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* Arturas Rozenas, Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, New York University, [email protected]. † Yuri M. Zhukov, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, [email protected].
We greatly benefited from comments and discussions with Therese Anders, Volha Charnysh, Anita Gohdes, Evgeny Finkel, Omar Garcia Ponce, Stephen Kotkin, Leonid Peisakhin, Carly Wayne, Oleh Wolowyna, Thomas Zeitzoff, participants of workshops at Columbia University, George Washington University, University of Konstanz, University of Southern California, NEWEPS-9 at Princeton University, University of California–Merced, Arizona State University, UNC-Chapel Hill, NYU–Abu Dhabi, University of Wisconsin, and Yale University. We also thank Oleh Wolowyna and Natalya Levchuk for famine mortality and USSR census data, Alexander Kupatadze and Thomas Zeitzoff for sharing survey data, Anastasiia Vlasenko for research assistance, and Roya Talibova and Sergey Sanovich for assistance in obtaining data on Soviet army personnel records and elections. Replication files are available at the American Political Science Review Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XKMNAO.
Repression is a pervasive feature of politics.1 The most violent form of repression is one that indiscriminately kills mass populations, or places them in conditions where they die of hunger, exhaustion, or disease (Harff and Gurr 1988; Wheatcroft 1996). But what do perpetrators of mass repression actually achieve? According to one convention, repression’s central purpose is to deter expressions of political disloyalty (Lichbach 1987). Yet, repression often does the opposite—it inflames opposition (Gurr 1971). What explains this inconsistency in the political legacy of mass repression?
Despite persistent scholarly interest, this question remains unresolved. There is wide consensus that selective repression—which punishes specific individuals for specific actions—can induce obedience without backlash (Lichbach 1987; Kalyvas 2006; Blaydes 2018). Nothing close to such consensus exists on the impact of indiscriminate mass repression.2 Using equally plausible theories and empirical designs, past research has argued two seemingly conflicting points: Indiscriminate repression induces obedience toward the perpetrator (García-Ponce and Pasquale 2015; Lyall 2009; Young 2019; Zhukov and Talibova 2018), or repression inflames adversarial sentiments and mobilizes opposition (Balcells 2012; Finkel 2015; Kocher, Pepinsky, and Kalyvas 2011; Lupu and Peisakhin 2017; Rozenas, Schutte, and Zhukov 2017).
Our study helps explain why mass repression can generate both obedience and opposition. Repression’s legacy, as we show, is contingent on the political opportunity structure in which future behavior unfolds. Having intimately learned about...