Dr Z, part 3 - Clerks

This morning, on or around page 250 at the start of Part Nine, Zhivago's well placed brother Evgraf turns up, seemingly out of the blue, something of a guardian angel.

I started to wonder, how in those days when there were no computers and only fairly basic communication by wireless and telegraph, how the centre was able to keep an eye on the periphery. How was it able to know what this or that dissident was up to?

Nowadays, we can just feed the dissident's bank card details (or whatever) into the central computer and you can read him (or her) off every time he uses it, almost in real time. But what happened then? 

Part of the answer must have been the requirement for all adults to carry papers - work permits, internal passports, identity cards and the like - which could be marked up in various ways and which could be inspected by policemen and their like on demand. And taken back to the station for further investigation if there were bad marks or if their suspicions were aroused in other ways.

Another part must have been logging systems, like the one which features in the first version of the Jackal film, whereby the passport number of every visitor to every French hotel gets collected up and sent back to the centre on a daily basis. With an English version being a black book holding the passport numbers of bad people which immigration or passport officials were supposed to check against every arrival and every exit. A black book which they were supposed to update at the start of every shift and woe betide them if they missed someone.

Another part must have been central registries, central filing systems. Systems which grew into their 1960's maturity in the days before copying paper was cheap or digitising paper was available at all. The huge ledgers containing records of births, deaths and marriages. The huge ledgers containing the location of everyone's national health records. The huge filing systems maintained by all respectable government departments and many larger companies, the likes of BP and ICI.

All of which must have required a huge army of clerks to keep up to date and in working order. Maintenance of the records needed to run a surveillance state was hugely expensive. No doubt necessary in small doses, but a huge waste of resources on the scale practised by the likes of Stalin's Soviet Union. And that's not counting all the rest of the damage, the damage to people and the damage to production. Or to the defence of the motherland for that matter.

A corollary being, that the surveillance state was not just a few bad people at the top of the heap doing bad things. There must have been thousands and thousands of people somewhere else in the heap, perhaps just doing their job - but also responsible; their hands were not clean.

Rather as in war-time France, where collaboration must have been pervasive. Or as in war-time Germany, where participation must have been pervasive. Guilt was collective.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/dr-z-part-2-winter.html.