Mass Repression to Mass Warfare: Great Terror and Soviet Military Performance

• In Event: The Political Legacies of Violence

Abstract

A literature on coup-proofing has highlighted a trade-off between the loyalty and competence of military personnel in authoritarian regimes, suggesting that some autocrats can sacrifice expected military performance by purging competent, yet potentially disloyal officers. We study a different dimension of this phenomenon: How does mass repression affect the military performance of rank-and-file soldiers in the context of mass warfare? We employ a unique dataset containing millions of individual records on Soviet conscripts in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 and a dataset of arrests and political killings during the Soviet Great Terror in the 1930's. We link the two data sources at the level of individual family and birth location to study how experiences of repression at the individual and community level impacted the battlefield resolve and loyalty of soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. Preliminary evidence suggests that Red Army soldiers more exposed to repression were more likely to desert and less likely to show battle-field resolve. Exposure to repression reduces incentives to fight for the tyrant.

Authors

• Roya Talibova, University of Michigan

• Yuri M. Zhukov, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Arturas Rozenas, New York University