This might be too simple, for the Soviet rulers could achieve nothing without the cooperation of millions of state officials and party members. As the political scientist Yoram Gorlizki has argued, “Whatever its flaws, the Soviet state exhibited levels of cooperation that were simply too high for it to be merely written off as a case-study in pervasive or all-encompassing distrust.”[314] While the Soviet state may have achieved high levels of cooperation by using coercion and surveillance to compensate for low trust, the party leaders were also aware of trust as a factor in the success of their project and in their own survival. Gorlizki shows that in private they talked obsessively about trust and how to sustain it. In public, they boosted the importance of the trust relationship between the party and the people. This relationship was famously satirized by the playwright Bertolt Brecht after the Berlin workers’ uprising of 1953: the people had forfeited the party’s trust, he said, so the party should now “dissolve the people and elect another.”[315]
To better understand the basis of cooperation within the Soviet system, some scholars have developed the concept of “forced trust,” applying it to relationships based on deprivation of independence (trust me because what other choice do you have?) or coercive control (trust me because I know your guilty secrets).[316] This terminology takes the idea of trust too far from the scholarly and everyday meanings discussed so far. The feature distinguishing “forced trust” is force, not trust.[317] What it points to, however, is the need to fill a gap: how trust works among people of unequal status.
The status that matters here is rank within hierarchies, which were characteristic of Soviet society’s formal organizations. Economists Albert Breton and Ronald Wintrobe define hierarchies as combining vertical relationships (between a principal and an agent of lower rank) with horizontal relationships (between agents of the same rank). Organizational performance is improved, they argue, when principals and agents build mutual trust on vertical lines: the worker who trusts the manager to deliver rewards and protection is more likely to work to the manager’s goals and to tell the manager the truth if those goals are compromised. Horizontal trust, on the other hand, is bad for an organization’s productivity, because workers that trust each other are more likely to protect each against the manager than to cooperate to deliver the manager’s goals.[318] An implication is that vertical and horizontal trust are likely to be substitutes, not complements.[319]
The practical focus of this chapter is on the mass surveillance of society. Mass surveillance was the work of a particular hierarchical organization, the Soviet secret police and its agentura (“agent network”). We will see that vertical trust was the key to productive collaboration between the KGB and its informers. In turn, KGB surveillance was nested in the mutually distrustful relationship between the party and the people under communist rule. On one side, the ruling party kept the people uninformed and under secret surveillance. On the other side, those people who had misgivings about the party and its rule, being conscious of surveillance and wary of coming under suspicion, kept their doubts to themselves. If the party lived by conspirative norms, so did the people. In turn, however, widespread reticence and suspicion of others complicated the task of surveillance.
The reader might wonder whether there is anything special in this topic. After all, every state has its enemies, including liberal democracies, and all states engage in counterintelligence. Every country has security services that practice surveillance and recruit informers.[320] What was different about communist states was the use of undercover informers to watch not just the small numbers suspected of active hostility to communist rule but also much larger numbers of “potential” and even “unconscious” enemies. Those to be watched included all that showed any sign of unauthorized deviation from political and social norms or that voiced any unauthorized criticisms of the Soviet political or social order, even if such behavior was hardly ever on the direct orders of the foreign adversary and was far more likely to indicate the general influence of ideas and values designated as foreign.
Associated with this was an extraordinarily sweeping definition of hostile intelligence activity, which was not limited to the purloining of secrets by professional spies but was extended to the unauthorized spreading of any attitudes or behaviors that might disrupt the social and political order. Under this exceptionally inclusive designation, almost anyone could turn out to be doing the work of a spy. If spies could be anywhere, then it was natural for spy catching to take the form of mass surveillance.[321]
Related to the exceptionally wide scope of Soviet counterintelligence was the unusually large number of Soviet counterspies. We will see that the number of undercover informers engaged by the Soviet KGB exceeded the number of FBI informers in the United States at the same stage of the Cold War by two orders of magnitude.
Undercover informers acted on the relationship between the Soviet state and society in two ways. One was to tip the balance of information in favor of the state, by giving early warning of the small-scale expressions and actions that might be precursors to more significant disruption of the political order. As a result, the state could usually be one step ahead of the citizen in preempting or promptly suppressing such tendencies. Notably, the informers could achieve this precisely because, working under cover, they did not present themselves as agents of the state. Rather, they were familiar figures—your classmate or colleague, your neighbor, or your drinking companion.
Because of this, the informers also acted on the relationship between state and society in another way. Although the facts of surveillance were strictly censored, it seems to have been widely understood in Soviet society that the KGB used undercover informers in significant numbers, that these would seek to exploit friendship or make friends in order to betray others to the state, and that no one could be sure who the informers were. The effect was to spread fear of informers and to corrode interpersonal (or horizontal) trust.
Secret surveillance was one factor leading to a low-trust society. For the authorities, low levels of trust in society presented pluses and minuses. On the plus side, low trust limited the scope of horizontal social networks and made ordinary people much less likely to join organized criticism of the regime or resistance to it. This enhanced the party leaders’ hold on power. But low trust also limited what they could achieve with the power that they held. Low trust reduced the effectiveness of state-sponsored or pro-regime initiatives because mistrust limited popular support and citizen cooperation. Thus, while secret surveillance added to regime security, security came at the expense of state capacity. From this perspective, the effects can be readily understood in terms of the secrecy/capacity tradeoff.
The first part of this chapter describes the KGB agent network in Soviet Lithuania: how many people, of what types, and where they operated. It introduces various kinds of documentary evidence that shed light on the attributes that made the effective informer, the “contract” with the KGB that formalized their recruitment, and various aspects of their training and motivation. A unique collection of records from the early 1960s shows us a range of stories of the recruitment and training of informers. We will find that the building of vertical trust was a key to the informer/case officer relationship.
316
Gorlizki, “Structures of Trust”; Tikhomirov, “Regime of Forced Trust”; also Ledeneva, “Genealogy of Krugovaya Poruka.”
317
Compare the legal concepts of controlling and coercive behavior in personal relationships, described in Home Office, “Controlling or Coercive Behaviour,” 3-4.
319
The idea that horizontal trust is a negative for corporate performance might seem old-fashioned in today’s world of team building and “distributed leadership.” Breton and Wintrobe appear to base their argument on scale. To improve productivity, horizontal cooperation needs to be coordinated across an entire organization. In an organization of any size, this is harder to achieve than the concealment of local shirking and diversion of resources. Smaller groups can more easily impede coordination than improve it. And horizontal trust is built more easily in smaller groups. Regardless of intentions, horizontal trust is more likely to worsen productivity than improve it. This plausibly suggests why a twentiethcentury command-and-control bureaucracy such as the Soviet state consistently prioritized vertical over horizontal relationships. Gregory and Harrison, “Allocation under Dictatorship,” 747-49. On vertical versus horizontal trust in the Soviet context see Belova, “Economic Crime and Punishment.”
320
But not in all times, an exception being China from 1967 to 1973, when the use of undercover informers was condemned as contradicting the mass line of the Cultural Revolution. Schoenhals, Spying for the People, 1-9.
321
Kuromiya and Peplonski, “Stalin, Espionage, and Counter-Espionage,” relate this way of thinking to the idea of “total” espionage (that is, that anyone could be a spy). They suggest that the idea spread from the security thinking of Japan in the early twentieth century to Germany in the 1920s and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. They describe Stalin’s mass killing of suspects in the 1930s as a corresponding form of total counterespionage. From that perspective, one could understand the KGB of the 1960s and 1970s as continuing to practice total counterespionage but replacing Stalin’s “kill all suspects” by “watch all suspects.”