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Mark Harrison, "Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism" (Stanford UP, 2023)
01:03:18
An interview with Mark Harrison
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- [00:00]
Dr. Mark Harrison
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to have with me today Dr. Mark Harrison, to tell us all about his book, just published by Stanford University Press in 2023, titled Secret Secrecy and State Capacity Under Soviet Communism, which dives right into one of the most secretive states that has ever existed, the Soviet Union, and helps us understand how this actually worked, what the benefits were, and especially what the costs were. This is a fascinating sort of beneath the hood, I suppose, behind the scenes of what's going on in the Soviet Union and helping us understand both the history and the analysis of it make sense of this information as well. So, Mark, thank you so much for being on the podcast to tell us all about it.
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Dr. Mark Harrison
Thank you. I'm a retired professor at the University of Warwick. By training, I'm an economic historian, and I spent most of my career working on Russia from one point of view or another. And I visited Russia many times. But I grew up in the Cold War at a time when Russia was famously a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. And I was fortunate to be one of the first to get inside the Russian archives after the Soviet Union collapsed. And there I found it, full of secrets. So I worked For a while on things like defense procurement. And on the face of it, defense procurement is always very simple. There's a buyer and a seller. But after that, everything gets very complicated. So I observed how the state seller in the Soviet Union used secrecy to try to exploit the state buyer. And that made me think, well, secrecy is interesting. I should try and find out more about it. But it took me a while to work out how. That was 25 years ago ago. It's taken me that time to write this book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fair enough. As you said, a mystery and enigma is not exactly an easy thing to figure out. And I think that that's kind of how you manage to do that is something we'll probably discuss. But I think as a starting point, you very helpfully outline in the book to help us make sense of all of this, the four pillars of the Soviet regime of secrecy. So can you take us through what these are?
- [03:33]
Dr. Mark Harrison
What made Soviet secrecy so all embracing and so effective were these four things. The first thing was that the state owned just about everything of importance in the Soviet economy in terms of production and distribution and exchange. Because the state monopolized most of these sorts of things. It also monopolized the press and the media. And so that was the starting point of its ability to control the flows of information. The second pillar was censorship. So in addition to having ownership of these things, it also controlled the information that flowed through the system and controlled what was available to the public. And it had a very large and mostly very effective censorship organization. It reviewed everything that was published in the central and local press and the radio and television, the theaters, stand up comedy acts, everything went through the censorship and had to be approved beforehand or not. A third thing was that the Communist Party was the ruling party. And the Communist Party came from the revolutionary underground of the late 19th, early 20th century, where it organized itself essentially as a conspiracy. And it did so to protect itself against the police and the agents of the old Russian state that were trying to find the members and disrupt its activities. But they carried these norms into government and they called them conspirative norms. So every party member who had any responsibility at any level was educated in how to behave like a conspirator, which meant really tell nobody anything unless they have a direct need to know. And the whole state was built around this need to know principle. So that was the third thing. And then the fourth thing was that in order to ensure the security of government communications, every business organization, every office, every leisure organization, cultural society, right down to cinemas and cosmetics manufacturers had A secret department. And the secret department was there to receive secret government instructions and to distribute them to the personnel. And the secret department in these organizations was run and supervised by the kgb, the secret police. And so these gave the leaders sufficient control over the flows of organization to ensure that over the 70 or 80 years that the Soviet Union existed, there were really no major leaks to speak of. In terms of things that came out to the public and the sort of thing that in Western societies you can read every day in the press, these things just did not happen.
- [06:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And given that that system, as you've just described, existed for quite a long period while the Soviet regime was in charge, to what extent were these pillars, was the system set up by Stalin? Did it predate him? What was his role in this?
- [07:14]
Dr. Mark Harrison
Stalin, I think, was personally quite involved in the origins of the system. So to begin with, once it had taken power, the Communist Party had to work out how to organize itself as a ruling party. And this was quite a complex task because it involved things like knowing who the members were, knowing what the qualities of the members were working out, who could join and who could be given responsibility. And this was a very complex task which various party leaders tried their hands at. And Stalin was the first to make it a success. Stalin had this capacity for very, very hard work, doing arduous, boring jobs that involved mastering a huge amount of information because it mattered to power. And so in 1919, Stalin became a member of the Communist Party's Org Bureau. The Organization Bureau is one of the subcommittees of the Central Committee. And in that capacity, he did two things which are very closely related, in fact. One was to get control of the membership so that Stalin began to be the person who decided which party members were promoted, which were appointed to government positions, who was given this job, that job, and so on. And so before too long, there were a great many party members who owed their careers to him. But the other thing was the decider, how their performance was to be measured and how they were to behave. And so at the same time as Stalin was organizing the membership, he was also involved in this writing down of the norms of conspiracy. So a few minutes ago, I mentioned this idea of conspirative norms. And obviously, initially, these weren't written. They were simply an understood way of behaving. But they were codified in 1919, 1920, 21, right through the 1920s, there was a process of codifying and elaborating them. And occasionally these documents appear in the archives called on conspiracy or on conspirativeness. Conspiritiveness is how I prefer to translate the Russian word, which is conspiratia, because it has a broader meaning than just plotting. It is to do with the essence of conspiracy, writing these down. Who was allowed to know things, under what conditions could they be granted access to secret party documents and government documents and so on. All these things were gradually written down in longer and longer sets of rules. And Stalin, I think, was intimately involved in this. He was essentially the person responsible for it by this stage. So a few of them bear his personal signature, but he's the element of continuity in the development of these rules.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So then, what impact did his death have on all of this?
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Dr. Mark Harrison
Well, so Stalin ruled for a long time. I mean, in the 1920s, he was not yet a dictator. He was simply an important person who had to negotiate with others. And by the end of the 20s, he was recognized as the most important of the party leaders. And by the early 30s, he had become clearly the first. And soon he was able really to use his colleagues instrumentally rather than to turn to them for support. And so throughout this period, there's a process which is not a gradual process, more so stepwise process, of secrecy becoming more and more intense. And by the 1940s, I think, secrecy had reached the point where almost nothing was published that could be of any interest to a foreign observer trying to work out what was going on. And at this point, one could say that the Soviet state was paying very severe costs in various ways, which we can probably come to later. So when Stalin died, a number of those who were around him and who now became the first circle of Soviet politics were clearly sort of chafing at the restrictions placed upon them by Stalinist rule. And within two or three years, they began to open up the censorship, for example, to allow the publication of statistics. Let's say economic statistics had really not been published for 20 years between 1937 and 1956. 57. And so things happened like the publication of a statistic yearbook for the first time in 20 years. Slightly edgy novels began to appear. Within a few years after that, Solzhenitsyn was able to publish a few short stories of the hard times in the Stalin years. It was a brief window, but the thing is that there was an element of relaxation which was quite genuine and quite important. The system, however, that he had created remained, I'm tempted to say, absolutely unchanged, certainly unchanged in principle. And so it remained a system in being that could open up, tighten, and quite sensitively control these information flows. And so within a Few years of Stalin's death, there was a feeling of that things had been allowed to get too liberal under his successors. And so it was quite easy for them then to ratchet things up again. So the system that Stalin created really remained in place until the late 1980s. However, there were these variations of policy, and one of the most important was certainly when Stalin died and things became a little bit more relaxed for a few years.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Interesting. Particularly thinking about kind of what a little bit of relaxation means. It's all very relative. And so I'd love to bring in sort of the other kind of implied, I suppose, country. Right. When we're talking about what is secrecy, what is allowed, what isn't. The obvious comparison is with the US during this time period. So you've given us some understanding of the norms of secrecy, the systems of secrecy in the ussr, The. How similar were they between the two countries in this sort of period during Stalin and also a bit after Stalin?
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Dr. Mark Harrison
Well, we should start with the similarities which were perfectly real. I mean, all governments have secrets, and just as the Soviet Union had top secret and secret and confidential information, so did the United States. But the differences are many and are of really great importance. So let's start with the rules of secrecy. So one of the features of American secrecy is that America did not really have much of a system until World War II. I mean, the Espionage act we know began was passed in 1917 in the context of World War II. And the espionage act, which is in the news at the moment, because this is the act under which former President Trump has been indicted, this was really the first American foray into official secrecy. But in many ways it was rather toothless act because, for example, it failed to prescribe clear penalties. And it made clear that the intention of espionage was all important. And because intention was important in American legislation, it meant that many years later, when someone like Daniel Ellsberg, who's just died, was charged with unlawfully disclosing American secrets, he was able to make a freedom of speech argument which was successful in the courts. One consequence is that the American and Soviet systems of secrecy were born roughly at the same time, 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. But American secrecy did not really have teeth until after World War II. And it was really under Truman that American secrecy really began to take shape and to acquire an elaborate system of rules and grades and also legislative penalties. And the remarkable difference at this point is that all those things that I've just mentioned were public. They were public information. And since then, nearly every American president Has early in their presidency, has passed an executive order on government secrecy which has been published. Whereas, in contrast, the Soviet system of secrecy was always a secret itself. And in my book, I call this the reflexive quality of Soviet secrecy. That is, it was self referential. What was secret was secret. The existence of secrets was secret. The rules of secrecy were secret. And anything that contained a reference to secret information, even if the secret information was not contained in the reference, that too was secret. And this gave Soviet secrecy a kind of multiplier because all you had to do was to refer to, for example, the secret decree, and then immediately what you had to do was to classify your reference with the same secrecy as the original decree. If you signed a receipt for a secret document, that receipt was secret. If you transmitted a secret letter, everything relating to the transmission of that letter was also secret. And this is, I think, an important difference between Soviet secrecy and American secrecy. Related to that, of course, is then the question of leaks. So in western societies, we are used to opening the papers and finding that somebody's leaked some important file or trove of government information. There are people out there who are hungry for leaks. We've got media that likes to expose government scandals and scan secret documents for signs of government misbehavior. It's a feature of living in an open society that the government finds it difficult to defend its information. And so secrecy is debated in the media, is sometimes debated in the courts when people are charged with secrecy. And we often find that the defense of free speech or public interest can be a defense against leaking secrets, as was the case, for example, when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers many years ago. Now he was charged, taken to court, and successfully pleaded free speech. And in the Soviet Union, this never happened, not once. And that's part of explaining how effective the system of secrecy was, that great crimes were committed and concealed under the heading of government secrecy. The murder of thousands, the arrest and execution of hundreds of thousands remained virtually unknown until the system collapsed.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So there's some kind of obvious capabilities there, right? Things that this system of secrecy enables the state to do. But also the system you're describing of sort of the receipt about the secret document, therefore it becomes itself secret. Right. There's some implications there that it's rather a lot of work to maintain all of this. So what is the secrecy capacity trade off?
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Dr. Mark Harrison
So I guess the starting point is the idea that although this might be a rather vague and insubstantial concept at first sight, there is a right amount of secrecy. Now, if Anybody listening is skeptical. Let me put it this way. I think it's easy to understand that a society can be too open for its own good. A government in which every war plan and every policy discussion is carried out in the open can easily find itself exploited or gamed or manipulated by foreign powers or by domestic lobbies in much the same way as if a private person carries on their financial affairs completely openly, and the whole world knows your bank account number and your passwords, it's highly likely that you won't have them for very long. So we can be too open, but it's also clear that we can be too closed. And so a society that is excessively secretive does appear to bear major costs. So the one that you were just talking about was simply that if you have a very complex and cumbersome system of secrecy, the government can be very hard to operate. Government needs instruments, ministries, agencies who go out and do the government's bidding. If everything is secret, how do these government agents find out what they're supposed to do? How do they receive instructions and so on. If you make this too cumbersome and too difficult, it can be hard to get things done. There are other costs as well, which I discuss in my book, but that's the simplest one. And one of the things that I'm able to do in my book is to try to estimate how much of the time of government officials was probably spent simply complying with government secrecy rules, carrying out the necessary paperwork, signing those receipts, investigating what happened if a secret piece of paper went missing and this sort of thing. And it works out, in the case that I examine, it works out at about 1/3. That is, government officials may have spent about a third of their time dealing with those sorts of things. And that's a third of your time that should have been. Well, could or should have been spent doing your core functions. You know, if your core function was to run an enterprise or to pursue criminals and so on, this is paperwork that you had to do first. So there are very major costs of that kind. And from some points of view, it's easy to see that that could become too much. Well, as soon as you entertain the idea that secrecy can either be too little or too much, there is then the idea that somewhere in between is the right amount. It may be hard to find. You may have defined it only by trial and error or experimentally. And also it might be a dynamic thing. It might change over time, but nonetheless, somewhere there's a right amount of secrecy. Now, in my book, I go One step further and say, well, the right amount might be different depending on who you are and the circumstances under which you operate. So if you look at democracies, open societies like Britain or America, it's clear that we ourselves don't believe in secrecy as an absolute good. Secrecy inhibits participation. It makes it difficult for the citizens to work out what the government is up to. So we try not to have very much of it. And secrecy is limited in its scope. And we try to give the citizens rights. For example, Freedom of Information Acts allow the citizens to ask for information about what the government is up to, and the government can't unreasonably refuse. Now, the government can refuse having given a reason. And of course, there's therefore a limitation on freedom of information. But nonetheless, there is the right at least to ask. And you know, you can look in the press and you can find these things discussed and debated all the time. If you're a dictator, you may well make a different calculation. More secrecy may make it the government more costly to operate, but it makes you more secure. The more secrecy you have, the less accountable you are, the less the citizens can work out what you're up to. And that lack of knowledge is disempowering. So the dictator may well choose to have more secrecy and to trade off the capacities of government in return for increasing their personal security, their personal grip on power. So that's the idea of the secrecy capacity, trade off. I think I really took the idea from reading about people talking about Internet security and banking security, how irritating it is to have to remember all those passwords that keep your account secure on the Internet. They make the Internet more difficult to operate for ordinary citizens, but they keep your assets more secure. And I think that trade off operates in politics and government secrecy as well. Secrecy makes it harder to get things done, but nonetheless, it keeps things safer. And if you're a dictator, one of the things that you're keeping safe is your life. Stalin, for example, was not interested in a government that he did not control. And so he was willing to give away some of the capacities of the state, enormous though they were, in order to ensure the security of his hold on power.
- [26:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Mark Harrison
That's o nnit.com.
- [27:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So with that idea of taking things from sort of the Internet and cybersecurity, there's very much, as you mentioned, the irritation or the frustration and certainly the idea of spending a third of your time sort of going, hang on, which form do I need to fill out again? Or how do I deal with this? The paperwork of it rather than the core functions has a massive impact. But if we're talking, as you said, about dictators, about dictators that want to make sure that they are not killed, it goes beyond just irritation, it really goes into fear. And you detail in the book that in this regime of secrecy, you've already talked a little bit about how it kind of changed and was more or less strict at different times. There were moments of heightened fear, especially heightened fear. Even within this context. Could you kind of help us understand why there were sort of different peaks and troughs in the level of fear and what the economic and practical consequences of this were?
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Dr. Mark Harrison
Well, if you look at Soviet history, there's really a 20 year wave of tightening of secrecy which in fact reaches its maximum after World War II. So you might think that war would be the greatest emergency. But as far as Stalin was concerned, secrecy became even more intense after World War II. There's a 20 year wave of tightening of secrecy in which Stalin is responding to a succession of concerns about the relationship between international pressures and the scope for domestic enemies to collude with the foreign enemy to undermine him. And this cycle reaches its peak after World War II. World War II, of course, is an emergency in itself. One of the features of World War II was the American development of the atomic bomb, which became public knowledge at the end of World War II. The Soviet Union had its own atom bomb project, which it then went on to develop. So this is part of the picture, but I think it goes beyond that to Stalin's fears that in the wake of the victory over Germany, people would start to undermine the party's control over things by seeking out new relationships with wartime allies. In particular, people looking for sort of cultural relaxation, a little bit more openness maybe we can be friends with America now. And a particular thing that caused him particular anxiety was a moment when Soviet scientists shared their work on cancer research with American scientists with the knowledge of very senior Soviet officials who had failed to consult fully with Stalin himself. And they kind of took for granted that this was not a big issue. And when Stalin heard about it, he became very angry and ordered a fresh clampdown. Not because he thought that anybody was spying, but because he wanted to draw attention to the importance of well meaning or negligent sharing of secrets. So as far as he was concerned, these scientists had shared their knowledge with the Americans because they wanted to boost their prestige overseas and essentially for selfish motives at the expense of the Soviet state. So he ordered a fresh clampdown. And one of the things that was involved in this was increasing the penalties for negligent sharing of secrets. So obviously espionage was already a deadly crime, but this meant prison if you accidentally or negligently disclose the secret. It also increased the secrecy, applying to various things which caused many people in the Soviet apparatus to have minor heart attacks, because had they last month given a speech in which they'd revealed something that would now be a crime. And a specific aspect that in some ways is amusing, but again, it was a source of huge anxiety was that there was a new law followed by new instructions which were promulgated across the entire Soviet state about the secret handling of paperwork. And these rules were classified top secret, but they included the rules governing secret paperwork, which is a lower graded classification. And this meant that people responsible only for secret paperwork were not allowed to read the instructions that now governed their work. And these instructions also included the requirement that you are not allowed to make abstracts from top secret government documents. So they couldn't even be shown selected text from the instructions. And it's just one little example of the kind of knots that they tied themselves into. Unintended consequences of complex rules. So the general aspect of this is unintended consequences of complexity. And there's lots of people out there who think it must be nice to be a dictator. All you have to do is issue orders and people jump to it. So in this case, Stalin was issuing orders and people were jumping all over the place, but they weren't doing doing what they were told. Instead they started thinking, how do I survive this sudden increase in the danger in my environment? And the answer was not to get on with doing their job. It was to start thinking, how can I insure myself against being punished for unwise decisions, for breaking rules? And so on. And the sort of activities that then spread were to do with lobbying superiors. Look at my problem, I'm going to have to break this rule. Please ensure me against the consequences. And then for the higher level officials, it was, here's a problem that we don't really know how to solve without annoying Stalin. In fact, we daren't get together to solve it in case it looks like a conspiracy against the state. So let's kind of set up a working party and kick it down the road. And one of my chapters in the book is Design is devoted to just such an occasion which took place in 1949, in fact, in the year that I was born. And the can was very satisfactorily kicked down the road for several years until the people that adjusted to the complexity got used to the idea of living with this heightened level of danger and everything became normal again. No solution was found. They just got on with it.
- [35:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And what about the consequences of all of this for sort of ordinary people, not the ones going, wait, I can't do my job because you won't tell me what the rules are.
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Dr. Mark Harrison
Well, so I think there's a difference between the bureaucrats and the ordinary people. For bureaucrats, these things rose and fell. I think for ordinary people there was a sort of permanent level of anxiety. Indeed, often ordinary people were not aware particularly of the rising and falling of bureaucratic anxiety. Even if you think of times like the Great terror in the 1930s when hundreds of thousands of people, maybe a million people were executed, a couple of million people were arrested and detained. But everybody thought, oh, this is just happening in my neighborhood. They didn't understand that it was happening across the country. But nonetheless, what was happening in their own neighborhoods was enough to make people pretty frightened over long periods of time. And I think there was a long term consequence of this, which was that just as the state became very secretive, so too ordinary people learn to live very secretive lives. And this is often misunderstood as people becoming depoliticized or apathetic. I don't think it meant that at all. I mean, yes, people learned to keep their mouths shut about politics and they learned to be discreet. They learned not to trust strangers. They learned to say what they really thought only in the family circle, and sometimes not even then. If they were worried enough about their children picking up stray remarks and repeating them at school, perhaps not even. There's a comment by the writer Isaac Babel, who I quote in my book about these days, I don't know who I can say anything to not even in bed with a pillow pulled over my head. And people learn to live like that. And I don't think it means that they became apathetic or depoliticized. It just meant they thought, well, I have one set of values for the public sphere, another set for the private sphere. And people continued to care about their private values, but they kept them well hidden. So one consequence of this was, I think, a very low trust society. Ordinary people became distrustful of strangers, they became reluctant to cooperate with strangers, bearing in mind that this was also a society that was heavily penetrated by secret police informers. And the defence against informers was again not to allow people about whom you didn't know very much into your intimate circle. There's interesting research on this relating to East Germany. Some German economists have done a long term study of the relationship between the density of Stasi informers in East Germany and trust in German society today. And they show quite clearly that the greater was the density of Stasi informants 30 years ago. The lower today is trust among citizens. And this has a cost to society because economists know that low trust brings lower incomes, lower investment, lower participation in society. And so you can imagine that I think that Soviet leaders did not deliberately set out to build a low trust society. In fact, they wanted the kind of trust that would allow people to cooperate with the Communist Party, to work with the Communist Party and cooperate with its goals and work together to achieve the modern industrial power that they were trying to build. But the result of their policies was to create a low trust society. So this is another aspect of the secrecy capacity, trade off that gave away some of the capacities that richer, more wealthy open societies can rely on in order to ensure the security of their own regiment.
- [40:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So given that there's quite a clear cost then for the government there and quite a strong impact even as you said, 30 years later. Let's talk, shall we please, about the impact that this secrecy regime had on decision making outside of the country. So what impact did this have on international relations, for example, from the USSR's point of view?
- [40:59]
Dr. Mark Harrison
Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union was pursuing a kind of twin track policy towards armament and disarmament. Well, I should say this actually begins in 1930. It goes back before the Cold War to the disarmament negotiations taking place in Geneva in 1930. But it's essentially in continuity with what happened later. And the two tracks were as follows. On one side they wanted to build Soviet military power and to rearm. On the other side, they wanted to persuade their likely adversaries to restrain their armament and to conclude arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. That would be to the Soviet Union's advantage. And there's an obvious clash between these two goals. How do you rearm and at the same time persuade others to limit their armament? And the answer was to exploit secrecy. So they rearmed in secret, while. All the time advocating and pursuing policies of arms control. So secrecy applied not only to the size of the Soviet Union's armed forces, but also to budgetary spending. So the Soviet Union had an annual budget, just like other governments, with allocations to defence. And in periods when the stress was being placed more heavily upon the need to conclude arms control agreements, the size of budgetary allocations was concealed. They could do this and get away with it because they had the system of secrecy that I've described. But the problem was that as time went on, it became apparent that there was a gap between Soviet pretensions to disarmament and the reality. And so, in a way, just as secretiveness inhibited trust among the citizens and the trust that citizens exhibited towards the government within the Soviet Union, it also undermined trust between negotiating partners in the international arena. Now, through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, that problem existed. It grew more and more acute. As we know, there were moments in the 1980s, particularly in the early 80s, when distrust between the Soviet Union, United States, NATO powers became so acute that the world was close to accidental nuclear war. But Brezhnev was an old conservative and he did not see a way around this problem. Andropov, Chernyenko, 1982, 3, 4, no change. But in 1985, you get Gorbachev coming in a younger generation, I think, with a genuine commitment to restoring trust and achieving some degree of nuclear disarmament. And quite early on, Gorbachev decided to grasp this nettle of concealment and to move out to a policy of greater openness, which would be both with regard to Soviet force levels and with regard to budgetary costs. What the Soviet defense burden truly was, and the problem that emerges from the papers of the time is nobody knew what the truth was. When I say the truth, what I mean is what was a realistic measure of Soviet defense costs? I mean, there are those who say, well, the whole Soviet economy was based on lies at this point, which I understand, but nonetheless, truth and lies are a bit relative here. But the published Soviet figure for defense at this time was probably a fifth of the truth figure by any standards. And what had happened in the interim was that the mechanisms of concealment had proved so Effective that the Soviet Union saw accountants had essentially lost the true total of budgetary spending, direct and indirect, on defence, for example, all the subsidies that were channeled not only through the defence industries, but through the heavy industries, through the civilian sector, into the inputs, into the military budget, the skewed prices, so on and so forth, forth. And so it turned out that there was no figure, no true figure that they could reveal as the truth and restore trust in the Soviet Union as a negotiating partner. New figures were promised. They took several years to emerge, and when they did emerge, it still wasn't really clear that they were a more realistic estimate, but they only closed part of the credibility gap. So a question mark still remains and remains to this day of what a more realistic figure would be. In my book I used the CIA estimates of the time, which were often criticized. But nonetheless, in hindsight, I think these were probably the best benchmark that we have.
- [47:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And so given the trouble that this got them in, right. Given the impact with sort of lost worker time, the fear within the country, the challenges internationally, to what extent do you think the USSR chose this level of regime of secrecy, knowing the costs and kind of making that calculation rationally?
- [47:44]
Dr. Mark Harrison
Well, that's, it's a great question and one that I. Okay, let me try and answer it like this. So there are several approaches to secrecy that I outline in the book. And at one extreme there's what I call the sort of culture of secrecy argument, which is Russians have always had secretive government. The Soviet Union had a culture of secrecy, very hard to shake off. There has, I think, to be an element of truth about this. But at the same time I show that in various ways it can't be the full story because Soviet secrecy was undoubtedly much more intense and more effective than the secrecy of the, the tsarist regime, the old monarchy. And I think if one was going to talk about a culture of secrecy, the more accurate thing would be the Bolshevik culture of secrecy. Because it was the Bolsheviks who brought this idea of conspirativeness into power. And I think for many Bolsheviks it was a kind of existential or identity thing. I am a Bolshevik, therefore I believe in conspirativeness. And again, this can't be the whole story because Gorbachev came up in that culture, he was reared in that culture, but he began in some ways in a hesitating and half hearted way, just begin to throw it off. I mean, the idea of glasnost, of transparency that he brought in in the later years of his perestroika were antithetical to the idea of conspirativeness. And although he was not a consistent adherent to glasnost, it was a break. So the culture of secrecy idea gets us some way. At the other extreme, there's the idea that secrecy is simply a policy. And when I think of a policy instrument, I mean, you think of a tax rate. A tax rate can be raised and lowered. There's always an element of stickiness. People become very attached to the idea that a particular tax rate shouldn't change and so on. But nonetheless, in principle, you can switch it up, you can switch it down, and that's how policies work. And secrecy seems stickier than that. When you look at the big changes in secrecy in the life of the Soviet Union, it's more like every 10 years or every 20 years, there's a big change. So that's a long time in the life of a policy. So there's something in between. In my book, I refer to the Doug north idea of institutions as rules of the game. So secrecy here is an institution, is a set of rules that is espoused by a coalition, and it persists as long as that coalition continues to be around it. Now, in Soviet politics, a coalition can be very narrow. In Stalin's time, it was essentially the governing coalition was a coalition of one from 1935, 36 through to 1950 or so. But it leaves us somewhere in between this idea that it's just a rational calculation. Situations change. So we dial it up, we dial it down. The other extreme, secrecy is just a culture that we can't change. What I say to my readers is there are these three approaches to secrecy, and each one is useful at different times. You don't have to be a believer. I try not to ask my readers to believe in something as a predicate to accepting what's in my book, because all these approaches have their limitations. They all have something to tell us, and they're just part of our toolkit. That's the way I think of it.
- [52:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's very helpful. As I said at the beginning, kind of not just telling us the history, but giving us ways of analyzing it in the book, which is very helpful. At the risk of opening up a massive can of worms as we come towards the end of this, I am going to ask about something you talk about in the book, which of course is this idea of being hard to shake off, right? The Soviet Union doesn't exist. But you can make a pretty decent argument that something like this system of secrecy exists. After the Soviet collapse in Russia today. So would you mind telling us a bit about the regime of secrecy that currently exists and sort of to what extent it's an evolution of the Soviet one?
- [52:50]
Dr. Mark Harrison
Okay. So, yes, it's definitely an evolution, and it's a conscious evolution, because as we know in biology, evolution is random. But in this case, there is an intelligent designer, and the intelligent designer is Vladimir Putin, who decided, I think, quite early on in his presidency that he was going to restore some of the main institutions of Soviet rule. At the same time, it's not exactly in continuity. It's not the same. And in some ways, I think all you have to do to see the differences is to look at what's happened over the last weekend. We've had a weekend of extraordinary events with the Prigozhin insurrection, the march of the Wagner troops towards Moscow, which then came to a sudden end with a purported agreement, the details of which don't matter for now. But there are two things, I think, that illustrate the continuity and the difference. So the continuity is we have no idea what is happening in the Kremlin. We don't know where the Defense Minister, Shoigu, has gone. We don't know what was really agreed. We don't know if Putin is sticking to the agreement or whether he's already reneged on it. We have no idea. So that's the first thing. There is secrecy around the core of power. But there's a difference as well, which is. What's just happened has resulted in a flood of information out of Russia. And this information is everything from the sort of TikTok telegram, kontaktia, postings of Russian soldiers either marching on Moscow or observing it. So we have immediate photographs, roadblocks, video footage from Rostov and Prigozhin being bid farewell by the. The citizens, and so on and so forth. It's extraordinary. And in Soviet times, that would, of course, you know, it would have been months before we even heard rumors of what's just happened. So why is that? When the answer is, well, we're living in a different technological era. My book is written about the technology of the sort of mid 20th century when the means of communication were centralized. So if you think about how the citizens of the Soviet Union communicated with each other, or how officials communicated with each other, well, you have centralized printing presses, centralized television and radio stations, a centralized telephone network, a nationalized post office, all under government control. It's analog technology, and it's centralized. And it was easy for a government to monopolize everything. I say easy, not easy but possible today. Everybody's got a mobile phone in their pocket which can be in direct contact with half the rest of the world's population. And peer to peer information sharing and social media mean that those four pillars can't be directly replicated. So there's a period of optimism when people thought, well, now that we have the Internet and social media and so on. Authoritarian rulers can't disempower people. If knowledge is power, then the people can't be disempowered in the way that they were before. And that's true, but they can be disempowered differently. So in the final chapter of my book, I try to tell the story of secrecy, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to Russia, somewhere close to the present day. And by the time I finished my book, the war in Ukraine had begun. And I was able to refer to it as an example of how it began, how that illustrated the secrecy capacity, trade off. But. What modern authoritarian rulers do now is rather than try and control everything, they exploit the existence of peer to peer information sharing and social media to disempower people in a different way by spreading uncertainty. So if you think to yourself, what does knowledge do? Is it enables us to be certain about what's happening. And the opposite of this is not just ignorance, it's uncertainty. And authoritarian rulers have learned to create uncertainty among the citizens by disinformation, by spreading myths and rumors. So a plane is shot down. Was it the Russians? Was it the Ukrainians? Was it the British? Was it the Israelis? There's the truth, but there's also a thousand rumors. I call it Leviathan of a thousand lies. And given the thousand lies, who can tell the truth? Perhaps a few experts can, but for ordinary people, it's really hard. So it's no longer Soviet secrecy as we knew it, there's evolution. And unfortunately it hasn't eliminated the possibility of authoritarian rule, but it's shifted the character of authoritarian rule onto different lines.
- [59:17]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for explaining that and tackling some massive topics quite clearly. At the risk of keeping you on that subject, though hopefully less in terms of evolution of how all of the world will go, but really what you're working on, you've taken us literally right up to the present day. Is there anything in the future, anything you might be working on, whether or not it's on this topic, whether or not it's a book that you'd like to share with the audience?
- [59:43]
Dr. Mark Harrison
Well, briefly, I have two projects on the go. One of them is just about finished, I think I have a co author, Eugenia Nazarolaeva of the London School of Economics. We're working on KGB techniques of preventive policing. And we we have a database of KGB records from Soviet Lithuania about how they used to intervene to stop people from offending before it happened. And we're using a variety of techniques including text analysis and machine learning to try to understand what they thought they were doing and how that evolved over time. We have a working paper in circulation, so if you Google you have been warned it won't be too difficult to find. The other thing I'm working on is a separate topic. So side by side with working on Russia over several decades, I've spent quite a lot of time working on the economics of the two world wars and the Cold War. And one of my interests has been economic warfare. And right now I have a project on the history of economic warfare with my colleague Stephen Broadbury, which is sort of midway along, hopefully there'll be a book titled something like economic warfare since 1800. And unfortunately, again, this is a topical thing because as I'm sure your readers realize, there are three campaigns of economic warfare going on in Europe right now. There's Russia's economic warfare against Ukraine. There's the West's economic warfare against Russia to deny Russia the imports that it needs to wage war. And there's Russia's warfare against Western economies carried on through Russia's energy exports. So it's a very complex subject. It's a live one and it's one about which we know more than we think. But to find those lessons, you have to go back into history. Thank you.
- [62:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that's absolutely fascinating. Best of luck with those projects. And while you dive into them, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Secret Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism, just out from Stanford University Press. Mark, thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise with us.
- [62:18]
Dr. Mark Harrison
Thank you. I've enjoyed it.
- [62:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hablas Espanol?
- [62:32]
Dr. Mark Harrison
Spriesto Deutsch?
- [62:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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