Inspection
From time to time, external audits gave rise to scandals. Best known is the Gosplan affair of 1949. Nikolai Voznesenskii, the chief of planning, was a younger favorite of Stalin, but in the spring of that year he lost the dictator’s confidence. An investigation revealed that many secret and top-secret papers were missing from Gosplan. The report noted, sinisterly, that no one had yet been prosecuted “as the law demands.”[148]
Other audits that can be found in the archives cover a range of years and types of organization.[149] They typically exposed violations similar to those found in Gosplan, including failures to use and store classified paperwork securely, and a steady trickle of lost instructions, reports, internal publications, photographs, maps, and security passes. These could give rise to sharp criticism, but the lethal consequences of the Gosplan affair were exceptional.
Destruction or Transfer to the Archive
The secret document’s life course ended with selection for destruction or the archive. Numerous records of this stage populate the archives. They take the by-now-familiar form of an affidavit signed by two or more officers, listing files selected for incineration because they had “lost practical importance” or “had no value.” Some are brief (e.g., “today we destroyed so many files”) while others itemize every record destroyed over many pages.[150]
Given the quantities of paperwork destroyed each year, it is not surprising that mistakes were made. Deviations from the record were a nightmare for honest officials and an opportunity for dishonest ones. It was difficult to tell the difference after the fact. When documents went missing, everyone would blame each other, while those closest to the event would maintain that the missing documents had been destroyed without a record being kept. Thus, they were willing to admit to procedural violations, which was not as bad as losing state secrets. Conversely, one might ask whether the process of destruction gave scope to cover up the loss or misappropriation of documents by recording them as incinerated. This could be detected only if a document listed as destroyed, but in reality missing, subsequently turned up intact. Exactly this happened in the Gosplan affair, when thirty-three documents listed as destroyed turned up in the home of an official of Gosplan’s secret department.[151]
The choice between destruction and transfer to the archive also selected the documentation that is available today for historical research. In general terms, we are told, documents were destroyed when they were judged to have neither operational nor historical value. In fact, the former Soviet archives that have been opened are full of records of historical value, including “secret plans, reports, minutes, decisions, appeals, and the official and private correspondence of citizens from the highest authorities in the Kremlin to the humblest provincial petitioner.”[152] In contrast, we have no idea of the historical value of what was incinerated.
As for volume, how much paperwork might the archived records represent, compared to what was discarded? Estimates of the proportions of documentation of federal agencies destined for the US National Archives range from “1-3%” (an overall average) to 20 percent in the case of the FBI, the internal security functions of which would appear to match most closely those of the KGB.[153] In the Soviet case we have not the faintest idea of the proportion destroyed. Quite possibly, the tens of millions of formerly secret historical documents that have kept both Russian and Western scholars so busy over the last thirty years are only a small fraction of the cumulative total of Soviet party and state paperwork that circulated through the history of the Soviet Union. We will return to this problem below.
Soviet procedures for handling classified paperwork were evidently costly. Just as a business must set part of its revenue aside to meet taxes paid in money, Soviet organizations had to set aside resources to meet the requirements of secrecy regulation. These regulations acted on the turnover of Soviet political and economic business like a tax on every transaction made. The tax was levied on the paperwork through which the Soviet system did its business. The tax was paid by every facility and office in the work done by its managers, supported by the white-collar staff of the secret departments, to register and trace every classified document through its life course. The consideration and determination of every significant issue required the exchange of secret paperwork, and this paperwork incurred the secrecy tax every time it changed hands. A personal instruction might change hands only once or twice, but a single decree that was distributed from Moscow to every establishment of a ministry or every province or district could change hands hundreds or thousands of times, with the tax being paid each time.
Considered as a tax on Soviet political and economic transactions, Soviet secrecy had two special properties. First, it was a “cascading” tax in the sense that it was levied on every stage of the original document’s lifecourse and on every stage in the life of the derivative paperwork produced to assure the government that the tax had been paid. Second, the secrecy tax did not yield a revenue to anyone: it was entirely consumed in the act of collecting it, resulting in a deadweight loss.
The cascading property of the secrecy tax was a result of the reflexive quality of Soviet secretiveness. Secrecy covered not only all the original tangible or intangible objects that were secret, but also the existence of secrets, including the regulations that protected them. When classified information was distributed, not only its content but also the facts that it existed and was distributed were classified. This affected the system of accounting for secrets because the derivative paperwork created by logging and auditing original secret documents was also classified secret, and so had to be accounted for in subsequent inventories and inspections, the documentation of which had to be kept secret and accounted for in turn and so on ad infinitum. As a result, the secrecy tax had an internal multiplier: each new original secret increased the total cost of secrecy by more than its own cost. Much of what we find in the former Soviet archives, such as inventories of documents including page after page that lists ledgers, inventories, and certificates of transfer and destruction of documents, is explained by this multiplier.
The secrecy tax provides a simple example of how secrecy made the Soviet political and economic system more secure, while at the same time reducing its capacity. Secrecy threw sand into the Soviet machine in the same way that transaction taxes and trade costs throw sand into the machine of any economy based on exchange.
Secrecy procedures worked in the same way as an oppressive and distorting tax, only to the extent that officials complied with it. Alternatives to tax compliance are tax avoidance and tax evasion. As in the world of real taxes, avoiding the secrecy tax required officials to find adaptations that would satisfy the demands of the secrecy regime more efficiently, while staying within the rules. By contrast, secrecy tax evasion involved rule breaking. How much was there of each?
Compliance
On the side of compliance, the mass of internal inventories suggests near universal alignment with secrecy regulations. In many offices, it seems, years went by without a single sheet going missing. It was worthy of note when someone was willing to admit that one document in a thousand or ten thousand had gone astray. Apparently isolated violations were reported to Moscow and pursued vigorously. As previously discussed, when a police officer lost an informer’s files and failed to report it, the loss was uncovered in less than a month. When a manager was implicated in the loss of a classified item, he was pursued for it for years. These documents give the strong impression of an orderly system of record keeping and tracking where mistakes and deviations were rare.
148
Khlevniuk et al., eds, Politbiuro TsK VPK(b), 293-300. Voznesenskii was afterward arraigned and executed for treason and undermining the economy (Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace, 83-89).
149
See, in addition to those already cited, a Stalin-era MGB inspection of Gosprodsnab, the state committee for supply of consumer and industrial goods, reported at second hand in Hoover/RGANI, 6/6/1650, 21-23 (report to KPK chairman Shkiriatov, signed by responsible controller Byshov, June 1953); and on similar lines a Brezhnev-era report on local government and party organizations in Soviet Lithuania in Hoover/LYA K-1/3/670, 55-61 (report to the Lithuanian party Central Committee, signed by KGB chair Petkevicius, 31 March 1969). Hoover/ LYA K-1/3/670, 88-91 (to Lithuanian Council of Ministers chairman Manyusis I. A., signed by LSSR KGB chair Petkevicius, 1 April 1969).
150
Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2575, 17 (deed of file destruction signed by MVD GULAG security administration cryptographer of secretariat Chernenko and filing officer of secretariat Ivanova, 17 May 1951); Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2588, 13-37 (deed of file destruction signed by MVD GULAG security administration operation department chief of third division Shipkov, senior operational commission Kharchevnikov, and secretary of operations department Kalmykova, 1 April 1952). Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2588, 63-69 (deed of destruction, signed by MVD GULAG security administration operations department, senior operational commissioner Kharchevnikov, senior veterinary officer Kuz’kin, and secretary Kalmykova, 26 July 1952). Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2588,78-79 (deed of destruction, signed by MVD GULAG security administration, operations department deputy chief Khanevskii, senior operational commissioner Dmitriev, senior veterinary officer Kuz’kin, 14 August 1952), referring to a 32-page appendix listing each document destroyed); Hoover/GARF R9414/1/2590, 29-30 (selection of documentary materials of the USSR MVD GULAG security administration subject to destruction, signed by chief of secretariat Teterevenkov and four others, 16 December 1952).
153
The website of the US National Archives and Records administration observes: “Of all documents and materials created in the course of business conducted by the United States federal government, only i%-3% are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever” http://www.archives .gov/about/. Haines and Langbart, Unlocking the Files of the FBI, xvi, report: “In 1984 the National Archive proposed and the FBI accepted recommendations for the FBI Records Retention Schedule, which would preserve approximately 20 percent of all Bureau records as permanently valuable and allow for the destruction of the rest.”