The Imperial Army and the Russian Civil War: From Oppression to Insurrection

• In Event: Historical Legacies of Violence

Abstract

How does army experience affect a disenfranchised minority group’s post-war behavior? Past research has identified the crucial role of combat experience in improving organizational skills and the ability to engage in collective action. However, little is known about how combat veterans utilize these newly gained skills in a post-conflict society and whether there are meaningful differences among veterans from elite and minority groups. To study the long-run legacies of oppression at wartime and in the aftermath of conflict, I use a set of two unique datasets containing millions of individual records on the Russian Imperial Army conscripts in the WWI and the soldiers of the Red Guard during the Russian Civil War collected from declassified archival documents. I conduct analyses at two different levels – individual and community (based on birth location) – to study how the army experiences of these soldiers from the marginalized and disenfranchised minority groups impacted their behavior toward the Russian state after WWI. I exploit a Bayesian Nonparametric Spatial Regression Discontinuity design at the district borders to empirically identify the post-conflict behavior of former Imperial soldiers during the Russian Civil War. I control for several characteristics of the Russian state and society using district-level covariates constructed from the 1897 Russian Imperial Census. The preliminary findings suggest that soldiers from marginalized minority groups were more likely to join the Red Guard to fight against the crumbling empire. Further, inhabitants of districts with a higher percentage of marginalized groups were more likely to join revolutionary forces. These results highlight the important role of combat experience in organizing a meaningful challenge against an authoritarian regime and capture the fundamental choice that every autocrat faces when the prospect of war emerges: fighting a serious and imminent external threat with an underdeveloped army or mobilizing and exposing potentially rebellious groups to essential wartime skills.

Author

• Roya Talibova, University of Michigan