Source: ArtStore

We examine the rise of left‐wing terrorism in the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1900 and assess its long‐term impact on Russian political development. Drawing on original surveillance records from the Imperial Russian Secret Police (Okhrana), we construct local indicators of radicalization and classify anti‐Tsarist actions into low-intensity revolutionary activities (such as propaganda dissemination and organizational membership) and high-intensity political violence (including riots and targeted assassinations). We then link these measures to district-level outcomes from the 1917 Constituent Assembly elections -- the last free elections before the Soviet era -- across more than 400 districts. Our spatial analysis, which accounts for inter-district spillovers and other socio-economic factors, reveals that in the Pale of Settlement, sustained political violence shifted voting preferences toward centrist parties, while more moderate revolutionary activities bolstered support for conservative factions. These results suggest that early twentieth-century Russian society preferred stability and gradual reform over radical change. Moreover, our findings challenge conventional narratives of an inefficient Tsarist bureaucracy by highlighting the crucial role of the secret police in maintaining authoritarian resilience and in shaping the partial radicalization of political preferences.

JEL Classification:  N33, N43, P20, P26, P37, P48, P51

Presented at:  2023 Summer Workshop in the Economic History and Historical Political Economy, Max-Planck PolEcon Summer Workshop, EHES 2023, EHA 2023, ASSA 2024, EHS 2024, EEA 2024, GSWG/VfS congress 2025, EPSA 2025

Source: David Rumsey Map Collection

This paper investigates the effects of the Soviet Union's forced deportation of 2.8 million citizens from nine ethnic groups between 1937 and 1944. These individuals were relocated to Central Asia and Siberia and placed under a "special settler regime" that deprived them of political and administrative rights and mandated the NKVD to organize their labor relations. Using the 1956 Rehabilitation Decree as an instrument for the randomness of the rehabilitation decision, this study examines the cross-effects of this quasi-experiment on the local labor market and education sector. The results suggest that the "special settler regime" did not provide any support for non-Slavic host region populations to advance in employment or education. However, rehabilitated ethnic groups experienced positive effects on higher education and white-collar employment in both host and origin regions. Additionally, the paper investigates whether ethnic violence resulted in an upsurge of votes in the 1991 referendum to stay in the Soviet Union, as well as more protests and unrest in the late Soviet Union. The findings indicate that individuals who were deported showed more support for preserving the Soviet Union, while rehabilitated groups exhibited reduced protest behavior. However, permanently exiled groups that evaded deportation from their origin regions experienced an increase in protests and unrest, an effect that is reversed in similar magnitude for the host regions. My findings remain robust even after accounting for education, employment, and historical violence.

JEL Classification:  D74, E65, I25, N34, O11, P16, R12

Presented at: the Economic History Colloquium at Humboldt University 2021, the X. ICCEES World Congress 2021 in Montreal, the SES 2022, the Clio 2022, the 6th GCEG in Dublin, CEPR Economic History Symposium 2022, the 8th IAAE 2022, 17th EACES 2022, the 8th Annual Meeting of the Danish and Scandinavian Economic Society, the CEECON 2022 in Berlin, NEUDC 2022, ASEEES 2022, ASSA 2023, RES and SES Joint Annual Meeting 2023.

Network theory is used to examine East Germany's dual dictatorship past, which is seen as the cause of higher levels of ethnocentrism and xenophobia among contemporary East Germans compared to West Germans. Within an intergenerational DeGroot framework, interactions between dynasties embedded in a network of social interactions are examined. A network cannot be abandoned by its dynasties, nor can it accept new members. All dynasties interact with each other and update their information based on a rule. The actions of dynasties indirectly affect each other's descendants through spillover effects in incentives and through strategic externalities arising from hidden beliefs. A central planner can intervene to change individuals' incentives through central schooling and upward mobility. The goal is to understand how the planner can intervene specifically in the presence of these dynasties and their constraints. This helps explain how a regime stabilizes itself and how it reaches homogeneity among its citizens. 

JEL Classification:  H11, N33, N43, P20, P26, P37, P48, P51

Presented at: 2022 ASREC conference (virtual), 2024 Workshop on Cultural Persistence and Transmission @QU Belfast

Source: Ilya REPIN. Arrest of a Propagandist. 1878

This project explores the roots of political radicalization in the Russian Empire from the early nineteenth century to the 1910s, focusing on how individual backgrounds shaped the path from revolutionary involvement to engagement in high-risk activism. We draw on several volumes of collective biographies of activists persecuted by the Tsarist regime between 1800s and 1910s. This unique dataset, covering approximately 17,000 individuals, offers rich detail on activists’ ethnic origins, occupations, social status, and revolutionary affiliations. It also highlights connections between activists within the Empire and those in exile across key European cities, enabling a deeper understanding of revolutionary networks and the spread of radical ideas. To build a searchable digital archive, we transcribe the biographies using Transkribus, an AI-powered text recognition platform. We fine-tune a model for 18th-century Cyrillic using 140 manually transcribed pages, achieving high accuracy in the digitization process. The texts are then processed with a custom Python pipeline and advanced natural language processing tools to extract key information such as names, dates, locations, and occupations. Data quality is ensured through a combination of automated checks and expert validation. The project contributes to current discussions on political violence, networks, and state repression, while offering a replicable framework for historical and interdisciplinary research.

JEL Classification:  D74, E65, I25, N34, O11, P16, R12

Presented at:  IOS Regensburg 2025 Workshop (scheduled)