Stalin’s terror and the long-term political effects of mass repression
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343317751261 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
Stalin’s terror and the long-term political
effects of mass repression
Yuri M Zhukov & Roya Talibova
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
Abstract
Repression has a long-term negative effect on political participation. Using millions of arrest records from archival
documents, and polling station-level election results, we examine how exposure to Stalin-era repression affects voter
turnout in Putin’s Russia. To estimate the effect of repression on voting, we exploit exogenous variation in repression
due to the structure of mid-century Soviet railroads, and travel distances to prison camps. We find that communities
more heavily repressed under Stalin are less likely to vote today. The electoral legacy of Stalin’s terror – decades after
the Soviet collapse, and across multiple election cycles (2003–12) – is systematically lower turnout. To show that our
result is not unique to the Putin regime, we replicate our analysis in Ukraine (2004–14), and find similar patterns.
These results highlight the negative consequences of repression for political behavior, and challenge the emerging
view that exposure to violence increases political engagement. While past research has emphasized the short-term
effects of repression over several months or years, we show that these effects may be durable over generations and even
changes of political regime. Our findings also demonstrate that repression need not be collective or indiscriminate to
have community-level effects.
Keywords
archival data, political participation, repression, Russia, Stalin, voting
Reflecting on his years in correctional labor camps,Soviet
writer and dissident Varlam Shalamov said, ‘He who has
been therewill never forget’ (Hosking,1991). During Josef
Stalin’s threedecades in office, the Soviet Union convicted
3.8 million people for ‘counter-revolutionary’ crimes
(GARF, 1954).The Gulag – an acronym for ‘Main Direc-
torateof Corrective LaborCamps and Labor Settlements’–
was among the defining institutionsof the USSR. Millions
experiencedthe camps first hand, but many more felttheir
impact indirectly – through disappearances of friends and
neighbors, and the transformation of their communities.
What is the long-term legacy of Stalin’s terror? Has expo-
sure to politicalrepression in the past made thesecommu-
nities less or more politically active today?
In this article, we empirically examine the effect of
Stalin’s terror on political participation in contemporary
Russia. Using archival arrest records collected by the
human rights organization Memorial, we estimate
each Russian locality’s exposure to repression during
the Stalin era, and the effect of this repression on
local voting patterns between 2003 and 2012. We
find that communities more heavily repressed under
Stalin are significantly less likely to vote in Russia’s
national elections, compared to nearby communities
less exposed to Soviet terror.
By itself, a negative correlation does not demonstrate
that the terror effect is causal. It is possible that Soviet
authorities repressed heavily in areas that already stood in
opposition to the federal government, and these initially
restive communities continue to be wary of Moscow
today. To address this concern, we use an instrumental
variable design, exploiting the structure of mid-century
Soviet railroads and travel distance to Gulag camps. The
Soviet repressive apparatus depended heavily on railroads,
which transported prisoners and con nected populated
areas to Gulags. However, the historical structure of the
Corresponding author:
zhukov.yuri@gmail.com
Journal of Peace Research
2018, Vol. 55(2) 267–283
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343317751261
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rail network – most of whichpredated Stalin’s terror – has
little direct impact on contemporary voting, apart from its
influence on Soviet repression.To the extent that railroads
also facilitated migration and economic development, we
show that these alternative pathways should bias against
finding a significant repression effect. Our results confirm
that exposure torepression had a long-term negative effect
on participation, equivalent to an 8.5% drop in local
turnout in 2012. We consider the role of electoral fraud
in this process, and show – with an analysis of data on
Ukraine – that the effect is not unique to Putin’s Russia.
We attribute this local decline in turnout to a deter-
rence of political activity. By punishing individuals for
‘counter-revolutionary’ crimes – real or imagined – and
in some cases extending this punishment to family mem-
bers, the Soviet state raised the expected costs of even
seemingly benign political participation. Citizens who
lived in communities with a similar level of secret police
vigilance developed converging expectations of how
likely dissent will be detected (or invented), and how
severely it will be punished. Where these costs have his-
torically been high, local norms have come to favor an
avoidance of political participation.
These findings make several novel contributions to
research on political violence (Kalyvas, 2006; Lyall,
2009), repression (Mason & Krane, 1989; Davenport,
2007), and voting (Colton & Hale, 2009; Treisman,
2011). First, our results reinforce recent findings on the
negative consequences of repression for political behavior
(Balcells, 2012), and challenge the emerging view that expo-
sure to violence increases participation (Bellows & Miguel,
2009; Blattman, 2009). Second, while past research has
emphasized the short-term effects of repression over several
months or years (Almeida, 2003; Gurr & Moore, 1997), we
show that these effects may be durable over generations and
even changes of political regime. Third, unlike recent
research on the legacy of Soviet mass deportations (Lupu
& Peisakhin, 2017; Rozenas, Schutte & Zhukov, 2017), we
show that repression need not be collective or indiscrimi-
nate to have community-level effects.
Repression and political participation
The question of ‘who part icipates’ in politics matters
greatly for public policy and democratic development,
because it shapes the set of preferences and opinions to
which the government responds.
1
Even in non-
democratic states, regimes often look to elections as a
source of legitimacy and corrective feedback (Brownlee,
2007; Magaloni, 2006). To the extent that repression
might shape the makeup of an electorate – determining
who votes and who abstains – the electoral legacy of
violence is of great importance for the theory and prac-
tice of government.
2
The political effect of repression has been a matter of
debate. Several studies find that exposure to violence
increases political engagement (Bellows & Miguel,
2009; Grosjean, 2014; Garcı
´a-Ponce & Pasquale,
2015). Explanations for this effect include backlash
mobilization, where communities react to violence by
aligning with the perpetrator’s opponent (Francisco,
2004), and substitution effects, where victims adopt
nonviolent forms of resistance (Lichbach, 1987). Other
studies emphasize ‘post-traumatic growth’, where expo-
sure to violence yields psychological effects that increase
social cohesion, altruism, and collective coping (Bauer
et al., 2016; Blattman, 2009; Gilligan, Pasquale &
Samii, 2014), and ‘expressive participation’, where vot-
ing becomes a means of empowerment (Schuessler,
2000; Bateson, 2012).
An important shortcoming of this literature is its
empirical focus on wartime violence by non-state actors
and weak states – who are generally unable to conduct
violence on a massive scale, and sustain it for long peri-
ods of time.
3
The few studies that examine legacies of
repression in the Soviet Union (Rozenas, Schutte &
Zhukov, 2017; Lupu & Peisakhin, 2017) have focused
on one relatively idiosyncra tic form of violence: mass
deportation of geographically concentrated minorities.
Both of these contexts are likely to amplify the ‘backlash
effect’ – either due to the perceived weakness of the
perpetrator, or the indiscriminate nature of the violence.
It remains unclear if community-level effects exist where
repression is more sustained, selective and diffuse,
1
We define participation as ‘actions aimed at influencing the
selection of government personnel and/or the actions they take’
(Verba & Nie, 1972: 2). While this definition potentially includes
protest activity and insurrection, we focus more narrowly on activities
‘within the system’, such as participation in the electoral process, and
voting in particular.
2
We define repression as the use of ‘physical sanctions against an
individual or organization, within the territorial jurisdiction of the
state, for the purpose of imposing a cost o n the target as well as
deterring specific activities and/or beliefs perceived to be
challenging to government personnel, practices or institutions’
(Davenport, 2007).
3
A recent exception is Bauer et al. (2016), who find evidence of
cooperative behavior following a wide range of community-level
violent experiences. However, their meta-analysis is limited to war-
related violence, mostly in Africa.
268 journal of PEACE RESEARCH 55(2)
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