The Types of Organizational Secrecy and the Micropolitics of Knowledge Production in Soviet-Style Dictatorships

Since Foucault, state bureaucracies have been regarded as producers of knowledge used to control subject populations. In addition to, or even above all, such bureaucracies control the bureaucrats themselves by using data they generate for appraisal and performance evaluation. This makes personnel eager to distort information reaching their superiors or prevent the production of facts that might discredit them in any way. This paper will explore the forms of secrecy that emerge within these complex relationships, using the example of the largest centralized bureaucracy in human history—the Soviet command economy—and the situation of a specific group of knowledge workers within it: Soviet sociologists. It applies theoretical frameworks from Goffman’s and Friedell’s shared awareness models, as well as approaches from the sociology of scientific knowledge, to analyze various types of secrecy present in bureaucratic organizations. The official mission of Soviet sociologists was to evaluate Soviet society’s progress toward communism and to identify problems encountered on this path. In centralized bureaucracies, however, identifying problems often means placing blame on someone who either failed to predict them or failed to solve them. In the USSR, this tendency was taken to the extreme due to the fact that the central legitimizing myth was the myth of development according to Lenin’s all-encompassing plan. In this context, the identification of any problems—which Soviet sociologists were interested in discovering, as it extended their professional jurisdiction—carried an inherently subversive message. As a result, their ability to conduct research was severely restricted. At the same time, the Soviet state prided itself on being scientifically governed and could not publicly admit that it disregarded the possibilities of applying the latest scientific techniques to itself or ignored the results of scientific analysis. This created a complex micropolitical dynamic through which Soviet sociologists had to navigate.