Contemporary Germany: Scepticism—Paranoia—Cynicism—Nostalgia (related to order and security)—Events of the past overshadowing present life—Shame—Distrust / Trust—Anger—Disappointment— Disillusionment—Betrayal—Fear—Uncertainty—Dissociative behaviour / escape through alcohol or drug abuse.[368]
In a quantitative study, economists Lichter, Lôffler, and Siegloch take as their starting point a range of qualitative descriptions of East German society that strongly resemble those found by Neuendorf: a widespread consciousness of informer surveillance, leading to a fear of strangers and the breakdown of bonds of trust among colleagues, neighbors, friends, and family members. They then look for validation of these patterns and their present-day correlates, mapping modern large-scale survey evidence onto historical variation in the density of Stasi informer networks across more than two hundred East German counties in the 1980s.[369] The variation was substantial, with as few as one informer per thousand in some counties and up to ten per thousand in others.[370]
This project finds a statistical link from more intensive informer surveillance in the 1980s to lower levels of trust in strangers and civic engagement thirty years later. The authors interpret the correlation as causal, not only because of the passage of time, but also by ruling out other historical factors that might also have been responsible for systematically higher levels of surveillance in particular counties.[371]
As the wider literature on economic development would predict, it turns out that higher levels of informer surveillance under East German communism are also linked to reduced education, employment, selfemployment, and incomes after communism. The authors estimate that these effects could account for half of the East-West gap in productivity and incomes across unified Germany.
These findings are of interest at more than one level. First, it is remarkable that the outcomes of informer surveillance are found in the variance of fear or mistrust across society. Thirty years later, mistrust is greater where informer surveillance was previously more intense. In other words, the people of an East German county not only registered the experience of being more (or less) under watch in some way but also altered their social norms and preferences to match that experience, and these alterations persisted across a generation.
Second, it appears that the capacities for grassroots political and economic cooperation in civil society are bundled together and cannot be separately treated. When informer surveillance suppressed political cooperation against the regime, it also did long-term damage to the citizens’ ability to join with each other in productive cooperation.
Finally, if a low-trust society was the product of secret police surveillance, it is of interest to return to the question of whether the product was intended. This seems unlikely, for two reasons. One, the party leaders sought and demanded the trust of the people. And two, while distrust of strangers impeded antiregime activities, it also impeded KGB information gathering. The effectiveness of KGB operations relied on the capacity of the agents to win and retain trust in others while persuading them that they were not in fact under surveillance. The targets of surveillance sometimes rejected approaches from informers, based on no more than suspicion. In anticipation of scrutiny, every informer had to be trained to overcome suspicion and win trust. Fear of inadvertent exposure could also hinder the recruitment of potentially useful informers, as in the case of Agent Rimkus.
In all these ways the fear of informers, and the mistrust of strangers associated with it, raised the operating costs of the authoritarian state and consumed resources that would otherwise have been available for other purposes. The secrecy/capacity tradeoff was at work once more.
Stalin’s first requirement of his subordinates was that they should be open with him. The party expected its members to trust it with their personal failings and weaknesses. The KGB expected to be informed of the facts of everything, no matter how intimate.
The glass through which the regime watched society was a one-way mirror. The regime itself was opaque. Its conspirative norms were designed to prevent outsiders from seeing in. Those kept out were not only the nonparty masses but also many ordinary party members, who were not trusted with the inner secrets of the system of power.
Those who were excluded from the system of power had considerable understanding of the spirit in which they were governed. They responded by developing their own informal rules of conspirative behavior. To defend their privacy, they put up barriers against strangers, especially those that seemed unreasonably curious. Conversation in queues or on the telephone became guarded. Children were taught that what is said in the family cannot be repeated in the classroom or even in the playground. In fact, while the Soviet system of power deliberately held back the development of civil society, this unofficial tradecraft provides confirmation that civil society did exist under Soviet rule. The shared conspirative norms of personal interaction were a practical achievement of Soviet civil society, one that helped its self-defense against a suspicious and intrusive state.
The widespread fear of informers raised barriers against the operation of counterintelligence. Every informer had to be trained to overcome the mistrustful instincts of the target, win the target’s confidence, uncover their secrets, and betray them to the state. The same secrecy that enhanced the security of the regime undermined the effectiveness of the state over which the regime presided.
As a result, the Soviet leaders’ efforts to secure themselves against the disruptive influences of ethnic nationalism, cultural rebellion, and hostile religious and ethical values required large investments and incurred increasing costs. Relative to respective populations, the KGB maintained an agentlira of around one hundred times the size of the FBI informer network on the American side at a similar stage of the Cold War. The damage done by informer surveillance to the capacity of citizens to work together in both politics and economics persisted long after the communist state came to an end.
7. SECRECY AND THE UNINFORMED ELITE
In 1989 the Soviet Union’s leaders finally let go one of their most valued secrets, one that Western agencies had devoted tremendous efforts to guessing or uncovering over a quarter of a century. This was the true size of the USSR’s military budget. The Soviet leaders agonized over this decision: what might they gain and lose by disclosing the truth? Was continued secrecy helping them achieve their goals—or had it become a hindrance to safeguarding the Soviet Union’s vital interests? Would the disclosure be enough to satisfy Western curiosity—or would it open the Soviet government to demands for more revelations?
Underlying these dilemmas was a still more agonizing question: Could the leaders themselves lay hands on the information some of them now wanted to disclose? Did anyone know the truth? If not, how could they disclose to the West something that none of them knew, even if there existed a compelling national interest in doing so?
From the point of view of secrecy, the subject of this chapter is the effects of compartmentalizing secret government information. The scale of a country’s economic commitment to military power is valuable information. The economy’s overall supplies must be divided between military uses on one hand, and civilian uses on the other—primarily, consumption and investment. The more is committed to defense uses, the less is available to others. The division can be an index of national priorities. The government of a country may have an idea of the influence it seeks in the world
369
Lichter, Loftier, and Siegloch, “Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance.” The evidence of this paper is based on the third-stream definition of trust, discussed earlier in the chapter: trust is allowed to mean whatever respondents have in mind when they respond to survey questions about trust.
370
Lichter, Loftier, and Siegloch, “Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance,” 11. This study uses a subset of Stasi informers designated as “operative” informers. Pooling the data from all the East German counties at that time gives an average operative informer density of 3.8 per thousand. If all categories of Stasi informers were counted, the total in 1980 would be 170,000 (Gieseke, “German Democratic Republic,” 199), making an informer density of just over 10 per thousand in the East German resident population of the time.
371
As the authors report, informer density was determined by Stasi leaders at the level of larger districts, the borders of which were redrawn in the 1950s on the basis of economic factors that can be controlled for. To limit the scope for other confounding factors, the study exploits the variation of outcomes when counties on either side of district borders are compared with each other. Lichter, Loffler, and Siegloch, “Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance,” 7,16.