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

This lecture has been cancelled. We are working on rescheduling it!

Speaker: Yuri Zhukov, Assistant Professor, Political Science, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

What is the net effect of mass repression on the behavior of citizens? Yuri Zhukov and Arturas Rozenas address this question by studying the political legacy of Stalin’s coercive agricultural policy and collective punishment campaign in Soviet Ukraine, which led to the death by starvation of over three million people in 1932-34. Using unusually rich data on eight decades of local political behavior, we find that this act of mass repression inflamed opposition to Moscow, but only when the threat of renewed violence was absent. When such threat was present, communities more exposed to ‘terror by hunger’ behaved more loyally toward the regime.

Yuri Zhukov is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Faculty Associate with the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research.