He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism, and reported the following:
Page 99 begins a story about secrecy, fear, and bureaucratic behavior. The context is this: in 1947, Stalin was enraged to find that Soviet biochemists had shared a potential cancer therapy with American scientists. The Soviet scientists thought they had official permission, but their superiors had failed to ask Stalin properly. The Soviet Union was already a super-secretive state, but now the dictator ordered a clampdown, directed not against spies but against all accidental, negligent, even well-meaning disclosure of state secrets. With ever more complex and demanding secrecy rules and harsher penalties for unintentional violation, a wave of fear rippled through the Soviet bureaucracy.Visit Mark Harrison's Twitter perch.
Among the top secrets of the Soviet Union were the names and locations of its forced labor camps. As far as the economy was concerned, each labor camp was just a business that was allocated supplies (like food and fuel) and delivered products (like timber or construction services). The effect of the new rules was to make labor camps so secret that their commandants could no longer communicate with suppliers and purchasers, or make and receive bank payments, without breaking the law.A gap between rules and realities was not unique to this moment or this context. Generally, rigid adherence to rules might have made the entire Soviet system unworkable. All Soviet managers were compelled to break rules for the sake of their job, even those that aimed to do only just enough to be left alone to ‘sleep peacefully.’ They were used to an environment in which rules came into conflict with realities. Their skill lay in knowing which rules they could break and how much they could get away with. The evidence of our story is that Soviet managers saw the gap between secrecy rules and realities as particularly dangerous.At first, fear paralyzed the labor camp officials. Then, they began to look for ways to work around the new rules while appealing to superiors for protection. That’s the story that begins on page 99.
Would going straight to page 99 give the reader a fair impression of my book as a whole? Yes and no. Yes, the story that begins there illustrates a core theme: secrecy was fundamental to the communists’ monopoly of power. But secrecy also carried large and varied costs that made their power less usable. That doesn’t mean they took secrecy “too far.” It simply means that Stalin was willing to pay a great price to guarantee security. (It’s probable that his successors did think he had gone too far. After he died, they let up on secrecy to a small but significant degree.) The story also illustrates that a monopoly of power and secret decision making do not endow authoritarian rulers with decisiveness and the ability to cut through red tape. What follows page 99 is the unfolding of a saga of bureaucratic time-wasting and indecision that went on for years without resolution. Eventually those involved just had to get used to living with absurd rules.
But no, page 99 doesn’t give the reader a full sense of what my book is about. For one thing, the story that begins there may be canonical, but it’s also one of the drier (dare I say boring?) stories in my book. Other stories in the book that might be more fun for the reader arise from the secret uses of the personal information that the secret police held on anyone who came to their attention, how secret police informers spread mistrust through society, and the frequency with which secret police officers lost secret documents by getting drunk in bars and forgetting their briefcases.
For another, my book is not just a collection of stories. It also offers a framework for understanding the different roles that secrecy has played in authoritarian states compared to modern democracies.
--Marshal Zeringue
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