The only important addition to our knowledge, the contents of the Smolensk Archive (published in 1958 by Merle Fainsod) have demonstrated to what an extent dearth of the most elementary documentary and statistical material will remain the decisive handicap for all inquiries into this period of Russian history. For although the archives (discovered at party headquarters in Smolensk by German intelligence and then captured by the American occupation force in Germany) contain some 200,000 pages of documents and are virtually intact for the period from 1917 to 1938, the amount of information they fail to give us is truly amazing. Even with "an almost unmanageable abundance of material on the purges" from 1929 to 1937, they contain no indication of the number of victims or any other vital statistical data. Wherever figures are given, they are hopelessly contradictory, the various organizations all giving different sets, and all we learn beyond doubt is that many of them, if they ever existed, were withheld at the source by order of the government.
Also, the Archive contains no information on the relations between the various branches of authority, "between Party, the military and NKVD," or between party and government, and it is silent about the channels of communication and command. In short, we learn nothing about the organizational structure of the regime...In other words, while it has always been known that official Soviet publications served propaganda purposes and were utterly unreliable, it now appears that reliable source and statistical material probably never existed anywhere.--Hannah Arendt The Origin of Totalitarianism, Preface to Part Three, xxxi (June 1966)
In her analysis of totalitarianism Arendt calls attention to the "multiplication of offices" in one-party dictatorships (522). This permits "constant shifting of power" (among party, state, office, etc.) by the leadership in order to generate permanent domination by the leader (53). One side-effect of this multiplication and constant motion is the undermining of competent state capacity (564).*
A key feature of this is impaired state capacity, which is worsened by the culture of secrecy, pervasive censorship and propaganda, is that the state and its leadership lack reliable information even about itself. And part of the problem is that the culture of trust that supports a whole system of data gathering, collecting, and dissemination is constantly undermined in a totalitarian context.+
That the state is a machinery of record, a collector and disseminator of accurate public data was (recall) the central argument of Lippmann’s book Public Opinion (1922). A lot of our social practices, inside and outside the market, presuppose a social infrastructure in which the machinery of record is reliable; public authorities and private actors can plan their activities.
Lippmann’s underlying idea was not wholly original. As Nick Cowen reminded me recently, one can see the germ of it articulated nicely in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty that “the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency” should be allied with “the greatest possible centralisation of information, and diffusion of it from the centre.” Mill adds that "this central organ should have a right to know all that is done, and its special duty should be that of making the knowledge acquired in one place available for others."
To be a machinery of record requires state bureaucracies that operate by clear and impartial rules, statistical offices that collect data, and public record-keeping that is reliable and accessible to all with minimal thresholds. This immense and often nearly invisible machinery makes possible both political contestation and many private individual and collective decision making. As Lippmann, himself an accomplished journalist, emphasized even the very free press that reports the news and holds politicians accountable presupposes a proper functioning machinery of record (of births, deaths, marriages, licensing, etc.).
Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have a tendency to undermine the machinery of record for a whole mixture of ends. But this is also true in states in which petty corruption takes a firm hold: once the opportunities and culture of bribery take over, say, customs house and farm or building inspectors, the data they report must be treated as fiction. In societies where corruption is normalized, the machinery of record cannot hope to stabilize expectations and facilitate planning.
But, Arendt also notes that within structural undermining of the Weberian bureaucracy, there is "the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police." (567) This goal is the development of a map -- we would say network-- of "the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population." (567) With the increase of computer power and the drop in its cost this goal is now not just feasible, but almost certainly within reach of public and private institutions. Arendt's concern is not the ways by which this network can be exploited to some policy end; but rather that a full map of the network allows for disappearance of (shall we say) nodes on even whole regions of the network. Survival in a totalitarian state requires, in addition to Luck, disappearing from the grid.
So, on Arendt's account then totalitarianism is characterized by two opposing movements: (i) the structural undermining of the state as machinery of record; and (ii) simultaneously the development of a secret map of the networked characteristics of the population. It is important to recognize that these are not in contradiction with each other. This is not just because the networked population map is relatively flat. Rather, given the effect of (i) on (ii) it is because in this map, once shadow-bookkeeping can't be trusted either, the state's activities become invisible to itself. This is why, despite the fearsome capacity to kill and terrorize, and (say) build at gargantuan scale, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes tend to be relatively hollow.
Naturally, this analysis raises non-trivial questions about political contexts in which the machinery of record and the networked map are properly functioning and not kept a secret. This question can be explored by way of the present political and public health fascination to use networked maps of wireless phone usage to control the spread of a virus, and people.
*By opening up career opportunities to the ambitious young it also ties would be revolutionary spirits to the status quo.
**See Arendt's note 110, on p. 562.
+This is compatible with Theodore M. Porter's argument that the rise of accounting and statistics is itself a response to pervasive mistrust. By solving this crisis, the machinery of state can engender positive cycle of mutual trust.
Comments