Secret Leviathan

3. THE SECRECY TAX

All states keep accounts. These accounts are of various kinds. Of necessity, they include records of the state’s money and the state’s employees. From more modern times they have also accounted for the nation’s money and the nation’s people. It goes without saying that the Soviet state accounted for money and for people.^[131]

The Soviet state also kept accounts of secret paperwork. As part of their normal duties, Soviet officials regularly counted and listed all classified documents that passed through their hands, and all that were held in their files. Each classified document had its own life course, every moment of which was recorded from its creation through distribution and storage to destruction or assignment to the archive. The purpose of the accounting system was to provide assurance of the integrity of the regime of secrecy. As I will show, the accounting system was surprisingly costly. It was costly because secrets were numerous and keeping track of them was a complex task that consumed the efforts of government officials.

The costs of accounting for secrets deserve investigation because a willingness to incur costs can be evidence of motivation. The costs of Soviet secrecy suggest a lower bound on the value of secrecy to the Soviet rulers. The rulers valued secrecy because it helped to prevent change in the political order and so preserved the flow of benefits to the regime.

The existence of the Soviet system of accounting for secrets can be documented directly. It is also evident from many small failures. From creation to destruction, a named person was responsible for every classified document at every moment. Being human, these people lost or mislaid secret paperwork in a variety of circumstances, or they failed to record their disposal as required. These failures were also documented. They too reveal the system. In addition, they provide evidence of misaligned incentives and of the many attempts to bring them back into alignment.

The first part of this chapter describes the life course of the secret document and the data that it generated at each stage. The costs of complying with secrecy procedures can be likened to a cascading secrecy tax, paid on every transaction of government business. Using a unique data source, I go on to measure the burden of the Soviet secrecy tax on the management of a small regional bureaucracy—a republican KGB. A comparative perspective suggests that the burden was heavy. Finally, I consider the scope for generalizing this finding.

The secrecy tax was a procedural cost of Soviet secrecy. If we wish to account for the overall costs of Soviet secrecy, the procedural cost was a first instalment. Secrecy also incurred further costs directly through the effects of fear on the productiveness of officials and managers (Chapter 4), and indirectly through the adverse selection of the officials and managers themselves (Chapter 5), the spread of mistrust through society (Chapter 6), and the misinformation of the leaders (Chapter 7). While it is only the start, however, the secrecy tax is of particular interest because the evidence will suggest that the secrecy tax alone was very large.

To understand how the burdens of Soviet secrecy arose, we will follow the life course of the secret or top-secret document. Although “top secret” differed from “secret” in other ways, the system’s auditors and stocktakers would often refer to “secret and top-secret” documents in the same breath, treated them similarly, and counted them with the same obsessive attention.

The evidence is taken from three microfilm collections in the archive of the Hoover Institution. Those used here are from a party agency, the KPK (Commission of Party Control, responsible for looking into wrongdoing

by party members), and two government agencies, the Gulag (chief administration of labor camps of the Soviet Interior Ministry) and the KGB (Committee of State Security, or secret police) of Lithuania, at the time a province of the Soviet Union.

The life course of the secret document was marked by rites of passage, enacted at certain fixed staging points: production, distribution, filing and storage, transfers of ownership, inspections, and destruction or archiving. Each stage generated its own documentary evidence, as shown in Table 3.1.

Production

The original secret document was usually typewritten with a fixed number of carbon copies. On 7 February 1965, deputy chief Juozas Petkevicius of the Lithuania KGB signed a six-page report to Moscow on popular responses to Khrushchev’s dismissal in 1964.^[132] As illustrated in Figure 3.1 (panel A), the front page shows that the archive holds copy no. 2 of a document classified “top secret.” A standard block of information on the back of the last page states that two copies were made. Copy 1 went to Moscow and

copy 2 to “file no. 236.” The person responsible for the document is identified as Baltinas and the typist as Kuzina. The date of typing is 6 February, one day before the signature. This information was standard although not completely uniform. The next document in the file (panel B) shows small variations. Copy 1 went to Moscow, but the file number for the second copy is not entered; we see this quite often. The last line adds that the original draft was destroyed, but the space for confirmation is left blank.

Distribution

Every office was required to maintain daybooks or ledgers that recorded, line by line, every item of outgoing and incoming secret and nonsecret documentation, including letters, instructions, and telegrams. Some ledgers listed correspondence such as reports and memoranda; others itemized the instructions that cascaded down from above. Every item was logged as outgoing by the sender and as incoming by the receiver. Thus, any and every item could be tracked and its whereabouts established, whether it was at rest or in transit. In principle, this assured secure distribution.

The ledgers, which were inevitably also classified secret, amounted to substantial documentation. Ledgers were typically bound volumes of one hundred double-sided sheets (two hundred pages) with handwritten entries that recorded in rows and columns every item sent or received, any copies made, to whom they were distributed, by whom acknowledged, when returned, and whether destroyed, with dates of each event.^[133]Over time, every office quickly accumulated many ledgers. When the officer responsible for the MVD Gulag secretariat was changed on 7 January 1953, the outgoing and incoming officers cosigned an inventory of its paperwork. It was recorded that, in the two years from 1951, the office had acquired 343 ledgers (nearly 70,000 pages) listing incoming correspondence, more than half of them secret items. Another 15 ledgers itemized more than 11,000 incoming coded telegrams and more than 2,000 outgoing in 1952 alone.^[134]

With such a system, what could go wrong? Either sender or recipient could be guilty of a lack of care. When that happened, the minutes that were normally needed to enter an item in the correspondence ledger turned into hours of painful investigation. To illustrate: a secret packet arrives. You sign for it, so now you are responsible. When you open it, you find a missing page, or perhaps an incorrect serial number. Who can say it’s not your fault? You convene your colleagues. Together you write and swear a witness statement (necessarily classified secret) to confirm the discrepancy.^[135]

In that example the fault belonged to the senders. Alternatively, the sender could be a victim of the recipient’s lack of care. Here is a tale with which any student can empathize. Having borrowed a secret handbook from the KGB training library, you handed it back to the librarian. But the librarian failed to record that you did so. Now it seems you must have mislaid it, so you will be charged with a violation: the loss of a secret document. You’re saved only when the book turns up—back on the library shelf.^[136]

Intermediaries could blur responsibility. In 1944, Stalin’s war cabinet telegraphed a secret instruction to a factory manager in Gor’kii (Nizhnii Novgorod) province. In his absence, the local party secretary held it for safe keeping. Five years later, someone asked: Who now held the telegram? The party secretary said he handed the telegram to the manager, but without obtaining a receipt. The manager, now a junior minister, swore he had never received it. This story has several notable features. It took five years to follow up the missing telegram, plus two more years to investigate it. The case was considered important enough to be reported to Stalin’s chief of staff. And the outcome? After investigation, no guilt could be assigned.^[137]

Secret documents were supposed to be distributed through one of two channels, the agency’s own courier service (if it had one) or the “special service” of the ministry of communications. Open channels such as the regular mail or civilian couriers were not to be used under any circumstances. But the secret channels were cumbersome. Mishaps arose when officials resorted to workarounds: they carried secret documents themselves or sent them by a personal courier. Lapses of attention on the part of the bearer led to many cases of paperwork being lost or stolen in transit. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, briefcases were sometimes stolen in bars or mislaid as a result of excessive drinking.^[138] (Men often used briefcases to carry shopping, so the casual thief was likely looking for alcohol or personal valuables more than government papers.)

The sheer volume of secret correspondence was sometimes of concern. Throughout the Soviet system there was a perennial cascade of instructions, many of them secret, and many of them implementing, modifying, or canceling previous instructions. If the original instruction was classified, care had to be taken to ensure that subsequent correspondence referring to that instruction was classified to the same level. So many decrees heightened the risk that a nonsecret decree could disclose the content of secret ones, or even just their existence, by referring to them.^[139] This illustrates the issues that could arise when secrecy was reflexive at the level of detail.

Filing and Storage

In important offices such as those of the Gulag, an inventory of secret paperwork was carried out on the first of each month. This was one of a series of measures that together assured secure storage. Many archived files contain lengthy sequences of affidavits enumerating hundreds of secret and top-secret items incoming and outgoing from various offices.^[140] Despite the scope for deficient storage and mistakes in handling, nearly all such accounts certified everything as all present and correct.

Should we believe them? The system was designed for a low-trust environment. In all cases, the inventories had to be certified by at least two officials of varying status, who had to agree on a cover-up if the records were not in order and shared the risks of being caught out later in a he. It was not possible for one person to cover personal deficiencies without securing the collusion of others. Collusion to cover up missing items was not impossible, but the conditions for achieving it were demanding.

Transfers of Ownership

Comprehensive inventories were also required when one official was appointed to replace another in charge of an office. A joint affidavit acknowledged the transfer of responsibility for classified papers. The length of such a document could range from one page to many dozens. The following case is not untypical. In June 1965, the first (secret) department of the Lithuania KGB second administration changed hands. Two senior lieutenants signed a deed of transfer (typed the same day in one copy).^[141] Over six pages the document enumerated files, ordinary, letter-coded, and special; decrees and instructions; personal files and personnel records; “most wanted” and “no longer wanted” notices and lists; information about German intelligence; lists of traitors, foreign agents, participants in anti-Soviet organizations, war criminals, and state criminals; forms to request undercover documentation and wire taps; records of undercover documentation issued to officers; card indexes of agents, “safe house” keepers, and active cases; and ledgers for registration of incoming and outgoing correspondence.

In this list the largest single item was the correspondence ledgers, amounting to 13 volumes and so 2,600 pages altogether, compared with a mere 1,400 pages of documents in files. This illustrates the reflexive quality of Soviet secrecy: the deed itemized not only original documents but also the ledgers that itemized them as they came in and went out. Classified “secret,” the deed of transfer would be entered into the next inventory in its own right.

Changeovers occasionally exposed the loss of documents. When an office changed hands, the new boss had a strong incentive not to cover for items that had gone missing under the preceding regime. Here is an example from February 1948. At that time (as discussed in Chapter 4) the entire Soviet bureaucracy was in a state of high anxiety over a recent law that criminalized the accidental or negligent disclosure of state secrets. The incoming chief of the Gulag secretariat reported that a classified document was missing. The last person to hold it, a former chief of Gulag, could no longer trace it. The loss was reported to the interior minister, who personally demanded another search.^[142]

However strong the precautionary motivation for the newcomer to check the integrity of the secret files left by his predecessor, it could be overridden by other factors. Corners were sometimes cut in the Gulag in wartime when newly appointed camp bosses took over “on the go,” dispensing with the formalities of inventories and deeds of transfer in the rush. Later, they ran into trouble because they had accepted responsibility for documents that turned out to be missing.^[143]

Further measures ensured secure storage facilities and day-to-day handling. In every establishment, classified documents were the property of the secret department. The documents’ file headings were periodically reviewed and approved. Each file was listed as either secret or top secret, with its term of conservation (three years, for example) and the name of the responsible official.^[144] The secret department required secure rooms where staff could work unobserved, and where safes could be locked away. Outside working hours, all documents had to be returned to the safes and the doors and safes of the secret department were supposed to be locked and sealed.

Office by office, the security of file storage and compliance and the procedures for handling secret documentation were audited periodically by inspectors of the MVD or KGB. Their reports show how inadequate facilities and under staffing could interact.^[145] The existence of files did not ensure that documents were placed in them in a timely way; backlogs of documents might accumulate in trays, waiting to be filed.^[146] Safes might be left unsealed overnight. Lacking secure accommodation, classified work might be done and documents left lying around in areas accessible to civilians or, in the Gulag, even to prisoners.^[147]

Inspection

From time to time, external audits gave rise to scandals. Best known is the Gosplan affair of 1949. Nikolai Voznesenskii, the chief of planning, was a younger favorite of Stalin, but in the spring of that year he lost the dictator’s confidence. An investigation revealed that many secret and top-secret papers were missing from Gosplan. The report noted, sinisterly, that no one had yet been prosecuted “as the law demands.”^[148]

Other audits that can be found in the archives cover a range of years and types of organization.^[149] They typically exposed violations similar to those found in Gosplan, including failures to use and store classified paperwork securely, and a steady trickle of lost instructions, reports, internal publications, photographs, maps, and security passes. These could give rise to sharp criticism, but the lethal consequences of the Gosplan affair were exceptional.

Destruction or Transfer to the Archive

The secret document’s life course ended with selection for destruction or the archive. Numerous records of this stage populate the archives. They take the by-now-familiar form of an affidavit signed by two or more officers, listing files selected for incineration because they had “lost practical importance” or “had no value.” Some are brief (e.g., “today we destroyed so many files”) while others itemize every record destroyed over many pages.^[150]

Given the quantities of paperwork destroyed each year, it is not surprising that mistakes were made. Deviations from the record were a nightmare for honest officials and an opportunity for dishonest ones. It was difficult to tell the difference after the fact. When documents went missing, everyone would blame each other, while those closest to the event would maintain that the missing documents had been destroyed without a record being kept. Thus, they were willing to admit to procedural violations, which was not as bad as losing state secrets. Conversely, one might ask whether the process of destruction gave scope to cover up the loss or misappropriation of documents by recording them as incinerated. This could be detected only if a document listed as destroyed, but in reality missing, subsequently turned up intact. Exactly this happened in the Gosplan affair, when thirty-three documents listed as destroyed turned up in the home of an official of Gosplan’s secret department.^[151]

The choice between destruction and transfer to the archive also selected the documentation that is available today for historical research. In general terms, we are told, documents were destroyed when they were judged to have neither operational nor historical value. In fact, the former Soviet archives that have been opened are full of records of historical value, including “secret plans, reports, minutes, decisions, appeals, and the official and private correspondence of citizens from the highest authorities in the Kremlin to the humblest provincial petitioner.”^[152] In contrast, we have no idea of the historical value of what was incinerated.

As for volume, how much paperwork might the archived records represent, compared to what was discarded? Estimates of the proportions of documentation of federal agencies destined for the US National Archives range from “1-3%” (an overall average) to 20 percent in the case of the FBI, the internal security functions of which would appear to match most closely those of the KGB.^[153] In the Soviet case we have not the faintest idea of the proportion destroyed. Quite possibly, the tens of millions of formerly secret historical documents that have kept both Russian and Western scholars so busy over the last thirty years are only a small fraction of the cumulative total of Soviet party and state paperwork that circulated through the history of the Soviet Union. We will return to this problem below.

Soviet procedures for handling classified paperwork were evidently costly. Just as a business must set part of its revenue aside to meet taxes paid in money, Soviet organizations had to set aside resources to meet the requirements of secrecy regulation. These regulations acted on the turnover of Soviet political and economic business like a tax on every transaction made. The tax was levied on the paperwork through which the Soviet system did its business. The tax was paid by every facility and office in the work done by its managers, supported by the white-collar staff of the secret departments, to register and trace every classified document through its life course. The consideration and determination of every significant issue required the exchange of secret paperwork, and this paperwork incurred the secrecy tax every time it changed hands. A personal instruction might change hands only once or twice, but a single decree that was distributed from Moscow to every establishment of a ministry or every province or district could change hands hundreds or thousands of times, with the tax being paid each time.

Considered as a tax on Soviet political and economic transactions, Soviet secrecy had two special properties. First, it was a “cascading” tax in the sense that it was levied on every stage of the original document’s lifecourse and on every stage in the life of the derivative paperwork produced to assure the government that the tax had been paid. Second, the secrecy tax did not yield a revenue to anyone: it was entirely consumed in the act of collecting it, resulting in a deadweight loss.

The cascading property of the secrecy tax was a result of the reflexive quality of Soviet secretiveness. Secrecy covered not only all the original tangible or intangible objects that were secret, but also the existence of secrets, including the regulations that protected them. When classified information was distributed, not only its content but also the facts that it existed and was distributed were classified. This affected the system of accounting for secrets because the derivative paperwork created by logging and auditing original secret documents was also classified secret, and so had to be accounted for in subsequent inventories and inspections, the documentation of which had to be kept secret and accounted for in turn and so on ad infinitum. As a result, the secrecy tax had an internal multiplier: each new original secret increased the total cost of secrecy by more than its own cost. Much of what we find in the former Soviet archives, such as inventories of documents including page after page that lists ledgers, inventories, and certificates of transfer and destruction of documents, is explained by this multiplier.

The secrecy tax provides a simple example of how secrecy made the Soviet political and economic system more secure, while at the same time reducing its capacity. Secrecy threw sand into the Soviet machine in the same way that transaction taxes and trade costs throw sand into the machine of any economy based on exchange.

Secrecy procedures worked in the same way as an oppressive and distorting tax, only to the extent that officials complied with it. Alternatives to tax compliance are tax avoidance and tax evasion. As in the world of real taxes, avoiding the secrecy tax required officials to find adaptations that would satisfy the demands of the secrecy regime more efficiently, while staying within the rules. By contrast, secrecy tax evasion involved rule breaking. How much was there of each?

Compliance

On the side of compliance, the mass of internal inventories suggests near universal alignment with secrecy regulations. In many offices, it seems, years went by without a single sheet going missing. It was worthy of note when someone was willing to admit that one document in a thousand or ten thousand had gone astray. Apparently isolated violations were reported to Moscow and pursued vigorously. As previously discussed, when a police officer lost an informer’s files and failed to report it, the loss was uncovered in less than a month. When a manager was implicated in the loss of a classified item, he was pursued for it for years. These documents give the strong impression of an orderly system of record keeping and tracking where mistakes and deviations were rare.

Where did compliance come from? For loyal public servants there was the internal psychological reward of adherence to a shared code, the code of conspirativeness. No doubt this was reinforced by the expectation that loyal compliance would be rewarded eventually by career advancement. It is evident that compliance could not be taken for granted. For those more focused on the job at hand than on abstract political values, such as research workers, secrecy regulations could be a source of frustration: they interfered with workflow and the sharing of information.^[154] Other frustrations of secret work were the greater difficulty of getting permission to travel abroad or public acknowledgment of achievements. Despite this, secret work also brought personal rewards. Secret work was of higher priority, so employees could expect higher salaries and larger bonuses, better conditions of work and housing, and better supplies of both working materials and consumer goods and services.^[155] Finally, the “cult of secrecy” bound all the participants together like a church congregation. Whether they came to communion because they were true believers or because they hoped for material benefits or just for the sake of giving and receiving solidarity, they all observed the same rituals.^[156]

Avoidance

The most obvious adaptation to the secrecy tax was to avoid creating a paper trail by doing business face to face or on the phone. This adaptation was certainly effective, but within narrow limits.^[157] A two-way conversation could pass on simple instructions or provide a channel for a yes/no decision. Much government business was too complex or involved too many participants to be handled in this way. Outcomes based on conversation weakened accountability, unless immediate records were made on both sides, which defeated the object of reducing paperwork. Finally, the interception of telecommunications became the object of a Cold War arms race, and protecting signals also became increasingly costly over time.

Staying with paper-based technologies, avoidance could have taken the form of reorganization to limit the flows of secret correspondence. If secret correspondence arose with highest frequency in the vertical transmission of instructions, then the secrecy tax gave officials an incentive to shorten chains of command, even at the cost of some loss of scope. If the more frequent occasion for secret correspondence was horizontal coordination, then officials should have encouraged horizontal integration, even if vertical chains of command were lengthened. As discussed earlier (in Chapter 2), the Soviet ministerial system was subject to continual reorganization in both dimensions, but there is no evidence that secrecy costs were a salient consideration.

Finally, officials responsible for managing secret work might have undertaken direct measures to limit secret correspondence. A rare example of open concern is found in documents dated April 1974. Officials of the Soviet Lithuania KGB warned that secret paperwork was a growing burden: Excluding the secret department itself, 1.3 million secret and top-secret items had gone in and out of KGB offices during 1973. This was an increase over 1972 of more than 4 percent.^[158] The figures implied that each KGB employee handled about 1,000 classified items per year.^[159] The authors called on “unit leaders to take forceful measures to restrict administrative correspondence and get rid of instances of the creation and duplication of documents not required by urgent administrative necessity.” But there is no sign that this or any other concerns ever prompted specific measures to stem the flood of classified paperwork.

Evasion

Evidence of evasion of the secrecy tax is plentiful. The records of audit and inspection, already discussed, often pointed to an office culture of carelessness and negligence that spread behind the closed doors of a particular ministerial department or local party organization. As a rule, perhaps, loyalty and career concerns were enough to ensure that most government officials stuck to the rule book most of the time. But, at any moment, standards could slip. Caught between an exacting rule book and the need to get things done, one person took a shortcut. The next person ignored it to maintain goodwill, and a third copied it to save effort. In this way, rule breaking could spread within an office from desk to desk.^[160] In some cases, entire organizations degenerated into slipshod practices. Multiple violations would persist until somebody broke ranks and there was a scandal, followed by decisive action and a return to compliance.

Because the secrecy tax was not paid in money, the former Soviet archives have no record of its ruble cost. The secrecy tax was paid in effort. Ideally, we would somehow aim to capture in a single measure the scale of efforts that went into the original and derivative classification of Soviet secrets and all the measures that traced and protected them. We cannot do that, but we can see the results of those efforts in archived paperwork. Paperwork can be measured, although imperfectly, in numbers of pages, documents, or files, and the overall purposes of paperwork can also be analyzed, again with some imprecision.

In this section I use part of the archive of a small regional Soviet bureaucracy, the KGB of Soviet Lithuania, held on microfilm at the Hoover Institution as of 2011. Taken as a whole, the archive comprised two kinds of records: management information (instructions, plans, reports, and so forth), and operational case files (including many private or personal records not of KGB origin). The records containing management information are taken to represent KGB management activity, so we use those, setting the case files aside. Then, we estimate the proportion of the management files that was dedicated to maintaining secrecy.

The comparison cannot be done directly, because the Soviet Lithuania KGB archive, which contains millions of pages of documents, has not been digitized. Instead, I sample it based on a unique source, the catalogue of the Lithuania KGB collection at the Hoover Institution. The source combines two features: it is digitized, and the description goes down to the level of the individual file.^[161] These features are unique in so far as the catalogues of other former Soviet archives are typically unpublished paper records that cannot be reproduced or processed digitally, or they do not provide file-level description.

The unique features of the Hoover catalogue can be used to distinguish the records of the secrecy accounting system from other management records. As described in more detail in the Appendix to this chapter, the analysis involves using stemmed keywords and their combinations to assign files to topics of KGB activity. In the process most management files are assigned to one or more topics of KGB activity.

The data run continuously from 1940 to 1991. For present purposes I will focus on the period from 1954 to 1982, which I will call “Soviet postwar normality.” The beginning of normal times was marked by the restoration of civil peace in Lithuania after years of armed rebellion, and the end was marked by the death of Leonid Brezhnev. Under Soviet postwar normality, the KGB was outwardly preoccupied by the activities we might expect—investigating suspicious people and hunting fugitives, forestalling demonstrations, investigating plots, eavesdropping on suspects, following foreigners, and harassing nonconformists or excluding them from work involving government secrets. Yet the documents left behind from those years indicate that behind the façade, the work of the KGB was overshadowed by a larger preoccupation: assuring the safety of its own secrets.

In Table 3.2, normal times are represented by the second column. The column shows that, over thirty years of Soviet postwar normality, accounting for secrets alone accounted for 34 percent of the paperwork left in the KGB archive. On that basis, the average secrecy tax rate paid by the KGB was one-third. This is the single most important fact that emerges from the documents.

The rest of the table provides context. Before 1954, archived KGB paperwork is dominated by the records of its existential struggle with an

Note: The bold figure in the table is the one highlighted in the text as the most important outcome of the exercise.

Source: Statistical appendix to Harrison, “Accounting for Secrets,” https://warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/data/secrets/jeh2013appendix.pdf.

armed nationalist insurgency. While the armed struggle took priority, accounting for secret paperwork took a back seat, and the secrecy tax made up less than 8 percent of KGB records. After 1982, the secrecy tax wedge was apparently twice its size in normal times—more than 70 percent of KGB records. But this should not be taken as meaningful. As discussed below, that figure is almost certainly skewed by the collapse of regular archiving practices in the last years of Soviet rule.

When secret file management is compared with other KGB activities, it becomes apparent that, in normal times, the secrecy tax consumed more paperwork than any single operational focus of the KGB that is identified here. This is shown in Table 3.3. Examples of other activities were the investigation of crimes and hunting suspects, looking into citizen complaints and petitions (often denunciations), keeping surveillance on foreigners, looking into economic disruptions, and warning rule breakers to behave. None of these other activities comes close to accounting for secrets in the proportion of KGB attention it could expect to receive.

How reliable and how representative is this exercise? First, reliability. A problem is that we have access not to all KGB paperwork, but only

to the KGB paperwork that was archived. The fact is that we lack useful knowledge about the policies that selected paperwork for conservation, as opposed to destruction. But any error that has resulted is likely to be on the side of understating the burden of secrecy. As noted earlier, “practical importance” was the only criterion ever mentioned for keeping a document for the archive. Intuitively, it seems unlikely that the documentation of secret file management was seen as of more practical importance, and therefore more worthy of archiving, than the documentation of an anti-Soviet plot and its suppression. If the records of file management were disproportionately targeted for incineration, then our estimate of the burden of the secrecy tax could be biased downward.

The idea of a downward bias is reinforced by the composition of documentation archived from of the last years of Soviet rule in Lithuania. In that period, KGB priorities for the retention of documents were reversed. The documents of greatest practical importance were selected for removal or destruction in order to prevent their ultimate disclosure. Less important documents were retained because it was not a priority to destroy them. The result appears in the third column of Table 3.2: for the years 1983 to 1991, three-quarters of the KGB archive consists of records of secret file management. In fact, there is little else. On that basis the secrecy tax rate paid by the KGB was at least one-third.

Then, representativeness. If that was the rate paid by the Soviet Lithuania KGB, what does it mean for the Soviet state more generally? Lithuania’s KGB was, after all, a relatively small agency, with fewer than 1,200 regular employees in 1971 from a country of 3 million.^[162] No matter how large as a proportion of its own costs, the aggregate burden of KGB secrecy in Lithuania on the Soviet state was trivial. The one-third secrecy tax rate takes on real significance only if it gives some idea of the rate at which the tax was levied across the Soviet state as a whole.

The case for generalization is substantial, but some uncertainties cannot be eliminated and should be acknowledged. First, what about the KGB elsewhere? The KGB of Soviet Lithuania clearly worked to the same procedural standards as the much larger KGB of the Union. KGB structures were everywhere similar, if not identical. All republican KGBs followed the norms set by Moscow. If security threats were always local and specific, the systems used to manage them were general. The relationship between center and periphery was not one way, it is true. Moscow and the republican KGBs continually exchanged best practices and aimed for mutual improvement. When things went wrong, however, Moscow called the tune. This was the message of Vitalii Fedorchuk, sent to Kyiv in 1970 to take over the Ukrainian KGB. Faced with the suggestion of doing things the local way, he dismissed it contemptuously: “We work for the entire Union. There is no such thing as Ukraine in our work.”^[163] In short, the KGB everywhere did what the KGB was doing in Lithuania.

Second, what about other Soviet organizations—central and local government departments, enterprises, offices, research labs, and so forth. Did they too pay the secrecy tax at the KGB rate? It would be natural to suppose that Soviet secrecy was more relaxed in branches dealing with consumer goods or entertainment, for example, so that these departments might have paid the secrecy tax at a reduced or concessionary rate. Yet every office of Soviet government had its own secret department to look after its secret government instructions and its secret war mobilization plan, whether it was the KGB or the office in charge of the supply of undergarments. In short, the KGB set standards across the entire Soviet state bureaucracy, and every secret department operated on parallel lines under direct KGB supervision.

Undercutting the case for generalization, the proportions of secret to nonsecret activity were surely not uniform across all parts of the system. Even core agencies had some unclassified correspondence. Agencies outside the core probably held more unclassified documentation in relative terms. For this reason alone, the secrecy tax must have varied somewhat across the different branches of the state and bore less heavily on civilian agencies.

To summarize, we have tried to measure the secrecy tax rate on Soviet government administration. The only evidence to hand comes from the archive of the Soviet Lithuania KGB. It suggests a rate of at least one-third. But there is an error margin on each side. The fact that we rely on documentation selected for the archive suggests that one-third might not be enough. The fact that the figure is based on the KGB suggests that one-third might be too much, because for other Soviet government departments, the burden might have been less. Either way, the tax rate was high enough that even substantial corrections would struggle to make it insignificant.

When the government allocates human resources to the security of its own paperwork, is one-third a lot? To benchmark this figure, consider what would seem like a lot in other contexts. In an open society, how much does it take to excite the public? At the end of 2006 it was revealed that over the previous year London’s Metropolitan Police had spent around 5 percent of its £3.2 billion budget on “non-incident linked paperwork” (£122.2 million) and “checking paperwork” (£26.5 million). These figures were enough to create newspaper headlines in the UK.^[164] The Lithuania KGB figure of one-third is larger than the Met’s 5 percent by an order of magnitude. This suggests that the British public would see the secrecy tax paid by the KGB as very large.

The principal metric employed in annual reports of the US Information Security Oversight Office is the number of instances of “original” and “derivative” classification and declassification.^[165] Although informative in general terms, this does not lead to any statistic against which Soviet practices can be benchmarked. Since 2003, however, the ISOO has published an annual supplementary estimate of the dollar costs of classification and declassification. The costs of information security and classification management to American government, suitably normalized, could provide a benchmark.

In 2010, $5.7 billion (or 95 percent) of the US federal government’s total outlays on the protection of classified information were attributed to three departments: Defense, State, and Justice.^[166] What is the right denominator for this sum? In the case of the Lithuania KGB, we compared the quantity of paperwork devoted to secret file management with all other paperwork not in individual case files. What is the US government activity that corresponds with the latter? Since paperwork is labor intensive, we use labor costs of the three departments largely responsible for original classification (in other words, we exclude outlays on operation and maintenance, procurement, research and development, construction, and housing). In 2010 US federal outlays on national defense personnel, “conduct of foreign affairs,” and “litigative and judicial activities” came to $184.6 billion.^[167] With that on the bottom line and $5.7 billion on top, outlays on the protection of American secrets in 2010 ran at 3.1 percent of the direct costs of the general activities concerned. Again, we arrive at a fraction that falls below the Lithuania KGB’s secrecy burden by an order of magnitude.

The Soviet system of accounting for secrets throws a clear light on the procedural costs of doing business under a secretive dictatorship. Conspirative rule imposed something like a secrecy tax on the turnover of government business. Just like a real tax, secrecy threw sand in the machinery of state, making it harder for the right people to obtain information and disseminate decisions. The burden was magnified by Soviet secrecy’s reflexive quality, which turned the system of accounting for secrets into a secret on its own account, one that had to be accounted for within the system.

The human response to a tax can be compliance, avoidance, or evasion. On the evidence, it seems that most Soviet officials complied most of the time. There is little sign of avoidance. As for evasion, taking the form of careless document handling, reports are plentiful. The evidence is that bad examples, if unchecked, could take hold and spread through an office until they were uncovered and suppressed. Only continual enforcement secured general compliance.

The records of a small regional bureaucracy, the Lithuania KGB, let us measure the burden of secret paperwork. In the “normal” postwar years of 1954 to 1982, the secrecy tax was levied at an average rate of at least one-third of overall KGB management costs. There is reason to think that we could generalize this figure across all of Soviet government, although with room for error on either side.

The secrecy tax shows clearly the position of the Soviet state in the secrecy/capacity tradeoff (previously depicted in Figure 2.3). The Soviet state operated with a level of secrecy beyond that which would have maximized state capacity. The secrecy tax was heavy enough to consume a substantial proportion of the Soviet state’s human capacity. The state was rendered less capable, while the regime of the ruling party was made more secure.

By April 2011, the Hoover Archive had acquired 5,312 files from the Lithuanian Special Archive (the archive of the Soviet Lithuania KGB) containing just over one million microfilmed pages. These files, listed in Table 3.2, all from fond K-i, were catalogued in five collections (opisi) numbered 2 (counterintelligence departments of the NKVD-NKGB-MVD-KGB up to 1954), 3 (counterintelligence departments from 1945), 10 (the KGB secretariat), 14 (the KGB city administrations), and 45 (operational case files).

As can be seen, these files are not all of one type. The typical file in opisi 2, 3, 10, and 14 contained management information (instructions, plans,

reports, and so forth). It was open for around a year and was closed at around 2oo pages. The typical operational case file in opis 45 was of similar length (but length was much more variable). It contained many personal records not of KGB origin. A few were opened long before Soviet rule reached Lithuania, and many remained open for decades (at the extreme, one file ran from 1926 to 1985). To focus on the routine management of the Lithuania KGB and place some limits on heterogeneity in the data, we leave opis 45 out of the analysis, keeping opisi 2,3,10, and 14 in. In the text, I call these the “management files.”

It would be hard to make sense of this material without paying close attention to time variation. More files were opened in just one decade, from 1944 to 1953, than in all other years taken together. There were sharp increases in the rate of file creation in 1943 and 1983, and sharp declines in 1953 and 1985.

Specifically, from 1940 to 1953 Lithuania was a theater of conflict, including armed resistance to Soviet rule in 1940/41 and from 1944 to 1953. KGB activity was dominated by the need to suppress the armed resistance. In the KGB archive this is reflected by a torrent of paperwork devoted to counterinsurgency operations. From 1954 the flood subsided to a trickle that was limited to concerns over historic offences and offenders.

From 1983, the quantity and balance of KGB records present in the archive were increasingly affected by the disorderly end of the KGB’s presence in Lithuania in 1991. It became the KGB’s priority to remove to Moscow or destroy many records of current operations that would normally have been archived, to prevent their ultimate disclosure. At the same time, many records deemed to be neither current nor important were retained, because it was not a priority to destroy them.

For the purposes of this chapter, therefore, I discount the data provided by the early and late years of KGB activity in Lithuania. That leaves the 29 years in between, from 1954 to 1982, which (for ease of reference) I call the period of “Soviet postwar normality.” These “normal” years yield 1,003 management files containing more than 160,000 pages of reports, minutes, letters, speeches, and similar material.

The spirit of the exercise is to assign files to topics, based on analyzing the terms used to describe them. The topics are found from keywords and keyword clusters in the file descriptions reported by the Hoover Archive’s electronic catalogue. The first step reduces the catalogue to words and numerals. When numerals are dropped, just over 86,000 words are left. At the second step, “stop” words are eliminated—all words of one or two letters, and conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, and numbers—leaving words that may be considered substantive. The language of the documentation is Russian, and in Russian nouns decline and verbs conjugate, so substantive words must be reduced to their invariant word stems by deleting the variable word endings, while managing the risk of ambiguity arising from word stems with multiple meanings. This is done by hand. The final list comprises 1,400 unique keywords.

The third step assigns each keyword to one of three broad headings, “operational” (oriented toward external goals, such as the suppression of hostile activity), “organizational” (oriented toward internal goals, such as integration with other party and state institutions), and “procedural” (oriented toward compliance with internal norms of bureaucratic behavior). For general interest, Table 3A.2 lists the top ten keywords under each heading with their frequencies.

The fourth and last step involves determining the frequency of particular topics, based on the clustering of predetermined keywords in the file descriptions. In the spirit of quantitative text analysis, this amounts to supervised topic identification. Topics are identified by a stepwise procedure: first, files are identified by association with counterinsurgency and with secret file management (the category of interest for this chapter). This step generates the data for Table 3.2. Remaining files are assigned to police work (the identification and pursuit of state criminals), matters relating to foreigners, the study of complaints (including denunciations) and petitions, economic matters (surveillance of the economy and investigation of the causes of economic disruption), the suppression of anonymous circulars, matters relating to young people, preventive work (called profilaktika), and matters relating to Jewish people. In the outcome (shown in Table 3.3), more than 80 percent of management files are successfully assigned to one or more topics of KGB activity.