Day: October 1, 2023
Twenty-five years ago, after the fall of the Soviet Union, an academic at the University of Warwick began work in the Russian archives to map the sophisticated regime that made the Soviet Union the most secretive state that ever existed.
A new book, based on decades of research, describes the complex layers of secrecy within the Soviet Union, what secrecy hid, what the state gained and lost because of it, and what we can learn about how secrecy is used in Russia today.
Emeritus Professor of Economics Mark Harrison at the University of Warwick and author of Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism says: “The Soviet Union’s archives hold many millions of secret documents. Their volume is far greater than the government information that was released into the public sphere. But the biggest secret was the huge gap between the appearance and reality of the communist party dictatorship. To all appearances, the Soviet state was decisive, all-knowing, and all-powerful. Behind the scenes, the state was ruled by procrastination, indecision, groupthink, mistrust, fear, and disinformation. This gap was hidden by secrecy.
“The communists were the most diligent state-builders of the twentieth century. The political leaders valued secrecy because it bought them security of tenure. But secrecy was extremely costly. The price they paid was in a state machine that was far less capable than the one they pretended to deploy. There was a secrecy/capacity trade-off.”
“Ordinary people who had no direct connection to power also paid the price of secrecy. Not only were they denied the freedoms of an open society. In addition, they knew that the secret police held information about their background and lives. You didn’t know what that information was or how it affected your life. A promotion might be mysteriously blocked, or an application to travel abroad that was refused without reason. You would never know why. You could only suspect that there was something in your past that the state knew about. And there was no appeal process.”
A measure of the scale of the Soviet Union’s secret state compares the number of US and Soviet secret informants at the height of the Cold War:
“In 1976 the FBI had around 1500 undercover informants. In a slightly earlier year, 1968, the KGB had 165,000 informants. Given that the Soviet population was slightly larger than the American population at the time, the difference was 1:100.”
What we can learn about Russia’s secrecy today
The digital age we are now living in is more adapted to disinformation than to censorship. Yet, the secrecy /capacity trade-off continues to operate, explains Professor Harrison:
“President Putin chose to plan and launch the invasion of Ukraine in complete secrecy, to preserve his freedom of action and achieve surprise. But in doing so he sacrificed a large part of his invasion force. With more transparent decision making, Russia’s soldiers would not have invaded Ukraine thinking they were on an exercise, and President Putin would not have sent them into battle believing that he could win the war in three days.”
Secret Leviathan: Secrecy and State Capacity under Soviet Communism by Mark Harrison, published by Stanford University Press (2023), is out now.
WARSAW — Several countries have accused members of the Russian Orthodox clergy of collaborating with Russian security services, pushing Kremlin policy inside the church and even recruiting spies from within.
On Sept. 21, Bulgaria deported Russian Archimandrite Vassian, guardian of the Orthodox parish in Sofia, along with two Belarusian priests. In a press release, the Bulgarian national security agency says that clergy were deported because they posed a threat to national security. “The measures were taken due to their actions against the security and interests of the Republic of Bulgaria,” Bulgarian authorities wrote in a statement, according to Radio Svoboda.
These reports were also confirmed by Russia’s ambassador to Bulgaria, Eleonora Mitrofanova, who told Russian state news agency TASS that the priests must leave Bulgaria within 24 hours. “After being declared persona non grata, Wassian and the other two clerics were taken home under police supervision to pack up their belongings. Then they will be taken to the border with Serbia” she said.
The Russian ambassador called the deportation “brutal and blatant.” In a statement, the Russian mission in Bulgaria wrote: “It is obvious that the current Bulgarian leaders have set themselves the task of destroying only socio-political and cultural-humanitarian ties between our countries, but also the severance of relations between sister Orthodox Churches and the turning of the Russian and Bulgarian nations against each other.”
Bulgaria is not the only country accusing Archimandrite Wassian, who in secular life is known as Nikolai Zmeev, of working for Russian security services.
The priest may have been cooperating with the Russian services for years.
Radio Svoboda has reported that he was among three Russian diplomats recognized as persona non grata by North Macedonia. According to Macedonian and Bulgarian media, Zmeev had been “following Moscow’s orders to cause a split in the Macedonian Church” for years.
Even stronger charges were brought in the U.S. against another Russian Orthodox priest, Dmitry Petrovsky. After analyzing his activities as part of his work in the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, the FBI accused him of recruiting agents among priests and parishioners of Orthodox churches in the U.S. for the Russian services.
Citing FBI sources, Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan described Petrovsky’s activities on the independent website Agentura. Their findings show that the priest may have been cooperating with the Russian services for years, under the guidance of Patriarch Kirill, who has long been loyal to the Kremlin and openly supports the war in Ukraine.
In May 2021, FBI officers found files related to Russian intelligence on Petrovsky’s computer. The documents included files on prominent Orthodox priests in the U.S., as well as detailed biographies of their family members. According to FBI agents, this data was intended to help Pietrowski to blackmail other members of the Orthodox clergy.
According to Soldatov and Borogan, the documents found on Petrovsky’s computer also contained a plan for cooperation between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian security services.
The “areas of cooperation” mentioned included, among others, “the involvement of clergy in operational activities.” Investigative journalists, citing informants from the Russian Orthodox Church, determined that these documents were prepared shortly after Kirill was appointed patriarch in 2009. The FBI shares the same opinion.
However, the American authorities have not yet detained Petrovsky, who appears to be in Russia.
After the end of separatism in Garabagh, Armenia and its patrons began to resort to provocations that would ignite the next war. Before that, Armenia, which tried to create provocations and sabotages around Lachin under the false testimony of the European Union mission group, in the name of humanitarian aid, this time started to cause joint provocations in the assassination of the Azerbaijani soldier.