Secret Leviathan

5. SECRET POLICING AND DISCRIMINATION

When some ordinary person popped up on the KGB radar, the first step of the officer on duty was to write a note to the KGB archive. The note asked the archivist: Is there “compromising evidence” on this person?

The term “compromising evidence” (komprometiruiushchie materialy) was unknown before the Soviet era. In the early years of Bolshevik rule, the secret police began to build its records of the political and social attitudes of the individual citizens who came under surveillance. Whenever suspicion arose over a person’s loyalties or practical inclinations, the records were scoured for “compromising evidence” that might shed new light on the case.^[235] Official use of the phrase became so frequent that it was shortened in writing to “k/m” or (in conversation) “kompromat.” More recently, the word kompromat even entered the English language.^[236]

A search for kompromat could be prompted by many things. Sometimes it was a person’s suspicious behavior that drew attention: for example, they might express anticommunist views to a neighbor, or tell subversive jokes at work, or show interest in political or military secrets over a drink in a bar. Someone might meet up with a foreigner, seemingly by accident, or by an arrangement that fell outside the foreigner’s authorized schedule of official meetings. A person could attract attention just by being in the neighborhood of a suspicious incident, such as a fire or an industrial accident. Any of these things could trigger KGB enquiries into the subject’s record to establish whether there was some preexisting pattern of behavior or association.

Citizens could attract the interest of the secret police even while they behaved entirely correctly. One way was to apply for promotion to a position of leadership or responsibility at work. Another was to seek permission to travel abroad—a privilege reserved for those with loyal attitudes and responsibilities. Or, to put it differently, while it was obvious that you could invite an enquiry into your background by doing things that invited suspicion, you could achieve the same less obviously by seeking an advancement that required you to be above suspicion.

In terms of its bearing on the subject’s loyalty, the quality of kompromat was extremely variable. The clearest indication was provided by evidence directly implicating the subject in a crime. By contrast, a good deal of information counted as kompromat was made up of facts or hearsay of a purely circumstantial nature: for example, living on one’s own, or living in the neighborhood of a secret installation. Other kinds of information were historical, being based on incidents or associations from a person’s distant past. We will see that most items of kompromat were circumstantial or historical. To that extent, it is reasonable to say that its evidential quality was typically poor. This was a defining feature, not a defect. For most purposes it was enough for kompromat to provide a basis for suspicion. It did not need to prove guilt.

Despite its typically poor quality, kompromat was valuable. The value of kompromat arose in two contexts. The context of this chapter was created by what the economist Ronald Wintrobe has called the “dictator’s dilemma.” Secret Leviathan was perennially suspicious. The security of the Soviet rulers rested on their capacity to sniff out enemies to be isolated or neutralized or punished before they could pose a serious threat. But who were the enemies? The party leaders could not judge people by appearances. Fearing repression, those who were disaffected or alienated from the existing order spent much of their time simulating loyalty, at least in public. Even an all-powerful dictator with powers of life and death could not make those around him freely confess the inner feelings that might lead them to hostile thought and action if the opportunity were ever to arise.^[237]

In the context of the dictator’s dilemma, the secret police had no better choice than to turn to kompromat, to the tenuous evidence of past associations and patterns of behavior and to hearsay, with the hope of achieving a rough separation of those who could safely be advanced or promoted from the others—the “usual suspects”—who were marked out to be isolated and marginalized. Here, therefore, the value of kompromat was its use for discrimination.

This chapter is based on evidence of the uses of kompromat in Soviet Lithuania, a Western borderland province of the Soviet Union, in the 1970s. This was well after the Thaw, when the consequences of being identified as a “usual suspect” became much less severe. In the 1930s and 1940s, people were identified as suspect based on class background, ethnic affiliation (especially when linked to the people of a neighboring state), past political activity, and compromising family ties. Hundreds of thousands at a time went on to suffer forced resettlement, imprisonment, or execution.^[238] The Thaw put an end to these worst outcomes. Discrimination against people with suspicious markers became more selective and took the milder form of restricting individual access to education, employment, and foreign travel. At the same time, the principle of using markers of suspicion to judge a person and secretly channel them from one life course to another did not change.

Discrimination was not the only use of kompromat. A second use arose in a different context. A party or public official might ask for the cooperation of a subordinate or private citizen in a task, based on their civic duty. Faced with refusal, they could use kompromat to persuade by other means—by threatening disclosure of evidence that could lead to loss of employment or loss of liberty. A particular case, the use of kompromat to blackmail persons of interest into becoming KGB informers, is discussed in the next chapter. Although the power of kompromat to coerce was no doubt weaker in the 1970s than in the 1930s, the principle again did not change.^[239]

When used for its present purpose, that is, for discrimination, kompromat was bound up with secrecy in two ways. First, kompromat served the regime of secrecy. Because the Soviet system of government was more secretive and more encompassing than other systems, the performance of most if not all responsible work required access to secret government communications. The KGB used the kompromat in its files to decide who would be allowed to work with secrets and who would be barred.

Second, the substance of kompromat and all its uses were secrets in themselves. Decisions based on kompromat were covered by conspirative norms. When the KGB found reason to bar a subject from secret work or from foreign travel, we will see, no explanation was given, or some excuse was found. The subject was never notified that it was the KGB’s decision to bar them, or the grounds on which it did so. The victims might guess but could never be sure.

One advantage of holding kompromat in secret and acting on it under the cover of conspirativeness was to avoid challenges. If the citizens had access to the personal information held about them by the regime and the calculations made on its basis, then they might have taken steps to question the evidence or appeal the decisions. In that context, secrecy upheld the unquestionable authority of the state.

This chapter will show that kompromat was raw material for a system of statistical discrimination. The idea of statistical discrimination was developed by economists to explain why discriminatory hiring decisions persist in market economies, even among employers with a neutral disposition toward the discriminated group. Faced with a female applicant for promotion, the employer is likely unable to evaluate their individual commitment to the job in question. The employer knows, however, that women are statistically more likely than men to take leave for pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare. Comparing women to men, an employer (probably male) might conclude that on average women will make less-committed employees. Based on that calculation, the employer might go on to discriminate against female applicants generally.^[240]

For the sake of its own security, the Soviet regime took the part of an employer that tries to avoid recruiting less-committed employees. Its goal was to steer disloyal citizens away from positions in the economy or public service where they could learn secrets or influence others. Any applicant could make a declaration of loyalty, but this could not be enough. A person that harbored doubts or divided allegiances would be expected to hide them and try to blend into the loyal masses. To compensate, the Soviet regime relied on a set of markers of disloyalty—confiscated family assets, a doubtful war record, a previous conviction, the suspicious conduct of family members, having relatives abroad, church attendance, loose talk in the bar or the shopping queue—that could not easily be faked or manipulated. For the individual subject, any single suspicious marker would predict disloyalty to the state and the party very imperfectly, perhaps with large errors. But taken together, the markers would approximately identify a group with lower-than-average loyalty than the rest who had clean records. This is how kompromat supported statistical discrimination.

Its poor quality made kompromat only a rough guide to the regime’s enemies. Nonetheless, it may have been the best guide available. This is suggested by a survey of Soviet war refugees in Europe and America, conducted in the 1950s by the sociologists Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer. They constructed a measure of their respondents’ underlying (as opposed to superficial) hostility to the Soviet system and looked for determinants in their life histories. Statistically, they found, the single most important factor in this hostility was “experience of arrest by the secret police of oneself or a family member.”^[241] This was exactly the kind of information that the KGB looked for kompromat.

Suspicion-based discrimination among candidates for recruitment or promotion into responsible positions is the main topic of this chapter. We will see the range of suspicious markers that were included in kompromat. We will see how the KGB used them to identify potentially disloyal citizens and block their aspirations.

Discrimination is costly. In our stories, some of the costs fell straightforwardly on the “usual suspects,” who were confined to an out-group and prevented from following their ambitions. Other costs were borne by the state and the economy. As we will see, this came about because the pool from which the state drew its responsible officials was made less talented and less diverse.

The costs of suspicion contributed to the secrecy/capacity tradeoff described in Chapter 2 (Figure 2.3). Every society, including liberal democracies, must face the same dilemma. No state can prosper in the hands of bribe takers or traitors. Government officials and public servants should undergo scrutiny. Some degree of screening of those wishing to claim the rewards of state employment should surely improve the capabilities of the state, at least up to a point. Up to that point, the interests of society and the interests of its rulers are aligned. A problem arises when the incumbent rulers intensify the screening of recruits into public service to exclude every potential nonconformist, critic, freethinker, and innovator. To do so might improve the rulers’ security, but it will also progressively restrict the talent pool from which public servants are recruited, with damaging consequences for their talents and diversity. As a result, the state will become less capable, slipping down the slope of the secrecy/ capacity tradeoff.

We will find that kompromat could be used with flexibility, and a flexible approach could mitigate some of the costs. If the need was acute, the talented or qualified person with a suspicious record could still be allowed to set foot on the first rung of the ladder of promotion, serving an indefinite term of probation while remaining under scrutiny. Meanwhile, the kompromat would be kept on file.

At this point the use of kompromat to screen people merged into another use, to bring people under control in a coercive way. As discussed in the next chapter, the use of kompromat to control people was also widespread under Soviet rule.

With a population of 73,000 residents in 1970, Panevézys was Soviet Lithuania’s fifth city in order of size. (Panevezys means “On the Nevézis,” the slow-moving river that loops around its central district.) Its residents could not escape the shadow cast by the first half of the twentieth century. Lithuania, formerly a province of the Russian Empire and an independent republic from 1918, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 under the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Panevézys was quickly occupied by the Red Army. As the Soviet state began to transform Lithuania into a Soviet republic, mass arrests and deportations took place. These removed the country’s former political and business elites, including the “kulak” families (more prosperous farmers), along with anyone who took part in resistance.^[242] The process was interrupted by German invasion in 1941. With Nazi occupation came mass killings of Jews and communists. Jews were concentrated from the surrounding districts into the Panevézys ghetto, and all there were murdered.^[243] During 1944 the country was reoccupied by the Red Army and reabsorbed into the Soviet Union. There were more mass arrests and deportations, this time accompanied by an armed insurgency against Soviet rule that persisted for several years after the world war came to an end.^[244] These traumatic events are illustrated in the personal histories of the subjects we will study.

In December 1972, responding to a request from Moscow, the Panevézys town KGB made up four lists. Two lists were directly concerned with secret work. Six people in the town had been cleared for top secret work although their files held evidence that compromised them. Ten others had been barred because of such evidence, but for some reason they “continue to work in the positions indicated.”

The other lists were longer. One document carried the details of 79 people who were engaged in “supervisory duties” despite the kompromat available in their files. (The scope of supervisory positions appears to have included anyone responsible for others, so managers and team leaders at all levels in factories and offices, plus teachers responsible for school and college students.) Another list covered 96 people of the town who had applied to travel abroad and had been refused because of various suspicions. Allowing for a few names that were repeated in more than one list, the number of unique individuals comes down to 176.

Taken together, these lists provide unique information on the “usual suspects” in a Soviet market town of the 1970s. They include men and women, aged from their twenties to nearly ninety. The subjects were drawn from every major social group including farmworkers, factory workers, managers, government officials, and pensioners. One of the few restrictions is that, judged by family names, nearly all were ethnic Lithuanians.

Beyond that, the subjects of kompromat fell into two roughly distinct groups. These make the two columns of Table 5.1. A first group enters the record because they wished to travel abroad and were refused. They tended

Key: * One subject’s employed status is missing. ** Two subjects’ employment type is missing.

Source: The information in Tables 5.1 to 5.3 is abstracted from four documents in a file at Hoover/LYA, K-l/3/703. For ease of reference, I label them A, В, C, and D as below. In this table, the first column (“Denied foreign travel”) is based on the subjects named in List C; the second column (“In or seeking responsible work”) combines Lists A, B, and D. Six subjects are named in both columns. The lists are as follows: (A) Folios 90-91 (“List of persons cleared for top secret work and documents with compromising evidence,” 6 names, from chief of Panevézys KGB Lt.-Col. S. J. Kisonas, 3 December 1972). (B) Folios 92-93 (“List with compromising evidence [on persons] denied access, but they continue to work in the positions indicated,” 10 names, 2 December 1972). (C) Folios 94-109 (“List of persons withdrawn from journeys abroad for 1970 to 1972,” 100 names found in 99 entries, one of which concerns a married couple, from chief of Panevézys KGB Lt.-Col. S. J. Kisonas, 2 December 1972). (D) Folios 110-122 (“List with compromising evidence on persons with supervisory duties” (zanimaiushchikh rukovodiashchie dolzhnosti), 80 names, of which four also appear in List A above, five in List B, and six in List C, from chief of Panevézys KGB Lt.-Col. S. J. Kisonas, 3 December 1972).

to be older citizens, in their early fifties on average. Most were still in work, but one in five were pensioners. They were typically less educated and less skilled. The proportion of party members in the group (4 percent) was close to that in the adult population of Lithuania at the time.^[245]

The second group comprised all those listed because of their employment status or ambitions. They were younger, with average age in the mid-forties. They were more heavily male, more highly educated, and they had already reached higher-status positions. The proportion of party members (14 percent) was several times higher than in the adult population.

What was it, exactly, that made these people “usual suspects”? The purpose of KGB counterintelligence was forward looking, in the sense of aiming to forestall security threats before they materialized. Given that, one might think that the most useful compromising information would consist of suspicious things that people were reported as saying or doing in the present or quite recently. This was generally not the case. All the subjects were well used to living under authoritarian rule. They all aspired to responsible employment, or to foreign travel, or to both. Regardless of their inner thoughts, they understood the importance of living in outward conformity to the norms of Soviet life. The kompromat listed against their names shows few recent behavioral clues or signals.

To make sense of the mass of personal detail, we break it down into specifics. It turns out that the 176 personal files included 320 separate items of information. Then, each item can be classified in two dimensions. Was it recent, or was it “historical” in the sense of originating in Lithuania’s time of troubles now twenty years or more in the past, that is, up to 1953? And did it stem from some action or confession that the subject undertook by choice, or from circumstances or associations beyond their control?

Table 5.2 distributes the 320 items of kompromat over those two dimensions. In the time dimension, more than two-thirds (227 items) echoed the relatively distant past. In the voluntary/involuntary dimension, two-thirds (218 items) reflected circumstances and associations. In the aggregate, only one item in eight (39 items) reported something the subject chose to do or say in the recent past. This illustrates the low quality of kompromat generally.

Notes: Historic items date from the Stalin era (1953 or before); they include evidence from Lithuania as an independent state before World War II, under one German and two Soviet occupations, and up to the end of the postwar insurgency that coincided roughly with the death of Stalin. Recent items date from subsequent years. While the timing is not completely clear cut, no serious issues arise. Involuntary circumstances include suspicious family background; victimization by forced resettlement during Sovietization, whether as an adult or as a child; and having a family member known to be living abroad. Involuntary associations include all those cases where a close relative fell under suspicion for any reason listed above or below. Voluntary choices include decisions to resist Soviet rule in any way or at any stage, or to commit any other offence against Soviet law, including subsequent criminal penalization where it was applied. Included under voluntary choices are leaving the country under any circumstance, the evasion of resettlement, unauthorized meetings with foreigners, and any attempt to conceal the facts of involuntary circumstances or associations. Voluntary confessions can be religious or personal in nature; personal confessions are suspicious if they imply any kind of estrangement from society or desire to live differently, including marital discord, loneliness, and (in one case) a simple intention to emigrate. Source: See Table 5.1. The figures shown in this table combine the data of all 176 subjects named in the four lists.

Some examples bring us closer to reality. A straightforward case of kompromat that was both historical and circumstantial is provided by a male deputy chief technician, age twenty-four, with higher education, not a party member. He is listed as one who held a supervisory responsibility despite being compromised. During the postwar reoccupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union, this person’s family was designated a “kulak” household; their land was seized, and they were forcibly deported and resettled in a remote region of Siberia. So, the substance of the kompromat was that the subject, a baby at the time, was resettled with his parents as “son of a kulak.” While this is not said, his family history and personal experience as a child might lead him to hold a grudge against the Soviet regime.

Other aspects of family history that evoked suspicion were parents, siblings, or other close relatives who had held positions of prominence in Lithuanian life before the Soviet annexation of 1940, or who had collaborated with the wartime German occupation of 1941 to 1944, or who had avoided the Soviet reconquest of Lithuania in 1944 by fleeing westward, or who had stayed to resist Soviet rule during the armed insurgency of 1944 to 1953.

For example, a female secondary schoolteacher (age fifty-nine, with secondary education, not a party member) was listed as holding a supervisory position despite kompromat. The substance was that in independent Lithuania before the war, her husband had been a police chief (the Russian word used is derived from the German polizei). At the end of the war, the husband fled with the retreating Germans and now lived abroad. It seems the couple were no longer in contact (if they had been, it would likely have been mentioned). Among other examples, a female typist in the Panevézys town hall (age thirty-nine, with secondary education, not a party member), had been granted access to “top-secret” work despite the following circumstances: in 1948, one brother received a five-year term of forced labor as a supporter of armed nationalist groups; and in 1949, another brother was sentenced under the law of 4 June 1947 (against theft of state and public property).^[246] A young woman who managed a travel agency (age thirty-five, higher education, nonparty) was barred from foreign travel, because her father had served in the police under German occupation. All these people might be expected to have bitter feelings about what they had lost because of the Soviet occupation or the punishments their families had suffered for resistance.

Not all the circumstantial evidence was historical. Present-day circumstances and associations could also arouse suspicion. For example, a female secondary school teacher (age thirty-six, higher education, non-party), was reported to be living not far from “mailbox R-6478,” in other words, a strategic facility of some kind. There was more: the teacher had a close relative, an aunt, living in the United States. Finally, as a child, she had experienced forced resettlement. The outcome: the teacher’s request to travel to America to visit the aunt was denied. Living near a “mailbox” or a military establishment or having professional familiarity with a secret facility was also cited as kompromat in other cases where a foreign travel visa was refused. Even if nothing bad was known about their motivation, such a person had a capacity to do harm, and this raised a red flag for the authorities.

The involuntary circumstances that bred suspicion could amount to a cruel Catch-22. A male pensioner (age seventy-three, with secondary specialist education, nonparty) was refused a trip to Canada to visit his son. The kompromat that served as the basis for the refusal was that the pensioner lived alone and the son, who lived abroad, was wealthy. Nothing else was reported against either father or son. However, the circumstances implied that the son could easily support the father in Canada. If allowed to leave, the father had no strong reason to return home. The father’s loneliness, his separation from a son with the means to support him abroad, and lack of other family ties were the very reasons why he could not be allowed to make the visit. “Lives alone” or “Lacking family ties” was listed as kompromat in several other cases where permission to travel was denied.

All the forms of kompromat described so far were circumstances that the subject could not have changed. Other items indicate how the subject’s own choices could further shape the regime’s view of them. These choices could be far enough in the past to be considered historical, but they still carried weight. In 1948 a young woman had been given a ten-year sentence for supporting a nationalist group. Now a seamstress, in middle age, she was refused permission to travel abroad.

Of those listed as combining supervisory positions in the town with suspicious markers on their records, nearly one-third had spent time in a Soviet labor camp. Usually they had been convicted under the notorious Article 58, which was applied to counterrevolutionary crimes committed in the 1940s and early 1950s. The crimes in question stemmed typically from resistance to Soviet rule or collaboration with German occupation. They were punished by lengthy sentences, usually of ten years but sometimes of twenty-five (a term that replaced the death penalty between 1947 and 1950). What did such a sentence mean? It is a fact that, until the mid-1950s, those charged with such crimes could be convicted without evidence of guilty intention.^[247] Some acted as they did under a degree of coercion; others may have faced a choice between competing evils with no obvious “right” answer at the time. Still, many Lithuanians did choose to resist Soviet rule or support the German occupation, and to classify such actions as chosen seems more reasonable than the alternative.

Some cases look historical at first sight, but then they turn out to have involved more recent factors. As a child, the male deputy chief of a factory workshop (age thirty-seven, with higher education, a party member) had been resettled because he was born into a “kulak” family—something he did not choose. Later, as an adult, he chose to make things worse for himself. At some point, most likely when joining the party, he was required to write down a short summary of his life. In doing so, he omitted the compromising aspect—his “kulak” family origin, for which he had been resettled. This raised suspicion: a truly loyal applicant ought to have entrusted the party with the truth. It was coupled with another suspicious factor: his uncle had fled to the West in 1944 and now lived in the United States. The outcome was that the workshop chief was denied access to secret work, although he continued to be employed in the same position as before. A negative outcome also awaited a female schoolteacher who supplied contradictory information (perhaps in successive versions of her formal autobiography) about the fates of various relatives who were now missing and perhaps abroad. That they might be abroad was already compromising, but she compromised herself again by her efforts at concealment.

Amid the base materials, finally, there was gold—the kompromat provided by evidence of recent or current misbehavior. A deputy chief engineer (male, age thirty, with higher education, nonparty) was reported to be hostile to Soviet rule and dissatisfied with the existing order. Previously chief engineer, he had been refused clearance for top-secret work and demoted. But deputy chief engineer was still a position of trust, which he continued to hold despite the kompromat. Another engineer (male, age forty-three, with incomplete higher education, a party member) had also been denied access to secret work, but he was not dismissed. He had been disciplined once by the party for theft of public property (in other words, he had been the subject of a party investigation, but his party membership had saved him from prosecution). On top of this, his wife’s family was in contact with relatives in the United States. In i960 he had met up with American tourists in Vilnius—implicitly, without authority.) Such indiscretions were unusual—at least among those counted as holding down responsible jobs.

For those hoping to travel abroad, misconduct involving foreign tourists was fatal. Just a few months previously, without permission, a deputy head teacher (male, age thirty-six, a party member) had used his own private car to drive American tourists from Vilnius to Panevézys. Other kinds of unwise behavior involved rash confessions. A pensioner (female, age fifty-nine, non-party), whose husband was known to be living in the United States, was described as “indiscreet”: she was overheard saying things classed as disloyal. It was imprudent to praise the American way of life. It was especially careless to confide in a friend that, if allowed abroad, one might not come back. In fact, it was compromising even to admit to marital discord, because this suggested a weakening of the family ties that ought to ensure the responsible citizen’s return to the motherland. All such cases were refused a travel visa.

The data from Panevézys show that many people with kompromat were nonetheless allowed to hold jobs with some element of influence over others. Table 5.3 gives a few clues to what the KGB would overlook and what remained unacceptable. The table compares two groups, those cleared for top-secret work despite kompromat and those barred because of it. In Panevézys the top-secret sphere was very small, so we have only a few subjects—six in the cleared group and ten that were barred. Small numbers undermine the significance of the differences we see. That said, the demographics of the two groups (age, gender, education, and so forth) were very similar. But two differences are evident. First, those cleared were more likely to be party members. Perhaps the KGB saw this as providing some additional assurance of loyalty. Second, no one was cleared for top-secret work if the evidence on their files, of whatever kind, related to them personally (not to a family member) as an adult (not as a child).

A puzzle follows: Why were so many people with kompromat allowed to hold supervisory positions in the town, when so many more ordinary citizens were barred from foreign travel? On the face of it, secret work might seem more important to the state than foreign tourism. Why did the KGB screen the would-be tourists more rigorously than the managers?

A few factors suggest themselves. From the perspective of the KGB officer, the stakes involved in letting the “wrong” person travel abroad were very high. The outcome could be irreversible. On reaching a foreign country, where KGB surveillance was impeded, a tourist could defect. Permission to

travel might be and occasionally was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to abandon the Soviet motherland forever. As a defector in a foreign capital, a pensioner or a seamstress could do far more visible damage than a teacher or an engineer in their everyday duties in a small town in a Soviet province. Ordinary caution provides a plausible explanation for high rates of refusal.

By contrast, the risks of allowing the “wrong” person to start a career as a teacher or a deputy chief engineer could be managed. A new appointee, about whom suspicions lingered, could be watched. The damage they could do was real but limited. Mistakes could be reversed later by transferring the subject away from secret work or halting further promotion.

The greater lenience shown in employment decisions may also reflect another factor, one with wider significance. While the Soviet government was content to be represented abroad by citizen tourists of proven loyalty, it rarely had the need for any particular person to go. In contrast the state needed teachers and engineers everywhere, including in Lithuania. The state preferred its teachers and engineers to be above suspicion, but perhaps Lithuania had too few people like that. Its traumatic history loomed over so many who had been forced to make impossible choices in the past, and who now had to live under its shadow.

Perhaps there was an absolute shortage of guaranteed loyalty. Particularly in the early years of Soviet rule, native Lithuanians who combined the education needed for responsible work with a clean record may have been hard to find. Once the “usual suspects” were discounted, there might not have been enough people left to provide all the loyal teachers and managers that were needed. The data suggest that, in the face of a shortage, the Lithuania KGB learned to be flexible. Notably, if the only evidence against a person was historical or circumstantial, they could be allowed to rise, at least to the first rungs on the promotion ladder. But they could not be let out of the country. This was how Soviet Lithuania made its compromise with the tainted human resources available.

Every Soviet organization of significance received secret plans and other instructions from higher authority through a secure channel, maintained by its secret department. In turn, the secret department was staffed by party members and supervised directly by the KGB. Under these arrangements, the KGB was responsible not just for secret communications but also for selecting the people to fill the positions requiring access to the secret communications. In effect, there was a partition of the Soviet labor market between secret and nonsecret work that no one could cross without KGB clearance.

The Soviet economy was plagued by permanent shortages. The shortages, a result of the mobilization style of administrative allocation, extended to nearly all products from toothpaste and toilet paper to gasoline. Because there was a deficit of supply compared to demand, these were commonly known as “deficit commodities.” Because goods were in short supply, so were the workers needed to produce them. Perhaps not surprisingly, in Soviet Lithuania at least, it turns out that workers of certifiable loyalty were another deficit commodity.

The shortage of loyal managers in Lithuania had two proximate causes. On the supply side, the investigative capacity of the local KGB to investigate and resolve the large number of doubtful cases for clearance was limited. On the demand side, the sphere of secret work tended to expand faster than nonsecret employment. This left the KGB always struggling to catch up with the growing demand for cleared employees.

The Supply of Clearances

For a country of three million people, the Soviet Lithuania KGB was not a large organization. In the 1960s and early 1970s it employed around 1,200 officers and other salaried staff, two-thirds of them in Vilnius with the rest scattered around Lithuania’s other towns and villages. In Vilnius the counterintelligence administration had 140 career officers, of whom 26 belonged to its economic department.^[248]

The officers of the KGB economic department were probably a cut above the average. In 1977 three-quarters of economic department officers had college degrees.^[249] This compares very favorably with the wider Lithuanian workforce, less than half of whom had college experience (including incomplete) according to the 1970 census a few years earlier.^[250] To supplement their resources, they ran their own network of civilian informers in important factories and offices. The informers were also relatively well educated and motivated. As of 1968, there were 239 informers reporting to the economic department (a small fraction of the roughly 9,000 KGB informers of various categories in Lithuania at the time). The typical informer was an engineer, with higher education, aged 25 to 50 years and with 5 to 15 years’ experience of collaboration with the KGB. Of particular interest is that only 13 of the 239 informers had kompromat in their files. Of the 13, moreover, only five were recorded as having been blackmailed into cooperation; the others, although vulnerable to pressure, had agreed to work for the KGB without the pressure being exerted.^[251]The officers of the economic department had many duties. They were responsible for work on the railways and air transport, and in important industrial facilities, research institutes, and civil-defense organizations. In the facilities for which they were responsible, they were expected to organize surveillance, with particular scrutiny of the employees cleared for access to government secrets; to recruit additional informers; and to make security plans for events such as visits and exhibitions.^[252] Their duties included the raising of vigilance among the workers with regard to security lapses and suspicious behavior by means such as delivering interminable lectures in the workplace on “the struggle with the adversary’s ideological diversions.”^[253]

What was it like to work at a secure facility under KGB surveillance? As described by the historian Kristina Burinskaité, the territory of a closed facility was screened from regular passers-by and secured by controlled access. Employees’ workplace conversations were monitored and their contacts with visitors were restricted. Foreign visitors were excluded altogether or, if admitted, were shown equipment and products designed to mislead, while secret activities were suspended.^[254]

In short, the officers whose duty it was to investigate and certify the loyalty of those admitted to secret work were high in quality but few in number. They also had a vast range of competing responsibilities and priorities. Thus, the supply of clearances was limited by the resources available, which were scarce.

The Demand for Clearances

In just one year, 1973, the rather small KGB economic department issued 4,584 clearances in total—nearly 90 per week—but this was not enough to meet the demand. In any case, not all applications for clearance succeeded. In the same year, 321 candidates (or 7 percent of the total) were rejected.^[255] When the KGB barred an employee from secret work, it generally caused difficulties for the managers responsible for their selection, who were already invested in the unsuccessful candidate, and they now became reluctant to enforce the KGB’s decision.

How large was the sphere of secret employment? In Soviet Lithuania in the 1960s, more than 100 offices and factories were secured by direct KGB supervision. Some were industrial plants, often specialized in research and defense-related production—Lithuania did not have any weapon plants, but there was considerable emphasis on defense-related lines including radar, radio electronics, and marine engineering. Other workplaces that demanded KGB regulation were focused on Lithuania’s topography (mapping and aerial photography) and external borders (border security, ports, and airports). Fisheries came under KGB supervision because trawlers could be used to spy on foreign shipping and their crews might find opportunities to defect. The network utilities supplying power, gas, and water, and railway, highway, mail, and cable and wireless services also came under surveillance, as did the Vilnius offices of the Soviet Union’s planning and statistical agencies and central bank.^[256]

The number of KGB-regulated facilities increased only a little over the period of our data (1961 to 1971), but their workforce doubled, rising from 98,000 at the beginning of the 1960s to 200,000 at the beginning of the 1970s. This was substantially faster than the growth of aggregate employment in Lithuanian state-owned enterprises and offices, so the share of the secret sphere also expanded from 14 to 17 percent of public employment.^[257]

Not everyone that worked in the secure facilities required access to secret communications. A handful of workplaces—six in 1961, ten by 1971— was designated “especially important” (osobo vazhnyi, the highest grade of secrecy). In these facilities around one-third of the workforce was cleared for access to paperwork classified “secret” or higher, and their number tripled over the 1960s.^[258] The increase would have been even greater, but for a purge in 1963 (discussed below) which resulted in a sudden large drop in the number of cleared employees.

At the same time secret work was not confined to the parts of the economy subject to direct KGB supervision. Managers across the entire economy also required access to secret government correspondence, not just those in key plants or offices. It is more difficult to identify the limits of the secret sphere in that wider sense. The overall number of security clearances in Soviet Lithuania is known only for particular years and sectors. In 1979, for example, a total of 14,000 personnel held clearance for working at the highest grade of classification—“of special importance.”^[259] This was around 1 percent of the public-sector workforce.^[260] It seems certain that much larger numbers were cleared for lower grades of secrecy. In 1973, for example, the KGB issued more than ten times as many clearances for “top secret” and “secret” work as for work “of special importance.”^[261] While an estimate based on a single year should have large error margins around it, it is reasonable to infer that work classified at any level could have embraced one-tenth or more of public employees.

The size and growth of the secret sphere were driven partly from above, by government policies, partly from below as managers responded to incentives created by the economic system. Government policies and priorities were of first importance: they allowed the armed forces and the defense industry to command a growing share of national resources (as discussed in Chapter 7). In Lithuania, they caused industrial development to concentrate on radio electronics, the fastest growing branch of the Soviet defense industry.^[262]

The economic system itself shaped incentives in the market for loyal and responsible employees in two ways. First, the permanent labor shortage enabled employees of all kinds to move easily from job to job at the first occasion for dissatisfaction. High turnover among cleared employees necessitated a continuous flow of new clearance applications. Cleared workers, experienced in handling secret communications, sometimes left the secret sphere. Their replacements were hard to find, and everyone suffered from the newcomers’ inexperience.

Second, there was a tendency for managers just at the edge of the secrecy blanket, but not quite under it, to try to tug it over themselves for warmth. The comfort that they sought came from the privileges of secret work—the ready access to supplies, perhaps also the social aura associated with things that one can’t talk about. Managers knew, for example, that classifying a particular line of work as secret would improve supplies and other conditions of work. As a result, new lines of work could be classified or overclassified while old lines were not declassified. Another example: the KGB met with growing numbers of requests for clearance of staff from facilities that were not secure themselves but sought links with secure facilities that they could not develop without personal access.^[263]

Viewed in this light, the disproportionate growth of the Soviet secret sphere can be thought of as a mix of real growth and inflation. The real growth was fueled by Soviet defense priorities and industrial plans, which steered resources into the Soviet armed forces and supporting industries. The inflation arose from the efforts of managers on the edges of the secret sphere to classify and overclassify their own activities to improve bargaining power relative to others. As one would expect in a command system driven by preparations for “future war,” there were no attempts to cut back on the secret sphere’s real growth, but there were periodic efforts to stamp down on secrecy inflation by reducing the number of posts requiring clearance. In 1963, for example, the industrial and science positions counted as secret work were abruptly cut back by 30 percent across the Lithuanian public sector.^[264]

Living with Shortage

In the market for loyal and responsible employees, therefore, demand was persistently buoyant and expanding. As for supply, the KGB vetting process limited the number of candidates that could be considered over a given period. It appears that the supply always fell short of demand. The evidence of shortage is that, when the KGB came visiting, its inspectors kept on discovering persons in positions involving secret work who had not been cleared or who had been refused clearance. When these people were identified, managers used delay and negotiation to avoid having to replace them.

For managers, full compliance with the clearance system was an impossible goal. Managers regularly nominated obviously unsuitable people for clearance: an alcoholic who repeatedly lost secret documents in his charge, a former Christian Democrat who had served a term in prison for anti-Soviet resistance, and close relatives of emigrants and resisters.^[265] The clearance process took too long—so long that managers lost patience and allowed the candidate to start work anyway. When the rejection came through, the manager’s headache was then to explain the situation to the newly recruited subordinate without mentioning the KGB.^[266] Some other pretext had to found to justify dismissal—bad behavior or poor performance.^[267]

(The same secrecy applied to decisions to refuse foreign travel.^[268])

Sometimes, managers just ignored the decision. In Kaunas three such cases were reported in the autumn of 1967. The emergence of “serious” kompromat in the case of a senior engineer led the KGB to cancel—for a second time!—his clearance, but the transport ministry then failed to transfer him to other duties. Also seriously compromised were the planning and dispatch department chief of a marine engineering works “and his close relatives.” By its nature, the department chief’s work involved secret matters, but neither the factory director nor the party committee had taken steps to move him on. At a power equipment repair factory, the equipment department chief was barred from secret work on grounds of serious kompromat. After this, the director appointed him deputy chief engineer, making him no. 3 in the factory hierarchy. Frequent absences of the director (no. 1) and chief engineer (no. 2) at the same time now gave the deputy unhindered access to all the secret correspondence reaching the factory.^[269]

The historian Saulius Grybkauskas suggests that the KGB had limited capacity to manage the managers that worked around the system “for the good of the cause.” It was hard to discipline passive resistance. Directors appeared to survive conflicts with KGB officers without suffering lasting career damage. The director of the Elfa electrical engineering factory explained how he worked around the KGB. The visiting KGB officer was known as the “guardian angel.” On several occasions the guardian angel ordered the director to remove politically unreliable employees from their duties. The director did not want to comply, given the difficulty of replacing them. The trick was to delay action long enough to take advantage of the turnover of the guardians. When the old one moved on, the incoming officer took time to catch up with the status of the tasks that the old one left unfinished. The director successfully exploited the guardian angels’ circulation to delay action continuously, in the case of one employee, for almost twenty years.^[270]

To summarize, you could work around the KGB. More than anything else, this marks a change in the political atmosphere since the 1930s, when to ignore the secret police was to write one’s own suicide note.^[271] At the same time, playing poker with state security still took nerve and effort. In other words, you could work around the KGB, but the workarounds were not costless. A manager would play the KGB only for valuable stakes, such as the capacity of the enterprise to fulfil the state plan.

While the KGB could be put off, there is no evidence that it could be bought. There are no cases on file of corrupt side-payments or other means by which managers could have bought the guardian angels’ favor.

The endemic shortage of cleared personnel may have been greater in the Western borderlands than elsewhere. In the Russian Republic the problem was reportedly less acute. Irina Dunskaya, who left the Soviet Union in 1983, specified the grounds for refusal of employment in the special design bureau (SKB) of the Moscow Radio Plant:

If one was ever in a German prison or came to the attention of German occupation authorities; one has taken part in a dissident movement; one has applied for emigration from the U.S.S.R.; often, Point-4 [a person’s ethnic label] was used to summarily exclude Jews from the Radio Plant.

At the time of writing (in 1980), she concluded:

Almost anyone in the Soviet Union can be cleared for classified work, since the children of opponents of the 1917 revolution (tsarist officers, big landowners, industrialists, the nobility) has passed away or grown old, as have those who came under the German occupation during the Second World War.^[272]

That may have been the case in Russia.^[273] The Western borderlands were relatively rich in kompromat. For residents of the Baltic region in the 1960s and 1970s, the taints of parentage and of resistance to Soviet rule were still comparatively fresh.

The price paid by the targets of suspicion varied from one period to another. From its first years the Soviet regime began to collect and use historical records, surveys, census data, and police registrations to catalog the population by markers of political and social unreliability.^[274] During the Civil War, the principles of class justice allowed revolutionary tribunals to decide who was guilty of a crime against the Revolution based on their social background rather than on evidence of complicity.^[275] By the 1930s the NKVD had card indexes listing 10 to 15 percent of the population (probably 15 to 30 percent of working adults), classified by the degree of social danger that each person represented.^[276] In the “mass operations” and “national operations” of 1937 and 1938, the personal records of millions of “former people” became the basis on which they were selected for detention or execution on suspicion of being enemies. This included former landowners, “kulaks,” traders, priests, and ethnic minorities thought to harbor loyalties to bordering states.^[277]

A problem of statistical discrimination is that for every correct prediction there are false positives and false negatives. When communist regimes tried to predict who would turn out to be their enemies, false negatives were those who, lacking grounds for suspicion, passed the test, were classified loyal, and then rose to positions from which they could exploit their in-group privilege for some selfish or antisocial purpose. The false positives were the innocent victims: loyal citizens who aspired to education, promotion, and rewards such as foreign travel but were held back by some suspicious marker from the past that assigned them to the out-group.

Stalin understood that false positives (or innocent victims) were inevitable. “Because it is not easy to recognize the enemy,” he declared, “the goal is achieved if only 5 percent of those killed are truly enemies.”^[278] Nikolai Yezhov, who implemented this approach in the Great Terror, echoed him: “Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.”[279] As it turned out, however, false positives were not the only problem. After war broke out in 1941, many false negatives appeared. These were the millions of Soviet citizens who ended up on the side of the enemy, although there had been no reason to suspect them of disloyalty beforehand.^[280]

If Stalin never had misgivings, his successors understood that mass killing based on suspicion was far too costly, given the unreliable benefits. Twenty years after Stalin’s death, in the period from which we take our data, those who turned out to have a suspicious background or associations were more likely to be watched and barred from college education, promotion, and foreign travel than detained or killed. Thus, the price of suspicion was dramatically lower in the 1960s and 1970s than in the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless, suspicion remained the basis of exclusion from responsible work.

How did this affect the evolution of the Soviet system? The idea that the Soviet state persistently excluded the most competent or talented people is of long standing. Describing Stalin’s creation of the nomenklatura system of personnel selection, his biographer Stephen Kotkin noted: “Stalin put a premium on competence, which he interpreted in terms of loyalty”—that is, party members were classed as competent if and only if they would unswervingly follow the party line and loyally implement party directives.^[281]

Economists Egorov, Sonin, and Zakharov take this line of reasoning further. Egorov and Sonin argue that the people in the dictator’s circle that he should fear most are the most competent ones, because they could replace him. On that basis, they predict, when considering whom to promote, a dictator will impose a more demanding loyalty test on people of greater competence than on others of lower capability, who pose less of a threat.^[282] In other words, the security-minded dictator should trade competence for loyalty. On similar lines, Aleksei Zakharov argues that dictators who value competence and promote more capable subordinates will have shorter tenures. The more far-sighted the dictator, the greater the premium he should place on loyalty over competence (not the other way around, as is sometimes suggested).^[283]

Adverse selection is the predicted outcome. Adverse selection is also what contemporary observers thought they saw. “Negative selection” for “servility, brutality, and coarseness of mind” are the words used by Robert Conquest, the historian of Stalin’s terror, to describe the formation of the Soviet state’s executive class.^[284] Nearly the same words were used by the Polish economist Wlodzimierz Brus when he remarked that communism tended to “negative selection” for “servility and conformity.”^[285]

In fact, as we have seen, the Soviet state chose its personnel from a pool out of which the KGB had filtered anyone that might reasonably be suspected of being a freethinker or nonconformist, anyone with a cosmopolitan outlook or with close links to the wider world, anyone whose life experience or contact with other cultures and ways of life might lead them to resist the Soviet way of doing things or introduce a discordant perspective. This looks like a mechanism for the adverse selection that contemporaries described.

Stepping back from the study of communism, the wider social-science literature suggests that the social costs of discrimination arise through two channels. One channel is the quality of competition; the other is the quality of collaboration.

The Quality of Competition

Dividing people into an in-group and a discriminated out-group impairs the competition that allows individual talents to find their best use. Negative selection results in the short run, because more talented out-group members are kept out of the promotion pool, and their place is taken by less talented in-group members. Discrimination in education will multiply those losses in the long run, because educational capital will be misallocated in favor of the less-talented in-group members.

While the discriminatory barriers facing women and ethnic minorities in Western market economies are lower than they used to be, the costs of the barriers that remain are thought to remain large. A complete elimination of racial barriers to labor market competition from the French economy could raise its GDP by 16 percent.^[286] A study of the US economy finds that declining barriers to the employment of women and Black people explain two-fifths of real income growth over the half century from i960 to 2010; reduced educational disadvantages produced greater gains than reduced discrimination in labor hiring. Complete elimination of remaining barriers would raise US GDP by a further 10 percent.^[287]

On the side of employees, KGB discrimination also created disincentives. It raised the personal risk associated with investment in skills and qualifications. A person could spend years studying and training, and then KGB kompromat could stop their career in its tracks. For some employees—in Lithuania, a significant number—the risk of exposure of a dubious record could become a reason to avoid gaining the competences that would put them in line for promotion. For them, KGB regulation may have made a quiet life in a low-skill, low-wage environment preferable to seeking distinction and risking the scrutiny that would follow. Their talents would remain unused or undeveloped.

It remains the case that every society places some barriers in the way of talented people from less-privileged backgrounds. Before communism, interwar Lithuania placed many restrictions on the opportunities available to women and to ethnic minorities—Jews, in particular.^[288] Rather than focus on the negative (discrimination against those who became outcasts under communist rule), should we celebrate the positive (discrimination in favor of formerly marginalized groups)?^[289] Or did communist rule just replace one caste by another?

There is no doubt that the coming of Soviet rule to Lithuania widened opportunities for many women and for many Jews.^[290] What Soviet rule did not do is create a competitive labor market. Rather, it attached labels to the population, allowing authority and privilege to be redistributed in favor of those classed as loyal. This favored Jews who were willing to commit to the establishment of Soviet rule. Later, it worked against them when they were reclassified as potential agents of the new state of Israel. Rather than levelling the playing field, Soviet class labels replaced old forms of discrimination with new ones, fixing in place a new stratification of society.^[291]

The Quality of Cooperation

Another channel for the effects of discrimination is the quality of cooperation. The idea is that a group of people with different but complementary capabilities, experiences, and insights will collaborate and innovate more productively than a group of people who are all the same.^[292] By implication, excluding out-group members can only reduce the diversity of the talent pool, with groupthink and stagnation as outcomes.

Diversity might not be an unmixed blessing. It is thought that an increase in the genetic diversity or ethnolinguistic diversity of a population might also disrupt society by weakening solidarity and promoting conflicts, at least beyond a point.^[293] The key here is that to realize the gains from diversity requires diversity to be expressed. There can be no gain from diversity if people cannot voice their differences of experience and insight, and if those differences are not allowed to bring change to established ways of thinking and doing. The challenge, therefore, is to manage change without slipping into violence—a continuous balancing act of moderated disruption.

Soviet institutions ruled out this balancing act. Suppressing disruption was literally the first priority of KGB counterintelligence.^[294] The Soviet leaders feared that open disputes over Soviet goals and values could only weaken the authority of the ruling party and lead to civil conflict. In their eyes, the diversity arising from “alien” social origins and nonconformist outlooks was always a threat to be suppressed. An example is provided by the considerable ethnolinguistic variation across the length and breadth of the Soviet landmass. This diversity was an unavoidable fact, but Soviet leaders from Stalin onward were determined to minimize its political significance. In 1930 Stalin declared that, until they inevitably disappeared, ethnic cultural differences should be confined to matters of “form” (such as dress and language), while all Soviet cultures would share the same socialist “content.”^[295]

This formula continued to rule Soviet “nationalities” policy long after its author was no longer mentioned. It was not contradicted, at least in the eyes of the authorities, by universal compulsory ethnic self-labelling, or by official support for non-Russian languages and non-Russian elites, because the distinctions of ethnicity and language were supposed to be merely formal, while meanings and practices were expected to conform precisely with the substance of official norms and central directives.^[296]

The KGB system for protecting government secrecy and security was designed to keep people with discordant values and life experiences out of positions of responsibility. These people, the excluded minority, may not have been any smarter, or more knowledgeable, or more talented than others. What they had to offer was simply different. The risk that the ingredient of nonconformity might lead to change in the design or working arrangements of the state and planned economy was exactly the reason they had to be excluded.

To conclude, the secret uses of KGB kompromat capture another aspect of the Soviet secrecy/capacity tradeoff. The more the Soviet regime tried to improve its security by excluding suspicious people from secret work, the more it harmed the human capacities of the state. In the late 1930s, Stalin’s preference for loyalty over competence became so extreme that the millions of people being killed or imprisoned included even world-class scientists and engineers; at the same time, important branches of science and technology were handed over to out-and-out frauds such as Trofim Lysenko, whose mistaken pseudo-Marxist claims about plant selection and adaptation were forced on agricultural specialists and farmers.^[297]

By the 1970s, Stalin’s successors had had time to revise his legacy. The Soviet state no longer tried to kill out-group members or physically exclude them by imprisonment or resettlement in the remote interior. For the most part, it tried to keep them within the community while discriminating against them in a calibrated way, aiming to exclude them from managerial responsibility and influence over others. They aimed to recover some state capacity while sufficiently protecting their secret channels of communication. At the point where we observe it in this chapter, the Soviet state was more open to competing and diverse talents than in Stalin’s day. Still, it remained highly secretive and suspicious of those who had the ambition to serve it, and there was still a price to be paid. Thus, the Soviet state remained on the downward slope of the secrecy/capacity frontier.

The mechanism already described was as follows. The KGB was the gatekeeper to the world of secret work, and secret kompromat provided the KGB with its instrument of control. This use of secrecy promoted the security of the ruling party leaders, but it also damaged the state through its human capacity. On average, personnel were selected, based on their compliance with an approved template of family history and lifestyle choices. The diagnosis of negative selection, as Conquest and Brus suggested, fits the story. Selected for “servility?” Perhaps in many cases, if not necessarily in all. For “conformity?” Yes; in fact, that was the point.

The Soviet state was organized on a set of core principles. Knowledge was power. Monopoly of power required a monopoly of information, from which enemies were to be excluded. Enemies were hard to single out from the mass, so potential enemies were identified on suspicion.

Suspicion was based on evidence of behaviors, associations, and family backgrounds that failed to conform to the Soviet template of the good citizen. This “compromising evidence” or kompromat was used to grade people politically and socially and to promote them or hold them back.

In Stalin’s time suspicion alone could send someone to the execution cellar. After the Thaw, the mark of suspicion was reduced to a brake or a barrier to advancement. But kompromat continued to play an important role in administering secrecy. The uses of kompromat that we have looked at in this chapter were to decide who should be allowed to make foreign visits and who should be allowed to work with government secrets.

In addition, kompromat was itself secret. Because it was secret, it was beyond verification, and decisions made on its basis were beyond challenge.

The cases we have examined are drawn from postwar Soviet Lithuania. The substance of kompromat was mostly historical and often circumstantial. In the years of world war and postwar insurgency, many Lithuanians struggled to choose among competing evils. The personal records of this traumatic period provided many grounds for KGB suspicion. Less often, it was more recent circumstances and indiscretions that provided the basis to sideline or exclude them.

The personal consequences of KGB discrimination were milder than in the past, but still left their mark on the subjects’ lives. For one person, a dream of family reunion was shattered; for another, their career slowed or came to a sudden, unexplained stop.

The consequences for the state and society can be inferred. When kompromat was used to screen candidates for employment in secret government, it acted as a filter for nonconformity. The Soviet template of the respectable citizen prescribed a set of conventional family backgrounds and associations, life experiences, attitudes, and behaviors. Those who deviated from the template invited suspicion and discrimination, leading to exclusion from many avenues for personal advancement.

A large social science literature suggests that the homogenization of society on these lines will have two effects. One is that there will be less conflict or disruption—and suppressing disruption was a key KGB priority. The other is that there will be less innovation. Perhaps the nonconformists might be better, or more talented, or smarter than others. Or, perhaps not; it might be just that the nonconformists are different, and cooperation among people who are different from each other is more valuable than cooperation among people who are all the same.

This suggests another aspect of the trade-off between secrecy and state capacity. The Soviet leaders’ quest for security drove them to restrict recruitment into the business of the Soviet state to those graded above suspicion. The outcome was to reduce the human capacities of the state.