A large number of denunciations and informers

In the USSR, denunciation was defined as secretly reporting to authorities or superiors about someone's illegal activities. There is no exact statistics on the number of denunciations, as well as data on how many crimes were revealed precisely thanks to reports from citizens.

From 1956 to 1960, an average of approximately 680,502 crimes were reported annually. Even if we exaggerate the role of denunciations as much as possible and assume that all these crimes were solved solely thanks to “informers,” it turns out that approximately 680 thousand people out of the country’s 198 million population were involved in denunciations.