A Soviet newspaper from 1965 looks rather bland at first. A lot of smiling workers, record harvests, victories on the foreign policy field. But it does not look like the most sophisticated news source in the country. And yet this was exactly that – and not because of the content of the paper.
The Gap in the Photograph
As a Soviet citizen, you learned early to count. There are 8 officials standing at the top of Lenin’s Mausoleum in this May Day photo. And in next year’s photo there are 7 people. The gap told you before any announcement.
Censorship practice, deleting politicians from images, was standard, but readers knew what was missing from a picture and the edited version became the evidence.
This practice – reading political reality from state output rather than from state output's content – came to be called Kremlinology in the West, though it was really just journalism conducted without journalists. Ordinary Soviet readers became forensic by necessity.
The Delay Is the Unit of Measurement
An unreported disaster is not silence. It means something. A factory fire that remained unreported for three days was bad. Two weeks of silence were catastrophic. The length of time a cover-up was going on was something that Soviet citizens could read accurately. Pravda meanwhile ran photographs of tractor production.
This type of decoding is in contrast to a much greater quantity of information handed to us by the free press every morning than any human could hope to read. We have never needed to develop such a skill, because we have never been forced to. For another take on the type of decoding of information that is currently being left unread (the damp marks on walls that most people walk straight past), Damp Has Three Dialects, and They Are Not Saying the Same Thing follows exactly the same logic.
Third Name, or Second?
Official communiques had a sub-dialect of their own: name-order. Thus, if a politician jumped from third to second place amongst a list of signatories, that would indicate that someone above him in the list had fallen from favour. A name in smaller print or within brackets functioned like a slow drum beat. Western embassy analysts kept notebooks of such information, trying to monitor the internal politics of a sealed world by watching where names sat on a page.
The censors, in their efforts to keep information out of the public eye, actually ended up creating the world's most attentive reader community. People who had no access to accurate information became incredibly adept at figuring out what was going on by reading between the lines of what was not said.
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Does anyone still use these methods today?
Yes, and quite systematically. Analysts monitoring North Korea apply almost identical techniques – tracking which officials appear alongside the leader in state photographs, and which ones quietly stop appearing. The method travels wherever the incentive exists.
Can you apply this kind of reading to ordinary Western news?
Yes, in another form. Information is also provided by what a publication chooses not to cover. That is editorial information, the same as what is leading the publication. Information is also provided by what is on page 18. Information is also provided by the absence of a follow-up on a story after the initial reporting cycle. Although no single body is controlling all output, our intuition to notice what is not there is still of use.
How did Western governments actually put Kremlinology to work?
Embassy intelligence analysts maintained charts and maps of the top Soviet leaders. These would be updated with the latest photographs and official documents on individuals. State media coverage of particular officials would also be tracked, including when it stopped, and changes would be reflected in the embassies' assessments of political stability. The study of such figures was a formal discipline, not some marginal pastime.
Did ordinary Soviet people do this, or mainly specialists?
As widely practised by ordinary people. Such knowledge was transmitted informally by family members and work colleagues rather than in a formal setting. Knowing who was currently “in favour” could have real consequences, for example if one mistakenly aligned himself with the “wrong” faction.
What happened to the skill when the Soviet Union fell?
The transition did not happen without a generation that had spent decades reading between official lines struggling to take statements at face value, even after the incentive for hiding things had changed. A habit of mind developed under given conditions is not shed instantly when those same conditions cease to exist.
