For the powerful, secrecy is one way to induce powerlessness in others. Secrecy has this effect because it leaves ordinary people uncertain of what decisions have been made, who made them, and on what grounds, to what purpose, and with what expected effect. But secrecy is not the only way to induce powerlessness. The same uncertainty can be brought about by other means, such as confusion. The subject of this chapter is Russia’s transition from one form of authoritarian rule to another: how Secret Leviathan took on a new guise, Leviathan of a Thousand Lies. What does it matter if the truth leaks out, when the state can drown it out in the confusion of a thousand lies?
Leviathan of a Thousand Lies does not manage without secrecy altogether. It continues to monopolize and withhold some kinds of information, especially concerning the people and processes at the core of government. But it does not try to censor everything. On all other matters it publishes widely and communicates permissively, screening the facts behind “availability cascades” of conflicting stories, false rumors, and plausible myths.[444]
Leviathan of a Thousand Lies is not new. In fact, it was the form in which Secret Leviathan operated abroad during the Cold War, in societies that practiced free speech. Unable to shut down Western media sources beyond the frontiers, the Soviet state competed with them by a strategy of disinformation. False news stories such as that HIV/AIDS was a US experiment gone wrong, or that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered by the FBI, were calculated to spread distrust of the West and support for anti-Western ideas.[445]
As the capacity of the authoritarian state to practice comprehensive censorship at home was undermined by new technologies that could not be suppressed forever, the techniques of disinformation were brought home to be employed against the domestic population. How that came about in Russia is the subject of this chapter.
By disinformation I mean the government promotion of myths and false rumors. In the Cold War, disinformation was practiced by both sides. The political scientist Thomas Rid has identified the 1950s as a time of American leadership in what was then called “political warfare”; after that, the Soviet Union moved forward and took the lead. Rid argues, however, that there is a long-run affinity between dictatorship and disinformation: states that practice disinformation systematically must either be or become authoritarian. This is because disinformation undermines essential aspects of the rule of law including respect for facts and trust in the probity of elections. “Disinformation operations,” he writes, “erode the very foundation of open societies—not only for the victim but also for the perpetrator.”[446] A government that consistently disinforms its own citizens is travelling toward authoritarian rule. Thus, dictators and would-be dictators have been disinformation’s most assiduous practitioners.
On 5 March 1991, Pavel Laptev and Yurii Ryzhov, officers of the Communist Party Central Committee, wrote a severe warning. They complained that party records were under threat of seizure by hostile groups and that party correspondence was being systematically leaked to the outside.[447] “From now until the situation is stabilized,” they announced, members of the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the “leading organs” of the party would need to come personally to the Central Committee building in Moscow if they wished to be familiarized with “documents of a secret character.” Only in “extreme necessity” would secret documents be sent out of the building by courier, marked “Deliver person-to-person only,” and subject to immediate return.
A few months passed. Stability did not return. The summer saw a state coup and a countercoup. The Communist Party was expelled from power. At the end of the year, the Soviet Union disintegrated. The regime of secrecy collapsed.
What remained of the Soviet state after the collapse? The most obvious change was the shrunken domain of its successor, the Russian Federation. Russia lost half the Soviet Union’s population and two-fifths of its economy. Although the losses were substantial, and proved to be a source of lasting grievance, Russia kept Moscow, the former Union’s capital city; most of the former Soviet territorial expanse, including many non-Russian ethnicities and territories; most major defense industries and strategic installations; and (after some negotiation) all the nuclear weapons. Thus, post-Soviet Russia did not lose the pretension to be a global power.
While Russia retained the symbols of statehood, its state capacity was shaken to the foundations. Some of Leviathan’s key attributes, such as fiscal and legal capacity, fell to low levels. Violent crimes and property crimes rose sharply. Even before large-scale privatization, state assets were hollowed out by insiders.[448] Budget deficits ballooned as revenues from the state sector collapsed, while the old producer lobbies and new electoral coalitions competed for fiscal handouts. Capital resources fled abroad. It is sometimes maintained that Russia’s reformers of the first Yeltsin administration made bad choices: they should have followed some other template or listened other voices. The fact is that at that time they had few levers at their disposal and few choices to make. In most matters, their hand was forced by lack of means to do anything else.[449]
The disorderly 1990s were not all bad for Russians, giving millions new freedoms to travel, to learn, and to start a business. At the same time, the collapse of Russia’s state capacity in the early years undermined the prosperity and personal security of all citizens. Rebuilding the state was a necessary project. That it went ahead on authoritarian lines was not inevitable, but it was made highly likely by three main factors. These were the depleted state of civil society, the survival of the communist nomenklatura, and the growing weight of the siloviki.
The first factor is most general. As discussed in Chapter 2, sustainable democracy requires an inclusive state to evolve in continuous competition with civil-society activism so that the rule of law is maintained.[450] This did not happen in Russia: civil society was enfeebled after seventy years of surveillance and repression, and its activization in the last years of Soviet rule remained superficial. Russians faced the future without long-standing, deeply rooted political parties, trade unions, charities, volunteer groups, and neighborhood associations.
Second, although the post-Soviet state was reorganized, it was never purged of officials with Communist Party or KGB backgrounds. The Russian state was overwhelmingly staffed by former Soviet officials who had entered government service through party membership and selection for secret work by the KGB.[451] Natural processes thinned them out over the next decades. But, as recently as 2010, most holders of senior positions in Russian government posts had either entered government service in Soviet times as junior members of the party nomenklatura, or they were children of the nomenklatura.[452] Their common attribute was to have been reared in the old ways of ruling, including the ways of conspirativeness.
Third, the army, the security services, and the police remained intact as organizations. Their departments became known as the “power ministries” with their leaders called the siloviki (strongmen). While they never worked out a common political program, they shared clear preferences for a strong state with a powerful leader ruling over a submissive society.[453] As for the power ministries’ rank and file, their numbers were depleted, but in a way that helped the leaders. Their networks of influence widened as former comrades who had lost their positions went into business and politics, from where they could continue to trade favors.[454] By 2010 the siloviki accounted for around one-third of the senior figures of the Russian state.[455]
444
On availability cascades in a free society, see Kuran and Sunstein, “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation.” This prescient paper was published in 1999 when Facebook did not exist, and the number of internet users worldwide was no more than 300 million,
445
For these and other examples see Cull et al., Soviet Subversion, Disinformation and Propaganda; Rid, Active Measures.
446
Rid, Active Measures, 10-11. Similarly, Bennett and Livingston, “Brief History of the Disinformation Age,” 3, describe the goal of disinformation as the disruption of rule-based institutions. A focus of recent literature on information wars and disinformation is the potential they create for democratic breakdown, especially in the United States: see Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda; Bennett and Livingston, eds., Disinformation Age; Lindberg, ed., Automatization Turns Viral. Glaeser, “Political Economy of Hatred,” provides a canonical discussion of the use of false histories to mobilize support for authoritarian leaders by polarizing societies and focusing popular anger against outgroups.
447
Hoover/RGANI, 89/21/66, 1 (“On the question of the procedure for familiarization with CPSU Central Committee documentation and materials of Central Committee members and leaders of regional party committee in the complex sociopolitical situation,” to the CPSU Central Committee from deputy head of the Central Committee general department P. Laptev and first deputy head of the Central Committee organizational department Yu. Ryzhov, 5 March 1991).
449
For a powerful memoir of the time see Gilman, No Precedent, No Plan; for a strongly argued retrospective, Mau, “Russian Economic Reforms.”
453
On continuity from the Soviet KGB to Russia’s FSB, see Service, Kremlin Winter, Chapter 20.
454
Kim Murphy, “Russia’s New Elite Draws from Old KGB,” Los Angeles Times, 10 November 2003, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2oo3-nov-1o-fg -spiesio-story.html.