Mass Repression and Political Loyalty: Evidence from Stalin’s ‘Terror by Hunger’ - Notes

Mass Repression and Political Loyalty: Evidence from Stalin’s ‘Terror by Hunger’

Authors: Arturas Rozenas (New York University) and Yuri Zhukov (University of Michigan).
Examines the political legacy of Stalin's coercive agricultural policy and collective punishment campaign in Ukraine (1932-1934), which caused a famine (Holodomor) and the death of over three million people.
Finds that communities exposed to the famine behaved more loyally toward Moscow when the regime could credibly threaten retribution in response to opposition.
When this threat abated, the famine-ridden communities showed more opposition to Moscow, both short and long-term.
Keywords: repression, political violence, mass killing, conflict, elections, protest, legacy.

Repression and Political Disloyalty

Repression, especially when violent and indiscriminate, can incite opposition rather than enforce obedience.
Selective repression (punishing specific individuals for specific actions) can induce obedience without backlash.
The impact of indiscriminate mass repression is debated, with conflicting arguments about whether it induces obedience or inflames opposition.
The study argues that the legacy of repression depends on the political opportunity structure, specifically the threat of retribution.
Populations victimized by past repression will act more obediently only if they expect the regime (or its successor) to punish disloyalty.
A threat of retribution can compel victimized populations to "falsify" their preferences and appear loyal to avoid repression.
When the regime cannot punish acts of opposition consistently, previously suppressed anti-regime sentiments will manifest.
Responses to historical repression depend on the permissiveness of political conditions.

Holodomor as a Case Study

The study examines the impact of the 1932-34 famine in Soviet Ukraine (Holodomor) on political outcomes.
Stalin’s policies deprived communities of food, livestock, and freedom, leading to over three million deaths.
The Ukrainian state recognizes the famine as politically motivated genocide.
The study uses instrumental variables for local famine lethality and changes in Moscow’s coercive threat.
Famine-struck communities were more hesitant to express anti-Soviet or anti-Russian views when Moscow could credibly respond with violence.
When Moscow’s retributive threat abated, these communities became hotbeds of opposition.
Past research has often focused on snapshots of political behavior, leading to diverse findings.

A Unifying Logic

Mass repression can induce compliance only if the threat of resumed violence remains credible.
Otherwise, it will have the opposite of its intended effect.
The effects of the past are dynamic and contingent on a changing contemporary context.

The Contingent Legacy of Repression

Repression can signal a regime’s willingness to extract loyalty through violence, creating expectations of punishment for disloyalty.
However, repression can also mobilize opposition, especially when it victimizes innocents.
The legacy of repression is contingent on the contemporary political context, particularly the threat of retribution.
High threats of retribution incentivize citizens to act loyally, even if it contradicts their preferences.
This preference falsification is heightened in communities previously exposed to repression.
When the threat of retribution is low, suppressed resentments manifest through adversarial behaviors.
Retributive threat is distinct from regime type and state capacity, pertaining specifically to deterrent capacity.
It is a component of the political opportunity structure, which is permissive when the retributive threat is low and restrictive otherwise.
Local norms of political behavior will favor compliance or opposition depending on the permissiveness of the political opportunity structure.
People who experience or observe repression directly and intimately are likely to experience its effects more strongly than those who learn about it in abstract.
Repression’s lessons can persist in the long run and shape the attitudes and behavior of people who did not witness it directly: parents pass political attitudes to their children, schools and religious institutions educate their audiences, citizens learn their community’s political norms from their neighbors and peers. Over time, these interactions shape prevailing views about politics, including which behaviors might provoke retribution from the state.

Terror by Hunger (Holodomor)

Holodomor is interpreted as "terror by hunger," "state aggression," and "premeditated mass murder."
Others view it as an unintended by-product of Stalin’s economic policies or precipitated by natural factors.
The key question is how the government responded to food shortages and how the population interpreted the government’s motives.
The famine occurred after radical reforms to the Soviet agrarian sector, transforming private farms into government-run collectives.
Moscow forced peasants to join collective farms and demanded fixed quotas of grain.
Administrative and technological inefficiencies, combined with bad weather and pests, led to a 30-35 percent drop in harvest from 1930 to 1932.
Party officials responded to the poor harvest by taking punitive steps, blaming grain shortages on hoarding by "enemies of the state."
Authorities confiscated food, livestock, and seeds, and denied access to food purchases and credit.
The state banned private farming and introduced internal passports and residency permits.
Over three million people died, and the famine spread beyond rural areas.
The state’s vindictive response fostered the belief that Holodomor was a deliberate act of repression.
Local officials saw hunger as a means to punish and discipline peasants.
Survivors associated the famine with the total confiscation of all food and stressed that starving peasants were trapped.
Soviet intelligence detected such sentiments, with people saying the grain was taken by Moscow.
Perceptions of famine as an act of state violence persist today, with over 70 percent of Ukrainians viewing it as genocide.
The impact of coercion depends less on the punisher’s actual intent than on the interpretation of that intent by others.
Even where natural causes contributed to famine mortality, citizens attributed famine deaths to the regime.

Data and Hypotheses

The study tests theoretical predictions with disaggregated data on historical famine losses and eight decades of subsequent local political behavior.
The main unit of analysis is the 1933-era Ukrainian rayon.
The sample comprises 386 rayons, excluding western Ukrainian territories acquired after 1939, Crimea, or rayons now part of Moldova.
Data on rayon-level famine losses are from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s Mapa: Digital Atlas of Ukraine.
Data from the 1926 Soviet census is used to measure rayons’ urban and rural populations, and local proportions of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians.
Crop suitability indicators for the locally dominant crop (wheat, potato, dairy) are included.
The proportion of land area covered by forests and area devoted to heavy and light industry are measured.
The effect of famine on five sets of political outcomes from 1941 to 2017 is considered.
This timespan saw fundamental changes to the political opportunity structure in Ukraine.
Each outcome variable is scaled so that higher values represent greater behavioral opposition to Moscow.
Opposition to Red partisans in 1941-1944 is the first outcome variable.
It’s measured by estimating the density of partisan base camps per rayon, and taking its additive inverse. Large values indicate that partisan camps were scarce, implying low support or even opposition to the Soviet cause.
The percentage of anti-Soviet votes in elections to the Supreme Soviet in 1946-1958 is taken as the second outcome variable.
Anti-Soviet votes are measured by matching electoral district-level voting results to 1933-era rayon borders and then calculating the percent votes cast “against all.”
The third set of political outcomes is anti-Soviet protests in 1987-1991.
Protest activity is measured by geocoding Beissinger (2002)’s event database and calculate the frequency of demonstrations – against central state or party institutions, or for Ukrainian independence – in each 1933-era rayon.
*Fourth set of outcomes is anti-Russian votes in Ukrainian parliamentary and presi- dential elections in 2002-2014.
Variable is constructed by matching polling station results from Ukraine’s Central Electoral Commission (UCEC) to 1933-era rayons, and calculate the average share of votes cast against parties and candidates promoting favorable inter- pretations of Soviet history and closer ties to Moscow.
The fifth rayon-level outcome is anti-Yanukovych protests in 2009-2013, when pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych held office.
Variable is measured by geocoding dis- aggregated protest data from Ishchenko (2013), matching them to 1933-era rayons, and calculating the number of local demonstrations against central or local government institutions. Higher counts of protests indicate greater expressed opposition to Moscow.
*Individual-level survey data supplements the community-level analyses on opposition to pro-Russian armed groups in eastern Ukraine in 2017.
Opposition to pro-Russian armed groups, their views on Holodomor’s causes, and whether any of their family members died in the famine are measured.
Geographic variation in the threat of coercion is exploited, counting the number of days a respondent’s town or village spent under DNR/LNR control since 2014.

*Hypotheses are presented with respect to each post-repression outcome.

*The average famine effect is detailed for each outcome

*Empirical strategy exploits exogenous variation in local famine mortality due to weather shocks.

*Weather shocks are defined as deviations from median rainfall and temperature.

Specification

The following two-stage regression specification is used:
ln(Faminei) = \theta \cdot Weatheri + Oblast{j[i]} + \beta0xi + vi + \epsiloni, yi = \alpha \cdot \widehat{ln(Faminei)} + Oblast{j[i]} + \gamma0xi + vi + ui.
Where
$y_i$ denotes each poltical outcome
The parameter \alpha represents the causal effect of weather-induced famine deaths.
$x_i$ includes control variable
synthetic spatial covariates $v_i$ are included (Moran eigenvectors) to remove autocorrelation from second-stage residuals.
*Observations are weighted by pre-famine population

Instrument plausibility

A potential concern with our empirical design is that weather instruments “depoliticize” famine
The primary causes of Holodomor were political, in that the famine would not have occurred without collectivization, forcible grain requisitions, punitive quotas, mass arrests, and movement restrictions. Nonetheless, archival evidence and multiple historical studies suggest that Ukrainian locations that experienced worse weather also saw more famine deaths, in part because these conditions intensified the deleterious effects of Soviet policies.
A study by Naumenko (2017) finds that the onset of famine could not have been caused by weather because there was no major global weather shock in 1931-1932. While we fully agree with that conclusion, our results show that adverse weather nonetheless explains some of the cross-sectional variation in famine mortality, conditional on its onset.
Survey results also show that respondents see Holodomor as genocide even if they resided in rayons with adverse weather in 1931-1932
The central Committe of Ukraine’s Communist Party explicitly disallowed use of weather and other exigencies as excuses for missing quotas

Community-Level Effects

OLS and IV estimates of the effects of famine on the five rayon-level political outcomes are reported.
Instruments are strong across all specifications, as first stage F-statistics indicate.
In 1941-1944, Red partisans had a significantly harder time operating in rayons hard-hit by famine.
Suggesting that past repression inflames opposition when the original repressor cannot credibly threaten retribution.
After Moscow unambiguously re-established its rule in Ukraine, localities more exposed to famine became less likely to cast anti-Soviet votes in elections.
In 1946-1958, Moscow showed no hesitation in using mass deportations, killings, and other violence against anti-Soviet insurgents in western Ukraine and the Baltic States.
The very same communities that were less supportive of Soviet authorities on the battlefield now signaled their loyalty to the regime at the ballot box.
Places that experienced greater famine saw more anti-Soviet protests in 1987-1991, when the regime’s ability to suppress behavioral challenges was again in doubt.
The magnitude of this effect approximates that on anti-Soviet votes, but in the opposite direction.
In 2002-2014, when Moscow’s coercive leverage in independent Ukraine was very limited, communities more exposed to famine saw significantly lower electoral support for pro-Russian parties.
These communities also saw significantly more protests against the “pro-Russian” government of Viktor Yanukovych.
*The IV Results are robust to alternative specifications, alternative weather instruments and measures of WWII behaviors, driving outlier and also measurement error in our weather instrument

Individual-Level Analysis

*Individuals who lost family members were more opposed to pro-Russian separatists
*This effect wasn't as strong among respondents who had lived under DNR/LNR control, Where Moscow's threat was more apparent

Alternative Explanations:

Incomparability of Political Behavior
Looking at heterogeneity of results with two cases that involved the Political structures changing while conditions remained constant: WWII and the late Soviet era.
Ethnic compostion
There is no quantitative evidence famine affected politics by changing local ethnic composition
Political mobilization and propaganda
German occupation cannot account for such events
Soviet and Post-Soviet Period also wouldn't account for the effects.

Mechanisms of Persistence

The family-centered mechanism is not the only mechanism for persistence
As a assault against their communities, geographically or ethnically defined.
It is not surprising, therefore, that people living in famine-ridden areas would become exposed to narratives of group victimization – not only through their relatives, but also their friends, neighbors, co-workers and other community members
This community-level mechanism of persistence warrants closer study in future work.

Conclusion

Stalin’s “terror by hunger” had a contingent political legacy.
Ukrainian localities that experienced harsher famine behaved more loyally toward Moscow when and where a threat of retribution was present.
These same localities behaved disloyally when such threats abated.
This propostion is suggested to draw a conclusion for the literature of autocratic politics.