Introducing the words quoted above, the Butler report noted: “A hidden limitation of intelligence is its inability to transform a mystery into a secret.” Conversely, our story suggests how to turn a secret into a mystery. In the first years after World War II, Soviet defense outlays were not secret, and the published figure was not deceptive. At some point a decision was made to allow the published figure to diverge from the factual total, and the factual total became a secret. To maintain the secret, the flows of funds into the defense sector were covered by mistitled budget items and redirected by hidden subsidies. Over time, the underground river widened, and its secret tributaries multiplied. The cover was originally designed to hide the true scale of the defense sector from foreign eyes, but it worked so well that eventually the Politburo itself lost sight of it. The secret became a mystery.
Why did the Soviet leaders, who concentrated so many powers into their own hands, allow this to happen? One explanation is simple and plausible: it suited the Soviet military not to have to account for the full sum of defense costs. Akhromeev came close to admitting this in his television statement, already quoted: “Previously the armed forces were only interested in what they were given for upkeep, in accordance with a government decision. As far as research and development was concerned, this came under the ministries of defense industry sectors. Nor did we pay for series production deliveries.” In other words, in sharp contrast to the American military from the 1960s onward, the Soviet military was spared the need to count its costs, other than for the upkeep of the troops. Nor did it have to justify the costs for the simple reason that nobody knew what they were.
It is sometimes asked if the Soviet Union collapsed because of its military burden. A moment’s thought suggests that this cannot have been the single cause. The Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991. At this time, having already peaked, the military burden was declining. If a heavy military burden could bring about economic collapse without help from other factors, then the Soviet Union should have collapsed in 1942 or 1943 when the military burden was several times higher than in 1987 or 1988.[439] In fact, the Soviet collapse had many causes, including economic, social, political, and moral factors. The military burden was there in the background, but it was never decisive.
What can be affirmed is that the mystery surrounding the military burden indicates the declining effectiveness of Soviet rule. Stalin, for whom divide-and-rule was a first principle of governance, would never have tolerated a situation where the military could make common cause with the leaders of the defense industries to freely spend the government’s money.[440] During the time of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, the military acquired an unprecedented capacity to exploit secrecy in their own interest. In that sense the “golden age” of the Soviet defense complex (as the historian Julian Cooper called the Brezhnev period) was the leaden age of communist rule.[441]
Eventually, secrecy over defense costs came at the expense of state capacity. As Gorbachev recognized, secrecy had deprived the Soviet state of the capacity to do business with its foreign adversaries—to commit to arms limitations. It also cost the Soviet state its capacity to manage government spending and limit its burden on the economy.
Stepping back, we can see that the secrecy over defense costs was one aspect of a more general phenomenon. Soviet secretiveness gave rise to an uninformed elite. In principle, one person had the right to know everything: the party leader. Below this level, even within the Politburo, all knowledge was compartmentalized by need-to-know. One agency, the KGB, had the responsibility to manage the compartments of secrecy. This was bad enough. The result of need-to-know was that most members of the late Soviet elite were brought up on myths about the history of their own country and of their own party, about how the world worked, and about the Soviet Union’s place in the world. The few that knew better had no right to share their knowledge more widely and risked punishment if they tried to do so without authorization. Most were never exposed to serious debate involving principles of logic and evidence. It is true that many products of Western scholarly research and debate were imported and translated into Russian, but their availability was strictly limited to readers whose loyalty was proven, so that they were already known to be willing to endorse the conclusions previously approved by the party.[442]
All knowledge is one. This is why our institutions of higher learning are called universities, not multiversities. While universities generally find it convenient to compartmentalize their teaching and research into disciplines that lend their titles to departments and faculties of economics, history, or chemistry, a good deal of what passes for the advance of understanding relies on making connections across those boundaries. When knowledge is compartmentalized by secrecy, those kinds of advance are suppressed. In the early 1980s, the future of the Soviet Union had become an inherently multidisciplinary problem, involving economics, ecology, sociology, political science, and moral philosophy (at least). Few were used to thinking in all those disciplines at once, and those that were inclined to try were forced into silence or into exile. In that context it is unsurprising that, of the many plans for institutional reform put before Soviet society over the next few years, not one was realized.
Could less secrecy have saved the Soviet Union or communist rule? That might be a counterfactual too far. Before Gorbachev, all Soviet leaders saw comprehensive secrecy as fundamental to preservation of their regime. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, seems to have shown that they were right: when he became a late convert to the idea of an open society, the Soviet regime lost its grip on society and fell apart.
8. SECRECY AND TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AUTHORITARIANISM
This concluding chapter tells two stories. One is the story of secrecy in Russia, where the Soviet state collapsed in 1991. What took its place in Russia was a state of fewer capabilities and diminished pretensions, initially open to both economic and political competition. As the story will show, the regime of secrecy was shaken to its foundations and its sphere contracted sharply. A period of stabilization was followed by partial restoration. Thirty years on, the old secrecy regime had been rebuilt to a point somewhere between the suffocating completeness of the Soviet era and the chaotic freedom of the 1990s. The question then is where modern Russia has positioned itself on the secrecy/capacity tradeoff, and what that tells us about its political regime.
The other story of this chapter is one of information technology and information possibilities. The first decades of the twenty-first century have differed from most of the twentieth by the decentralization of information sharing. Peer-to-peer communication technologies and social media have transformed access to the public sphere. When most citizens carry a pocket computer that connects them directly to global networks, a state that controls only the printing presses and the broadcast studios can no longer monopolize public discourse. But modern networking technologies also provide authoritarian leaders with other means than secrecy and censorship to disinform the public.
Information has value, according to the economist Kenneth Arrow, because it reduces uncertainty.[443] Uncertainty is a factor in the balance of power in society, because a person who is uncertain is less able to choose their best course of action, and so has less agency. In other words, uncertainty is disempowering. From this, the value of information is that it dispels the powerlessness associated with uncertainty.