppression of knowledge about them. The result was a tradeoff: for the sake of its own security, the Soviet regime pursued secrecy far beyond the point where state capacity began to decline. This implies that, although the communists aimed to expand state power, it was not their most important goal. Their most important goal was to hold on to power at all costs.

The following five chapters illustrate this theme, providing evidence of a range of damages to Soviet state capacity arising from the excess of secrecy. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the practical impact of conspirative norms on government business and the working lives and practices of the officials responsible for it. These were direct costs of secrecy. Compliance costs arose because secrecy created burdensome additional rules and procedures with which business partners had to comply in order to do business. There were also behavioral costs: an environment of secrecy reduced cooperation among higher authorities and lower officials, whose efforts were redirected away from government goals. Chapter 3, “The Secrecy Tax,” considers compliance costs. It takes a deep dive into the procedures that assured secrecy. It describes these procedures, and it shows that compliance with them placed a burden on government business similar to a cascading transaction tax. When measured, the secrecy tax was surprisingly heavy. The costs could be mitigated by ignoring them or working around them, but systematic violations were not the norm. To the limited extent that we can measure across countries, the Soviet costs of secrecy were heavier than in modern liberal-democratic states by an order of magnitude. The readiness of the Soviet authorities to pay a heavy secrecy tax shows the importance of secrecy to their system of rule.

Chapter 4, “Secrecy and Fear,” considers the behavioral cost of secrecy. Soviet secrecy affected government business not only procedurally, but also by changing the behavior of government personnel. An event study from the late 1940s is based on a natural experiment in history. Unexpectedly, Stalin ordered a sharp intensification of the regime of secrecy. This created new penalties for government officials who shared secret government information with each other, even though sharing the information was necessary to carry out their normal business. The shock sent a ripple of fear through the Soviet bureaucracy. As the wave reached them, we see how officials stopped doing their regular jobs and turned their efforts instead to self-protection and mutual insurance against heightened risks. Normal business did not stop, but it slowed down before recovering.

Two more chapters are about indirect costs of the regime of secrecy. Nearly all Soviet business was government or party business, and nearly all government and party business was secret. No one could be selected for a white-collar or management role unless the KGB cleared them for access to government secrets at the level corresponding to the role. This gave the KGB oversight of the selection and promotion of the Soviet state’s responsible personnel. How this worked is addressed in Chapter 5, “Secret Policing and Discrimination.” The KGB used evidence held in its secret files to discriminate against candidates whose life experience and personal attributes gave grounds for suspicion. The evidence was called kompromat (“compromising evidence”). Vetting based on kompromat valued loyalty over competence and conformity over diversity and originality. Discrimination on such lines harmed the quality of the state’s human capacities.

The party aimed to win the people’s trust, but its methods of rule created a low-trust society. By its nature, the Soviet police state drove its enemies underground. To pursue them and neutralize their influence, the state used the secret police and undercover informers. This is the subject of Chapter 6, “Secret Policing and Mistrust.” The informer network provided the state with important information that could not be obtained in any other way. A few documents from the archives of the Soviet security police allow us to see in detail how the KGB developed productive informers: how they came to the KGB’s attention, were recruited, and were trained and reeducated. A common factor among potential recruits was a tainted past, documented by kompromat. In principle this allowed for recruitment under pressure, but pure coercion was an inadequate foundation for productive, long-term collaboration. In fact, the KGB often caught such people at a moment when they were having second thoughts about their underground activities or feelings of regret for past transgressions. People in this situation might be superficially willing to accept recruitment, but their commitment was often skin deep, so that they might then go on to waver or become passive, and this had to be managed. It was essential for the agent to trust the case officer, and for the agent to win the trust of the subjects being secretly investigated. The purpose of winning trust was to carry out deception. In turn, the penetration of society by informers was an open secret. Private citizens learned to distrust strangers, especially those that sought familiarity. In the short term, lack of trust in society raised the costs of government surveillance. In the long term it harmed society and the economy.

Chapter 7, “Secrecy and the Uninformed Elite,” investigates the effects of secrecy on the capacity of the state to know itself and correct its policies. In most modern societies, even if public opinion is underinformed about some issue of state, there is usually an informed elite. In the Soviet state, no one was entitled to know anything beyond their immediate sphere of responsibility. Thus, secrets were withheld not only from the Soviet public but even from party leaders who lacked a direct need to know. The outcome was a chronically underinformed leadership. The chapter describes the case of Soviet defense outlays. In the sunset years of Soviet rule, Mikhail Gorbachev ordered disclosure of the Soviet Union’s true military spending. In the arena of international diplomacy, he concluded, secrecy had cost the Soviet Union its credibility. No one would negotiate arms control with a state that could be expected to lie about the size of its armed forces or military budget. Only openness, Gorbachev believed, could regain external trust. From this point the friends and enemies of greater openness in military affairs fought a protracted struggle. Possibly, however, the struggle was pointless: the true burden of Soviet military spending had been so well hidden for many years that it had been changed from a secret, known if only to a few, into a mystery that no one could fathom. It follows that for many years no one had been controlling the Soviet budgetary allocation to defense, something that ought to be one of the most important strategic decisions of any state.

Communist rule in Russia ended with the collapse of secrecy. The transition from communist rule and the state-owned command economy took place amid a new crisis of state capacity, which turned out to be much more decisive for how things worked out than the plans and policies espoused by reformers or the advice they received from outsiders. The crisis of state capacity was resolved, once again, in an authoritarian way. The book is concluded by Chapter 8, “Secrecy and Twenty-First-Century Authoritarianism.” Its subject is the forms of government that have emerged in Russia (and some other countries, most importantly China) since the Cold War came to an end. Previous chapters described the nexus between secrecy and an authoritarian system in the era of the typewriter, the filing cabinet, and the briefcase. Digital information technologies and peer-to-peer information sharing have revolutionized the context of authoritarian rule, forcing a redefinition of the spheres and rules of secrecy. I describe this process as the morphing of Secret Leviathan into Leviathan of a Thousand Lies. What remains the same is that the core of power in Russia (as in other authoritarian states) is once again veiled by secrecy. Moreover, the secrecy/ capacity trade-off is still at work.

My book seeks to contribute to history and social science. Its contribution to history lies in the thick description of Soviet secrecy, a subject little studied before now because it was deliberately concealed. My book discusses the historical evolution of the Soviet regime of secrecy and its uses and costs, with a focus on those aspects that appear to have been more specific to communist rule. As for what is left out, Soviet secrecy also provided a cover for corruption and cheating the state.^[75] But corruption and cheating take place under all systems of rule, so these are omitted.

To social science my book contributes a simple idea, the secrecy/capacity trade-off. In turn, this is based on a way of understanding the gains and losses from secrecy and their distribution. As explained in Chapter 2, the innovations involved are modest steps, not great leaps. Other scholars have linked authoritarian rule to the control of information. However, it is often assumed that the control of information is sufficiently understood as propaganda plus censorship (including the punishment of violators such as harassing or killing disobedient journalists).^[76] As this chapter has already shown, comprehensive censorship was only one of the four pillars of the Soviet regime of secrecy. Again, the idea that authoritarian rulers must incur costs in order to protect their ruling position is not new to social and political science. The contribution of this book is to locate the costs of the Soviet regime of secrecy in damaged state capacity, and to explain why the Soviet rulers ignored the damage or found it acceptable.

For both history and social science, my book tries to inject some precision into the idea of the costs of secrecy. In the last months of Soviet rule, a senior KGB officer floated the figure of 30 to 40 billion rubles (equal to 3 to 4 percent of Soviet GDP in 1990) in the Russian press as the social cost of “unjustified secrecy.”^[77] Unfortunately the meaning of this estimate remains unclear. An obvious issue is that “unjustified” secrecy begs the question of how much is justified. Less obviously, as this book will show, the cost of secrecy comes in many forms, including the resources consumed by enforcing and assuring it, the resources wasted because of the adverse behaviors it induces, and the opportunities for economic and social development foregone because of the restrictions that secrecy places upon individual and social choices.

The focus of this book is on how secrecy affects state capacity. It combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to conclude that Soviet secrecy helped to keep the Communist Party in power, while doing material damage to the capacities of the state the communists built. If it has a shortcoming of which I am aware, it is that my book is not always able to determine the size of these effects. Where my skills fall short, I have every confidence that others will be able to improve on my efforts.