Turning to the secrecy/capacity tradeoff, the evidence is that it persists. One case in point is the poor quality of decisions made by the Putin administration as it approached the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Why did the Russian Army lose the early battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv? According to former soldier and Russia expert Jeffrey Edmonds, the answer is secrecy.[504] Secrecy over Russian intentions “denied the Russian military the ability to prepare for war in the way that it had trained for countless times before,” Edmonds explains.
Interviews with captured Russian officers and enlisted personnel suggest that the operation and its scope were likely not shared at the tactical level. For those of us who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, every soldier, staffer, and commander understood where they were going, the danger they might face, and at least the rough outlines of the types of missions they were going to undertake. While there are an infinite number of surprises in war, we all knew we were going to combat. Turning to the Russian military’s experience thus far in Ukraine, it is apparent that this process of emotional and mental preparation for war was missing.
President Putin kept his invasion plans under the tightest secrecy, consulting with no more than a handful of others. According to one report, even Kremlin staff were shocked by Putin’s announcement of the “special military operation.”[505] As a result, secrecy impeded military preparations and their implementation, and also short-circuited consideration of the likely resistance to be expected on the part of Ukraine and its supporting coalition.
The poor performance of the Russian army in the war of attrition that followed suggests another price of secrecy. Evidently, trillions of rubles supposedly invested in military modernization before the war had been diverted or lost, with poor logistics, badly designed weapons, and defective or missing equipment parts as outcomes.[506] The growing secrecy surrounding prewar defense outlays and military procurements appeared designed to conceal Russia’s military modernization from foreign observers—but its more important effect may have been to hide the hollowing out of Russia’s military capacity by corruption and waste from the Kremlin leaders.
Thirty years after the fall of communism in Russia, the secrecy/capacity tradeoff was still at work. Moreover, the fact that the Putin administration erred on the side of too much secrecy, rather than too little, provided a clear signal of its authoritarian character.
Given that historians now have access to what happened behind the scenes of communist rule in the Soviet empire, it is tempting to think of the secret record as what “really” happened, and the rest as mere appearance. But this sets too low a value on appearances. Secrecy is also the control of appearance, and authoritarian rulers care greatly about the look of things. Secrecy can have a theatrical aspect, the “spectacle of secrecy” described by the literary scholar Cristina Vatulescu and expressed in the image of the “Iron Curtain.”[507] In other words, the formidable appearance of authority is also part of its essence, and the history of appearances is an essential aspect of what really happened in history.
Theatre rests on illusion, and the maintenance of illusions in the Soviet theatre relied on keeping the spectators away from the back of the stage. A question that follows is to what extent the backstage capabilities of the Soviet state lived up to what the spectators imagined. Here the study of secrecy itself is helpful because it can shed a clear light on the gap between the public spectacle and what went on behind the scenes.
Extreme secrecy gave the Soviet state the appearance of decisiveness, national purpose, a monolithic will, and an unrivalled ability to command the unanimous consent of the people. But the appearance was a façade, designed to deceive. This book has shown that behind the façade lay wall-to-wall bureaucracy, high decision costs (and sometimes gridlock), abuse of power for private purposes, the misallocation of talent, contagious mistrust, and a misinformed leadership. The outcome was a state that was less capable and more fragile than anyone, insider or outsider, could imagine at the time.
The ability of a government to make decisions and direct others to carry them out without undue procrastination or diversion of effort to other purposes is one aspect of state capacity. At first sight, secrecy seems like a powerful tool for augmenting the decisiveness of the state and containing its running costs. Indeed, authoritarian regimes often display impressive decisiveness and fearsome powers of enforcement; that’s one way we know that they can be called “authoritarian.”
The mystique of authoritarian regimes arises from concealment of their inner workings. Like the proverbial sausage, they “cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”[508] The historical research covered in this book suggests that the stratagem of concealment is deliberate. The records of the twentieth century’s most long-lived authoritarian regime show that its iron curtain of secrecy concealed colossal waste of opportunities and human resources, and diversion of time and effort to private goals.
Secrecy conceals weaknesses as well as strengths. It seems designed to hide clues, but it may also hide cluelessness. When we strip the secrecy away, we find that the true capacity of Secret Leviathan was much less than appeared on the surface. Soviet secrecy made authoritarian rule cumbersome and indecisive. Bureaucrats used nearly as much paper secretly registering and inventorizing secret correspondence as writing down the original secrets. Secretive government permitted everyday abuses, while denying a place in government business (that is, in nearly all the business there was) to faces that didn’t fit. Secretive government could withhold valuable information even from its own leaders.
I do not conclude that Soviet secrecy was irrational or mistakenly excessive from the standpoint of its rulers. The same security/usability tradeoff applied to Soviet government as to all business systems. With good reason, Soviet rulers preferred a regime that was more secretive, even if less—much less—user friendly. The force of reason behind this choice is suggested by the fact that, when the veil of secrecy was torn down, the system came down with it.
As described in this book, Secret Leviathan lives on only in a few corners of today’s world. Elsewhere it has adapted to the new era of general access to social media and information sharing. The modern exterior of the authoritarian state is Leviathan of a Thousand Lies. The beating heart of Leviathan of a Thousand Lies is still surrounded by secrecy, an impenetrable veil that prevents the investigation and accountability of power itself. But while secrecy remains at the inner core, modern dictators no longer practice comprehensive censorship of the public sphere. Instead, they propagate uncertainty by a smokescreen of myths and rumors. In this way, they aim to paralyze those inclined to collective opposition or resistance and neutralize threats to regime security.
Leviathan of a Thousand Lies continues to face the security/usability tradeoff discussed in Chapter 2. One reason is that the capacity of the state in Russia, China, and elsewhere relies on a population continually stirred up by disinformation. Leviathan of a Thousand Lies propagates many false models of how the modern world has come into being and how it works. These models rely heavily on stories of the past victimization and humiliation of the nation by foreign states and their citizens. Such stories stoke xenophobia and fear of diversity. They leave Russia a country with few friends in the world. Russia’s closest allies are China and India, two countries that hate each other. More generally, a society in which most people have been sold nonsensical beliefs or feel compelled to profess them would seem hard to govern sensibly. This is the subject for another book that someone else must write, if they have not done so already, so it is also my place to stop.
505
“Istochniki: rossiiskie vlasti ne byli gotovy к vvedennym protiv strany sanktsiiam. Vozmozhno, po tomu chto Putin skryl plan vtorzheniia ot mnogikh podchinennykh,” Agenstvo, 2 March 2022, https://www.agents.media/rossijskie-vlasti-sanktsii/.
506
Polina Beliakova, “Russian Military’s Corruption Quagmire,” Politico, 8 March 2022, https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-military-corruption- quagmire/; Alex Crowther, “Russia’s Military: Failure on an Awesome Scale,” Centre for European Policy Analysis, 15 April 2022, https://cepa.org/article/ russias-military-failure-on-an-awesome-scale/.
507
Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics, 6. For the “Iron Curtain,” see Winston S. Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace,” speech at Westminster College, Fulton, MO, 5 March 1946, International Churchill Society, http://www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/ speeches/i946-i963-elder-statesman/i2O-the-sinews-of-peace.
508
Applied to law making, this saying is traced back to the lawyer John Godfrey Saxe, writing in the Daily Cleveland Herald on 2 March 1869, by Fred Shapiro in “Our Daily Bieg: Uncovering More Quote Authors,” Freakonomics, 5 March 2009, https://freakonomics.com/2oo9/o3/o5/our-daily-bleg-uncovering-more-quote-au thors/. (A “bleg” is a blog entry that begs the reader for further information.)