Minorities and Disaster Relief: 1891–92 Famine in Imperial Russia

• In Event: Institutions of Democratic Representation through Historical Lens

Abstract

Why is governance poor in diverse regions? The conventional wisdom emphasizes the deficit of cooperation in diverse societies due to heterogeneous preferences or the inability to communicate or impose sanctions across group boundaries. We propose an alternative explanation: states’ approaches to governance often vary with the identity of their citizens. Ethnic and religious minorities, in particular, are sometimes ruled through intermediaries, which allows the central government to save on administrative resources and to manage noncompliance. However, these strategies impede direct state-society interactions, are hard to reform, and may derail state performance in a crisis. We present support for this argument in the case of the 1891–92 famine in the Russian Empire using an original district-level dataset on the relief operation. We show that crop failures caused more deaths in districts with a large Muslim population. We further show that Muslim-dominated districts were late to receive food loans from the central government and had emptier granaries already on the eve of the famine.

Authors

• Volha Charnysh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Brendan McElroy, Harvard University