Where did compliance come from? For loyal public servants there was the internal psychological reward of adherence to a shared code, the code of conspirativeness. No doubt this was reinforced by the expectation that loyal compliance would be rewarded eventually by career advancement. It is evident that compliance could not be taken for granted. For those more focused on the job at hand than on abstract political values, such as research workers, secrecy regulations could be a source of frustration: they interfered with workflow and the sharing of information.[154] Other frustrations of secret work were the greater difficulty of getting permission to travel abroad or public acknowledgment of achievements. Despite this, secret work also brought personal rewards. Secret work was of higher priority, so employees could expect higher salaries and larger bonuses, better conditions of work and housing, and better supplies of both working materials and consumer goods and services.[155] Finally, the “cult of secrecy” bound all the participants together like a church congregation. Whether they came to communion because they were true believers or because they hoped for material benefits or just for the sake of giving and receiving solidarity, they all observed the same rituals.[156]
Avoidance
The most obvious adaptation to the secrecy tax was to avoid creating a paper trail by doing business face to face or on the phone. This adaptation was certainly effective, but within narrow limits.[157] A two-way conversation could pass on simple instructions or provide a channel for a yes/no decision. Much government business was too complex or involved too many participants to be handled in this way. Outcomes based on conversation weakened accountability, unless immediate records were made on both sides, which defeated the object of reducing paperwork. Finally, the interception of telecommunications became the object of a Cold War arms race, and protecting signals also became increasingly costly over time.
Staying with paper-based technologies, avoidance could have taken the form of reorganization to limit the flows of secret correspondence. If secret correspondence arose with highest frequency in the vertical transmission of instructions, then the secrecy tax gave officials an incentive to shorten chains of command, even at the cost of some loss of scope. If the more frequent occasion for secret correspondence was horizontal coordination, then officials should have encouraged horizontal integration, even if vertical chains of command were lengthened. As discussed earlier (in Chapter 2), the Soviet ministerial system was subject to continual reorganization in both dimensions, but there is no evidence that secrecy costs were a salient consideration.
Finally, officials responsible for managing secret work might have undertaken direct measures to limit secret correspondence. A rare example of open concern is found in documents dated April 1974. Officials of the Soviet Lithuania KGB warned that secret paperwork was a growing burden: Excluding the secret department itself, 1.3 million secret and top-secret items had gone in and out of KGB offices during 1973. This was an increase over 1972 of more than 4 percent.[158] The figures implied that each KGB employee handled about 1,000 classified items per year.[159] The authors called on “unit leaders to take forceful measures to restrict administrative correspondence and get rid of instances of the creation and duplication of documents not required by urgent administrative necessity.” But there is no sign that this or any other concerns ever prompted specific measures to stem the flood of classified paperwork.
Evasion
Evidence of evasion of the secrecy tax is plentiful. The records of audit and inspection, already discussed, often pointed to an office culture of carelessness and negligence that spread behind the closed doors of a particular ministerial department or local party organization. As a rule, perhaps, loyalty and career concerns were enough to ensure that most government officials stuck to the rule book most of the time. But, at any moment, standards could slip. Caught between an exacting rule book and the need to get things done, one person took a shortcut. The next person ignored it to maintain goodwill, and a third copied it to save effort. In this way, rule breaking could spread within an office from desk to desk.[160] In some cases, entire organizations degenerated into slipshod practices. Multiple violations would persist until somebody broke ranks and there was a scandal, followed by decisive action and a return to compliance.
Because the secrecy tax was not paid in money, the former Soviet archives have no record of its ruble cost. The secrecy tax was paid in effort. Ideally, we would somehow aim to capture in a single measure the scale of efforts that went into the original and derivative classification of Soviet secrets and all the measures that traced and protected them. We cannot do that, but we can see the results of those efforts in archived paperwork. Paperwork can be measured, although imperfectly, in numbers of pages, documents, or files, and the overall purposes of paperwork can also be analyzed, again with some imprecision.
In this section I use part of the archive of a small regional Soviet bureaucracy, the KGB of Soviet Lithuania, held on microfilm at the Hoover Institution as of 2011. Taken as a whole, the archive comprised two kinds of records: management information (instructions, plans, reports, and so forth), and operational case files (including many private or personal records not of KGB origin). The records containing management information are taken to represent KGB management activity, so we use those, setting the case files aside. Then, we estimate the proportion of the management files that was dedicated to maintaining secrecy.
The comparison cannot be done directly, because the Soviet Lithuania KGB archive, which contains millions of pages of documents, has not been digitized. Instead, I sample it based on a unique source, the catalogue of the Lithuania KGB collection at the Hoover Institution. The source combines two features: it is digitized, and the description goes down to the level of the individual file.[161] These features are unique in so far as the catalogues of other former Soviet archives are typically unpublished paper records that cannot be reproduced or processed digitally, or they do not provide file-level description.
The unique features of the Hoover catalogue can be used to distinguish the records of the secrecy accounting system from other management records. As described in more detail in the Appendix to this chapter, the analysis involves using stemmed keywords and their combinations to assign files to topics of KGB activity. In the process most management files are assigned to one or more topics of KGB activity.
The data run continuously from 1940 to 1991. For present purposes I will focus on the period from 1954 to 1982, which I will call “Soviet postwar normality.” The beginning of normal times was marked by the restoration of civil peace in Lithuania after years of armed rebellion, and the end was marked by the death of Leonid Brezhnev. Under Soviet postwar normality, the KGB was outwardly preoccupied by the activities we might expect—investigating suspicious people and hunting fugitives, forestalling demonstrations, investigating plots, eavesdropping on suspects, following foreigners, and harassing nonconformists or excluding them from work involving government secrets. Yet the documents left behind from those years indicate that behind the façade, the work of the KGB was overshadowed by a larger preoccupation: assuring the safety of its own secrets.
156
The phrase “cult of secrecy” was popularized by Rubanov, “Ot kul’t sekret- nosti к informatsionnoi kul’tury.” Here I extend its meaning somewhat.
158
Hoover/LYA K-1/3/786, 28-38 (report “On the condition of and measures to improve work with documents in the LSSR KGB,” signed by chief of inspection Rupsys, chief of information and analysis division Andriatis, and chief of secretariat Grakauskas, 8 April 1974) on folio 33. This report also gave figures for the Lithuania KGB second (counterintelligence) administration alone (30,965 items of secret and top-secret correspondence in 1971, 31,236 in 1972, and 33,000 in 1973) and for the Kaunas city department of the KGB (4,658 items in 1973 up to 10 April, and 5,456 in the same period of 1974, an increase of 12 percent).
159
In 1971 the Lithuania KGB employed 1,218 officers, enlisted men, and civilian employees, reflecting slow growth over preceding years. Anusauskas, KGB Lietuvoje, 43.
160
This kind of copying seems to explain the local spread of most kinds of petty offending. Glaeser, Sacerdote, and Scheinkman, “Crime and Social Interactions.”
161
File catalogues in Russian archives, if they exist, are paper based. Often, basic file descriptors are lacking. Published catalogues are generally not detailed at the file level. See for illustration the 700-page catalogue of the Gulag archive Sovetskaia repressivno-karatel’naia politika i penitentsiarnaia Sistema edited by Werth and Mironenko; also the online catalogues of GARF at http://opisi.garf.su/ and of RGAE at http://opisi.rgae.ru/.