In claiming that communist rulers wanted to hold state power and build the state, I do not exclude that their program extended to other things as well—to build a modern, technologically progressive, well-defended society, for example. But for all the things the rulers wanted, they saw one instrument—a strong, capable, multifunctional state. Power was what made the state their instrument, and, for that and for their own survival, they wanted to hold onto power at any price. Secrecy helped to keep the rulers in power, but the same secrecy also ate into the capacity of their instrument to deliver their program. This was part of the price they were willing to pay to retain power.
The idea of the secrecy/capacity tradeoff suggests rational choice. A public-choice perspective would imply that the government can calculate and freely choose the degree of secrecy most consonant with its preferences.[120] From this perspective, secrecy looks like a policy, similar to a tax rate or a speed limit, that can be varied in line with changing circumstances and needs.
To what extent did communist regimes consciously choose the degree of secrecy, knowing the consequences of doing so? Does the government of any country actually choose the amount of secrecy in this deliberative, calculating way? Doesn’t the amount of secrecy that the government inherited, to which everyone has become habituated, weigh more heavily than any calculation? Was the level of Soviet secrecy really a calculated choice?
There are several approaches to this issue, and public choice is not the only angle. To understand the responsiveness of the degree of secrecy to a changing world, we could range the alternative models on a spectrum, with secrecy more easily recalculated and fine tuned at one end, and more inherited from the past and inflexible at the other. To simplify, secrecy might be a policy (flexible and freely chosen), a culture (inherited and predetermined), or an institution (with elements of both).
As discussed above, the idea of a secrecy/capability tradeoff suggests that the government should freely decide the combination that is best suited to its idea of the national interest. If circumstances or needs change, the degree of secrecy should change. In this view, secrecy is just a policy that can be recalibrated and varied as flexibly as a tax rate. This idea has at least some merit, for Soviet secretiveness was not a constant. As discussed in Chapter 1 (and further illustrated in Chapter 4), Soviet secrecy was more intense than secrecy in prerevolutionary Russia, while the late 1920s, late 1930s, and late 1940s saw consecutive increases in the degree of secrecy, before a rebound in the 1950s.
Empirical support for the idea that secrecy can be varied in response to changes in the context is found in the work (already mentioned) of Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin.[121] They note that, to retain power, authoritarian rulers need to control both society and their own bureaucracy Control of the media helps them control society, but it also impedes control of the bureaucracy because bureaucrats become the main source of information about their own performance. Media freedom gives the ruler better information about bureaucratic performance, but also empowers the opposition. But this problem is more acute for some rulers than for others. An oil-rich regime can maintain itself by spending or sharing oil rents; it need have less concern for bureaucratic performance. Egorov and coauthors show that media freedom is inversely related to the size of a country’s oil reserves: the more an incumbent ruler can expect to rely on oil rents, the less is media freedom in the country. The direction of the effect is unambiguous, and its timescale is within a few years. This provides support for the idea that the degree of censorship, at least, can be varied in response to changes in the regime’s environment.
While Soviet secretiveness was not a constant, it was clearly less flexible than, say, a tax rate. Major alterations transpired no more frequently than once a decade, and there seems to have been little fine-tuning in between. This suggests that secrecy was not so much continuously variable as a regime (the word they used themselves) with considerable persistence, adjusted rather occasionally and then quite sharply.
The idea of secrecy as a flexible policy instrument suffers from another notable weakness. It rests on the idea that costs and benefits are well defined and measurable, so that the government can balance them and find the right degree of secrecy by watching the balance change as secrecy is adjusted in real time—an implausible scenario. If optimization did take place, and if reoptimization happened when circumstances changed, it must have taken the form of time-consuming trial, error, and correction.
The idea of trial and error does not contradict optimization in general; on the contrary, much real-world optimization takes that form. But it certainly implies that finding the optimum might be much more difficult than Figure 2.1 would suggest.
A Culture of Secrecy
An opposite approach to secrecy can be found in the idea of culture— that is, the degree of Soviet secrecy might have been the outcome of a secretive culture. The word culture is often a way of capturing the sense of shared norms and practices that persist unchanged among a population or a subgroup over long periods of time. Often it is associated with the transmission of identity: look, we do things this way, not because it happens to be efficient, but because we are who we are. Cultures change, and a culture of secrecy might be made to change by external pressure, such as a competing culture or counterculture of openness, but cultures do not change of their own accord.[122] A characteristic weakness of the “culture of secrecy” approach might be the lack of a clear sense of who are the agents of cultural persistence and what motivates them. But perhaps this is not required, because if one culture is equipped to suppress another, it is surely a culture of secrecy.
The idea of a communist culture of secrecy is clearly exemplified by the idea of “conspirative norms”: the Bolsheviks explicitly patterned their governmental practices on the habits they developed for survival in the revolutionary underground.[123] Once the party came out into the open and seized power, it did not change its habits but rather formalized them in a written code, so that conspirativeness became a way of ruling. On this interpretation, extreme secrecy was not so much a choice as an inheritance that no one could avoid—not only a way of ruling but a way of being that was handed down from one Bolshevik generation to the next.
On this reading, Soviet leaders of the following generations had no alternative but to continue the culture of secrecy. They did not calculate how they did things; they would have been able to fine-tune it only with great difficulty, and they could not abandon it. Even Mikhail Gorbachev departed from it only under the pressure of extreme events that could not be denied, such as the Chernobyl catastrophe.[124]
There is clearly something to the idea of a secretive culture, not only communist but also Russian. For hundreds of years, Russia has been ruled by secretive councils organized around the figure of a tsar, then a general secretary, and now a president.[125] From time to time, Russia has become more open, but such periods have been brief, followed quickly by a return to “normal” secrecy.
120
“Public choice” is essentially the idea that one can understand political activity in the same way as economic activity, that is, individual political actors pursue their perceived self-interest by allocating resources and cooperating or competing with others subject to material and institutional constraints. See Shughart, “Public Choice.”
122
In the context of US secrecy, this language is found on almost every page of the chairman’s foreword to the Report of the Moynihan Commission, xxxi- xlv, as well as throughout the report itself. In the Soviet context see Mikoyan, “Eroding the Soviet ‘Culture of Secrecy’”; Zakharova, “Trust in Bureaucracy and Technology.”
123
Lih, “Lenin and Bolshevism,” 58, traces the Bolshevik idea of “conspirativeness” back to the revolutionary underground of 1906.
125
On the secret councils of Imperial Russia, see Tarschys, “Secret Institutions in Russian Government.”