Carnival Night
In 1956, Soviet audiences were treated to one of the most delightful comedies ever produced in their country. Carnival Night, directed by Eldar Ryazanov, tells the story of a group of enthusiastic young people preparing a New Year's celebration at a cultural centre. There will be music, dancing, jokes, and plenty of entertainment. Everything is going splendidly until Comrade Ogurtsov arrives.
Ogurtsov is the newly appointed director, a man of considerable authority and almost no understanding of what he is supposed to be directing. He disapproves of the music, distrusts the jokes, and regards spontaneous enjoyment as something bordering on an administrative offence. What the celebration really needs, he decides, is more seriousness. Preferably a lengthy scientific lecture.
The organisers, who actually know what they are doing, spend the rest of the film trying to prevent their director from destroying the event. They deceive him, distract him, and quietly disregard his instructions. The audience gets its celebration despite the man in charge, not because of him.
It is a wonderful satire of Soviet bureaucracy, made during the relative cultural opening that followed Stalin's death. Its optimism is part of its charm. The bureaucrat is ridiculous, the young people are resourceful, and common sense eventually triumphs over authority.
But imagine the same story taking place fifteen years earlier, under Stalin.
Imagine that Ogurtsov has the power to arrest the musicians, interrogate the organisers, and send the performers to prison for questioning his instructions. Imagine that every attempt to save the celebration can be interpreted as sabotage.The result would no longer be a comedy.
The film reveals something about organisations that is easily overlooked: the people who understand the work are not necessarily the people who have the authority to direct it. In a healthy institution, this difference can be corrected through discussion, disagreement, or practical experience. In an authoritarian system, it can become permanent. Authority no longer needs to demonstrate competence. It merely needs to enforce obedience.
Something remarkably similar had been happening for years inside one of the Soviet Union's most important institutions: its intelligence service. There, the people who knew how to do their jobs were frequently at the mercy of superiors who distrusted their judgment, misunderstood their work, or lacked the competence to manage them.
And unlike the organisers of a New Year's celebration, intelligence officers were risking their lives.
Consider Richard Sorge, the German communist who established an extraordinary Soviet intelligence network in Japan. Operating as a journalist, he gained access to German diplomatic circles and cultivated sources close to Japanese decision-makers. Few intelligence officers could have hoped for better connections.
In 1941, Sorge sent warnings concerning Germany's impending invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin was not persuaded. He had convinced himself that Hitler would not attack so soon, and reports contradicting this belief were treated with suspicion.
According to the material presented by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, Stalin's contempt for Sorge was extraordinary. He dismissed the agent in crude and insulting terms, treating him less as a valuable intelligence source than as a thoroughly disreputable character.
Two failures were operating simultaneously. Stalin distrusted Sorge personally, and he was unwilling to accept intelligence that contradicted his expectations. The first concerned the credibility of the source; the second concerned the plausibility of the information. A competent intelligence organisation must distinguish between the two. An unreliable person may occasionally provide accurate information, just as a trusted source may be mistaken. The task is to evaluate the evidence, not merely the reputation of the messenger or the preferences of the recipient.
Under Stalin, however, professional assessment could be overwhelmed by political judgment. His contempt for Sorge was itself symptomatic of a system in which the personal convictions of the leader could take precedence over the work of intelligence professionals.
Here was a man who had spent years infiltrating the enemy, delivering information that Moscow had gone to considerable trouble to obtain. Yet his greatest obstacle was not the German embassy or the Japanese police. It was the political leadership of the country he served.
There is an important qualification. Sorge's later intelligence suggesting that Japan was unlikely to attack the Soviet Far East was taken more seriously. His reports were not universally disregarded. But that only makes the underlying problem more interesting. Information was not simply judged according to its reliability. It was also judged according to whether it fitted the leadership's existing expectations.
Sorge was arrested in 1941 and executed by the Japanese in 1944. Twenty years later, the Soviet Union posthumously honoured him as a national hero. By then, presumably, he had become considerably less suspicious.
The story of Kim Philby offers another variation on the same theme, although here the principal problem was less ideological suspicion than operational incompetence.
Philby was one of the most successful Soviet agents of the twentieth century. He penetrated British intelligence, rose to senior positions in MI6, and eventually became its representative in Washington, where he had access to sensitive Anglo-American intelligence cooperation.
For Moscow, this should have been an intelligence triumph beyond imagination. A committed Soviet agent had reached a position from which he could observe some of the most closely guarded secrets of the Western alliance.
There was, however, a minor administrative difficulty. The Soviets were not always particularly good at communicating with him.
After Philby arrived in Washington in 1949, effective contact with his Soviet handlers was disrupted for months. The officer Valeriy Makayev, assigned to work through Guy Burgess, subsequently demonstrated a remarkable capacity for operational mishaps, including problems with dead drops and materials.
Imagine having an agent at the centre of your adversary's intelligence establishment and struggling to collect what he knows.
Then came 1951. Donald Maclean was approaching exposure, and Guy Burgess accompanied him in his flight from Britain. According to the Mitrokhin material, Moscow instructed Burgess to go with Maclean. The disappearance of both men brought suspicion upon Philby, whose close association with Burgess was well known.
An operation intended to save a compromised Soviet agent thus helped undermine the position of another whose access was exceptionally valuable.
It would be misleading to attribute these failures directly to Stalin's paranoia. Makayev's mistakes were operational failures, and the handling of the Burgess-Maclean escape involved decisions whose precise motivations remain historically disputed. Intelligence services everywhere make mistakes. There is no reason to assume that every blunder committed by a Soviet officer was a consequence of Stalinism.
But organisations do not operate independently of their history. And the history of Soviet intelligence under Stalin was one of systematic institutional destruction.
The purges of the 1930s had devastated the Soviet intelligence services. Experienced officers were arrested or executed. Professional knowledge was lost. Networks of trust were broken. Foreign contacts, the very foundation of intelligence work, could become evidence of treachery. Officers learned that survival depended not only on professional competence but also on avoiding the suspicions of their superiors.
This was hardly an environment conducive to developing capable intelligence managers.
The connection between the purges and Makayev's particular mistakes cannot be established simply by pointing to their existence. But the broader institutional consequences are clear enough. An organisation that destroys experienced personnel, undermines professional independence, and makes honest reporting dangerous should not be surprised when its competence deteriorates.
Paranoia and incompetence were therefore not necessarily competing explanations. They could form a chain of cause and effect. Political suspicion destroyed experienced personnel and undermined professional judgment. The resulting organisational weakness made mistakes more likely. Those mistakes, in turn, could provoke further suspicion and tighter control.
Sorge and Philby illustrate different points along that chain.
Sorge obtained intelligence that contradicted Stalin's expectations and was consequently distrusted. Philby obtained access that Soviet intelligence could scarcely have hoped for, only to find himself dependent on an organisation that sometimes struggled to exploit it.
In the first case, the information was available but unwelcome. In the second, the information was potentially available but poorly managed.
Both failures diminished the value of extraordinarily successful intelligence operations.
There was also a deeper contradiction at the heart of the Soviet system. Intelligence work requires initiative, imagination, independent judgment, and a willingness to challenge assumptions. Yet Stalin's political system increasingly regarded those same qualities as potentially dangerous.
It wanted intelligent people who would not think independently. It wanted courageous people who would never question authority. It wanted accurate information without the discomfort of confronting inconvenient truths.
And when its agents succeeded beyond expectation, their success could itself become suspicious.
The problem was not simply that frightened people made mistakes. It was that frightened organisations became less capable of recognising and correcting them.
In an institution where errors can be acknowledged, there is at least the possibility of learning. In one where errors may be interpreted as treason, people have powerful incentives to conceal them. Information is filtered, responsibility is avoided, and loyalty gradually becomes more important than competence.
The consequences extend beyond individual mistakes. An intelligence organisation may become increasingly skilled at collecting information while becoming progressively less capable of understanding it. Its officers learn to anticipate what their superiors want to hear. Reports are adjusted, doubts are suppressed, and inconvenient evidence is treated as a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be understood.
Eventually, the organisation ceases to function primarily as a means of discovering the world. It becomes a means of confirming the worldview of those who control it.
This is where the difference between satire and history becomes important. Comedy can expose the absurdity of authority without having to confront all its consequences. History cannot.
And that brings us back to Comrade Ogurtsov.
In Carnival Night, the musicians and performers know perfectly well how to entertain an audience. Their problem is a director who believes that authority gives him superior judgment. He does not listen to the people who understand the work. He imposes his own ideas and mistakes obedience for competence.
Ogurtsov is not necessarily unintelligent. His problem is that his position makes it unnecessary for him to acknowledge that others may know something he does not. He has confused the right to make decisions with the ability to make good ones.
Fortunately, the organisers can work around him. They are clever enough to save the evening, and the film allows them to succeed.
That is precisely where the comparison with Stalin's intelligence service ends.
Under Stalin, bypassing the director could be interpreted as disloyalty. Correcting him could be dangerous. Demonstrating that he was wrong could be more dangerous still. The people with the greatest practical knowledge were not necessarily the people permitted to make decisions.
The film's optimism is therefore revealing. Released in 1956, three years after Stalin's death, it imagines a world in which ordinary people can outwit bureaucratic authority without being destroyed by it. The bureaucrat is made ridiculous rather than terrifying. The organisers win, the music plays, and everyone goes home.
For many Soviet intelligence officers of the preceding decades, there had been no such happy ending.
There is a lesson here that extends well beyond Soviet intelligence. Organisations do not become intelligent merely by employing intelligent people. They become intelligent when those people are permitted to question assumptions, report uncomfortable facts, exercise independent judgment, and correct mistakes.
The most sophisticated intelligence network in the world is of limited value if its political masters refuse to believe what it discovers, or if the organisation responsible for handling its agents has lost the competence to make use of them.
The central problem is not simply incompetence, nor even paranoia. It is the subordination of reality to authority. Once an institution reaches that point, information itself becomes dangerous, because information may contradict the people who possess the power to decide what is true.
In Carnival Night, the organisers know what the audience wants, the director does not, and the celebration succeeds because the organisers manage to circumvent him.
Under Stalin, the organisers might have disappeared before the first musician reached the stage. The director would have received a report explaining that the evening had been a tremendous success.
And he would have believed it.