The Hoover Institution hosts an Authoritarian Workshop Book Talk with Mark Harrison on Tuesday, August 15, 2023, at 12-1PM PT in Stauffer Auditorium.
In his Secret Leviathan, Mark Harrison describes the complex apparatus of rules and checks that were administered by the Soviet secret police. The secrecy apparatus seemingly gave the state unprecedented power but, behind the scenes, secrecy raised transaction costs, incentivized indecision, compromised government officials, eroded citizens' trust and led to a secretive society and an uninformed elite. In other words, the Soviet leaders accepted the reduction of state capacity as the cost of ensuring their own survival.
Harrison combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to evaluate the impact of secrecy on Soviet state capacity from the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Based on multiple years of research in once-secret Soviet-era archives (much at the Hoover Institution), this book addresses two gaps in history and social science: one is the core role of secrecy in building and stabilizing communist states; the other is the corrosive effects of secrecy on the capabilities of authoritarian states.
