Finally, Akhromeev speculated that the lack of credibility of the ridiculously small figures for defense outlays published at the time gave the Soviet Union a hidden propaganda advantage:
The propagation of myths about large outlays of the USSR’s budget on military purposes and the “Cold War” was advantageous to the USSR’s leaders since it provided a justification (based on “huge” military outlays) of the low standard of living of people in the USSR.[411]
Despite his long list of concerns arising from the prospect of disclosure, Akhromeev did not insist on secrecy forever. Whether as a tactical retreat or as a strategic repositioning, he pleaded for time:
We are not ready to enter such discussions. Let us come out onto the world level in our [international] economic relations in the 1990s, and then we will publish our military budget and have no more secrets.[412]
As of April 1987, the situation was one of deadlock. The reformers wanted “no more secrets” now, not in several years’ time. But there was no consensus on what should take the place of secrecy. At this point, Beliakov made a remarkable suggestion:
It appears expedient not to publish the actual sum of outlays and in preparation of the documentation to proceed by way of artificial formulation of a figure for our “outlays on defense activities” that is acceptable for publication.
Given this, [we ought] to examine the actual outlays of the advanced capitalist countries on these uses and compare their outlays per head of population and in terms of percent of gross national product. The figure of our outlays on defense activities (which should include the known outlays on defense—20 billion rubles) in percentage terms should be not worse than the developed capitalist countries.[413]
The spirit of the proposal was clear enough. Beliakov was playing the joke of the business consultant who, on being asked to solve two plus two, lowers his voice to ask: “How much do you want it to be?” It is ambiguous what Beliakov meant by “not worse.” Most likely, he meant “not less”: everyone understood that the published figure was too small, and a more expedient figure would be larger than before, one that showed the Soviet Union neither underplaying nor overplaying its hand as an equal partner of the United States.
Akhromeev was not alone in his anxieties. In the early summer of 1987, the resistance crystallized. The Kataev papers include a memorandum from July of that year, prepared for signature by seven senior figures: Prime Minister Ryzhkov, Defense Minister Yazov, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, former ambassador to Washington Dobrynin, Central Committee secretaries Zaikov and Yakovlev, and first deputy KGB chief Bobkov.[414] All but Bobkov and Dobrynin were Politburo members. This was a heavyweight alliance.
The Seven acknowledged that the published 20-billion-ruble figure lacked credibility. For context, they cited the CIA’s much higher estimates of the Soviet military burden at the time—15 to 17 percent of Soviet GNP.[415] They warned, however, “Disclosure of the actual scale of overall allocations to the needs of defense of the USSR at prevailing prices will not yield a positive political outcome and can even lead to adverse consequences for the USSR.” Their supporting arguments echoed Akhromeev’s:
If we set out along the road of detailed justification of our defense outlays at current prices, then we will have to enter fruitless discussions about the comparative costs of the basic types of weapons and military equipment, design work, and other items at home and in the West. At the same time, to announce the true prices of domestic military products would create particular difficulties in the sale of our weapons to foreign countries.
For the first time, they set out a concrete plan of action:
In the situation before us, it appears possible ... to start from the proposition that the published defense budget of the USSR expresses [only] the outlays of the USSR ministry of defense on personal maintenance of the Armed Forces, their material-technical provision, military construction, the provision of pensions, and a number of other outlays.
In this secret document, the Seven chose their words with notable caution. “That the published defense budget of the USSR expresses the outlays of the USSR ministry of defense on personal maintenance of the Armed Forces,” et cetera, was termed a “proposition” from which it was “possible to start.” They did not affirm it as a fact. They went on:
Concerning the financing of scientific research and experimentation, and also the procurement of munitions and military equipment, it can be announced that we make the necessary allocations under other headings of the USSR state budget; comparison of this part of the outlays of the USSR with the outlays of other countries on analogous uses has no sense because of fundamental differences in the structure of the armed forces, prices of weaponry, and the mechanism of price formation.
Public comparison of the Soviet and American military budgets, they concluded, “will be possible in 1989 to 1990 after the Soviet Union has implemented the proposed radical reform of price formation in the course of restructuring the administration of the economy,” that is, in the next “two to three years.” To announce this position would “allow us in some degree to lift the pressure which has existed for a long time on the question of the size of the USSR military budget.”
In the short term, therefore, Akhromeev got his way. On 6 August 1987, the Central Committee adopted the position that the defense budget would be declassified, not immediately, but within the next two to three years.[416] This would buy time for the experts to come up with a number that would be both credible and meet the foreign objectives of Soviet diplomacy.
The outcome was revealed to the world in several stages. Speaking at the Geneva disarmament conference on 15 August 1987, Gorbachev affirmed that the Soviet Union was committed to greater military openness—in principle. The following day, Deputy Foreign Minister Petrovskii told the conference that the published Soviet military budget, now 20.2 billion rubles, was accounted for largely by the maintenance of the troops and so forth, and so was only a fractional component of the true total. (This appeared to vindicate the working assumptions underlying a substantial subset of the Western estimates of the Cold War era, discussed above.)
Finally, after three more weeks, Gorbachev announced that transparent and comparable figures for the Soviet defense budget would be made available within “two to three years.” This completed the implementation of the Central Committee decision of 6 August.
If the decision is taken at face value, then the following months should have been full of activity. To expose the thousand hidden cross-subsidies that supported military production and procurement to a first or second approximation would have required a major accounting exercise, but there is no evidence that such an effort was commissioned or undertaken. Alternatively, as the Seven envisaged, it required the “radical reform of price formation” that was expected to accompany the transition to a market economy, so that the results could be observed. There is no sign of this either. On the contrary, it is a fact that no price reform took place, the reason being that all serious economic reform measures were blocked by resistance and indecision.[417]
While nothing was being done, the balance of elite opinion was shifting. In the autumn of 1988, a party journal published a long article entitled “From the cult of secrecy to an information culture.”[418] The author, Vladimir Rubanov, was a senior KGB officer serving as head of a research unit for “questions of the defense of state secrets and of legal regimes of assurance of state security.”[419] Although much of it was couched in rather general and abstract terms, the article amounted to a wholesale rejection of the existing regime of secrecy. It called for public discussion of the proper limits to be placed on government information and for legal regulation of security classification based on a “presumption of nonsecrecy.”[420] It introduced the Soviet reader to the US system of information security oversight, including its acknowledged defects. It highlighted both the economic costs of excessive secrecy and the losses to Soviet diplomacy of the inability to respond with facts to Western discussion of Soviet ends and means.
411
Hoover/Kataev, 1/1 (“V. L. Kataev. Perechen’ arkhivnykh materialov. Kom- mentarii к nekotorym iz nikh,” undated).
412
Hoover/Kataev, electronic files, 2002c48_disk_04_mic.pdf (“Sovetskii VPK—vzgliad izvnutri”).
413
Hoover/Kataev, 12/13 (“TsK KPSS. К porucheniiu о povyshenii otkrytosti voennoi deiatel’nosti SSSR,” dated April 1987).
414
Hoover/Kataev, 12/13 (“TsK KPSS. V sootvetstvii s porucheniem TsK KPSS doklady vaem ...”). Bobkov’s name was added by hand after crossing out the name of KGB Chief Chebrikov. This document has other annotations including a date, 20 July 1987, and, above the heading, the reference “P78/VII.” This seems to correspond with resolution P78/VII on the future declassification of the defense budget, adopted by the Politburo on 6 August 1987, mentioned in other documents in the same file (“T.t. Masliukovu Yu. D. (sozyv) . . .”, 13 dated August 1987), and 11/31 (“Spravka. Dlia aktivizatsii nashei vneshnei politiki,” accompanied by a memo dated 22 March 1989).
417
Hanson, “Soviet Economic Reform,” provides contemporary insight into the deadlock behind the failure of Soviet economic reforms under Gorbachev. For a retrospective view, see Miller, Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, 55-73.
419
“Rubanov Vladimir Arsent’evich,” on the website of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, a Russian NGO think-tank, http://svop.ru/ рубанов-владимир-арсентьевич/.