Successful reeducation could be reinforced by material rewards. These were cash payments or gifts of goods or services (in one case, spa holidays) in short supply. The context is that in principle the services of the informer were unpaid. Rewards were supposed to be small and to reflect exceptional service. These principles were not always observed: just as the KGB was aware that some agents were unsuited to their duties or shirked them, it was reported from time to time that some case officers misused bonus payments to reward routine performance or even nonperformance.[354] In the records at hand, in contrast, we see that payments and privileges could be productive. Rewards were distributed in a calculated way, not in the petty spirit of incentive payments for results, but to affirm the agent’s status and service and to strengthen the affective tie between agent and case officer. In turn, this improved the agent’s morale and increased motivation and effort.
Fear of informers spread mistrust of strangers through Soviet society. How do we know this? Not directly, but by a series of deductions. First, the existence of informers was widely known, although not necessarily uniformly so. Second, this knowledge induced fear of all but the most intimate relationships, which can be construed as mistrust of strangers. Third, the long-term consequences of mistrust of strangers were greater where informers were most likely to be present.
To begin, the existence of the agentura, although strictly censored, was an open secret to many. Widespread awareness of informers is suggested by memoirs and personal accounts drawn from most if not all periods of Soviet history.[355] Another kind of evidence is literally anecdotaclass="underline" informers were the subject of many jokes that circulated and have been recorded. An encyclopedia of nearly six thousand Soviet political anecdotes lists thirty-nine items—in other words, not many, but also not zero—under the index heading “seksot i donoschik” (secret collaborator and informer).[356] Here’s no. 1,636, which captures the sense of the incalculable risk presented by a stranger:
Parked at the embassy is an American automobile of an expensive make and the latest model. Two pedestrians walk up from opposite directions and stop involuntarily. One of them exclaims: “An amazing foreign car!” Then he panics and tries to correct his gaffe: “An amazing Soviet car. I think it’s Soviet. Yes, yes, it must be. Of course!” “What, can’t you tell an American automobile from a Soviet one at first glance?” “At first glance I can’t even tell an informer from a regular person.”
Given that undercover surveillance was strictly secret, how did awareness of informers enter society? Even gossip and rumor must start from somewhere. Several channels are plausible. One channel was a constant factor: the official ideology. Through the period of Soviet rule, the ruling party leaders presented the people with the image of a society encircled and penetrated by enemies. When anybody could be a spy, it may have become obvious that anyone could also be a counterspy.
Another channel that may have fed the public awareness of the presence of informers in society was the high-water marks left by the periodic waves of radical mobilization and terror. At such times the hunger of the secret police for private information was advertised by campaigns that encouraged all citizens to volunteer denunciations.[357] The cult of Pavlik Morozov, the son who supposedly denounced his father to the state for resisting the collectivization of local farms, taught this duty to generations of schoolchildren.[358] Then there was correction: the Great Terror was followed by a campaign against “slanderers,” those who had falsely denounced their colleagues and neighbors to the secret police and were now made scapegoats for some of the more obvious injustices. The campaign against slander was publicized and extensively reported in the press.[359]
Finally, the carelessness and indiscretion of officials may have helped to stimulate informal understanding of the role of informers in society. Officers could gossip in bars or among neighbors.[360] The negligent disclosure of informers’ evidence might have enabled some targets of surveillance to identify them.[361] Some recruits to the agentura gave themselves away, driven by conscience or by carelessness.[362]
A related question is how far this awareness extended, and where were its limits. The evidence available includes the testimony of relatively urbanized, educated people that left diaries or memoirs or met and confided in Western visitors, who were often journalists or scholars. Perhaps personal awareness of the KGB agentura was higher in towns or among educated or responsible people. If so, it would support the idea that the awareness of informers somehow followed their actual presence in society. But the silence of the less educated and more dispersed sections of society leaves the conjecture untested.
Where the awareness of informers was felt, the effect was a fear of strangers. “You can’t trust anyone but your pillow,” said a young man to the American journalist Hedrick Smith, after learning that one of his friends had reported on him to the KGB.[363] Without knowing, perhaps, he echoed a remark attributed to Isaak Babel, a writer of the previous generation: “Today a man talks freely only with his wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”[364]
A consequence of the fear of strangers was self-censorship. A woman whose father was arrested in 1936 recalls, “We were brought up to keep our mouths shut.”[365] In postwar Odesa, Jewish parents taught their child that what was said within the home could not be shared at school or outside their intimate circle: “You are not to repeat.... Only to your family members and your friends.”[366] Instinctively, ordinary people developed their own “conspirative” norms for everyday survival. On meeting strangers or distant acquaintances, it was a mark of good faith not to discuss politics, not to complain about shortages, and not to enquire after missing people. The fear of strangers made such confidences impossible without long and intimate association.
The same fear also limited the scope of horizontal social networks. In any circle, the new arrival was an unknown risk. “We don’t want personal relations with that many other people,” the journalist Hedrick Smith was told.[367]
New perspectives on the long-term consequences of undercover surveillance are provided by two recent projects on East Germany before and after unification. The anthropologist Ulrike Neuendorf, herself East German by origin, took the life histories of ten former citizens of East Berlin and Brandenburg (supplemented by other shorter interviews), with the aim of working out the effects of secret police surveillance on society. She sought to establish how her subjects remembered feeling at the time, first, living in East Germany under Stasi surveillance, and then, in the aftermath of German unification. She offers a qualitative summary:
During GDR-times: Paralysis—Guarded towards others—Security— Order—Reliance on the system to work/comfort—Shame—Distrust / Trust was even more meaningful, as more was at stake—Anger— Disappointment—Betrayal—Fear—Uncertainty—Dissociative behaviour / escape through alcohol abuse.
354
Hoover/LYA, K-1/10/311, 87-94 (Report on the expediency and appropriateness of cash outlays under Art. 9 (special outlays) in the organs of the Soviet Lithuania KGB, by Lt. Col. Babintsev, chief of the Soviet Lithuania KGB chairman’s group, 23 June 1962).
355
From the 1930s, see Figes, Whisperers, 258-71. From the 1970s, see Smith, Russians, 141-142, and Harrison, “There Was a Front,” 45-46.
357
Fitzpatrick, “Signals from Below.” See also the row heading “Complaints and Petitions” in Table 3.3.
360
In China in 1957, a security officer attributed widespread informal awareness of the interception of mail to indiscreet colleagues. Schoenhals, Spying for the People, 133.
361
That this was possible is indicated by occasional KGB documentation of efforts to avoid it. “With the aim of legalizing the agent evidence of X’s unhealthy utterances” (in other words, to disguise the true origin of the evidence), “her colleagues Y and Z interviewed her covertly. In their submissions they both indicated that in their presence at the end of May this year X expressed anti-Soviet nationalist judgments.” Hoover/LYA. K-1/3/697, 80-82 (Report to Maj.-Gen. Yu. Yu. Petkevicius, chairman of the Soviet Lithuania KGB, on preventive measures implemented in relation to X, no date but November 1972, names redacted by the author).
362
Carelessness: Harrison, “There Was a Front,” 46. Conscience: Figes, Whisperers, 259. A few years ago, the author heard of a young man who, on being approached by the KGB to provide information, immediately told all his friends, knowing that this would halt his recruitment. According to Gieseke, History of the Stasi, 94, in dissident and church circles this was “the most proven method” of refusing Stasi recruitment without saying no to the face of the recruiter.
365
For the 1930s see Figes, Whisperers, 251-58, and Hosking, “Trust and Distrust,” 14-17.