Abstract
Among communism’s many intellectual vices, the belief in the inevitability of a specific resolution of History was, arguably, the most far-reaching. Codified and formalized, variously as dialectical or historical materialism, or scientific communism, these sub-doctrines of Marxism-Leninism were used to justify a programme of wholesale social, moral and economic transformation. Inevitability determined that the outcome was beyond reasonable doubt. Opposition to the course of History was thus futile. History, as we know, let communism down.
Blocking the exchange of information is still, of course, one of their most important tasks, and a foundation stone of totalitarianism…
Valentin Turchin, 1981
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Notes
Friedrich Hayek’s contention, expressed in The Road to Serfdom, that planning the human condition leads to totalitarianism, is totally vindicated. In the post-Soviet period it is worth noting the observations made by Andrei Amalrik in his article, ‘Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?’, which was first published in the journal, Survey in 1969. Noting the extreme isolation of the regime and its surrealistic picture of the outside world, he adds: ‘Yet the longer this state of affairs helps to perpetuate the status quo, the more rapid and decisive will be its collapse when confrontation with reality becomes inevitable’. See Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?, Harper & Row, New York and Evanston, 1970, p. 41.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Collins, London, 1987, p. 83.
The proliferation of IT has blurred distinctions between words such as knowledge, data, ideas and concepts. Most people would be quite content to subsume these four words under the apparently simple rubric of information. For the task in hand, I intend to adopt the same pragmatic approach. That said, there are significant differences between these four categories. It was, in part, the failure to cope with these distinctions, or rather the attempt to define them away, which proved so fatal to communism. Theodore Roszak is one of a number of commentators who have tried to take a detached view of IT in the West. Information, he notes, ‘smacks of safe neutrality… in that innocent guise, it is the perfect starting point for a technocratic political agenda that wants as little exposure for its objectives as possible. After all, what can one say against information?’ Cf. Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking, Lutterworth Press, Cambridge, UK, 1986, p. 19.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1992, p. 93.
Western radio broadcasts to the Soviet empire played a vital role in providing accurate information and countering official propaganda. In the introduction to his thorough and comprehensive study of Western radio broadcasts to the Soviet empire Michael Nelson notes that the effects were twofold. First, they broke the monopoly of the mass media which was essential to the communist Party dictatorship. Second, the cost of jamming was prohibitive. In 1990 Eduard Shevardnadze cited the staggering figure of 700 billion rubles over two decades as the cost of ideological confrontation with the West. Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War, unpublished manuscript, 1995, p. 2. See, too, Julian Hale’s explanation of jamming: ‘Jamming is expensive for a technical but simple reason. The incoming signal starts at one point, but it ends up over a huge area. If it is transmitted on a number of frequencies, it has to be combated by both sky-wave jamming, in other words by using the same medium as that used by the broadcaster and by ground-wave jamming, which interferes with signals in the immediate vicinity of the jamming transmitter. This requires in a country the size of Russia, innumerable transmitters directed against a single signal. It also requires large teams of monitors to follow the signals around the frequency spectrum and, as jamming is selective, to listen out for the hostile parts. An indirect cost is incurred in the transfer of manpower (estimated to be up to 10,000 technicians in Russia) as well as equipment, which would otherwise have been used to boost domestic broadcasting services.’
See Julian Hale, Radio Power: Propaganda and International Broadcasting, Paul Elek. London. 1975. p. 133.
The problem of the ‘objectivity of information’ was a source of abiding concern to Marxist-Leninist philosophy. For, if objective information does not depend on the subject then the neutrality of information becomes a serious possibility. Cf. Peter Paul Kirschenmann, Information and Reflection. On Some Problems of Cybernetics and how Contemporary Dialectical Materialism Copes with Them, trans. T. J. Blakeley, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland, 1970, p. 120.
In the Bol’shaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 3rd edn, vol. 28, Sovetskaya entsiklopediya, Moscow, 1978, censorship is defined as: ‘control, exercised by officials (secular or spiritual), over the content, publication and dissemination of printed material, and over the content (performance or showing) of plays and other dramatic forms, of works, cinema productions, of productions of visual art, radio and television broadcasts, and sometimes even of private correspondence, with the aim of not permitting, or limiting the dissemination of ideas and information, recognized by those authorities as being undesirable or harmful.’ 3rd edition, vol. 28, p. 489. In certain circumstances, such as war, this definition, with the elimination of religious censorship, might well apply to the liberal democracies. What the originators of this definition conspicuously fail to mention is that whereas, in the West, such proscription is confined to exceptional circumstances, and in most cases, outside of war, is subject to a public, legal challenge, the nature of censorship in the Soviet Union was altogether more pervasive and destructive. Nor indeed is the existence of the censorship apparatus formally acknowledged. A great deal of what was known in the West about the Soviet censor came to us from defectors, exiles and some diligent and persistent scholarship. However, even before the collapse of the Soviet Union the trickle of information had long been a flood enabling scholars to build up an accurate picture of the extent and nature of the mechanism. New information, made available in the glasnost’ period, has confirmed the basic picture, and the view repeated many times in various forms, that Soviet censorship was ‘a new phenomenon in the history of thought control’. Arkady Belinkov in The Soviet Censorship, Martin Dewhirst and Robert Farrell, (eds), Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1973, p. 1. The Soviet Censorship is now, understandably, somewhat dated. Nevertheless it contains a great deal of valuable information and personal testimony on the nature and ramifications of Soviet censorship. It is an essential starting point in any study of the problem. Censorship involved a tortuous process of writing, consultations and rewriting and several layers of checking and rechecking before something was deemed fit for publication. For a detailed and personal account of dealings with the censorship see Leonid Finkelstein’s experiences in Dewhirst and Farrell, pp. 50–63.
A recent publication that builds on the earlier study of Dewhirst and Farrell is Marianna Tax Choldin and Maurice Friedberg (eds), The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars, and Censors in the USSR, Unwin Hyman, Boston and London, 1989. In her survey of censorship in Soviet translations of Western authors, Tax Choldin concludes that whereas the tsarist censors were reactive, that is they tried to limit the perceived damage done by foreign authors, Soviet censors were largely active, that is deletions and amendments had a definite ideological purpose. As she quite rightly suggests the Soviet response has more in common with rewriting or control. Tax Choldin’s conclusions are based on a comparative study of English texts and Soviet translations of Senator Fulbright’s, The Arrogance of Power (1966),
Sir Harold Nicolson’s, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (1954)
Kwame Nkrumah’s, I Speak of Freedom (1961)
Jawaharlal Nehru’s, India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September 1946–April 1961 (1961). See Tax Choldin, pp. 29–51.
Any doubts about Soviet attitudes towards neutrality in the dissemination of information can be dispelled by remarks made by V. V. Kuibyshev in early 1931, when forced collectivization was at its height: The information part of our press is a sector of this agitation by means of facts. And in these two words is essentially contained the whole Bolshevik definition of the tasks of information. Above all this is agitation — i.e., not the toothless, dispassionate transmittal of facts, but the selection of facts in such a way, in such an order, that they themselves shout out for us, for our cause. Quoted in A Country Study: Politics in the USSR, 3rd ed., F. C. Barghoorn and T. F. Remmington, Little, Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1986, p. 178. A Soviet study defines information as being ‘an organic part of propaganda’. Spartak I. Beglov, Vneshnepoliticheskaya propaganda: Ocherk terminov i praktiki, Vneshnyaya shkola, Moscow, 1984, p. 359. In the Soviet mind at least, the relationship of information to partisanship is not only inseparable, but also desirable.
This is the sin of objectivism. Cf. A. M. Prokhorov (ed.), Bol’shaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 3rd ed., vol. 18, Moscow, 1974, p. 262.
See Angus Roxburgh, Pravda: Inside the Soviet News Machine, Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1987, p. 51.
In his detailed description of the workings of the Soviet censorship Leonid Finkelstein comments on the censor’s manual, Index of Information Not to be Published in the Open Press, known as ‘The Talmud’. Among the many forbidden topics were: man-made and natural disasters, information about seasonal price increases, any discussion of better living standards outside the socialist camp, statistics which are not taken from the reports of the Central Statistics Bureau, the existence of GLAVLIT and the jamming of foreign radio stations. The defection of a Polish censor, Tomasz Strżewski, to Sweden in 1977, confirmed the existence of an equally comprehensive censorship mechanism operating in Poland. See The Black Book of Polish Censorship, trans, and ed. Jane Leftwich Curry, Random House, New York, 1984. For a wider discussion of censorship in Central and Eastern Europe see Paul Lendvai, The Bureaucracy of Truth: How Communist Governments Manage the News, Burnett Books, London, 1981
George Schöpflin (ed.), Censorship and Political Communication in Eastern Europe, Frances Pinter, London, 1983.
Robert Tucker, quoted by Robert Conquest in Harvest of Sorrow, 1986, p. 290.
Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1993, p. 123.
Monroe E. Price, Television, the Public Sphere, and National Identity, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995, p. 16.
Brian McNair. Glasnost’, Perestroyka and the Soviet Media, Routledge, London, 1991, p. x.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1973, p. 469.
Edward Shils, quoted in David Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent, The Free Press, New York and London, 1964, p. 50.
Brian McNair, Glasnost’, Perestroyka and the Soviet Media, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 17.
For a discussion of information in the Soviet economy see George R. Feiwel, The Soviet Quest for Economic Efficiency: Issues, Controversies and Reforms, Frederick A. Praeger, New York, Washington and London, 1967, pp. 94–6.
Kenneth Kraemer et al, DATAWARS: The Politics of Modelling in Federal Policymaking, Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, p. 65.
James Davidson and Lord Rees-Mogg, The Great Reckoning. How the World Will Change in the Depression of the 1990s, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1992, p. 166.
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism. An Economic and Sociological Analysis, trans. J. Kahane, Liberty Classics, Indianapolis, 1981, p. 113. The original German-language edition was published in 1922. Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus, Gustav Fischer, Jena.
Carl Sagan and Iosef Shklovskii, Intelligent Life in the Universe, Holden Day, Inc., Amsterdam and London, 1966.
Andrei Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, trans., The New York Times, with introduction, afterword and notes by Harrison Salisbury, W. W. Norton & Company Inc, New York, 1970. See ch. 7, ‘The Threat to Intellectual Freedom’. In his third proposal Sakharov notes: ‘A law on press and information must be drafted, widely discussed, and adopted, with the aim not only of ending irresponsible and irrational censorship, but of encouraging self-study in our society, fearless discussion, and the search for truth. The law must provide for the material resources of freedom of thought.’ p. 87.
Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, trans. Richard Lourie, Hutchinson, London, 1990, p. xiv.
Valentin Turchin, The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview, trans. Guy Daniels, Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1981, p. 45.
Turchin, ibid., pp. 78–9. Zhores Medvedev notes that the attacks on cybernetics — dismissed as ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’ — held back the development of the computing industry in the Soviet Union. See Soviet Science, W. W. Norton, New York, 1978, pp. 53–4. Some applications of computing were clearly more important to the party than others. For example, the KGB maintained a computer database known by the acronym SOOD to which all the communist satellites, with the exception of Romania, contributed information. The East German STASI are known to have contributed at least 75000 personal dossiers for computer storage, which is in addition to the material contributed by the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA), the agency responsible for espionage abroad. See David Pryce-Jones, The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 1985–1991, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995, p. 253. Richard Cummings, formerly of RFE in Munich, suggests that the acronym is SOUD System for Institutional and Operational Data (Sistema dlya uchreditel’nykh/ustanovlennykh i opera-tivnykh dannykh?), not SOOD as given in Pryce-Jones.
For a full account of the attacks on scientists, especially during the immediate post-war period, see George Counts and Nucia Lodge, The Country of the Blind: The Soviet System of Mind Control, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1949.
Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?, no translator, Harper & Row, New York and Evanston, 1970, p. 8.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1954, p. 93.
Another aspect of SDI, that tormented Soviet strategists, and one which assumed great importance in expediting the final collapse of the Soviet empire, was the ability of the SDI system to be able to manipulate vast amounts of data in real time. This requirement, as Richard Pearle noted, plays to an American strength. See David Pryce-Jones The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 1985–1991, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995, p. 122. Pryce-Jones’s title is something of a misnomer. Both superpowers fought proxy wars and the Soviet empire’s appetite for suppression and military intervention continued throughout the Soviet period. Yeltsin has continued this tradition beyond 1991. There was also the war on the front of ideas and the practical application of these ideas; that is the battle between a free-market economy and the central-command economy. We should also bear in mind the election of Thatcher and Reagan, crucial events in the ending of the Cold War.
Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1983.
Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Collins, London, 1987, p. 19.
Gorbachev, Perestroika, p. 25. A further reference to Lenin, can be found in Gorbachev’s paraphrasing of a well-known Leninist principle, first articulated in What is to be Done? (See V. I. Lenin, Sochineniya, vol. 5, 4th edn, OGIZ, Moscow, 1946, p. 341.): ‘No revolutionary movement is possible without a revolutionary theory — this Marxist precept is today more relevant than ever.’ Ibid., p. 49.
See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Hutchinson, London, 1986. Conquest notes that 14.5 million are likely to have died as the result of the war waged against the peasants. Conquest regards this as a conservative estimate, p. 306. Note that Gorbachev was a specialist in agronomy, which makes his comments about collectivization in Perestroika all the more difficult to fathom. Also, collectivization was intended to destroy self-reliance and initiative, the very qualities that Gorbachev wished to see unleashed in perestroyka.
One example which typifies the sort of intellectual exercise in damage-control which I have in mind is the collection of articles in Robin Blackburn (ed.), After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, Verso, New York and London, 1991.
Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Goodbye to All That’, in Robin Blackburn (ed.), After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, Verso, New York and London, 1991, p. 121.
Two articles published in the latter half of 1990 in Kommunist are worth quoting. The first shows a lamentable understanding of just how bad things were, even at this late stage. See for example, Dzherman Gvishiani et al, ‘Sotsial’nye apsekty informatizatsii’, Kommunist, 10, July 1990, pp. 48–56. The authors propose sensible measures. The trouble is that what they are proposing is far too little, and above all too late in order to save the Soviet Union. In July 1990 the system was beyond reform. They note: The increasing volumes and the ever increasing speed required for the processing and transmission of economic information (in the widest sense including production-technological, administrative, statistical and financial planning) are creating a fundamentally new economic situation. The processing of information constitutes the basis for the structural perestroyka of industrial production, of integrated processes in our country’s economy, and in the world economy (p. 50). The belief that merely building an information structure could solve the Soviet Union’s problems fails to realize that such an information structure, that is one with computers and IT would presuppose a totally different Soviet Union. Just grafting a modern information infrastructure onto the ailing Soviet body politic would do no good at all. The authors note the hostility on the part of the bureaucracies to anything that might break their information monopoly. Problems of information reconstruction are, ‘in the first place’, they argue, ‘problems of science, not ideology’ (p. 54). This surely misses the point: they are problems of ideology since considerations of ideology are put before the considerations of science and solving real situation problems. A second article shows understanding, but any solutions are of course far too late. See V. Makarov, ‘Informatizatsiya v novom ekonomicheskom mekhanizme’, Kommunist, 12, August 1990, pp. 51–5: We are sometimes surprised as to why, in a country of centralised planning, statistical data concerning economic and social processes are much more sparse than in countries with a market economy. But you see control from the centre, according to an idea, must be based on the knowledge of what is happening in the regions. The paradox is explained by the fact that every institution only needs information and indicators for which it is responsible. The institution tries to keep this information secret by truths and lies so as, on the one hand, to avoid control, and on the other hand, to raise its status and to be able to dispose of a resource, which can be realised in a market of exchange in kind. […] (p. 52) […] The striving of the administrative-command system to block the horizontal flows of information is corroborated by the total concealment of banking information which reflects the economic interaction between organisations. This is a priceless source of the most reliable and timely data of economic processes. It is precisely banking information that in the West is the foundation of all economic statistics. Up till now we have sealed the secret with seven seals. Yet, the computerization of banking is one of the high priority spheres of informatization where the greatest effect is possible (p. 52). and note too: Throughout the country in the course of one year banking operations to the sum of three trillion rubles are carried out. The majority of these follow on after the corresponding material relocations -deliveries products and so on. In general the delay constitutes anything from ten or more days. It is as if we live in another financial world which moves at a slower speed. If we are to march in step with the West, then there is no other way than to create the very same (technically) banking system, where every operation is measured in seconds, where cashless transactions with the help of cards and other means increasingly drive out cash, where fundamental economic decisions are taken in banks, and not mechanically processed (p. 52).
Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1996, p. 15.
Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, Viking, London, 1995, p. 15.
Frank Ellis ‘The Media as Social Engineer: The Failed Experiment, 1953–1991, Russian Cultural Studies, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 221.
Ibid. A similar example of the use of computer networks in an emergency, but in a political context which bears no relation to the Soviet circumstances, is cited by Randy Reddick. Immediately after the large earthquake struck California’s San Fernando valley on 17 January 1994, state employees used the Emergency Digital Information Service (EDIS) to keep people informed of rescue operations. See Randy Reddick, The Online Journalist: Using the Internet and Other Electronic Resources, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, New York, 1995, p. 102.
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Unwin and Hyman, London, 1988, p. 439.
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Ellis, F. (1999). Information Deficit. In: From Glasnost to the Internet. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27076-7_1
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