Читать онлайн "Secret Leviathan" - Harrison Mark - RuLit

In 1991, as Laptev and Ryzhov feared, there were moments when it seemed as if the Soviet state and party offices, whether in Moscow or in the provinces, were about to be stormed by the mob and their papers thrown to the winds or sold off to the highest bidder. On the whole this did not happen. The state and party archives remained largely intact. For a time, the collapse of Soviet rule left access to them without a legislative framework. The gap was filled, initially, by presidential decrees of the Yeltsin administration, then by new laws on the federal archives and on state secrets enacted in the summer of 1993.^[464]

The law on state secrets of 1993 represented a considerable break with the principles of Soviet secrecy outlined in Chapter 1. In the new Russia, the old classifications (“of special importance,” top secret, and secret) were maintained, but secrecy was no longer for perpetuity. The term was limited to thirty years, although it could be extended at need. The law renewed a government list of matters governed by secrecy, but the list was more modest that in Soviet times. For the first time the law designated matters that could not be made state secrets. Exclusions included negative social or environmental trends and natural and technological disasters (such as Chernobyl). The law made explicit that secrecy could not be invoked to hide the compensation, criminality, or corruption of government officials. For the first time, access to employment involving secret matters, including the withdrawal of access previously granted, would be governed by formal rules and procedures. For the first time the law provided that the official list of secret matters should be reviewed at five-year intervals. For the first time the law guaranteed citizens’ right to appeal decisions to classify secret matters or to refuse clearance for access to secret work.

For the historian wishing to work in the formerly secret archives of the Soviet party and state, the legal framework of 1993 left many problems unresolved. Not all archives were opened. The Presidential Archive, the KGB archive (holding papers from the time of its reformed establishment in 1954), and the current archive of the Ministry of Defense (holding papers from the outbreak of the Soviet-German war in 1941) remained closed other than to privileged researchers. Disturbingly, as time passed, many archival records that had initially been declassified were reclassified secret.^[465]

Secret Leviathan, although traumatized, still had life in it. For one thing, even if the Russian state had broken formally with its communist past, Russia was still governed largely by ex-communists, brought up to honor the shared norms of conspirativeness. For another, the military, police, and security agencies signaled publicly that their bloodlines to the Red Army and Cheka of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War remained unbroken. If the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii was toppled in Moscow in 1991, his cult lived on in the ethos of the FSB.^[466] In cities and towns throughout the Russian Federation, Dzerzhinskii’s memory was honored by statues left untoppled and streets and squares left unrenamed.^[467] For Russia’s armed forces, nothing symbolized their continuity with the Soviet Union’s Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army more than the increasingly mystical me-morialization of the Soviet-German war dead.^[468]

Measures to restore the status and rewards for secret employment provided a more businesslike signal of government intentions to revive Secret Leviathan. As already mentioned, in Russia’s transition to a market economy, secret government work lost all its former privileges. This problem was addressed in October 1994 by the introduction of special salary supplements for government employees, graded by the level of classification of their work. The supplements were modest at first, being set at 25, 20, and 10 percent for work involving documentation “of special importance,” “top secret,” and “secret” respectively. Further increases in 2006 and 2007 raised the supplements to more generous levels: 50 to 75, 30 to 50, and 10 to 15 percent, respectively. Reporting these measures, the economist Julian Cooper suggests that they created (or perhaps reestablished) incentives to expand the secret sphere, and this was reflected in growing budget secrecy at the time.^[469]

For researchers on current affairs, especially those with a security aspect, an ominous trend was the growing number of defendants brought to court by the FSB, charged with collecting open-source data to pass to foreigners. Best known at the time was Igor Sutiagin, a civilian researcher on nuclear weapons. On 7 April 2004, Sutiagin was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for passing information to the US Defense Intelligence Agency. His legal defense was that all the information he had collected was in the public domain and could be known by anyone. As a civilian, he had no access to military secrets. The defense failed. Sutiagin was not the only to fall foul of the authorities in this way. Over ten years from 1996 to 2007, at least seven others were found guilty of espionage based on collecting data from unclassified or open sources.^[470]

More positive signals were given out during the presidency of Dmitrii Medvedev (2008 to 2012). The Medvedev administration took several steps toward more accountable government: there was an anticorruption drive, more transparency for the intelligence agencies, commitments for Russia to join the Open Government Partnership (an international coalition of governments and nongovernmental organizations) and the International Monetary Fund’s Fiscal Transparency Evaluation, and eventually a minister for open government, the reformist politician Mikhail Abyzov.^[471] But the Medvedev administration also restored the legal status of the “secret departments” in all agencies and enterprises connected to secret government business, and subject to supervision by the FSB.^[472]

While some of these signals supported a positive interpretation, subsequent events showed the optimism to be unfounded. With Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Russia withdrew from the Open Government Partnership.^[473] As for fiscal transparency, an IMF update in 2019 noted progress since 2014 in some areas but backsliding in others. Notably, secret outlays had increased to 17 percent of the federal budget in 2018 (compared with 10 percent in 2009) and one-third of public procurement contracts were classified as secret and not open to competitive tendering.^[474] Increased concealment of the defense budget under secret items was another negative aspect of the time.^[475] This trend is not easily explained by the secrecy laws and regulations of the time, which did not allow for classification of the ruble aggregates reported in the budget.^[476]Also in 2019, Mikhail Abyzov was arrested and charged with corruption.^[477]

Other signals of the convalescence of Secret Leviathan were a series of poorly explained events and the suppression of independent investigation into them. Among these were murders of independent journalists (such as Anna Politkovskaia, an investigator of human rights abuses), of opposition politicians (such as Boris Nemtsov), and of critics who had fled abroad (such as Aleksandr Litvinenko). State news media were brought under government editorial control. Independent media suffered harassment or were bought up by government supporters. Scholars whose investigations contradicted the government’s narrative of Russia in the twentieth century were increasingly criminalized.^[478] Important nongovernment sources of independent information, such as the Levada Center, a polling organization, and Memorial, a human rights group, were stigmatized as “foreign agents.”^[479] The same fate befell the anticorruption FBK foundation set up by the opposition activist Alexei Navalny.^[480] In other words, the government reserved to itself the right to decide who should be targeted for corruption.