Some explanations of the return to secretive government in Russia focus on particular triggers. One candidate is the global price of oiclass="underline" with oil prices rising steeply in the first decade of the new century, the Russian state became more reliant on oil revenues. Perhaps it lost interest in other sources of improvement, such as competitive markets and media freedom.[481] Consistently with this, the rise in oil prices was followed (with a few years’ lag) by the rise of anticorruption campaigners such as Alexei Navalny. Perhaps government officials and the privately wealthy people with whom they were connected found an increasing need for secrecy to hide their assets and transactions.[482] Another possible trigger is the Western sanctions imposed on Russia after its occupation of Eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014: because of these measures, the Russian government became more interested in hiding legal and illegal transactions from international monitors.[483]
While not discounting the role of such events, it seems beyond doubt that Russia was already returning to secretive government long before the annexation of Crimea and before anticorruption campaigning took off, and the most important underlying factor was Russia’s return to authoritarian rule under Vladimir Putin.
The restoration of Russian autocracy was deeply rooted in the way communism ended. One feature of the transition was elite continuity. As discussed earlier, the New Russian elite was largely composed of former Soviet party and state executives trained to do business in secret. Putin himself was a former KGB officer, a professional enforcer of the Soviet regime of secrecy. The first Putin administration marked an important turning point. In the Yeltsin years, when Putin was a minor figure, Kremlin politics were discussed and debated, not only in the news, but also as a matter of historical record in the memoirs of multiple participants including Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and their associates. While this shows that a return to greater secrecy was not inevitable, it is nonetheless the case that all such flows of information dried up from the time of Putin’s accession to power.[484]
A feature of the transition that might have predisposed Russian society to accept a return to a highly managed information environment was disillusionment. The opening of Russian society was enabling for many, but not for all. For many Russians, the transition from communist rule was disappointing; for some it was tragic. Many concluded that authoritarian order was preferable to transparent disorder.[485]
Finally, disorder was plentiful in the transition, and it had important consequences. It is sometimes said that Russia’s transition was peaceful, and this was true in the sense—important but limited—that Russia did not go to war with its neighbors, as happened in Yugoslavia. But there was plenty of violence, and not only on the periphery of the former empire. In Russia itself, private violence surged: homicide rates doubled over the benchmark of the last years of Soviet rule. State violence was refocused from a foreign war (in Afghanistan) to a civil war (in Chechnia). Two wars were fought against Chechen separatists, the first from 1994 to 1996 and the second from 1999. The trigger for the second war was a shadowy conspiracy to bomb apartment buildings in Moscow and two provincial cities, in which the FSB played a role that remains without convincing explanation.[486] A surprising outcome was to propel the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin to presidential power: Yeltsin resigned, appointing Putin in his place, and Putin went on to be elected in 2000 by a large majority.
The breakdown of the Soviet regime of secrecy was not predetermined. The example of North Korea shows that Secret Leviathan can live on. North Korea is as closed and secretive today as the Soviet Union was in 1949. But the rulers of North Korea have paid an exceptional price: to maintain their secretive rule, they have had to keep their society in great poverty, and the result is that they themselves have few good choices.
The examples of China, Vietnam, and Cuba have shown that Secret Leviathan can also adapt. In different ways, these three countries have become more open, but each has contrived to keep the secrets and mysteries surrounding the core of power. The economic consequences have varied: China and Vietnam have prospered, but Cuba’s economy has stagnated. Even so, most Cubans today live far above the level of most North Koreans.[487]
Why did Secret Leviathan need to adapt? To understand the evolutionary pathways of Secret Leviathan in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to grasp the fundamental conditions that made it possible in the twentieth. One condition was mass production.[488] From the 1870s to the 1970s, in every major economy the mass production of things was coordinated by great corporations. The coordination of mass production relied on flows of information upward and inward from the periphery to the apex of power, while orders flowed downward and outward. When Lenin and Stalin envisaged the society of the future, they imagined American mass production building national power according to a centralized Bolshevik plan.[489]
The same technologies that fostered mass production lent themselves to comprehensive censorship. Censorship relied on centralized control of information flows, and the high fixed costs of predigital technologies made centralization easy. If the state could own the means, it could control access and restrict their uses. Information sharing was centralized in a few great printing presses, a national postal service, a network of telegraph and telephone exchanges centered on great cities, and broadcasts radiating from a few radio and television studios and transmitters. Monopolization by the state made possible the comprehensive censorship of information deemed generally unsuitable to the public, and the systematic denial of access to anyone unable to demonstrate authorized need to know.
Later in the twentieth century, this model was subverted. The services revolution led the way. In today’s wealthy economies, most wealth is generated in the production of services, and services are made valuable by shared information about risks and opportunities, reflected in prices, costs, news, and personal data. Meanwhile, the fixed costs of information sharing fell with astonishing rapidity. Technologically the process was dominated by Moore’s Law, by which the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. The first integrated circuit is thought to have been created in 1959. The number of transistors per circuit reached the thousands in the 1970s, the millions in the 1990s, and the billions in the early 2000s. One outcome was to flood the globe with personal information-sharing devices: by 2016 there were more cell phone subscriptions in the world than there were people. Another was the internet: in 2016, half the world had used it by one means or another (including cell phones) in the previous three months. Four social networks—Facebook, YouTube, WeChat, and Instagram—had more than 6 billion users between them at that time.[490]
481
This interpretation would be in line with Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin, “Why Resource-Poor Dictators Allow Freer Media.”
482
On power and money in Putin’s Russia, see Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy, and Miller, Putinomics.
487
In 2015 North Korea’s GDP per head (at purchasing power parity) was estimated at $1,700 (compared with $42,770 for South Korea in 2019). For Vietnam, Cuba, and China in 2017 the same figures were $6,900, $12,700, and $18,200 respectively. CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/.
489
For the affinity of early and mid-twentieth-century mass production to both communism and national socialism, see Link, Forging Global Fordism.
490
See Our World in Data on Moore’s Law, https://ourworldindata.org/gra pher/transistors-per-microprocessor; on cellular subscriptions, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/mobile-cellular-subscriptions-per-ioo-people; on internet users https://ourworldindata.org/internet; on users of social media https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media).