Secret Leviathan

4. SECRECY AND FEAR

In March 1948, a new set of “Instructions to ensure the conservation of state secrets in institutions and enterprises of the USSR” appeared on the desks of government officials in Moscow and other cities.^[168] The purpose of the new instructions was to provide for detailed implementation of the law “On responsibility for the disclosure of state secrets and for the loss of documents containing state secrets” enacted nine months previously.

Dissemination of the new instructions sent a wave of anxiety through the offices of the Soviet state. The most immediate cause was not so much the detailed provisions inside as the words on the outside: the top righthand corner of the cover page was marked “Top secret.” The provisions inside the document regulated the handling of all secrets, those classified “secret” as well as “top secret.” Clause no. 108 of the instructions obliged the secret department of every organization to issue the relevant extract of the rules to personnel responsible for handling correspondence classified at the level of merely “secret.” But a preceding clause, no. 87, “categorically” prohibited taking copies from secret government “decrees, decisions, and dispositions.” Thus, the top-secret classification on the outside of the instructions indicated that those qualified to work with documentation classified secret, but not more secret than that, should not be allowed to read the provisions that they were now obliged to follow. The fear was intensified because the law itself, now brought to life by the instructions, established heavy criminal penalties for negligent or thoughtless violations: to fall foul of the law, it was not necessary to be suspected of acting on behalf of a foreign power.

To work for Secret Leviathan in those years was frightening. At work you were bombarded with plans and priorities that were continually revised. You were supposed to achieve them while also showing compliance with a bewildering variety of political norms and administrative rules. You slipped up, and after that your fate was a matter of chance. Maybe no one would notice; or they might notice and do nothing now, but they might recall it months or years later. Once the matter was reported, you could suddenly find yourself under arrest, holding up your trousers because your belt had been removed, under interrogation, then under sentence, then in a cattle truck bound for the Far North or East.

The new law and the instructions that brought it into operation laid out a minefield of entrapments from which anyone would be lucky to escape unscathed. The instructions ran to 47 printed pages and 168 clauses. Anyone who has seen an organization develop knows how it works. You start out with a few simple rules, and you trust everyone to work to their spirit, not their letter. Inevitably, a few people set out to test the limits and cut corners. On each occasion, you respond by adding a new prohibition. Over time, the rules multiply.^[169] Here are just two of the rules for typists:

§112. It is prohibited for typists to keep any kind of documents on their desks in nonworking time. All spoiled documents and sheets of paper interleaved to protect the typewriter roller should be handed at the end of work to the senior typist or to the chief of the secret department (secret unit) for storage or destruction.

§113. It is prohibited for typists to carry on conversation with any other person about their work. To clarify unclear wording in original documents, typists should turn to the senior typist or to the executive who submitted the secret document for typing.

Each new rule added to the number of things to be remembered and observed. It also increased complexity, heightening the risk that new rules would contradict old ones or that combinations of rules would have consequences that were unwanted and unexpected.

Among government officials it was a particular fear that matters such as plan figures, released a few months previously and already in the public domain, might now be considered secret, making it an offence under the law to repeat them in public.^[170]

Heightened fear had economic consequences. Afraid of the law and the instructions, officials sought insurance against the new risks they faced. They looked for protection by various means. One way was to do as little work as possible, because if nothing was done no rules would be broken. But inaction was dangerous, too, because no one was paid to do nothing. If inaction carried risks, one compromise was to slow business down through postponement. Another was for middle managers to seek out the support of colleagues. Here the problem was to take advice from peers without creating the appearance of an organized conspiracy against the party. A more attractive workaround was to petition the superiors who depended on the middle managers to fulfil the party’s plans. Such appeals ensured that the superiors were fully informed of the issues and made the higher-ups coresponsible for the steps that the middle managers now had to take. In turn, the higher-ups were made to switch attention from their own core tasks to the reform of procedures that stood in the way of getting results.

At every level, normal business slowed down. To outsiders, the Soviet Leviathan retained its usual appearance: all-knowing, authoritative, under the command of a single will. On the inside, Leviathan dithered, its limbs paralyzed by indecision.

The next sections of this chapter discuss the origins of the intensified secrecy regime, and then its implications for one particular—and most important—secret: the identification and location of the labor camps of the Gulag. Thereafter I tell the story that is central to this chapter as it transpired in 1949. The concluding sections discuss how fear worked in the Soviet economy and whether the effects of fear show that Stalin went too far.

The seeds of the chaos that spread through the Soviet bureaucracy during 1948 are to be found in the global search for a cure for cancer. At the end of the 1920s a Soviet scientist, Grigorii Roskin, embarked on a long-term project of research on biological cancer therapies. Reasoning that cancer growth involved a failure of the immune system, Roskin’s idea was to find a naturally occurring agent that would boost the capacity of the immune system to combat tumors. He chose the tropical parasite that causes Chagas disease, an inflammatory syndrome. After a few years his wife Nina Kliueva joined the project. Their research was not classified, and the work in progress gave rise to several open publications. Despite wartime disruption, by 1946 Kliueva and Roskin had developed what they believed to be a promising if still experimental anticancer drug, which they called “KR.”[171]

In the prewar years, Stalin’s terror had broken Soviet scientific contacts and exchanges with Western Europe and the United States. During the war these contacts were resumed with official support on both sides. There were limits, however: the Soviet Union was excluded from Anglo-American atomic research, for example, and gained access to its results only by espionage.^[172]

At the war’s end, there were widespread hopes among Soviet people that they would be rewarded for the Soviet victory by relaxation, allowing a more open or even “normal” political and cultural atmosphere.^[173] KR became a vehicle of these hopes. In July 1946, an article by Roskin describing his research appeared in the American journal Cancer Research; the paper had been solicited, approved, and submitted through official channels in the autumn of 1945.^[174] This and other scientific contacts fed public interest in the United States. In Moscow, the US ambassador was able to meet Kliueva and Roskin. Subsequently, he put forward an American-funded program of joint research to Georgii Miterev, the Soviet health minister. Visiting the United States in October, Vasilii Parin, secretary of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, carried samples of KR and a book, newly published in the Soviet Union by Kliueva and Roskin, that described their work. After some hesitation, he shared the book and the samples with interested American researchers.

Disaster followed. The scientists had misread the direction from which the wind was blowing. High officials of the USSR Health Ministry and Politburo members such as Andrei Zhdanov and Viacheslav Molotov were aware of what was going on and even encouraged it, but they failed to secure the approval of the Politburo itself—in other words, of Stalin. Instead, there were delays and miscommunications while the visits and exchanges went ahead. In January 1947, when the matter came to Stalin’s attention, Zhdanov turned abruptly from the promotion of Soviet science in the West to a new posture: the need to protect valuable Soviet secrets. Angered, Stalin sacked Miterev and had Parin arrested. Over a few weeks, however, his crosshairs shifted away from the officials to the scientists. Stalin feared that, by sharing their work in progress on KR, Kliueva and Roskin had put at risk Soviet claims to priority in an important field of health science and to the potential revenues from its commercial exploitation. The scientists were now accused of violating secrecy and of betraying the interests of the Soviet state to American intelligence for the sake of “personal fame.”

All that the outside world knew was that the exchanges and visits came to a sudden stop, while Kliueva and Roskin disappeared along with their work. In fact, they remained at liberty and their research continued, although in secret. They were not charged with spying or arrested, a sign of how times had changed since the Great Terror. Behind closed doors, however, they were subjected to severe condemnation. Zhdanov had them brought before an “honor court” held on 5-7 June 1947, where they were denounced and censured before hundreds of spectators. In the second half of 1947, party organizations and government ministries held hundreds of closed meetings across the country to condemn them.^[175]

The KR affair had lasting consequences. One was the secrecy law of 9 June 1947.^[176] The new law took the regime of secrecy to a new degree of intensity. The law was not aimed at espionage or treason, for which the most severe penalties were already available under the infamous Article 58 of the RSFSR Criminal Code. Rather, it set out severe penalties for the lesser offenses of unintentional or negligent disclosure of state secrets, which were potentially far more numerous and everyday than cases of deliberate spying.^[177]

In Soviet history, new laws were often accompanied by stringent enforcement campaigns based on exemplary punishment of offenders.^[178] Discussing the new law in a draft for Pravda (subsequently published on 27 September 1947), the USSR state prosecutor Konstantin Gorshenin outlined recent cases in which the defendants were sentenced to four or more years of forced labor, not because they were traitors, but because they lost secret documents through negligence. There were spies in Gorshenin’s narrative, but the spies were foreign rather than home grown. Foreign intelligence agencies, Gorshenin suggested, were predators in search of a “habitat” that could supply “willing or unwilling prey.” He claimed that they found their victims especially among those citizens “in whose consciousness such relics of the past as a self-centered attitude to social causes, nonideological, narrow-minded interests, an egotistical drive toward cheap personal fame, adulatory self-abasement before bourgeois culture, and so forth, are still strong.” Also open to foreign manipulation were “those who, out of their own generosity, trust everyone and anyone, and fail to reckon the cost of their generosity to the interests of the state.” Only increased vigilance could frustrate the imperialists’ designs.^[179]

If the KR affair triggered the sudden clampdown, it is natural ask what wider considerations were also at work. The historian Nikolai Krementsov places weight on the international context of the late 1940s. He suggests that Stalin, having observed how the United States had exploited secrecy to gain a monopoly on the new technology of atomic weapons, may have concluded that the Soviet Union should seek a parallel monopoly in the new medical technology of cancer treatment. He quotes a telling phrase found in a secret report of the time, where the author, a Soviet journalist, described the KR treatment as “a kind of biological ‘atomic bomb.’”^[180] The analogy might be weakened by the fact that the Americans had made public the most important ideas behind the atomic bomb and its manufacturing technology in August 1945, within days of the first use of atomic weapons against Japan. The Smyth Report withheld some details, but still it gave away enough for the Soviet atomic engineer Nikolai Sinev to call it “an original compass, making it possible to orient oneself in the taiga [i.e., wilderness], so as not to get lost and to have confidence in success.” Although it was public information in the rest of the world, the Soviet authorities did not allow the Smyth Report to circulate freely and provided it only to specialists based on need to know.^[181] These reasons make it hard to see the Soviet secrecy law of June 1947 as a symmetrical or proportional response to American measures. But there is no doubt that Stalin saw American interest in Soviet-American scientific exchanges as predatory.

The previous chapter described how secrecy threw sand into the machine of the Soviet state by burdening the officials’ working lives with complex procedures. The story of this chapter is a case study in how a sudden intensification of the regime of secrecy had a similar effect by making the officials severely afraid of new penalties. The new secrecy law of 1947 applied everywhere across the Soviet state, not just to the administration of health science, where the shock originated, and it reduced state capacity everywhere, including in completely unrelated branches of the state. We will show this by looking at what happened in the Gulag system of labor camps.^[182]

In 1947 the Gulag was already completely secret, and the new law made no difference to that. What the law did in the Gulag, as elsewhere, was make everybody much more frightened of accidentally letting slip details about their work, even when the people they were dealing with were other state officials, and even when their mutual business was carrying out plans that were previously authorized and made compulsory by government legislation.

A few days after the new secrecy law of 1947 was enacted, the leaders of the Gulag issued a new list itemizing the Gulag’s secrets. First on the list was: “The location of corrective-labor and verification-filtration camps, colonies, deportation prisons, and other Gulag subsections.”^[183]

This was not new; the location and identification of labor camps were secret long before 1947. They had become secret in stages, rather than all at once. In 1922, Moscow’s three labor camps belonging to the Chief Administration for Compulsory Projects were no secret: their phone numbers were published in the telephone directory.^[184] As of 1927, a comprehensive list of Soviet state secrets did not mention labor camps. It did classify as “secret,” under “matters of a military nature,” “The dislocation in toto of every category of institution and establishment (for example,... all institutions of higher learning..., all warehouses, etc.).”^[185] So, under these rules, a comprehensive list of labor camps would have been classified, but labor camps were not singled out as a special case, and it was not forbidden to reveal the location of any particular forced labor facility. In the early 1930s the Soviet media published various accounts of life behind the wire. The writer Maksim Gor’kii contributed idealized stories about life in the labor camps of the Solovetskii islands, the Moscow suburb of Liubertsy, and the White Sea canal project.^[186] At this time, therefore, although the censorship was now fully operational, the existence of particular labor camps was still not secret, although reports of conditions were heavily sanitized.

By the 1930s, however, the fact that something was not listed as secret did not mean that anyone could freely know it or repeat it. The statistics of forced labor were secret de facto at this time, as well as the laws governing the use of the laborers.^[187] A particular factor is that the early 1930s were the time of the Great Depression in the world economy. An international outcry developed against the Soviet export of commodities produced by forced labor such as timber and gold.^[188] This set off a self-reinforcing cycle: foreign opinion became more suspicious of the Soviet uses of forced labor, so the Soviet state (which did have something to hide) became more secretive, and this strengthened foreign suspicions.

After the Depression the campaign against Soviet exports died away, but there was no return to openness. Official propaganda of the benefits of “corrective labor” ceased. The works on the subject that were previously published were banned, and some authors were arrested. By 1937, concealment was total.^[189] There were no more stories of conditions in the Gulag until 1962, when a window was opened briefly for Alexander Solzhenitsyn to publish his fictional account of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, set in an unnamed Siberian labor camp. Then the window closed again, and the full facts were suppressed for another quarter century.^[190]

An illustration of the utter secrecy under which the labor camps had fallen can be found in the beginning of the end of the Gulag. Stalin died on 5 March 1953. On 28 March, on the initiative of its first deputy chairman and interior minister Lavrentii Beria, the USSR Council of Ministers ordered the Ministry of the Interior to transfer most forced labor camps and colonies to the Ministry of Justice.^[191] Within a few weeks, hundreds of establishments and millions of lives had changed hands.

For the handover to take place, Justice Ministry officials had to receive some sort of account of the camps and colonies for which they were suddenly responsible. Of many questions they might have had, the first was surely: Where are they? What are they called?

In fact, camps were everywhere—not just in the Arctic and in Siberia, as many once supposed. In Moscow the secretariat of Gulag (the interior ministry chief administration of labor camps) compiled lists and maps. There appears to have been one list and one map for each of the 150 or so provinces and republics of the Soviet Union at the time. Every map was drawn in pen and pencil by an anonymous hand. Roads, railways, rivers, and coasts were traced. Installations were symbolized and place names were artfully lettered.^[192]

For the historian, the inference is unmistakable: the Gulag had no printed maps. Why not? It is true that the Soviet Union was not a rich country, and maps that were accurate enough to be useful were not cheap to produce and reproduce. But were they so costly as to be beyond the country’s means? Absolutely not.

In fact, Russia had a long tradition of print cartography. According to the website of the Russian National Library, map printing “began and came of age” in Russia already in the eighteenth century.^[193] In Russian history, when maps were needed, they were produced. Alexander I created the Imperial Army corps of topographers in 1812. In 1914 the Russian Army entered World War I with a stock of 30 million printed maps of the border districts of the empire and its neighbors. In 1941 the Red Army’s early retreats cost it a stockpile of too million maps.^[194] By this time, topographical units fully equipped with map stores and printing facilities were embedded in the Red Army’s mobile formations. After the chaos of 1941, much of the war was fought over vast interior spaces of the country that prewar thinking had considered invulnerable. Despite this, each major operation saw the printing of many millions of maps of various scales and their distribution to the troops, including specialized maps for different branches of the armed forces.^[195]

In short, Stalin’s bureaucracy was certainly capable of supplying printed maps when required. It was demand, not supply, that prevented their production. If the Gulag had no printed maps, it is because they were not wanted. The production and distribution of printed maps of the Gulag could only have widened the circle of people with access to the identity and location of labor camps, which were among the top state secrets of the time.

The labor camps of the Gulag were not self-sufficient. They received deliveries of food, fuel, and equipment from outside suppliers. They provided civilian facilities with products such as timber, ores and minerals, and other materials and foodstuffs. This required them to undertake everyday transactions with a wide range of civilian counterparties: suppliers and purchasers, the railways that delivered supplies and took them away, and the state banking system that held an account for each camp and recorded debits and credits for camp purchases and receipts.

In 1949, bilateral transactions between the Gulag and its civilian environment began to break down. Reading between the lines, one gathers that the breakdown remained partial; it would have become complete only if all those involved from top to bottom had stuck rigidly to formal rules. Instead, a complete breakdown was avoided to the extent that officials resorted to working around the rules or ignoring them to some degree.

A gap between rules and realities was not unique to this moment or this context. Generally, rigid adherence to rules might have made the entire Soviet system unworkable. All Soviet managers were compelled to break rules for the sake of their job, even those who aimed to do only just enough to be left alone to “sleep peacefully.”^[196] They were used to an environment in which rules came into conflict with realities. Their skill lay in knowing which rules they could break and how much they could get away with.

The evidence of our story is that Soviet managers saw the gap between secrecy rules and realities as particularly dangerous. It produced more than the usual amount of fear. For this reason, while they were willing to work around the rules to some extent, they also took steps to insure themselves against the potentially severe legal consequences of doing so. Insurance involved two things, both directed at their superiors. One was prompt disclosure of the illegal actions they were being forced to undertake; this implicated their superiors in joint responsibility either for rule breaking or for the plan breakdown that would follow from working to rule. The other was to invest significant time and effort in lobbying superiors for the rules to be adapted to reality.

The practical issue started from the designation of labor camps’ names and addresses. Labor camps were given different designations for different purposes. Specifically, every camp had a “full” or “effective designation” (polnoe or deistvitel’noe naimenovanié) and one or more “conventional designations” or code names (uslovnoe naimenovanié).

The camp’s code name was for nonsecret use, most commonly in providing release certificates to prisoners at the end of their terms, in enabling personal correspondence between prisoners and their relatives, and in the personal correspondence of camp officers and hired employees. The sole purpose of the code name was to avoid disclosing the full name and address. For that reason, it was also essential to avoid disclosing the concordance between code names and full designations.

An example is Volzhlag, also known as Volgolag (and before that Vol-gostroi). Volzhlag was opened in 1946 and transferred in April 1953 to the Yaroslavl’ provincial Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) administration.^[197] Its full name was Volzhskii ITL MVD (the Volga Corrective Labor Camp of the Ministry of Internal Affairs). Its full address was “Perebory village, Rybinsk ward [raiori], Yaroslavl’ province [oblast’].” Volzhlag also had a unique telegraphic address, “Volga.”

Unique letter codes were issued to every camp under MVD decree 001542 of 25 December 1945. For Volzhlag, high in the Russian alphabet, the letter code was “E”. Camps lower down the list had codes with two or three letters. Camps were issued with letter-coded stamps (shtampy) and seals (pechati) to certify releases and correspond with persons such as prisoners’ relatives, Gulag officers, and hired employees. Stamps were articles of convenience that substituted for typed or printed letterheads. Circular seals were more important: they gave legal force to signed original documents. At this time, meanwhile, camps continued to use their full designations in correspondence with state organizations and state counterparties. They were also issued with stamps and seals giving full designations to authorize and notarize such correspondence and financial documentation under MVD decree no. 00249 of 29 April 1949.

Finally, mailbox numbers were issued under MVD decree 0035 of 15 January 1949; these were for use in all nonsecret correspondence to avoid fuller identification.^[198] For Volzhlag, the mailbox address was “Shcherbakov town, mailbox no. 229.”

Things Fall Apart

Our story begins on 15 February 1949, when Gulag third administration chief Volkovyskii forwarded a letter to second administration legal department chief Liamin. The letter was from Moldavian deputy interior minister Babushkin to Gulag chief Dobrynin in Moscow.^[199] It reported that the local oil industry distributor was refusing orders for fuel from the local Gulag administration. The reason: these orders were classified secret, as they had to be, given that the delivery address was a state secret. But under the Soviet Union’s new secrecy regime, the fuel supplier was entitled to accept secret orders only from military units. The camps of the Moldavian Gulag were not military units, so their orders were returned without being met. The same difficulty was affecting supplies of meat, grain, and other food products to the camps, and so was “demoralizing the work of supply.”

A related issue emerged with a letter of 7 April from MVD war supplies administration chief Gornostaev to deputy interior minister Obruchnikov.^[200] MVD decree no. 0035-1949 (already mentioned above) ordered that labor camps’ nonsecret correspondence should use mailbox numbers as the only form of designation. This created the following problem. Gos-bank, the state bank, held its depositors’ full names and addresses, not their mailbox numbers. Gosbank was now refusing transfers to or from the settlement accounts of labor camps based on identification by mailbox number, because this did not match the account details that it held. But full designations were now a state secret that could not be disclosed to Gosbank—although Gosbank already held this information in the account details. Payments were being held up, and there was a risk of penalty charges for setting up transfers incorrectly.

A note of 6 August from Moscow office chief Slobodkin of the MVD supply administration to Gulag chief Dobrynin widens the frame.^[201] Slobodkin reported a general breakdown in the settlement of invoices to labor camps for equipment and medical supplies. Bank officers were rejecting payments across the board on the grounds that the payer was insufficiently identified. Bank records had not been updated to correspond with depositors’ mailbox numbers.

Slobodkin warned Dobrynin to anticipate a problem when considering how to update the bank records. Under MVD regulations, it was prohibited to extract and copy information from secret documents. If the document that Gulag now provided to Gosbank was a list of camps by mailbox number, it would be labeled “top secret” or “secret,” making it illegal for the bank to extract and copy the necessary information. Slobodkin asked Dobrynin “not to delay a solution.”

Time passed, but the mismatch between rules and realities persisted. On 9 March 1950, a year after the problem first arose, Volzhlag chief Kopaev reported his anxieties to Gulag secretariat chief Chirkov.^[202] The root of the problem, he suggested, was a clash between two MVD decrees. Decree no. 001542-1945 gave every camp a letter-coded designation and letter-coded stamps and seals to authorize releases and correspond with private persons. Decree no. 00249-1949 issued stamps and seals giving camps’ full designations, for correspondence with state organizations and state counterparties, and to authorize and notarize financial documentation. One problem arose in mailing nonsecret correspondence to other government agencies. The letter inside was written on paper headed by the full name of the camp. The envelope, which could be seen by anyone, carried the sender’s mailbox number and town. Put the two together and you had access to a state secret—the concordance between the camp’s full and conventional designations. Similarly, an order issued to an external supplier bore the camp’s mailbox number, while the authorizing seal gave its full name. Similar issues arose in dispatching products and making payments. Someone in the secretariat wrote in the margin: “Comrade Rozenberg. We need to speed up agreement on the draft decree. 17 March 1950.”

Recall MVD war supplies administration chief Gornostaev, who wrote first to deputy interior minister Obruchnikov in April 1949. He appears in the file twice more, the second time more than a year later, on 24 July 1950, writing to new deputy interior minister Serov.^[203] He began by reminding Serov that the matter was not new. MVD decree no. 0035-1949, he continued, did not cover the addressing of rail and river shipments and bank transfers. At present this could be done only by revealing the full names of camps. The MVD war supplies administration had made proposals, Gornostaev complained, but the matter remained unresolved. “Given that the disclosure of the full designation of MVD camps, building sites, and colonies, and their location is impermissible,” he concluded, “I ask for your instructions to accelerate the resolution of this question.”

Who t Is to Be Done?

Overlapping with the sequence of complaints were the first moves toward a possible resolution. In May 1949, Gulag second administration deputy chief Nikulochkin reported to Gulag chief Dobrynin that the allocation of mailbox numbers to camps had given rise to unanticipated difficulties with suppliers and bank officers.^[204] He proposed a round of consultations with counterparties to identify solutions. But consultations would involve the exchange of information, which required high-level authorization. Nikulochkin asked Dobrynin to authorize the Gulag’s financial section chief to visit Gosbank, its transport section chief to visit the transport ministry, and its quartermaster general to visit the ministry of communications.

These visits evidently took place. On 1 July 1949, MVD transport section chief Zikeev reported back that the transport ministry did not need to know details of senders other than mailbox numbers (the report does not discuss the problem of recipients).^[205] The MVD transport section could provide the transport ministry with a daily matrix of shipments by line of origin and destination. The mailbox numbers of camps had to be known to the MVD transport section in Moscow, its local suboffices along the railway lines, and the station masters. This system already applied to shipments from special-purpose construction projects, i.e., the secret labor camps of the interior ministry’s administration for industrial construction, Glavpromstroi.

Six weeks later, on 21 September, Gulag acting chief Bulanov proposed two options to deputy interior minister Chernyshov.^[206] He began by reviewing the current situation: orders for food, clothing, building materials, equipment and machinery, pharmaceuticals, and published materials were breaking down. The orders went to suppliers as top secret, and so were being rejected and returned unfilled. Suppliers required full addresses to fill orders. But to provide these addresses openly would disclose state secrets. The first option that Bulanov proposed to Chernyshov was to assimilate relations between Gulag establishments and civilian counterparties to the rules that the interior ministry had recently (6 August 1949) applied to the military formations of its internal security troops. In effect, every camp would be reclassified as a troop unit (voiskovaia chast’) of the MVD. A second option was to reregister every camp with suppliers and banks as an “MVD facility” (ob'ekt MVD) with a mailbox number. Either way, private correspondence would continue to go via existing mailbox numbers.

Bulanov’s memo is followed in the file by two options for interior minister Kruglov to consider. The first option took the form of a draft decree “On the introduction of new designations of corrective labor camps.” The draft approved the nomenclature “MVD facility, mailbox number XXXX.”^[207] It authorized camp chiefs to communicate in top secret their true addresses to deposit holders and railheads, and it required them to prepare new stamps and seals incorporating the new nomenclature.

The second option, a draft decree “On the procedure for maintaining correspondence of corrective labor camps and formalization of their documentation on business and financial operations,” was provisionally dated November 1949 and so was most likely prepared separately. It approved another nomenclature, “troop unit no. XXXX,” for all camps except those of Glavpromstroi.^[208] According to this draft decree, Gosbank account holders would register only the troop unit number; orders for goods would specify the unit number and railway line and station. This draft decree gave authorizations and requirements to camp chiefs that were similar to the one before, and it covered the complexities of secret and private correspondence in more detail.

At this point the MVD second special section stepped in and became responsible for carrying the matter forward. On 26 November, second special section chief Filatkin wrote to Gulag chief Dobrynin asking for comments on a revised draft decree “On the procedure for maintaining correspondence,” etc. This document is not in the file, but it was evidently a revision of the option that sanctioned the renaming of camps as “troop units” (the title given is the same but with a few extra words).^[209] Dobrynin wrote back to Filatkin on 7 December with minor amendments and corrections to the list of camps. Dobrynin and Filatkin jointly sent the agreed composite to Kruglov for signature on 30 December.

One Step Forward, One Step Back

Kruglov did not sign. On 20 January, MVD financial department chief Karmanov and chief accountant Zaitsev raised objections to the Dobrynin-Filatkin solution.^[210] They pointed out that, under a Gosbank instruction of 2 April 1945, troop units could hold only deposit accounts, not settlement accounts with overdraft facilities. The camps currently held 10.6 billion rubles of Gosbank credits that they would have to give up. Replacing this sum would be beyond the budget of the MVD (more evidence, if more is required, that access to money did matter in the Soviet economy). For the proposal to work, Gosbank and Prombank, the state industrial investment bank, would have to agree to alter the instructions so that the “troop units” of the Gulag could raise overdrafts.

Almost immediately, this interpretation was confirmed by Gosbank. On 4 February 1950, financial service state counsellor Borychev wrote to deputy interior minister Mamulov to make a simple point: Renaming labor camps as troop units would not preserve secrecy.^[211] “Everyone knows,” he explained patiently (or was that sarcasm?) that military troop units were not funded by Gosbank. The labor camps had large funding needs. The discrepancy, he pointed out, would attract attention and this would lead directly to what was to have been avoided: disclosure of the location of camps. It would be better, Borychev argued, to stick to mailbox numbers on a system like that used by the defense industry.

These arguments appear powerful and are not contested in the documentation. Instead, they were ignored. A short background paper from Gulag second administration chief Matevosov, dated May 1950, for example, noted that the “troop unit” proposal had been current since September the previous year when Gulag first proposed it to deputy interior minister Chernyshov.^[212] FIG u re 4.1. Should we give labor camps the cover of “troop unit”? Mock letterhead for a troop unit of the MVD

Source: Hoover/GARF, R-9414/ldop/145, 41 (“Appendix no. 2 to USSR MVD Decree No.___of____December 1949”). This document was (naturally) classified “Top secret.”

It envisaged that, while camps would be renumbered as troop units for business purposes, the system of identifying camps by a letter designation, which originated with NKVD decree no. 001542-1945 (see above), would be maintained for nonsecret correspondence such as release certificates and correspondence with private persons.

The MVD leadership met on 9 May 1950. The minutes recorded approval “in principle” of Filatkin’s draft decree, but also asked the MVD secretariat, second special department, and legal unit “attentively to review” the issue together one more time.^[213] There is no draft decree, but ninety-five Gulag establishments were listed by name from “A” to “Ya,” each labeled “Troop unit no. [space].”^[214] The list is dated December 1949, so it is most likely part of the package originally sent to Kruglov at the end of that month (see above). A sheet attached with a mock letterhead and three seals for correspondence, financial authorizations, and packages respectively, looks as if it has the same origin. The letterhead followed the template shown in Figure 4.1.

The proposal to reclassify labor camps as “troop units” was still current in June 1950, when a draft letter from interior minister Kruglov to war minister Vasilevskii enquired whether the Soviet Army would object to the renaming of camps as troop units.^[215] It is not clear whether the letter was ever sent: no reply is filed. Handwritten across the copy on file are the words: “Comrades Yatsenko and Filatkin. Examine the draft decree one more time for report to the minister for signature. 8 June (signature illegible).”

Indecision

At the back of the file are further draft decrees of the interior minister, one dated “1950” and the other “August 1950.” The idea of renaming camps as “troop units” had gone. Instead, both decrees were based on Bulanov’s other option of September 1949: camps were to be renamed “MVD facility” (ob”ekt MVD) with a four-digit number. The first draft decree is a single page followed by lengthy “Instructions” and a model letter for each camp to send to its local Gosbank branch office.^[216]

The instructions are more detailed than in previous draft decrees. A key clause affirms: “The location (of camps) is a document of special importance” (in Russian, osoboi vazhnosti, the highest level of Soviet secrecy); “Reproduction and duplication are prohibited.” Previous conventional designations, including letter codes and telegraphic addresses, were to be abolished, but mailbox numbers would be retained. Secret correspondence within the MVD would use full designations; secret correspondence with other ministries (including MGB, the security ministry) and nonsecret correspondence would use only facility numbers. The instructions cover many other contingencies, including how to deal with camps that are dissolved, newly established, relocated, and so on.

The last draft decree in the file, dated August 1950, again enacts the “MVD facility” solution. Model letters to local railway stationmasters and bank officials are included.^[217] The tone is more practical and bureaucratic than the preceding draft. Much of the content is similar; two additions stand out. Paragraph 6(e) deals with prisoners and their relatives:

Mailboxes of MVD corrective labor and special camps are used only for letters, transfers, and packages addressed to prisoners. Answers to relatives of convicts requesting the location of prisoners... are to be given out only verbally through the information bureau of the first special department ... indicating the mail address of the prisoner’s place of confinement (e.g., Skvortsov Ivan Petrovich, year of birth 1903, serving punishment—town of Kotlas, mailbox no. 420).

And paragraph 3(c) directly addresses the anxieties of Volzhlag chief Kopaev (voiced in March 1950 and mentioned above):

To prohibit the simultaneous use in a single administrative correspondence of differently named forms, stamps, and seals of the camp (e.g., application of a seal with the camp’s conventional name and use of its actual name on signature, etc.).

Neither the “troop unit” nor the “facility” solution was enacted. On July 29, 1950, MVD war supplies administration chief Gornostaev complained—again—to deputy interior Serov.^[218] The interior minister, he said, had issued more decrees: in addition to no. 0035-1949, there was now decree no. 00108-1950. These decrees (not in the file, unfortunately) gave every camp a mailbox number. The problem, Gornostaev continued, was that nothing had been implemented. MVD camps and building sites had not revised their bank account details, so that the MVD war supplies administration remained unable to debit camps for shipments because the debits were not accepted by Gosbank. In fact, Gosbank was imposing a 100-ruble penalty for each incorrect debit. Meanwhile, the war supplies administration had to continue to use full details of camp names and addresses, since these were what Gosbank required. Until the matter was resolved, Gornostaev asked permission to maintain this practice, using the MVD secret courier service.

Decree no. 00108-1950 was not the final word. Gulag second administration chief Matevosov wrote to MVD legal section acting chief Kurbatov on 23 September 1950, asking him for comments on the draft decree “On the procedure for maintaining correspondence,” mentioned above, revised after the MVD leadership meeting on 9 May 1950, and still, apparently, pending.^[219]

The Outcome?

Nearly one year after Volzhlag chief Kopaev first reported it, the problem of mixing secret and nonsecret identities in nonsecret correspondence continued to trouble camp officials. On 9 February 1951, Bazhenovlag acting chief of administration Golubev asked MVD secretariat deputy chief Diukanov for urgent clarification of MVD decree no. 0035-1949. Two months passed before Gulag organization department chief Liamin replied, on 4 April:

A draft decree has been presented to the USSR MVD leadership on the procedure for correspondence about questions of the production and business activities of camps. Given a positive decision on this question, the questions raised by comrade GOLUBEV will find their solution.^[220]

On 27 February 1953, the MVD finally issued decree no. 0033-1953 (again, missing from the files), with new rules to resolve the problem of unintentional disclosure of state secrets in nonsecret correspondence. Provincial MVD administrations reported new mailbox numbers to their superiors and to bank officials and other counterparties. There was no mention of “troop units” or “facilities.”^[221]

By this time, it would appear, the fear had subsided. In the spring of 1953, nearly four years had passed since the Gosplan affair of 1949 (discussed in Chapter 3), which began with the loss or misplacement of secret documents. The files of the party control commission from this period show only two other cases involving carelessness with secrets. In 1944 (another incident from Chapter 3), a coded telegram from Stalin’s war cabinet got lost in Gor’kii (Nizhnii Novgorod) province between a factory director and the local party secretary. Although five years had passed, in the fevered atmosphere of 1949, an inquiry was launched. The matter was taken seriously enough for a two-year investigation, but the principals blamed each other, and evidence was lacking to determine fault, so no action was taken. And in June 1953 a case was filed against half a dozen officials of the USSR state committee for supply of food and consumer goods for the loss of secret documents.^[222] Each blamed the others, and the matter was resolved by party warnings and reprimands. These were light penalties, normal in the bureaucratic career of any moderate risk taker. There was no hint of criminal charges.

Six years after the secrecy law of 9 June 1947, the number of complaints about its impact had fallen away. The officials of the Gulag had evidently learned to do business in spite of the new regime. Perhaps, through habituation, they no longer feared it. Stalin was on his way to see Marx. The Gulag would fade to a shadow before disappearing forever in 1960. But its secrets would be kept for another generation.

The impact of the June 1947 secrecy law worked its way through the Soviet system. The effects were not instantaneous, because the law took many months to implement fully. Rather, the shock rippled through the system at all its levels. At lower levels the evidence is of a sharp increase in trade costs—the costs of transacting official business among the various specialized agencies of the state.

Official business depended on the willingness of parties and counterparties to share information. For example, buyer and seller had to identify themselves to each other before setting out prices and quantities in contracts that would implement the plans already decided at higher levels. As the regulatory framework evolved, managers recalculated the risks of identifying themselves to each other as before. They found that the risks of penalization for innocent disclosures had risen. As a result, they changed their behavior. They redirected their efforts away from managing the economy toward self-protection.

In the first wave, managers tried to avoid giving away dangerous secrets or receiving them. With that aim, managers declined orders, and bank officials declined payments. By these actions, officials replaced one risk by another. While mitigating the risk that they would be charged with unintentional secrecy violations, they heightened the risk that they would fail to fulfill the state plans by which all would be judged. The state’s business still had to be done.

In the second wave, the managers embarked on a spontaneous campaign of writing letters. They appealed to their superiors for help. The object of these appeals was twofold. On the surface, they demanded solutions that would allow them to do business safely. There was also a subtext, to implicate the superiors in responsibility for the rule breaking and workarounds that might now be forced on them if they were to continue to do the state’s business. These were the efforts by which the managers sought to protect themselves.

At higher levels, officials were made forcefully aware of the spreading disorder below, the risks of paralysis, and their responsibility for finding a solution. But any solution would have unintended consequences and could even be interpreted as an attempt to work around the law. Workarounds based on joint action could quickly acquire the smell of conspiracy. When decisive action was risky, with few certain benefits, it was generally better to keep options open.

In the short term, the outcome that was safest for the higher officials might well be to procrastinate and put the decision off until tomorrow. When tomorrow came and the advantages of the various options had to be recalculated, continued delay would probably come out on top again. Thus, the short term could drift into the long term.

Economists have given considerable attention to the human tendency to procrastinate. George Akerlof attributes it to undue salience of the costs of present versus future action.^[223] For Susan Rose-Ackerman, complex organizations can give rise to rational procrastination. Suppose responsibilities overlap, so that more than one official is available to solve a particular problem. In that case, a reputation for prompt decision making becomes a liability: the official that is known for timely decisions will be overwhelmed by petitioners. Delay is better because it shifts work pressure onto others.^[224]

In the present context, a more plausible candidate is the explanation offered by Gomes, Kotlikoff, and Viceira. They describe a competitive democracy in which tenure is limited by the frequency of elections. Short tenures encourage short-term optimization: if the decision that would most benefit the community in the long term looks personally risky, leave it to your successor.^[225] The Soviet Union of the 1940s was not a democracy, but bureaucratic circulation was still competitive. As long as the normal period of tenure was shorter than the period of payoff from tough decisions, procrastination could be the outcome in an authoritarian system, just as in democracies.

In this story, the Gulag officials did not want to risk being held accountable for wrong decisions, and the safest course was to make no decisions and hope to be promoted or transferred before the issue became a crisis. How did their indecision affect the state? There was a pure time cost: a decision that would optimally be taken now was taken later. But this was not all. While the decision was delayed, additional costs were incurred: The state’s resources were used up in the time that officials spent in committees and working parties, on fact-finding missions, and on the writing and reading of correspondence. This is because the decision was not just delayed: for the sake of delay, it had to be considered and reconsidered repeatedly. Higher officials used their time to prolong investigations and draft and redraft complicated decrees and instructions in alternative variants that were never approved. Lower officials used their time to press for information about the progress of a decision that was never made. In our story, the decision they needed had absolutely no political significance: it was of a technical nature that might be thought well suited to a committee of experts. The problem was simply that the committee did not decide.

The costs of managers’ self-protection and high-level indecision interacted and fed off each other. At lower levels, the Soviet officials that left these issues hanging in the air were demonstrating indifference to heightened transaction costs. While they left matters unresolved, officials and managers below them continued to avoid responsibility where necessary, to work around the rules where possible, and to take out the insurance that seemed to be recommended—to give time and effort to lobbying Moscow for change. So, decision costs and trade costs compounded each other. The officials that repeatedly delayed effective resolutions tolerated this negative spiral.

As the short term drifted into the long term, a mitigating factor was the human capacity to normalize changes in the environment. At first, the new secrecy law was frightening. Officials did not know how it would work and how it might affect them. It took several years to learn how to work around it and insure against it. Eventually, however, it became the new “normal.”

From this point of view, procrastination had its merit. In postponing resolution, senior officials simply waited for managers to find a workable accommodation to the new regime. Eventually, they legislated in such a way as to formalize this accommodation. There is no evidence that this happened by design, but it suggests that wait-and-see was a sensible strategy from the private perspective of those involved.

The effects of the secrecy law of June 1947 offer a natural fit to the concept of the secrecy/capacity tradeoff. Figure 4.2 extends the diagram introduced in Chapter 1 (Figure 1.2). As before, the vertical axis measures state capacity, and the horizontal axis measures the degree of secrecy (which in turn depends on the mix of regulation and penalization).

The outcome of this figure will be, as before, to show state capacity with an effective maximum at the degree of secrecy S*. But the figure’s starting point is the notional maximum of state capacity, shown as the level of the horizontal dotted line level marked C. Think of notional state capacity as what might be achieved by selfless, fearless officials, true “servants of the people” who seek neither personal advantage nor self-protection. The ideal limit is not achievable, because real servants of the people are human and therefore to some degree self-interested. I don’t mean that all public figure 4.2. The secrecy/capacity tradeoff: Secrecy adds to state capacity by cutting leakages, but subtracts from it by augmenting fear

Note: On the horizontal scale, higher degrees of secrecy (marked by increasing regulation and penalization) lie to the right. On the vertical scale, C marks the level of notional state capacity, as defined in the text. At each degree of secrecy, effective state capacity is notional capacity, less leakage costs, less fear costs. S* marks the degree of secrecy that delivers the maximum of effective state capacity. From Z, a point initially preferred by the dictator, an increase in secrecy moves the state to Z': leakage costs are further reduced, but fear costs increase by much more, so effective state capacity declines

servants are venal; clearly, in fact, some societies have been much better than others at approaching the upper limit, because of their social norms and their methods of selecting and training noncorrupt public servants. Nonetheless, the supply of saints is limited everywhere, and everyone has private needs and desires, so public administration is never perfect. Because of those private motivations, effective state capacity will always fall below notional capacity.

The figure simplifies the private motives of government personnel into two deductions from notional state capacity, arising from leakages and from fear respectively. Effective state capacity is what is left after accounting for the combined costs of leakages and fear.

Leakage costs are what is lost from state capacity when officials leak government information in order to share a benefit with private or foreign interests. This is the violation of which Kliueva and Roskin were accused. The reasoning behind the idea that state capacity is reduced by leakage of government information might be that the information leaked is intrinsically valuable, or that leakages deprive the government of its first-mover advantage in games of strategic rivalry. In the KR affair, as Stalin and Zhdanov saw it, Kliueva and Roskin sold information that belonged to the state and might have been of both commercial value and of value to national prestige, in exchange for personal fame and favors in the West.

The Politburo response was to intensify information regulation and to create new offences subject to criminal penalties, in the expectation that these would deter further leakages. In other words, the Stalin-Zhdanov model of regulation and penalization predicted that more secrecy would reduce leakages. Large at first, then diminishing as the degree of secrecy is increased, leakage costs are shown in Figure 4.2 by the vertical distance between notional state capacity (the horizontal dotted line) and the dashed curve. As the curve suggests, it might not be possible to eliminate all leakages and, in that case, each further increase in the intensity of secrecy would have a diminishing marginal effect. Still, we already know that the results were effective to some degree.

Fear costs are the other deduction from notional state capacity. These are shown in Figure 4.2 by the vertical distance between the dashed curve and the solid curve. When the state is transparent, there is no fear.

Suppose the regulation of official life becomes more complex and demanding, and penalties for violation become both more severe and also, because of growing complexity, less predictable. Then, fear will spread through officialdom. The human response to fear is to seek insurance, individually and in groups. But the process of building insurance consumes time and effort, which are diverted from the resources assigned to the officials’ state business. As secrecy becomes more intense, fears multiply. As fear grows, the costs of fear increase at an increasing rate, shrinking state capacity.

Effective state capacity is always less than notional capacity because of the deduction of leakage costs and fear costs. More secrecy narrows the gap at first, because large leakage costs can be easily suppressed while fear costs remain low. At first, effective state capacity is increased. It rises to a maximum where secrecy is set at S*. Beyond that point, fear costs take over because, while officials are already too frightened to leak much information, increasingly they are also too frightened to do their jobs. As the fear effect sets in and increasingly dominates their working lives, so effective state capacity declines slowly at first, then rapidly.^[226]

In the spring of 1947, the Soviet state was already far to the right-hand side of Figure 4.2—at a point such as Z, say, where leakages were small and fear costs were relatively large. In response to the KR affair, Stalin pushed the Soviet state still further to the right. As the story of this chapter shows, with the increase in secrecy the previous level of state capacity could not be maintained. Fear drove it down to Z'.

Writing about Stalin’s last years, a historian describes “mindless, excessive secrecy.”^[227] Had Stalin’s rage caused him to lose his mind? Historians and biographers have often questioned Stalin’s sanity. He is not infrequently described as a victim of “paranoia.”^[228] Scholars often seem more comfortable with the idea that Stalin blundered uncontrollably than that he calculated his moves. But this conclusion is mistaken.

There is plentiful evidence of Stalin’s psychopathology.^[229] Damaged by childhood abuse, Stalin had few scruples, few friends, and a limited capacity for empathy. At the same time, he had superior talents for organizing information and for logical reasoning: in other words, he could rationalize. He excelled at the patient, step-by-step argumentation of syllogisms. In speeches and letters, he advanced complex, consistent models of cause and effect in the world. He showed patience and persistence in the pursuit of long-term objectives, whether we construe these as personal or political. With this went a high degree of self-control, including the ability to wait. He controlled his feelings, rarely allowing himself to express self-doubt, depression, or despair. Even if he lacked empathy, he had insight and was able to dominate and manipulate others.

Stalin could rationalize; could he also optimize? Some of Stalin’s policy choices have been thought to imply unstable or inconsistent preferences, which would rule out a capacity to optimize. For example, Stalin often seemed to promote investment at all costs, but then he would abruptly switch course, ordering the distribution of consumer goods. Or he would target his enemies with precision and calculation, and then abruptly lash out at the guilty and the innocent alike in very large numbers. It is hard to see the consistency.

In these cases, economically minded historians have argued that Stalin’s behavior was consistent with optimization subject to constraints: at any moment, his decisions depended on which constraints were binding. For example, Stalin favored investment over consumption when possible, but he shifted the priority to consumption when intelligence reports warned him that the limited supplies of consumer goods risked damaging the workers’ willingness to work.^[230] He preferred selective repression when possible, switching to mass killing when internal threats became less well defined (making selection more difficult) and when external threats increased (making the neutralization of internal threats more urgent).^[231]

A study of Soviet monitoring and audit agencies points in the same direction: Stalin did not trust his subordinates and wanted to control their actions, but not at all costs: he was willing to balance the costs against the benefits of control at the margin.^[232] The balancing of benefits against costs at the margin, and readiness to adjust to changing constraints, are both signs of a capacity to optimize.

Why did Stalin not aim to maximize Soviet state capacity? Stalin had a strong interest in building the Soviet state. As previous chapters have shown, he invested great efforts in the staffing of effective state agencies, and a powerful state of multiple capabilities was one of the most important outcomes of his rule. Nonetheless, Stalin also had other concerns. Most importantly, he had no interest in building the capacity of a state over which he did not rule, a state that did not follow the directives of the party that he led. In fact, regime security was Stalin’s first and foremost concern, and state capacity was of value to him only if it was under his control. Consistently, when state capacity was at a maximum, he would have been willing to give some of it away in return for more of the secrecy that kept his regime safe. Although increased secrecy gave his officials a harder time, it also added to the security of the regime, which was also his personal security. So, a point somewhere to the right of the maximum in Figure 4.2 was the logical place for him to position the Soviet state.

But where, exactly, was the optimum? And did Stalin try to find it? The KR affair shows that in June 1949 he decided secrecy was too lax and needed to be tightened. The record does not show his understanding of the tradeoff he was making. If he understood it, he did not have the means to optimize with precision or without errors. Even if he would have preferred to balance his objectives efficiently, the command system did not exist to be efficient, and it could not calibrate or compute many of the values that would have been required for perfect optimization. If Stalin aimed to optimize, he did so intuitively, by trial and error. After 1945, moreover, he may have become more prone to errors. With age he gained knowledge and experience, but increasing age also began to erode his mental capacity and physical stamina, so that he left more and more important decisions to subordinates.^[233]

Thus, the secrecy law of 1947 did have some perverse effects, and it might have been a mistake. But it was not the act of either a fool or a madman.

Despotic Leviathan should be capable of decisive measures. Dictators do not have to account for their actions before the courts or before public opinion. Soviet officials answered only to superiors for their decisions, and Stalin did not have to account to anyone for his.

The story of this chapter shows how secrecy undermined the making and implementing of decisions. When Stalin suddenly tightened secrecy in 1947, his aim was to deter officials from engaging in the unauthorized exchange of information with outsiders. But the climate of fear engendered by the new rules hindered all business—not just the unofficial business that Stalin aimed to stamp out, but also the official business of the state.

Secret Leviathan became sluggish and irresolute. The state’s business continued, only to the extent that the parties were willing to work around or ignore the new rules. In that context, however, neglect of the rules was now more dangerous than before, because the law of 1947 was explicitly aimed at secrecy violations committed without a guilty intention to harm the state. Managers tried to protect themselves by lobbying superiors for action to remove these difficulties and by seeking to implicate the superiors in the expedients that would allow them to work around the rules. Higher officials responded with indecision and delay. Everyone looked as if they were doing something, but what they were engaged in was self-protection at the expense of their core duties.

In an open society, indecision is visible. Private corporations in a competitive market economy answer for delay to the buyer, who can switch business to a more agile competitor; they must develop mechanisms to limit indecision and other business costs or leave the market. Democratic leaders must answer for indecisive government to voters, including taxpayers, who can switch their votes to political rivals. Media competition creates a market for compromising information about politicians’ performance and a race to disclose it. Political competition means that information prejudicial to one party will eventually to be exposed by others in what a well-known study calls a “fixed pattern”:

Classified documents are routinely passed out to support an administration; weaken an administration; advance a policy; undermine a policy. A newspaper account would be incomplete without some such reference?^[234]

Thus, liberal democracies have been poor keepers of government secrets. While this does not rule out indecision, it does at least ensure that the citizens hear about it at some point.

It is something of a surprise, therefore, to find that indecision and gridlock could also be features of authoritarian rule. Fear can be electrifying, and Stalin often counted on that aspect of fear to galvanize those around him into action. In our story, however, the effect of fear on government business was the opposite: the shock was paralyzing. The decision to intensify secrecy was the cause of the paralysis, and secrecy also served to conceal it until many decades had passed.